Reflections on Week 1 reading: "We'll Leave the Light on for You: Keeping Learners Motivated in Online Courses"

This article focuses on key strategies motivating student in an online learning environment. Elements of this article tie to discussions that we had in our last LD Community meeting. Jeff Swain was emphasizing the importance of being able to articulate our approach as designers. He shared an anecdote about walking away from a painting that he really liked because the artist couldn't articulate the intentionality of their artwork. It's a great point. If we cannot share what we hoped to express through our work, then what difference is that then a really lucky monkey pounding away at a keyboard?

How would I hope to express my work to faculty as we being to sit down on a new project? I think that would be a combination of my stated approach, an honest survey of my strengths and weaknesses, and lessons learned. I don't know if this means developing three different lists or one well crafted statement.

Getting back to this article. I've been thinking that one very useful engaging question to start with faculty might be, "how (what are the strategies and techniques you use) do you motivate your students"? I think this kind of question would be very useful for identifying ways that we could structure their content to address engagement, meaningfulness, goals, interaction, feedback, tone, etc.

A reflection on the entire course... it's difficult to find a path in all this openness. I know that's kind of the idea, but I get lost in all of the content and areas to explore. It's negatively motivating to feel like I'm missing a lot of what's happening.

I just finished configuring the presentation I recently completed for PennTAP with Google Analytics. Their interface has changed for the better. It took me a little while to get used to the new dashboard. It is much easier to navigate between profiles and find different reports.

Implementing the code is the easy part. What I need is a crash course in analytics. I understand some of the basics, but have a lot to learn about how to interpret the data to affect change.

This project stands out a little differently because unlike tracking data for a website, we're looking to gather information about a single webpage with an Adobe Captivate presentation (26 min 34 sec). I was told that these metrics will be useful for achieving a goal of 1750 participants. There's a lot to be interpreted by this number. Are we looking for 1750 unique visits for the total duration of the presentation? This wouldn't account for the person that starts to watch the presentation for 10 min then has to leave to watch the last half of the presentation at a later time. We can't track individual users this way.

A better approach would have been to use an ANGEL group and have each participant logged into the roster. There may still be time to implement this approach. These kinds of important details should have been discussed at the beginning of the project.

Workplace Options hosted a webinar on preparedness and while there were some decent over arching topics, I really felt like the entire presentation fell apart because those topics were poorly supported.

I'm no disaster planning and response expert nor am I an expert in risk assessment, but listening to this presentation taught me that people really need to carefully assess where they are going for information.

The presenter, Brande Newsome, laid out her presentation based on the following outline:

1. justification
2. planning
3. preparation
4. execution
5. practice
6. mish-mash

While I think she covered the critical topics, I would have organized the presentation more clearly. She did cover some good information on communication, preparing children and workplace contingency planning.

Some of her advice was conflicting or downright dangerous. When discussing non-perishable foods, she said "this isn't a time to be healthy... indulge" and later said to eat "healthy" non-perishable foods. Which is it? It's easy to find healthy non-perishable foods. Do that, plain and simple. You don't have to sacrifice during a survival situation that you've planned for by eating only Dinty Moore and Jello powder (not that she was suggesting that). Then she said you could use a Britta filter to grab water out of a lake... sure if you don't mind potentially being exposed to bacteria, viruses, and chemical contaminants. Using a Britta filter with an open water source like that is negligibly better than drinking directly out of the lake with your hands. For goodness sakes... a decent water filter costs under $75 and under $25 for an emergency one - get one of those! Or tell people to buy a lighter, learn how to build a fire and use a pot to boil water that has been filtered with a hanky.

I did want to share some resources from her slidedeck:


I posted the following questions during the Q&A and chuckled when she responded to my second question about "zombies".

She responded very seriously that there's no research out there to show that we would be in this type of situation. I laughed to myself. But in all seriousness, I think there are two very tangible topics to discuss here. One is on the level of public perceptions and mass communications. Why are we as a society gravitating to this phenomenon now? The concept of zombies have been around for decades if not centuries. What is it about us now that makes this a popular topic in the media? For the most part, it isn't because the quality of storytelling has improved. I'm not talking about "just" the movies and TV shows out there. I'm seeing what I think is a dangerous trend in the firearms industry, a branding of firearms, ammunition and accessories that are marketing to the "zombie slayer." The legal ramifications are staggering in self-defense situations.

The second topic is that I think the concept of the "zombie" is a metaphor for realistic disasters. It could be an outbreak, military action against civilians, etc. What, if any, value can we derive from the "zombie" culture that is useful for real-world planning and preparation? Again, I think mixing discussions about "preparing for the zombie apocalypse" is a slippery slope for people who are in the security industry or concerned with real-world planning.

