BetterDistanceLearning

29. Robust Online Access Publishing Model

2011-04-19T21:50:00.001-07:00

At least five significant problems exist in drawing a larger number of faculty into online teaching and in improving the efficiency and usability of online learning materials:

protecting and preserving the intellectual property rights of faculty authors
creation of stable hyperlinks to multimedia
convenient URL access from print documents such as workbooks as well as from e-documents
support for mobile computing device access to multimedia with minimal manual URL entry
updating links to multimedia not under your control even when those links appear in previously published print materials.

These issues are not adequately addressed or in many cases even acknowledged by existing course/learning management systems, which is the primary reason that faculty buy-in to these lags and why existing usage is in many cases fraught with inefficiencies.

The ROAP model addresses all five of these issues and does it in a way that eliminates the use of most proprietary tools, provides a way for faculty to gain royalties on their original course materials and thereby overcomes a key issue in reuse of materials by others, and makes it possible to use already-known authoring tools such as Word and PowerPoint. In a significant step forward it provides the way to regard the vast array of video resources on YouTube as an already-built and cataloged library of learning objects while providing the means to easily manage and overcome issues of moved or eliminated videos and their replacement with substitutes. In addition it inherently reduces dependence on the course/learning management system allowing simple "a la carte" use of it only for functions or activities that require privacy, providing a choice for faculty rather than a forced march to total reliance on LMS features and constraints. Among other things this also makes it possible to minimize workload when a decision is made to change from one LMS to another. I describe the ROAP model in a 15-minute video you can view on YouTube by clicking here or by entering this QL:

q123.us/roap

What's that? That's a QL--a "qWikLink"--so named because it reduces the amount of entry necessary when a URL must be manually typed. QL's complement QR (Quick Response) codes and are a feature of the ROAP model. They are also what makes it possible to manage links to multimedia resources apart from the URLs or links you place in web sites or printed learning materials so that as true URLs change you can keep the links viewers see active. This is part of why the word "robust" is the first word in the ROAP acronym. QLs are an open and free technology and ROAP documentation shows you how to create them.

Who will dislike the ROAP approach? Obviously, LMS vendors are not pleased when a method is presented that has the potential to reduce or eliminate reliance on their product. IT support and training personnel who have built careers based on large and complex learning management systems may feel threatened. Just about everybody else will likely rejoice that it's possible to simplify the process of online learning materials preparation while making the product better and easier for faculty and students, and to do it much less expensively and faster (and quite possibly without an LMS at all!).

Look for additional postings here in the near future that further document the ROAP model. Visit these QLs to see how I have already been using this model very successfully for over a year in three courses I conduct at DePaul University's College of Digital Media:

q123.us/200 CSC-200 Introduction to Computers and IT Careers

q123.us/205 GPH-205 Historical Foundations of Visual Technology

I could have made those QLs hyperlinks. I purposely didn't so that you could enter just those few characters on your browser's URL link to demonstrate for yourself how QLs work! In both cases you can download the e-book that IS the course (all original course content)--I provide it free to students and it's open to all who would like to see it. I'm not just whispering vaporware here or theorizing--I am using ROAP now and I make only minimal, "a la carte" use of an LMS. And the courses run more smoothly, I can adapt materials and approaches quickly, and the students seem happier. Imagine that.

28. More about less of the C/LMS*

2011-03-30T15:13:00.000-07:00

I just received the iPad2 I ordered on March 11.To test how the camera worked I quickly recorded and posted this video for my students in CSC-200 and GPH-205 at DePaul University, and included some comments and predictions about the waning of *course/learning management systems. Here's the video, 7 minutes of inspiration. To download the e-book I mention as an example click here.

27. Simple and quick videos

2011-01-21T05:29:00.000-08:00

You can easily make informal videos and post them to YouTube to maintain a presence with your online students using a 4th generation Apple iTouch--which has cameras, unlike earlier models! All it takes is a simple stand that you can construct in 5 minutes using a coat hanger and the plastic box in which your iTouch comes to you. The iTouch will transmit your video to YouTube via wifi without any need to connect to a computer or to interact with anything more than a key click! Check out these two short videos I made on January 20 to show you how!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEEzUc1bi58 How to make the stand and use it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeoidVDuEPA A quick video example I made using my iTouch

That example (a still frame from it is above) was made under less than optimal conditions indoors at night with only incandescent lighting, but it's better than a sharp stick in the eye.

Timeliness and spontaneity are much more important to online teaching than a fetish for excessive video quality. Set aside your notions of making an appointment with a technician to record you with a big video camera, green screen background, video editing, and all the overhead and delays of that approach. Those things are a part of "canned" courses and boring, scripted "talking head" videos that can be deadly dull. What you bring to your online course is YOU and your unique (and hopefully engaging and sincere) personality. Convey that to students this way. Simple is better. In multiple ways!

