Building Better Moodle Rooms

These are my liveblogged notes from the Campus Technology webinar Building better Moodle rooms: Online strategies and best practices. My comments are in italics. Because it’s liveblogged, it’s mostly bullet points and some of it may be unclear. This webinar will be archived and should be available tomorrow; I’ll post the link then. Update: The archived presentation is now available.

Speakers

• Bob McDonald, Manager of Sales and Client Relations, Moodlerooms
• Peter Lamothe, Principal Consultant, Harvest Road
• Stuart Sim, CTO and Chief Architect, Moodlerooms

Underlying pedagogical structure for Moodle:

• Constructivism
• Scaffolding
• Feedback

Step 1: Think Constructivism

• Theory matters in your design
• Social constructivism—learning from others
• Many different avenues for learning: instructor led plus peer interaction

Step 2: Use Scaffolding

• Context & coaching to involve students in learning
• Student participation is important
• Use ADDIE model to determine scaffolding

ADDIE

• Analyze where your students are now. He’s talking about instructors figuring it out in discussion boards or activities with the live course, not in the design in advance like what we do.
• Develop (he has the steps of ADDIE in the wrong order): Chunk content into manageable pieces.
  • Book (think of chapters, individual pages, etc.)
  • Glossary
  • Lesson
  • Resources
• Design: Sequence and Organize
  • Rich content, multiple media types possible
  • Edit view of Moodle, showing how to add and organize content
  • Moodle blocks on the right can have widgets like a calendar, news, show who’s online, etc.
• Implement: Stay involved in the course
  • Students and teachers learn from each other
  • Discussion
  • Chat
  • Wikis
  • Multiple views for discussions
    • Nested
    • Threaded
    • Flat
  • Discussions can be graded
• Evaluate
  • Activity logs—what are students clicking on?
  • Gradebook
  • Assessment within specific activities

I’m not really convinced that he was talking about “scaffolding” here. It’s instructional design, certainly, but I didn’t really see that this was about student supports that are gradually removed. Did I miss something here?

Step 3: Provide Feedback

• Targeted feedback helps you remove scaffolding so students do more on their own
• Feedback from the community is equally important as feedback from instructors

Harvest Road’s Hive Digital Repository

Storing learning objects for different purposes

• Personal Learning
• Organizational
• Knowledge Management

Content Reuse

• Single instance of content—no duplication
• Dynamically deliver to courses
• Permissions and access more important than DRM

Open standards help “future proof” better than using proprietary systems

This demo includes screenshots in Firefox for Mac, so it clearly works there. Yeah for not being restricted to IE!

• Version options available
• Use a URL to link to the LOR—link, not copy content so it’s dynamic
• Able to find dependent files and bring those in dynamically too

Q&A Session

(Several of the questions weren’t of interest to me, so I didn’t record them all.)

Q: Transitioning from Blackboard or Web CT to Moodle
A: Biggest challenge was changing from content-centric to activity-centric model. Hard to move from idea of presenting content to focusing on interaction.

Q: Can instructors be notified via email when students upload content?
A: Yes, in some modules.

Q: Can content (like for quizzes) be created on the PC and uploaded?
A: Yes, Moodle imports from multiple formats, so there are several ways this can be done.

Q: Will Moodlerooms really host for $1/student/year?
A: Yes, for a minimum of 500 students.

Q: What about synchronous interaction? Moodle seems biased towards asynchronous.
A: Moodle’s chat function is synchronous, and b/c it’s open source it works with others. Uses something called DimDim.

Q: Do we host ourselves or is there a central location?
A: Moodle allows either—depends on what you want and need. Lots of flexibility for how you can own your courses. Even if hosted, you still own your data and can take it elsewhere if you want to leave a specific vendor.

Q: Is Harvest Road a 3^rd party vendor selling an add-on?
A: Yes, a third party adding functionality to support and work with Moodle.

Q: Can you display math equations?
A: Yes, Moodle has a math editor.