If someone were to ask me how I would give a presentation on disaster planning, this is the approach I would take:

1. rationale
2. expectations
3. planning and preparation
4. practice
5. execution
6. recovery

My rough thoughts on each topic, hardly an exhaustive list:
Rationale

• define disaster on an individual basis
• consequences for failing to prepare
• balance planning with daily function

Expectations

• you cannot rely on any one else (the government, police, fire department, schools, employers, even other family members) to save you when disaster strikes... they might, but don't expect it
• if you do not prepare, you are likely to lose family members, overall wellness, and/or valuables

Planning and Preparation

• the only way to tackle a big problem is to break it down into small pieces
• work together with others
• do what you can, even if it's only a little
• the rule of 3's: You can only survive approximately
  
• 3 minutes without air
• 3 hours without shelter
• 3 days without water
• 3 weeks without food
• 3 months without hope
• 3 years without goals
• what are your priorities? how would you rank the following: physical (and spiritual) health, financial well being, home and vehicle maintenance, happiness, security, livelihood, community, etc.?
• identify your threats: personal accidents/injuries, employment, crime, natural disasters, human-induced disasters, etc?
• what is the likelihood or risk associated with those threats?
• what strategies and methods/tactics/plans do you have to address each of those threats?
• where can you go for planning resources?

Frankly, I think I could have given a much better presentation on the first three topics myself. I'm not even going to finish my list here.

Don't leave the well being of yourself and your family to anyone else. It takes so little to start to plan.

Today's webinar was a one in two part series on accessibility and focused primarily on legal aspects to online education and compliance.

Both the National Federation of the Blind and the lawyer responsible for much of the successful litigation against institutions, Goldstein, said very plainly that if you call the NFB for help, they will not go after you. They are understanding of and pleased with institutions that recognize they are not where they need to be and reach out to the NFB for guidance with accessibility compliance. Too bad Penn State didn't get that message before we were sued. They also acknowledged that they do not have the resources to sue everyone, but hope that a few lawsuits will make 100 other take notice.

There were three examples of good practice given during the Q&A:

1. Cal State
2. Ohio State and
   
3. Blackboard

Interestingly, the speaker didn't have any examples of online-only institutions. Another speaker didn't have any examples, but did mention that some vendors like Google are trying.

Penn State World Campus was mentioned in a good light. It was used as an example that we understand that we need to take action and that we were perceived as very active towards accessibility compliance.

Apparently, the University of Phoenix uses a "homegrown" LMS and is unique because of its resources. For example, they buy licenses of JAWS for new students and work with those students to ensure that it works with their systems.

I thought it was interesting that Kelly Hermann was beyond an understanding tone. Compliance is not an option. She does work to help faculty become aware of shortcomings through hands-on development, however the circumstances are that they either make the content fully compliant or they take it down.

It was also interesting that the one deaf panel member used a translator rather than using the captions and typing directly into the webinar chat.

Christian gave a great presentation about how the PSU community can triage (turn one huge problem into a queue of smaller, more manageable problems handled through an iterative process) our commitment to the NFB agreement.

I've posted my initial notes online.

I had a number of questions, but the big one for us would be: Does triage apply to our course content? We would expect that the "long tail" of any of our given courses would look different from a "normal" website since every page should expect to see significant traffic. How do we even go about gathering data on web traffic? Should we be using Google Analytics?

http://catalyst.navigator.nmc.org/gallery/

Future of Learning Environments
Josephine Hofmann & Anna Hoberg

• Workplace learning changing requirements
• learning has to be a part of daily work (not rigid training)
• just-in-time learning
• Learning 2.0 - learning w/in working process, requires more from learners and from learning design
  
  
• Focus for Design Grid
  
  
• Management Audit Framework - looking at multiple aspects of a company before designing learning, conducts interviews, the create a complex graphic to summarize their findings
  
  
• Learning 2.0 wrap-up: "assure future innovation, offers approaches for the demographic change, prepare employees for a dynamic, permanent changing environment"
• big challenge: cultural change

Hands-on Info Tech Virtual Lab Powered by Cloud Computing
Peng Li, East Carolina University

• HP catalyst project team
• large DE student population (about 100 students)
• abstract: secure, scalable, remote lab learning environment allows for learning anytime and anywhere
• installed HP servers, virtual labs, application image library
  
  
• physical labs are too difficult to maintain
• 1 server can replace multiple hardware computers
• decentralized - students install their own, need powerful computers and instructors cannot monitor work/provide help
• centralized approach - using multiple cloud systems, on-demand, highly scalable
  
  
• visualization is not simulation (SL = virtual world simulator), real IT applications
• reservation system on Blade Server
• setting up and maintaining a cloud computing system is not easy
• assessment: most like virtual labs, helped to understand topics, develop hands-on skills, easy to monitor, easy to seek help, collect resource data
• spread due dates... reduces load, use in evening
• high speed internet and firefox required
• space and memory is required to support more students

Computation Chemistry Infrastructure
Isaac K'Owino

• audio problems - great opening video
• virtual chemistry tools VLab 1.6.4 and ChemLab 2.0
• http://www.modelscience.com/products.html?ref=home&link=chemlab
  
• grad, undergrad, and HS students work together
• encourages hands-on experience
• students don't need real labs if they have these virtual labs to learn
• awesome collaboration and opportunities to make huge impacts
• http://irydium.chem.cmu.edu/find.php

Reflections
I logged on today to specifically tune into the presentation on virtual labs powered by cloud computing. It was a very interesting presentation and I wonder if there are aspects of this project that we could benefit from here at IST or elsewhere around PSU. We're already using virtual labs at IST, but I've heard that scalability is an issue and concerns that we're starting to use demonstrations over visualization.

