A course syllabus is a communication tool. It’s one of the first pieces of information that you give to your students. It’s quite likely that they may have already heard about your course from a friend, or maybe it’s a requirement for all first year students whether they like it or not, or it might just have been the perfect filler for a Wednesday afternoon that let’s Jezebel enjoy a lecture-free Friday this semester. Whatever the reason is that your students find themselves in your class, the fact is that you have minutes if not seconds to entice them to stay. In a sense, you can look at the course syllabus as a marketing tool used to entice prospective pupils to sign up for your class, but we’ve gratefully not reached that point yet in the degradation of the education system (for the most part).

From your students’ perspective, the syllabus should be easy to follow, clearly outline exactly what they need to do to pass the course, and precisely list all deadlines. Aside from that, they’re not likely to care what you put in it, until, of course, the due date for their first assignment beings to loom.

The syllabus is also a communication vehicle between instructor and educational institution. Each institution is held responsible to abide by certain guidelines when validating programs of study. Most of you already know that course outlines are not generally the place to publish poetic renditions of what you hope your students will eventually aspire to become. Syllabi are meant to ensure that you follow the rules and include all the elements in your course that you promised you would when you stood before your program committee all those months ago.

When programs of study are developed, many people work very hard to ensure that all local, regional and sometimes even international requirements are met to ensure that students can benefit from accredited education. Yes, it can sometimes feel like a burden to have to meticulously address the details of a syllabus. I know that making sure that all learning outcomes are discussed in the course readings may not be as fun as reading the latest Dan Brown novel. I can also see how double-checking that the assignments adequately test students’ engagement with the materials might be less entertaining than shopping for new shoes. For these reasons, I understand how it can sometimes be tempting to just reuse last year’s syllabus. After all, the course hasn’t changed since the last time you taught it…right?

Hmm…I’m not so sure. You see, even if last year’s subject matter is still relevant, this year’s students are probably a little different from their predecessors, at least if you compare skill sets and habitual behaviors. The reason for this is that most of your students are technology sponges. How does their relationship with technology influence their relationship with you? Well, let’s think about it this way: Each year, many new technologies are introduced into the market but it doesn’t really matter how many get their 15 minutes of fame. What’s important to note is which ones get picked up by a critical mass of users – often termed ‘innovators’ (many of whom fill up your lecture halls). Once the critical mass is reached, the technology is integrated into mainstream culture, and that’s when you can bet it’s going to find its way into your classroom too.

What’s a teacher to do? How can one lonely soul standing in front of rows of students attached to digital gadgets get their attention? You can’t. Let’s face it, most of the time you don’t even have their full attention when they’re looking you straight in the eye. So, how can you still do your job of imparting age-old wisdom and timeless guidance to a group of freshly networked minds constantly engaged in…something or other? You get creative. You learn their language. You sit yourself in front of a computer and you start figuring out what tools they’re using. You look around the campus and you start to take notice of what mobile devices your students carrying and research how they’re using them.

Once you reach the point where you begin to realize how much there is you don’t know, you can rest assured that you’re on the right track. This is the point at which you begin to lose the fear of experimenting with different ways of communicating with your students. You don’t necessarily have to be fluent in the latest digital languages in order to get their attention, but you are expected to have some basic conversational knowledge of their speak.

That brings us back to the syllabus. Are you sure there aren’t a few changes you’d like to make to last year’s version? Maybe you want to check if the publishers of your required texts have released some new online resources to supplement your readings. After all, why reinvent the wheel when the tools have already been made for you. Speaking of which, have you taken a look through some of the free reusable learning object repositories available online? Maybe MIT World might inspire you to incorporate a video or two into your lectures this term. Note to all you YouTube addicts: try branching out. You can start by taking a look at what Columbia University, The Open University and even iTunes U has to offer. You might just surprise yourself and impress your students all at the same time (and who doesn’t like a little multi-tasking in this crazed workaholic age?).

Once you start exploring some of the digital resources out there, you’ll most likely find that last year’s syllabus no longer does justice reflecting what you can do with your course this year.

Why bring this up in the first place? Well, I was recently editing a syllabus of an online course for a client, and the exercise reminded me of how many twists and turns educators face when remodeling course outlines to reflect updated deliveries that integrate technologies into the mix. So I thought I’d put together a few tips for those of you facing this challenge – and I have a feeling that more and more of you will be doing just that in the near future, if you haven’t started already.

Since the structure of most course syllabi features standard headings, I’ll arrange the following suggestions under some of these common denominators. Please note that not every possible syllabus heading is addressed below. I’ve restricted the discussion to some areas that are particularly impacted by technology.

Instructor Contact Information

The common headings under this category are usually:

Course Instructor:
Contact Telephone Number:
Email:
Office Location:
Office Hours:

Enter: technology.

Information about the course instructor probably won’t change in nature unless a human isn’t actually teaching the class.

Contact telephone numbers are still relatively common to include on course syllabi, but if we’re honest with ourselves, we should probably acknowledge that students are more likely to use telephone numbers to text teachers than they are to speak with them directly. This begs the question of whether you give out a number to a land-line or to a mobile phone, in which case, it might be a good idea to clarify that for your students.

Email is an interesting one, not because it’s necessarily still a shiny new form of communication, but rather due to the fact that email doesn’t sleep. Students can send you messages at all hours of the day. Continuous connectivity has conditioned us to expect immediate responses, which would be fine if each teacher was responsible for 5 student at a time, but when class sizes get any bigger than 8 students per instructor, we start facing a serious time crunch.

