Consistency vs Variety in Online Assessments: is the balance important?

I received an email last week from a college professor who had a good question. She is designing her second online course and was wondering what my opinion was on the types of assignments that work best online. Specifically, she wanted my opinion about whether predictability and variety were important facets in good assessment schemes for online courses.

Yes – I vote for predictability and variety; however, there is more than one way to skin the cat. Let me give you a few examples:

Scenario 1:

Assignment 1: Due Sunday of Week 3
Assignment 2: Due Sunday of Week 6
Assignment 3: Due Sunday of Week 9
Assignment 4: Due Sunday of Week 12
Online discussion: weekly
Final Exam: Week 14

In Scenario 1, the student can clearly see the pattern and predict the workflow from week-to-week as the course progresses through a semester. How about variability? Well, there are two types of weeks in this course: i) weeks with two deliverables (i.e. assignment and discussion) and ii) weeks with only one deliverable.

Scenario 2:

Assignment 1: Due Sunday of Week 2
Assignment 2: Due Sunday of Week 3
Assignment 3: Due Sunday of Week 4
Assignment 4: Due Sunday of Week 5
Assignment 5: Due Sunday of Week 6
Assignment 6: Due Sunday of Week 7
Assignment 7: Due Sunday of Week 8
Assignment 8: Due Sunday of Week 9
Assignment 9: Due Sunday of Week 10
Assignment 10: Due Sunday of Week 11
Assignment 11: Due Sunday of Week 12
Online discussion: weekly

In Scenario 2, like Scenario 1, students can clearly see the pattern and predict the workflow from week-to-week throughout the semester. For variability, there isn’t any. Every week is the same.

Scenario 3:

Assignment 1: Due Sunday Week 6
Term Paper proposal: Due Sunday Week 7
Online discussion: Weeks 4-8
Final Term Paper: Due Sunday of Week 12

In Scenario 3, it’s more difficult for students to see a pattern and they can have difficulty predicting the workflow as the course progresses. For variability, it’s pretty high. Some weeks have one deliverable, others have two deliverables and still other weeks have no deliverables whatsoever.

Scenario 4:

Mid-term Exam: Week 7
Final Exam: Week 14

It’s easy to see that Scenario 4 is highly predictable by students but the overall variability in the course is low.

So, given these types of scenarios, which is the ‘best’? In an online course, good course designs must strive to create student engagement. Over time I have learned that the best way to engage students is to provide them two things: 1) a balanced yet consistent level of predictability and variability in the coursework, 2) a balanced level of student-to-student and student-to-instructor interaction. I’ve dealt with the interaction piece before (here or here). So let me just stick to the predictability and variability component for this blog post.

Now if you re-examine the four scenarios above you might come to the conclusion that Scenario 1 is the most balanced as far as variety and predictability are concerned. Can it be improved? Consider Scenario 5:

Scenario 5:

Discussion 1: Due Sunday of Week 2
Assignment 1: Due Sunday of Week 3
Discussion 2: Due Sunday of Week 5
Assignment 2: Due Sunday of Week 6
Mid-term Quiz: Due Sunday of Week 7
Discussion 3: Due Sunday of Week 8
Assignment 3: Due Sunday of Week 9
Discussion 4: Due Sunday of Week 11
Assignment 4: Due Sunday of Week 12
Final Exam: Week 14

What do you think about Scenario 5 for an online course? Is it better or worse than Scenario 1? What do you think about the entire idea of predictability and variability in assessment schemes? Please leave your comment below.

