Unstoppable

Another book recommendation: Unstoppable: Finding Hidden Assets to Renew the Core and Fuel Profitable Growth. Not to be confused with the movie Unstoppable starring Wesley Snipes. This book was recommended by the President of St. Petersburg College, Dr. Carl Kuttler. It's not about distance learning, but more about improving your organization by tapping those hidden gems and highlighting what you do best.



I see Kirkwood is starting late today. Ouch. It might rain here. It's a bit windier than this picture shows.

Angel

We are in the process of collecting data on potential LMS. With that in mind, I attended the session in homage of Angel. Their LMS does provide some interesting potential learning and communication opportunities that others do not. Here is a quick list:

• WhoDunIt - report for instructor down to the click on who did what when and where
• Agents - Automated tasks (e.g. send email to students who scored too low on a test)
• Team - group work (I know other's have this, but does it work?)
• Tokens - replace variables with context specific information (e.g. student names)
• Dashboard reporting - at a glance review of course stats
• Variables can be communicated to Flash and back again
  
• IMS export/import - allows for quick and easy sharing of content across LMS

There are probably more, but these were the focus of the talk. Later I met the presenter and our Iowa Rep. It will be interesting to see if faculty at Kirkwood are equally impressed with Angel's take on the LMS product.

You can tour Angel and request a sandbox at their site. Angel is also making some interesting roads into (and in) Second Life.

Virtual Orientations

Presenters from Tri-C explained their set up to deliver live training events for online learners. They focused on using the LMS (Blackboard) and not so much on study habits, learning strategies, etc. They used Adobe Connect, but are in the process of reviewing potential, more cost-effective systems. It sounded like the only feature Adobe didn't provide that they wanted was break-out rooms.

There are plenty of other live, web-meeting type software out there. Adobe is cool since it is entirely flash-based, needing no extra downloads. Few probably know this, but Kirkwood has a software called iLinc that does the same thing. I have been looking at that for virtual instructor training. Never really thought about it for student training -- we have a limited seat number.

A website is available with a recorded example of what they are doing.

"Students like it."

I don't doubt that. But I have to wonder how much they need all this. Seems like a big investment and maybe it doesn't much matter. They are doing some comparative testing now. Perhaps next conference they will report on their findings.

They also mentioned a software called Zoho that begs some checking out.

Online Instructor Competencies

This session was out there, but I kind of liked it. He started by asking if there were other presenters in the room and had them announce what it was they were presenting on. A mini-commercial for up-coming sessions if you will. And then he asked if there were any stand out learning moments that had happened thus far at the conference. It was only the second session though so this one seemed a bit odd.

The actual presentation was loosely centered on his journey in working toward competencies for online instructors. He has a blog that should be interesting to watch: Desiderata. The presentation powerpoint is there.

"We tend to confuse activity with progress."

He mentioned he studied Philosophy as an undergrad, and that certainly showed (made me jealous really -- I wish I could speak more philosophically without getting in over my head so quickly).

If I followed him correctly, here are some steps to his journey:

1. First answer: How does learning occur? -- This might take some time, don't rush into it.
   
2. Come up with categories of competencies -- He started with the competencies as listed from the Illinois Online Course Evaluation project (Personal, Instructional Design, Social, Assessment, Technical, Pedagogical, Administrative)
3. Choose which competencies you will focus on.
   

From here the idea is to train instructors with these competencies in mind. We tend to focus on technical and perhaps are missing other opportunities. I'm left wondering if faculty feel they could use some more assistance in other areas.

Quality Matters

Prince George Community College has employed the QM rubric for several years now to review their courses. They follow the QM process to the letter so that their courses can have the "QM Seal of Approval". Some interesting facts from their presentation:

• FY 2008, reviewed 25 courses
• 25 courses =@ $11,000 (no chump change)
• $250/review chair, $150/reviewer (3 reviewers/course)
  
• 3 part time ("Duties as assigned") staff/faculty coordinating process
• 15-30% of their time at work dedicated to this process
  
• Dept Chair decides which courses to review
• Payment to reviewers for incentives
• (reviewing possibility of bonus to instructor/designers)

Biggest question is still out there: Does quality matters really matter? It's a tough question to answer. Data hasn't really been collected yet. Of course I would claim that the quality of a course could be improved by making it look more professional, but does that do anything to affect the learning outcomes? And if it does, is it worth @$440/course?

Naturally, there are other models. The DL Teach and Learning Group is currently looking into some of these. I'm looking forward to what they (we) find.

worst practices

Opening Keynote, Dr. Myk Garn, gave a nice little talk, with powerful images (he was a photography instructor), about learning from our worst practices. Learning best from my mistakes has certainly been true in my life and in teaching. He enhanced his presentation with mistake testimonials from the attendants. Good fun, and certainly good lessons learned.

When I started at Kirkwood, I often suggested that faculty incorporate discussion into their classes -- at least for those who did not use it already. Most told me about how terrible their experience had been in the past and so were not interested in discussing discussion. This always left me feeling strange, because while they learned a lesson from their failure, their solution was simply to avoid that behavior altogether. It seemed they had learned the wrong lesson.

Dr. Garn has a website: worstpractices.org. I haven't looked much, but it could grow into something interesting. He certainly has some insights... "Learning to fail in an organized manner" -- I like that.

He recommended The Innovator's Dilemma and talked some about sustaining vs disruptive innovations. He did not mention, to my recollection the next volume, The Innovator's Solution, and I probably shouldn't read into that too much, so draw your own conclusion. In any case, it's interesting to think about how we handle innovation. Careful planning? Or more of a "Fire - Ready - Aim" approach? Part of it, I think, is personality. But if we temper our personality to suit the type of innovation perhaps more successful failures will occur.

He didn't mention one of my favorite books, "The Logic of Failure", but I think it relates, so I did. Hey, it's my blog.

e-Learning Conference 2008

Made it a little on the wrinkled side. Flights were fine, some traffic in Orlando, but that's the price you pay for large cities.

The sun is rising now. The day beckons discussion about learning at a distance (and surfing). I can see a few surfers heading out to catch some waves already. I'm still drinking coffee and looking over the conference agenda. I have a pretty good idea which sessions I will attend today, but I will carefully choose my seat in case I need to change my mind and make a quick exit.

If there are particular questions about teaching and learning at a distance anyone wants me to watch for, let me know.

iPod Quiz

The folks at Respondus have added an interesting publishing feature to their test generation software. The software will now let you save the test for the iPod Quiz feature. If you already have your self-test questions loaded in Respondus, this will be a simple option to provide students. If you don't, it's 100% possible to download your questions from CE6 and then republish them for the iPod. Pretty nice. Can't say too many students will use it, but giving more options is certainly what counts.

50 Story Sites

From Alan Levin on CogDogRoo we can quickly explore and evaluate 50+ tools for presentation and story creation on the web. Plenty to look at here. Most interesting might be the Powerpoint conversion and sharing sites. I like the concept of timeline tools but I wasn't overly impressed with any of the embedded styles.

YouTube Lectures

UCBerkeley is using YouTube to host and deliver course lectures, visiting scholar events and marketing videos. Such a simple and useful vehicle.