Misunderstanding of Online Education

The author in this New York Times article describes the worst of online classes (one-size-fits-all, pre-filmed, “Internet course”, addressed to no one in particular) and compares it to the best of the lecture classes (gifted presenters, spellbinding sessions, engaged students. I suspect his experience is only with MOOCs which are interesting new products in education but which still are not fully developed.  I would dare say that nationwide there are few large lecture on campus classes where the majority of the students would use the adjectives he described. However, the majority of the courses run by reputable colleges in the online world do a fair job of creating a memorable and in many cases individualized learning experience for the majority of their students.

The Trouble With Online Education 

Our Administrative Motives Can Create the Online Haves and Have-nots

Anya Kamenetz of the Huffington Post in her article the “Online Education and the Laying on of Hands”  May 18, 2010 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anya-kamenetz/online-education-and-the_b_580769.html) covered UC San Diego professors, one of whom was an opponent of what we in Connecticut would call fully online education programs. While Ms. Kamenetz herself apparently is not such a Luddite, she thought some points were valid…and she has managed to convince me of the potential problem in at least on area.

Financial and budgetary motives are behind our decisions to build and grow online courses and programs. Over the years I have worked to convince many colleagues at my institution of the value of online courses to our commuter population of students. It is so obvious from the online instruction at institutions all over the world over the past two decades that students can and do learn well online when we design the courses with best practices in mind. It is so obvious that commuter students want and need more flexibility in our course scheduling to achieve their goals in a timely fashion. It makes so much sense for the institution to stop using only what in football would be called its “ground game.” We are gaining yardage this way but it is a grinding slow game; we could improve our overall student success numbers (certificate and graduation completions) with more properly designed and managed online courses. Nothing seems to spark any interest until begin to talk about the potential to generate greater revenue. If online courses can help us here, collectively we show great interest. This is the problem…for our students.

In the past, several for-profit colleges and other entities have tried creating online programs and failed due to the costs of building infrastructure, marketing problems, accrediting issues, staffing and recruiting talented faculty and staff, lack of any experienced online educators, and myriad other more minor problems. A college program must have a mechanism to overcome these problems if it truly desires success online. Ms. Kamenetz expressed concern that in resource-poor institutions the mechanism may include gimmicks, poor content infrastructure (open source?), unedited publisher content, courses that only include assignments, courses with no interaction ,and heavy use of video and audio in lieu of the hands-on instruction. (The best practices in online instruction encourage facilitation and student-student work but, based on constructivist thought, is still extraordinarily hands-on.)

One of the faculty Ms. Kamenetz interviewed expressed the following.

“The less fortunate citizens of our state will make do with underfunded campuses or settle for inferior and dehumanizing ‘virtual’ alternatives.”

The statement, while a too-generalized and flawed comparison between good on-campus courses and bad online courses, should cause those of us who work at commuter colleges to tread more carefully as we make decisions about growing online. We should want to grow online but for the right reasons. Our community college students academically fall into the demographic of the average college student. To the non-academic challenges we should not add programs that are solely profit-driven if we want to avoid creating haves and have-nots online.

Why Scrutinize Distance Learning ?

Originally published in the Distance Education Report July 2011

It is a question that refuses to die. I have heard it quite frequently over that past decade.  Why does there seems to be greater scrutiny of distance learning courses than the traditional face-face classes?  The distance learning faculty members at my college have asked me, even as recently as the past semester. Showing this is not just a regional concern, a couple of my LinkedIn groups have recently taken up similar issues. An interviewer asked Larry Ragan, the distinguished Director of Faculty Development for the Penn State World Campus, this question…again…in the March 15, 2011, Distance Learning Report.

When interviewers ask, the question seems to be an attempt either to stir up a good conversation between the face-to-face and online instructors where there are sure to be individuals on both sides or if talking to distance learning professionals like me to get an indignant reaction.

Having mellowed enough I now accept that there are multiple factors involved in the question, many illegitimate but some expressing warranting concern.

The relative newness of distance learning is an expressed reason. Although our college has been offering distance learning courses for over a decade now, many still perceive it as “new” rather than as is the case a part of the fabric of learning. Distance learning is not new. Classes conducted in learning management systems have been occurring since the 1990s. Classes conducted at a distance have occurred in a variety of other formats going back many decades. Recall correspondence and telecourses. The didactic foundation of most online programs, constuctivism, dates back to Jean Piaget in the 1950s and tributaries to constuctivist thought date back several hundred years.