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SchoolTube: Learning Without the Risk of Explicit Content

There's a dilemma in the K-12 Educational Realm: to block YouTube or not to block YouTube. Parents have the same dilemma at home too. There's a lot of explicit and suggestive videos on YouTube that most teachers/parents wouldn't allow children to be exposed to. The opposite is true as well: there's a lot of fantastic content on YouTube that can help kids in the learning journey. Each school and family makes up their own rules on how to navigate this problem. However, the father and son team of Carl and Andrew Arizpe are giving us all an alternative. It's called SchoolTube. It has all the good parts of YouTube without the risks of inappropriate content. The way that SchoolTube creates this safe environment is to empower teachers to moderate the videos posted to SchoolTube by their very own students. NEAT! Like YouTube, no account is necessary to view videos and the collection of interesting clips tops over 400,000 videos at the moment. Here's one example below that provides a fun and useful introduction to the Periodic Table of Elements. Chemistry geeks will love this.
The main page of SchoolTube also contains a "Video of the Day" that is judged worthy by users. Pretty cool. Do you have any experience with SchoolTube? Are there any other advantages or disadvantages? If so, let us know by leaving a comment below.

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Implications for Online Learning - 2012 Canada Copyright Reform

Hot off the presses! Contact North, Ontario's Distance Education and Training Network, has published a very useful summary of the profound copyright changes in Canada that have occurred in 2012 (to date!) Entitled: The Perfect Storm - Canadian Copyright Law 2012 (Making Sense of the Dramatic Changes and the Far-Reaching Implications for Online Learning).

It's obvious by the sub-title that this document discusses the recent changes in the context of distance education and online learning. Refreshing! It is important to note that unlike my last post on the subject of Copyright Reform in Canadathat this document by Contact North also explains five Supreme Court of Canada decisions that took place in July 2002 that contribute towards an expanded definition of "Fair Dealing", technology neutrality and a strong endorsement of end user rights. Have a look at this succinct document. If you are a teacher, instructional designer or distance learning administrator then it will definitely pique your interest.

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Don't Blink Eh?: Copyright Law is Changing in Canada - What It Means to Educators

Bill C-11 passed a House of Commons Vote this week and readings in the Canadian Senate have already begun. (Here's the full text of the bill in full-fledged legalese). So the writing on the wall is that Canadian Copyright Law is about to change. There are a lot of little goodies in the law that may help the average person. Some things that have been going on illegally for years will now be legal. Simple stuff like giving the ability to Canadians to:

• record their favourite TV shows for later viewing (Yeah - TiVo'ing the late game on Hockey Night in Canada so you can watch it the next morning while eating a bowl of Shreddies is now legal!)


• transfer music from your collection of Compact Discs or Vinyl LPs to a digital device (Yeah - ripping your RUSH Records so you can listen to Geddy Lee on your iPhone while eating a Beaver Tail is now legal!)

Canada is truly great, eh! But what's in it for educators? The practical answer to that question is still pending. People need more time to interpret Bill C-11 in the context of classroom courses, class websites, class discussion forums, and distribution of course materials for distance education. Some interpretations are already starting to become available and in the coming months more information will come to light. If you are a teacher, instructor, professor, or instructional designer then you will want to follow this for the next few months so that you can decide how it impacts your practice. So that you can start getting info, please find below some of the early interpretations and commentary on Bill C-11 from an education perspective.

• UBC’s summary of Bill C-11
• NDP Member Rathika Sitsabaiesan’s opinion on Bill C-11
• Bill C-11: A Guide for Academic Instructors by the British Columbia Library Association Information Policy Committee

If you come across any other great links on the subject, please let me know by leaving a comment below. I will be sure to amend this blog post with the resources you provide. Thanks!

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Careful: Test Cheaters are SMART!

A colleague of mine directed my attention to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that describes a high-tech method where students can cheat on some multiple-choice exams in online courses. It’s a great read really.

Overall, I think that the way the students exploited the weakness in the course’s testing method is truly ingenious. They deserve a bit of credit for detecting, and then so intelligently exploiting, the flaws in this course. (Note: not enough credit to absolved them of their academic dishonesty though!) They honed in on two-specific facts: 1) that students could take the tests twice and get an average of the two scores, and 2) that the correct answers where given to the students immediately upon answering a question. These two facts brought to light a weakness in the course that could be exploited by an elegant collaborative turn-taking method of sharing correct answers using Google Docs among a small group of students.

