Edtech Application

A "New" Kind of Virtualization for Distance Learning

2011-11-01T17:31:00.000-07:00

IT communities have been buzzing for a few years with the belief that desktop virtualization is clearly the path of the future. The June 13, 2011 issue of InformationWeek has two separate articles regarding desktop virtualization, a system whereby all functions of the individual user including the applications required to run them are pulled from a remote server. With on-campus virtualization, you do not necessarily need a powerful computer at your desk. Instead you need only a device, such as a Citrix Xen client, capable of pulling everything it needs from the server, displaying it on the screen, and taking inputs from mouse and keyboard. In theory, a college should be able to outfit its lab or classrooms in a more cost effective way.

However, virtualization is also the path of the past. Before personal computers (either Apple or IBM versions) came into being, the business world used large mainframe computers with mindless, aka CPUless and hard driveless, terminals to access them. At some point it just became much cheaper for an organization to own several or many PCs rather than a very expensive and difficult to maintain mainframe. Mainframes in general required their own atmosphere controlled spaces. They had significant trouble with power losses or fluctuations. They required very specially trained and skilled technicians. If a mainframe goes down, every terminal in your organization is down. Designed long ago, the architecture for mainframes could not operate the resource intensive applications of today or even 5 years ago.

Although in virtualization we are not talking about mainframes, a good deal has changed. In fact, virtualization now does not necessarily mean you need a special client device. Instead, it may be possible for a virtual server to work with existing desktop computers, laptops and tablets.

I believe this has a fascinating potential to resolve the issues we see in our technology classes. Typically, students sign up for a technology class who do not have the required software, who have incorrect versions of the software, who have hardware that cannot run a demanding application, who have software installed that conflicts with the application required for the class, and who at least at the start of classes do not even understand the impact these problems have on their performance in online classes. With so much being said about the importance of all students getting the best possible start in class, it is even more important in a distance learning class, where technical deficiencies at the beginning will place even a good student in peril throughout the course.

At this point, I am not convinced that desktop virtualization will mete out its potential on campus but it does have the potential to solve a number of problems online. Hopefully, the new CEO of IBM, Virginia Rometty can see the new path of virtualization.

YouTube or iTunes U: Who Will Win the Battle for Educational Content?

2011-09-13T17:31:00.000-07:00

2005: the Pioneer Days for Web Video

In 2005 providing video and audio content electronically to our students was a vexing problem at the college. Video files in particular presented several obstacles. They were insidiously large; took forever both to upload and download; were outrageously difficult to edit and even to add simple titles; and came in a variety of file formats, depending on the camera used. We talked about buying a streaming server which for our college and level of usage was much too expensive and required an additional expensive streaming license from Real Networks or another similar service. We posted them on our own web site but this meant that students were required to have a viewer for videos, an additional codec for the file type, and possibly upgraded hardware on their home computers. The video also needed to completely download before it could be played. Shortly after this I discovered that the ability to progressively download, a process that mimics the streaming of a regular server, had been added to Adobe’s Flash Player. (Progressive download was first added to Flash in 2003 but the implications were not readily apparent until a few years later.)

A colleague at the college did some research and discovered in 2007 that we also could likely use Apple’s iTunes U as a method for delivering our video content. We could upload videos at no cost onto Apple’s servers which would be downloaded on the student end using the iTunes Player either on the home computer or on a portable device like the—at the time—extraordinarily popular iPod. Unfortunately, the generous Apple contract required us to sign a limited liability clause which proved to be a several-year “sticking point.”

Comparisons but Not Apple and Apple

Fast forward to today. We and the rest of the educational world are using both methods for video.

Much of the video currently on the web including Google’s YouTube is sandwiched in a Flash wrapper to help it play with a minimum of problems. YouTube is very easy to use and has millions of users worldwide.

ITunes U now has near 1000 participating institutions, approximately 75,000 available files and millions of downloads.

Because the numbers fluctuate daily and iTunes U is primarily “marketed” to educational institutions it can be difficult to compare the two. YouTube can and is used by anyone with a video to upload. Although anyone can use iTunes for music and movies and have an iTunes account, iTunes U accounts are for institutions. It is not exactly an apples and apples comparison.

At the college we use both services. Faculty members find it easy to upload video content for their classes on their own with YouTube. Cellular phone cameras can quickly post video to YouTube. Our college adds recorded college events and activities to iTunes U.

