Media Richness Theory describes how and why particular media are selected to deliver a message.¹ In MRT, richness is operationalized in terms of a medium’s ability to accomplish four goals: sending multiple cues, supporting language variety, providing immediate feedback, and allowing personal nature to be communicated.

A rich medium, then, would allow for a variety of cues, both verbal and nonverbal, to be sent and received. It would also allow for the transmission of multiple language types, including the spoken and written word, and visual symbols and images. Rich communication media also permit feedback to be sent and received instantaneously and a high degree of personalization. Using these descriptions, a purely text-only, asynchronous element in an online course would be the least rich medium, whereas a synchronous videoconference or webinar would be the richest.

Studies show that a richer distance education environment, in terms of media-rich communication technologies available for instructor and student use, yields higher rates of student satisfaction and instructor-to-student, student-to-instructor, and student-to-student communication.² However, we do not always need a rich medium to accomplish a communication goal. A common predictor of media performance is one’s ability to select the proper medium for the task at hand. Typically a message or task that is high in ambiguity or uncertainty needs a richer medium in order to be successfully communicated. The opposite, then, is also true: a simple task or message, with little chance for confusion or misinterpretation, can be delivered via a less-rich medium.

Before selecting a medium to convey a message in your online class, it is helpful to do an evaluation of the tools that you have at your disposal. Depending on your personal technological efficacy, these tools may be limited to those that your institution licenses and supports or you may be able to venture out and use some freeware applications that are available online but often do not include user support. Use this sample chart (prefilled with a sampling of tools) to help you develop a media richness continuum of tools at your institution.

Once you’re aware of the media you may utilize in your online classes, you can start to select the proper medium based on the message you want to send. Note that you are not limited to one channel—you may select multiple media to communicate your message.

For example, in my introductory communication course, one of the competencies is public speaking. Of course, in an online environment this can pose a challenge. One way I address this learning objective is through having the students produce micro lectures via mediated speeches. Although I believe I write clear instructions, I realize that producing a mediated speech is probably a relatively new assignment for the students in my class, so the complicated nature of the task warrants more than just text-based instructions. For this task I chose two media to communicate my message: an assignment sheet and a mediated speech video.

In your online course, you may find it helpful to expand the media richness tools chart with an additional column, stating the purposes you intend to use specific media for. For example, if you have an assignment involving a complicated task or tasks, you might want to have a traditional text-based assignment sheet and supplement that sheet with an audio, audiovisual, or video message. Documenting these media decisions is a great way to begin a style guide for your class so you can readily identify which media are best to communicate any given piece of information, making interaction and delivering instruction in an online course environment a little less challenging and a richer and more rewarding experience.

References:
1 See Daft, R.L. and Lengel, R.H. (1984). Information richness: A new approach to managerial behavior and organization design. Research in Organizational Behavior, 6, pp 191-223.

2 See Shepherd, M.M. and Martz, W.B. (2006). Media richness theory and the distance education environment. The Journal of Computer Information Systems, 47, pp 114-122.

Jill Schiefelbein has taught and developed online courses at Arizona State University for the past six years. For more information on this topic, see Five Ways to Improve Interaction in Your Online Courses, an online seminar presented by Schiefelbein.

Reprinted from Online Classroom (March 2011): 1,2.

Tools and Techniques for Improving Course Accessibility

At-risk learners—those who have learning disabilities or who are not native English speakers—can benefit from multi-modal access to lectures and presentations. Learn how lecture capture and transcription technologies can help foster barrier-free learning environments.

It has become increasingly clear that one mode of delivering course material often is not enough for the varied learning styles, needs, and challenges of today’s college students. Research has shown that one of the simplest ways to improve access to course content is to capture, caption, and transcribe your lectures and presentations.

Discover how easy it is to create and publish accessible course materials in Tools and Techniques for Improving Course Accessibility.

Led by Keith Bain, this online seminar will help participants:

• Understand the accessibility challenges facing at-risk learners in various learning environments;
• Learn the basic techniques for digitizing lectures and presentations;
• Determine whether your campuses already have lecture-capture capability—and how to start using it;
• Compare the strengths and weaknesses of traditional and automated captioning and transcription tools; and
• Access readily available tools that generate captions and transcripts to publish accessible course materials.