In order to avoid disappointing your students by representing yourself as anything other than constantly at their disposal, it might be a good idea to specify a reasonable time period within which they can expect your reply. For example, providing guidance like ‘Students can expect to receive responses to email queries with 48 hours’ might help ward off anxiety-ridden follow-up emails.

There’s also another issue with email that doesn’t necessarily impact the course syllabus, per se, but that I still think is worth noting. Email is a form of written communication. Emails are not the same as text messages. In text messages, one can get away with steering clear of grammar, ignoring proper sentence structure, and even eliminating the use of full words all together. In emails, however, the text messaging rules of abbreviation and colloquial mannerism do not apply. The difficulty comes in when we expect students who have grown accustomed to communicating in abbreviations to magically appreciate the eloquence of properly formed sentences.

How you choose to deal with this dichotomy of acceptable communication styles is up to you. Depending on what subject matters and at which levels you teach, you may wish to include a brief disclaimer next to your contact email helping students understand the standard to which you hold them. Alternatively, this is also information you could include in your student handbook (see more on this below).

Now we get to the fun stuff: virtual vs. physical space. What if you never meet your students in ‘real life’? What if you don’t actually have an office space either (unless you count your kitchen table)? And what if you don’t even live in the same time zone as your students? In these cases, what do you put next to Office Location and Office Hours?

Before you can answer that question, you have to be clear about how you’re going to interact with your students. It’s easy to say that ‘all the resources are up on the course website’ and all your students have to do is log on and download your lecture files from the site, but what if they need additional guidance? How are you going to support them in engaging with the course content?

Your office location may end up being a nook on your course website in the form of a link to a chat room. Your office hours might take place each week on Skype. It’s up to you how you choose to make yourself available to them. The important thing here is to decide before hand how to best support your students and then to start evaluating the potential benefits of your technology options. Not every technology suits every purpose, and not every technology adds value to every scenario. Be open to learning about different kinds of technologies, and remember to have fun exploring how they work.

You may also want to consider if there are other pieces of information you’d like to include in this section. For example, do you have a Twitter account? If so, would it benefit your students to follow your feed? How about a Facebook Fan Page? Would becoming one of your fans somehow help your students more deeply engage in their learning? It may sound like a silly question, but what if you are a world-renown musician teaching at a performing arts school? Is it possible that students would be more receptive to learning from a musician with a prominent presence in the digital world in which they feel most comfortable?  How about Facebook groups? Does your course or department have a Facebook page?  (If you’re not sure what the difference is between a Facebook Fan Page and a Facebook Group, Mashable provides a great explanation of the differences.) These are all things to consider, particularly if you’re teaching distance learning students who may benefit from any opportunity to connect online with fellow classmates and teachers.

Technical Specifications & Required Tools

Although not a mainstream heading on most syllabi, technical specifications may be quite important to outline for students at the beginning of your teaching term. Technical specs include anything from a description of basic software packages they’ll need, computer accessories you’ll require them to have like webcams, microphones and/or speakers, to the amount of time they’ll need to be logged onto the Internet. This information is actually so important for students to receive prior to the start of the semester that you may also want to consider including it in the course catalog. If you are fortunate enough to live in a place where everyone has access to a computer and T3 Internet connections are free-flowing, including these sorts of requirements in a syllabus may not come as second nature, but that’s not everyone’s reality.

System requirements are also important to specify. For example, if I couldn’t use a Mac to complete course work, I may think twice about registering for the class. But setting frivolity aside for a moment, technical requirements can also seriously impact on students with learning disabilities. All of these factors must be taken into consideration far before you start drafting your course syllabus, but if you haven’t put much thinking into the technical requirements of your course yet, this is as good a time as any to start.

And in terms of specifying required tools, the importance of listing them in your syllabus is very dependent upon the nature of your subject matter. Courses in disciplines such as painting, photography or mechanics, for example, would be candidates for this heading. Are students required to purchase safety equipment, art supplies, or special calculators before teaching begins? Be as clear as possible, and try not to assume that what you consider an ‘every day’ tool is commonplace for everyone.

Required Readings & Recommended Further Study

The textbook is still alive and kicking. Authors and publishers alike love required textbooks because they guarantee a certain number of annual sales for them. There’s nothing wrong with that because there’s nothing wrong with making a living. Publishers are quite aware of the threat of paper-based books becoming obsolete before they hit the campus bookstore shelves (or online bookstore equivalents) so they work hard at creating supplementary resources for both teachers and students to increase the functionality of their static products. Do you know what extras come with your chosen texts? Have you acquired information on how your students can access these additional resources?

Online study aids can often make or break the sale of a book for students. After all, why buy a new book if you can get a used one for a third of the price? Come to think of it, why buy the book at all if the instructor only intends to refer to one of its chapters. If that’s the case for you, have you thought about providing digital copies of key chapters to students? School libraries often have ways of digitizing certain percentages of books at no additional cost to the instructor. In fact, sometimes these digitization programs are actually fully sponsored by your institution. It’s worth learning about your options – both you and your students will benefit.

Supplementary readings often include articles published in academic journals. The further up the higher education ladder you climb, the more often you’ll come across the ‘journal article’. The problem is, students often have no clue how to access their institution’s digital library, and therefore won’t know how to download your supplementary readings, even with the best of intentions. The unfortunate thing is that instead of asking for help, students often tend to just skip over the readings they don’t know how to access, short-selling themselves and the quality of their education.

