Poet Ponders the Digital

Notice that technical courses and courses that were "automated" had higher completion rates.  New study of low MOOC completion rates | Inside Higher Ed : The course with the highest rate of completion was "Functional Programming Principles in Scala," from Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, offered on the MOOC platform Coursera. According to Jordan's research, some 19.2 percent of the 50,000 students who enrolled completed the course.  At the other end of the spectrum was "A History of the World since 1300" by Princeton University, also hosted by Coursera, which reportedly recruited 83,000 students with just 0.8 percent reaching the end.  Five of the top six most-completed MOOCs relied on automatic marking alone, meaning that no peer assessment was required. Courses that relied purely on peer grading generally fared far worse in terms of the percentage of students reaching the end. My assumptions: Technical students do...

I have been contemplating if online learning differs by discipline, especially after reading a few studies on the topic. One of the studies (Xu & Jaggars, 2013), found: The subject areas in which the negative coefficients for online learning were weaker than average in terms of both course persistence and course grades (indicating that students were relatively better able to adapt to online learning in these subjects) were computer science, the applied professions, and natural science. Are the STEM fields that different, in terms of pedagogy and goals, from the humanities? Of course, we could certainly argue that the sciences are often taught divorced from ethics and humanistic concerns, but the teaching methods, objects, and outcomes assessments are my primary concern when reading such studies. Do Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) work better in the STEM fields than in the humanities? The coding course I'm currently working through is offered by a Russian institution...

Online education still represents a "digital divide" between socioeconomic groups. Notably, young male minority students seem to struggle in online settings. We are now 30 years into the personal computing revolution, now marked by smartphones with more computing power than early mainframes. Yet, familiarity with technology does not necessarily lead to academic success with technology. I found this new research paper online while working on a book chapter (sadly, after I submitted the draft). The study raises some old, familiar questions about online education and presents a challenge to people like myself with a vested interest in digital pedagogy. Adaptability to Online Learning: Differences Across Types of Students and Academic Subject Areas Di Xu and Shanna Smith Jaggars February 2013 Community College Research Center Teachers College, Columbia University Abstract Using a dataset containing nearly 500,000 courses taken by over 40,000 community and technical coll...

As some of you know, I decided against renewing my contract with the university where I work. Basically, the choice I faced was either stay in a place where I did not belong or not renew my contract so I could look for work elsewhere. Schools need to interview in the spring so they can hire new faculty and update course catalogs. It is a gamble to change jobs, but one my wife and I agreed would be best for me. Because my doctorate research focused on higher education and technology, I consider myself qualified to state that we are in the early stages of a major revolution. The upheaval is painful as some colleges rush online, while others outsource their online courses. Some top-tier universities and many community colleges are making these transitions well, but the vast majority of institutions are going to experience unrest. As a colleague told me, research like mine might encourage universities to trade classrooms for websites. The clock is ticking down as June approaches. In a ...

This fall, I resorted to using "anti-plagairism" tools for the first time in at least six years. One reason for this is that what I had been teaching at the University of Minnesota didn't lend itself to plagiarism. My technical writing students had to design a new toy or board game, create a prototype, and develop a product pitch. It's hard to steal another person's LEGO project that uses randomly selected bricks. However, teaching a literature class I found that students either had problems with understanding citation norms or they simply assumed an instructor wouldn't check to determine if a passage was a copy-paste effort. I learned this is a great reason to have two mandatory drafts before a final paper, too. My department head and other colleagues were supportive and I'm now working on a reusable lesson module that will address citations. Student don't quite grasp that simply because you can copy-paste doesn't mean it is acceptable. ...

I'm taking a short break from designing my Blackboard shells for both an on-campus and online course because I'm exhausted. Don't let anyone try to persuade you that online courses and courses with online content are somehow "easier" to prepare and to deliver. The time and energy required is substantially greater than the effort to prepare a traditional university course. Universities need to consider this time and energy more accurately. The minor stipend I receive for creating an online course does not reflect the time I invest in the effort. I definitely believe there are more benefits than negatives to providing online content to students, including extra content for traditional on-campuses courses. But, we have to admit that effective online delivery is time-consuming. The reasons for this are many; I can address a few now: 1) The course management software itself requires time and effort. Everything online is simply more time consuming. The benefits in...

As I prepare to assume the role of coordinator of an online (and traditional) degree program, I have been thinking about my ideal educational model. My ideal system would include online and traditional instruction, so many of the ideas I express below apply to traditional classroom education and online. Online systems might provide flexibility not possible for some traditional schools, which is why I am a believer in hybrid educational systems. So, my ideal degree program would… Allow students to switch between online and traditional instruction if they find online doesn't meet their learning styles or needs. Allow students to take and re-take any online tests and lab practicums two or three times until a set deadline, encouraging mastery over merely passing a test. A mix of questions or problems would prevent "memory gains" from repeated questions. Three exams does seem a reasonable cap, though. Allow students to move faster or slower than the traditional quarter and sem...

