For a variety of reasons (spam, themes, plugins, etc...), I have moved my blogging activity to a new site: allangyorke.com  I'll continue to post my travel and training information here since that makes it searchable across the university.

I went to a couple of sessions yesterday about Desire2Learn's work on analytics.  They already have a system that provides basic descriptive statistics such as test item analysis, reports on student activity within a course, and a graphic view of student achievement of learning objectives.  This new system that they're developing starts there and then moves into predictive models and student interventions.

The D2L Student Success System is a prototype mobile app that D2L is developing.  They provided a walk-through to demonstrate how they see it working.  In the demonstration, someone like an advisor would launch the app and because of their role at a university, they would be able to see a list of students they advise. 

Each advisee would have a color and shape indicator of how they are doing along with their current trend.  So this could be a green circle with an up-arrow inside to indicate a student who is doing well and trending upward.  Or a student could have a yellow diamond with a down arrow to indicate students who are doing okay, but trending downward.  The advisor could pull up a list of students who are at risk for failure (red triangles with up or down arrows). 

Say one of these students in the "at risk" category is Bob Dylan.  The advisor could click on Bob's image and get a more detailed view of his activity in his current courses along with some other information such as his GPA, sports involvement, and number of hours at a part-time job (this would have to be tied into other student information systems to pull together).  This is shown below on the left - click to enlarge.


Within a particular course, the advisor could see a quadrant view of student performance in that course and where Bob fits.  He is both under-performing and under-engaged with other students in the class (image on right above).  The advisor could then enter a recommended intervention for Bob and see what other notes have been made about him in the past.

Another student in this advisee's group of students is Audrey Hepburn.  She is an excellent student overall, but isn't doing well in a history course.  At the bottom of the image on the left, you can see a 59% student engagement and a graph next to it showing a downward trend.

The advisor looks at Audrey's interaction with other students in the course.  In this case, the course uses group assignments and discussion posts as a significant part of the final grade.  Audrey is the circle on her own in the bottom right.  She has been making her mandatory discussion posts, but not commenting on the posts of other students.  In a sense, she is not part of any group within the course.  So the advisor may want to intervene and get Audrey more involved in the course discussion to try to reverse the downward trend.

This is great stuff if it can become a reality.  The biggest problem is creating the predictive models.  The presenter said that it would be easier to do with an institution like Capella whose online courses all have the same instructional design model regardless of the course subject (science, math, history, etc...).  In our case, subjects are different, courses are different, instructors teach the same course differently, there are semester-to-semester differences, and there are a lot of activities outside the LMS.  We'll have to see whether this tool can be customized enough to accommodate that kind of variation and still provide useful predictions.

Desire2Learn is running a session on its mobile solutions. They have three different products in this area:

First, their CampusLife tool lets you build a campus app for your institution. They have a mobile interface where you can put together a set of pre-existing widgets such as web page, news feed, Twitter, maps, calendar, or photo collection through a Web-based interface. If you don't see what you want, they have a tool to help you create your own. Once you have things configured the way you want, it looks fairly easy to publish to multiple mobile OS's (iPhone, Android, and others). It looks like pretty straightforward way to quickly jump into the university-information app world.

Future trends:
They are working on tablet-specific versions. They are working on an ePortfolio mobile module, which would let you use a mobile device to do things like take pictures and post them directly to your portfolio.

Their Mobile Web is the mobile device view into the LMS (not an app, all web-based). After logging in, students see a mobile-optimized verison of the LMS, which focuses primarily on news, announcements, and alerts. Within a course, you can see content of the course and your bookmarks. It keeps track of your recently reviewed topics in case you get interrupted and need to get back to what you were reading. You can get into the discussions area of a course to read and reply to messages through a simiplified interface. The gradebook gives you a quick view into your grades by assignment and how you did in relation to the rest of the class. The calendar shows you a quick view of your calendar. The quizzing tool is not currently mobile enabled, but that's coming.

Desire2Learn 2GO is a set of native applications that students can download on their own if they like. Currently, these are only Blackberry applications, but that will change. The apps include the following: ePortfolio lets you upload artifacts to your portfolio and look at recent activity. Reader is a content reader that lets you download and read course content offline. Classlist lets you see the names and photos of people in your class. The Gradebook app gives you a simple view into gradebook data. Given the tone of the speaker, I assume these apps won't have much future development. Many of the features in these apps are available throught the Mobile Web view with the exception of off-line reading.