What can you do? The first step is to learn how to access online journal articles yourself. Please don’t be offended. I don’t mean to imply that you don’t know everything. It’s just that I’ve come across more than a few teachers who simply didn’t know how to log into their university’s digital library because they were never given formal training in the first place. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have other ways of accessing the materials, but if teachers don’t know how to go through the mainstream channels, they won’t know how to show their students how to do it either. Now, you may argue that it’s the librarian’s job to teach them, which is a good point. If your library does offer training on your digital resources, then schedule a training session for your students at the beginning of the semester and consider including those training times in this section of the syllabus.

Once you become comfortable accessing your institution’s digital library, you may want to also consider incorporating direct links to supplementary readings on your course site. This way, students won’t need to conduct online library searches themselves because the links can take them directly to the resources. On the other hand, learning how to conduct those searches is actually quite a useful skill to develop, so consider both sides before determining which way would most benefit both you and your students.

Grading

Grading is pretty easy to add into the course syllabus because it’s already been established during the curriculum development stage. That is, unless you decide to start integrating technologies into your teaching strategy post-validation.

What commonly happens is that a course is first taught using a face-to-face model, and then someone decides that it would be a good idea to start using a wiki here, dabble with the use of a discussion forum there, or go all out and migrate all taught courses into a course management system by next semester! The odd thing is that very seldom in these discussions does anyone mention the need to assess how student grading is going to be impacted by all these techno-tweaks. However just because a course is called by the same name, taught by the same teacher and held in the same room doesn’t mean the grading can remain the same if changes are made to the way students engage with its content.

I’ll tell you a funny thing about students: they generally don’t care how much work it took to convince your department head to let you use a wiki this semester, or how many man hours it required to develop your course website. If they don’t have to use the resource, it’s unlikely they will. After all, how much do you want to bet that the majority of your class is filled with surface learners?

That’s why it pays to take a moment to readjusting your grading scheme so that engaging with other students online will make it worth their time and effort. I know that sounds cold and cynical and that it contradicts the whole point of investing in one’s own education and personal development, but the fact that people are constantly inundated with information means that they have to have a good reason to draw their limited attention spans from one task to another. If you don’t give them enough of a reason to diverge their short bursts of focus in your direction, they’ll simply tune you and your fancy digital resources out.

The solution: make it compulsory. Are students graded for their wiki contributions? If so, how much of their overall grade do their contributions affect? Unless you answer that question with a number higher than 0% (I’d recommend at least 5%), you’ll see a lot of white space on your wiki by semester’s end.

Warning: Be careful about how you allocate your marks. Students may rationalize not participating in the wiki because they can afford a 3% cut in their overall mark – they’ll just make sure they do well enough in other parts of the course to get that passing grade. (Again, I’m generalizing here based on the average surface learner. My apologies to all you over-achievers out there. I’m one of you! I swear!)

Sometimes it’s better to be vague. For example, this course taught by Professor Martin Irvine at Georgetown University breaks down the marking scheme quite broadly with 40% of the overall mark going to ‘seminar participation and collaborative Wiki contributions’. I’d say that that’s a more bitter pill to swallow than a measly 3% cut in your final grade. Alternatively, this Wiki Grading Rubic available at the Flat Classroom Project is a much more intricate grading scheme for assessing wiki contributions and is definitely worth taking a look at if you’re finding it challenging motivating your students to be more engaging online learners.

Whether you want to encourage your students to use wikis, discussion forums, chat rooms, blogs, videos or some other application of technology, I strongly encourage you to consider the impacts that counting it toward final assessment could have on the quantity and quality of your students’ contributions. Yes, it may mean getting up in front of that validation panel again, but it’ll be worth it. Not only will you be able to formally reward your students for their hard work, but you’ll also create a valuable precedent for other teachers facing the same challenges.

Attendance & Class Participation

Attendance in a physical classroom equals engagement in the online environment. Is attendance part of your marking scheme? Do students get awarded a certain percentage of their final grade for making it to class on time? How about if part of your course is taught online? How do you account for attendance then? Not everyone has the luxury of teaching in a computer lab where online attendance can be measured by simply counting students sitting in front of terminals (although how much of a luxury that would be is questionable at best). Online attendance is a slippery slope and it’s worthy of a bit of forethought before you decide how to approach it.

The first question you might ask yourself is how to measure online engagement. The simple answer is site traffic statistics. Now we’re getting into a bit of a controversial area because not many people like to believe that they’re being observed. We tend to shy away from this concept of ‘Big Brother watching us’, so much so, in fact, that we do a pretty good job of avoiding the topic altogether. But is there even a question in students’ minds that teachers have access to site traffic statistics showing exactly how long they spend on course sites and what information they access? Is there even a question in teachers’ minds that students occasionally attempt to skew these statistics by appearing to be logged on for extended periods of time when, in reality, they’re just catching up on their favorite shows on Hulu?

The key here is to create your own definition of ‘student engagement’ as it relates to your course subject matter. At the early stages of course develop or curriculum re-design, start to think about how you want to structure your online resources to create a student-centric learning environment. This could mean that you steer clear of posting links to your coveted PowerPoint presentations and start roaming reusable learning object repositories in search of engaging activities through which students can work outside of class time to re-enforce their face-to-face learning. It could also mean, for example, that you assign specific online activities during Tuesday’s lecture that become the topics of conversation during Thursday’s tutorials.