However, YouTube content was limited to 10 minutes, regardless the file size. In 2010 this was increased to 15 minutes. ITunes limits its uploads to 1 GB file size, regardless how long it runs. We have found that lengthy videos can be compressed into small file sizes so that ITunes works best for our recorded campus events and whole class sessions, whereas YouTube is very convenient and easy to use for faculty within their classrooms.

EDU YouTube: A Strong New Contender

The fight has heated up with EDU YouTube which allows academic institutions to add longer running video content to a specific YouTube channel.

Although I have not seen it yet in the EDU YouTube courses, Google has a straightforward method for profiting from their videos. They have sidebar and pop up ads relative to the video content. I do not see the same clear methods for profiting from the iTunes U videos.

Currently, I would speculate that because of the ease of use, the absence of the necessity of a player especially with the rise of smartphones that can easily access the Internet, and the easy potential to profit, I believe that Google’s YouTube is on target to win the race.

Educational Twitter Problems

2011-06-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

Twitter has and has had tremendous promise for use as an educational tool but bringing it into broad educational usage is fraught with challenges, some that have to do with students, the administration, and faculty…and some with Twitter’s own policies.

Added in 2009 Twitter lists are also a great way to group together and make the tweets you follow more manageable. Since your lists can be private or

public, you can also follow lists themselves, essentially follow the tweets of sets of others without following them individually.

For a few years, we have been using Twitter as an administrative communications tool. We post weather and classroom closing, registration, and student program information. It has been a hard sell to our students and to our faculty. Our faculty members believe they do not have the time to learn new applications. Our students also do not want to learn anything they are not already using. Our increasingly younger students attempt to use Facebook for everything rather than explore other things that may be useful for other purposes. Additionally our IT administration of our collective colleges does not trust the permeability and security of free systems. After our college successfully began using Twitter for weather messages, the system of colleges licensed a pay system that can send emergency messages to cell phones but not much else.

Last year my department cosponsored bringing to speakers Mark Freydenberg and Ben Aslinger, Bentley University professors, to our college for a presentation on Web 2.0 technologies that they use in the classroom. I find fascinating their discussions about using Twitter and cell phones in the classroom as a way to get better and more rapid participation and feedback from their students. Their integration with Twapperkeeper meant

that they could capture and archive Twitter discussions for better analysis of their content and quality. It was disappointing to hear that Twitter used their terms of service to eradicate Twapperkeeper. However, there may other ways to capture the content.

For the past semester, our numbers of Twitter users were at about 17% our official college Facebook Insight numbers. We began using more than a year before Facebook but despite concerted efforts the number of users has not budged by more than one percent.

The future of Twitter is unclear. Twapperkeeper founder John O’Brien believes that Twitter is forcing out helping applications so that they can develop and somehow monetize these aspects themselves. However, I have not seen the results of their efforts so far. The popularity of Facebook dominates the college landscape. Facebook also continues to morph into the social media application that does what all others do. So far the only uncopied advantage Twitter has is that it forces users to be more concise with its 140 character limit. But is that an advantage or simply an anachronistic novelty?

Missing the Value of LinkedIn

2011-05-30T08:57:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I participated in a discussion about the difference between elearning and distance learning with a number of educators: a consultant, CEO of a mission, a professor, an online trainer, a CLO, a teacher/writer, and a technology director. They were from Washington, D.C., Utah, Great Britain, California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Virginia, and Oregon. They had all volunteered to be a part of the discussion, to share their knowledge and perceptions. For each of them I was able to see online resumes so I could verify that they had some experience, education, and/or background knowledge. I could tell quickly that their comments were valid and reliable during our discussion. We had this conversation asynchronously over a couple of months. A couple of individuals posted research links and other references. I do not normally directly network with any of them but I know people who know some of them. With this asynchronous conversation happening I received emails each time someone posted so that I did not have to constantly check this for two months. During this time several people looked at my background and experience, some desiring to connect with others in my profession, others looking for collaborators or employees with my skill sets. All of this happened in LinkedIn.

In the paragraph above, I have done more to explain what LinkedIn does than the sum total of news coverage for the past couple of weeks. The media focused on the initial public offering and continually asked us if the fact that the IPO did so well was due to a new dot-com boom. They asked us this question even though they gave us only one possible answer. They did not talk about the possibility that LinkedIn has intrinsic value, how it is different than Facebook and Twitter, how the business has grown over the last five years, that it is populated not by everyone you know but by colleagues, that LinkedIn profiles people but has ways to plug in business and industry, and that because LinkedIn is connecting individuals with the same professional interests it is also building the most powerful electronic “mailing list” in the world. The media—all the media—really failed in informing us so that we could answer their question intelligently.

