Online Learning

A Piece of the Online Pie

April 21, 2015 by Mary Wiseman

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?

Collaborative Ideas Instead of Discussions

April 16, 2015 by mwiseman@baypath.edu

Over the last year, I have been working with the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction online courses. With the program director I have developed some online collaborative activities that can work in place of the plain vanilla discussions so often seen in online courses. Click on any of the images to enlarge. The first is a VoiceThread embedded, so students can mimic a book talk-round table discussion.

The second is a Google Hangout, where students virtually met weekly and the Google Hangouts were recorded and then embedded on a content page, within Canvas, so students could refer back to the Hangouts.

The third concept was to have a class of students all simultaneously watch a full-length movie while also engaging in a simultaneous discussion. For this activity I embedded the movie on a content page within Canvas instructing the students how to download the movie. Students were told to open the movie in one window, then open the discussion forum in a second window. The professor will have the students start and stop their movies at a specific times so students can then engage in the discussion.

At this writing, both the VoiceThreads and Google Hangouts have been very successfully implemented. The movie viewing will occur at the end of the month.

Beyond Read, Write & Discuss

April 4, 2015 by Mary Wiseman

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.

The full paper can be downloaded here.

MHE622 – Week Eight – Reflections on Personalized Learning, Supporting Adult Learners & Concluding Thoughts

December 17, 2014 by Mary Wiseman

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.

Build on previous learning
Require critical reflection
Provide structured feedback
Use check-in quizzes
Monitor students’ participation
Pick up the phone

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/

MHE622 Foundations of Online Learning-Final Presentation-Mobile Learning

December 13, 2014 by Mary Wiseman

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.

MHE622 – Week Six – Reflections on Best Practices in Online Course Design

November 30, 2014 by Mary Wiseman

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?

How will I ever be able to suggest ‘purposes’ for tools that are: easy to use, have some relevance to the course content and goals, and enhance student learning?
How can our Online Learning & Digital Team best teach our faculty?

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 😉

Day One @OLC 2014

October 31, 2014 by Mary Wiseman

The Online Learning Consortium 20^th Annual International Conference #ALN14 is being held at the Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando at the heart of Walt Disney World. Founded back in 1992 from funding by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation [formerly known as the Sloan Consortium], this year Sloan has undergone some rebranding as @OLC moves into new markets worldwide. This name change signifies where Sloan has been and where it is headed-online.

Leadership & Administration and Faculty & Student Engagement are the primary tracks this year with the all-encompassing Undefined track serving to contain the balance of the hundreds of sessions offered this year. One event coordinator told me there were 2200 attendees with more offerings than any previous year.

I arrived interested in hearing more about:

Mobile learning
Competency-based learning
How others have been tackling the issues of orientating faculty into online learning?
What others are doing to incorporate online community for their faculty?

Day 1 Wednesday, October 29, 2014 did not disappoint.

I started #ALN14 by listening to Jason Rhode of Northern Illinois University speak about Designing Competency-Based Self-Paced Online Workshops for Introducing Faculty to Online Teaching Technologies.

Granted Northern Illinois University [NIU] has a much larger ‘scale’ than Bay Path in their approach to orientating their faculty to online learning-however, they do many things we already do:

survey faculty for prior knowledge,
allow faculty to work in a sand-box [or Master] course,
create an individualized plan. We do this, albeit a little less formally than NIU,
and offer a self-paced learning environment.

A few takeaways I would like to see us implement in our online faculty orientation are:

Offer a slightly more formalized ‘learning contract’ for our online faculty. This might be a little more time consuming [however, I’m sure we could find some technology to track] and I believe it would legitimate the process. We could augment our orientation with a couple of ‘free’ perks as well, such as offering:
- a little more ‘pre-start’ guidance and objectives for the incoming faculty
- badges for completion
- an approach to the potential of an online certification. This might dove-tail into feeding faculty into the MHE program.
- a gateway leading faculty to our ‘newly developed’ online community.

I attended a session entitled, Building Online Academic Communities with the Commons in a Box, by Matthew K. Gold from City Tech and Grad Center of CUNY. I have been working with WordPress since 2009 and believe it is a great solution for containing an online community [as well as ePortfolios].