There are many advantages to integrating technology into your teaching, one of which is that it has the potential to grant many more people access to an education. However, there are just as many ways to approach online engagement as there are to manipulate online traffic statistics, so my advice is to get creative and get your students so excited about your subject area that they lose track of time and forget about their reality TV fix all together. Oh, what a beautiful world that would be!

Class participation is another pickle. First of all, it’s measured very subjectively in a face-to-face environment. Teachers observe students, assess the quality of their responses to questions and evaluate how they engage with their peers during group activities. When it comes to online participation, everything becomes very black and white – literally. Every comment a student posts in a discussion area is recorded with a time stamp and sometimes even with a word count. This is great for the teacher because reviewing student participation over the semester is as simple as digging through discussion archives (if you’re assessing solely bases on quantity, that is!).

For students, however, online participation can become a much more daunting endeavor than its face-to-face counterpart, especially if they don’t feel confident in their ability to express ideas in writing. This trepidation can, and most often does, turn into virtual silence in which teachers end up having drawn out conversations with themselves. I won’t get into the complicated area of how to stimulate online community engagement (let’s leave some of the fun for future posts), but I will point to the importance of being clear with students about the nature of the online participation expected of them, particularly if it’s summatively assessed.

One note, if I may: Requiring your students to post a certain number of comments in an online discussion area could result in a virtual flooding of senseless commentary. Online engagement can take on many forms. Even using Twitter as a tool to share reference sources or a group wiki to develop the initial draft of a group research paper could very nicely qualify as online participation, and may even turn into much more engaging forms of social learning than getting together once a week in a physical classroom.

And a few words about student handbooks…

Any topics that you feel require in-depth explanation can simply be referenced in the syllabus and then explained in detail in your student handbook. Topics like plagiarism, safety procedures (if applicable), breakdowns of grading schemes, etc. are common to expand upon in student handbooks. This information also fits very nicely on course webpages.

It’s up to you how you structure the publication of your course information. The important thing to remember is that entering the online learning environment changes the playing field in many ways. It’s up to you to be flexible, open to learning new things, and confident in your ability to learn from mistakes, because no matter how much you plan ahead, you’re sure to get a few surprises along the way.

Position: Writer
Location: Anywhere

Description: Are you involved in the world of educational technology? Studying or teaching online? Developing elearning strategies for your institution and putting together blended learning curricula? Or perhaps you’re training people on how to make the most of a particular technology and writing up online learning materials? And don’t think I’ve forgotten about all you learning management system/virtual learning environment administrators! If you fall into any or all of these categories, (or one that I’ve missed) and you’re interested in writing about your colorful experiences, then you’ve come to the right place!

Virtually Scholastic is opening its digital doors to guest contributors who know how to wrap timely messages in witty packages. This is a perfect opportunity for writers interested in expanding their readership and amplifying their virtual voice. It’s also a wonderful chance for those of you who’ve been thinking about starting a blog but who aren’t really sure whether to make the investment just yet. Virtually Scholastic has been around since 2008 and has cultivated a loyal following from places around the world like the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Italy, the Philippines, India, Spain, China and Russia.

If you know how to speak to a global community of practitioners (or aren’t exactly sure what that really means but would still like to have a go), then here are the steps to follow:

1. Read through some of the content at http://www.virtuallyscholastic.com to get a feel for the tone and the nature of the material.
2. Write what you propose to be the next post to be published on the site. Make it timely, fill it with interesting links, and remember to include a poignant message. Also remember to include one image along with source to accompany your writing.
3. Email your article to contact {at} virtuallyscholastic {dot} com along with a brief introduction to yourself and your work.

Guest contributors will be asked to write between one to two articles a month. Biographies of contributors will be featured on the site once three pieces have been published. Writers will also be expected to monitor discussions of their posts once comments start coming in, as well as to post occasional commentary to other VS posts.

I look forward to reading your work!

Mashable has been singing the praises of location-based apps spinning their case toward bottom-line hungry small business owners. Benefits like the ability to draw customers to your location and to create incentives that build a loyal following are being highlighted in the discussion as ways of helping entrepreneurs see the potentials of geolocation technology. I apologize if I’m pointing to the obvious, but my question is, ‘Have you lost your minds’?

Have we suddenly gotten over our hang-up of Big Brother watching us? You’re quite intent on keeping your browsing history private when you don’t want anyone knowing where you’re clicking. The notion of someone tracking your physical location bothers you less than someone knowing where you click? I understand how cell phone companies can justify providing services allowing account holders to ‘see’ where each one of their additional phones are at any given time as a way of enhancing parental controls, but are we sure we want to go down this road?

Loopt has been around for a while, so the concept of suping up our trendy, high-tech phones with the ability to tell us when we’re a few blocks away from our ex in an effort to avoid acting like a mature adult is no new thing. However, when the location-based technology market starts to bloom in all its invasive glory, one has to wonder where the demand is coming from for these developers to see enough lucrative opportunities to want to get in the game. Have you not reached the point yet where information overload is almost unmanageable and it’s come time to prune your way back to human interaction? Do you really want the general public to know where you are all the time? Evidently you do, because even Facebook is on board.

Are you happy now? Your dream of being able to notify everyone in your network of where you are has finally come true.  Your ‘network’ – that group of people you haven’t spoken to since you shared glue sticks in grade school but who you’ve perhaps nonetheless poked once or twice, or maybe, if you were feeling particularly generous, you may have even thrown a sheep his or her way.

You can even tag people who are with you!

