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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Quickly and Easily Create a Historical Timeline Handout

I know that this blog talks about educational technology and that the readership often examines these postings to receive tips on how to use new tools for learning. But sometimes, I am compelled to write about an old tool particularly if the old tool can be used quickly and easily to create something useful.

Today I stumbled accross a nice tutorial video (1 min 39 secs long) on how to use MS-Excel 2007 to make a timeline depicting a series of historical events. The output it makes would be great as a handouts to students in class or via distance, and what I love best about this tutorial is that it really walks you through step-by-step. So if you have never used Excel before you can still accomplish this task easily.

The tuorial video as well as the associated text-based instructions are produced by Microsoft Education. If you have never visited their site, it's worth it. They have a fantastic page that lists all their how-to articles pertaining to several of their software programs including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Publisher and Windows Live Movie Maker. The topics are quite varried and some other good articles include developing an interactive story in PPT and creating a class newspaper in Publisher.

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Is Google good for education? Take a LitTrip or explore an Art Museum thanks to Google

Ben Daley, Chief Academic Officer and COO at High Tech High, has recently posted a lovely list of 24 Google products that have an application to the field of education. I knew about the educational applications of some of these products already: YouTube (1, 2, 3), Google Scholar, Body Browser. However, there are many on this list that are new to me. Here are two products that caught my eye in particular:

1. GoogleLitTrips. Basically, it leverages the Google Earth platform to intertwine geography with reading novels. Check out this recent article in the National Post on the subject.
   Also, have a look at this video featuring Jerome Burg as he describes the GoogleLitTrip concept. It won a Microsoft Education Award in 2010!

2. Google Art Project. Google has partnered with some world class museums to bring their artwork to students anytime and anywhere. Using the Google Street View technology, students can explore museums and access high resolution images of artwork. They can even listen to audio tours while exploring paintings. Check out this video below introducing the Art Project.

Do you have a favourite Google product that is a great fit with education? If so let us know by leaving a comment.

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Re-thinking assignment late penalties in distance courses? Is it time to think outside the box or not?

David Truss recently posted a fantastic commentary on a blog post by Tom Schimmer entitled: Enough with the Late Penalties. The subject is about late penalties in school. Essentially the argument they both make is that if you examine the objectives of most courses, rarely is there an objective that relates to punctuality or ability to meet deadlines. If this is the case then why do the large majority of courses issue marks (i.e. penalties!) to students based on when they hand in their work? It's a fantastic argument that I feel is very thought provoking.

I can think of three reasons for late penalties in distance courses:

1. Most assignments are formative assessments and in order for them to have a chance to function as such they need to be submitted and graded prior to the student beginning work on subsequent assignments. Removing late penalties and theoretically allowing students to hand in their material anytime during the course may circumvent the benefits of the formative assessment-feedback cycle.


2. Cheating. Students that hand their assignments in ‘early’ and receive their feedback can share the feedback with other students who have not yet submitted their work. For assignments that have specific answers (unlike large essay assignments) this opens a large potential avenue for cheating. Some people may argue that the instructor could simply delay giving feedback on this assignment until all submissions have been received but I think that’s equally dangerous. Students these days want prompt feedback – not delayed feedback.


3. How about instructor marking? As an instructor I can be more efficient, objective and consistent if I mark all related assignments in the same condensed timeframe (preferably on the same day). By allowing students to hand in their material anytime, then the instructor will be marking the same assignments on various days and consistency may falter.

Are there more reasons that I have missed? While I like the noble idea of not penalizing students for the date at which they submit their assignments if the course objectives do not address aspects related to punctuality, etc., I think the three reasons I have presented above are important enough that I would not want to ignore them.

What do you think about late penalties? Should they be abolished or not? Why? Is the only possible penalty 'marks'? Leave a comment below.

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eLearning – do we know what the heck we are doing? Are we in a rut?

Trent Batson, executive director of The Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning, has just published a thought provoking article in Campus Technology (dated 19 Jan 2011). As a practitioner in the field of eLearning I read Trent’s article with great interest. Many of the points he touched upon really rang true to me. For example, he writes: “The shift in education is away from learning autonomously to learning collaboratively.” This statement applies broadly to education and I feel it is important to highlight this concept in an eLearning and distance education context. When I am a member of a Course Development Team that develops web-enabled courses, too often I slip into the rut of placing the academic content first in my priority list while placing student-to-student collaborating and interaction as a much lower priority. Why do I do this? I think there are several reasons:

1. It’s easier (and faster) to put together content then it is to put together meaningful student-to-student collaboration experiences. Content is easily sourced with the maturation of the Internet and professors do not have unlimited amounts of time to devote to course development activities.


