Are you new to social media curation in online learning? [VIDEO]

When you think about the word "curation", what comes to mind?  Well for me, I think about museums right away.  I think about the museum curators that work in museums going through collections of resources and making decision about which artifacts to collect together and how to organize them to tell a story, to emphasize a concept, or to serve a learning outcome.  And it's just not about placing the chosen artifacts together in the museum and then walking away.  These museum curators describe the salient features of the artifacts and organize them in such a way that new visitors can glean the required information and discover for themselves the intended (or novel) themes and the stories.  It's an important job to be a museum curator because their bias about the artifacts invariably will make its way into the finish product on display.  I don't really think that's a bad thing, because museum curators are experts in their field and they can identify the most compelling themes and stories, and expertly organize artifacts in museums for people to interact with so they can learn.

So what does this have to do with online learning?  Well, re-read the entire paragraph above, but substitute the words "museum curator" for "teacher", and where you see "museums" put "online courses".  Go ahead re-read it.

Wonderful isn't it?  So if you are thinking of becoming an expert online teacher, take a moment to improve your skills in curation, especially social media curation.

This great video produced by Vanessa Dennen (Florida State University) for the Social Media for Active Learning MOOC (#SMOOC2014), will give you a quick overview of social media curation. It's a great topic that all online instructors will love exploring.

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Three ‘MUST HAVE” best practices in teaching online courses

If you came to read this posting to find a definitive list of best practices in teaching online courses, then please accept my apology.

I will not be compiling the large golden list of best practices in online teaching. Why you might ask? Well – because there is no definitive list. There are far too many variables in play in the online classroom (or any classroom really) to be able to represent all the best practices in online teaching in a short list. However, I do want to take a moment to discuss some findings by a research team who studied groups of online students at South Texas College and West Virginia University’s College of Human Resources and Education. What they focused their research upon was asking students in online courses very simple questions about the instructor behaviour:

1. Please describe one thing the instructor did that helped you to succeed in this course.


2. Please describe one thing the instructor did that hindered your success in this course.

The results are fascinating and you can read them all in detail in the original publication (pdf). However, summarized briefly are the four major perceived instructor actions that were responsible for course success:

• Providing feedback that helped students understand their strengths and weaknesses.
• Focusing discussions on relevant issues
• Encouraging students to explore new concepts
• Helping students clarify their thinking

Now, summarized briefly are the three major perceived instructor actions that hindered course success:

• lack of feedback that helped students understand their strengths and weaknesses
• poor communication of the important course topics (i.e. lack of course and lesson objectives, and lack of clear links between course material and the course description)*
• poor instructions on how to participate in course activities/assignments*

If you examine these two lists you can make some additional observations which distil down to the three ‘MUST HAVE’ best practices:

1. The topic of ‘feedback’ appears on both the positive and the negative list. That demonstrates how critical this item is to students. It’s a must. The distance instructor must be highly skilled in providing timely and detailed feedback. Furthermore, I will argue that this feedback has to be perceived by the student as being customized/personalized feedback for them. It’s not enough for the distance instructor to mark all the assignments with a simple number grade and then to broadcast to the class a message with the general strengths and weaknesses found in the assignments. Each student’s assignment must have specific and detailed feedback on it for the feedback to be perceived as positive success factor by students.
2. The remaining ‘course delivery’-type points are focusing discussions, encouraging students and helping students clarify thinking. This type of feedback can be more class-based in nature. Well placed messages in the discussion forum guiding the discussion, introducing a relevant current event or highlighting the merits of a particular discussion point can go a long way. All these items can be done publicly for the entire class to see and benefit from. So the instructor must have a public presence in the online class.
3. Note that the last two items marked with the asterix (*) in the negative list are instructional design weaknesses. They can be easily corrected with some additional up-front effort refining of the course materials prior to the delivery of the course. As an instructional designer I have experienced some instructors groaning when I have suggested to them that they formulate course objectives and lesson objectives. I’ve also heard similar groaning when I have provided feedback stating that the course assignment materials are not detailed enough, that a rubric would help or that a model solution might be useful to students. It’s true that formulating these support components of the course take time and that for some instructors the task is onerous because they are content-experts not instructional design experts; however, the findings in this paper clearly show that lack of attention to the instructional design components can be directly detrimental to perceived student success.

So despite this not being the definitive list, I certainly feel that these three findings that I have grouped together above are valuable best practices for the distance instructor in online courses. What do you think?

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Is ‘Simple’ a four letter word in eLearning? Are bells & whistles blinding us?