26. Supporting courses online without an LMS!

2010-10-31T09:39:00.000-07:00

In earlier posts I made the claim that you can support course instruction without a learning management system (LMS)--and that your support could actually be better than with an LMS: cheaper, faster and easier to build and maintain, and easier for students to navigate. Since my earlier postings I have developed support for three courses taking my own advice. The learning materials for these courses are not hidden in one or another proprietary LMS. They are continuously open to any interested party. Take a tour through any of these course sites to get some ideas for your own efforts in this area:

http://bit.ly/gph205autumn      My best site yet; this supports an art history/art technology survey course
http://bit.ly/csc298autumn      These learning materials support the computer science junior level internship
http://bit.ly/explore-Chicago   I teach this course in the autumn term: "Exploring Chicago Architecture"

In each of these cases all web pages have been composed using either Word 2007 or Powerpoint 2007. Each page is saved as a .docx or .pptx file so I can continue to edit it, but is also saved as a .pdf. The .pdf for each page is what is put onto a server (using a free FTP program, Filezilla). Hyperlinks in one page refer to other .pdf pages. No HTML coding is required for this type of web site construction. The URLs you see above are aliases created free at the bit.ly web site so that students can more readily locate them.

It's not quite accurate to say that I avoid use of an LMS entirely. In my courses I use exercises of a unique design to force students to engage with assigned readings. Those exercises are housed on either DePaul's LMS (Blackboard or Desire2Learn) or in one case on Moodle as hosted by ISP http://www.classroomrevolution.com/ through its "crteacher" individual subscription service. I personally pay $149.95 a year to be able to have up to 150 students interact with exercises housed on Moodle. Students enroll themselves in the Moodle course when they arrive there by way of the first "exercise" link on a .pdf web page and sign themselves into it using an enrollment password I supply to them. I abide by the K.I.S.S. principle; "keep it simple, stupid."

This inexpensive arrangement gives me an excellent and highly responsive way to conduct research comparing the Moodle open-source LMS to other (proprietary) systems. Based on my experience with it, in my opinion Moodle is as useful for course support as are most proprietary LMS's and is actually better in a number of ways than some major players in this field. I'd strongly suggest that anyone interested in exploring ways to economize on (and even improve service) for course support consider outsourced Moodle. My experience is limited to ClassroomRevolution but several other vendors also exist. Pursue subscription service before investing major capital and annual expense funds on an internally hosted proprietary system--you will no doubt find as many or more advantages in outsourced support as I have. Put your limited funding to use in more beneficial ways than overhead in this area.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité!

-Jim

25. Forcing students to do assigned reading

2010-08-03T22:03:00.000-07:00

I want to share with you a way to prepare simple, repeatable online exercises that you can use to force students to do assigned readings. This technique works with just about any learning management system through its "quiz" mechanism but I'm not talking about quizzes, which are assessment devices. I'm talking about repeatable exercises that are learning devices. And they are not chickenfeed "self test" or "low stakes" devices either; these are major grade items that count for a significant part of the student's grade. Why? Because they won't do them unless they count for a lot. An remember: they are repeatable and everyone can do well on them--if they expend the effort to do the readings!

Here are two videos. The first one just explains why these learning exercises are good and refers to a recent article as an "opener" on the topic. The second video actually shows you what a typical exercise question looks like and how it works:

Part 1 - overview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vt__ooddpM

Part 2 - example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC6RxhS8K0k

If you're in a hurry, watch the second video first.

My own research on this technique clearly indicates a very significant positive correlation between the amount of effort a student expends on the exercises in a course and the amount of knowledge gain and retention experienced. In addition, student satisfaction rises as the student sees their score rise as a result of their efforts. I'll be posting more information on this form of reading "encouragement" as time goes by, I have a few papers under development to explore them further.

24. Distributing slides efficiently to students

2010-07-30T21:33:00.000-07:00

In response to a question from Sigrid W. who I met at the recent Fusion conference in Chicago, I created the short video you can access by clicking here. This is 9 minutes long and shows you two ways to output Powerpoint slides that students can view without the use of Powerpoint and without having to download huge Powerpoint files. Both of these methods are available to you in Powerpoint itself, but not many instructors seem to be aware of them. Each method reduces the size of the files you share, and both methods preserve your control over your slides by not making them editable by viewers. The second method (.pdf output) can reduce the size of the file you share to less than 1/10 of the original Powerpoint file size. Whether you are teaching in-class, hybrid, or full online you need to explore ways to make your teaching materials reviewable by students outside of the classroom--and the techniques shown here can help you do that. "Distance learning is fun, especially when it is done well." -Jim

23. Suggestion for clear and rapid method to organize a D2L course site

2010-07-23T09:37:00.000-07:00

We're starting to use Desire2Learn as an LMS. In working out a good way to organize a course web site using it I learned a lot from Erik Christensen's presentation in early July at the D2L "Fusion" user's conference in Chicago. I combined some of his ideas with mine on the use of .pdf materials with hyperlinks and came up with what seems to be a productive, quick, and very clear organization--for both students and faculty. I have illustrated and documented what I came up with in this brief set of notes. Take a look and try out the hyperlinks in this .pdf, they are all active and lead you to accessible documents. In particular try out the link to the videos which are embedded from YouTube in some trivial but very useful HTML. You might find this organization of course materials, discussion, exercise, and submission points useful in your work. -Jim

22. Use .pdf's for web pages instead of HTML

2010-07-17T20:54:00.000-07:00

A revelation: you can use Word 2007 or Powerpoint 2007 to output .pdf files containing active hyperlinks and these can be used instead of HTML-created web pages for your learning materials web site. I'm NOT saying output HTML from these products (which can be horrid and far too complex for the purpose) but rather that you output the document as a .pdf file and make that web-accessible. Why do this? Download this paper draft I recently created to read many reasons why. Take a look at this video I placed on YouTube illustrating this and an additional technique involving this form of .pdf web page where you can easily insert "notes" that open up when you pass the cursor over them--with no programming knowledge at all, and no special arrangements--just by annotating your .pdf with an inexpensive tool. If you teach you can make your learning materials available with web page designs that visually far outdistance anything you could achieve in HTML or with the editing tools of your LMS and you can do it using tools you already know: Word and Powerpoint. Reduce your extraneous cognitive load (translation: minimize the drek of creating learning content and navigation to it with your LMS) using this technique.