So overall, interesting stuff. The Campus Life app is the most interesting to me, but I'd want something that focuses on course or college resources instead of university information. The D2L speaker said that they can work out a license if we want to produce multiple apps.

I'm spending the next few days at the Desire2Learn Fusion conference. Even before it officially began, they did a good job of setting the stage for the culture of the conference and the company: forward-thinking, playful, cooperative, and Canadian. Two things stood out today: Neuroscience and Bob Dylan. I'll get to Dylan later.

Neuroscience:

The keynote presentation for the Desire2Learn conference was delivered by Jonah Lenrer, author of How We Decide. It was an interesting talk - I might need to get his book. He touched on the results of some studies that change the way that we think about thinking.  Here are a few examples:

The first concept was about the origin of epiphanies. These moments of insight are typically composed of four parts: a complex problem, a relaxed mental state, a new idea, and the recognition that the new idea is right.

The relaxation component is an essential piece. It lets us turn inward and find the solution. This is counter-intuitive because the typical thinking is that complex problems require more focus.  In practice, moments of insight typically occur when someone is involved in a relaxing activity such as walking on a beach or taking a long shower.  That makes sense to me - I typically do my best thinking when I'm walking, running, swimming, or taking a shower.  Although these aren't completely relaxing (like meditation), they all involve simple physical activities that give me the time to let my mind wander.

Relaxation isn't the only factor for success. Jonah also talked about grit using an example: every year, between 5 and 10 of West Point's cadets drop out within the first few weeks when they are going through something like boot camp. Grit is the personality characteristic that enables someone to persist, even through failure. "When the going gets tough, the tough get going", right? By designing a test for grit and providing some extra support to students who score lower, they have been able to reduce their dropout rate by 40%.

The next study Jonah covered investigated the effects of dopamine. It is typically associated with the pleasure center of the brain, but it also seems to have an impact on wiring the brain to predict patterns.  Dopamine seems to "swim upstream" and is released when the beginning of a pattern is detected.  So if you repeated Pavlov's experiment, you'd see dopamine release when the bell is rung.  If you added something else like flash a light before ringing the bell and then feeding the dog, the dopamine would be released with the flashing light.  In that sense, it is an indication of anticipation instead of just pleasure. 

The learning element comes into play when a pattern is disturbed. When we encounter a significant deviation, it creates a kind of pattern-mismatch response, which can alert us that something is wrong and trigger action.

The final point was about "the importance of not eating the marshmallow". Four year old kids are given a marshmallow and told that if they wait and don't eat it, they can have two later. Some can wait 5 seconds. Some 2 minutes. Some full 15 minutes. The kids who did well generally found ways to distract themselves and refocus their attention. That skill seemed to help them later in life, leading to better academic performance and lower incidents of aggression. Apparently, there are ways to intervene early with kids who would eat the marshmallow, which could be as simple as telling them to think of the marshmallow as a picture instead of the real thing. I've included a video below that helps illustrate this particular experiment:

Again, interesting work. I have always found psychology to be a fascinating topic, so I might get Jonah's book and a couple of the others that he referenced for a popularized view into this kind of research.

One more post from an Educause Learning Initiative session - I had to save this one in Evernote instead of posting right to the blog because the room I was in didn't have a good network connection.

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Duke is hosted an ExperienceIT session about the iPad.  They have had a program since May where faculty and students can borrow an iPad for a week.  They also have a small pool of six iPads for one-off class loans (students share them in teams), some cases where they loan out an iPad for a semester, and two cases where they have permanently granted some iPads to their Global Health and Environmental Sciences program. For faculty, they had some accessory to loans as well, including keyboards and VGA adapters.

The semester-long loans are for purposes like writing in foreign languages, grading papers, programming for the iPad, mind mapping, and studying musical scores.  They tried to accommodate as many requests as they could, but turned down some proposals where the proposed use was the same as a request from someone else.

Each of the week-loaner iPads are loaded from a central laptop with a common set of apps.  They were able to manage this with a single computer since they only had four iPads in the loaner pool.  The semester-long loans come with no apps with the assumption that faculty will want to connect them to their own laptops and load their own apps.

