February 2009 Archives

The Director of Marketing and Advertising for Information Technology Services at Penn State is retiring. Last week, several candidates for the position were brought in, and one session was an open presentation/forum, where each candidate did the dog & pony show, then fielded questions from the audience.

My question was a written one - "How do you promote a service to PSU students in five seconds or less?" The moderators must have thought it was a joke, as it never made it to the candidates. Yet I was dead serious.

Some say today's students have shorter attention spans than previous generations. I disagree. It not that their attention spans are shorter, it's that the ability to gain and hold their attention is harder. There's too much noise. Even if you get someone's attention, the background noise continues, and chances are a blip will occur that will shift that person's attention away from your stuff. Time - the fourth dimension - is our enemy when it comes to reaching the current generation. We have to get in, snatch attention away from so many competing elements, make our point, and get out.

As an instructional designer, I always pay attention to TV ads. the good ones do what we need to do. In 30 seconds or less.TV advertisers understand they have a blip of time to reach and convince their audience to buy or do something. Instructional Designers can learn a great deal from their approach.

So what would an instructional lesson designed to acknowledge the fourth dimension be like? What if we tried to meld it with Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction?

1. Gain Attention
2. Inform Learner of Objective
3. Recall Prior Knowledge
4. Present Material
5. Provide Guided Learning
6. Elicit Performance
7. Provide Feedback
8. Assess Performance
9. Enhance Retention and Transfer

Gain Attention - Let's borrow from TV here. We need something splashy, with some cool background music. Something that reaches learners on the affective level, pulling them in and motivating them. In five seconds or less.

Inform Learner of Objective - Well, how about using Twitter's 140 character limit as a limit on how to present these? KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid (or Keep It Short and Sweet).

Recall Prior Knowledge - How cool would it be to be able to link to learner's e-Portfolios and pull up relevant artifacts, visibly showing how the new lesson ties to existing knowledge? Work for assimilation, not accommodation unless you must. Ausubel would be so proud! 

Present Material - Wow - this is a tough one. This is where the bulk of time is spent. Again, turning to a body of evidence of prior learning, like an e-Portfolio, why not do a quick and dirty assessment of learner's prior knowledge, then pull up a quick Yes/No survey that asks the learners if they know the listed aspects of the material to be learned? Let's say there are 10 "chunks" of content, each relating to a specific learning objective. Some program/expert system/LMS pulls up some evidence of learning artifacts from the learner's e-Portfolio perhaps tied to the current objectives and asks the learner to indicate what they do/do not know about the current objectives. Then the instruction is tailored to the individual to present just the material that is needed. This implies an underlying electronic system that can handle this, and a body of evidence to tap into, but it could be done without all that - it would just take more up-front work bythe designers an implementers of the instruction.

Provide Guided Learning - How do you provide help as needed that's quick and unobtrusive? I think we cover that in F2F situations fairly well. We look for body language cues to indicate if learners "get it," adjust as needed and offer additional information, than carry on. In electronic situations it's different. We can provide the tried and true question every several minutes to see if the learners "got it," then brach instruction accordingly. A bit old fashioned, but it works for learners that don;t have a clue about their own learning styles and don't know how to reflect on their own learning. Better would be to teach learners up front  these skills and provide them with Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS) that allow them to choose when and where they need guidance. Best would be some way to monitor students galvantic skin responses, eye movements, etc. and use that strem of data to make decisions akin to an instructor that can observe the learners F2F, but that's far fetched for now.

Elicit Performance & Assess Performance - Ah , the crux of the biscuit!  Did the learner actually learn? Why not build the performance & assessment right into the instruction - couple it so that it occurs naturally, instead of having a time-consuming TEST at the end of an instructional sequence. Simulations and games offer this possibility, as do mini-activities build into instruction.

Provide Feedback - Following the "Elicit Performance" step, feedback should occur throughout the instructional sequence, where it will be perceived as natural and not a timely add-on after instruction.

Enhance Retention and Transfer - This fails to happen so many times in education. We teach, assess, them move on to another topic that may have little conceptually to do with the previous topic. In recent years instructional theorists have moved away from the notion of far transfer, citing little empirical evidence to support instructional activities that lead to it. So way try to build it into the instruction at all? Why not ask the learners to make the connections, in the form of reflective exercises that are tied to an e-Portfolio, exercise that the AI/expert system for the next instructional sequence can tap into to KISS this upcoming instructional experience?

So - instructional design and the fourth dimension. We can't escape the fourth dimension, for without it you have no learning. Learning takes time. Yet in today's world, with so many things constantly clamoring for our attention, instructional designers need to look for ways to design the five-second lesson. We'll never get there, but it's a goal for which it's worth striving.

I just read an interesting (and short!) article titled "College 2.0: A Wired Way to Rate Professors--and to Connect Teachers." At the University of Maryland-Baltimore County (at which BTW my cousin just started teaching), Gerald Canfield, an associate professor of information systems, is publishing his use of their CMS (Blackboard), posting number of hits, etc. Why? he feels it's a way to reach other faculty:


and it's part of the new bragging rights of faculty - something they can put on their resume.

