As online learning grew, so too did the functionality of course management systems. As the systems grew more and more complex, they became more and more fragile, necessitating the new administrative function of instructional designer to manage the systems. Control of distance learning gradually shifted from faculty to administrator as instructional designers started dictating how online courses would look and function.

Now faculty are starting to wrestle control back from administrators through the use of social media such as blogs, wikis, and VoiceThread. These systems can be easily set up by faculty and students to foster interactivity and user generated content that is not possible in course management systems. Best of all, instead of spending hours stocking the modules of a course management system, a faculty member can create a blog in minutes and spend nearly all of his or her time communicating with students.

But few colleges have a social media strategy. The assumption is still that all content must be housed within the LMS. Systems such as Blackboard are adding social media modules like blogs and wikis, but moving them into the locked-down LMS removes the very openness which gives these media value. The better approach is to understand that the LMS is just one tool among many for delivering online learning, and just like a carpenter, use the tool that best suits the job.

Here are some ways to incorporate social media into your course:

• Faculty members who want to create a hybrid course should use social media systems such as blogs or wikis rather than an LMS. An LMS is good for a fully online course, but requires needless administrative time for a hybrid course.
• Many faculty are teaching fully online courses though a combination of social media and LMS systems. For instance, Michelle Pacansky-Brock uses Moodle to manage assignments and maintain her gradebook, and Ning to teach her class. Steve Kolowich uses Moodle plus Skype and Elluminate to add interactive elements to his online courses. At Norwich University, I’ve added blogs, wikis and webinars outside of our LMS to provide students with an opportunity to explore issues within the profession that interests them.
• Schools are starting to attach social media “shells” to their LMS. GoingOn provides blogs and other forms of discussion that exist outside of the classroom to allow collaboration between students across the institution. For instance, all students in a business program can carry on discussions related to business outside of their particular courses. Learning Objects is another system that provides students with a “personal learning space” where they can create a blog, share sites, and collaborate in a variety of ways with like-minded students. It also allows clubs and departments to create Facebook-like sites to share information.
• Schools are changing to an LMS built on social media principles, such as Drupal. An open source platform, Drupal gives faculty the flexibility to make student blogs the homepage of their course, rather than administrative functions, encouraging collaboration. Better yet, any part of a course can be made public so that students can engage in conversations with other students, faculty, or professionals in the field.

Education is changing, and social media is presenting a world of opportunity to improve learning outcomes.

Feedback
As usual, I welcome your comments, criticisms, and cries of outrage in the comments section of this blog.

Resources
Insidious Pedagogy: How Course Management Systems Impact Teaching
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2530/2303

Learning Management Technologies: Enterprise Systems or Consumer Goods?
http://www.educause.edu/E09+Hybrid/EDUCAUSE2009FacetoFaceConferen/LearningManagementTechnologies/175842

Envisioning the Post-LMS Era: The Open Learning Network
http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/EnvisioningthePostLMSEraTheOpe/199389

The Traditional LMS is Dead: Looking to a Modularized Future
http://ideaentity.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-traditional-lms-is-dead

Drupal: http://drupal.org/

GoingOn: http://goingon.com/

Learning Objects: http://www.learningobjects.com/

John Orlando, PhD, is the program director for the online Master of Science in Business Continuity Management and Master of Science in Information Assurance programs at Norwich University. John develops faculty training in online education and is available for consulting at jorlando@norwich.edu.

Streaming media in online courses
When I recently created an online course on the philosophy of religion, I was concerned with delivering the course content in a variety of ways that would enhance the students’ ability to understand it. In addition to primary readings, study guides, and written lecture notes, I created presentations for streaming over the Web that combined bulleted text with more elaborate narration of the presentation topic, and I made extensive use of images to visually illustrate and make apparent the meanings of the text and narration. I created 12 narrated slide presentations, ranging from 4.5 to 11 minutes and covering topics such as the problem of evil, the validity of religious experience, and faith and reason.

I used Camtasia to produce the presentations, because this software allows for easy editing of video and audio segments, easy conversion to a Flash format for streaming over the Web, and easy construction of downloadable MP3 files and files for podcasting. Although this presentation software is relatively easy to use, it still took me about eight hours to create my first four-and-a-half-minute presentation. This involved learning the software, conceptualizing and creating the presentation, editing it, converting it to a Flash format, and posting it to the course website. By the time I constructed my 12th presentation, I was able to produce a 10-minute presentation and have it posted to my course website in about three hours. The resulting presentations enabled the students to view and listen to the content as often as they wished, to jump to different spots in the presentations, and to advance forward or backward through the content.