Do I sound like a cynic? I hope not. It's just that when I came across these techniques I had been groveling for years at the feet of an LMS trying to get it to do my bidding rather than vice-versa. When I discovered that I didn't need the LMS for content creation and presentation, and possibly at all--I jumped out of my seat, danced around the room, went to the pub and bought a round of drinks for all present, and later that evening fell asleep a truly happy soul. Wooden stakes are as good for pounding into the hearts of software as for monsters. Try what I am suggesting here and you too might start sharpening your sheleighly.

21. Excellent conference! Quality Matters (TM)

2010-06-12T21:38:00.000-07:00

Quality doesn't happen by accident.

I attended the Quality Matters (TM) conference held in Oakbrook, Illinois this weekend and came away with an understanding and appreciation for the finest method and rubric I've ever encountered to guide an instructional designer in forming the content of a course. The presenters were almost uniformly excellent in describing and illustrating how they have applied this method to the development of online courses that meet the needs of learners instead of just being online repositories of syllabi and readings. I strongly recommend that anyone engaged in the development, management, or acquisition of online course materials visit this organization's web site at http://www.qualitymatters.org/. As stated on that site:

"Quality Matters (QM) is a nationally recognized, faculty-centered, peer review process designed to certify the quality of online courses and online components. Colleges and universities across the country use the tools in developing, maintaining and reviewing their online courses and in training their faculty."

This non-profit organization is an excellent resource! One of the presentations at the conference, by Joann Golas and Rick Salisbury, focused on sharing an online tool that incorporates the Quality Matters rubric for self-check of a course design and organization. This tool is open to all at:

www.idd.depaul.edu/qualitymatters/selfcheck.html

This tool was composed using EditGrid, a free web-based service that provides a spreadsheet-like capability for building and sharing what you might otherwise have to package as a spreadsheet and distribute in that form. Since this is web-based it's immediately available rather than through physical software distribution and no one need have Excel in order to use it.

I also took the one-day training session that describes and documents the use of the QM rubric taught by Diana Zilberman, President, Director, Distance Learning (Baltimore City Community College). This is a very fine, intensive introduction to the mehtod from the point of view of a reviewer certified to judge the extent to which the an online course meets the expectations of the rubric. Since the rubric considers course organization but not design it's applicable to all types of subject matter. I strongly recommend that anyone involved in online course development take this course.

The fact that the method provides for internal and external review and a recognized certification makes the QM rubric more than just a well-intentioned suggestion. This is in effect the ISO-9000 for online courses but is much more focused and practical than ISO would be for this purpose. ISO is valuable but it;s for management of processes, not this level of development. QM is focused, it doesn't involve reams of forms, strange terminology, or electronic eyewash.

If you want to build toward the best online course creation and delivery possible you need to check out Quality Matters.

Most likely, your competition is already using it or will soon be. -Jim

20. Gmail beats Blackboard for work submission

2010-06-01T13:12:00.000-07:00

I found that clearing up student work submission issues with Blackboard was taking too much of my time since students can only submit once and don't receive any acknowledgment that their work has been made viewable by the instructor (the "Save" button strikes again!). So I created a free gmail account specifically for the course and it works much better! Documents open faster, are easier to file, I can give much quicker feedback--in fact I knock out three quick feedbacks in the time to used to take me to just log in to Blackboard! Here's a 7 minute video that shows you how I have this organized:

19. K.I.S.S. grading -- simple and simply better!

2010-05-15T17:10:00.000-07:00

How do you keep track of grades, provide grades to students, and give students meaningful and accessible feedback? Pondering this long and hard after grappling with the arcane, cranky, geeky and erratic methods provided by a large LMS vendor that shall remain nameless, an epiphany dawned. Simple personal productivy software has improved all sorts of things since the days when I kept class grades on a ledger sheet. Maybe ordinary technology has now given me a way to do things SIMPLY and effectively without having to learn an approach designed by a non-teaching programmer. Imagine that!

It turns out that a checklist for students--which I recommend in any case--can easily be expanded and maintained and can provide better support for both faculty and students than anything I have seen in an LMS. (Drive another nail in that coffin!) So after implementing it RIGHT NOW in a course underway (why not?) I recorded a demo video using Camtasia (another element of infrastructure I highly recommend to anyone attempting online lecture work) and posted it on YouTube, the subway wall of the world. (If Martin Luther were alive today I am convinced he would post his 95 theses on YouTube rather than nailing them to the church door that was the public forum of his day.)

Click here to see video! You can download the grade report I demo in this video as an .rtf document from this link: grade report.