Hold on, let me get this straight. Even when I’m having an actual face-to-face conversation with someone, you want me to pull out my ‘smart’ phone and make sure that my status and location are updated? Why? So as not to inconvenience all of my devoted followers? Come on! Aren’t we making the paparazzi’s lives a little too easy?

And what about the soon-to-be massive lists of external entities grabbing hold of your information (which may now also include satellite images of your backyard, what time you checked in at your gynecologist’s office and how cruel gravity was to you at your last Weight Watchers weigh-in)?

For right now, though, only a few apps have been selected to push information back into Places. Initially, Gowalla, Foursquare, Booyah (creators of MyTown and Nightclub City) and Yelp will integrate with Facebook Places. ~Source

From an educational perspective, there may be some ways to take advantage of this type of technology. For a multi-location based approach to teaching, such as the one adopted by THINK Global School, I suppose it might be interesting for parents, teachers and chaperons to know where students are throughout their years of studying abroad. I guess you could also try to make the case that it would be a good way for students to figure out how to read maps and learn some geography by getting used to seeing where all of their fellow classmates are munching their sandies and learning their Mandarin on any given day. But the question shouldn’t really be, ‘Can we think up a way to use this technology?’, should it?

Ok, granted when an application of a technology is so novel that it necessitates a change in the way to communication/operate/connect, etc., then perhaps we do have to approach a review of its potential benefits from a slightly crazed ‘inventor’ mind-set in which we think outside of the outer perimeters of the outside of the conventional box.

I suppose you could always design a business marketing class assignment around geolocation technologies asking students to develop creative ways of generating sales in specific industries by using any one of the smart phone apps out there. Some ideas that come to mind are thinking of how the restaurant industry can benefit, or perhaps the travel sector, and questioning the relationship between location-based technologies and the ever-present community rating models like Yelp and Tripadvisor, and more recently Hunch.com. Then again, that might be construed as condoning this type of technology, and to be honest, it comforts me to convince myself that it’s only a fad.

I guess if we look at the bright side, at least playing this type of ‘video’ game gets you out of the house.

What does ‘open’ mean in the context of education? Many have shared their opinions on what they think ‘open’ represents, but that’s not really the point, is it? I mean, sharing our views may contribute to the discussion, it may open some eyes and maybe even change a few perspectives, but it hasn’t led us to the answer yet. Does that mean no one really knows the answer? Merrily skipping a little further down this stream of thought, I wonder, if no one really has the answer, there’s no reason for me not to share my point of view too. What’s the worst that could happen – I look silly, unaware, perhaps a touch confused? However I look, everyone else is varying shades of the same color, so here’s me jumping into the debate.

To this humble student of life, ‘open’ education means accessible education. If it weren’t for openness, I wouldn’t be picking up my masters degree in a few weeks, I wouldn’t be singing the potential benefits of technology to whomever will listen, and I most certainly wouldn’t have had the pleasure of collaborating with brilliant minds from all over the world, all interested in pursuing their passion to explore how technology can impact the way they learn and teach.

‘Open’ doesn’t necessarily mean free, but it definitely means affordable – at least to the consumer. Case in point: I am still paying off my undergraduate loans, but I closed the account that funded my masters quite a few months ago. ‘Open’ may not necessarily represent the cheapest option for the institution, but once all that front-end heavy investment has been made, it most certainly has the potential to represent the most efficient, scalable and transferable option. Perhaps if I had waited just a few years, I could have accessed my graduate course materials for free on iTunes U where the OU ranks in the top 5 most downloaded sources in this fruity academic database. That wouldn’t make me eligible to receive my coveted competitive ammunition (a.k.a. my degree certificate), but that doesn’t mean I still wouldn’t be smarter for it.

To technologists, ‘open’ has a lot to do with trying to figure out how to avoid reinventing the wheel. For legal teams, it’s predominantly about how to navigate the slippery slopes of copyright laws. To academics…well, that one is a bit difficult for me to answer. You see, I’ve spent many years working on the ‘other side’ of the academic profession. I was a part of university administration, which essentially means that I was not ‘one of them’. However, I did have the privilege of working with many of ‘them’ (to at least attempt) to expand their awareness of what educational technology could mean to them and to broaden their understanding of ways in which ed tech could be incorporated into their worlds if they decided to give it a chance. So you see, all I can do is tell you how I perceive the way academics interpret ‘open’.

There is one school of thought that shuns the concept of digitizing any intellectual materials that it undoubtedly took these brilliant minds centuries to cultivate. These ‘inner two-year-olds’ barely feel comfortable releasing 8th generation photocopies of PowerPoint presentations to their well-paying students (6 per page so as to ensure maximum note-taking real estate). The idea of adapting their materials to fit an electronic learning environment suitable to enrich the lives of an exponentially larger group of eager beavers is simply out of the question. Why? Good question.

The other school of thought, the one with which I had much more of a pleasure working, accepts the notion that perhaps there may be some benefit to learning new ways of communicating. They concede that there may in fact be some truth that changing the way we communicate might better enable the current generation of teachers to convey information to their audiences in inspirational ways. As you can see, the title of ‘information sharer’ fits this Generation 2.0 of teacher much better than the ‘sages on dusty stages’ that precede them. Think of it like an iPhone versus a telegram – both get a message across, but the quality of the message, the way we go about receiving it and how we choose to interact with it are very different. Students may be sitting in lecture halls, texting and doing their very best to provide evidence of just how many twits there are in the crowd, but in this unfortunately common act of ignorance, they’re also sending a very valuable albeit crudely packaged message to their leaders and guides: we use technology to get our messages across, why aren’t you?

