Multilitteratus Incognitus

Last week I was somewhere between work, teaching, the NERCOMP symposium I co-facilitated and the annual Sloan Consortium Emerging Tech for Online conference. It was nice to see some familiar MOOC faces on both twitter and on the live stream presentations. I think it was in Jen Ross's presentation (of EDCMOOC fame) that a Rhizo14 participant was quoted anonymously.  I really didn't think much about it at the time. It was more of an "wow, I didn't think rhizo was really that well known outside of some crazy circles."  In any case, it turns out that the quote was from the autoethnography that we are working on (slowly but surely I guess), and that no permission was sought to use the quote.  Before I knew the specifics the prompt on the rhizo14 facebook group was: I have to admit that my gut reaction was "someone's watching? Who's reading our stuff?" But, I should point out, that this isn't indicative of a  negative reaction, but rather a ...

NOTE: this is a report of the post I wrote for Sloan-C back in November of 2013.  I am reposting here as a backup.  The original can be found here http://blog.sloanconsortium.org/2013/11/18/mooc-evaluation-beyond-the-certificate-of-completion/ This coming January will be my third year of involvement in MOOCs. Questions have come up in the last year around the issue of why students “drop out” and how to better retain students. Tied to these questions is the issue of evaluation of learners and learning in MOOCs. At this point, I’ve witnessed at least three different kinds of MOOCs, and they all approach evaluation somewhat differently. During my first year all MOOCs were of the cMOOC kind. This included, among others, LAK11 (Learning Analytics) , CCK11 (Connectivism) and MobiMOOC (mLearning) . There was not an evaluation of learner knowledge acquisition component in these MOOCs because the MOOCs were focused on community and emergent learning. This meant individual...

Since I have a captive, in a sense, audience, I thought I would use the power of the crowd to help me identify a suitable PhD program for myself :) Now, over the years I've been thinking about pursuing a PhD, but a sage mentor once told me that I should take at least a year break from school before making any decisions.  Essentially clear the head out, think about what I like to do, and then think about what PhD program might be most appropriate for me.  Well, it's been four years, and I've already made a few excel spreadsheets with potential programs, but they all fall short in some way shape or form, usually the main issue is financial ;-)  So, I thought I would tap into the wisdom of the crowds on the web, on #edcmooc, and people following the Sloan Consortium to see what you all think about my (potentially unreasonable) conditions for the "perfect" PhD program; it can be an EdD too - PhD is just short-hand for the purposes of this post. Program of Study...

I just realized that it's been a while since I've posted something on here. I guess compared to other blogs I am still a regular poster, but I'd like to post more often.  Well, here I am!  I guess time flies when you are having fun, and getting over a cold (have we found a cure for that yet?) This month has been a crazy month, in addition to the day job, and my part time teaching gig (which is a lot of fun; there are lots of bright people I have the privilege to have in my class), I was: facilitating a MOOC Basics workshop for the Sloan Consortium which was a lot of fun presented a poster on MOOCs in higher education ( free download in PDF ) at NERCOMP 2013 moderated a panel discussion on building MOOCs with my colleagues (again at NERCOMP 2013) finished off a book chapter with a colleague on blended learning and still chipping away at the Twitter participation in MOOCs paper analysis with the MRT. I was a bit bummed that I couldn't really participate more in...

Here it is! The final week of BlendKit2012! I know it is only a 5 week MOOC, but it seems to have gone by pretty quickly! The topic of this week, as with any well designed course, is evaluation - or: how do you know that your learning intervention (in this case designing a blended course) has worked and your learners walked away with the knowledge they need to be successful. The reading this week centered around this topic of evaluation. The questions to ponder are as follows: How will you know whether your blended learning course is sound prior to teaching it?  How will you know whether your teaching of the course was effective once it has concluded?  With which of your trusted colleagues might you discuss effective teaching of blended learning courses? Is there someone you might ask to review your course materials prior to teaching your blended course? How will you make it easy for this colleague to provide helpful feedback?  How are “quality” and “success” in b...

After a tittle like that, I feel like this blog ought to have a theme song ;-) Is this too dorky? Not dorky enough?  Chime in through the comments :-) In any case, it's Week 2 of #cfhe12 and the topic of the week is New Pedagogies: New models for teaching and learning . I find it interesting (and ironic) that Blended Learning and Online Learning are considered "new pedagogies" and "new models."  Even though I am currently undertaking 2 Blended Learning workshops (one MOOC #blendkit and one workshop through Sloan-C), I have known about blended learning for a while.  As far as Online Learning goes...I've known about it, and been active in it for much longer!  How can these models be considered new?  To me MOOCs are new because we are still exploring them.  There is no "one MOOC format", just as there is no one Online Course format. MOOCs are a subset of Online Courses, and MOOCs have many other courses that are a subset of a MOOC. That being said...