Degree mills, disreputable, unaccredited institutions, that offer courses with little if any of the academic rigor we expect in our colleges and universities have added to the distrust of distance learning. Actually, I believe we are out of the “Wild West” days during which any institution could post a “degree-granting” program with money as its sole quid pro quo. While it is true that there are unscrupulous programs, I also believe that regulatory agencies are watching and that the average potential consumer of online education programs is better informed.

Some see the greater regulatory scrutiny of distance learning itself as evidence that something is wrong with the whole notion of learning away from campus. The US Department of Education has directed the accrediting organizations to have greater scrutiny over the distance learning programs. Accrediting organizations are particularly concerned with the resources devoted to distance learning programs and to methodology and processes to prevent student cheating, concerns we should have in all our programs. Rather than see this as undue attention, I view this as the attention that places distance learning on par with its sister campus-based programs.

Of all the arguments I hear, perhaps the least reasonable and most pernicious is that regarding whether or not real learning can take place online. It is as if either without the student sharing the same physical space with the instructor or without the student’s ability to see the instructor the human brain cannot retain memories and experiences. This argument is a visceral reaction by those who do not understand and likely have not participated in online learning. It is wrong and rooted in the nostalgia of classroom magic. A synergy that contributes to learning does happen when a student is in a seat on campus but the synergy also happens in a discussion group online. In fact, the US Department of Education’s meta-analysis study, the “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning” (September 2010) concluded that “online learning is much more conducive to the expansion of learning time than is face-to-face instruction”; that “the effectiveness of online learning approaches appears quite broad across different content and learner types”; and that “students in online conditions performed modestly better, on average, than those learning the same material through traditional face-to-face instruction.”

College administrators sometimes express that they do not feel as in touch with adjunct online instructors. If the instructor is not within the geographical area, they are not able to call the person in for a meeting if needed. Obviously, this hypothetical scenario is also based on a misperception that college administrators are engaged with any appreciable number of adjunct instructors, whether on ground or online. As an adjunct for a number of years at multiple institutions, with just a couple of exceptions, I found it rare that I communicated with anyone at the institution about classroom instruction. I was fond of saying that being an adjunct is a lonely duty. Unless I made it my absolute mission to do otherwise, I could spend an entire semester having no contact with other faculty member or administrator. The most engagement with other faculty and administrators that I have experienced as an adjunct was in teaching online courses where there were discussion groups, online adjunct activities, email, and phone/web conferences.  Thus, it is exceedingly rare that we need a face-to-face meeting with an adjunct instructor.

The scrutiny then is both unwarranted when it comes to questioning how it is different than other venues for learning and warranted when we are interested in improving learning overall. It seems that the best concern is the is not that we need to watch this shifty-eyed new fad called distance learning but that we need to take care as we are building all our courses, face-to-face and on-campus. Students can and do learn this way. Distance learning gives us the chance to take a fresh look at courses with a renewed focus on pedagogy. There is the potential to learn from those who care most about learning, those will to put in the effort and time it takes to build and conduct distance learning courses. College opportunities can be expanded with more courses and time conveniences. Why should we have the greater scrutiny? The best argument is that we care about learning and getting it right.

Missing the Value of LinkedIn

A few weeks ago I participated in a discussion about the difference between elearning and distance learning with a number of educators: a consultant, CEO of a mission, a professor, an online trainer, a CLO, a teacher/writer, and a technology director. They were from Washington, D.C., Utah, Great Britain, California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Virginia, and Oregon. They had all volunteered to be a part of the discussion, to share their knowledge and perceptions. For each of them I was able to see online resumes so I could verify that they had some experience, education, and/or background knowledge. I could tell quickly that their comments were valid and reliable during our discussion. We had this conversation asynchronously over a couple of months. A couple of individuals posted research links and other references. I do not normally directly network with any of them but I know people who know some of them. With this asynchronous conversation happening I received emails each time someone posted so that I did not have to constantly check this for two months. During this time several people looked at my background and experience, some desiring to connect with others in my profession, others looking for collaborators or employees with my skill sets. All of this happened in LinkedIn.

In the paragraph above, I have done more to explain what LinkedIn does than the sum total of news coverage for the past couple of weeks. The media focused on the initial public offering and continually asked us if the fact that the IPO did so well was due to a new dot-com boom. They asked us this question even though they gave us only one possible answer. They did not talk about the possibility that LinkedIn has intrinsic value, how it is different than Facebook and Twitter, how the business has grown over the last five years, that it is populated not by everyone you know but by colleagues, that LinkedIn profiles people but has ways to plug in business and industry, and that because LinkedIn is connecting individuals with the same professional interests it is also building the most powerful electronic “mailing list” in the world. The news media—all the media—really failed in informing us so that we could answer their question intelligently.