I realize I’m generalizing, but at this stage of the debate about openness, it’s difficult to deny that we haven’t yet come close to finding a middle ground. But why look at technology through bitter colored glasses smeared with resistance? After all, technology is as much a vehicle of information transfer as paper is. The difference is that whereas paper can be viewed as the byproduct of massacred forests, the Internet (for to use the term technology would be much too gnarly a maze to navigate in the context of this discussion) could just as easily be seen as a voracious devourer of our privacy. The production of paper is contaminating our planet. The Internet is home to evil predators. Producing paper pollutes our water supplies. Surfing the electronic waves of the Internet is dangerous because ‘they’re watching you’.

Is it at all clear how ridiculous the argument against anything can become whenever we refuse to bend our perceptions just enough to see things a little differently? Paper has also been an invaluable tool facilitating communication through generations. Some of the most important decisions made on the planet have been recorded on paper. Art, history and love have been created on paper. As for the Internet, it has provided access to medical care in some of the most remote places on this planet, given the opportunity for children to learn in areas where traditional schools don’t exist, and facilitated the cultivation of countless communities of like-minded individuals seeking ways to connect and contribute value to society.

And what about teachers teaching teachers? Isn’t it possible that there are new instructors out there, just entering into the world of knowledge sharing, who would greatly appreciate a benchmark approach to course development? Wouldn’t having access to some of the most renown higher education institutions’ courses (Yale and MIT come to mind) have the potential to add value to the educational offerings provided by any countries at all interested and able to access and make subsequent use of the information, regardless of whether it’s to inject new lifeblood into university, high school or even elementary school curricula?

All I’m saying is…try being open. The middle ground isn’t that far away.

So it’s been a while. I have to admit that ulterior motives have propelled me back into the blogosphere. I’m returning to VS not because I’ve been particularly moved by an ed tech article or because I’ve come across a funky new technology I wanted to show you.  To be quite honest, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my short stint away from anything and everything related to online learning. You see…

I finished my Masters in Online and Distance Education in December ’09, and from the moment I submitted my final piece of work, there was a part of me that knew I needed to take some time to recover. Perhaps that’s a common response felt by many a grad student, but the way in which I’ve been repelled from all things technology (even my shiny new iPhone at a certain point, or the untouched iPod shuffle that’s been sitting on my desk in its original box for over a month now) was quite surprising to me. After all, one thing I’ve learned about myself throughout this process has been that I have a natural tendency to seek out new technologies, determine in what ways they work within an educational context, experiment with new applications, and join emerging groups excited to share their common interests in the field.

Maybe it was a case of me just overdosing on technology, but funnily enough, I didn’t suffer from the often paired imbalance of information overload. In fact, I’ve been deliriously delighted diving into books – the real PAPER kind! – ever since I officially parted ways with my student self and reentered into the adult world. I’ve even succumbed to redecorating my workspace in an effort to reflect my internal desire to reconnect with the less virtual literary world with which I think I might remember briefly engaging back in high school for a day or two.

I’ve unapologetically started piling books onto my revamped workspace – not elearning books, not research books, not even learning and teaching books – but the kind of books that you want to fall asleep reading at night and reopen in the morning as you take your first sip of steaming caffeinated goodness. My home office is now adorned with candles propped up on rounded glass plates, next to a crystal hourglass that’s been sitting in its original gift box somewhere in the back of my closet for long enough that I can’t remember when I got it in the first place. The coffee mugs are still there (for what an empty cerebral world it would be without them!) but no more do I have to burrow myself in piles of file folders stuffed with printouts of assessment criteria for upcoming assignments.

So back to those ulterior motives. They relate to this adult world I speak of, so often associated with mountainous career paths to climb and saturated weekly calendars to survive. It’s time to enter into the working world again, and for many of us instructional designers, our blogs are our calling cards – even more important in many ways then our CVs. So, I welcome this New Year, albeit slightly late, with this first post of twenty ten. Getting back in the game as it were… But now that I think of it, perhaps I did read something recently that’s sparked this train of thought…

I received a mailing a few days ago from my Alma Mater inviting me to join its graduate association. The group’s slogan is “In my end is my beginning” – a sentiment that so brilliantly encompasses my current state. I suppose you could say that I feel accomplished, but coupled with a presumably organic sense of achievement is this bittersweet taste of being back at square one again, and no matter how many coffees I gulp down, the bitter taste doesn’t seem to be going away. Maybe it’s got something to do with the unemployment rate or with the economy, or with the general uncertainty of the times.

In any case, regardless of my recent momentary shun of all things technology or of my desire to temporarily disengage from the virtuality of so many of the worlds we live in these days, I have continued to do one very important thing through this whole process. I’ve been determined to remember that many of my experiences as a student in the world of educational technology are most probably also experiences that other online students have shared. And now I find myself holding these thick tomes of lessons learned and knowledge gained close to me as I begin to look around for a new place to put them down so that I can share them with others.

I think that in the end, the most cherished lesson I take away with me from graduate school is of how important it is to be as observant, tolerant and open minded as we can be when we are students because that is the best way to ensure that we are heard when it is our time to teach.

Strange question? Well, perhaps at first glance, but when you think about it, technology can easily become a part of so many aspects of our lives. Whether you have committed to studying online on a full-time basis, or you’re wondering if maybe a part-time option is more manageable for you, there are many many options from which to choose!

