Top Four HOT Concepts in Distance Learning

1. Distance Learning itself. At my institution, we are scratching our heads a little bit wondering why we have an above average number of enrollments in our distance learning courses. The same enrollment boom is occurring at other institutions like Bryan College. However, if you do a quick Google search and read a few reports it is clear that the pundits have been predicting that distance learning enrollments will rise. Student seem to be gravitating towards learning opportunities that are not tied to them having to be in any particular location at a prescribed time during the day or week. So called ‘anytime, anywhere’ learning. They enjoy the flexibility of distance learning away from the traditional 1-hour (or 3-hour) face-to-face lecture format. So Distance Learning itself is a really hot concept. Be sure your institution plays into the needs and wants of today’s students. When you design your distance learning courses, lean towards asynchronous models that do not prescribe the students to assemble (even virtually) at any particular time during the week. These synchronous models can be less attractive to students especially if they reside in a different time zone that the host institution. If you cannot avoid some synchronous activities in your distance courses, then be sure to be up front with your students and clearly state the degree of synchronous commitment expected of students before they register in the course.

2. Mobile learning. With each passing set of Christmas holidays, more students find themselves joyful recipients of an iPad, iPhone or other fancy tech thingy under the tree. The number of students that come equipped with tablets, smartphones, e-readers and other gadgets is increasing quickly. They are using these gadgets daily for numerous activities and the mobility affordances provided by these items is very attractive to users. Leverage this trend and be sure that your course materials are mobile friendly. PDF files can help but if you want to go one step further, try ePub and Kindle-specific MOBI files. With just a little more effort on your part (more info here), you can provide students with choices in the file formats for their course materials. Choices usually equate in the short run to student satisfaction. Satisfy your students’ desire for mobile learning by making your course materials mobile friendly.
3. eTextbooks. The tide is turning (albeit slowly) in the publishing industry. Attention is slowly drifting away from the model of having a hardcopy textbook with associated electronic resources online towards a more student-centered model of have an integrated electronic textbook that students can either rent or buy, and store on their own electronic devices. With each passing semester I learn from my students that they are interested in these digital versions of textbooks (sometimes it's because they may cheaper than hardcopy!). For example, I just received an email last week from a student expressing great joy because the publisher of the textbook for my course was providing a Kindle version for sale. The idea of keeping all his textbooks assembled into his tiny Kindle was a BIG advantage for this student. This reinforces the previous point above Mobile Learning. The penetration of mobile devices into the student body is now driving textbook publishers to devote more resources to eTextbooks. So what can you do about this? If you are a textbook author, then encourage your publisher to make eTextbook versions of your book. If you are in the process of selecting a book for your course, then take the extra moment to compare if each of the titles you are considering has an eTextbook format. Making wise choices that facilitate students to learn “anytime, anywhere” will prove to be a win:win for both the students and the educational institutions involved.
4. Free Resources. Ask any student and she will tell you “Free is King”. Whether you are an instructional designer or a professor, challenge yourself to scour the Internet to look for freely available resources that relate to the topic of your course. Critically evaluate each one and choose the best ones to integrate into your course. Yes – this takes time. However, if you do just a little bit every semester, you’ll soon have course chock-full of fantastically freely available resources that will make your course better. Better courses without increasing cost equals more satisfied students. That logic is easy to understand. Want an even better idea? Design a non-traditional assignment where you ask your students to scour the net and evaluate resources for quality. Let them do the legwork of finding the material and then you can integrate the best of found treasures into future iterations of the course. Brilliant!

Do you have a comment about these Top 4 concepts or do you have a HOT concept for distance learning that didn’t make it into my Top 4, if so, please leave a comment below.

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Controversy: Letting students run their own school within a school!

Have you heard of the Independent Project? It’s controversial. If you haven’t heard about it than take a moment to watch this video:



Along with the link to this video, I posted this question on my twitter feed last month: “Do you agree or disagree with students running their own school within a school?” An old friend of mine, Dave Kirk, wrote a very thought-provoking email to me about how this subject touched him personally as a young student. He has allowed me to share it with you here:

“This is very cool. I love the idea behind this project and applaud those who helped to make it happen.