The project that really grabbed my attention was the last presentation from Isaac in Kenya. Although there were audio problems to begin with, I was impressed with the work Isaac has been doing with collaboration from around the world and the awesome impact they appear to be having with HS, undergrad and graduate-level students.

I was looking through an email newsletter Melissa forwarded on 3/22 from Adobe, and found some really cool examples of HTML5 and CSS3:

Nizo - an incredible example of a marketing page announcing the pre-release of an iPhone app... encourages the user to explore manipulate objects on a page to infer what the app will do; if nothing else, just scrolling up and down the page is beautiful how the animation comes together

HTML5snippets - website that features a cool collection of code snippets of what people are doing to build CSS3 websites; examples of cutting edge web development, while representing the future... all of the examples are useable today

I haven't really mentioned CSS3 at a recent OIDI staff meeting and thought I should add something about it. Reading through an article about the notable changes in HTML, I read about how closely related HTML5 and CSS3 are. This PDF goes in more details about the relationship between HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript: "In most cases, HTML markup defines the structure of web content; JavaScript manages behavior; and, CSS determines the content's visual presentation." I also found an article that talks about the pros and cons of HTML5 and CSS3. Many of the cons are based on the fact that both are still in development or early stages of adoption.

I'm really interested in these developments because they represent what is coming and there is so much to learn.

This past weekend was the TLT Symposium. I was disappointed that I missed most of the event. My daughter's second birthday party fell on the same day. I'm going to have to check out Jane's keynote. I was looking forward to that event more than any other this year.

I missed a lot more than Jane's presentation however. I had the privilege of working on two of the planning committees: the Program Team and the Gamification Team.

I was able to make one of the sessions that I had volunteered for. I spent the last session in the Arcade (room 218) talking with faculty and staff about getting traction with their ideas. While I was there I spoke with:

• Larry Ragan & Drew
• Lori Shontz
• Susana Garcia Prudencio
• Shivaani Aruna Selvaraj and Chris Stubbs

I definitely want to check back with Lori and Susana about some of their ideas and help them with their next steps. Lori was talking about lower levels of participation in her blended offering of COMM 260W course. Susana was interested in games that would help strengthen vocabulary games for SPAN 001-003.

There's a lot happening and I can imagine that the Educational Gaming Commons is keeping pretty busy these days. I was talking with Ravi and we came up with some great ideas around creating a crowd-sourcing resource that would help people with ideas get their projects implemented. This web-based resource would match people with certain skills to specific needs of different projects. For example, I might indicated that I had certain competencies with instructional design, project management, and intermediate multimedia development. The website would send me emails when certain projects needed certain forms of support at specific stages. I could choose to pitch in for as much or as little as I was able to. After the project was finished, Ravi had a great idea that everyone involved in the project could get together and reflect. I was just thinking it would be a great time to celebrate as well! We don't celebrate completed projects enough around PSU it seems... so busy with what's next :-)

This is a wake-up to everyone looking into transcribing content if you haven't already. I've been doing the work, both transcribing and publishing media with captioning, but I haven't been on the money end of things before.

We recently send a number of audio files to a quality transcription service who charges $150 an hour or $2.50 a min to transcribe audio. At these rates, it will cost us approximately more than $3700 for twenty three recorded lectures!

I'm not hear to complain about the costs since I think that $2.50 is pretty realistic for quality transcribing. I don't know much about the business. I wouldn't be able to say how much lower I think this charges could be. With higher demand and more competition, I wonder how sustainable business could be charging much under $2 a min.

The message I want to get out to other online course designers, program managers, and accessibility specialists is can we afford to transcribe all public audio content coming out of the university? Those fees don't cover person-hours required to publish those transcriptions along with the media. The time to add transcriptions for video takes the least amount of time. I'm thinking 5-20 min depending upon the length of the video and publishing platform. Other formats, like published Captivate files can take considerably longer. How much to you pay your designers and multimedia specialists an hour? Multiply that for each video and then each course or website you support.

Please don't mistake my post as an argument against accessibility. I strongly support designing for accessibility--what benefits a few, benefits all. We do have to take these costs into account when developing our budgets. I have a feeling that's not really being done right now.

Brenda and I attended the LabSim 4.0 webinar "Navigating LabSim 4.0" yesterday and I captured a few notes from the session. Testout will be posting a link to the recording in a few days at: http://www.testout.com/home/educator-resources/instructor-tools/webinars.

What are we looking to get from this product/service?

• the ability to cherry pick activities within a course
• reporting on performance within those activities
• a means to manage multiple classes and account holders
  
• ability to create new accounts
• single-sign on access for our students
  
• IT support for the product?
• a licensing agreement?

Potential next steps

1. contact one of their sales reps
   
2. provide access to courses for faculty to return a list of possibilities for use with a PSU course (work with Brenda on this?)
   
3. share our needs assessment with TestOut (Craig Russon?)
   
4. discuss potential services