For five years, I have been trying to generate interest at my college in LinkedIn which I believe has enormous value for our students and faculty. I have always placed Linked in the pantheon of social media: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I organized workshops and talked to many individuals as we worked on other projects. It has been an uphill climb but some of our faculty members are encouraging students to get the account and those students are using LinkedIn to get jobs.

For their part, the students initially do not like LinkedIn. They want it to be Facebook. Although LinkedIn is making what I believe are some antithetical concessions, it is not the place where you post what you are wearing or where you are eating dinner. It is not the place that you post your favorite jokes and pictures of your vacation. It is not the place for concise blast messages. Not the playground Facebook has become, it is grown-up. It is the networking of the adult world, a digital place where time, money and other resources matter and a place where who you connect to online has more of an impact than on your feelings. Students have to be taught the value of LinkedIn, just as I have to teach our faculty and college administrators. Just as the media should be “teaching” everyone. Having stated this, I cannot deny that there is a potential for people to make a boat-load of money but this is not the only story. It is not even the main story.

Compfight for Images

From the January edition e-Learning review I discovered a really neat Web 2.0 tool called Compfight, which allows you to search the Internet for images. Okay so you’re wondering can’t I already do that with Google? Yes, you can but you have a limited—yes, Google, I said limited set of ways that you can search. Compfight is a Flickr image search tool. Compfight’s thumbnails make it easy to use as well.

Compfight allows you to search for images in safe and unsafe modes as Google does. It also allows you to the license. You can choose “any license, creative Commons, commercial” to sort the images based on the license. You can also find just the original versions of the picture, its copies, or both. Plus if you like the picture you find this button so that you can tweet it or Facebook it right away.

As a learning management system administrator and a faculty trainer at my college I must confess that it is difficult to help even our faculty users understand some of the ins and outs of copyright, fair use, and public domain items when it comes to their course. Lately we’ve been talking just a little bit more about Creative Commons which perhaps offers a middle ground, a place where others are willingly sharing their content but also specify exactly what you can do with it. This is what is missing in the general Internet search with Google.

One thing that always concerns when a powerful, new free tool appears on the Internet is its long-term prospects. So many web companies start out as free hope they will be bought out by someone “big.” Other companies are hoping that once they get us addicted to the usage their pages that we will be willing to pay for the service. Since change the college is a process not an event, training people to use something new is problematic if that item only last a couple of years. Come by which began in 2008 is already due for some administrative changes. And according to Site Trail it is respectable usage numbers. Still is valuable enough that for now I am advising people to use it before it becomes a pay service.

Too Much Interactivity in Online Courses?

The first time I heard it I was at a Sloan-C conference a few years ago. It was a small isolated study so I regarded it as a curiosity rather than a study to cause us to re-examine our online learning philosophy. Since then, I have seen it again a couple more times. Last year in the Distance Learning Report a different group of researchers reported that increased interactivity lead to decreased student satisfaction and may actually decrease a student’s chance of success in the course.

It makes sense to me that increased work places a student under increased stress to make sure the extra activities are completed in a timely fashion.

Despite the sample sizes and the program implications, I can accept the possibility of the veracity of the researchers’ claims. It makes sense that in the continuum of online learning activities there is both a point where the activities can be insufficient in number to allow the students to adequately achieve the course objectives and a point adding more does not mean the students learn more.

However, I am not interested in seeing more studies showing the same on either side, “those fer and those agin.” For those of you doing research I propose the following questions. Where are the lines to be drawn? Where is the “sweet spot” in the middle where it is ideal for learning, not too much but containing sufficient rigor? Is “sufficient rigor” the same for all institutions of higher learning? If not, what accounts for the differences? Who is best suitable to determine what is too much or too little, faculty, administrators, student, accrediting bodies, states, or the federal government? Is there a different point depending on discipline?

For now, I suspect that at most institutions for a sizeable percentage of institutions there is too little interactivity, especially if the institutions allow instructors to design their own content. Answering the questions above can help us to repair this problem.

Where Are the Faculty Leaders for Digital Humanities?

A colleague recently sent me a link to a New York Times article, Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches by Patricia Cohen.

In the article Cohen describes how the new world of data is leading to studies and research in the world of humanities that just were not possible in the past such digitally mapping Civil War battlefields to determine topography‘s role or “using databases of thousands of jam sessions to track how musical collaborations influenced jazz”.