For five years, I have been trying to generate interests at my college in LinkedIn which I believe has enormous value for our students and faculty. I have always placed Linked in the pantheon of social media: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I organized workshops and talked to many individuals as we worked on other projects. It has been an uphill climb but some of our faculty members are encouraging students to get the account and those students are using LinkedIn to get jobs.

For their part, the students initially do not like LinkedIn. They want it to be Facebook. Although LinkedIn is making what I believe are some antithetical concessions, it is not the place where you post what you are wearing or where you are eating dinner. It is not the place that you post your favorite jokes and pictures of your vacation. It is not the place for concise blast messages. Not the playground Facebook has become, it is grown-up. It is the networking of the adult world, a digital place where time, money and other resources matter and a place where who you connect to online has more of an impact than on your feelings. Students have to be taught the value of LinkedIn, just as I have to teach our faculty and college administrators. Just as the media should be “teaching” everyone. Having stated this, I cannot deny that there is a potential for people to make a boat-load of money but this is not the only story. It is not even the main story.

Compfight for Images

2011-03-04T18:09:00.000-08:00

From the January edition e-Learning review I discovered a really neat Web 2.0 tool called Compfight, which allows you to search the Internet for images. Okay so you're wondering can't I already do that with Google? Yes, you can but you have a limited—yes, Google, I said limited set of ways that you can search. Compfight is a Flickr image search tool. Compfight’s thumbnails make it easy to use as well.

Compfight allows you to search for images in safe and unsafe modes as Google does. It also allows you to the license. You can choose "any

license, creative Commons, commercial" to sort the images based on the license. You can also find just the original versions of the picture, its copies, or both. Plus if you like the picture you find this button so that you can tweet it or Facebook it right away.

As a learning management system administrator and a faculty trainer at my college I must confess that it is difficult to help even our faculty users understand some of the ins and outs of copyright, fair use, and public domain items when it comes to their course. Lately we've been talking just a little bit more about Creative Commons which perhaps offers a middle ground, a place where others are willingly sharing their content but also specify exactly what you can do with it. This is what is missing in the general Internet search with Google.

One thing that always concerns when a powerful, new free tool appears on the Internet is its long-term prospects. So many web companies start out as free hope they will be bought out by someone "big." Other companies are hoping that once they get us addicted to the usage their pages that we will be willing to pay for the service. Since change the college is a process not an event, training people to use something new is problematic if that item only last a couple of years. Come by which began in 2008 is already due for some administrative changes. And according to Site Trail it is respectable usage numbers. Still is valuable enough that for now I am advising people to use it before it becomes a pay service.

Too Much Interactivity in Online Courses

2011-01-08T13:40:00.000-08:00

The first time I heard it I was at a Sloan-C conference a few years ago. It was a small isolated study so I regarded it as a curiosity rather than a study to cause us to re-examine our online learning philosophy. Since then, I have seen it again a couple more times. Last year in the Distance Learning Report a different group of researchers reported that increased interactivity lead to decreased student satisfaction and may actually decrease a student’s chance of success in the course.

It makes sense to me that increased work places a student under increased stress to make sure the extra activities are completed in a timely fashion.

Despite the sample sizes and the program implications, I can accept the possibility of the veracity of the researchers’ claims. It makes sense that in the continuum of online learning activities there is both a point where the activities can be insufficient in number to allow the students to adequately achieve the course objectives and a point at which adding more does not mean the students learn more.

However, I am not interested in seeing more studies showing the same on either side, “those fer and those agin.” For those of you doing research I propose the following questions. Where are the lines to be drawn? Where is the “sweet spot” in the middle where it is ideal for learning, not too much but containing sufficient rigor? Is “sufficient rigor” the same for all institutions of higher learning? If not, what accounts for the differences? Who is best suitable to determine what is too much or too little, faculty, administrators, student, accrediting bodies, states, or the federal government? Is there a different point depending on discipline?

For now, I suspect that at most institutions for a sizeable percentage of institutions there is too little interactivity, especially if the institutions allow instructors to design their own content. Answering the questions above can help us to repair this problem.