Participants also get valuable resources to share with their colleagues after the seminar. These include how-to guides and training resources for recording, transcribing, and publishing accessible media. Participants are even given access to a temporary user account where they can test automated captioning and transcription.

When you order the recording of this seminar on CD, you’ll also receive the complete transcript.

An optional Campus Access License is available for an additional $200. It allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal website for unlimited access by the entire campus community.

Order the CD + Transcript

Who Will Benefit:
This seminar is recommended for directors of educational technology, instructional developers and designers, professors and instructors, educational technologists, ADA and Section 508 coordinators or advisors, and disability resource professionals.

Speech capture, captioning, and transcription technology can improve success rates for all students, particularly at-risk learners who have learning disabilities or who are not native English speakers. Learn how you can use these tools to increase learning success on your campus by registering for this seminar today.

All seminars include a discussion guide for facilitators
Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

During the recent online seminar Selecting and Using Technologies in Online & Blended Courses, Tony Bates, an elearning and distance education planning and management consultant, offered some insights on what to consider when making technology decisions.

Bates, author of Managing Technology in Higher Education: Strategies for Transforming Teaching and Learning, recommends the SECTIONS model, which examines a variety of factors for determining the most appropriate technology to bring into a classroom. Some of the larger questions you need to ask are, “How will this technology benefit the students? Does it make learning more accessible for the students? Does it increase their flexibility? What kind of students are you reaching—or, more importantly, could you reach who you’re not reaching already—with this technology?,” Bates said.

The SECTIONS decision-making model
Students – What are the demographics of the students in your course? Do they work? Do they live on or near campus? What is their preferred learning style? Are they motivated learners?

Ease of use; portability – There’s nothing more frustrating than technology that doesn’t work like it’s supposed to, so whatever technologies you choose, they must be easy to use, easy to maintain and reliable. Training should be available for anyone who needs it.

Costs – The costs involved could be fixed or variable, and go beyond the actual cost of the product to include instructor time, instructional support, media production, and maintenance.

Teaching – What is your teaching style? Some technologies lend themselves more to didactic or direct teaching; others to student participation. What are the intended learning outcomes? How will students be assessed?

Interaction – What technologies will engage and motivate your students? What technologies will enhance interaction between you and your students, between students, and between the students and the course material?

Organization – Does the institution support the use of learning technologies? Can you and your students get help if you need it? If you try to do something different will you be rewarded or punished?

Novelty – New technologies are a double-edged sword, Bates said. Because they are new, they might attract positive attention and support. However, new technologies also carry more risk because they’re largely untested, and may never reach broad adoption or maturation.

Speed and Security – Security and privacy issues are becoming increasingly important. Is the technology secure or can it be ‘hacked’? Is student information protected? Is the data stored on a secure server and is it backed up in case of an emergency?

“The key is, whatever model you choose, think about the technology choice before designing the course,” said Bates. “Too often instructors get halfway through the course and then start making decisions about the technology when that should have been thought about at the beginning so that it can be properly integrated.”

Results of the survey were released earlier this month in a report titled Trends in eLearning: Tracking the Impact of eLearning at Community Colleges. The survey was completed by 139 colleges, typically by the institution’s distance education administrator.

Since the survey began in 2004, respondents were asked to rate the greatest challenges for their distance education program. For all six years, the number one challenge has been the need for support staff for training and technical assistance. The second biggest challenge this year, moving up from number three, is adequate assessment of distance education classes.

Some of the key findings of the report:

• 21 percent offer blended courses; up from 15 percent last year.
• 71 percent continue to increase the number of blended courses each term; up from 53 percent last year.
• 81 percent cap enrollment for online classes.
• 72 percent develop their own course content; 21 percent use publisher content.
• 40 percent charge students an additional per-credit fee for take online courses.
• The most difficult classes to teach online remain unchanged from previous years and include: lab-based sciences, speech, clinical requirements, fine arts, nursing, math, industrial technology, foreign languages, and computer hardware.
• 63 percent have mandatory faculty training with most saying that “more than eight hours” are required.
• 40 percent allow full-time faculty to reside in another city or state from the institution.

