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Tag: eLearning

Published on Leave a comment on The 12 Apps of Christmas

by Karen Nichols
The University of London and the Dublin Institute of Technology both launched on 1 December their respective 12 Apps of Christmas. It's not too late to sign up. These are free online courses, aimed at students and instructors of all ages who are interested in learning more about integrating mobile learning technologies into their studies or classes. I have to admit that I was disappointed on December 1st when the University of London revealed the first app--Google Translate. I thought I knew all about this app, but I was surely wrong! Their presentation was easy to follow and well-illustrated. I truly had no idea that sound files would work on Google translate. Each app includes educational applications and actual activities for you to try of which there are several for Google translate. So check out the site and see if you may be interested in participating in reviewing the apps and these mini-courses and providing feedback. 15-20 minutes a day are kindly requested for you to give feedback to them. Here's the link:
http://www.openeducationeuropa.eu/en/news/new-edition-successful-12-apps-christmas-online-courses-students-and-teachers

And here's a demonstration of Google translate and the song LaBamba!

Published on Leave a comment on 3 Facts about Mindset in Learning

by Janice Florent

mindset in learning infographic

Mindset is a crucial factor in learning. In a Learnnovators.com blog post, Arun Pradhan lists three well established aspects of mindset in learning. They are:

  1. You can prime your brain
  2. Interest drives learning
  3. A growth mindset matters

Each fact is supported with a tip for learning design to make the most of that fact. For more information refer to his 3 Facts About Mindset In Learning infographic.

Published on Leave a comment on Another Great National Distance Learning Week!

by Karen Nichols

National Distance Learning Week 2015 has been a whirlwind of free webinars and events across the country and even a few other countries participated as well.  I'd like to share with you a few of the webinars I attended that I found interesting and useful. When you click on these links, you'll be taken to Blackboard Collaborate so you'll need the Bb Collaborate Launcher installed in order to view the archived presentations.

"Discover The Latest Mobile Learning & Collaboration Technology" This one includes a discussion about the merits and disadvantages of native apps and web-based apps as well as some good questions posed by the participants.

"Virtual Presence: Inspire and Engage in the Virtual Classroom and Beyond" An actually inspiring presentation to me as a trained actress discussed techniques to use as an instructor in an online environment to engage your students.

"10 Signs That the Shift to Digital Is Underway – and 5 Ways to Get Ahead of the Curve!" One of the signs is that we have proof that students really do their homework at 1am!  This presentation contains several resources including the one below.

e-Literate TV is also an interesting concept introduced in this latter presentation. What do you think of it?

Published on Leave a comment on Have a Tweet Spree Using Twitcam!

by Karen Nichols

I attended a presentation on using social media to engage underrepresented students at the most recent Online Learning Consortium in Orlando.  Several apps were discussed and Twitcam was one of them.  I decided to investigate it for myself.  If you go to the twitcam website:  http://twitcam.livestream.com/ the directions say you can begin in three easy steps.  Well, that wasn't quite my experience, but it was still pretty easy just the same.

So, from the Twitcam homepage, I was told that Flash needed to be installed.

Then I was told to set up my webcam.  Fortunately, mine is built in.

Next I have to log into Twitter.  But wait, there is no sign of Twitcam inside my Twitter.  What they should say is to "scroll down to the bottom of the Twitcam page and click on Broadcast Live.  THEN you'll be taken to Twitter where you can log in and see Twitcam.

Once there, you must "allow" Twitcam to access your webcam and microphone and then it really is easy to follow their directions.  You will be tweeting live which could be a really wonderful learning experience for various concepts you're teaching.

When finished, click on stop recording and you'll be asked if you want to archive your video.  So not only could you reach students as you streamed your video live, you can provide the link to the video for anyone who missed it or who would like to replay it later.

So here's just a quick example of a twitcam video I made.  Because this is a free service, you'll have to view all or part of an ad before the video will play.  Since you can tweet as you're videotaping, you can add the text of what you're saying to make it accessible since I don't see any way to add captions, or add something else like an assignment.  You can provide a link to the archived video or embed it.

http://twitcam.com/giovj

I'm really interested to know if you think you may like to try something like this and create a video tweet spree for your students.  If you do, please share!

Published on Leave a comment on OLC Conference Highlights

by Karen Nichols

I'm back from Orlando and so excited to try, share and continue to learn about all of the presentation topics from the 21st Annual Online Learning Consortium International Conference 2015. There were hundreds of sessions so I couldn't attend all of the ones I would have liked, but I did my best to sample a bit of everything.