Something that I noticed after I got comfortable in my ‘online learning hat’ was that the ‘online’ or ‘e’-learning or ‘technical’ part of my learning experience very quickly melted into the other parts of the process. Soon, I began to see it as my customized, border-less and self-empowering learning experience minus the ‘e’. As time went on, it became less important to isolate the ‘online’ part because the technology became one of the many important aspects of my learning experience.

So that brings me back to the holidays! I know that not everyone celebrates at the same time, and not all of us share the same traditions, and there’s certainly quite a lot of travel that takes place during this time of the year, so I think it’s safe to say that not all of us celebrate in the same place either! But, what I’m really interested in talking about here with you, is how (or even whether) you’ve incorporated technology into your holiday traditions. To start us off, I’ll share a story…

I was hiking in Big Basin Redwoods State Park yesterday with a couple of friends. One of them asked me if I had any ideas about organizing a dinner or some sort of party for our social group. I started thinking about it, slept on it over night, and then inspiration hit once the alarm went off this morning! With coffee in hand, I began sifting through all my cookbooks, and put together a menu for a potluck dinner. Then, I started thinking about how to give people access to the menu and the recipes and, a little while later, I came up with an e-vite as well as a dinner menu plus all the recipes! How? Technology! Yes!

Now, I know that a paper and pencil would have worked too, or even making photocopies and mailing them out would have gotten the message across. But I think that technology represents the option to do things differently. I’ll even go a step further and say that one of the most important things that technology allows us to do is to communicate differently. That’s what online learning represents to me – a different way for teachers to get their messages across to students, and an alternative way for students to receive those ideas and form educated opinions about them for themselves. And if you consider how unique and multifaceted each of our perspectives are as we look around in this world and try to make sense of it, we can use all the alternatives we can get!

For some of you, it might still be too early to talk about the holidays, while for others, you’re already planning guest lists and wrapping gifts. I’d like to share my little dinner invite with you, as well as the menu items and recipes. If you’re inspired, you’re more than welcome to use them to create your own events. Or maybe…they’ll inspire you to think about others way that you can use technology to make your holiday season more festive and enjoyable!

The Chronicle just wrote a piece about Northern Virginia Community College and how the school has incorporated online teaching into its emergency plan (i.e. teach online when natural disaster strikes).

It’s great that this institution is setting a minimum level at which teachers are required to be trained in the use of some technologies, and even greater that training is being provided. However, if the motivation is to get courses online fast in case a disaster strikes sooner rather than later, it makes me wonder how thoroughly sound pedagogical principles are being considered. If they aren’t high on the agenda, then what we have here is an all too common scenario in which face-to-face courses are just being ‘transferred online’. Translation: weekly PowerPoint presentations, a few handouts, some links and maybe a room change announcement are all that students are going to get out of their virtual learning experience.

I’m just not grasping the logic here. Why do we have to have an emergency before we start considering the benefits of online learning? I suppose that one good thing to come out of this type of practice is that it’s getting people to rethink the way that they can deliver their courses, but who is to say that an Internet connection or even a power source will be accessible in a natural disaster?!

I suppose that sometimes…it takes the perception of necessity to get us to embrace change…or, at least to start thinking about how that embrace would look.

Today’s post is about online study aids for students. For the most part, we’ll be looking at different variations of online flashcards. It’s up to you to determine whether they can add value to your teaching strategy. As a learning technologist, I would normally sit down with one or more instructors and discuss the nature of the course/module, how it fits in with the curriculum, the desired learning outcomes, the makeup of the student profile, the resources available within the classroom and throughout the term of the course, as well as how the teachers envision their instructional journey. Seeing as we don’t have that luxury here, I’ll do my best to provide you with an overview of some of the tools available to you – all free, all relatively user-friendly. One thing I will caution is that there is often a stigma associated with flashcards in which they are perceived as being useful only for elementary level learning, but with a bit of creativity and imagination, it’s possible to harness their power to aid in memory work and apply them beyond the basics of any subject – languages, geography, medicine, science and technology, history, etc.

Brainflips is the first tool on our list. The site has a great interface, each set of flashcards comes with a score board, timer, navigation panel and total number of cards in the deck, which makes it easy to see where you are in the testing process and how well you’re doing. You can study the materials in three different modes: introduction (question & answer side-by-side), traditional (question then answer), and response mode (manually enter answer). Learners can join groups which means that, for example, you can start a study group where you can create sets of decks of flashcards relevant to a specific class you’re teaching and have your students join your group. It gives you a sense of community and allows you to contextualize the learning in a clear place on the site. In terms of file formats, you can include audio, text, images and video into your flashcards. The search feature could be a bit more encompassing and there doesn’t seem to be much choice in how to filter and sort the results which makes it all the more important to know what you’re looking for.

FunnelBrain takes a very student-centric approach to learning. Based on the Leitner Method (common in the design of flashcard learning tools), the site emphasizes students working together to collaboratively build their knowledge and skills in common subject areas – a communities of practice approach for students. Mixing the well grounded learning theories with an innovative use of wikis and social software differentiates this from many of the other flashcard tools out there.

Although student teamwork is a great way to develop social as well as scholastic skill sets, how does the student know if they’re on the right path? Having said that, I understand how bringing teachers into the mix would significantly change the dynamic of a student-focused learning approached and these sorts of social dynamics are really important to consider in all technology enhanced educational settings. For example, there was a long-standing misconception prevalent in the educational community (I’m trying to be optimistic and use the past tense here…) that if students are using technologies so widely in their social lives, they will, of course, pick them up just as readily to support their learning. Then we found out that as soon as the context became more formal and people started watching (and assessing) what the students were doing with the technology, voluntary participation dwindled to a meager few. At best, you got a lot of lurkers and a very lonely eModerator creating monologues in the place of what was hoped would become enriching online discussions.