Although it is not discussed in the article, I imagine that this course did not have a final exam, or if it did, it followed a similar format (multiple-choice, with the answers given immediately) and naturally was un-proctored. Therein lies one problem. If the final exam is not proctored then what incentives do the student have to learning anything during the semester? However, this point is moot if there was no final exam in the course.

In the case where there is no final exam and the weekly tests are essentially summative evaluations, more design features need to be put into place to give incentives to students to learn. Does the feature of being able to take a multiple choice test twice help students learn? In a summative evaluation, does the feature of giving students the answer to a given question immediately after answering help them learn?

What do you think would be a better design for this course? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

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Humanline - more free images for educational use

I know I have written about free photo repositories before (here and here). Here’s the new kid on the block: Humanline. It’s an image library of arts, history and science that is mainly focused on licensing images for use in education (your ears should perk up now) and for commercial use. On the education side, a careful read of the license shows that for most applications usage is free of cost. The usual credit-line requirement is there; much like a Creative Commons-type license. There is a pre-validation step that you must undergo when applying for your free educational account that normally takes 48 hours.

At this time the database of images is not gigantic; however, it is growing. They are actively looking to partner with other image repositories, museums, galleries, private collectors or archives – basically any organization that has public domain images in their possession. Heck – maybe they should partner with Wikimedia Commons - they are HUGE! (*grin*).

You can browse the Humanline repository or search with key words. When I searched for ‘chemistry’ the selection was limited but it did return a very nice portrait illustration of Robert Boyle the 17th century Irish Chemist that is credited with several discoveries about gas laws. So if you were designing and developing a unit for first year chemistry, such a portrait could be useful. A search for the term ‘nightshade’ yielded some interesting classical illustrations of related plants. In an educational setting these engravings would be fun to compare to real life photos of the same plant.

So despite its limited size at this point, Humanline has potential. Do you know of any new image repositories that can be used freely in education settings? If so, please leave a comment below.

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Video is KING in distance education

With the field of Distance Education exploding due to the maturation of the Internet, it’s no wonder more good quality free academic content is finding its way on the web. Here’s a great example that I just learned about from Dr. James Harris at the University of Leeds in England. It’s called The Faculties and it contains video snipits of senior-level highschool (or junior-level university) lectures spanning several fields including Biology, Chemistry, English, History, Math, and Psychology. To date, they have produced over 360 videos with a promise of more to follow. If you are not in the business of distance education this repository remains useful. Instructors can request downloads of the videos so that they can be played for students even in classrooms that are not wired for the Internet.

This semester I am teaching a second year chemistry course via distance and I have some students in the class that have asked me if I could provide links to some useful videos on specific topics. Naturally, I am always on the lookout for them so I was very excited to learn about The Faculties. I’ve watched about a dozen videos so far and they are very good. There is definitively something for everyone in this repository and you can stay up-to-date on the progress in building this repository via Twitter (@thefaculties). Have a look at some of the videos and let us know what you think. Do you know of other similar free video repositories other than the standard YouTube search? If so, let us know by leaving a comment below.

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Teaching and Learning Centres: Who Needs Them?

Short Answer: we do.

Long Answer: I work at an established Military College. By established I mean 1876. Futhermore, this Military College has been empowered to confer university degrees since 1959. So these two facts together will lend most observers to believe that teaching and learning has been going on here for many years.

So why isn’t there a Teaching and Learning Centre here? Hmm. I don’t really know. The question was raised again in my mind when I read the excellent report by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario entitled Teaching and Learning Centres: Their Evolving Role Within Ontario Colleges and Universities.

Have a read of this paper. After reading it I have a question for you. Can you think of any good reasons for denying instructors and students access to a Teaching and Learning Centre? If not, why aren’t they found at all post-secondary institutions? Please leave your answers in a comment below.

