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Category: CAT & Mouse: E-Learning

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!

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Published on 3 Comments on Accessibility is for Everyone

by Janice Florent

mobile phone with the caption accessibility is not only for the impaired

Although there are legal mandates requiring institutions of higher education to make educational materials accessible (e.g., the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act), accessibility is fundamentally just good design. Content that is accessible is better organized and therefore more usable by all. Accessible content renders properly on a wide variety of devices, it is easier to navigate, and it conveys information in a consistent, logical manner. Moreover, changes in how we view the content are occurring. More and more content is being displayed on mobile devices. For content to appear properly on all devices, it must be well designed.

In my recent series of accessibility tips, I identified some things you can do now to design with accessibility in mind as you are creating content and setting up your courses. Designing with accessibility in mind will save you some time in the event you do have a student with a disability. Remember accessible content is not only for the impaired.

Just in case you missed my accessibility series of blog posts, I provided links to them here:

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Published on 1 Comment on Power of Podcasting

by Janice Florent

headphones laying on a desk

“Podcasting” is a term inspired by the Apple Computer Corporation’s iPod—a portable digital audio player that allowed users to download music from their computer directly to the device for later listening. Podcasting has changed in that it no longer just refers to audio but can also be video content which can be listened to live or downloaded for later use.

A podcast is similar to a radio show in that each show consists of a series of individual episodes you can listen to on your computer or on a digital audio player like an iPod. What distinguishes a podcast from a traditional radio show is that you can listen to a podcast whenever and wherever you want to, and you can subscribe to a podcast series so when a new episode is available, it automatically downloads to your computer.

Podcasts have changed the way people share their knowledge with others. This revolution has touched education industry and a lot of educators are using podcasting for teaching and learning.

The Office of Instructional Consulting at Indiana University Bloomington suggested some pedagogical uses of educational podcasting, benefits of podcasting, and things to consider if you are planning to use podcasting in education. That information is as follows:

Pedagogical Uses of Educational Podcasting

  • Preview/review lectures or course content
  • Language learning
  • Student-created content/projects
  • Reverse lecture
  • Screen/software demonstration
  • Situated (contextual) learning opportunities
  • Guest presentations (via podcast)
  • Supplementary course materials
  • Lecture recording
  • Mini lessons with audio and visuals

Benefits of Educational Podcasting

  • Doesn't require lots of bandwidth (as opposed to streaming media)
  • Network connection not needed in order to play (only needed to download)
  • Allows for timeshifting (both instructor and students)
  • Source for multimodal learning
  • May allow for re-use of content over time

Things to Consider in Educational Podcasting

  • Privacy and intellectual property
  • Value of human interaction and student-teacher relationship cannot be ignored
  • Potential barriers for technology challenged students
  • Potential barriers for students with different learning styles
  • Consider type of podcast in regard to purpose, audience, and file size
  • The time it takes to produce podcast

For more information about educational podcasting you can read the Ed Tech Review article “How and Why Teachers should use Podcasts.” In it, Prasanna Bharti explains how to create a podcast, suggests tools for creating podcasts, and lists some education podcasts that have experts and thought leaders sharing insights on various fields of educational technology.

Additionally, it is best practice to include transcripts and closed captions with your audio and video content. Many people believe closed captioning and transcripts only benefits students who have a hearing impairment or have a language deficit. This could not be further from the truth. Closed captioning and transcripts can also help students with cognitive disabilities, as well as learners accessing podcasts in noise sensitive environments, learners accessing the internet with low bandwidth or with a limited data plan, and basically all learners. Presenting information in multiple ways can help address the diverse needs of learners in the classroom and engage students on multiple levels.

Attend the upcoming "Creating Accessible Course Materials: Transcripts and Closed Captions" workshop to find out how to make your podcasts accessible.

Photo credit: Music Appreciation 101 by Dustin Gaffke used under CC BY 2.0 / cropped from original

Published on Leave a comment on Ways to Use Video in Your Courses

by Janice Florent

Video is one of the most powerful, motivating, and visual ways to learn. Videos can be used to promote critical thinking and active learning. The use of videos in education has become a lot more mainstream due to the accessibility and ease of use of equipment and software, but also due to the growing realization of the pedagogic benefits of video content.

In a recent Technology Enhanced Learning article, Phil Vincent suggested ten ways to use video in education. Those suggestions are:

  1. Record content for an online or ‘flipped’ course
  2. Record an interview
  3. Create a video introduction to a course or topic
  4. Create a screencast demonstrating a tool, technique, process, or software
  5. Record lectures/presentations for revision
  6. Capture a recording with a green screen or PowerPoint slides
  7. Create a microlecture
  8. Record assessment guidelines for students
  9. Review/present a journal article or text book
  10. Record module evaluation feedback

In Phil’s article “10 Ways to Use Video in Your Teaching” he provides examples of each of these. If you are interested in seeing examples of any of these refer to the article.