Congratulations to Xavier's own Richard Peters who received the award for best in track for: Going High-Tech in Higher Education: The HBCU Dilemma. (If the streamed session is no longer available when you read this, please reply to the blog post for more information.)

College of Arts and Sciences Dean Anil Kukreja and I co-presented on Taking Shape:  A Collaborative, Comprehensive Faculty Development Plan for Our Online/Hybrid Instructors. (If you're interested in a copy of the powerpoint and accompanying documents please reply to the blog post with your email address.)

MERLOT representatives were also present to talk about three new or updated features they're offering to educators:
  1. Content Builder actually hosted by MERLOT
  2. MERLOT Bookmark Collection
  3. Course ePortfolios (click this link to see sample course eportfolios)

The conference featured Discovery Sessions where you could browse an assortment of "how-to" type presentations as well as a Technology Test Kitchen where various gadgets were showcased along with educational uses.  Numerous opportunities to meet and connect with peers were also available.

The big news of the OLC conference was that they were awarded a 2.5 million dollar grant from the Gates Foundation.  Member institutions will be able to compete for grants in order to improve outcomes for underserved students.

As I was leaving Orlando, I took this photo and it really captures the soaring feeling I had concerning the future of online education, thanks in large part to the people I met from the conference and their dedication to continuous improvement and ultimately to the students we serve.

Hot Air Balloon Over Disney Springs
Hot Air Balloon Over Disney Springs

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Published on 1 Comment on Metacognition for Effective Online Learning

by Janice Florent

The thinker statue in Stuttgart

Students who succeed academically often rely on being able to think effectively and independently in order to take charge of their learning. They are thinking about their own thinking; mastered the knowledge about their own learning. This is referred to as metacognition. Metacognition is about understanding how to learn effectively, in a limited amount of time, using strategies that are corrected over time.

According to Flavell (1979), metacognitive knowledge involves three key variables:

  1. Self-awareness: The capability to analyze one’s own strong and weak areas of knowledge and how to fulfill the deficiencies.
  2. Task analysis: What do learners know about the task and what they need to do to complete it successfully?
  3. Selection of strategy: Problem solving strategies that enable the learners to understand and comprehend new knowledge.

Incorporating metacognitive strategies into your course design can help to create autonomous and self-starting learners, who are responsible for their own learning and are willing to share the synthesized version of their knowledge with peers.

In a recent eLearning Industry blog post, Christopher Pappas listed five tips for enhancing metacognition in eLearning. Those tips are:

Integrate a wide range of skills and subjects.

The real world setting offers unpredictable problems that require a range of skills to solve. Students will need to employ their metacognitive capabilities in the real world to solve such multi-faceted problems. Replicate this requirement in the online classroom. Provide problem scenarios that require a broad spectrum of skills to solve.

Model the metacognitive process.

Leading by example is one of the most effective ways to encourage metacognition in your students. Create a tutorial or video presentation that showcases the metacognitive process. State the problem or question in the beginning of the presentation; then guide them through the steps you would use to solve it. Be as detailed as possible and include every mistake they could make along the way, as mistakes can serve as invaluable teaching tools as well.

Give them control.

The freedom of choosing a learning activity is a powerful learning experience. Give your students more control over which modules they can learn first, which projects they can complete first and what activities they can follow first. By doing this, you generate authentic interest, rather than forcing them to master a particular subject. They are also more likely to use their critical thinking, analysis, and creative thinking skills to solve the problem if they were the ones who chose to tackle the problem themselves.

Review, identify and evaluate.

At the end of every eLearning activity, encourage your students to review, identify, and evaluate the process. Ask them to review the eLearning activity, itself, including their personal opinions about it. Then ask them to identify the strategies they utilized and why they chose these strategies, before evaluating their overall performance and assessing their strengths and weaknesses throughout the task.

Encourage learners to differentiate what they know from what they need to know.

The objective of any eLearning activity is to fill the learning gap. Before each eLearning activity encourage the students to determine what they currently know and what they need to learn by the end of the task. This might be developing specific skills or acquiring new information. Once they have completed the task, have them evaluate their original statements in order to determine if they have achieved their individual goals. You can also ask them to modify or add to their statements throughout the eLearning activity if necessary.

You should utilize these tips to enhance metacognition in your course design to benefit your students by facilitating their learning process and helping them to achieve better results.

If you are interested in getting more information about designing your course to enhance metacognition, read Christopher Pappas’ blog post "5 Instructional Design Tips to Enhance Metacognition in eLearning."