This is an exploratory program with faculty who are used to exploring things, so they didn't have a huge support structure in place.  However, they did form an iPad Users Group that are organized by the IT staff and held on a monthly basis.  They also had an informational page on their IT site and a blog about ongoing experiences using iPads in education.  There were no student training sessions, but there are tutorials on Lynda.com that students could access.  When surveyed, most of the faculty didn't need any support.  A few talked to a local IT consultant, checked the Lynda.com tutorial, or looked up what they needed online.

Here are some of the results of their evaluation: Some of the most common apps were DoodleBuddy, Dropbox, Evernote, iAnnotate, GoodReader, GoogleDocs, Keynote, and Pages.  There is also an attendance app that helps faculty track attendance - that might be useful based on some of the discussions that we've been having with Sherry Robinson about tracking tokens that students can use to skip a class, extend a paper deadline, etc...

Faculty like that it's so portable, using it to read for pleasure, its ease of accessing the Internet, quick on/off, and full-screen access to an app (no distractions).  The dislikes were that they didn't like how complicated it was to load documents, typing, and issues with projection.  Using a document camera is one way of getting around the projection issues.

The people who were most disappointed were the ones who assumed that the iPad is a tiny laptop.  A few commented that they were hesitant about exploring it completely or buying apps because the device is on loan and would have to be given back.  In class, being able to view media and documents and essentially pass those around by handing over the device was a popular use.  It seems like it would be much easier to do this on an iPad than on a laptop.

iAnnotate is a pretty cool app for reading and marking up PDF files for research or grading purposes. Some of their faculty were using specialty apps such as ForScore (Music) and Modality (Medicine).  DoodleBuddy was used to help students practice writing foreign characters, but it could also be used for sketching practically anything. 

In one case, they had two sections of a class, one with iPads and one without.  They found that students with the iPads were more likely to have their materials with them, including drafts of their papers.  Both sections did mind mapping as part of their note taking activity, but those with the iPads were more likely to incorporate the mind maps into their writing.

They have a link for other examples of how faculty have been using their iPads:
http://tinyurl.com/ipad-examples

Great session.  Lots of ideas here about discipline-specific apps and uses of iPads and other mobile devices/tablets. 

Here is a list of the apps that were installed on the loaner iPads.  Some of these have real potential. We may need to catalog a list of apps and example uses in a wiki.

• Dragon Dictation
• eClicker
• iThoughtsHD
• Mendeley
• ForScore
• Doodle Buddy
• Mind Meister
• Noterize
• TeamViewer
• Wolfram
• Sound Recorder Pro
• Sound Note
• TeamViewerHD
• ShareBoard

His central point is that innovations like the Web are disruptive by definition (or else they wouldn't be innovations). Changes like these often cause folk panics that are blamed on folk devils: faceless Others who are "evildoers" that plot to disrupt society. In this case, the folk devils are pirates who are trying to weaken copyright law. If they accomplish that goal, creative work will stop because the financial incentive to create new intellectual works will disappear. He feels that this view is typified by a new article called "Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?", which proposes that Shakespeare and other playwrights of his time created what they did because people build theaters and began charging for entry.

Patry points out that Shakespeare actually borrowed most of the plots, characters, and language from existing works and modified them for his own purposes. As such, most modern lawyers would classify his writing as being derivative works.

Patry proposes that copyright laws have been written from a faith-based initiative. It assumes that people consider things like their control over their work for their lifetime plus 70 years before they decide to produce something. The evidence is to the contrary - creative works appear to be limited by the restrictions that are created by copyright law, whether or not that is the intent of the person who creates the work. [This is one of the reasons that I'm a big advocate for Creative Commons and release the stuff that I create under a Creative Commons license.]

Interesting bit of history: the EU synchronized their copyright laws to a uniform standard of life+70 years, but US law was still life+50 years, so the EU said that they would protect US authors' works to life+70 if we also protected EU writers to that standard. At that point, the US media companies lobbied for the increase to life+70 years.

In any case, most of this is preaching to the choir for me, but then again, we had Lawrence Lessig come to campus to present at the Symposium and I set up the copyright.psu.edu site.