2. Most professors have more experience putting together content than designing meaningful student-to-student collaboration experiences. Professors are content experts and many lack the specialized training in educational design.


3. Some members of academic departments still believe that content is king! The perception exists that allocating some student energy towards collaboration only decreases the amount of time they have to spend learning the content and that this is a non-desirable effect. Some of these same people believe that teaching and learning is exclusively about lectures and textbooks. Some of those same professors build assessment schemes that test only a student's ability to regurgitate content. In the end what does the degree mean? That the student is good at memorizing? Does the workplace need the majority of staff to be good at memorizing?


4. There is some student push-back to collaboration and interaction especially at a distance. Many provide the all too familiar complaints such as “it’s too hard”, “I hate group work”, etc. Well – being a productive person in the workplace REQUIRES interaction and group work with other staff (some of which are not geographically co-located). So despite being perceived as “difficult or hard”, collaboration is a required skill to master early in all disciplines.

Reading articles, like Trent’s, help situate and realign myself better in the big picture of education. Have a look his article and let us know if any points ring true to you. Leave a comment below

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Should I buy books about technology in education? Answer: NO!

This post is not intended to offend Barnes & Noble or any other book seller. I received a great question over the weekend asking if I could “help finding a good book about technology in post secondary education” and I had to take a couple of days to think about it. I have some fantastic books on the shelf about Instructional Design but I have very few about Educational Technology. Why? Well, I think it is difficult to find a one-stop resource book that describes the best practices in using technology in post-secondary education. There are a few factors that come into play that make this challenging:

• Technology is an enabler, not a driver when it comes to sound instructional design and course delivery. So the front end design analysis must be done to identify the objectives that you want to accomplish in your course. Once the objectives are clearly articulated then the best pedagogical tool and strategies can be selected to meet the specific objective. So you see the selection of pedagogical tools/strategies (including technological tools) comes second – not first. So it’s challenging to write a book with a chapter called ‘Virtual Worlds’ because in my view that’s putting technological tools first!


• Pedagogical/technological tools and strategies can be used in the classroom and out of the classroom, and the same tool and strategy may not produce the same results under those two different conditions. Approaches need to be customized according to the setting and also according to the types of students involved.


• Technological tools and strategies change faster than print. So the large majority of information and knowledge about this topic is not found in books – it’s found on the Internet in Personal Learning Networks (PLNs).

So the permutations provided by combining the three points above together contribute to why a good comprehensive book on the subject is difficult to find. If you are a teacher, where does that leave you? How are you supposed to learn about how to select pedagogical tools to meet the needs of you course and your students? Do you just give up?

No you don’t give up silly. You work smarter and you make a commitment to go and learn about what’s out there, and more importantly, you find out how it's being used effectively and in what contexts. Here are some strategies that you can personally adopt:

1. Examine your PLN and make sure it is working well for you. The goal of the PLN is to provide you with a support system of like-minded people asking like-minded questions and together you can act as a large professional development resource for each other. Invest time to perfect your PLN - the return on the investment will be measurable. If you need more info about PLNs, I’ve written about them before.


2. There’s an implication in point 1 above: that you do not have to re-invent the wheel. Just use someone else’s wheel IF it meets the needs of the course and the needs of the students. So the challenge is in sharing ideas with your PLN. There are some very effective ‘tricks’ for sharring ideas on the Internet. For example, Twitter has this thing called hashtags which allow users to tag their postings using keywords. For example, the hashtag “#edtech” is a key word that you can imagine might be useful to follow to learn about the topic of educational technology. Well, you can follow it directly using your favourite twitter client (like Tweetdeck for example), or you can follow it indirectly by using a hashtag aggregating service like paper.li. This service can display a selection of Twitter postings from the last 24 hours having any specific hashtag and as a bonus the postings are presented in a nice tabloid newspaper style. Check out the paper.li newspaper for the hashtag #edtech. This link refreshes with all new content filtered off the Twitter stream every 24 hours. Other hashtags like #elearning, #education, #teaching may also be interesting to look at regularly.