The article is not a list of hitherto unquantifiable potentialities; it asks the question of purpose and value of the information being obtained. The article is yet further reinforcement that even technophobic or techno-agnostic educators must shift their positions to provide guidance to our digital native students. Even though technology is not their field, this means that educators must continually educate themselves in the both what kinds of technology are available to their students and how to use them. It means that my colleagues can ill afford to spend their time only on their disciplines but must now consider technology usage to be as much a part of their disciplines as is using the library. It means that technology, particularly office and web 2.0 applications, must play a role in classroom sessions.

Another colleague once told me that technology tools are best when they work right and remain in the background. Cohen’s article helps to show that viewing technology through this lens may be shortchanging our students regardless the discipline.

What’s In a Campus Edition?

Why do companies marketing to educators and students love to name their products campus edition? I suppose that the name is intended to make us see that they are creating something specifically for us. However, what exactly are they creating? The term does not seem to refer to the same set of things each time.

Most of my colleagues are familiar with the WebCT Campus Edition and Blackboard Campus Edition learning management systems. These LMS versions are being steadily morphed into Blackboard 9. At some point there will be no online Blackboard campus using the term campus edition. However, based on how frequently the term is used, I do not think there will be any shortage of products or services that do use the term.

An example is Mozilla Firefox Campus Edition 2.0.0.6, a student-centered variant of the Firefox browser that added two components, an iTunes control called FoxyTunes and a research manager called Zotero.

Wimba’s Campus Edition product is called Genuine Genie. It is designed to allow presumably a teacher or college professor to convert easily Microsoft Word documents into web pages. Added features will also allow interactivity to be built into the web pages. The web pages can be loaded into LMS courses. This product is a somewhat schizophrenic and has several permutations of its name/brand: Genuine Genie, Course Genie 2.0, and a version contained in Lectora (another name of prevalence).

One of the latest campus editions to hit the streets is by PBworks, formerly PBwiki. The shift from wiki to works signals that PBworks is expanding its business model. Unlike its basic free account PBworks Campus Edition provides unlimited premium workspaces for $799/year. The premium version offers centralized control, centralized account creation, centralized monitoring of accounts, branding of the PBworks accounts, and easy site administration. A planned add-on will be plagiarism tools. In effect, PBworks is nudging more into the realm of the LMS.

Whether or not PBworks is successful remains to be seen. In the present economy, the low cost is certainly in their favor. If past trends continue, one sure thing is that Campus Edition will not be the final name of their product and they will not be the last to call their product campus edition.

Is Voice Better than Text?

I recently read about Nuance Communication’s Dragon Dictation app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Nuance has created this app version of its remarkable Dragon Naturally Speaking software which allows you to speak into a microphone while Dragon types the text for you. Distance learning professionals have loved Dragon Naturally Speaking and comparable software for years. Many distance learning professionals will also gravitate toward to Dragon Dictation app which adds greater mobility to their ability to work at a distance. (This app is currently free in the US and Canada but if it becomes popular the cost will undoubtedly rise.)

Other Voice to Text Technologies

Of course, Dragon Naturally Speaking has not been the only technology to transcribe voice to text. Microsoft has long built this capability into its operating systems. However, it has not been something that they have marketed as value added, perhaps because it has been woefully inferior to Dragon until recently. Although Dragon Naturally speaking is still in my opinion the best, Microsoft has recently put some pretty good speech recognition software in Windows 7. It starts up easily and works a million times better than their previous versions although Dragon is still better.

Problems

With the app and speech recognition, professionals have gained powerful new tools to help them conduct distance learning courses which are largely text-based. However, does the use of the tools translate into better courses or better service to the students? From my own experiences the answer seems mixed.

One problem is over-reliance on the software. Dragon boasts that it is 99% accurate—and it is amazingly accurate—but there are drawbacks. Dragon learns to recognize your individual speech patterns as you use it and that takes time for the accuracy to get really good. Even so it makes mistakes and herein is a significant difficulty. You need to proof-read your own text from Dragon which is tough for lengthy passages where Dragon got 99% of it right but there are hidden sections that Dragon bobbled but with real words.

Years ago when I first installed Dragon I felt liberated from my slow typing speed. Now I could “type” at the speed of thought. For my online students this meant that I could answer their questions with more detailed, more nuanced answers. In actuality, many of my answers became less succinct. The reading involved in an online class already takes a good deal of time. Long instructor passages take even more time. Lengthy answers from instructors can confuse those who are not strong readers.