Photo credit: The thinker by Iulian Ursu | CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Published on 1 Comment on 7 Deadly Sins of Online Course Design

by Janice Florent

Seven Deadly Sins"Seven Deadly Sins" by ILOVEDUST is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

In an Edvocate article, Daniel Stanford listed his seven deadly sins of online course design from a faculty developer’s perspective. These resonated with me; and I thought I would share Daniel's seven deadly online course design sins with you.

#1. Overwhelming Discussions

“Post to the discussion board, and then respond to three classmates’ posts.” Sound familiar? These are often the instructions for online discussions even though it would be impossible to replicate this level of participation in a face-to-face class. The result is a massive number of posts that instructors and students dread sorting through.

#2. Lack of Scannable Text

Staring at a computer screen trying to read the information is tiring enough as it is. Don’t make it worse by writing long paragraphs that lack visual interruptions and organizational cues. “Chunk” the content to make it easier to scan through.

#3. No Progress Indicators

Within seconds of entering a course or a specific unit of content, students should know what they’ve completed, what is incomplete, and when the incomplete items are due. The worst nightmare of any online student is to think he or she has met all the course requirements for a given day or week, only to stumble upon additional ones after a critical deadline has passed.

#4. Bad Narration

There are two reasons most instructors create narrated PowerPoints.

  1. They believe it will be faster to deliver a lecture verbally than write it out.
  2. They believe it will be more engaging for students than reading.

Both of these motivations have their pitfalls. First, faculty are often surprised how long it takes to produce an effective narrated presentation. Second, delivering information via audio with no text alternative makes it difficult for students to control the pace of their learning. Also, audio-only approaches to instruction can be challenging for ESL learners (English as a second language) and a deal breaker for students with disabilities.

#5. Buried Leads

Don’t make students read through or listen to several minutes of non-essential fluff before you get to the good stuff. Burying the lead wastes students’ time and hurts your credibility as a curator. As a result, students will struggle to find the part where you finally say something important. Worse yet, they might begin to ignore your emails, readings, or videos altogether.

#6. Digital Hoarding

Face-to-face courses come with limitations that encourage instructors to prioritize what they share with students. Examples include the number of hours in each class meeting and the number of photocopies the instructor has time to print. In online courses, these limitations are removed or relaxed, which makes it tempting to share every interesting reading, video, and website you’ve ever encountered. All too often, the result is a course site that feels like one of the homes on Hoarding: Buried Alive, but with more scholarly journals and fewer cats.

#7. Faceless Professor Syndrome

Online courses provide limited natural opportunities to reinforce that you’re a real human being and help students put a face with your name. Don’t squander these opportunities by obscuring your identity and increasing your anonymity on the discussion board and in your self-introduction. Humanizing your online courses improves the learning experience as well as student success and retention rates.

If you are interested in knowing how Daniel Stanford suggests you atone for these deadly online course design sins, read his Edvocate article “Seven Deadly Sins of Online Course Design.”

Published on Leave a comment on Thursday is Global Collaboration Day!

by Karen Nichols

I've been asked to share the following information about Global Collaboration Day:

Over the next couple of days, students, classrooms, teachers, administrators, parents and organizations will be either attending and/or hosting events online that are designed to showcase and promote global collaboration. We (Lucy Gray + Steve Hargadon, co-chairs of the Global Education Conference) are the calendar coordinators but not the direct conveners: that is, over 100 groups have designed and planned their own events which we have then organized into a directory and in special calendars to allow these events to be seen in any time zone in the world.

This is a huge worldwide experiment to demonstrate the power of globally-connected learning.

Examples of projects and events include: a teacher in Australia who will lead others in learning to dance Greek-style via Skype and Edmodo; African students and teachers answering questions through Whatsapp; and classrooms participating in a global virtual amazing race. There are professional development sessions for individual pre-service teachers, in-service educators, and other adults; as well as projects for entire classrooms to join in. We encourage you to browse the event directory or the calendar and choose a compelling event to attend!

Here are some tips to keep in mind as the next couple of days unfold:

Read directions and our website carefully to prepare.
If you have a question about a particular event or project, contact the host of that event directly. Their contact information is posted in each event listing.
Join our Remind texting and email group for event reminders.
If you need live help, we’ll do our best to be available. We will be in and out of this Blackboard Collaborate room as our own schedules allow.
Be patient! Things may not always go as well as intended! Learning to be flexible and adapting to situations online is a big part of becoming a global collaborator.