Well, yesterday afternoon I got fired up when listening to the final panel discussion of the day at Sloan-C's annual ALN conference. The panel was titled "Evolution or Revolution? What’s Happening with “Traditional” Online Learning?" and I have broken down my thoughts by speaker. Jose Cruz (The Education Trust, US) This was a pretty interesting speaker, and he made a good point about putting "learning" back in "online learning". The speaker pointed out that governments was accountability, higher graduation rates, and, of course, do it with less money. This speaker,  mostly focused on access to higher education and higher education completion along ethnic and socioeconomic lines. Beyond that the speaker focused a lot on the numbers of people, along different ethnic and racial demographics, that have a BA. It seemed to me that the basic assumption was that the BA degree was a necessity - period. There was no interrogation of why a BA is a requiremen...

 It's week 3 of 5 in BlendKit2012, and this week's readings are on the topic of assessment (a pretty important topic if you ask me!). Thus far the contributions of my fellow participants have been pretty interesting to read as well (keep it up! :-)  ). In any case, this week's readings give the reader a quick overview of the testing types that an online environment affords, talks (briefly) about the importance of defining expectations (i.e. setting up grading rubrics) and  talks a bit about informal assessments.  This week's questions to keep in the back of your head are as follows: How much of the final course grade do you typically allot to testing? How many tests/exams do you usually require? How can you avoid creating a “high stakes” environment that may inadvertently set students up for failure/cheating?  What expectations do you have for online assessments? How do these expectations compare to those you have for face-to-face assessments? Are you ...

BlendKit, prepare to have your mind blown! OK, I am a exaggerating a bit, but I am going to come to this MOOC from a non-traditional approach. I've been thinking about the DIY activities, and I have to say that the DYI tools (4th column, DIY project deliverables) are pretty nifty; not just for blended learning, but also for instructional design purposes in general. Now, I don't think I will have a ton of time to complete all DIY deliverables; and, considering that the course I am working with is only a proposal which may, or may not become a full course†, I think it's best to not spend a whole lot of time on a specific course until it's approved to run (given other competing time issues). In any case, my guinea pig course is a course on Mobile Learning that I developed (at least in syllabus form) in the past year. The funny thing is that I originally conceived of this course as a blended course; however due to business factors (more online students interested in t...

This morning, while commuting to work, I was catching up on some blog posts from fellow #blendkit2012 participants and I came across a blog post titled Is blended the same as half-distance ? but Andres Norberg. I was originally just going to comment on the blog post itself, but the response was getting quite lengthy, so I converted into a blog post. Anders asks: If traditional face-to-face education is combined with distance education, what happens? Savings of classroom space and lecturing time? Better enrollment on campus due to increased flexibility in scheduling for students? Extra learning efficiency by using modern tools? More stimulating classes? A sense of being modern and up-to-date by enriching a classroom culture with digital tools? All of the above? It's interesting, to consider f2f education combining with distance education, but, when it comes down to it, what does that combination really mean?  For example, our campus has a lot of  web-enhanced courses , ...

Last year, for me anyway, the major pondering point of the year was MOOC pedagogy. Between cMOOCs and xMOOCs I've seen, and I am now still experiencing a lot of different deliveries, technologies, interactions, and I've been pondering their underlying pedagogies, and what makes them work! While I am still thinking about MOOC pedagogies, I have out that pot on thwack burner to slowly simmer and I've decided that fall semester is going to be about the blended mode of delivery. To this extent, I am taking the series of 3 Sloan-C workshops on blended learning to see what their experts say on the topic, and I am following BlendKit2012 out of UCF. This week is the final week of the first Sloan-C workshop, and the beginning of BlendKit. I've already submitted my blended learning module to the workshop coordinators, so it's time to deal a little with BlendKit. The reading in week 1 is interesting. As someone with a masters degree in instructional design, and with som...

Well, one more campus technology conference and expo is done! The Campus Technology annual summer conference is the nation’s premier higher education technology conference, where leading innovators and experts in technology for higher education guide faculty, instructional designers, eLearning program managers, information technologists, and campus administrators into the new realm of teaching and learning using the latest in applications, social software and immersive platforms. Initially I was thinking about writing a blog post per day (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday), but I had way too many interesting conversations with presenters, participants, and vendors to be able to do this (brain stops working after a certain point, you see).  So I thought I would pick 3 of my top sessions, and my top vendor of the show and talk a bit about these. KEYNOTES First of all, the keynotes by Mark Milliron (Chancellor of Western Governor's University) on "Deeper Learning Conversations ...

Last week, despite the craziness, I completed two courses.  First, I completed the #fslt12 MOOC, which I really enjoyed a lot!  The interactions between my peers and the facilitators were great, there was a lot of sharing of best practices and lived experiences, and I took a lot of things away; both things that I can immediately put into practice, and things that I need to read up on :-).  It was a bit of a bummer that I was not able to attend the final session and present my microteaching activity (see a blog post or two back), but my peers did discuss it and gave me some feedback which was pretty cool! I hope that Oxford Brookes runs this MOOC again next year because I think it's beneficial to people that are new to the teaching profession :-) The other course that I completed was a course/workshop from the Sloan Consortium on implementing the quality scorecard in online programs.  This was a pretty interesting course. Going into it, I was under the i...