I would like to see more young people take such responsibility for their learning and view their teachers, schools, and textbooks merely as one set of many resources and one possible structure for learning rather than "the way to learn". The earlier in life one discovers that they can direct their own learning the better off they will be.

I had a few teachers in my education who understood that sitting in a classroom listening to them was just one way to learn and not necessarily the best way to learn - certainly not for everyone. I got along well with these teachers as they allowed me to take control of my learning (which often involved poor attendance in their class) and gave me the support to learn in other ways and trusted in me to do so.

My parents were also quite supportive of this approach. I remember my dad saying to me one day when reviewing my report card "I will ignore the numbers I see in this column (attendance) provided you continue to achieve numbers like the ones in this column (marks)". I remember that moment very clearly standing in my parents' kitchen, what I heard my dad say to me that day was "I trust you to be responsible for your learning and to have the discipline and good judgement to choose for yourself the resources and methods which will enable you to succeed."

I continued to post excellent marks and my father kept good on his promise to let me have complete responsibility and authority to direct my own learning. He never asked where I was during class or how I managed to learn the material and to me this was the ultimate expression of his trust and faith in me.

I consider that short conversation in my parents' kitchen to be the most powerful conversation my father and I ever had.

I thoroughly enjoyed viewing this documentary...thanks!”

After reading Dave's email – does it reinforce or challenge your initial thoughts about the Independent Project? Let us know by writing a comment below.

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PLEs, Networks and Knowledge - FREE Course!

Building on the successes of the massive Connectivism course that Stephen Downes and George Seimens mounted in 2008 and 2009, PLENK2010 will be launching on Sept 15th. Sponsored and organized by the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI) at Athabasca University, PLENK stands for: Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge. Find out more here. If you want to learn more about the current trends and the bleeding edge of PLEs / PLNs / group-based learning then this will be the place to be in Fall 2010. It promises to be jammed packed with all kinds of progressive educators as well. So the connections you can make while participating in the group will be very valuable to your practice whether you are a teacher, instructional designer or educational administrator.

Given that Professional Development funds are scarce in almost every jurisdiction, this free opportunity is very attractive. See you there!

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Mobile Technology: Bigger than the Internet and the PC combined

Mobile technology is going to change your life and the change has not really begun yet. That's the take home message from Elliot Soloway (Professor, Univ. of Michigan) and Cathie Norris (Professor, North Texas Univ.). In their fantastic and thought provoking video, called A 21st Century Education: Educating the Mobile generation, that documents a road trip through Texas and Louisiana to see firsthand how mobile technologies are being used in school, Elliot and Cathie argue that mobile technologies in use today are initiating a fundamental shift in education. It's the beginning of a deep kind of change in our life where mobility adds the ability for people to walk around and have all the knowledge with them regardless of where they are: office, classroom, car, park, mall, sidewalk, etc. This amazing new resource is available 24/7 in the palm of your hand. Once in place in the culture of our society, so many constraints will be removed from our daily lives. The immediacy of information provided by mobile devices may accelerate learning because the notion that formal learning can only be done in schools will erode fully. Learning will happen everywhere and in every context with this new resource that was not there before.

"It's an evolution - not a revolution." - Elliot Soloway, 2009

Watch the video and let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.

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Teaching with cellphones impacts learning?

Note: This is a follow-up message to an item posted to eLearning Acupuncture a week ago (19 Nov 2008), so be sure to read the original post first before reading this post.

I left off in the last post with the intention of testing if the use of cellphones in teaching contributed positively towards student learning. So here’s the simple experiment I designed.

First, a week after I exposed the class to the cellphone exercise in trying to answer the question “what is the mechanism of action of cyanide’s toxicity” via text message, I posed them the same question again. Only this time, they could not use their cellphones – they had to personally know the answer at that moment. The result is that four people out of 24 students answered the question correctly.