3. Points 1 and 2 above are great but there is a critical piece missing: you need to give back. Start telling the world (i.e. your PLN) about your successes and your failures in your teaching. By taking the time to articulate your experiences you will be amazed at what benefits can come to you directly. In my view, being reflective of your practice as a teacher is a requirements for growth in your proficiency. So write a blog, contribute to a wiki, post to twitter or update your status on Facebook. It doesn’t matter how you do it – it just matters that you DO it.

If you have any other strategies for learning about best practices in educational technology, feel free to share them by clicking the comment link below.

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Lookout Google Maps – Here comes Google Body!

Is there anything Google can’t do? That’s the question I asked myself yesterday after my first experience with Google Body. What Google has done for street maps, it is now beginning to do for the human body. Google Body is a virtual system that involves an anatomical human model where you can peel back the layers of the body to visualize everything from muscles, to organs, to nerves to bones (all labelled and all searchable!) – and the entire thing is web-based! Granted you have to install the most up to date version of Firefox or Chrome which supports the WebGL standard but that’s a very small price to pay to get a glimpse of this FREE tool. I learned about it from my friend Katia Hamati. She’s an Instructional Designer with Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean. In fact, she has gone on to create a short video that demonstrates some of the features of Google Body – so you can view this video before you dive into Google Body yourself.



For a first release, they have done a very respectable job. Some detail is missing and I really hope that Google continues to develop this tool to add more detail to it. I would love to see it slowly morph into a very robust and complete depiction of the physical structures in the human body. The fact that it is FREE for everyone to use is just fantastic. Do you teach Biology, Anatomy, Physiology, etc? If so, please leave a comment below about how you feel about this resource.

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Transform YouTube into an ACTIVE learning tool for your students

Nina Arjarasumpun, from Knewton Inc., was kind enough to write me an email out of the blue earlier this week. In her email she wanted to introduce me to a novel way in which the GMAT Prep team at Knewton was leveraging YouTube’s free video hosting service. She likened their work to the classic ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books that are popular with kids. In fact, it is simple branching logic where the system presents different content based on the decisions made by the user. The staff at Knewton are translating this simple idea into practice in the context of multiple choice questions using video segments. It’s awesome. I tried a few of their questions while wearing my student hat and the logical branching system coupled with the videos really makes the learning active and fun. Next term I am teaching a distance course in chemistry, and I will try to make a few of these types of learning objects to try out on my students. I’m excited to see how it works for me.


Chris Black at Knewton has prepared a great blog post that describes how to make these interactive logical branching videos. It’s a great posting that explains all the details. Very cool! If you currently use a similar strategy in one of your courses or if you end up trying this out in your course, let us know about it by leaving a comment below.

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No, No, NO! People remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they see? It’s ALL wrong!

This is old news but it is news that some people in education still have not grasped. I was having a casual conversation with a professor on the weekend and he explained to me that people learn by doing and that well established research supports that people remember more about the task when they do it as compared to when the simply read or hear about it. The first part of his statement sat well with me. I fully understand that people learn by doing. However, the second part made alarm bells go off in my head. I know that this part of his statement is controversial. How many educators believe this statement to be gospel? Well, if you are one of them, then you have to read this great debunking article on the subject by Will Thalheimer written over 4 years ago. It’s the story of how non-existent research can change the world ;-)

Go read it now.

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5(+1) Biggest Mistakes in Online Education

Guillermo Ramirez from Politecnico Grancolombiano in Bogota Columbia has shared a provocative presentation on SlideShare that attempts to bring us back to the basics of what education is and what education is not. His presentation highlights that the primordial essence of the concept of education is strongly rooted in a relationship between teacher and learner. He goes on to caution us that 21st century technology should not replace the requirement for student-instructor interaction. The presentation is a good reminder that educational models that put the learner first, the instructor second, and the technology third are models that are congruent with long proven educational concepts. Conversely, models that put technology higher than 3rd on that list are in danger of producing unwanted outcomes. Have a look at the slides below. Do you agree with Guillermo’s argument? Why or why not? Leave a comment below.

The 5 big mistakes in virtual education

View more presentations from guiramirez.

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Use Twitter to Increase your GPA!

Rey Junco, a professor at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania, recently communicated the results of a research study where he showed that judicious use of Twitter infused into face-to-face classes in the Pre-Health Professional Program resulted in an increase in student GPA from 2.3 (Non-Twitter control group) to 2.8 (Twitter experimental group). Also, he showed a significant increase in student engagement (as measured by the National Survey of Student Engagement tool) in the Twitter experimental group when compared to the non-Twitter control group. Together these findings suggest that social media and technological supports for the classroom student may be beneficial to junior students. Check out his video summary of his study below. What do you think about these conclusions? Leave a comment below.