Access a PDF of the report Trends in eLearning: Tracking the Impact of eLearning at Community Colleges, here »

For more information on the ITC, go to http://www.itcnetwork.org/

Assuming that your students will pick up a new technology on their own is a recipe for disaster. You must also be explicit about how you want them to use these systems to avoid them going off in the wrong direction.

Training your students in the use of technology need not be time consuming. The secret is to only do it once—it becomes time consuming when you need to repeat the training over and over.

You can take time in class to demonstrate how to use a system, but what about the students who miss class that day, or simply forget parts of the presentation? You can write out the steps for an online class, but seeing how something is done is far more effective in learning a process than reading about it.

Happily, it is very easy to make a screencast that walks people through the process and allows them to view it as often as they need. I’ve found that it takes far less time to make a screencast of a process than to write out the directions. I’ve also found that I get far fewer questions about a process with a screencast than written directions.

I make screencasts to explain nearly any task to students or colleagues. For instance, if I make a spreadsheet for my boss or others, I’ll accompany it by a two or three minute screencast pointing out which cells contain which information. This saves a lot of time explaining things later. I also make screencasts showing students how to post to the class blog and wiki, and allow them to view them on their own.

Screencasting only requires a microphone, which are built into some laptops, and if not can be purchased for around $30. The system will record your mouse movements and everything you do on the screen while you describe the process. There are numerous free and easy to use systems, and sites to post the results for your audience to watch or download at their leisure.

Once you start screencasting, you won’t want to stop. Have fun!

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

Links to Free Screencasting Software for Teachers
Jing (http://www.jingproject.com): An excellent system from TechSmith which allows users to make five-minute screencaptures and either download the videos or post them to screencast.com.

ScreenJelly (http://www.screenjelly.com/): Allows for 3 minute videos that can be shared by email or Twitter.

ScreenR (http://screenr.com/): Make screencasts without downloading any software.

Screencast-O-Matic (http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/): Allows for up to 15 minute screencasts that are hosted on the site or uploaded to YouTube.

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.

The seventh edition in this annual series is a collaboration between the NMC and ELI. Each year, the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on campuses during the next one to five years.

The six technologies described in detail the 2010 Horizon Report and their time-to-adoption are:

Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less

• Mobile computing
• Open content

Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years

• Electronic books
• Simple augmented reality

Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years

• Gesture-based computing
• Visual data analysis

The report introduces each of the six technologies by defining what it is and its relevance to higher education, creativity, or research, and examples of current or future applications. Each section then concludes with an annotated list of readings and other resources.

“Campus leaders and practitioners across the world use the report as a springboard for discussion around emerging technology,” noted Larry Johnson, chief executive officer of the NMC. “As this is the seventh year of the report, it also offers an opportunity to look back at the overarching trends over time. What we see is that there continue to be long-term channels along which technology appears to be unfolding. These have affected, are affecting now, and will continue to affect the practice of teaching and learning in profound ways for some time.”

To create the 2010 Horizon Report, the 47 members of the 2010 Advisory Board engaged in a comprehensive review and analysis of research, articles, papers, and interviews; discussed existing applications and brainstormed new ones; and ultimately ranked the items on the list of more than 110 technologies that emerged for their potential relevance to teaching, learning, and creative expression.

According to ELI Director Malcolm Brown, “Identifying the key emerging technologies for learning is vital in a time in which all planners are forced to make very careful choices about investments in technology. The Horizon Report goes beyond simply naming technologies; it offers examples of how they are being used which serves to demonstrate their potential. Finally, the report also identifies the trends and challenges that will be key for learning across all three adoption horizons. This makes the Horizon Report essential for anyone planning the future of learning at their institution.”

Incidentally, if the rise of Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media caught you off-guard as much as it did me, I think it’s important to note that the 2005 Horizon Report included “social networks and knowledge webs” as a technology with a time-to-adoption horizon of four-five years. I guess I should have been ready.

The 2010 Horizon Report can be accessed here.