We appreciate the time and energy that our hosts have invested in this special day, and hope that our participants learn something new and become more

See you online,

Lucy and Steve

Published on Leave a comment on Engage Students Through Online Collaboration

by Janice Florent

photomontage with globe in foreground

In a recent eLearning Industry article, Dr. Amy Thornton, Director of the Center of Online Learning at Columbus State University, listed multiple strategies to engage students online. Dr. Thornton wrote that it is important to allow students to engage with content in different ways to ensure learning transfer. The engagement strategies suggested by Dr. Thornton are:

Keep it interactive

Interaction keeps students at their computer and engaged in the content. Not being able to see your students means that you have to keep them on their toes throughout the session. A few ways you can do this are:

  • Feedback - invite students to share their comments about the content.
  • Polling - asking polling questions can initiate discussion.
  • Brainstorming - invite students to assist with brainstorming on how a particular topic can be applied or used in the “real world.”
  • Scavenger Hunt - send students on a virtual scavenger hunt to find something and come back with their findings to share with the class.
  • Graphics - use graphics to create visuals. Students could be allowed to use electronic whiteboard tools to mark up the graphics or identify parts of an image.

Use triggers

Variety is the spice of life. Providing different types of learning experiences can help engage different types of learners. This can also keep your students on their toes because they don’t know what is going to happen next. A few ways to accomplish this are:

  • Multimedia - use video and/or music clips to add something for your visual and auditory learners.
  • Polling - give students a chance to think about the content that was covered and apply it.
  • Electronic Whiteboard - get students involved by asking them to write on the electronic whiteboard.

Group work

Allowing your students to work in smaller groups can give them more opportunity to interact with each other and be part of the discussion. Managing this in an online environment can be challenging, but with some planning can add a lot of value to your session. Here are a few ways to approach group work:

  • Discussion - assign a topic and have the groups discuss and report back to the class.
  • Brainstorming - allow the class to break into groups to brainstorm ideas.
  • Project - allow time for groups to work on a group project together.
  • Case Studies - allow your students to practice their problem-solving skills.
  • Role-play - similar to case study; give students a scenario they must work through where each group member must take on a role.
  • Use authentic materials - use real materials that give students an inside look, for example, online museum exhibits, scientific simulations, and scanned manuscripts.

Give students a task

Giving students some of the responsibility in facilitating synchronous class sessions will keep them engaged and help them create their own learning experience. A few ways to do this are:

  • Give students the opportunity to facilitate an activity.
  • Appoint a note taker for each session.
  • Have students do presentations.
  • Appoint a student to lead the discussion.

For more information read Dr. Thornton’s article “Online Collaboration Strategies to Engage Your Learners.”

Image credit: image by geralt from Pixabay

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Published on 2 Comments on Improve Student Retention in Online Courses
empty highway with a success ahead sign

Studies show that students withdraw from online courses at a higher rate than in face-to-face courses. There are many reasons for students withdrawing from an online course. Some reasons are beyond the instructor’s control. Educators do not like to see students withdraw from courses for the wrong reasons. There are some things instructors can do to improve retention and reduce attrition in online courses.

In a recent blog post, Dr. Peter van Leusen, Instructional Designer for EdPlus at Arizona State University, provided a list of proven strategies that can be implemented on a course level and are based on good principles for teaching (Chickering & Gamson, 1987), adult-learning strategies, and technology solutions. Those strategies are:

  1. Be present – Instructor presence is key. Make early contact at the start of the class and stay active throughout the course.
  2. Encourage active learning – Incorporate activities that require students to move from passive consumers to active users of information.
  3. Set clear expectations – Expectations help students gauge requirements for the course and individual assignments.
  4. Provide constructive, meaningful and timely feedback – Feedback gives students an indication about their performance. Effective feedback is frequent, prompt, specific, and written in a supportive tone.
  5. Make course content relevant – Invite guest speakers to provide career specific examples or include “real world” examples to illustrate course content. Design assignments to be flexible and allow students to pursue interests.
  6. Include collaboration and peer-to-peer communication – A common criticism of online courses is the lack of interaction with peers. Offer opportunities for students to share perspectives, experiences, and learning.
  7. Guide students to be autonomous – Self-directed learning describes students who take initiative and responsibility for their own learning. This is critical in an online class.
  8. Collect formative feedback on lesson effectiveness and student comprehension – The decision to review a certain concept or continue often depends on whether students “get it” or not.
  9. Identify and reach out to struggling students – Utilize an early alert system and reach out to students when necessary to offer support and share available resources to help students get back on track.

If this has piqued your interest, you can read more in Dr. Leusen’s "9 Proven Ways for Instructors to Address Online Student Retention" blog post.

Image credit: Image by geralt from Pixabay