Think about it. Do a little self-study ROI (return on investment) analysis and see assess all of the factors including grade sheet setup, messing around with it to fix it when a course is copied to a new term, and how effective or ineffective your current method is in meeting student needs as well as your own. For me that analysis clearly showed that the grading aspect of many LMS's was the best idea of 1996. But this is 2010. -Jim

18. CTPEC presentation May 13, 2010

2010-05-13T17:37:00.000-07:00

I gave a talk at the May 13 meeting of the Chicago Technology Professionals Education Council at Northeastern Illinois University. I promised to make the slides I used at this session accessible so I have posted them here: CLICK HERE. I have output the PowerPoint slides two-up so you can view them in a compact form. But I have also used CutePDF-Pro to annotate that .pdf with popup notes at many places. This gives you more of the talk than would the slides alone, because I don't use many words on slides (I think wordy slides are a travesty of human dignity and the product of unthinking minds. Frankly I would sooner have a root canal than sit there looking at the back of someone's head while they read their slides to me. Unfortunately that happens so often that I have run of out teeth for the dentist to work on in that tradeoff.) Comments are welcomed concerning the heretical notions I express in the slides (which notions by the way were quite positively received by the crowd assembled for the talk!). In addition, here are .pdf's of the two recent papers on which I based this presentation:

Guided active review confirming soundness of the concept (SALT conference, Washingon DC, 2009)

Proposal and substantiation of minimal cognitive load LMS model (MBAA, Chicago, 2010)

17. Embedding YouTube video playlists

2010-04-20T13:14:00.000-07:00

YouTube videos can be a great resource for some types of distance learning experiences. Here is a playlist of 16 short interview responses by professional human resources personnel at a recruiting agency. I have the students in an internship course view this and then make a video of themselves responding to the question "tell us about yourself." Each student submits their video to a discussion board posting as an attached file, so the other students in the course can view it and critique it. This is a great assignment that involves multimedia in a highly relevant way both in the viewing and assigned student work!

Spend a little time using keyword searches in YouTube and you're almost guaranteed to find useful material for asynchronous discussions and as required viewing for information content! By using an embeddable playlist (if one is provided) rather than a single video embed, your students will see an entire series of short videos rather than just one video--but even one video is much better than none at all!

16. Have some fun with video updates!

2010-04-15T17:49:00.000-07:00

Video and video hosters like YouTube provide a great way for you to maintain a connection with your distance learning students! I use a FlipVideo Ultra camera on a tripod next to my desktop and just flip it on when I want to record an update, introduce an assignment, explain a rubric, or "tell" my students something important. I do a little editing using either Windows Movie Maker or Camtasia and then upload it to YouTube. After it's up there I copy the embed code from YouTube and insert it into the "Hear Ye, Hear Ye, Hear Ye" home page that I set to appear on the course Blackboard web site instead of that dowdy "Announcements" page that took top honors as the most unattractive web page design from 1997 through 2005. Typically a video like this is 5 or 6 minutes long and concise. It's a great place to use a little subtle humor. Click here to view a course update I posted this evening to one of my courses and see if you can spot the humor I included while keeping a straight face...

15. Let's try DLMS for real!

2010-04-11T21:41:00.000-07:00

DLMS = "Ditch the Learning Management System." That is, provide online course support to any mode of instruction without the cognitive and infrastructure overhead of learning management system software. Heresy! I am sure my notion is heretical to some who have a vested interest in proprietary course/learning management systems. But think out of the box for a bit and I will help you see the case for an "a la carte" approach to instruction in colleges and other institutions of learning.

In a prior posting I suggested that it's possible to provide high quality online support to in-class or distance learning students without the use of a course/learning management system at all. Why not actually show you? That's exactly what this posting does. You can view how I am phasing this in this right now for an actual live course named GPH-205 "Historical Foundations of Visual Technology" at the DePaul University College of Digital Media (CDM). I provide access to the online support for this pure distance learning course through the online syllabus for the course. The online syllabus system is standard at CDM but access to the home page for a course supported in this way can also be achieved just by providing a URL to students. I only used our online syllabus system page for this since it's available to me and quite handy.

Click here to access the syllabus for GPH-205 and then click on the Unit 2 label which is a hyperlink to web page for one of the five segments of the course. I am fleshing out this unit during the period April 15 through 25 so expect to see it change a bit over that time period. Check back occasionally to see Units 3, 4, and 5 become accessible at this link as well. The course ends in June 2010 at which time I will come back and compose the unit 1 page.

Your comments and suggestion are welcomed either in the comment box here visible to everyone or by e-mail to me at the address above! Liberté, égalité, fraternité!

14. Use an introductory screen collage!

2010-04-07T09:30:00.000-07:00

A great way to help establish a connection with the students in your pure distance learning course is to create a collage of pictures students have submitted to an "introduce yourself" discussion board forum. For students who don't have a picture or don't submit one, you can use the id pictures that are provided by your student system. No names--just pictures, and include one of yourself too. How to form this? Easy as pie! Just use PowerPoint as an easel. Insert all the pictures into one slide and resize and position them there. Youc an even put in a text box as I did here to identify the class. Then Save As a .jpg file (save your one slide as a .ppt or .pptx slide also if you want to be able to re-edit it.) Now the magic part: FTP your slide to a web site that you have access to--such as your college account or one you privately maintain. Then in Blackboard insert an External Link menu button and point the URL to the picture like this:

http://www.thisSiteIsMine.com/intro_collage.jpg

Position the URL button anywhere in your menu button list. If you want this page to come up as the first page a viewer lands on when the visit the Blackboard course web site, make it the top menu button. (You may have to change the starting page to this button using Control Panel > Settings > Course Entry Point.) I have had a lot of success establishing a connection between members of the class by letting everyone see that other real students are involved with them in the course! -Jim