Where Are the Faculty Leaders for Digital Humanities?

2010-11-29T15:46:00.000-08:00

A colleague recently sent me a link to a New York Times article, Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches by Patricia Cohen.

In the article Cohen describes how the new world of data is leading to studies and research in the world of humanities that just were not possible in the past such digitally mapping Civil War battlefields to determine topography‘s role or “using databases of thousands of jam sessions to track how musical collaborations influenced jazz”.

The article is not a list of hitherto unquantifiable potentialities; it asks the question of purpose and value of the information being obtained.

The article is yet further reinforcement that even technophobic or techno-agnostic educators must shift their positions to provide guidance to our digital native students. Even though technology is not their field, this means that educators must continually educate themselves in the both what kinds of technology are available to their students and how to use them. It means that my colleagues can ill afford to spend their time only on their disciplines but must now consider technology usage to be as much a part of their disciplines as is using the library. It means that technology, particularly office and web 2.0 applications, must play a role in classroom sessions.

Another colleague once told me that technology tools are best when they work right and remain in the background. Cohen’s article helps to show that viewing technology through this lens may be shortchanging our students regardless the discipline.

What’s In a Campus Edition?

2010-05-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

Why do companies marketing to educators and students love to name their products campus edition? I suppose that the name is intended to make us see that they are creating something specifically for us. However, what exactly are they creating? The term does not seem to refer to the same set of things each time.

Most of my colleagues are familiar with the WebCT Campus Edition and Blackboard Campus Edition learning management systems. These LMS versions are being steadily morphed into Blackboard 9. At some point there will be no online Blackboard campus using the term campus edition. However, based on how frequently the term is used, I do not think there will be any shortage of products or services that do use the term.

An example is Mozilla Firefox Campus Edition 2.0.0.6, a student-centered variant of the Firefox browser that added two components, an iTunes control called FoxyTunes and a research manager called Zotero.

Wimba’s Campus Edition product is called Genuine Genie. It is designed to allow presumably a teacher or college professor to convert easily Microsoft Word documents into web pages. Added features will also allow interactivity to be built into the web pages. The web pages can be loaded into LMS courses. This product is a somewhat schizophrenic and has several permutations of its name/brand: Genuine Genie, Course Genie 2.0, and a version contained in Lectora (another name of prevalence).

One of the latest campus editions to hit the streets is by PBworks, formerly PBwiki. The shift from wiki to works signals that PBworks is expanding its business model. Unlike its basic free account PBworks Campus Edition provides unlimited premium workspaces for $799/year. The premium version offers centralized control, centralized account creation, centralized monitoring of accounts, branding of the PBworks accounts, and easy site administration. A planned add-on will be plagiarism tools. In effect, PBworks is nudging more into the realm of the LMS.

Whether or not PBworks is successful remains to be seen. In the present economy, the low cost is certainly in their favor. If past trends continue, one sure thing is that Campus Edition will not be the final name of their product and they will not be the last to call their product campus edition.

Is Voice Better than Text?

2010-05-11T14:35:00.000-07:00

I recently read about Nuance Communication’s Dragon Dictation app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Nuance has created this app version of its remarkable Dragon Naturally Speaking software which allows you to speak into a microphone while Dragon types the text for you. Distance learning professionals have loved Dragon Naturally Speaking and comparable software for years. Many distance learning professionals will also gravitate toward to Dragon Dictation app which adds greater mobility to their ability to work at a distance. (This app is currently free in the US and Canada but if it becomes popular the cost will undoubtedly rise.)

Other Voice to Text Technologies

Of course, Dragon Naturally Speaking has not been the only technology to transcribe voice to text. Microsoft has long built this capability into its operating systems. However, it has not been something that they have marketed as value added, perhaps because it has been woefully inferior to Dragon until recently. Although Dragon Naturally speaking is still in my opinion the best, Microsoft has recently put some pretty good speech recognition software in Windows 7. It starts up easily and works a million times better than their previous versions although Dragon is still better.

Problems

With the app and speech recognition, professionals have gained powerful new tools to help them conduct distance learning courses which are largely text-based. However, does the use of the tools translate into better courses or better service to the students? From my own experiences the answer seems mixed.

