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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Educate the Mobile Generation: Convert WORD documents to ePub and MOBI

You’ve seen the headlines and heard the buzz as much as I have: smartphones are taking over the planet, e-books are selling like hotcakes, and, tablets like the iPad are cannibalizing laptop and desktop computer sales. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to conclude that Mobile computing in the hottest trend in technology since electricity was invented. With this fact in mind, I asked myself this question – are my course materials mobile-friendly? Can my students easily get the materials in my course onto their mobile device be it an iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android Smartphone, Sony eBook Reader, Amazon Kindle, or Barnes & Noble Nook, etc.

Well, I was a bit embarrassed by my answer. My answer was ‘sort-of’. I was providing nice printer-friendly PDF files as one format and PDF does work on most mobile devices but it’s not optimized for mobile delivery. So I decided to try something new. I am converting my WORD documents to ePub and MOBI (for Kindle) formats. So I Googled around to get some help and found this very useful posting by Jeremy Reimer dated March 24th, 2010. It really guided me in the right direction. This is what I did:

1. I took my WORD source documents (*.doc) and ‘Saved As HTML’ (or “Save as Web Page” for the Mac version of WORD) using the built in function in WORD.


2. Then I opened the HTML file up in Dreamweaver. I then used the fantastically useful feature in Dreamweaver of Commands > Clean Up WORD HTML.


3. Then I used the second most fantastical feature in Adobe Dreamweaver: Commands > Clean Up HTML.


4. Then I applied a unique class attribute to each Lesson Title in my HTML document so that I could use this unique class attribute to generate a Table of Contents for the ePub and MODI files later. I did it really simply. I found the lesson title in the HTML code and then noticed right before it was a paragraph code (<p>) so I changed that to <p class=”TableOfContents”> for every lesson title or section title of my document that I wanted to show up in the Table of Contents.


5. I then downloaded a free copy of Calibre. It’s an eBook reader software for computers. In addition, it also converts from one eBook format to another. So I loaded the HTML version of my document into Calibre.


6. Next, using Calibre I chose to convert this HTML version of my document into an ePub format. There are some settings you can play around with; however, I generally stayed to the default settings with one exception: the Table of Contents. I specified that I only wanted items in the Level 1 of table of contents that had a paragraph code with class = “TableOfContents”. Here's the exact syntax that I used in Calibre: //h:p[re:test(@class, "TableOfContents", "i")]


7. Finally, I repeated step 6 while choosing MOBI as my output file format instead of ePub.


8. Done.

I emailed myself these two files and tested them on my iPhone. They both work well. Links are active, footnotes work, Table of Contents is exactly how I wanted it, and images look fine.

Now I am going to put up the ePub and MOBI versions of the course materials on the Learning Management System for students to have access to if they want to optimize the experience for mobile devices. At the end of the semester, I’ll survey them to see which file formats they used and when, etc.

If you have developed any other useful methods for converting WORD documents to ePub and MOBI format then please leave a comment below.

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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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