I'm at a session that covers three educational mobility initiatives.

Ohio State is going first.  Their university marketing group has been involved with mobility for a while, starting in 2005 with an old WML service.  Now, they have a mobile web interface for campus information (m.osu.edu) as well as an O-H-I-O app, which helps people take and upload pictures related to their grassroots marketing campaign.  Their Student Life group has been slow to go mobile, primarily because of "analysis paralysis" - web or app, which devices, etc...  instead of just jumping in like their marketing group has done.

Students are involved with their development efforts including doing research, user testing, and participating in design.  To create their app, they are using <a href="http://www.appcelerator.com/"> titanium</a> (converts JavaScript to native code for iOS and Android).

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Abeline Christian University is starting with the idea of maximizing the time that you spend with students in class.  It's like a GPS system - enter the directions at the beginning and then only pay attention to it when prompted.  

They created the Heads Up app.  It helps randomly assign groups and give students prompts for the topic and type of perspective they should take on it, for example "Healthcare Reform" is the topic for the whole class, a perspective like "A Social Ill" or "A Utopian Vision" for the group, and individuals are told what "hat" they are wearing - something like if you have the white hat, you should focus on facts and figures in a logical way, but if you have the yellow hat, you are supposed to approach the topic from an emotional perspective.  At the end of the discussion, there is a quick thumbs up/down feedback mechanism for how the group discussion went.

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Purdue is the final group presenting.  They created Mixable, which is a Facebook app with connections to DropBox, Twitter, YouTube, and Vimeo.  Mixable figures out and sorts what you are trying to share: status updates, photos, links to YouTube videos, etc... Links to online resources become bookmarks that can be seen within a course or across all of your courses.  Students can see a list of their courses and can opt out of a course or decide to follow it and receive all of the course updates.

They set up a site for all of us to use and give this a try:
http://tinyurl.com/elimixable

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Overall, these were great quick-hitting sessions.  We didn't get to go into any of the topics in depth, but at least we have some good leads on some new approaches that we could try.  Seeing all of this work going on makes me feel like a kid in a candy store.  I want it all! 

If I had to pick one of these to try first, I'd probably go for Heads Up.  I think a lot of our faculty would do more peer interaction in classrooms if it were easier to manage in large courses.

This is a session specifically about the Next Generation Learning Challenges program, which is focused on increasing student preparedness for college and their completion rates. They also want to prepare a new generation of people to enter the workforce with the kinds of skills that employers are looking for, including communication skills, problem solving, creativity, how to find and evaluate information, and work in teams. Educause leads this initiative with several other partners, including funding from the Hewlett Foundation and the Gates Foundation.

Wave 1 focused on building blocks for college completion such as open courseware, blended learning, deeper learning and engagement, and learner analytics. They have received over 600 proposals and have gone down to 50 finalists who are working on their final proposals.

Wave 2 launched in January and is still open. Its will be about college readiness for students in grades 7-9 in math and literacy core competency state standards.

Wave 3 is TBD.

They would like anything that is funded as part of the project should be open and available under a Creative Commons license so it can be adopted by others. The other key criterion is assessment to measure success.

One of their key challenges will be figuring out how to disseminate the resulting resources in a way that is discoverable, transferable, and useful to other institutions. I've seen a lot of grant-based projects that are put in the open when they're done, but never go anywhere because there isn't any momentum behind them.

It's an interesting program. I don't know if there is a match between the program and TLT strategy, but I'm definitely interested in looking at what is produced and seeing if there is a match or collaboration opportunity.

GWU is presenting what they have done with lecture capture and the way they deliver their Masters in Project Management program. That program is mainly composed of adults with 16 years of professional work. 60% of their students are taking the course at a distance and about 40% are taking the same courses on campus. [A small portion are taking a combination.]

When they started in 1998, they decided that they didn't want to do annotated PowerPoint because they would lose the faculty's body language, so they started doing studio-based recordings (expensive), then video self-recording (awkward), and finally lecture capture.

