A Culminating Selection of Work from My Masters of Higher Education Program
Yeah! I have now completed the work necessary to complete my second masters degree. This one is a Masters of Science in Higher Education Administration with a concentration in Online Learning.
Please have a peek at my culminating capstone paper and presentation.
I’ve always loved taking surveys and quizzes to ‘check’ my preferred learning style and I tend to be a Visual/Spatial Learner- d’uh. Recently however, I have come across some ideas and theories that debunk the Learning Style Theories and I have to say, these folks have come compelling ideas.
In fact one woman Tesia Marshik has a debunking theory that says, “We store information in terms of meaning and not according to a sensory mode,” (Website. TEDxUWLaCrosse). What I found interesting in this video and some of Marshik’s theory, dovetailed nicely with Horton’s Absorb, Do & Connect Activities.
Tesia Marshik ends the video expressing how we should not believe in learning styles because we are:
Tesia Marshik says if we give up the concept that there are learning style preferences and focus on things that impact learning and have scientific research to back-up the theories. She states, “All of us are capable of learning in a variety of ways.”
Additionally, here is a list of websites, articles, videos and papers all DeBunking the Learning Style Myth. There are some pretty heavy hitters in there, well worth a glance.
Inside Higher Ed Article
Do you think online faculty would work harder if they were given a piece of the tuition pie?
Today, Inside Higher Ed posted this article A Piece of the Online Pie. There is a third party company, American Partnership, which proposes to do just that.
The online “enabler” company Academic Partnerships plans to share tuition revenue with faculty members at partnering universities as the company prepares a major update of its online education platform.
Notoriously online faculty are underpaid and over worked. Given the opportunity to have a bigger piece of the pie, do you think that incentive would help improve online faculty interaction and performance? Would it improve yours?
And, what do you think of that image/graphic? Look how the 3.0 online game changes learning: mobile devices, multiple languages, student interaction and credentialing….thoughts anyone?
Jill Hubley is a web developer and creates some very amazing visualizations. It takes a very special thinking to envision information the way she does. Look at the NYC Tree Map and roll over the dots. You will see the types of tree listed and you can even filter by tree type.
Online courses rely far too heavily on the read, write and discuss format. This multi-media presentation takes a tongue and cheek approach to explaining how the discussion forum became popular and how online faculty can move beyond this sometimes very boring format.
A transcript of the presentation can be downloaded and read here.
Here is a list of apps that we covered during the day:
More iPad Training is in the plans to incorporate into our regular faculty training workshops.
Personalized Learning:
The Coming Era of Personalized Learning Paths article, posted by my classmate Jill Motyka, caught my attention this week. All during this MHE622 course this topic has been rattling around in the back of my mind. I predict, in the near future, we are going to see more analysis of and course building revolving around what Peter Smith calls ‘personalized learning’ and ‘connected learning’. With all the resources, people, content, etc. available I believe the next natural step is to ‘allow technology’ to bring these together to further the learning for the student -any type of student- and especially college-aged student and adult learners.
Bay Path University’s American Women’s College [TAWC] has their SOUL system of personalizing online learning for their contingency of undergraduate learners and I believe this is one ‘approach to personalized learning.’ However, I think the future will show more approaches that will see more ‘wrangling and curating’ of personalized approaches to learning. I believe these new approaches will even further augment the type of personalized learning TAWC is currently doing.
The wrangling and curating of learning I envision will tap into social networking, big data, and other knowledge bases using the Internet and other technologies. The result of this gathering as Smith concludes will allow us to, “…be able to scale those personalized learning paths—to millions of learners in the coming era.” I also predict that mobile devices and other mobile technologies will aid in distributing this new ‘personalized learning’ to the student.
Working with Adult Learners:
Being a life-long learner and involved, daily, in supporting faculty with delivery of their content to adult learners, the article Six Ways to Support Adult Online Learners, posted by classmate Carol Dykas, seemed interesting and the fact that bullet-pointed articles always attract me. This brief article holds wonderful reminders.
Kelly actually cites Natlaie Peeterse’s findings, “adult learners need to become more aware of how they learn.” Because adult learners come to ‘their learning’ with some prior knowledge adult learners, with some guidance, can become more self-aware and learn how-to learn better. These six tips offer great ideas that I can use when working with online faculty-to remind them to use these ideas with their students and I can use these ideas as I help teach faculty to become better online teachers- it’s a win-win.
Concluding reflections & thoughts about what I have learned overall in the course.
As I reflect back over these very swift moving eight weeks, I feel I have learned much and confirmed much of what I already knew about online learning. Eight weeks ago my initial questions and hopes for this course were to examine current trends in the field and evaluate the impact these trends may have on the future of online education.
I feel especially better able to evaluate the effectiveness of various models of online education and more prepared to articulate the use of a variety of ‘disruptive technologies’ in online learning-and most specifically mobile learning. Many of my questions pertaining to the future, of online pedagogies, still go unanswered, which is normal-who can predict the future. However, having taken this MHE622 course, I feel more confident in articulating my ideas for the future of online education and learning.