Although I was glad to provide students with learning options that would appeal to those who preferred to learn through listening and through visual representation of ideas, I wondered if there would be increased learning benefits and whether these benefits would justify the time needed to produce the presentations. In order to assess this, I also posted a complete transcript of the narration for each presentation. With 31 students in the class, I expected that there would be a natural division between those students who preferred to learn the content through the streamed presentations, those who preferred the text-only versions, and those who would use both modes to learn the course content.

Was it worth the time needed to add the bells and whistles? We’ll answer that question in Thursday’s post.

Jerry Kapus is an associate professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at University of Wisconsin-Stout.

Reprinted from Bells, Whistles, and Learning Online, Online Classroom, May 2009.

Now in its eighth year, The Teaching Professor Conference provides a thought-provoking and stimulating forum for educators of all disciplines and experience levels to share best practices that advance college teaching and learning.

This year’s Call for Proposals seeks submissions for presentations, panel discussions, and poster sessions focusing on the theme of “Educate. Engage. Inspire.” Submissions should relate to one of the following tracks, however compelling ideas that fall outside of these topical areas are welcome:

• Learning
• Activities that engage students
• Teaching specific types of courses
• Instructional vitality: Ways to keep teaching fresh and invigorated
• Teaching and learning with technology
• Grading and feedback

To submit a proposal, please visit The Teaching Professor Conference website and fill out the online proposal form: http://www.teachingprofessor.com/conference/proposals. Information on the proposal process, including what the review panel looks for in a quality submission, is also available at the above link.

The deadline for submissions is Oct. 22, 2010.

“Each year The Teaching Professor Conference delivers a full slate of programs and presenters guaranteed to restore your enthusiasm and renew your personal commitment to teaching,” said MaryAnn Mlekush, conference manager. “We welcome proposals from new and returning presenters who lead sessions that engage attendees and offer practical strategies that can be implemented in their classrooms.”

If the academic departments and the faculty housed within them are so important to the execution of a university’s mission and developing relationships with students and other constituents, what should be done to best “support and help” them?

There are several things that campus leaders can do to help and support academic departments. Whether we serve as a president, provost, dean, director of an academic or non-academic support unit, or an academic department head, our formal and informal policies and procedures need to reflect the following:

1. Respect the centrality of academic departments to the mission of the university. The dog must wag the tail, not vice versa.
2. Respect the diversity and individuality of each department. One size does not fit all.
3. Commit to the principle of shared governance. Top-down governance works only when those at the top are perfect.
4. Maintain open and timely communication across administrative divisions. The complexity of the 21st century university demands it.
5. Find out what is going on in these departments. In most cases, there are great things happening, but if not, you need to know that too.
6. Empower, enable, and encourage academic departments to accomplish their respective missions. This may mean that you finally approve that additional staff or faculty line, but it may mean you need to let them know that you appreciate them, that you trust them, and that you genuinely care.
7. Centralize help and support functions where appropriate. Create mechanisms that would relieve academic departments of some of these pressures. “One-stop” centers, held desks, and timely communication can eliminate some of the burden placed on the academic departments.
8. Lead your leaders. Department heads need you. Most deans and provosts have previously been department heads but sometimes fail to recognize how demanding and complex this position has become.

Successful business leaders understand that to take care of their customers they must first take care their employees, especially those who interact most directly with these customers. We in higher education would do well to do the same. Let’s help academic department help their students, alumni, and anyone else who might call.

Doyle D. Carter is an associate professor and head of the department of kinesiology at Angelo State University.

Excerpted from I Think I’ll Call My Department, Academic Leader, vol. 25, no. 11.

“Well if you promise not to bust me, Dr. E, I could take a picture of all this and send it to them,” offered Claire. She pointed at the laminated sign in the front of the room that said in huge font, complete with helpful picture, NO CELL PHONES ALLOWED IN CLASS.

Now, I am just as annoyed as the next person by the rude, thoughtless use of cell phones in public and have no patience with the thought of students using them to talk or text during my class. But Claire’s comment reminded me that most cell phones today are powerful little handheld computers and, like any tool, I could put them to use to facilitate and enhance several aspects of the teaching and learning I want to happen in my classroom. That was a new insight for me. It motivated me to start using cells phone in class rather than just being offended by them.