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75,000 Hit Thursday!

Back in April 2010, I was ecstatic to report that this blog reached 50,000 hits. It took a glorious 5 years

and 8 months of blogging before this blog crossed the 50,000 hit threshold (that calculates out to an average of about 171 hits/week over the 5 year 8 month period). Well, the hit frequency is steadily growing because e-Learning Acupuncture crossed the 75,000 hit mark today and the most recent 25,000 hits were amassed in only 1 year and 9 months. During that time the average weekly number of hits has climbed to 284 hits/week. I love it!

Happy 75,000 Hit Thursday to all the independent bloggers out there! May the hits come fast and furious to you all for years to come!

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Learning because ‘it’s cool’ say 17 year old boys

When was the last time you heard kids say they did a science project outside of class time because learning is cool? Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve heard that very often in my career as a science educator. I’ve seen a lot of students say that learning at school is cool depending on the subject matter or the project, etc; however, this story is a bit different.

Two 17-year old kids from Newmarket, Ontario sent a Lego minifigure carrying a Canadian Flag into space and filmed it all. Yup - still pictures and video were taken for the entire 80,000+ ft (24 km) climb and the 122+ Km distance the contraption traveled. They did all of this on their own time, with their own funds, away from school in a completely unrelated fashion from any assignment, science fair or school project. Why? Because they just thought it would be cool.

Awesome! I agree: cool!

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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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Must Watch: The best Prezi of the Year!

A colleague of mine, Dr. Jean-Marie Muhirwa, recently returned back from the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) E-Learn 2011 World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare & Higher Education held in Honolulu, Hawaii on 18-21 October 2011. He told me about one keynote presentation that had a very high impact on the audience and after seeing it myself, I have to agree that it's one of the best prezi-type presentations I have ever seen. If you are new to Prezi, then check their website out. I asked Jean-Marie to give us a little summary of the morning of this presentation, and this is what he wrote.

The Techno Troubadour and Teacherpreneur by Amy Burvall and Herb Mahelona was undoubtedly the most popular keynote presentation of the conference. The big Hawaii Ballroom at the Royal Sheraton was packed despite the fact that it was schedule at 8:30-9:30 am, a bit early by Waikiki standards where there is so much to do and even more to see 24/7. Most of the attendees grabbed a muffin or a croissant and a hot drink form the tables at the huge entrance hall and rushed in the room. Everyone was eager to secure a good spot, close to the stage and to the big screen. Because of their creative work, the presenters have arguably become superstars in the field of EdTech. They were featured in a Washington Post article and are regularly interviewed scores of by mainstream and specialized publications, mostly in North America and in Europe. No small accomplishment for what started as a collaborative effort from a World History teacher (Burvall) and a technology specialist (Mahelona), both from Hawaii. The result was the successful History for Music Lovers to teach history online through music parody. Over the last few years this partnership took the initial project to new heights by addressing some of the most fundamental and complex issues related to online learning, creativity, copy rights, social justice, etc. No wonder the resulting prezi made Educational Technology scholars, academics and practitioners from around the world rub elbows that early in the morning on October 19 2011. Although there were a few glitches during the playback, especially since it had to be fast-forwarded to selected videos due to time constraints, it looked like the engaging prezi stole the show to its creators’ live presentation. However, the packed conference room shrunk to less than 20 attendees during the Keynote conversation with Burvall and Mahelona, scheduled 10:00 – 11:00 am the same day. Not blessed with the gift of being everywhere at once, I had to follow the crowd to equally inviting concurrent sessions. The one I was heading to was entitled’ A Novel Pedagogical Evaluation Model for Educational Digital Storytelling Environments by colleagues from Greece.

• Gosh, I wonder how much time they spent putting together the whole thing, one attendee asked me unexpectedly while we were exiting the room.
• A lot, I bet!... That’s all I had the time to reply before our paths diverged.