I approached these four people to ask the follow-up question: “Where and when did you learn this fact about cyanide?” Of the four people who answered the question correctly, two of them were the students who had successfully completed the cellphone activity last week, one was someone who independently looked up the answer because of her exposure to the question in last week’s cellphone activity, and the last person was someone who knew the answer from a previous course.

So here is how I interpret this data in combination with last week cellphone data.

First, let’s examine the people who successfully accomplished the cellphone task last week and let’s see if their accomplishment from last week affected their learning. Of the two students who accomplished the cellphone task last week both were able to correctly answer the question regarding the mechanism of action of cyanide one week later. Both students identified the previous week’s cellphone activity as being the time and method that they learned this answer. So for 100% of these students, success with the previous week’s cellphone activity did indeed contribute positively to their learning. They demonstrated this by retaining this knowledge for the period of at least one week.

Second, let’s examine the student who did not successfully complete the previous week’s cellphone activity yet was stimulated by the activity to a great enough extent where she independently researched the answer and was able to demonstrate her knowledge one week later. Did the cellphone activity affect her learning? YES! On the surface this sounds quite positive doesn’t it? However, there were 19 other people in the class who where not stimulated by the activity to a great enough extent to independently research the answer as she had. So for 1 out of 20 (or 5%) the activity stimulated their learning despite being unsuccessful with the cellphone activity. For the other 95%, there was no positive impact.

Third, the student who previously knew about the mechanism of action of cyanide was unaffected by the activity – he already knew the answer.

So taken together, despite a very small sample size, there is a suggestion that cellphone use in the classroom might positively affect learning. Maybe just enough of a suggestion that further investigation on the subject is warranted. What do you think? Please leave a comment below.

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Wikis as Assignments

I attended a very useful online presentation last week by Mike Orey of the University of Georgia (via the Wimba Distinguished Lecture Series). In one of his graduate courses in education, as an assessment activity, he asks students to contribute to a wiki-book that he and his colleagues have developed: Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching and technology. The reason I am making this posting is two-fold.

1. The concept of asking students to contribute to a wiki that will remain for future users is very interesting to me. Clearly an assignment of this nature fits into the highest levels of Bloom's Taxonomy and could even serve as a capstone assignment in some types of courses. In Mike's example, he created a privately owned wiki for this purpose; however, Wikipedia could be used as well.



2. Mike's eBook is excellent from a practitioner’s point of view! Have a look it. It has some interesting sections on topics such as Motivation, Adult Learning, Problem-based Instruction and Learning Communities as an Instructional Model. Chock full of case studies and well referenced with supporting literature. If applicable, Mike encourages you to adopt all or part of this eBook as a textbook in your course. He's so nice (*smile*).

Kudos to Mike & friends on more than one level!

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Support Materials for using Wikis at a Distance

I am currently designing and developing a masters level course on Entrepreneurship that will be delivered at a distance in a web-enabled format. The professor and I have decided that the major assignment in the course will be to create a business plan. Students will be put together in pairs and asked to produce a 1st draft business plan. Selected members of the class will provide feedback to each draft business plan and then the pairs of students will finalize their business plan for submission to the professor. In order to facilitate collaborative authorship of the business plan, despite students being geographically separated from each other, we chose to offer students the option of using a Wiki. I’ve written about Wikis before so this post won’t be re-iterating what I’ve already discussed. Instead this post is more of a show and tell. In this course, we’re not obliging the groups to use a Wiki; however, we’re providing details on how to use one in case they want to try it. I have created two support documents for students:

1) A Word handout, which describes what a Wiki is, suggest one free Wiki service (i.e. www.WikiSpaces.com), and briefly gives the steps on how they can get started.
2) A short Flash tutorial showing how to get started on WikiSpaces.

Have a look at these resources. If you have any ideas on how they can be improved, please let me know.

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