Q: Now that online learning is reaching millions of learners, what’s going to keep people involved?
A: Interactivity and interaction with community of learners and instructors. Rich opportunities for learning. Collaboration and closeness even though it’s online.

Q: What differentiates a great online instructor from an ordinary one?
A: Two elements:

1. Learner-centered design
2. Connecting and communicating with students

Q: Are good classroom instructors always good online instructors, or not always?
A: Online has different requirements, especially within design. Not always.

Q: Are you working on integrating Elluminate and DimDim?
A: Yes, they are—cuts down their own development costs to use existing open source. Better to not start from scratch—use the tools that are already out there.

Moodlerooms is working on ways to integrate just about any synchronous tool, even if they’ve never heard of it. They create adapters to bring it in.

Technorati Tags: moodle, lms, instructionaldesign, constructivism, scaffolding, moodlerooms, learningobjects, harvest+road, assessment

Online Networking in Courses

These are my notes from the presentation MySpace is not YourSpace: The Promise and Pitfalls of Online Social Networking at the Conference for Distance Learning and Teaching last week. The presenters were Alan Foley and Hal Meeks.The slides from the presentation are available as a pdf. Late Update: You can get the audio with the slides now as well.

Two ideas in particular from this presentation really struck me:

• Online can be great. Several presenters, including the first keynote speaker, mentioned the idea that we don’t have to ask any more whether online can be “as good as” face-to-face learning because the research shows that it’s pedagogy and teaching methods, not technology, that influences learning. Alan made a great point though; let’s not just settle for online being “as good as” face-to-face&emdash;let’s figure out how to use technology to create teaching methods that wouldn’t be possible face-to-face so that online is great learning.
• Our technologies structure our learning. A typical LMS encourages structuring learning in one way (with units and discussion boards and read-write-reflect). Blogs and wikis encourage a different kind of structure, but it is still a structure and we should be conscious of that.

Here’s the notes from the presentation (my side comments in italics):

Not a how to presentation, although there is some of that
How social networking tools can capture possibilities in distance education
Construct and reconstruct the teaching and learning environment
No significant difference research—we should be striving for a better experience, not just equal, with online learning (I love this idea—this is what I want too!)

Flickr for rapid sharing of content—visual journal of events
World of Warcraft as social construct

• avatar
• guilds
• interact with other players

YouTube (emokid21ohio)
MySpace—showed a band

Do they fit in a learning environment?

• engagement
• simple to publish
• accessibility (both 508 and other—anyone can play)

Questions to ask:

• Are online systems “just as good”?
• Does it have to accomplish the same goals?
• What can we learn?

Rethinking teaching for online
Standard teaching models are based on scientific practices

• constructivism
• behaviorism
• cognitivism
• progressivism

Problems involving IDs in creating games—game designers say IDs make games not fun
IDs do systematic and predictable—not everything can be predictable—social constructs aren’t predictable. Models don’t consider all social and cultural aspects.

“Teaching systems assume [certain types of] student learning interactions”
How students and teachers interact

Term used to be distance education b/c it was about space and geography
Now more about online education—about the tools, not the distance b/c lots of online students are local

“Tools define interaction”

• If you have a test, you emphasize timing and one right answer

Online courseware encourages certain types of learning styles and objectives
Not as good at “unquantifiable learning”

Technology shapes learning spaces
PowerPoint shapes content
Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (pamphlet, not a book) Edward Tufte
Tufte concludes that PPT is bad
David Byrne thinks there is potential for exploration and ways of using tools

Teacher-student hierarchy
We have a legacy in physical classrooms from old desks in rows—maybe online lets us get away from that old legacy and create new practice (nice idea)

The medium molds the messages

Roles in e-learning are often static and defined. Chat forums outside of course settings don’t have same hierarchy, more dynamic. Possible to create richer interactions between students and faculty. They say even an LMS can be used in exciting ways.