On my way to the next presentation, I overheard another attendee mentioning to his friends that he was impressed by the engaging prezi but couldn’t quite see how he could possibly harness its potential to benefit his online students. There you go! Even the prezi of the year didn’t escape the rule: there is no meeting of academics and professional s without hard questions. Assuming the technical skills and the subject matter expertise are warranted as it was the case in the Burvall-Mahelona partnership, where do you find time and pedagogical skills to design a prezi that is worthwhile to your students? A good question to ponder during the upcoming holidays while enjoying the best prezi of the year.

So after seeing the prezi, what do you think? Any juicy tidbits in there that are interesting to you? If so, leave a comment below.

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Don’t use Facebook for teaching your class – use Edmodo!

If you are like me, you probably had not heard about Edmodo until right now. I had never heard of it until it flew across my twitter stream in a posting from a colleague. So what is it? It’s a web-based social network space for teachers and students. Its safe and easy Facebook-like interface allows the class to collaborate, connect, share content, access homework, etc. It’s free for both students and teachers. To appeal to today’s mobile generation it also has both iPhone and Android apps. So the idea of anywhere, any place, any device learning can be truly experienced using Edmodo. Here’s the Edmodo at a glance video. Have a look at it and let us know if you think this would be good for your students by leaving a comment below.



Afterwards, check out the Edmodo in Action page that showcases several examples on how Edmodo can be useful in Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, and Math clashttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifses. There are also examples of how Edmodo can be good for teacher professional development and for parents to http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giffeel connected to their children’s learning.

There has been a lot of controversy about the appropriateness of teachers 'friending' their students on Facebook ... Edmodo eliminates all this. It's task specific; it's for school. No more blurry lines between personal life and school life. It's simple, it works, and it's easy. Edmodo is like a learning management system but with all the boring linear structure taken out and all the fun of community building injected into it. I like that shift. So will your students.

Note: In Dec 2011, it was reported that Edmodo raised 15 million dollars in funding to expand their operation. Interesting.

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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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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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Don’t police plagiarism! Instead design assignments that cannot be plagiarized.

Who says Facebook is a useless waste of time? This morning on my ride to work I was checking my Facebook on my iPhone (don’t worry - I was not driving!). I saw a post by a friend of mine on my news feed who was sharing a post by a friend of his entitled “NYU Prof Vows Never to Probe Cheating Again – and Faces a Backlash.” The link brought me to the article from the Chronicle of Higher Education that instantly riveted me to its text. It is a fantastic story of the real life struggles of university teachers in the war against plagiarism. You just have to read it before you continue on with this post. So take a break right now, go read that article and then come back here.


OK – so now that you’ve read the article I hope you agree with me that it is definitely interesting. What intrigues me about it is the last paragraph that provides some options on a different approach: designing assignments that cannot be plagiarized. Realistically, I think it is difficult to design assignments that are completely void of any risk of plagiarism; however, assignments can be designed that minimize the risk considerably (i.e. they provide disincentives to plagiarism). I’ve got a few ideas (most are applicable to the online classroom as well as the face-to-face classroom) and many of them involve student-to-student interaction, which is a bonus to those instructors that are seeking to make their courses more interactive:

1. Group work. In my experience as a student, instructor and instructional designer, group work places additional pressures on students to avoid plagiarism. It is probably because the risk is greater. Should plagiarism be detected then the entire group risks sharing the same consequence. By using this student-to-student collaborative approach you also put additional responsibilities on students to develop their intra-group communication and teamwork skills. Skills that are required in every workplace! Bonus!


2. Discussion. When it comes to expressing one’s idea in a discussion forum posting online that might be about 100-250 words in length or in a structured discussion in the face-to-face classroom, plagiaristic behaviours do not seem to immediately rise to the surface in most students. Most students can manage well in this form of cooperative student-to-student participatory activity. Therefore, designing a component of your assessment scheme devoted to discussion will be wise choice.