13. Blackboard Home Page Makeover

2010-04-03T04:41:00.000-07:00

As the instructor your Blackboard course home page is where any student lands when they access the course. Usually this is a kind of dowdy text-heavy screen cluttered with dull-appearing verbiage or at best, a skinny graphic. You can improve the appearance of it 1000% by making a single graphic that is 1022 x 626 pixels in size and making it be the home page. The effect can be stunning as you see illustrated above. Click here for a full size screen picture of this image. How do you do this? Take these simple steps:

1. Form a collage of whatever pictures you want using PowerPoint (any version). You use PowerPoint as an easel to arrange and size the pictures into a full screen slide.

2. "Present" the slide as if doing a slide show and press Shift and PrtScrn. This will take a copy of the screen into the clipboard.

3. Open the Paint program included with Windows. Press Ctrl and V to insert the image into this crude photo editor. Use Paint (or you favorite phot editor) to crop and produce whatever 1022 x 626 pixel area of the image you want as your graphic home page. Save this as a .jpg file.

4. FTP the graphic to any separate web site you can use to house things. Put it in the public_html folder there.

5. Use the Control Panel to install an external link menu button you can name anything ("Welcome!" is a good button name, or use the course identifier for that) that points to the image at the separate web site. Make this button the top one in your list.

6. Use Settings in the Control Panel to make the new button the starting page of your course web site. Since I don't use the Announcements feature I instead modify that button and make it inaccessible to students (I use video e-mail and sometimes post the contents of each significant e-mail in a Content Area page name "Me to You").

The effect of making these changes can be visually stunning! Any college department can create its own "branding" in this way, if desired, with no external technical support. This doesn't destroy the college's own branding, which still appears in on the screen as you can see. The fact that the graphic is stored in a separate web site means that multiple courses can readily use the same image and a departments can standardize on it or allow instructors to be creative. Try it. The effect is more dramatic than the wildest makeover show on television! -Jim

12. Why not ditch the LMS entirely?

2010-04-01T00:59:00.000-07:00

As I was pondering the simplification of things I came upon the notion of the ultimate simplification: why not abandon the use of a course/learning management system entirely? If you are posting documents and web links--and the web provides a rich array of these for free online textbooks and videos--you can create "pages" using PowerPoint and output them as .pdf files. This way you use a familiar tool to form a home page and provide links to your Word-created documents including images and text elements that aid readability, and everyone can open them. Why encumber your life as a faculty member with the need to learn some other editing tool and a complex system to support your course and then have to keep up with changing complexities as vendors create ever new-fangled features and gizmos? Just how complex does teaching and learning have to be anyway? Every hour spent fiddling with new technology is lost to more productive research and tenure-seeking efforts!

To try out this idea as simply as possible I created a fictitious example course ABC-123, "History of Science and Technology" and began to implement it as I proposed. It's just a collection of related one-page .pdf documents. I created and output each page as a .pdf file using Word 2007. I just copied the .pdf files to a web site and then created an alias for the URL at bit.ly. Click on this alias URL to get to the home page of this course: http://bit.ly/no-LMS. Only the home page and unit 1 are currently there to serve as an example. The design is basic--too basic for my taste. See the update below for a much more artfully presented course!

UPDATE!

Want to see an actual live course that is conducted without the use of an LMS with tremendously more visually appealing design? Go here and you'll get into a REAL course that is using this approach in the summer 2010 term.

Whoa! What heresy! But guess what? You can get a free chatroom to hold real-time text "conversations" with drawing and slide images with your students at http://www.dabbleboard.com/. I set up one of these for unit 1 of the course. Access the course with the link above and try it! If you conduct a chat session, make it an assignment for each student to prepare and submit a summation or notes from it. And with a free e-mail account named for your course at http://www.gmail.com/ you have a "dropbox" that your students can use to submit their work. The only thing that will go in there is material from the class--forget about having students overload your general e-mail account with tons of assignments. Create such an e-mail account for a course, delete stuff from it at the end of the term, then reuse it for the next term. Create a free account like that for each course you teach. Simple. Quick. Free.

Double whoa! Who can access your course? Who can register for it? The answer is simple: there is no registration for it. Registration is something your student system does. You get a roster from it. You give those enrolled students the URL for your home page and ask them to send you a first e-mail to your course gmail account. Gmail will build a contact list of those e-mail addresses for you and that's how you will give students individual feedback throughout the course. How many people do you really think are going to go to that URL and do the work of your course without being enrolled in it and getting credit for it? And what if someone not in the course blunders into the URL? Does that harm anything or is it actually good marketing for your course and your institution?

What's the point? The point is, as Lisa Lane points out in an article entitled "Insidious pedagogy: How course management systems impact teaching" (see http://bit.ly/no-LMS2) a course/learning management system imposes a pedagogy on the instructor. You suit your course to it. It also imposes a potentially large learning burden on you simply to do what you have always done: to teach your courses. If you can do a fine job teaching your courses without the burden of a new system to learn and keep up with which really isn't the point of your course content anyway, why not?

Has anyone ever analyzed the ROI on your LMS? And what's it costing faculty and students in that most precious resource of all: time? Think about it...