One problem is over-reliance on the software. Dragon boasts that it is 99% accurate—and it is amazingly accurate—but there are drawbacks. Dragon learns to recognize your individual speech patterns as you use it and that takes time for the accuracy to get really good. Even so it makes mistakes and herein is a significant difficulty. You need to proof-read your own text from Dragon which is tough for lengthy passages where Dragon got 99% of it right but there are hidden sections that Dragon bobbled but with real words.

Years ago when I first installed Dragon I felt liberated from my slow typing speed. Now I could “type” at the speed of thought. For my online students this meant that I could answer their questions with more detailed, more nuanced answers. In actuality, many of my answers because less succinct. The reading involved in an online class already takes a good deal of time. Long instructor passages take even more time. Lengthy answers from instructors can confuse those who are not strong readers.

It has been my experience and I have heard from others that there is a fair amount of mental processing while typing with the keyboard. For most people, speech may happen to rapidly for this to occur. Speech is also perceived as relatively informal, a fact which we easily tolerate when speaking to someone, but becomes written speech significantly increases the expectation that there will be a more formal structure to the content and that more thought will be embodied in the construction of the content.

Why transcribe at all?

Sometimes I wonder why we bother transcribing at all. Would it not be better if we are speaking anyway to simply record the lecture and post the audio? This would help to students who may have some kinds of learning disabilities. This could help students who have differences in learning styles. This would enable students to listen to the content while mobile such as on an iPod or other mp3 device, which fits with the busy way our world works now.

Some of my colleagues argue that making the text available to students is important still to promote textual literacy, that it is still important for students to master written communication. Yet the same colleagues do not know what to make of the current texting phenomenon, which has students producing more text-based communications than ever.

Perhaps programs like Dragon and the new Dragon app could make a huge impact if adopted for texting. In fact, it could help us solve some of the issues we are fighting in education such as sentences in all lower-case with no punctuation and myriad acronyms. Teens, and all of us, could type as fast as the thoughts occur. This would remove the need for large QWERTY keyboards on phones. The question is would it be adopted because again we do not understand why texting is so popular. When we do we will be able to address the educational problems and move more decisively toward changes in the way students learn and the way we provide them information online.

Central Falls Implications for Community Colleges

2010-03-26T12:34:00.000-07:00

In February 74 teachers and 19 staff members were fired by the superintendent at an underperforming Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. The decision has received a good deal of media attention and a significant amount of praise around the country. (Even President Obama has publically agreed with the measure as a move toward greater accountability in education.) While it is too true that the school has been a consistent underperformer, in the national media the story is mischaracterized. In reality it is, of course, not a story of callous teachers who do not bother to do their jobs or care about their students. The school was filled with professional teachers who worked very hard to help their students achieve. It was also not about a school that was making zero progress. The school’s test scores had improved over the last two years although to be fair the increases were slight. It was not that the teachers were unwilling to change the structure of the high school program. Structural changes such as moving from a comprehensive high school to one with upper and lower divisions had already been approved. In the end the unresolved issues that caused the superintendent to make the radical move seemed to be more about the requirement for teachers to work harder and longer for what their union regarded as inadequate extra pay.

This apparent national confusion about the reason the teachers were fired has implications for those of us in higher education. The problem is about the teachers accepting changes to their employment without what they believe to be fair pay. The perception is that they do not accept performance measures and are failing in their jobs

We, the community colleges, share a stronger bond with our high school educator colleagues than most traditional 4 year colleges. We must educate an increasingly greater percentage of the high school graduates and returning nontraditional students in order to keep the country globally competitive. Furthermore, we have been more willing to build programs that do more than provide a good liberal arts foundation but rather increasingly provide direct job skills which may even more lead to industry-style standards of measurement of performance. After all, a sizeable proportion of our students are looking not to transfer and certainly not just enlightenment, but rather for transferable and marketable skills. It seems manifest that at some point there will be a greater demand for us to be held accountable for our students’ performance.

I know that all my colleagues, faculty and administrators, in college are dedicated professionals who care about their students and their student’s futures. However, once the kinds of standards that have stabbed dagger-like into the status quo of compulsory public school have been imposed on community colleges, how will we fair? The answer is likely split. Some parts of our colleges, such as our nursing and technology components, are accustomed to performance measures. Both born out of public necessity and applauded by local government and industry for their ability to improve each region, the programs were initially structured in a way that performance measure is part of their infrastructure. While it has strong ties to our colleges’ liberal arts tradition, distance learning, due to its continued scrutiny and foundation in technology, seems more readily accepting of performance measures. Other more traditional parts of our colleges, those that are more focused on a traditional view of the liberal arts college (not necessarily traditional in the community college sense) will undoubtedly have more difficulty adjusting.