Both the on-campus and the distance education students like the lecture capture system and are quick to let the university know if there is a problem with a recording or if something isn't uploaded and available when they expect it. Their system is integrated with iTunesU. Blackboard is used for the typical assignments and communication mechanisms. They also use Elluminate Live to have regular chat sessions that typically happen two days after the lecture is available - which gives the online students enough time to have seen the lecture and come up with questions. Students using Elluminate are required to use a camera and headset so faculty can see the students and students can see each other. These sessions are optional and attended by more online students (80%) than on-campus students (50%).

The seamless integration of Echo360 into their courses is a big plus for them. Faculty don't need to do anything to do the recording or post it online. Their classroom facilities staff don't come to the rooms to work the technology, but they can monitor each room live to make sure that there aren't any technical issues. Generally, faculty don't edit their recordings. Those who want to do it try for a semester and then go back to not reviewing. The one exception is when someone asks the faculty a question during break that is intended to be confidential.

They have pressure-sensitive pads installed on the floors that control the cameras in the room, so if faculty move from one area of the room to another, the two-four room cameras know where they are, can switch to the best video source, and can focus in. They have microphones set up around the room, in the ceilings, so any student speaking can be heard. They ask students to sign a notice so they know that they are being recorded.

Currently, they are set up in five classrooms with plans to expand. They tried doing the personal capture, but students didn't like that as much since it didn't feel like being in the classroom (they had gotten used to seeing the full room). It could be different if a student saw the personal capture version first and had different expectations.

An image from a white board doesn't come across well on the video. They've found that both the online and on-campus students prefer a document camera since the image is a lot clearer.

While I knew a lot about Echo 360 going into this session, it was helpful to see how a real implementation is structured and integrated into other classroom and university-wide technologies.

Edward Gehringer from NC State has been using the Expertiza system and a wiki to have his students collaboratively write their textbook. He made a good point - for profit textbooks are sold based on reviewer testimonials instead of scientific data on the effectiveness of a certain textbook on student learning. He pointed to a study that said that in a certain course, students who bought the textbook did no better than those who didn't. On the other hand, there is a growing body of research stating that students who use a wiki to create their own textbook learn more because of their engagement in the writing process.

The administrative issues involved with students writing their own wiki-based textbook are an issue. The chapters need to be ordered so the foundation materials are ready before the subsequent chapters. Students may need to be assigned to chapters so everyone gets an equal chance of writing essential content instead of being able to choose their topics. Multiple deadlines need to be managed: choosing a topic, submitting a draft, review, etc... Finally, there should be a double-blind review process to eliminate awkward peer interaction.

He had us try Expertiza to sign up for a topic. We had some technical issues logging in, but once we got in, it was an nice system for having students sign up for the topics that they wanted to write about. Expertiza also handles feedback from the instructor, TA, and anonymous peers as well as providing information on how much team members contributed to a project.

When the students actually do the writing, they are editing unique wiki pages in a Mediawiki system, so there is much less likelihood of a problem with simultaneous editing even though he has up to 120 students in his course.

Edward is a professor in Computer Science. One of his courses had a fairly good textbook on parallel computing, but it was thin in some areas and didn't have any information about developments in the field that happened after the publication date. So he had his students write what was essentially a supplemental textbook. At first, students were a little confused about the process. They often found information that was outdated by sticking to the first few results in a Google search. Also, they sometimes wrote about materials that were covered in later chapters of the textbook.

Survey results from the students indicated that they were proud of the work they put into the wiki and understood the topic that they were asked to write upon in greater depth. Students generally thought that the content written by other students was good and the feedback they received from other students was fair. However, they also fel that there was too much rating required in the process.

Some additional thoughts on working with student authors: He did find that plagiarism was an issue, but recommends that you put that into the rating system so it's more likely to be caught and corrected. Students often organize the content of their chapters to parallel the sources that they found, which isn't very helpful since someone might as well read the original source. They get students permission to share their work online and openly so they don't run into legal issues down the road.

The sign-up process is very useful for managing large numbers of students and topics. If you don't have a complete list of topics, you can have students suggest some of their own. He has also used social bookmarking (Delicious.com) to have students track their sources as well as suggest resources for other students.

So overall, some interesting thoughts on managing the construction of a course resource with a large number of students. We may want to look into Expertiza and see if it would be a useful tool for managing student collaboration assignments in large courses. Edward and his team created Expertiza - he said that we can use their instance or download the code and run our own.