11. Use a simple grading rubric .pdf like this!

2010-03-28T05:50:00.000-07:00

A rubric shows in detail how a given piece of work will be judged as to "goodness" along a few dimensions. A rubric is separate and distinct from a grading scale or assignment point summary. Composing a rubric for graded assignments given to students is crucial. Not only does it help students understand why you gave their work the score you did, it helps you as an instructor think through what you expect of an assignment and it helps ensure objectivity and consistency in your scoring. Many websites exist to give you samples and help you form rubrics--just google "rubrics." Here I take it a big step further in speed, convenience, and feedback to students with these suggestions:

1. Form your rubric to be straightforward and understandable. A couple of rows for dimensions of judgment and a couple of columns for low, medium, and high scores and their requirements is better than a huge document with more information than anyone can wrap their head around.

2. Compose your rubric in Word and output it as a .pdf.

3. To use the rubric on a student's work, open the .pdf using CutePDF-Pro or a similar tool to add notes as in the example I provide below and save it with the students name and assignment name. Apply a note to each applicable grade cell explaining why that score was rendered.

4. Send the .pdf rubric copy you just created for the student to him or her using your learning management system, where you record the grade for it.

Here is a sample rubric I use in many of my courses, as edited using CutePDF-Pro (click on this link to download it). This will open in the free Adobe Acrobat .pdf reader. See what my feedback is!

http://www.ambriana.com/john_smith_assign1.pdf

Why do this in .pdf form rather than Word? Because pdf's open faster for you and the student, but even more importantly because what CutePDF gives you the capability to do far surpasses what Word provides. And a student typically will not be able to modify the copy of the rubric on which you record the grade, unlike the case with a Word document! Investigate the free and Pro versions of CutePDF at this link: http://www.cutepdf.com/. Nitro-Pro (http://www.nitropdf.com/) is another tool for accomplishing the same thing but its price is higher. -Jim

10. Slides: best way to post according to research

2010-03-26T16:06:00.000-07:00

PowerPoint slides have become a staple in much instruction. They can be misused by loading them with too much text and not enough graphics or by using cosmetic graphics that have no educational value. Regardless of how you choose to use them, it's of benefit to make your slides available to students. This is true for traditional in-class instruction but it is especially true of distance learning. According to cognitive research, what posting process best serves the purpose of your learners?

As it turns out, providing your slides as .ppt or .pptx files is about the WORST way to make them available! This method requires your learners to have PowerPoint (correct version) and it gives away your slides. In addition, without your voice narration, your slides are much less useful--unless of course you have committed the greatest slide sin of all, simply making slides into word pages, which we emphatically do not recommend!

You can add sound to PowerPoint slides as demonstrated in my posting #6. This overcomes the lack of narration but it doesn't overcome the other problems mentioned above. In addition, it doesn't come up to the level of usefulness to a learner that research indicates is optimal. In research documented by Richard E. Mayer in his papers and in Multimedia Learning, published by the Cambridge University Press in 2001 (ISBN 0-521-78239-2) Mayer documents as the "Modality Principle" in chapter 8 the fact that the most effective learning from slides occurs when slides contain graphic information and both narration and animation are employed. "Animation" doesn't mean cartoons. It means pointing, circling, highlighting, and otherwise drawing attention to elements of the image while you discuss them. Unfortunately, even sound-narrated PowerPoint slides do not allow animation to be captured except for a very limited range of transition highlighting of words (but "word slides" are anathema: boring and emminently forgetable--you might was well use a mimeograph machine and smail mail your material to students!).

According to Mayer's research what best serves the purpose of your learners is slides that are narrated and convey animated emphasis as this 9-minute example illustrates:

This is a brief lecture from a class I conduct in pure distance learning mode which blends art history with technology--the course is entitled "Historical Foundations of Visual Technologies." The slides I use in this course are based on the assigned text (Gombrich, The Story of Art) with supplemental illustrations. The slides present art from different periods of history and the pigments and colorants, binders, and other materials used to create it. Very nearly all of the slides are images and not words. View this brief lecture and you'll hear me and you'll also see me use the cursor to point and even mark on the images. This is what Mayer means when he says "animation." An even more potent and interesting presentation might begin with 20 or 30 seconds of you "talking" to learners by looking into a camera and splicing this to the front of the slide presentation. But how do you create this kind of slide presentation?

To post a slide lecture in this way you create your slides and then you go through them while you narrate them and use the cursor to point and mark. You do this while a "capture" program is running. The program I use is Camtasia, which licenses for $179 with an educators's discount from http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp. Camtasia is available for both PCs and Macs. Adobe offers Captivate which operates in a similar way. But a free product from Microsoft named Windows Media Encoder, which you can download from http://bit.ly/freeWME does almost as good a job! (I created an alias for the full Microsoft URL for the download site; the URL this alias resolves to will show on your browser's address line and the highest level will contain "microsoft.com". The alias housed at bit.ly is just a convenience.) Each of these tools gives you the ability to conduct your slide presentation with sound and animation to produce a video file. You can post the video file at http://www.youtube.com/ (10 minute length limit) or at http://www.viddler.com/ or at http://www.teachertube.com/; the advantage of this type of posting is that your learners can use any browser to view your presentation. Each of these video hosters provides the "embed" code you can copy and paste into a web page supporting the course to make it play within the page. Alternatively, you can post the video file at your institution's iTunes university site, on a local server, or even as an attachment to a Blackboard discussion board posting. When you convey it to your students as a file, however, you'll want to output it as an .mp4 file which can be viewed directly on a Mac or using the free Apple Quicktime application on a PC. My recommendation? Chunk your slide lectures into 10-minute parts for everyone's convenience, record them as narrated and animated video files, and post them on YouTube. Then use the "embed" feature to have them play directly in your course Blackboard or other learning management system web pages. Use relevant graphics and as few words as possible and polish your slide presentations. Posted publicly in this way no "administration" is needed to make them accessible to your learners. And they will help market your institution as well as your courses and you! Why hide your light under a bushel basket? -Jim