For the last decade in distance education and elearning, I have repeatedly come across the theme that “more is better”. You’ve heard it too I’m sure: more links, more optional material, more practice quizzes, more solutions to self-assessment questions, more video clips, more audio clips, more flash animations, more HTML, more mouse-overs, more student-to-student interaction, more discussion, more group projects, more online activities, more simulations, more wikis, more blogs, more web 2.0 tools, more textbook publisher resources, etc. We’ve heard it so frequently that we can begin to believe it. However, when a course is being designed, what should the driving force be when considering design elements? Should it be “more is better”? Obvious answer: NO! We need to take a deep breath and go back to first principles: Instructional design. It is for the benefit of the learner in their practice of learning and it involves using a systematic approach to the development of learning materials. This approach involves an analysis of learning needs and goals, and based on this analysis decisions can be made about the course materials, level of interactivity (i.e. student-to-content, student-to-student, and student-to-instructor) and assessment strategies. I argue that the ‘more, more, more’ approach can act counter-productively in student learning. With so many activities, so many learning objects, and so many different tools to navigate that it is not surprising that some learners feel overwhelmed and fall behind. Simple designs that demonstrate consistent and logical links between the objectives of the course all the way through to the types of assessments presented to the learner while using appropriate technology to support these logical linkages can avoid the ‘cognitive overload’ phenomenon that overwhelms some learners. I think we need to pay more attention to simple and effective instructional designs, and we need to pay less attention to the “more is better” approach to courses. Let’s start thinking less about which new and cool technological feature to “add” to a course and let’s start thinking more about “raison d’être” of a course: for the learner to learn. Ask yourself hard questions like “do I really need 378 HTML pages in this course”? So I challenge you all to re-examine your courses and actively pear down things that do not directly support the aim of your course. Make it simple. Make it elegant. Make it easy for learning by learners. That’s just my two cents. How do you feel about this issue?

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Try Teaching Science at a Distance

The October 2010 issue of International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning is out and what I like about this publication is that the full-text of the articles are completely open and accessible. You are not required to pay a membership fee for access. What is also interesting about this publication is that is does book reviews as well and in many cases it tries to choose books that are also completely open and accessible.

This issue has one particular book that is available in PDF format by a Creative Commons License: Accessible elements - Teaching science online and at a distance edited by Dietmar Kennpohl and Lawton Shaw of Athabasca University.

It is a topic near and dear to my heart because I teach post-secondary science courses in class and at a distance. I have written some blog posts in the past relating to this subject (here, here, here).

This online book is fantastic and covers several important issues: the student-centered aspects of learning science at a distance; hands-on laboratories at a distance whether they be ‘kitchen chemistry’ or remote control labs, or anything in between; the institutional logistics of offering science programs at a distance. This is all fantastic and relevant material to colleges and universities today.

If you get a chance to look at this document, let us know what you think about the subject by posting a comment below.

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Short Cuts for Converting Classroom Courses to Online Courses - Ask an Instructional Designer

I recently answered an email question from a reader named Barb that might interest other readers as well:

Question:

Hi Eric,

I ran into your site through the Internet and would like some advice on the following.

I am a trainer and am currently working with a couple of other trainers on converting our Instructor led courses into online self paced courses using Captivate.

We know there will be work to re-design some of the content etc. However, I am looking for shortcuts. the content has already been approved by SME's.

I wondered if we could "storyboard" the content out in Powerpoint and then bring it into Captivate. In other words I want to avoid extra steps. Instead of using Microsoft Word to storyboard content, we would just place the graphics and text within a Powerpoint world and then bring it in. Or do we even need to use Powerpoint?

Your suggestions would be appreciated.

-Barb

Answer:

Hi Barb,

You have a good question here. In my view it all comes down to how you envision the finished product meeting the needs of your target market. You mention that you are developing instructor-led training into an online self-paced course; however, you do not mention the topic of the course, the types of students that you are serving, or your proposed course delivery strategy.

So I will make a few of assumptions in answering your question.

Assumption 1: the topic of the course is some type of training on how to use a computer system or a piece of software.I make this assumption (or guess) because you are choosing an audiovisual-based authoring tool like Adobe Captivate to present your training.

Assumption 2: your students are established employees at a company that will be required to use this new software or computer system in their job.

Assumption 3: if you are looking for shortcuts on how to re-engineer existing classroom materials for use in a online self-paced course, then I assume your time is limited to complete this project. Perhaps your budget is limited as well.

Assumption 4: the SME-approved classroom materials that you have available to you are print-based materials. Perhaps in MS-Word format.

So if these above four assumptions (or predictions!) hold then this is my advice to you.

Use a print-based framework for your finished product; however, augment the print-based material with short audio-video tutorials (created with Adobe Captivate) that show students the piece of software in action. By choosing this route, you take a major short-cut of being able to re-use some of the existing course materials in MS-Word format. You only need to invest your energies in augmenting the paper-based course materials with appropriate audio-video tutorials. This solution also circumvents the need to use Powerpoint. Last I checked people still prefer reading material on paper vs. the computer screen.

In the end you can upload a series of Captivate Videos to YouTube and then mail-out a paper-based workbook to students. That way students can keep the workbook and consult it when they are back in the workplace for 'just in time training', and similarly, the YouTube videos are accessible 24/7 from work or at home. There is no need for you to have a specialized learning management system in place to deliver such a course either. That saves on budget as well.

I hope this answer helps. Take care.

-Eric

Do you have other recommendations for Barb? If so, post a comment below.

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Free Academic Videos for Everyone

It's new and it is in a 'beta' state; however, Academic Earth is something to keep your eyes on. Currently, it offers thousands of post-secondary lectures from authorative sources - all free. The creators of this repository have worked hard to integrate features into it that make it extra useful. Each lecture has a side bar with a slection of special options, such as a download to iPod option, a citation option, an 'embed' option that gives you code you can copy and paste into your website (this means that you can distribute the video to your students without having to host the video on your server. Nice!). Each lecture is rated by registered users of the website (registration is free!). So over time, the most highly rated lecture will float to the top. While in the 'beta' state, Academic Earth strongly encourages users to leave feedback on any bugs you find as well as to make suggestions on how to improve the service. At the time of launching, it is billed as "Thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars." Not bad for a start, where will it be a year from now! What do you think?

Photo credit: Here.

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