When I have attended meetings or conferences and the topic was online courses, a great deal of attention is paid to the "target audience" for online education. The assumption is that online courses are ideal for certain groups: Workers seeking to complete a degree. Rural residents unable to relocate or travel to a campus. Disabled students requiring accommodations. Non-traditional students (meaning everything from older to unusually young). These might be ideal "targets" if a university operates as nothing but a business, but even private institutions have a responsibility to deliver the best, most meaningful educational experience to all qualified students. I would argue the pressure on for-profit institutions is actually greater because there is a skepticism in academia towards the profit motive. And what we ignore when we think of "target audiences" is that the descriptions do not reflect the personalities of the students. Online courses, from hybrids t...

http://chronicle.com/article/Blind-Students-Demand-Access/125695 I have argued that online courses are not equivalent to traditional spaces and often are more of a barrier than an accommodation for students with special needs. I remain skeptical that online spaces can be made flexible enough to accommodate all students. Nor, honestly, do I believe it is right of universities to suggest to many disabled students that online courses are somehow better for them. In the case of blind students, clearly the online spaces aren't working as planned. For students with limited mobility, maybe online is a good alternative, but I found them less engaging and harder to comprehend. Right now, we don't consider the pedagogical implications carefully enough, but I also understand the rush to online spaces is an economic necessity for some institutions. Since I have difficulty with mobility as well as some cognitive differences, my views of online education are biased. I like the conven...

This weekend I installed WordPress on our personal server. The process took about two hours, including customization and tweaking beyond the basic installation. No great PHP or MySQL skills were required; as long as you know how to use the command prompts you can install WordPress. The modifications included adding Amazon code to the PHP-generated pages. This allows us to use Amazon links without long URLs. To do this, I had to copy code from our Amazon Associates account and paste it, formatted, into the PHP code. Not a challenge, thankfully. I also enabled two spam filters via the PHP code. What makes WordPress, Drupal, and Moodle popular is the ease with which these systems can be extended. Third parties have created numerous plug-ins, widgets, and themes for these three open source platforms. I could, rather easily, support a pretty large number of teachers and students using open source software (OSS) for Web applications. The price is ideal and the skills required are incre...

In the last few days, I have noticed what might be called an "explosion" of activity on the forums for my writing class. With 23 students, these where the statistics: Thursday: 56 new posts. Friday: 246 new posts. Saturday: 100+ new posts. After you scroll through the posts, reading them or not, Moodle marks the posts as read. This means that each night's posts were counted separately. I make that distinction because WebCT didn't take the same approach -- some posts I had read would remain marked "new" for several days. What leads to twelve discussion threads being so active? I'm not sure but I am going to explain what I do. It should be noted that I use online spaces for every class, so students always have access to materials. However, I do not use the online spaces for instruction when a course is not specifically online. The current course is traditional and the forums are mainly to help students discuss assignments. 1) I set "weekly...

I still dislike the "pop-up" or "list" method for entering grades in Moodle. I could enter digits much faster; I hate being forced to use the mouse / touchpad to select grades. This is consuming a bit more time than it should, but it seems comparable to Blackboard in terms of the time and effort. At least I have Moodle set to always show the complete enrollment when I enter grades. For some reason, Blackboard always showed only ten students at a time, no matter how often I told the system I wanted to see 25 or more students at once. The grade book for Moodle is a bit confusing, still. I use a Numbers spreadsheet I migrated from MS Excel, so the online grades are only for students to track their progress. Still, I wish the display were a little easier to read. The last column is showing an average points earned per assignment, when what I would like to see is a points total. I'm sure I'll figure out how to change this… but it isn't a major issue right n...

I went back to requiring weekly responses to readings and lectures after two semesters without the requirement. I know students always complained about weekly responses and I found that the grades in a course would not change with or without the responses. But, something told me that the online conversations were valuable. There are already 138 posts to the forums on Moodle this semester. The students are using the forums actively, along with the group wiki pages I set up on Moodle for students. The posts reflect a much deeper attention to detail than I think the students exhibited in the courses without weekly responses. While the grades might not be different without the responses, I'm convinced the overall quality of work and reflection is higher. I realize that if the grading were more objective this would not be an issue — in a writing course we always "curve" the grades somewhat based on the work in that class. Also, I think the students rise to what they perc...