Commons in a box is great solution that would give us everything we need to create our own BPU academic online community- and it’s free. We like free.

This would give faculty, student groups, departments etc. virtual space to create:

profile pages
groups
committees
blogs
academic journals and other research
links to social media feeds
a showcase of examples

With the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction Writing Program at the top of my mind, I can easily envision an MFA Cohort page for faculty and students alike, to congregate and share all sorts of information.

Of course, there would be challenges:

maintenance- who is responsible? How often?
interaction fatigue –would this be used by the community? Or, is it overload?
tracking and surveillance-for the community

Yet, the possibilities are:

Communities ARE our Resources- they create our stories
They become our human microphone

This session ended with an interesting quote, by Jim Groom,

‘It ain’t a community without love, feedback, and being there.’

The afternoon keynote speaker Dr. John Medina was one of my favorites of the day. Speaking to an audience of at least 800 people, once he started talking, John barely stopped to breathe. John’s premise revolves around the 12 brain rules. In his talk he spoke about a couple.

Survival: The brain is a survival organ. It is designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment and to do so in nearly constant motion (to keep you alive long enough to pass your genes on). We were not the strongest on the planet but we developed the strongest brains, the key to our survival.

Isn’t it interesting how learning often revolves around sitting still, in a classroom? How might we incorporate some of these brain survival rules into online learning? John went on to explain the impact of exercise.

Exercise: Exercise boosts brain power. The human brain evolved under conditions of almost constant motion. From this, one might predict that the optimal environment for processing information would include motion. Indeed, the best business meeting would have everyone walking at about 1.8 miles per hour. At work, we are in our own way, by incorporating our standing desks!

To get a little sense of John’s energy have a look at this quick video. I think John’s book[s] are a must for my library.

This was just Day One!
How did Leanna and Mary’s presentation on Collaborative Creation go?
Stay tuned for more details.

Online Learning at the Swan & Dolphin

October 29, 2014 by Mary Wiseman

After a long day of travel from the north, I was delighted to be able to step out onto my balcony at the Swan and Dolphin Hotel, in 80 degree weather, to view this sight. I immediately turned off my AC and kept the sliding door open to fresh air and sunshine.

The impeccable groomed grounds Swan and Dolphin Hotel in Disney

Getting a ‘lay of the land’ [which feel to be spread out over acres of flawless green grass and ground, shining pools and palm trees] is a bit of exercise. I’m glad I packed my pair of Converse. After an evening of outdoor relaxation the stroll back to my room I encountered this ‘avenue of the pink palms.

Avenue of the pink palms

Back at my room, I studied the session guide which kept me up well past my usual bedtime. It looks to be a very lively time here at the Online Learning Consortium International Conference 2014.

Evening image of Swan and Dolphin Hotel

Greetings to My MHE622 Colleagues

October 22, 2014 by Mary Wiseman

My hope for this course is to examine current trends in the field and evaluate the impact these trends may have on the future of online education. I am interested in the analysis of various learning theories, with a special emphasis on ‘how’ learners are [and will] incorporate mobile learning into their online studies.

For the past 20 years my career [and professional positions] have almost always been centered on academia and online learning. My own under graduate and first masters degree were completed online [via The New School] while I lived and worked in Beijing, China. I also have a graduate certification, in instructional design, which I also completed fully online.

Currently I am working as an Online Course Builder at Bay Path and work everyday in Canvas. I like to describe my work as being similar to that of a translator, only I translate Professors’ syllabi and learning objectives into online activities and ultimately online courses.

Working with Prof. Leanna James Blackwell

Working with Professor Leanna James Blackwell

As with most of us involved with online learning, over the years, I too have struggled with all sorts of issues- that can occur when learning/teaching online- ranging from getting around Chinese firewalls to working remotely with others [and just about everything in between]. Because of my own experience, I feel I am able to empathize with the challenges others encounter as they work, teach, and learn online.

I enjoy learning and having such a long history with online education I felt this MHE Program would be a natural evolution and help me bridge my background with my future endeavors. My career plans are to incorporate more instructional design, into my daily work, apply the concepts I learn [in this program] to my work, and continue to expand my online repertoire.

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