Showed using del.icio.us with a CMS and blogs for a course. Students preferred using blogs; Alan aggregated feeds to keep track. Said it was harder for him but students were more engaged.

“Online social constructs are disruptive both pedagogically and conceptually.”
Walter Benjamin “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”—how art is affected by ability to reproduce through lithographs and photographs

Need for proximity—part of why SL interest in online education
SL is comfortable for educators b/c they can create a traditional classroom in a virtual environment—it feels more real than LMS

When we translate physical places into virtual places, they are not the same thing—they are transformed. If you try to enforce rules to make it like the “real world,” you will be disappointed—it isn’t the “real world.” It doesn’t have the same rules—and it shouldn’t.

How do we fulfill the promise of not as good as, but superior?

Blogs inside an LMS isn’t necessarily the same—maybe it needs to be out in the world

One of the problems with the assumption of the net gen is that everyone has that access and experience, and that isn’t true.

Other literacies—textual and visual literacies
YouTube—yes, it’s a video which is visual, but all the commentary and everything around it is text—social construct
Students can act as critics of YouTube even if they aren’t creating videos—creating videos isn’t the only way to use YouTube

Social notetaking—students in a big lecture post in a wiki to share with others

LMS can house and centralize course materials even using all the external stuff

Privacy is still a concern—even bigger for K-12
Intellectual property

LMS creates a box for content—so does Facebook. It isn’t that one is good and the other bad, it’s recognizing that these constructs shape what we do and thinking about the pedagogy that we can use.

Update: I’ve been thinking more about this topic and have written more in a new post: Facebook as LMS?

Technorati Tags: CDTL07, myspace, socialnetworking, e-learning, onlinelearning, highered, education, lms, web2.0

Ubiquitous Learning Ideas from TCC 2007

“Technology, Colleges, and Community.” The theme for this year’s conference was “Blending Community and Multimedia in Ubiquitous Learning.” I have to admit that not too many people explicitly talked about “ubiquitous” learning; there were presentations on Web 2.0 tools and Second Life, some on accessibility and learning theories, and a few on working and teaching virtually. Now that I’m looking back and trying to sum up what I’ve learned, I can see some pattern in it though.

The conference home page says this:

E-Learning is passé. U-learning is the new wave globally in higher education. Ubiquitous learning encompasses e-learning and emphasizes learning anytime, anywhere and anyway in both formal and informal lifelong learning environments.

Of course, my first thought was “D’oh! I hope I don’t have to change the name of my blog!” I don’t really agree with the statement though. E-learning may change and transform, and we may use new terms to identify it, but it certainly isn’t going away. And really, they are certainly saying that e-learning is part of what learning is becoming; it just isn’t all there is. I see many of the Web 2.0 tools as potentially being part of the e-learning experience. Wikis can be great for group work in online courses. New synchronous and asynchronous tools pop up nearly every day, and we can integrate some of these into the rest of what we do. I can certainly see value in having a more traditional e-learning course at the center of a formal learning program, but supported, enhanced, applied, and reinforced through blogs and a peer learning network.

At it’s heart, perhaps “ubiquitous learning” is about all the myriad ways we learn. It can’t be just one thing; it has to be the formal and the informal, the virtual and the face-to-face, the synchronous and the asynchronous. It’s about reaching as many learners as we can, bringing the content to them in whatever format we can provide it, plus providing the opportunities for the learners to create their own content to share. All of it will interact and interlock to build something bigger and better–hence the “interlocking” image.

This conference provided 1 to 4 speakers every hour for 8 hours a day for the last 3 days, so there were plenty of choices. I attended 17 different presentations. My brain feels quite full right now! I’m sorting through pages and pages of notes and trying to collect a few things that I learned and ideas I found interesting.

Snippets and ideas

From Amy Bruckman in “Constructionist Online Learning Goes Mainstream”: I loved the image of “Technological Samba Schools.” In Brazil, communities form samba schools where everyone learns, everyone teaches, and everyone participates in preparation for the Rio Carnaval. Technology can help us create environments where we can all learn and teach each other.