I have experienced two issues with Moodle that annoy me. One is inconvenient, the other is truly frustrating. The inconvenience doesn't surprise me: the full-featured editor and some dialogs do not function properly in Safari. Since I don't mind coding the HTML manually, this is okay, but for students wanting the "Word-like" editor I have to explain they need to use another browser on a Mac. It's definitely not unusual, since Blackboard behaved oddly via Safari. The frustration was with assignments. If you select a "single file" assignment, you cannot return a copy of the file with comments. The problem for me, and probably other writing instructors, is that mark-up is part of the grading process. I like to return a paper with comments in the original file. If you create an "Advanced Assignment" item you can return drafts, with certain requirements. But, not realizing I had to create an "Advanced Assignment" even for a single fi...

Students have submitted their first assignments via Moodle and are starting to use the Moodle-based Wiki system for group projects. I have a lot of ideas for using this system, so I'll have to consider how the ideas might be shifted to Blackboard just in case. I like the use of standards within the Moodle Wiki and how easy it was to create a Wiki per group. I am going to be grading papers today, so I'll learn about returning them with grades tonight. So far, I'm obviously pleased with how flexible the system is. There are often too many choices, but I'm willing to tolerate some of the complexity for the extra power I seem to have as an instructor. Maybe newer versions of Blackboard will be as flexible. If I accept a post at a BB-only campus, I hope to have some time to play with any modules they have added. Moodle is working so much better for me that I'd hate to go back, though.

Moodle is definitely proving to be more flexible and, sometimes, more efficient than Blackboard. I created five groups for class today in under 15 minutes, something I could not do as quickly in Blackboard. I then created a Wiki for each group in only three steps. The Wiki in Moodle does use HTML instead of Wikitext, but that's okay with me and should be okay for students. The system is new for most students, but they seem to have far less difficulty than my previous classes with Blackboard. That's a definite positive to using Moodle. The campus interviews I have for tenure-track posts use Blackboard. If hired, I would certainly want to advocate for Moodle, now. Unfortunately, such choices are seldom up to instructors and few IT departments want to support several platforms. Reporting is overly detailed in Moodle; I would prefer a chart or something by student. Still, it is nice to be able to check so many student activities. Next week I collect my first online assignment and r...

This semester I am using Moodle for online course content, after six years of Blackboard use (including WebCT, WebVista). I thought I'd chronicle my experiences; I know it helps me refine my thoughts and it might help other instructors. As I design my course, which starts Jan. 19, 2010, I am finding some things take a bit of extra work with Moodle. This is because the system tends to present every possible variable for an activity, even when only two or three are required. It would be nice to have a "show basic" option for some tasks. I realize some instructors use every option, so those should be easily accessible, but cut the clutter is a good design philosophy. When I do use an option, such as setting the maximum points for an assignment, the system uses a "pop-up" or "drop-down" list, when I would rather key in the numeric value and tab to the next field. Scrolling through every number, from 1000 to 1, for "points possible" is annoying. I...

I have been on the Internet since the 1980s. I have located messages I posted in college via the USENET, now more than 25 years after I composed them. The various incarnations of my Web sites have also survived in various forms, for reasons I cannot explain. From my main site, though, I have removed things over the years and hope they are generally "gone" from the massive electronic memory that is the Web. I eschewed blogs for many years. I posted only a few badly written essays and ramblings on my Web site. My poetry was online, but I removed the works after someone told me there were things no one needed to read. I removed a few short stories, as well, realizing that I couldn't recall what was fictional and what was close to the realities of people I once knew. When you write a lot, thousands of words some days and literally tens of thousands some weeks, you end up capturing bits of the people around you. But what if they don't want to be exposed, ...

This year has been a study in contrasts. I chose to teach a traditional technical writing course in the fall and a hybrid course during the spring semester. The differences in student projects, the quality of their analyses, and general attitudes is remarkable. I know research found no easily quantified differences in learning outcomes. However, I think anyone could compare the group projects between these courses and see a difference in the products. While the lessons learned and the facts students retain might be similar, the results do demonstrate something. Some elements of are "intangible" because they are social and philosophical. For example, groups struggled online, even with guidance and gentle remainders to establish schedules and routines. In the traditional course, groups developed stronger bonds and worked together frequently. It should be noted that the face-to-face (F2F) students exchanged more e-mail and chatted more often than the students on the officia...

My students are not as tech-savvy as I assumed. No only are they not on the bleeding edge of technology, they suffer from the standard inattention that all students have. Online courses aren't as forgiving as "traditional" courses, which means the normal problems students have become more serious. For example, not reading an assignment calendar in a "physical" classroom can result in a late paper, but the student generally has several ways to at least get partial credit. Online, my course accepts late papers for two days... and that's it. Done. The paper is no longer merely late -- it is a zero. In a traditional class, my reminders would be verbal. Online, they are "announcements" that most students don't seem to read. Reminding students to check the calendar doesn't seem to take hold. Assignments are missed anyway. The online system requires Java for some features. When a student was having problems uploading files, she w...