9. Video: converting .mp4 to .avi for WMM

2010-03-26T05:11:00.000-07:00

We began using FlipVideo Ultra cameras in 2008 to do informal lecture and student response recording. Since these cameras produced .avi files the video clips were easily edited using Windows Movie Maker which is on all XP and Vista PCs (and is downloadable from Microsoft to work on Windows/7). But the newer 2-hour FlipVideos now being sold quietly made a switch: they no longer create .avi files, but .mp4. Due to the inane competitive personalities at the two largest personal computer firms .avi's are supported by PCs and .mp4's by Macs but not vice versa. You may find yourself, as we did, up the creek and SOL (sorta outa luck) if you wanted to use Windows Movie Maker directly with the video files now produced by Flips. Some quick research turned up free video file converter software named "AnyVideoConverter" that converts from .mp4 to .avi. It works great and is pretty fast! Here is a short video tutorial I created and posted on YouTube to show you how to get, install, and use this software:

Despite being a quick effort born of a last-minute unexpected need this video turns out to be one of my best-received with over 1,200 views and top 5-star rating! I've been poring over the comments received about it in the hopes of figuring out what I did right in this one so I can apply those same things to future videos!

8. Better Distance Learning Model Paper

2010-03-25T15:26:00.000-07:00

In an earlier posting I gave you an embedded video "tour" of a course Blackboard web site created using what I called a "Minimal Cognitive Load Model" (my post #5). Here is a link to the paper I wrote for the SAIS track at the MBAA 2010 conference being held right now in Chicago at the Drake Hotel.

http://www.ambriana.com/Janossy_2010MBAA_paper.pdf

This paper more formally describes the derivation of the model from research in cognitive loading and its minimization. The graphic above gives you a view of the core of the model. Essentially you use your course/learning management system to implement your syllabus and break out of the mold of having the syllabus be the sacred "pointer" document it has traditionally been. First, you divide your course term (semester or quarter) into segments of a few weeks each. Then you actually implement your syllabus in a separate web page for each segment of the course. I use five 2-week segments I call "units" for our 10-week quarters. The web page for a unit contains everything for that unit right there. No jumping around for the student as is the case if you pile all your readings in one place, all your discussions in another place, and all the assignments in yet another place. Here is an editable version of the worksheets housed in Appendix A of the paper to help your plan and organize a course this way:

http://www.ambriana.com/Janossy_2010MBAA_appendix_A.doc

There's lots more to effective distance learning than this but what you have here is a great start on it! Download the paper and read the research and reasoning behind this approach. In combination with repeatable online exercises and feedback (which I'll describe and illustrate in additional postings) this model provides a simple but powerful to quickly cast your existing traditional on-site course into a high-quality pure distance learning or hybrid format. Any faculty member can do this with just about any course learning/management system--but I have personally found so far that it is easy to do in Blackboard and Moodle. Try it in Desire2Learn and let us all know how it goes (we are going to D2L soon!) More to come on this topic... -Jim

7. Easy audio messages to students

2010-03-23T12:01:00.001-07:00

A short audio message to students posted in your Blackboard course web site provides a degree of contact you just can't achieve with text. While Blackboard 9.0 will soon provide a feature to capture and present audio messages we don't have this with older versions or other learning management systems. With a small amount of effort you can gain this capability though. The trick is to capture your audio via your telephone by leaving a message for yourself, using a system that packages each of your voice messages and attaches each to an e-mail as a .wav file which it then sends to you. One such system is provided by MagicJack, a small $39.95 device that in addition gives you free calling via your ordinary telephone! This device is about 2.5 inches by 1.5 inches and sports a USB plug on one side and a telephone jack on the other side. I've included a picture here. This device is the easiest way I have ever come across to get a "voice over IP" capability--that is, to carry your voice over the internet, free. With this device you just plug it into your computer, plug your telephone into it, and in about a minute you will have been given an additional permanent phone number. You dial as you would normally dial, and the person at the other ends doesn't need to have a computer and does not even know you are reaching them through the internet and paying precisely $0.00 for the call no matter how long you talk! You might even be calling a cell phone at the other end. But I digress... if you have a MagicJack or a phone system that works like it in that it sends you a .wav file for each voice message, here is what you do to use this to create a postable message for your students:

1. Record your words by leaving a voice mail for yourself.
2. Save the .wav file you will receive attached to an e-mail.
3. Process it with the free Audacity program to clean it up and output it as .wav.
4. Use the free Levelator program to enhance and standardize the voice volume.
5. Use Audacity to output the audio as an .mp3 file.
6. Post the file as an "item" in Blackboard.