I totally agree on both counts. At PSU, we use ANGEL, A New Global Environment for Learning. At PSU, we don't publish individual numbers. In fact, unless you dig through dry, dusty reports, you'll be hard pressed to find any numbers. So here they are, as of Feb. 13, 2009:

There are currently 75,441 students with at least one course in ANGEL.

• At peak usage during the Fall 08 semester, there were 80,007 students with at least one course in ANGEL.
• At peak usage during the Spring 08 semester, there were 72,157 students with at least one course in ANGEL.

There are currently 9,809 active course sections in ANGEL, 69% of total PSU course sections offered. 

• At peak usage during the Fall 08 semester, there were 10,610 active course sections in ANGEL.
• At peak usage during the Spring 08 semester, there were 9,259 active course sections in ANGEL.

There are currently 277,298 student-course-section enrollments (e.g., if a student has three courses in ANGEL that would count as three in this number).

• At peak usage during the Fall 08 semester, there were 294,917 student-course-section enrollments.
• At peak usage during the Spring 08 semester, there were 254,385 student-course-section enrollments.

ANGEL Groups (A group is a self-initiated course-like space)

• There are currently 10,297 groups with a total of 136,457 group users (unique editors and members).

PSU has bragging rights as a whole, no question about it! But what about the individual? Should individuals be posting their stats? I think that's OK as long as those stats are followed by substantive examples of the course content and activities. Otherwise, you could give a false sense of CMS use. For example, just because you have a course space in ANGEL doesn't mean you're using it, or using it well. You may just have your syllabus online and nothing else.

So, just as is true with any technology, just telling the world you are using a CMS is not enough. You have to share how you are using it, what your observations are of that use, and gee, what do the students think of it? Just posting raw numbers may be an indication of leading, but it can also be misleading. We need to paint the whole picture when it comes to CMSs.

Recently, my wife has undergone a series of MRIs for a (hopefully) non-existent medical condition. Today as I waited for the (again hopefully) last test, I marveled at the machine she was in, the knowledge it took to build it, and the community of practitioners needed to support it. The MRI machine is a pinnacle of modern technology that sits on the apexes of knowledge and community.

What my colleagues and I are doing in higher education is similar. We are a community of practitioners attempting to discover the best uses of some incredibly complex technology and support another community of practitioners in these uses. Wow.

You don't just plop someone down in front of an MRI machine and tell them to have at it. You train them, mentor them, and build their skills in the use of the machine. I observed this today, watching an 18-year veteran instruct a 5-year apprentice and a newbie.

Similarly, you don't just plop an educator down in front of a blog platform, or a virtual world, and expect them to be successful. Educators need our community to guide and mentor their community in best uses and practices. Yet unlike the MRI folks, many professors and instructors in higher ed. may not see the necessity of this. After all, their professional success to this point has been based, in part, on their ability to function independently. So it's up to us to explain why such mentoring is not just needed, it's critical to the successful use of the machine we name education technology.

At ETS, we're always in the process of mentoring instructors and faculty. We have a myriad of approaches to do so. Yet we can and should do more. We need to find ways to reach out to the early majority of adopters of education technology, in addition to the innovators and early adopters we currently reach. We need to foster a community where faculty understand that it's OK to reach out for assistance.

Waiting for results on an MRI is the hard part. What about the results of an instructional intervention that utilizes education technology? While experiments can fail, we need to show faculty this "stuff" works up front when we know it will do so. That's one way to interest the early majority.

None of this is new. We know the formula for success. Identify the early adopters, work with them, mentor and support them to ensure success. Then help them spread the word to other faculty who would otherwise never engage with the technology (or us). Until now, this has worked just fine.

My concern is with the rapid pace of all technologies, and the acceleration of change, the tried and true formula may no longer be enough. If change is accelerating, then our ability to adapt to change  and make all this stuff timely must also accelerate. We need new models to reach faculty.

So, we're experimenting with just-in-time screencasts, dynamic knowledge construction, and many other tools and methodologies. The community to support the machine has suddenly become more complex. We need to mentor each other far more than ever before.  The old apexes we stood upon are rapidly becoming dull, flat plains. We need to reach towards new apexes so we can assist faculty in obtaining new pinnacles of education technology use.

Over the years I've constructed several web sites around instructional design and education technologies. I'm constantly amazed at how many people contact me about these sites. My one site, Writing Educational Goals and Objectives, is the second Google hit on an "instructional objectives" search, so I have to assume many people are linking to it.

I didn't set out to do all this. I just wanted to share what I knew with others. Yet the end result is the same. In today's world, if you share something over the net, you are leading by doing, even if it's by accident.

Carrying this forward, are today's leaders with an online presence providing leadership with every post they make? That's pretty scary, considering the breadth of social tools out there. Many (like Twitter) can be used for personal info (I just ate a steak at XXXX and loved it!) as well as professional info. Or are we just receiving a more holistic picture of our leaders, one that will allow us to better understand their thoughts, humor, likes, dislikes, hopes, and dreams?

Will the new generation of techno-savvy leaders that use these tools actively bend them to promote their leadership visions, or will they not think about it before they unwittingly share their leadership in this arena? I'm seeing both things happen here. I'm curious as to what others are seeing. How is the Web 2 affecting leadership, and how are leaders utilizing Web 2 tools, deliberately and unwittingly?