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Distance instructors need to be more Responsive!!!

Have you ever wondered about what instructor behaviours were considered valuable by post-secondary students? Have you ever wondered if the expectations are different between in-class students and online distance students? I think these are good questions. I have wondered about this issue and the possible differences based on the delivery mode of the course as well. I was fortunate to attend a good presentation by Albert Johnson, a Senior instructional Designer at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where he described the findings of just such a study that was undertaken with data collected in 2008. The top 9 instructor behaviour characteristics actually matched in both in-class and online distance delivery modes; however, the order of priority is different. Here's a summary of the rankings as indentified by both in-class and distance online students:

Rank	In-class	Distance Online
1	Respectful	Respectful
2	Knowledgeable	Responsive
3	Approachable	Knowledgeable
4	Engaging	Approachable
5	Communicative	Communicative
6	Organized	Organized
7	Responsive	Engaging
8	Professsional	Professional
9	Humorous	Humorous

When I examine the rankings and compare the two groups, I note that one instructor behaviour skyrockets from 7th place in-class to 2nd place in distance online courses: responsiveness. Shown below are four key quotations from distance online students which provide insights into their expectations on the subject of instructor responsiveness:

"If you have to wait WEEKS to get a response from a professor, it can be highly frustrating. Also helps gain trust between the student and instructor. After all, if I can never get a response, it leaves me with little faith that if I ever had a problem with something in the course, the professor would be of any use."

"Responding to postings and questions in a timely fashion is important for students in web courses. Waiting for days or sometimes even weeks to get a response or even worse no response is extremely frustrating. Thankfully there are sometimes other students that can help out."

"Students are online at different times and are completing course material at different rates. Receiving timely feedback on email requires that a professor be available more often than an on-campus professor would be."

". . . it is important that profs make themselves available for students to be able to contact them especially in key points of a term such as midterms, finals and papers. When it comes to web based courses e-mail and telephone comes in to play."

After attending this presentation and examining the study paper (found here), I think most of this is common sense. However, it serves to underline that responsiveness is a sensitive issue with distance students. The successful distance instructor will strive to be responsive and available to students in an above average fashion (and, possibly, in increasingly non-traditional timeframes such as weekends) when compared to the in-class instructor. With the popularity of online distance courses steadily rising, clearly, this will have long-term inplications for instructor work-load and work-balance. What do you think?

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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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Take your students back in time with video!

In September 2010, the YouTube Time Machine (YTTM) was born. The concept is simple. Select a year anywhere from 1860 to today and this service cues up videos found on YouTube pertaining to that year. Everything from TV commercials, to news reports, to music videos, to sports and movies. It’s quite the trip down memory lane to dial in the year you were born for example. I was born in 1969, and the first thing that the YTTM played for me was a very disturbing TV Commercial for the International House of Pancakes. I can’t imagine what the marketing geniuses were thinking when they made that! Anyway, this fantastically simple service can have some very interesting applications to teaching and learning. The obvious examples of history or sociology courses come to mind. Want to know a bit about the culture of a particular year? Well then YTTM is a great place to spend 15 minutes of time. Check it out and let us know if you integrate this tool into your teaching or learning by leaving us a comment below.

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Conversation starters with your students online?

Are you an online teacher in a sociology or psychology class? Do you sometimes scour the web for multimedia tidbits that you can use with your students to start a discussion? I think many teachers online are searching for those lovely tidbits that are inspirational, interesting and moving so as to spark learning and ultimately to fuel communication and discussion between students online.

Well, today I came across a neat website: StoryCorps. If you visit their About Us page, this is the first sentence:

"StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives."

I learned a long time ago that truth is often stranger than fiction so real life accounts of people’s lives can be a great spark for discussions in any humanities field. StoryCorps has conducted over 30,000 interviews many of which are available in audio files on their website. They are short stories which makes them digestible easily. Many are VERY interesting.

One of the latest ventures by StoryCorp is to create animated shorts from a small selection of their stories. Directed by Mike and Tim Raush, the first five shorts are fantastic. Check them all out! Humanities teachers will have a field day with these animated shorts. I am sure. Enjoy.

If you have an interesting way to integrate an animated short video into your online class, leave a comment below and let us know your tips and tricks!

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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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