This sounds more complex than it actually is. Click on this link to hear a short message from me produced this way: http://www.ambriana.com/not_really_a_frog.mp3 . The message gives you a number to call--my MagicJack number--and if you leave a short message there (and if I have time) I will post it here in this blog so you can listen to your own voice quality and decide if it's acceptable using this method. I'll post some videos here soon on how to do the Audacity and Levelator work if anyone is interested... -Jim

6. Making sound-annotated slideshows

2010-03-22T19:40:00.000-07:00

You can add sound to PowerPoint slides. Then if you post the slides, any student with PowerPoint can view and hear your lecture. This is not nearly as good as creating a movie of the slide presentation with sound, where you can include pointing with the cursor to emphasize the parts of the GRAPHIC image that you are discussing. (Don't even THINK about PowerPoint slide sets with only just text; if that's what you're using, go back to running off your text on a purple-print mimeograph or carving it on clay tablets...). Here are a pair of short videos. The first one shows you a headset with microphone that serves me well--the Logitech "Clear Chat" costing about $30 at Amazon, and how to use it and PowerPoint to sound-annotate your slides. The second video shows the result, illustrating how the slide show would appear to a student who downloaded it and is viewing it using PowerPoint. (Click on the arrows at the right of the bottom-of-screen control bar to expand the video to full screen; you can then return to the blog by pressing the Esc key.)

To facilitate showing you how the slide set is viewed by a student, I actually played it on my desktop and captured the screen using Camtasia. The free Windows Media Encoder would have worked almost as well for this particular purpose. With either tool, the result is a video file you have to post somewhere, because video files are usually too large to post in Blackboard and their format limits them to convenient viewing by machine type (Windows PC or Apple Mac). I post my videos on YouTube because I don't mind if they are accessible to everyone on planet Earth as well as the rest of the universe. And it's free, and I can do it myself without a middleman. My kind of place.

It's a forgone conclusion that if you're going to conduct effective distance learning and you use slide-illustrated lectures you need to provide your sound-annotated slides to your students. But go farther and think about embedding videos in your learning management system course website. To see how to do that you can view other postings I will make here soon, since this is so much fun to do!

5. A research-based distance learning model

2010-03-22T16:12:00.000-07:00

I've been researching cognitive loading for several months and have applied some of the concepts of that field of study to the design of a model for Blackboard course web sites. You see this model in this 8-minute video which I prepared to illustrate the presentation of a paper at the MBAA conference in Chicago in March, 2010.

Let me know what you think! - Jim

4. Add a person to your Blackboard course

2010-03-22T16:06:00.000-07:00

(Sorry folks, this applies only to DePaul University! This won't make any sense to you unless you are an instructor at DePaul because only DePaul faculty have access to take the action describe here!)

If you need to add a late-enrolling student to your course, or want to add a faculty or staff member as a teaching assistant, watch this video and take the steps indicated. You will need certain information supplied by that person in order to do this.

3. Introduce assignments with a page + video!

2010-03-22T15:07:00.000-07:00

Major assignments in a course deserve to be explained. You are probably already laying them out in a well-written document. Why not combine an introductory video featuring YOU talking to your students, the assignment document, and a discussion board forum where students can post questions if they have them? As you respond to any questions in that forum it builds an "FAQ" (frequently asked questions & answers) automagically. I made the video for this using a FlipVideo camera, but a webcam and Windows Movie Maker could have done it just as well:

In my experience this method not only approximates what you would have accomplished in an in-class session, it's actually BETTER in many ways. I do this now on the Blackboard site even for classes I do teach in person. It's just a better way to support students in the class!

2. Use video to "tour" your Blackboard website!

2010-03-22T14:43:00.000-07:00

Many instructors send a welcoming e-mail to students prior to the start of a pure distance learning class. That's a great idea! Why not also make a short video showing them your Blackboard web site too? Post it on YouTube and send them the URL. If you were meeting the class in person, would't you do this in the first class session? Here is an example of what I am talking about:

I made this using a simple webcam attached to my desktop and running Camtasia while I went through the site and explained it. Camtasia is a wonderful tool for doing this but costs $179 even at the educator's discount (it is well worth it!). But Windows Media Encoder (WME), a free 10 Mb download from Microsoft's web site, is what I used to produce that MyGrades video, and the result is very nearly the same when viewed--you just can't reaily edit what you have captured. So what? This is not video for network television, it's one-shot, bond-building communication between you and your two or three dozen students. It's quite adequate quality for the purpose. Look for a video or two under my name already at YouTube on how to download, install, and use WME. I will create new ones soon (the ones you see were created on a laptop in a hotel room at a conference last year). Have at it peeps! Text-only communication is going the way of the dodo, your audience is already seeking more than that now! -Jim

1. What your students see at My Grades

2010-03-22T14:26:00.000-07:00

One of the shortcomings of Blackboard version 8 is that as the instructor, you can't see what students see in the MyGrades button. Once you do see what that presents to students, you can better understand how your wise use of the GradeCenter can provide a great resource for students for upcoming assignments and for feedback from you on already-graded assignments. Click on the arrow button here on this video to see what you can't ordinarily see, and to listen to me describe what is present here. This video lasts only 5 minutes:

This is just one of many short videos I will post and describe here. Check back or subscribe. There no fluff and no advertising here. I train faculty in the use of course/learning management systems. Having this material out here makes my professional life easier. If it also helps you, consider it serendipitous! -Jim