From Melinda Roberts in “Promoting Active Learning in the Online Classroom through Innovative Course Design”: When designing course activities, think about whether you could do the activity just fine if no students were present. If the activity would work without them, don’t do it! Students should be active participants.

From Bobbe Baggio in “The Implications of Anonymity in Cyber Education”: Where is the balance between accountability and anonymity? Americans equate privacy with freedom; this is not always the case in other cultures.

From Nancy White in “New Horizons for Online Interaction: the Individual and the Group”: A great presentation with very effective use of images. A few quotes stand out:

• “The positive development of a society in the absence of creative, independently thinking, critical individuals, is as inconceivable as the development of an individual in the absence of the stimulus of the community.”–Einstein
• “All groups are networks, but not all networks are groups.” –Nancy White (although I think she may have been quoting someone else)
• “Networks are magnificent containers for groups.” –Nancy

How do we learn how to shift from individual –> group –> network? How do we even know when to shift?

Nancy also touched on the concept of “Community Technology Stewardship”: leaders with experience who help others make good technology choices.

From Karl Soehnlein in “Effectively Using Technology to Increase Interaction and Collaboration in the Online Asynchronous Classroom”: An environment conducive to collaboration has familiarity, openness, trust, and respect. Work to move from adversarial discussion to collaborative dialog. As an instructional designer, I can work to include some discussion boards where students are joint problem solvers with a single goal to achieve rather than only using discussion board assignments where the individual opinions are the main focus. One way is to have students define the problems and goals mutually while they discuss rather than defining the problems for them before they have a chance to start.

What I have learned about Second Life will have to be another post; this is already getting quite long. Kudos to anyone who actually read to the end of the post!

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Image citation
interlock from pianoforte’s photostream.

Technorati Tags: tcc2007, asynchronous learning, instructionaldesign, interactivity, e-learning, collaboration, anonymity

Content is NOT King

Last week, someone emailed me this article, Writing for E-Learning. to help support a point she was making about adding a search function to online classes. I think her idea of a search function is great, but I mentioned that I disagree with several points in the article, starting with the assertion that “content is king.”

From the article:

Content is King
The quality of e-learning material depends on the quality of the writing from the subject specialist. When converting written materials to web pages it is the original content sets the standard. So what was bad content in print will probably produce poor material online. Conversely, it is usually the case that well written printed material will convert to good e-learning material.

I think it’s the whole idea of whether we are in the business of providing content or providing an educational experience. If teaching was just a matter of presenting content, then those two would be the same, but reading or listening aren’t the same as learning. If our main goal is to provide content to students, then we should be in the publishing business—it’s a much more effective and efficient way to get lots of text content to students. If our goal is to provide an educational experience, then it may start with content, but it can’t end there. With the constructivist theory, it’s about providing active learning experiences; with connectivism it’s about building a learning network and collaborating with others. I’m not so concerned with which theory we label our work, but I do think that learning isn’t just about pouring information into students’ brains.

The “content is king” view is that pouring quality content into their brains is all that’s needed. The reason this article ends by talking about having printable content is because it is written from a publishing standpoint rather than a learner standpoint. His points on quality writing and structure are good, but I disagree with the fundamental purpose of online learning (and probably any learning) that this author presents. The author assumes that the instructor knows everything and must share this expertise to the students; the author doesn’t show that he believes the students have anything of value to share with each other and the instructor. Especially with adult learners, I think that’s the wrong approach; I think our students’ experiences and ideas are very valuable.

I’m not convinced by the connectivist idea that the “pipe is more important than the content.” I don’t want to have to choose either the pipe or the content. Can’t I have both? Does this have to be an either/or, or can it be a both/and? Garbage content in a great network isn’t that beneficial, nor is great content with a lousy presentation and learner experience. Am I just being naive here, or can we find a middle ground that values both the content and the presentation?

Technorati Tags: e-learning, connectivism, constructivism, instructionaldesign