This week I started a 2-week (online) workshop from the Sloan Consortium on Implementing the Quality Scorecard for the Administration of Online Education Programs . So far it's a pretty interesting course, and I've read through the reading materials supplied by the workshop facilitator.  One of the things that stands out, and this makes sense, is that an academic department can't go at it alone.  In order to implement a quality online program you need to reach out to many stakeholders, gatekeepers, and partners. In project management parlance, you also need a champion! One of the things that I've been thinking about over the past few years has been this tension between the online and the on-campus sides of operation.  In most departments there is an online person and an on-campus person.  In some departments there isn't that distinction, but in the minds of people there still is that online vs. on-campus  - this comes from discussions with people on my own cam...

I was reading a number of posts last week on Change11 on the topic of the 21st century University. Given how far things had progressed in the previous century it's hard to prognosticate on anything that's more than 10 years away...so in lieu of a guess or prophecy of what is to come, here's more of a wish: let's all just learn to work together! This past year I had attended a few conferences, both in person and virtually, and I've met colleagues that have been in situations that are similar to my own: their online and face-to-face sides of the institution are different, with different funding lines and different organizational charts. This type of organizational behavior does have adverse reactions in the teaching and learning realm in that more innovative teaching and learning opportunities are hampered by campus politics and funding lines. In our institution for example, face to face courses are offered through the "regular" university; while online c...

Life and Death Screenshot This week is gaming and simulation week (if you haven't guessed from the posts that I've been posting and responding to) on Change11 with guest Clark Aldrich . As usual, I've skipped the live session since there is more than enough content on the blogs and what's been provided by the guest facilitators. The reading matter for this week is a short book by Clark titled Designing Sims the Clark Aldrich way . The book was quite succinct and on the small side, perhaps an abbreviated version of  The Complete guide to Simulations and Serious Games , in other words a good quick read to get you situated in what one needs to do in order to get simulations off the ground for instructional purposes.  This book, for me, was quite interesting because it bridged my computer science and UI design backgrounds, with my management background, and my instructional design background - it was pretty cool to see all of these converge in an area (simulations) t...

The other day I posted some thoughts based on Leahgrrl's original post on adjuncts and technology . Tony Bates also posted thoughts on the issue around the topic of accreditation . Between these blog posts, and comments to all three of them, the mental gears started to slowly turn and think of additional thoughts around the issue.  The first one being accreditation. Tony writes that through his experiences being part of an accreditation agency, adjunct labor is something that they pay attention to when new  programs apply to become accredited, but then there is no follow up.  I know our campus had a recent AQUAD review* for all programs on our campus, and  both internal and external reviewers viewed departmental submissions of the resumes of these departments (history of department, course offerings, student information, course reviews, faculty reviews, student evaluations of courses and instructors,  etc.), in short everything an accreditor would ...

I was reading a post by Leahgrrl the other day titled Adjunct Technology, or why I can't figure out Blackboard . It was quite an interesting post, and not something completely foreign to me - I've read my fair share of adjunct posts on the Chronicle of Higher Ed , and Inside Higher Ed , as well as having known many adjuncts personally. This past week, while attending the Sloan-C annual conference (virtually) I saw a session on developing faculty, and one of the institutions (the name escapes me now) had faculty take an 8 week long training seminar which focused on pedagogy, but the final "product" of the course was a full course on Blackboard (or whatever LMS the institution used). The faculty were not paid for the workshop, but they were paid a stipend for creating the course on Blackboard (so I guess they were sort of reimbursed for the time they spend on this project in some fashion). What should be pointed out was that not all institutions do this - I think only...

Last week I was a virtual attendee at the annual Sloan-C conference. It was fun and educational enough to spend 3 days watching live streamed sessions, and a saturday catching up on some recorded ones. The recorded ones are not as fun since you don't have the twitter stream going :-)  In any case, I was watching the session on State Perspectives on Online Education and it seemed to me that there still is tension between the online side of the house and the face-to-face education side; namely that the f2f side doesn't want online to be "poaching"  "their" students, and in some cases refusing to share resources.  This was a major #facepalm moment for me because it's essentially two sides of the same organization fighting each other - which is really counter productive...so I tweeted: Competition between online&f2f jeez!Can we get over it already &recognize that OL or f2f doesnt matter.Its just one campus! #aln2011 Which lead to a brief exchange...

ChangeMOOC has started! Even though it's still an introductory week where people get to know each other (should I bother posting a "hello, my name is..." type of blog post?) it is the start of the MOOC for all intents and purposes. The one things that is really striking about this MOOC is the name... change what ? is what I want to know. Granted if you look at the course schedule it's all about education. I guess the subheading for this MOOC is education, learning and technology , so I guess we are changing them, but eduMOOC just finished a few weeks ago, and that was all about Online Learning Today...and Tomorrow . So I guess ChangeMOOC is a superset of what eduMOOC was about?  Either way, the week by week topics look interesting and interest piquing. I was planning on taking some Sloan-C workshops this fall, but between research projects and the ChangeMOOC, I think I won't have time.  Perhaps I will revisit the idea of SloanC workshops later on :-) #chan...