Reference:

2010 Horizon Report. Johnson, Laurence F., Levine, Alan, Smith, Rachel S. and Stone, Sonja. 2010 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2010. http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2010-Horizon-Report.pdf (accessed January 15, 2010).

In one such study, Joanna C. Dunlap and Patrick R. Lowenthal from the University of Colorado at Denver used Twitter as a way to enhance social presence in an online course. In an article that appears in the Journal of Information Systems Education (see reference below) the authors discuss the ease in which Twitter can enable “free-flowing just-in-time interactions” and describe the instructional benefits they discovered in using the micro-blogging service.

Based on their experience using Twitter with their students, the authors also offer five guidelines for using Twitter in the classroom:

1. Make it relevant: Following celebrities on Twitter can be fun, but make sure students understand how Twitter will help them meet certain learning goals for your course. Show them examples of how you have benefitted from using Twitter.
2. Define clear expectations: The authors required students to use Twitter two-three times a day for two weeks. After that time, if the student decides he or she doesn’t see a value in Twitter, then they are not required to keep using it. However, the authors found that most continued participating in the Twitter discussions for the duration of the course and beyond.
3. Model effective and appropriate Twitter use: Demonstrate for your students Twitter best practices by showing them how you use the application to connect with colleagues, share information, and ask and answer questions. It’s also a good idea to remind them that Twitter, like other social networking sites, is a public forum.
4. Build Twitter activity into assessment: To reinforce Twitter as a valuable resource, the authors encouraged students to use information and resources gathered through Twitter participation in their research papers and presentations, and assessed them on the accuracy and relevance of this information.
5. Stay active in Twitter: Continue to participate in the Twitter community you created even after the course ends. The authors found this enabled them to achieve a social presence needed to support ongoing student engagement.

Using Twitter to Keep Students Connected
An experiment on the use of social media at the University of Leicester in the UK has shown that Twitter can act as a valuable communication tool in the college setting.

The study, published by the Association for Learning Technology, discovered that ‘tweeting’ helped:

• Develop peer support among students
• Develop personal learning networks
• Students to arrange social meetings

The researchers also found Twitter to be very attractive as a data collection tool for assessing and recording the student experience, with a wide range of free and increasingly sophisticated online analysis tools.

References:
Dunlap, J.C. & Lowenthal, P.R. (2009). Tweeting the Night Away: Using Twitter to Enhance Social Presence. Journal of Information Systems Education. Retrieved November 19, 2009, from here.

University of Leicester (2009, November 16). Twittering the Student Experience. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 19, 2009, from here.

Electronic portfolios, wikis, do-it-yourself podcasts, and online collaboration tools are just some of the Web 2.0 applications being embraced by faculty as a way to give their students more control over the content and process by which they learn, says Rhonda Ficek, director of instructional technology services at Minnesota State University – Moorhead. In the October 29th online seminar, Creating a Personalized Learning Environment with Web 2.0 Tools, Ficek provided a comprehensive overview on how Web 2.0 tools are transforming teaching and learning through what has become known as Personalized Learning Environments (PLE’s).

While Learning Management Systems like WebCT and Blackboard are course-centered and largely faculty-driven, Ficek says PLE’s are learner-centered systems with four key features:

• Communication and collaboration
• Formal and informal learning
• Flexible roles and structures
• Electronic portfolios and organizers

The Web 2.0 tools used to create PLE’s are easy to use, and provide anywhere from basic to advanced features for free – two factors that make them attractive to both faculty and students. Ficek demonstrated the ease-of-use for a number of applications during her seminar, including the wiki WetPaint, e-notebooks like Google Notebook and Zoho, and an electronic organizer called Zotero, which is a Firefox extension used to collect, manage and cite research sources.

“Web 2.0 applications are playing a key role in the evolution of these powerful virtual learning environments and are forcing educators to have a different attitude about the role of technology as it relates to the development, delivery, relevance and retention of content,” says Ficek, noting that tools like electronic notebooks also are more efficient for instructors than traditional notebooks and provide her with a quick and easy way to provide feedback.

“These applications are also empowering learning in ways that hadn’t been possible before,” she says.