Performance measures and our acceptance of them cannot solve a Central Falls kind of problem. The performance measures are only a way to provide the institution with data. The way that the institution interprets the data and the proposed solutions form the locus of problems. Without knowing many more of the details of the Central Falls superintendent’s proposal than I have outlined here, it is difficult for me to say how fair the proposed changes were to the teachers or if the union should have accepted them. Knowing our mandate to provide college opportunities to all, if our colleges’ data showed we had a similar problem, I am not sure that dedicating more faculty time to the problem would help us. I also cannot imagine college deans and presidents taking such extreme measures to achieve what will likely be only marginal increases in overall college achievement. Until we arrive at that place in time it is not clear how we should respond. Unfortunately, the right time to contemplate the issue for community colleges is when the problem does not yet exist. The right time is now.

Helping Students Understand Plagiarism

2010-02-28T15:58:00.001-08:00

Two of my esteemed colleagues, Pamela Carroll and Peter Patsouris, presented to the academic division on Friday. The topic was plagiarism. The exercise involved dividing those in attendance into relatively random groups and providing them with case studies. The case students contained detailed accounts with shadings of suspected plagiarism in each. This outstanding exercise revealed to us that we have no detailed consistent policy for handling such cases, that there are three different ways that we are handling plagiarism, that we each see the offending students in different lights, and that the stakes vary depending on the course and/or program of study.

Our exercises did not address distance learning but since this is my niche at the college, I began to think how cheating online generally plays out. Our courses, which are the standard heavily text-based variety, require students to post answers in text to a discussion board, assessment or assignment. Our online student, feeling the pressure of deadlines, work and family obligations, and perhaps the additional pressure of educational developmental weaknesses, take a short cut by copying, pasting and failing to attribute. Typically, the online student is given a zero and not allowed to make up the score. The student also is usually admonished and reminded of the stated policy for academic honesty in the syllabus. Then if this was not the final exam we move forward, assuming that the matter is settled. But is it? Did we just make the point, or perhaps a better question, did we teach the student anything about the consequences of cheating?

Our students in particular come from differing backgrounds with differing attitudes about how to get ahead in life. They have been exposed to images and events in the media and politics that suggest that cheating works if you are clever enough about it. I don’t know that you change this kind of perception by exacting even the heaviest penalty, failure of the course or dismissal from the program. It may even be somewhat unfair to some of our students who may not be articulate enough to explain their rationale to us, the educators. Because of the way we work online, it may be even more impersonal and the student again may be learning nothing about personal integrity and honesty.

Perhaps in the past at the college level we have not been traditionally in the role of instilling culture as our high schools colleagues but the growing enrollments and a growing concern with the practice of teaching at the college level is perhaps signaling that change is nigh. Maybe it will be some sort of stepped approach aided by a software application—I don’t have the answer—but I do believe that we need to develop methodology for moving a student down the path of academic honesty and ensuring that they understand that it is foundational to many other aspects of successful adult life.

Prep Pandemic Classes Online

2010-02-14T19:58:00.000-08:00

Another large storm moved up the east coast threatening to bury every town in its wake with snow this past week. This after a storm that crippled the mid-Atlantic states with feet of snow the weekend before. The first storm missed Connecticut when it turned out to sea but the forecasts predicted that on Wednesday we would not be so lucky. In preparation colleges, schools, and businesses announced their closures as early as a day before. Parking bans were put into effect. Those businesses that did open Wednesday morning closed early. The governor worked with major employers to stagger employee releases so that the highways were not clogged and that everyone had the opportunity to get home safely. However, the storm on Wednesday was seen by many as a bust as most of our towns received only a few inches of snow, which prompted many of us to wonder if all of efforts were warranted.

It reminds me of the issue we faced with preparing our colleges for the H1N1 flu. Last summer in our institutions there was a great deal of discussion about contingency plans in the event that many of our students suddenly were not able to come to classes. Although there are other good reasons that should provide impetus to have solid contingency planning, primarily, we were attempting to prepare for a potential H1N1 outbreak. We did not want to have our students severely set back in their educational goals by losing a semester. We dealt with the pieces of the problem we thought needed to be addressed in our prep work. We discussed probable numbers of classes that could be affected. We looked at the numbers of faculty and staff members that could be affected. We developed updated our contingency plans for moving course content online in a short period. We developed training workshops to prepare our faculty to conduct at least part of their classes in Blackboard. We attempted to work affectively to convince our staffs and faculty that the planning was worth the extra energy.