Let me share three simple ways they’ve helped my students and me:

1. Archive content from the chalk or white board by taking a picture of it, as in the vignette referenced above. Sure, interactive Smart Boards offer the same option, but for those of us who do not teach in rooms equipped with those, the cell phone camera is a fine low-tech option. Sometimes classes yield tremendous spontaneous insights that we may want to draw upon later. Claire sent the pictures to her classmates who missed class, and although I do not advocate making it easier on students who are absent, neither do I want them to miss out on crucial content. We have also used the cell phone cameras to capture 3-D structures and role-plays that have come up in class to which we know we will want to refer later without necessarily saving the original items. The real coup was using my own cell phone camera to document the board notes from a freewheeling faculty meeting that would have otherwise vanished. My most anti-technology colleagues were pleasantly taken aback.
2. Time small group activities using the built-in clock functions. In any group of three or four students, at least one (if not all) will have a cell phone. When we break out for intimate discussions or application tasks, I have the phone holders synchronize times and timers, and then let the groups do their work. This frees them from having to keep glancing at the room clock and keeps them more focused on the task. I have also experimented with all students using timers set on “vibrate” to monitor timed reading and individual in-class exercises and am pleased with the sense of calm this elicits, quite different from the tenser “countdown” atmosphere we have when I am the sole timekeeper.
3. Google it. There are times when what’s happening in class veers in an unanticipated direction and we need a fact I simply do not have at my disposal, nor does anyone in class. If it’s true that “all of us are smarter than one of us,” then literally bringing in the world via the Internet capacities of my students’ cell phones makes us collectively brilliant. We can do a quick search to find the missing details, and then move on. It has also been instructive to probe and push and ponder when diligent students come up with differing facts. These are great teachable moments that help me underscore why their research must not begin and end with Wikipedia—and the evidence is right there in their hands.

The list above is hardly exhaustive, but perhaps it can help us begin to refocus the cell-phones-in-class conversation. New technologies require us to harness our wisdom and imagination. They also challenge us to think differently about what we do and why. Based on what’s happened in my classroom I now propose that there are pedagogically defensible alternatives to silencing cell phones in our classrooms.

Karen Eifler, PhD, is an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Portland, Oregon.

Excerpted from Three Things to Do with Cell Phones (Besides Confiscate Them), The Teaching Professor, vol. 23, no. 7.

Using that definition as a common starting point, Shibley led seminar participants through a five-step process for renewing program-level learning outcomes assessment.

Step 1: Create a team – Determining who to involve in the assessment process is a critical first step, and Shibley recommends creating a team that includes those who care about learning, faculty who need scholarship, both junior and senior faculty, and possibly students.

Once the team is assembled, you need to assign a point person to lead the team. You should also provide training, so that each member understands the process. Finally, given that participation on an assessment team is an additional responsibility to an already full faculty plate, it’s always a good idea to find a way to recognize and reward team members for their contributions.

Step 2: Identify issues, problems and needs – This is where you begin the conversation about assessment, clarifying assumptions along the way. Find out how faculty in your program define student learning outcomes assessment, and what they’re currently doing. Take the time to revisit the key elements of your assessment process, review prior reports, and determine specific strengths and challenges.

Step 3: Select opportunities – During this stage you want to prioritize issues for each phase of the assessment cycle. The cycle includes defining outcomes, establishing criteria, collecting evidence, interpreting results, and taking action.

Step 4: Develop solutions – Shibley uses a learning opportunities matrix to provide an action-plan framework for addressing the deficiencies and priorities identified through the previous steps. As you begin to develop solutions, it’s important to communicate to those outside of the team what you’ve discovered and how you plan to tackle each issue.

Step 5: Update the process – The final step of the assessment renewal process is the implementation phase, where you take everything you’ve learned about what needs to be improved in your assessment processes, and make it happen.

“It’s important to think about program-level learning outcomes assessment as much more than simply meeting the demands of accountability,” says Shibley. “It’s really about quality, and about focusing on student learning, and looking for strategies to help you improve student learning.”

What a simple, straightforward definition for something often defined in much more complex ways. But problem solving doesn’t always mean the same thing. It might be the solution to a specific problem, like those that appear on math quizzes, or it might be a collection of possibilities that respond to a complex open-ended problem. But however it’s defined, problem solving is one of those skills all teachers aspire to have their students develop.

Understanding how problem-solving abilities develop is not easy, and measuring their development is even more complex. As a result, much of the research involves analysis of learners solving “knowledge-lean, closed problems that do not require any specific content knowledge to solve and that have a specific path to the answer.” (p. 866)

What this means is that “while we know a great deal about the problem-solving process in an abstract environment, we do not in fact have much insight into how students solve many types of scientific problems.” (p. 866) Not having this knowledge makes it pretty difficult to address problems that students may have as they work to solve more complex problems, like those included in an introductory chemistry course, for example.