3. Presentations. Once a students, has the additional pressure of having to share their ideas to the class in public, then the desires to plagiarize the work may be quenched to some degree. Public display is the driving factor here. Combine this presentation approach with the group work approach and then there could be a synergistic effect to the plagiarism disincentive.


4. Peer review. In some courses it is difficult to avoid having a term paper in the assessment scheme – so plagiarism can become attractive to students in this scenario. So what strategy can be employed to discourage plagiarism in this setting? I can think of two ideas. The first is to have the first draft of the paper be subjected to peer review. Build into your assessment scheme that each student will select one first draft from a classmate and perform a critique on it. Give them a structure and a rubric for their critical feedback. Have items on the critique rubric represent anti-plagiaristic characteristics such as proper citation format, original work, consistency in voice and style across the paper. Of course, associate grades with this critique exercise so that people have an incentive to do a good job. There’s a chance that this peer feedback could set the student on the right track early in the process should any weaknesses be present. 2) Require that the students post the first draft, the associated critique and then the final paper electronically into an online discussion forum for all class members to see. This public display of one’s work at every stage adds the disincentive to plagiarize because the term paper may be exposed to more eyes than simply the instructor’s.


5. Retain and display past student work for future classes in the form of a public wiki. Frame the term paper assignment in the context of building a repository of knowledge in the field to be shared publicly with the world using a wiki. Each time the course is taught the wiki expands with new student-generated work. The fact that the student term paper will be shared with people outside the classroom may provide additional disincentive to plagiarize.


6. Have student’s build/create something that isn’t a term paper. In physics class have them make a rubber band racecar, test it, calibrate it, document the entire process and then have them race it against classmates at the end of the semester. In biology class, have go out into nature and photograph something themselves, repeatedly over time so as to observe developmental changes, and have them document their findings. In math class, have them go out in the world and collect real life data to use in the assignments. In English class, have them write original short stories and then practice their literary criticism skills by formally commenting on the original work of one of their peers. In history or journalism class, have them go out and interview people as sources for the material in their papers. In any class, have them make a movie or a digital story. By creating something they are working on something new - something different. It is more difficult to plagiarize when the subject matter is ‘new and different’. For most students, it will be more fun to unleash their creativity on the subject then to invest hours trying to devise plagiarisms schemes that will result in an equally creative product.

There are many more ways to design assignments to include disincentives to plagiarism. If you have a good idea, please share it with us below as a comment.

Bonus Tip: Don't do away with proctored final exams. There are already well-established plagiarism protections in these environments. Just avoid making exams worth 60% of the final grade, etc. The pressure to score well on such a high stake assessment can be crushing for many students.

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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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Why are you re-inventing the wheel? Use these education videos!

Almost every day something comes across your Twitter feed which is a golden nugget. A perfect little resource, tool or story that can help you in your practice of being an educator. However, once in awhile you hit the mother lode. Such is the case today with a blog called Open Culture: the best free cultural & educational media on the web. I was compelled to visit the site with their recent posting entitled 125 Science Videos: Our Greatest Hits. Wow – it’s a very appropriately titled post. There’s some great free videos on this list that touch on subjects relating to Astronomy, Space Travel, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, Neuroscience, etc. Some of these videos could be used to augment a distance learning class or they could be shown directly in a face-to-face classroom setting. I took the opportunity to view a few of them. Some particularly interesting ones from my perspective were the Physics of the Bike, the Periodic Table of Videos project, and of course the very funny bit that Technology is Awesome but Nobody is Happy.

There’s a lot more interesting posts on this great Open Culture blog. So quit making plans to re-inventing the wheel by mounting your own video production company. Instead take the time to peruse all these free media objects. There will certainly be some appropriate ones for almost any course topic.