It has been my experience and I have heard from others that there is a fair amount of mental processing while typing with the keyboard. For most people, speech may happen to rapidly for this to occur. Speech is also perceived as relatively informal, a fact which we easily tolerate when speaking to someone, but becomes written speech significantly increases the expectation that there will be a more formal structure to the content and that more thought will be embodied in the construction of the content.

Why transcribe at all?

Sometimes I wonder why we bother transcribing at all. Would it not be better if we are speaking anyway to simply record the lecture and post the audio? This would help to students who may have some kinds of learning disabilities. This could help students who have differences in learning styles. This would enable students to listen to the content while mobile such as on an iPod or other mp3 device, which fits with the busy way our world works now.

Some of my colleagues argue that making the text available to students is important still to promote textual literacy, that it is still important for students to master written communication. Yet the same colleagues do not know what to make of the current texting phenomenon, which has students producing more text-based communications than ever.

Perhaps programs like Dragon and the new Dragon app could make a huge impact if adopted for texting. In fact, it could help us solve some of the issues we are fighting in education such as sentences in all lower-case with no punctuation and myriad acronyms. Teens, and all of us, could type as fast as the thoughts occur. This would remove the need for large QWERTY keyboards on phones. The question is would it be adopted because again we do not understand why texting is so popular. When we do we will be able to address the educational problems and move more decisively toward changes in the way students learn and the way we provide them information online.

Central Falls Implications for Community Colleges

In February 74 teachers and 19 staff members were fired by the superintendent at an underperforming Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. The decision has received a good deal of media attention and a significant amount of praise around the country. (Even President Obama has publically agreed with the measure as a move toward greater accountability in education.) While it is to true that the school has been a consistent underperformer, in the national media the story is mischaracterized. In reality it is, of course, not a story of callous teachers who do not bother to do their jobs or care about their students. The school was filled with professional teachers who worked very hard to help their students achieve. It was as not about a school that was making zero progress. The school’s test scores had improved over the last two years although to be fair the increases were slight. It was not that the teachers were unwilling to change the structure of the high school program. Structural changes such as moving from a comprehensive high school to one with upper and lower divisions had already been approved. In the end the unresolved issues that caused the superintendent to make the radical move seemed to be more about the requirement for teachers to work harder and longer for what their union regarded as inadequate extra pay.

This apparent national confusion about the reason the teachers were fired has implications for those of us in higher education. The problem is about the teachers accepting changes to their employment without what they believe to be fair pay. The perception is that they do not accept performance measures and are failing in their jobs

We, the community colleges, share a stronger bond with our high school educator colleagues than most traditional 4 year colleges. We must educate an increasingly greater percentage of the high school graduates and returning nontraditional students in order to keep the country globally competitive. Furthermore, we have been more willing to build programs that do more than provide a good liberal arts foundation but rather increasingly provide direct job skills which may even more lead to industry-style standards of measurement of performance. After all, a sizeable proportion of our students are looking, not to transfer and certainly not just enlightenment, but rather for transferable and marketable skills. It seems manifest that at some point there will be a greater demand for us to be held accountable for our students’ performance.

I know that all my colleagues, faculty and administrators, in college are dedicated professionals who care about their students and their student’s futures. However, once the kinds of standards that have stabbed dagger-like into the status quo of compulsory public school have been imposed on community colleges, how will we fair? The answer is likely split. Some parts of our colleges, such as our nursing and technology components, are accustomed to performance measures. Both born out of public necessity and applauded by local government and industry for their ability to improve each region, the programs were initially structured in a way that performance measure is part of their infrastructure. While it has strong ties to our colleges’ liberal arts tradition, distance learning, due to its continued scrutiny and foundation in technology, seems more readily accepting of performance measures. Other more traditional parts of our colleges, those that are more focused on a traditional view of the liberal arts college (not necessarily traditional in the community college sense) will undoubtedly have more difficulty adjusting.

Performance measures and our acceptance of them cannot solve a Central Falls kind of problem. The performance measures are only a way to provide the institution with data. The way that the institution interprets the data and the proposed solutions form the locus of problems. Without knowing many more of the details of the Central Falls superintendent’s proposal than I have outlined here, it is difficult for me to say how fair the proposed changes were to the teachers or if the union should have accepted them. Knowing our mandate to provide college opportunities to all, if our colleges’ data showed we had a similar problem, I am not sure that dedicating more faculty time to the problem would help us. I also cannot imagine college deans and presidents taking such extreme measures to achieve what will likely be only marginal increases in overall college achievement. Until we arrive at that place in time it is not clear how we should respond. Unfortunately, the right time to contemplate the issue for community colleges is when the problem does not yet exist. The right time is now.