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League for Innovation Conference Report Tom Foster (Chandler-Gilbert Community College) The major buzz was Partnerships and Training. In terms of partnerships, Tom says that it seems like everyone is parterning with everyone else, so both Blackboard and WebCT had long lists of technology firms and content firms as partners (e.g. $10 million deal with Microsoft and Blackbaord). There is more of an emphasis on "plug and play" with courseware systems to allow easier integration of content and features. Blackboard announced a pricing change that is more modular for features and now based on student enrollment. As far as Training, Tom noted that educational institutions are not asking "whether" or "when" to provide informarion and services online, but "how can we offer online learning and maintain quality?" He saw them looking at using courseware systems themselves as tools fo training and faculty development (so faculty experience systems as students), and offering release time for faculty to develop courses. Some participants noted recent articles of large universities that had scaled back efforts for completely online learning and were more focusing on what is termed all over the place as "hybrid" courses- mixtures of technology and face-to-face learning. Some of these studies are showing that these hybrids are more powerful for student learning, and notions of one instructor teaching 500 students was not effective or feasible. Alan noted that this was going to be very important to define these hybrid models as they directly impact the strategic planning and bond planning efforts that aer going to be ramping up next year. Tom relayed a conversation with Vice Chancellor Solley who cited a need for Maricopa to be developing online efforts more collaboratively rather than as individual college effort- she is worried about our tendancy to duplicate efforts. Jim asked if anyone in Maricopa was doing any major research on the effectiveness of online learning (no answers) and suggested it is something we should take seriously. Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) David Weaver (Chandler-Gilbert Community College) For more details, check David's faculty page ("Bear with the 'temporary design' as I am working on something really cool with Shockwave and Monty Python like!") where he has links to information on JiTT, as well as the Physlets (Java applets), and his latest gig, Physics in Context. Do note that David pointed out the nifty buttons he built for that page using CoffeeCup, a free site that has easy tools for creating Java applets. "Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) is a teaching and learning strategy compised of two elements: classroom activities that promote active learning and World Wide Web resources that are used to enhance the classroom component." It does assume the presence of electronic communications between student and teacher, in David's case he used Blackboard, but JiTT is not about specific technology. David credits the idea to Evelyn Patterson at the Air Force Academy, who has used JiTT for several years now. There is an excellent book from Prentice Hall for those that are intersted in the approach. David says it can work in any teaching discipline. Simply, the teacher asks questions of students that they are required to answer 1-2 hours before each class, and the teacher reviews the answers to help guide or adjust the activities of that class based on the student's responses. "It allowed me to decide just before class what I needed to cover based on what the students demonstrated, not based on my guess as to what they should do." This was different for David than grading homework problems, which in the past took about a week, so by the time students got feedback on some content, he had already moved on to a different concept. David said it also allowed him to address misconceptions about Physics right away. In Daivd's implementation, he posted his questions as a Blackbaord quiz item, and he could simply log in as instructor and scan the responses that were listed out. He was not concerned with what student said what response, but scanned to chek thei understanding as a whole- "In a few minutes I could see where the class stood on their understanding of a concept." He did report some challenges with Blackbaord; there was some "wonky" formatting of student responses that were neatly submitted as dash and arrow motion diagrams. He had a lot of trouble with using Physlets- Java applets that do things such as allowing student to manipulate a trajectory of a body in motion to extra location data- they woudl then analze the data in Excel and perform some calculations. In Blackboard, there is no access to the file structure, so there was no way to upload the necessary .jar files. His approach was to make a linkfrom the quiz to another web server where he could set up the files correctly (Tom says this is fixed in Blackboard 6 and WebCT allows full access to the file structure). David gives his student one point credit for doing a "reasonable attempt." He could scan the answers, and if there were no bogus responses, he could then quickly assign points in the Blackboard gradebook based on whether the student attempted the quiz or not. The number of total points was enough in the end to make a grade difference. Bernie felt that there had to be this kind of incentive- "the students that need it the most would not attempt it without an incentive." It was also suggested that the making it an every day effort was important as well to keep students on task- David did enough for about 6 full weeks worth of his courses. According to David, his students thought the method was "a pain in the butt" but he was emphatic about how powerful it was for him as an instructor. He did say there was more focussed discussion on the problems and solutions in class. STAR Student Support for Online Materials Tom Foster (Chandler-Gilbert Community College) The STAR program uses students with technical skills to support faculty. These are students who are learning these skills in this college and in turn get to return the application of these skills to the college. At Chandler-Gilbert, the work done by students has not been in programming or technical support, but more in graphics design and media development for faculty use. The goals of the program are to:
Tom directs the students, and their skills cover areas of HTML, Illistration, Photography, Database development, and Graphic Design. One student also provides logistical and administrative support. Some of the products from these students collaboration with faculty include:
The students are very diligient about securing and filing model releases for any person photographed for web or print uses. They are now developing an online searchable image database that faculty could use for finding graphics for their online or in-class materials. When asked how he finds the students, Tom says he relies on recommendations from the Art department. Jim noted that the images (all done by STAR students) in Tom's presentation demonstrated the value of vivid images in communcication. Pearson eZ.exam Demo (Jameson Shiek, NCS Pearson) We saw a remote controlled presentation via "Centra" and talked via a conferencing telephone. The product sports a "Windows Explorer" type interface for creating tests that should be familior to most users. Questions can be entered or imported from external files. There are numerous question types, in addition to the standard ones, you can also create "Hotspot" type answers (such as clicking at points in a diagram), numeric input where a range of acceptable answers are accepted, and matrix type. Tests can be created via a web interface or via a Windows desktop application. There are many options for test delivery, via secure web sites, a LAN, on paper, soon via NCR Pearson scan forms, and a "secure browser" delivery (where the test taker is locked out of going to other web sites or alt-tabbing to other applications, disabled printing and screen capture). The "secure browser" feature only runs in Internet Explorer. The system has developed APIS to allow communication directly to and from WebCT (and soon, Blackboard level 2 or 3), making seamless the login and the trasnfer of scores from eZ.exam back to the course management system. For more information, we suggest you check with Mike Aragon at Glendale Community College, where they have used the product extensively for the last few years (under its other name as "QuestionMark"). The group repsent did not see a compelling amount of features to influence what they were doing in terms of testing. Respondus Update (Alan Levine) StoryWriterPHP (Alan Levine, Tom Foster) This was a quick recap of the presentation, and there was some interest in further development and access to the template. Many felt like we should spend future meeting time in looking at solutions for developign student portfolios. Next MeetingFeb 1, 2002 at Paradise Valley |
Note: This is an archive of web pages Alan Levine built for the MCLI from 1994-2006. Links will break and errors may occur.
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