But technology can help with the understanding of how students solve these more complex problems. The research reported in this article uses a software system that allows teachers to “track students’ movement through a problem and model their progress as they perform multiple problems.” (p. 867) The software uses case-based problems, for example, a chemistry case in which the student must identify an unknown compound based on physical and chemical tests that the student requests. There are “literally thousands” (p. 867) of possible paths that a student can take through this problem, according to the article, and the software can aggregate similar performances. Previous research has documented that the problem-solving ability of a typical student will not improve after he or she has completed about five problems using this software.

Given what other research has documented about the effectiveness of working collaboratively in groups on problems, this research team wanted to explore a “tantalizing” (p. 869) possibility: that collaborative groups might be effective in promoting the further development of problem-solving abilities. If groups were effective, would that benefit be retained when students went back to solving problems on their own? To answer those questions and another on how the nature of the group might affect the group’s effectiveness, researchers had students “stabilize” by working five problems individually; they then did five more problems collaboratively in pairs, and finally they did another five problems on their own.

Results? “Even individuals who had been given time to stabilize on a strategy adopted different strategies after solving problems in collaborative groups.” Better yet, after working with a partner, “a higher percentage of students adopted more successful strategies.” (p. 869) Based on data manipulation made possible with the software program, researchers conclude that most students improved by about 10 percent.

But that wasn’t all. Researchers grouped students according to their scores on a Group Assessment of Logical Thinking test. This instrument places students in one of three groups (based on Piaget’s theories of intellectual development) according to their level of thinking. About 50 percent of first-year college students are in the highest level. The collaborative pairs used in this research combined students from the same level for some of the pairs and students from different levels in other pairs. When a student in the lowest level was partnered with a student in the middle or high level, the lowest-level student had gains equal to those in all the other groups, “indicating that if they are paired with a student who can explain the problem and discuss it with them, they can improve their problem-solving performance significantly.” (p. 870) Interestingly, when students from the middle level were paired with those from the lower level, the middle-level students also became more proficient problem solvers.

Conclusion? “Using over 100,000 performances by 713 students on a problem, we have shown that we can improve student problem solving by having students work collaboratively in groups. These improvements are retained after grouping and provide further evidence of the positive effects of having students work in groups.” (p. 871)

Reference: Cooper, M. M., Cox Jr., C. T., Nammouz, M., Case, E., and Stevens, R. (2008). An assessment of the effect of collaborative groups on students’ problem-solving strategies and abilities. Journal of Chemical Education, 85 (6), 866-872.

Excerpted from Do Problem-Solving Abilities Develop in Groups?, The Teaching Professor, Volume 23, Number 4.

But despite the prevalence of technology on campuses, a new study indicates that computers alone can’t keep students from falling into their same weak study habits from their ink-and-paper days.

“Our study showed that achievement really takes off when students are prompted to use more powerful strategies when studying computer materials,” said the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Ken Kiewra, an expert in study methods and one of the authors of the study.

The research, published this month in The Journal of Educational Psychology, found that students tend to study on computers as they would with traditional texts: They mindlessly over-copy long passages verbatim, take incomplete or linear notes, build lengthy outlines that make it difficult to connect related information, and rely on memory drills like re-reading text or recopying notes.

Meanwhile, undergraduates in the study scored 29 to 63 percentage points higher on tests when they used study techniques like recording complete notes, creating comparative charts, building associations, and crafting practice questions on their screens.

The SOAR method of studying
Kiewra (pronounced kee-ra), a professor of educational psychology, calls the method SOAR: Selecting key lesson ideas, organizing information with comparative charts and illustrations, associating ideas to create meaningful connections, and regulating learning through practice. It complements how the brain processes information, he said.

“Learning occurs best when important information is selected from less important ideas, when selected information is organized graphically, when associations are built among ideas and when understanding is regulated through self-testing,” Kiewra said.

The study was built upon two experiments. In the first, undergraduates were questioned about how they study computer-based materials. In the second, they read an online text and then were asked to create on their computers some study materials that reflected their preferred (and likely weak) way to study. Or, they were prompted to use all or parts of SOAR study methods.

The latter group of studiers scored higher on tests measuring fact and relationship learning than the first group.

Kiewra is the author of Teaching How to Learn: The Teacher’s Guide to Student Learning (2009, Corwyn Press). He authored the new study with former UNL graduate student Dharmananda Jairam, at Penn State University, and said the study shows that as undergraduates spend more and more study time on computers, it will be vital for them to learn better ways of processing and then making use of information.

