Teaching, Learning & Technology

[#1]

Online learning is no longer in its infancy - but many students are still complaining about the QUALITY of the learning experience. I am happy to report that this need NOT be the case for courses we are teaching or are about to teach. But, we have to be intentional about the re-design of the learning experience. In most cases, we may have to re-design our courses from the ground up. The payback is a fantastic course that students rave about - and one that is much more fun to teach...

In case you didn't know already, in my "spare" time I teach online for Montana State University, which received an NSF grant to develop science content courses for elementary teachers (see http://www.scienceteacher.org/). In fact, my course is scheduled to run starting next week - and I'm really looking forward to it!

The course is a masters-level conceptual physics class on the Science of Sound, designed specifically for teachers in grades 3 through 8 who want to increase their own understanding of how sound works. The course is hands-on, inquiry-based, instructor-led, scheduled - and is entirely asynchronous. This means we have a lot of conversation, but no one needs to be online at the same time.

I often get asked, "How do you get your students to participate??" The answer lies in the design of the course, which was based on a teacher professional development workshop I ran as part of an NSF-funded effort in the Silicon Valley region. While the content remained the same, moving the experience from a Face-to-Face venue to Online Asynchronous was a creative challenge. Approximately 200 hours of development time later, I now have a course that is in many ways more fun to teach because the conversations are deeper and last longer.

In a typical compressed semester (6 weeks), the teachers participating in my course spend 8-12 hours per week doing their experiments, readings, and posting their thoughts. I spend about 10-15 hours per week facilitating the discussion and giving them personal feedback. With 15 to 20 students, it's not unusual for us to rack up over 2000 postings - and everyone seems to be enjoying themselves while learning quite a bit.

If you would like to create and teach an online course with a high level of student engagement, you can learn more about my experience from two references:

• "Online Professional Development that Works - rethinking my workshop and my teaching" was published by ISTE's "Learning and Leading with Technology" journal. A reprint is available for download in PDF format.
  


• Just last month I joined with George Tuthill, also an online instructor for MSU, in discussing our experiences in increasing student engagement while teaching online. Montana University hosted this discussion as a live webinar, which was recorded and is replayable in Elluminate (Java) format. Unfortunately the recording started several minutes late, so you may want to simply download the presentation slides in PDF format.

If you teach online and have any additional "best practices" or references to share, please post a comment for the rest of us!

Jim Vanides, B.S.M.E, M.Ed.
Worldwide Education Grant Strategy
HP Global Social Investment
Hewlett-Packard

For information about HP Global Social Investments, visit www.hp.com/hpinfo/grants/

[#2]

Jim,

Thanks for hosting this blog...my first visit. Your experience in online teaching seems to be with adult learners who are already teachers themselves...is that right? I'm interested in doing a blend of face-to-face and online SYNCHRONOUS (using Wimba Classroom) instruction for an undergrad class of 19-20 year old engineering students. Much resistance from colleagues to my doing such...I'm hoping to either find research to support my hunch that such a blend can enhance the experience for students, or to generate results myself.

What would make things easier is if all students had Tablet PCs...we did not get get Univ. approval for a proposed mandatory Tablet PC program...many of our students come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, so it is difficult to make a case for adding another high-ticket item to the already high tuition. So, we are finding it hard to make the most of interactive technologies such as Ubiquitous Presenter, DyKnow, Wimba Classroom and the like.

[#3]

Yes, my online course is ASYNCHRONOUS, scheduled, and instructor facilitated. There are MANY faculty who are trying variants of hybrid F2F and online (synchronous and asynchronous).

In fact, one of our 2006 HP Technology for Teaching grant recipients at the University of South Florida invited me to his "online" section, which was part of his F2F course. He did this as an experiment, but students actually liked the opportunity to NOT have to come all the way back to campus to attend the section meeting. The interaction was mediated by using Elluminate. I don't know if he has any formal research on the experience, but you can visit his website at ism3232.coba.usf.edu/HP.

I agree that Tablets would make the interactions better, especially for engineering disciplines that are diagramatic in nature. Have you experimented with USB wacom writing pads as an add-on to laptops? It's not as slick, but could work... - Jim

[#4]

I tried a WACOM tablet before I got my Tablet PC, and it was very frustrating...but I know people who adapt pretty easily to the difference in hand-eye coordination. But the problem is more that some students don't have laptops of ANY kind. Thanks for the link to the USF site....I'll check it out.... - Sandy

[#5]

I think one of the most important things students need to realize when they apply for an online course is that they need to have a high level of self-motivation. Online learning has a lot of advantages and in many aspects it is better than traditional education. However, after listening to all the benefits, some people start to think it is a kind of magic, which is obviously wrong. As a result - they expect too much, they are doing too little, and then they start to complain. Just IMHO.

Mary Curtz, school teacher

http://www.willow-school.org