Collaborative online learning is brilliant – I’m a strong advocate of erasing borders, delimiting limitations and just getting on the with the work. Empowering students to take control of their learning is an initiative that, as far as I’m concerned, couldn’t be supported enough.

StudyStack has a nice feature of allowing users to rate collections of flashcards (a.k.a. ‘stacks’) using a star rating system. Users can sort search results by stack ratings, by date or by the description given to each set of flashcards. Some additional features include the ability to export content to mobile devices, sharing content through digg, twitter, etc. and there are even a few games mixed in for fun. (On a side note, if you’re looking for a way to create quizzes that students can complete on their mobile devices, you may want to consider Mobile Study.)

If I had known about StudyStack when I was using Ciao! to study Italian, I would have certainly saved myself some time writing out list after list of vocab and verb conjugations! Students are lucky these days!

Quizlet has a great demo video walking you through the key features of the service. What struck me is that it’s narrated by Andrew Sutherland who appears to be creating a quiz set of some French vocabulary for his high school French class – and he’s not the teacher! He’s the student! Why isn’t the teacher running the demo? Why aren’t teachers the ones advocating this tool? Why is a high school student showing teachers how to create learning resources? Or is this just a marketing strategy designed to make the tool more relatable to students?

In any case, this is a great site full of social networking features, very visual, very user-friendly, and it seems to have a lively community of members. If you get tired of flashcards, Quizlet can convert the information from the flashcards into online quizzes (written answer, matching, multiple choice and true/false formats are available) and if you’re really in the mood for some learning fun, you can play some online games to test your knowledge.

Because these tools are so similar in their functionality and rely so much on the creator of the study aids to suit the needs of the target students, much of the success of online flashcards depends on what you make of them. Remember that this is all based on your summative assessment strategy, so ask yourself a few questions when considering the use of online flashcards:

1. Do you as the instructor design the questions or do you have your students design the questions as part of the learning process?

2. Do you follow up and survey students’ scores, or do you mention the study aid once and hope they pick it up on their own?

3. Is there even a need to design your own cards considering the amount of content already available online?

4. Are you using textbooks that already make online study aids available to students? If not, do online flashcards work any better then end of chapter questions paired with a pencil and paper?

…and remember to have fun with it!

When I graduated from my first degree, I didn’t know that the job I have today even existed. What does that mean about what I chose to study? If the jobs that today’s students will have tomorrow don’t exist yet, how does a student know how to choose the right course of study? What subjects will be relevant to their profession? What tools are going to help them in the workplace after they graduate?

A business degree was a marketable degree so that’s why I chose to study it, but the closer I got to the fourth and final year of the degree, the further I found myself diverging away from the values and beliefs representative of that community. Perhaps it was a lesson I had to learn for myself, but it made me wonder how my first university experience could have been different if my passion for what I was studying grew with each new thing I learned rather than dissolved into the background of a down turning economy.

I’m not trying to imply that we need a mechanism that would enable prospective students to see the future before they have to pick their course of study, but I am wondering whether it’s realistic or even practical to expect a higher education institution to be able to equip students with the skills and tools they need to not only function but also flourish once they get into the real world.

I’m afraid it comes back down to the teachers once again. If the teacher’s talking to the board, and the student is plugged into the technology, where’s the connection?

Where's the connection?

Wordle is getting a lot of hype in the educational blogosphere and also within my current study community, but I haven’t added it to my list of recommended techie tools until now because I just wasn’t totally convinced of its value.  It’s basically a tool that allows you to take a chunk of copied text (from an email, a document, etc., from a website url that has an atom feed, or even based on a user’s del.icio.us name) and paste it into a textbox. What comes out on the other end is a word cloud. Here’s an example below of a word cloud I created a second ago by pasting in the text from the ‘About‘ page of Wolfram Mathworld (a comprehensive learning object repository for all things math-related).

You can customise how the cloud looks, change colours and fonts and layouts, etc.

I suppose that it could be interesting to pick out key themes, terms, ideas, etc. out of selected works but how can it be usefully applied in an educational context?

Well, recently a colleague of mine from Dublin, Karl Duff, shared a really creative example with me of using Wordle within a foreign language context. The teacher creates a word cloud of an article or a short story. Students are then shown the cloud and the teacher explains the premise behind Wordle and the idea behind the bigger vs. the smaller words that are generated. Once students are clear on the concept of Wordle, they are asked to work in groups to create a short story based on what they think the Wordle cloud represents. This is, of course, done in the foreign language they are studying. The students are then asked to share their stories with the rest of the class and to discuss the similarities and differences between each group’s main ideas. Finally, the teacher reads out the article or short story that he/she originally selected to create the word cloud.

That’s the basic idea of the exercise. You could even go further and have the students create word clouds of their stories and compare with the original cloud. You could also add another level to the exercise and have the students individually write reflective essays about how their group’s story aligned with the key themes and ideas of the piece you selected. It all depends on how in depth you want to get.

To break down the design of the first part of this activity a bit more, I’ve adapted the Hybrid Learning Model (HLM) created by the Centre for Institutional E-Learning Services at the University of Ulster to outline the learning events that could take place in the example above using their mapping grid (pdf):

I would be very interested to hear how you’ve used Wordle to support your learning and teaching endeavors.