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Student-to-student interaction in small distance courses

I have been asked several times about ideas for injecting student-to-student interaction into distance courses when the enrolment numbers are likely to be low. Some instructors feel that with low enrollment numbers that it might be better to design an assessment scheme that contains only individual work. However, I feel differently. I think that one of the factors that determines the satisfaction level of a student with a particular course is the community of learning that was present during the semester. To have a community student-to-student interaction is required. So despite a very short class list, you can still form an effective learning community. Some things you could consider include:

1. Discussion. It’s the gold standard in cooperative student-to-student interaction. The deliverables are still individual but the students need each other in order to complete the tasks. There are many different ways you can build a discussion activity. Probably the most common way is for the instructor to post a few questions in the discussion forum at the beginning of the week and then ask students to answer a question in a reply post and then to comment on the answer to another student’s reply post. There are other ideas too. Select one student per week to write a summary or critique about the week’s required readings and then ask the other students to comment on their summary/critique in reply postings. There are many different models you can choose. You are only limited by your creativity here. And be sure to set clear guidelines about the quality and quantity of postings required to earn grades in this activity. These types of activities could work with as few as two or three students.


2. Peer feedback. In courses where there is a major paper or a project, you can inject cooperative student-to-student interaction by assigning students the tasks of reviewing the first draft of a classmate’s final paper/project. Provide them structure/guidance on what the feedback should be like and then have them submit their feedback to both the student and to you. You of course will grade the quality of their feedback. One idea to push the envelope further on this type of assignment is to conduct the entire exercise out in the open in a discussion forum. Have students post their 1st drafts to the discussion forum and assign classmates to post their feedback/reviews of the 1st draft also to the discussion forum. Students can benefit by seeing 1st drafts of papers/projects of others as well as the feedback each person received. Of course, the graded piece at the end conducted by the instructor should be kept confidential and not be placed into the discussion forum.


3. Group work. Cooperative student-to-student interaction is not the only type; there is also collaborative student-to-student interaction. That’s when you assemble a small team of students and assign them to produce a single group deliverable. In a small class – that equates to one team. It can be a paper, a Powerpoint presentation with speaker notes, a video, a podcast, a project, etc. It doesn’t matter – be as creative as you wish in choosing a deliverable that relates directly back to the learning objectives you are trying to serve. The key to conducting this type of activity is providing supports to help students accomplish this task at a distance. Almost all students will know how to work in a group in a face-to-face setting; however, in distance courses many students have far less experience. So I suggest the instructor prepare three supports: 1) a handout that explains some tips and tricks to effective teamwork at a distance. The handout should be tailored to match the deliverable in the specific course. In addition to discussing the deliverable, it should also discuss basic team functions such as the concept of needing a team leader, the importance of defining expectations between team members and role definition of members to facilitate task assignment, etc. This handout should include a standard team dynamic description (Bruce Tuckman’s model is the standard). 2) A mandatory Learning Team Charter. This requires students to create a document that contains all their contact information (including skype/twitter/facebook/IMs/TextMsgs), their expectations for the project, their personal strengths, weaknesses and interests. This document is central to starting the team off on the right foot with their communication strategy, and 3) Advice on tools. Create a private discussion forum for them where they can communicate, advise them that they can use brainstorming tools (like WallWisher - see this post) to generate ideas for their group paper/projects, advise them that they can use a wiki to collaboratively author a single document without emailing multiple versions of the document over and over, advise them that they can use a file repository service (like dropbox) to share centrally resources they collect while conducting research on their paper/project. One other important aspects of group work at a distance is that a component of the final grade MUST include peer evaluation. I suggest the component be fairly large – like 20%. 20% of the grade for this assignment should be based on a confidential evaluation of their group members that students submit only to the instructor at the end of the course. This gives incentives to students to perform at a high level in the team activity. Let’s face it – group work at a distance is an important skill to develop because it is increasingly present in almost every workplace. So giving students the opportunity to develop these skills in university courses is very worthwhile.

The above three categories of ideas are not exhaustive. There are many more ways in which you can inject student-to-student interaction into a web-enabled distance course even if the enrollment numbers are low. What are your ideas? Leave a comment below.

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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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