Although the year is not complete it appears to be far enough along that much like the storm that missed, H1N1 appears to have missed us this academic year too. Some are saying that their extra effort was in vain or that their lack of effort to prepare was justified. Some suggest that the man-hours of all the intelligent, educated professionals could have been better invested resolving some of the numerous issues facing our colleges.

In general I feel that prep-time is never wasted. In this case, we should like at the larger picture. Preparing for H1N1 has improved the technical knowledge of our faculty. Preparing for H1N1 has forced us to make sure that we are contractually and technologically ready to handle larger numbers of students online. Preparing for H1N1 has given us a better contingency plan that we can use regardless the cause that students are not able to come to the physical campus. Over the last couple of years schools and colleges in Connecticut have closed due to regional electrical power failures, water main breaks, grieving of tragic happenings, investigations into health of conditions, and violent events. For the most part we have been able to cope reasonably well when bad things happen but the work that we have done has prepared us for the worst.

Social Media & Preemptive IT Security

2010-01-24T18:01:00.000-08:00

In an episode of 2006’s the Masters of Science Fiction television series, called “Watchbird,” flying devices similar to our Predator drones (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs) are programmed with an algorithm that allows them to detect the intent of the an assailant. By doing so, the drones can act preemptively. As long as the Watchbirds were only being deployed away from our shores, everyone lauded their performance. When they were brought home to fight domestic crime, of course, things went awry.

Preemption is always a tricky business that harms innocents and dirties the hands of those who are placed in charge of its deployment, whether the dilemma is war or criminal justice. Now in our colleges we are somewhat unconsciously bringing the concept to education by imposing preemptive information technology security on many of our computer systems and restricting the use of those systems.

On the one hand, we have those who believe that security online must trump everything we do or attempt to do online. Regulations from federal (FERPA) and state laws are frequently interpreted in ways that seem to suggest that we need tight control of online security. On the other, we have those who like me believe that social media, open source software, email, and other Internet tools are so valuable that the occasional difficulties we suffer are simply the cost of doing business in the Information Age. Obviously, we need to comply with all laws but I remind my colleagues that these laws were not created recently and thus not with technologies in mind. Just as obviously, a system that prevents the use of social media, blocks the downloading of Internet materials, restricts the use of email to internal official business, locks out non educational web sites, allows only established database access, and allows only a small amount of designated users is extremely secure. This kind of locked-down system, however, fails us by ignoring our mission, educating our students. If we are not using all the relevant tools at our disposal to educate our students then we are failing our society and undoing hundreds of years worth of progress in education. When we know that our society demands a better educated workforce, when we know that this means educating young and old as well as extending the education of many already in the workforce, how can we in good faith think so preemptively? If we continue down this path, of course, things will go awry.

Linked Data fo the Future of Student Research

2010-01-09T20:01:00.000-08:00

I encourage everyone to view Hans Rosling’s amazing presentations, this one showing his new insights into world poverty and life made in Monterey, California in 2007. His worked exemplifies the kinds for presentations that should be available to everyone via the web if Tim Berners-Lee’s Linked Data becomes a reality. Currently, you can find all sorts of data on the web but information you can use is not so readily available. His idea is that everything, not just the conventional web pages, should have an address. For example, there should be a page containing data about you as an individual not just your pictures, games, and random thoughts but real data with statistics. This could contain the places you have lived, your credentials, work progress, earnings, family information, etc. but further those individual pieces of information should be available with or without information about you. Being able to disaggregate this data from your page allows anyone to create on the web or from the web information about the average credentials of people in your state, how people of your ethnicity move through jobs, etc.

The implications for educators are that we can our students get useful data on the web. Perhaps without subscriptions to specialized databases our students can get relevant, accurate, and reputable data. Perhaps we then shift from discouraging research on the web general to teaching our students how to select the most appropriate data for their work.

Currently, Linked data has a PR problem. Berners-Lee who is always visionary is not always the best candidate to express his own vision. He has expressed the concept at several venues over the last couple of years but so few organizations and individuals understand and have embraced the concept. Berners-Lee stated that his employer ignored his idea for hypertext markup language. We cannot afford to miss what he is saying now.