Teachers and designers of instructional software may want to take note of the study’s findings, as well.

“Teachers need to help students dispel crippling studying myths such as highlighting, outlining and rehearsal, and instead teach them strategies that help them succeed,” Kiewra said.

Steve Smith, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Office of University Communications.

The sobering fact is that less than sixty percent of the students entering four-year colleges in America today are graduating within six years. (Bowen, Chingos, & McPherson, 2009.) Minority students and those from poor families have an especially difficult time reaching the graduation milestone.

Historically, faculty members have not been expected to play a major role in retaining students. Their role, instead, was to “sort” students by assigning them grades based on their performance. The common view, for quite a long time, was that “students have a right to fail.” Many institutions did not even bother keeping track of the number of dropouts from their institutions or programs. In times of plentiful students and budget surpluses, this laissez-faire approach was tenable. This view is changing, rapidly, under the current conditions.

The new thinking is that institutions have a responsibility to promote and support student learning and that they should measure their success as institutions based upon how well their students learned. Certainly, students have a great deal of responsibility for their own success, but so does the institution and, by implication, the faculty members.

The shift from “teaching” to “learning,” then, is really a shift away from measuring the success of a college or university based upon resources and processes to measuring success based upon outcomes. These imperatives are behind the current drive to collect student success data and to help faculty and staff develop strategies to raise success rates. In short, institutions are turning to their faculties for help in improving upon dismal retention numbers.

Retention is not only a growing expectation and imperative, but it is also an opportunity for faculty members to take the lead in innovating, researching, and implementing new strategies while demonstrating their effectiveness. This is both a challenge and a huge opportunity for college professors to take the lead in re-creating the college learning experience in ways that are more supportive and effective.

Faculty members are on the front-line of meeting the increasingly important retention imperative. Instructors interact with students frequently and are likely to be among the first to notice signs that a student is disengaging from college and at-risk of dropping out. By learning to recognize the warning signs and taking informed intervention action, a faculty member can play a key role in changing the course of a student’s life for the better. This is an exciting opportunity and a big responsibility, but future generations depend on our willingness to rise to the challenge.

Excerpted from What Faculty Members Need to Know About Retention, a Magna white paper. Learn more about this valuable resource »

Reference
Bowen,William, Chingos, Matthew, & McPherson, Michael. (2009.) Crossing the Finish Line:
Completing College at America’s Public Universities. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Most faculty don’t encourage students to use personal experience because it is seen as too subjective and without much intellectual substance. Mott has students in her political theory course write three personal essays. Her motivation derives partly from the need to “displace the preponderance of passivity I find in their essays.” (p. 207) Not only does the academy object to the personal, but students themselves have been trained to stay out of their writing. “High school students know from experience that the more they talk about themselves, the more will be taken away.” (p. 207)

Mott’s carefully designed writing assignments creatively weave the first-person voice and personal experience into explorations of the political theorists being read in the course. Here’s her second five-page essay assignment:

“Begin by describing a situation in which you felt at odds with a professional (a doctor, a lawyer, a therapist, a teacher, a social worker). Show us (don’t tell us) how your experience of the event differed from that of the professional. Let the details of the story convey all the confusions of this experience. Stop and breathe. In the subsequent section, use one or two passages from Montaigne to analyze this experience, to unpack the confusion, and to lay out the terms of power. Finally, what did you learn about yourself as a result of this essay? (p. 209)

“The beauty of this method is that it allows a layering of experience, first descriptive, and then analytical, so that the writer becomes both participant and judge. First the writer explores the fullness of experience and then she reflects back on it using theory.” (p. 209) All three of Mott’s essay assignments are designed so that students cannot write about just their feelings or personal experiences. The personal writing becomes a vehicle for substantive discussion of course content. The article contains excerpts from student essays, and these show how effectively this approach enables students to confront personal experience with political theories that can explain more deeply or challenge what they may have come to believe about those experiences.

This article is not particularly easy reading, as Mott describes the writing assignments in terms of very specific discipline-based content. What the article does show clearly is how powerful carefully designed writing explorations like these can be. They allow students to take what they know and what they have experienced and hold that knowledge against a light that significantly illuminates their understanding.

Reference: Mott, M. (2008). Passing our lives through the fire of thought: The personal essay in the political theory classroom. PS, Political Science and Politics, 41 (1), 207-211.

Excerpted from Use Personal Essay Assignments to Encourage Substantive Discussion of Course Content, The Teaching Professor, vol. 23, no. 3.