Additionally, it is best practice to include transcripts and closed captions with your videos. Many people believe closed captioning and transcripts only benefits students who have a hearing impairment or have a language deficit. This could not be further from the truth. Closed captioning and transcripts can also help students with cognitive disabilities, as well as learners accessing videos in noise sensitive environments, learners accessing the internet with low bandwidth or with a limited data plan, and basically all learners. Presenting information in multiple ways can help address the diverse needs of learners in the classroom and engage students on multiple levels.

Attend the upcoming "Creating Accessible Course Materials: Transcripts and Closed Captions" workshop to find out how to make your videos accessible.

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

Published on Leave a comment on Annotate Videos in MoocNote

by Karen Nichols

Since Inverted Learning is this year's theme for CAT+FD and we are having workshops and information on flipping, here's a free, handy tool for annotating videos that you may wish your students to watch in advance of class. MoocNote does require an account but it's very easy to set up and does not ask for all of your personal information.  Here are the steps to getting started:

1.  Go to the MoocNote homepage and click on Sign Up.

2.  Enter your email and choose a password.  You're in!

3.  Once you're inside MoocNote you may import one video or an entire playlist from YouTube by entering the URL.

4.  Assign your video to a group (it can be a group of 1 if you wish).

5.  Begin viewing the video and stop it at key points to use add notes, questions, a resource link, etc.  The textbox and buttons are located directly beneath the video you're viewing.

Add notes links hotkeys

6.  Once you've finished, return to the Dashboard and you will see all of the notes you've made on the right side of the screen.  In the center, you will see the option to Share the video with others.

7.  Note that your students or anyone with whom you share the video will need to create a MoocNote account in order to view it.   I'm looking into any plans the company has to make links available in Blackboard to view from there.  Perhaps that will be coming later!

We've experimented with this in our ETC (Educational Technology Community) virtual meeting and some of the instructors find this may be a useful tool.  I want to share a video with my French 1020 students to get their feedback as well.  Please let us know if this app is handy for your needs too!

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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 Can you Flip an Online Class?

by Janice Florent

The flipped classroom is an active learning strategy that is being used by a number of educators. At its core, the flip means shifting the focus from the instructor to the students. This is done by inverting the design of the course so students engage in activities, apply concepts, and focus on higher-level learning outcomes.

The flip has moved away from being defined as only something that happens in class versus out of class. Instead, it focuses on what students are doing to construct knowledge, connect with others, and engage in higher levels of critical thinking and analysis. This applies to both the online and face-to-face environment. The real flip is not about where activities take place—it’s about flipping the focus from the instructor to the students.

So, can you flip an online class? The answer is YES! In a Faculty Focus article, Dr. Barbi Honeycutt and Sara Glova suggest three "flipped" strategies that can be integrated into an online class. Those strategies are:

Create a scavenger hunt.

Ask students to locate important course information, announcements, and deadlines. Offer an incentive for the first one to submit the completed scavenger hunt activity. Incentives may include the first choice on presentation topics, the chance to drop a low quiz grade, or the opportunity to gain an extra credit point on the final project.

Why it works: Students are actively locating information and constructing their own mental models of the course rather than just reading the course web site or listening to a video as you describe the structure and organization of the course.

Create a hashtag just for your course.

Encourage students to use the hashtag if they find course-related items in different social media spaces or elsewhere on the web. The hashtag should be unique to your course. Consider reviewing the posts and then sharing an item a week with the entire class.

Why it works: Students are actively contributing to the conversation by sharing resources and information they find rather than just reviewing the content you have collected.

Develop a low stakes assignment to encourage self-reflection and analysis.

Ask students to reflect on their own learning styles or personality in the online environment before beginning the semester. Encouraging students to think about this actively might help them to prepare for the online environment as they analyze their strengths, weaknesses, challenges, etc. Supplement this activity by making it a private forum requirement, then post a global response to students afterward with suggestions on how to succeed in the online environment.

Why it works: Students are asked to analyze and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses in regards to a course, activity, or assignment. This can help build students’ capacity to advance towards higher levels of critical thinking.

These are flipped strategies because they shift the focus from the instructor to the students; they encourage active participation from students rather than passive observation; and, they engage students on a higher level by encouraging creativity and evaluation rather than basic knowledge recall. Most importantly, these strategies can work in an online environment.

If this has piqued your interest, you can read more in the Faculty Focus article, “Can You Flip an Online Class?” and my blog post "Look for 'Flippable' Moments."

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