Performance Pay for Distance Educators

2009-12-16T18:29:00.000-08:00

Performance pay, educators more for more positive academic results, is not new. It is a concept that has been tried in isolated ways in the United States for several decades. These efforts usually are limited to grade school and usually are short-lived. According to Donald B. Gratz, author of "The Problem with Performance Pay,” most attempts to pay educators based on performance are founded on flawed logic including 1. That educators are unmotivated, 2. That the institution overall is failing, and 3. That measuring the academic achievement of the students is all that matters. Each of these assumptions, according to Gratz, can easily be refuted with evidence. Most educators care about their students. Our schools and colleges produced the society that has created the world of computing, the Internet and convergent cellular phone technology. The society demands that students are literate and understand math, yes, but also that they learn to appreciate the arts, interpersonal communications, and that they become productive citizens, things which are not measured on standardized tests.

At the community college level I also feel that my colleagues care about their students and do a good job of educating them. However, President Obama’s belief that community colleges are a key part of the economic well-being and growth of the nation will likely mean greater scrutiny of student success on-ground and online. I have noted that educators in distance-learning often believe that they should be paid more for developing and conducting distance-learning courses and programs than if they were doing a comparable thing on ground. However, this doesn't seem to be in any way based on student performance. The belief is that teaching online requires more work and more time than teaching on ground. I am puzzled that efforts to garner more pay are not connected to performance. It is not clear to me that an individual should be paid more merely because it takes more effort or time to teach. If that was the case, should we pay more to a person on ground if they took more time to develop a course? Individuals should be paid more if the results are significantly better than the results in a traditional face-to-face class. In college we tend to look at two primary measures of success, grades and retention. Currently, in our online classes these two measures are statistically the same as face-to-face classes. So as of now these cannot be the bases for performance pay. However, what if we begin to look at other measures of performance? Do students online retain knowledge longer or better? Does the predominant cooperative, collaborative, and discussion-based style of the online class increase interpersonal skills which makes for a stronger workforce? Admittedly, these types of things can be hard to quantify. Yet they are likely the exact kinds of measures that if totaled could justify performance pay in distance-learning.

Rubrics & the Fudge Factor

2009-11-16T16:39:00.000-08:00

Rubrics ensure fairness in grading the work of students. I was talking to a colleague once who did not want to use a rubric because it did not allow her to use the “fudge factor,” assigning a grade based on what you know—or feel you know—about a student rather than wholly upon the student’s actual performance. She thought the “fudge factor” was an equalizer helping to ensure students got what they deserved not just what they earned. I was horrified and took it as my mission to help her understand how not using the rubric was innately unfair to the majority of her students in a class in which the essay was the major method of assessment. With a diverse student body, many kinds of biases could creep ever so quietly and unknowingly into the grading process. Ethnicities, language, social status, styles of clothing, hairstyles, etiquette standards or lack thereof…and just the good old fashioned disdain much of the young have for older adults and authoritative types mean that, despite how hard you try, the way you see the student (in a ground class) plays into their score, in mostly subtle but perhaps sometimes in very large unconscious ways...even online. The fudge factor works against us by allowing us to reinforce subconscious biases. The only way to manage our own subconscious skewing is to use rubrics.

What Goes into a Hybrid Course

2009-11-02T07:12:00.000-08:00

Hybrid courses, which are also called blended courses, present many advantages to both the institution and to the students. In a hybrid course some time on the physical campus is replaced by time in the learning management system. At my institution it usually works out to be a 50-50 arrangement. The institution gains valuable classroom space to deal with a burgeoning student population. Students love the apparent reduced time in a classroom seat.

However, a conversation that I have had many times with my colleagues is that reduced time on the physical campus should not equate to reduced overall learning time. The online portion of the class is not equal to homework. The online portion of the class should include real learning. There should be—and this is not an all-inclusive list—activities, discussions, interactive exercises, group work, etc. Online students should expect multimedia, announcements, and feedback.

For students, real learning is not just reading from the text or from the web, nor is it simply posting an answer to an assignment, nor is it taking an online quiz, exam or other assessment. The online portion of the class should be as dynamic and lively as the on-ground portion. In other words, the online portion of a class should be a class.

If all you need is static, one-way content, if all you need is to post homework, then I would assert that a hybrid course is not what you need. Keep the students in class for the full number of credit hours and supplement those hours with the online support materials you would like.