References:
Kelly, R. (2012, March 2). Six Ways to Support Adult Online Learners. Faculty Focus. Retrieved December 8, 2014 from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/six-ways-to-support-adult-online-learners/
Smith, P. (2014, November 10). The Coming Era of Personalized Learning Paths (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/coming-era-personalized-learning-paths
Wiseman, M. (2014. October 22). Greetings to My MHE622 Colleagues. [weblog comment]. Retrieved from: http://mwisemanmhe.com/greetings-to-my-mhe622-colleagues/
Here is my Final Presentation for the MHE622 Foundations of Online Learning Course. I researched mobile learning and its impact upon higher education online learning.
MHE622 Wiseman Mobile Learning FINAL Presentation from Mary Wiseman on Vimeo.
A full transcript can be found here along with resources and image references.
Facilitating our online faculty in soaring?
My position at Bay Path University has me deeply involved in researching, synthesizing, training and supporting faculty in the best practices for online course design and delivery. So, I was really focusing in on ideas I could implement as I assist our online faculty to soar with their online courses.
The article entitled, “Three Ways to Breathe New Life into Your Online Courses,” has some very solid advice for implementing Web 2.0 and social media tools into an online course. As I think about the most common issues our online faculty struggle with I wondered “…how to help instructors stay current in resources, tools and lesson planning.” If some of my online faculty still struggle setting up a proper Discussion Assignment within their Canvas course, would they ever be able to handle the appropriate use of these Web 2.0 tools to engage their students?
When our Team uses social media- such as Twitter, Google Plus and Linked In for example, as tools to stay connected to our professional peers, how do we ‘teach’ our online faculty to engage in some of these same practices? The article concluded with, this reassuring concept, “By relying on and enhancing instructor creativity, we can breathe new life into our online courses.” This is food for thought and I kept thinking,about this as I continued reviewing our list of shared resources.
The Pelletier article “What Online Teachers Need to Know,” contains timeless advice for online faculty. I believed the most important piece of wisdom was this key idea, “One of the most effective types of training I have found is to enroll in an online course yourself. This will give you the opportunity to experience what it feels like to be the learner, and will no doubt reinforce the importance of presence, communication skills, engaged discussion, constructive feedback.” I can relate [and agree to this suggestion] yet I was still curious.
Having just met some of the Brown University Online Team, at the NERCOMP Conference earlier this November, I wanted to read more about their “Best Practices for Teaching Online.” I liked how the Brown Team organized the basic practices and supported each with their recommendations. The content was solid, however, I did find some bad links and I felt the information could use some refreshing. That said, I did find a nugget of advice [for faculty] in assessing student work online:
“We want tangible evidence of understanding! To achieve this, we expect that you will work with your instructional designer to provide the student access to relevant content (even if it requires online research outside of Canvas) and challenge the student to use the information he or she discovers to generate evidence of that understanding.
For example: well-designed online courses ask students to produce a variety of “learning artifacts” including projects, papers, discussions, photographs, diagrams, illustrations, videos, recorded interviews, and collaborative projects, whether produced independently or in collaboration with other students or subject-matter experts in the field of study. A wealth of artifacts allows you to assess the student’s ability to synthesize course content in great depth, and with confidence and legitimacy.”
All these ideas can be synthesized into the work I do with my online faculty and particularly how to enlighten them as they soar within their own online courses. I also want to be thinking of these ideas as I support my most challenging faculty in searching for that tangible evidence of their understanding in properly using the Canvas Discussion forums and Assignments 😉
Collaboration during our NERCOMP presentation
Last week I drove to Norwood, MA and presented a session with Gail McKenna revolving around out tactics on Proactive & Reactive Faculty Support here at Bay Path University. We had about 65-70 people show up, some who had driven from as far away as northern Vermont. Our session was first on the agenda and despite the early morning hour, people were really engaging and exchanging ideas with each other.
This is what the Q& A session looked like, from my vantage point. We generated a long list of items that fell into being either a challenge or a solution when supporting faculty.
Here is a summary of the Challenges and Solutions the room of experts came up with. We also had some positive feedback. Here is the results of the evaluation sent our by the conference coordinators: Supporting Faculty Teaching Online Eval. I think people liked the whole day. I found it to be very collaborative imaginative and a really nice way to spend the day-good lunch and snacks too- always important.
| Challenges | Solutions |
| Role Definition | Adjunct faculty who gets paid to support faculty-like a pinch hitter Evening training & 2 days during the summer |
| Buy in-building relationships | Faculty network via a wiki and LMS forum for discussions |
| Hearts & minds – PR | Flex time to support faculty to develop online courses |
| Incentives | Release for faculty to develop: rubrics |
| How to teach online | Use baby steps: first blended or flipped classrooms, then online |
| Tools & the rapid change | Tech literacy |
| Introduction to LMS & to institution- exposure | |
| Provide examples: gallery of best practices, reception to celebrate & an academy to teach | |
| Institutional Quality with learning activities & implementation of technology | |
| Faculty network via a wiki and LMS forum for discussions | |
| Student feedback-evaluations |
