Thoughts on having to design a MOOC…

As the final project in the graduate level educational technology course that I am taking at the University of Hawai’i, I have to design a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). Since I am under pressure from both the head of the department where I teach and my amateur photographer friends to create such an online course, I like the idea of creating a MOOC and want to do it. I just wish I understood what I am trying to design.

The voluminous and verbose material that we read about past MOOC manifestations was useless. It left me with more questions than answers. All I really know about MOOCs is the following. First, they are popular. If they were not, they would be called “OOCs” not “MOOCs,” after all, right? Second, many Ivy League schools are offering them. Third, in response to the elitist air arising from that Ivy League association and from a desire to jump on the proverbial MOOC bandwagon, a few pedestrian universities are starting to offer them too. That is about all I know about MOOCs.

When I asked for better clarification at our last online class meeting, I was told that a MOOC is just like a regular online course, but open to many more students. Meaning no offense to either the professor or his very helpful and professional teaching assistants, if you think about it, that explanation does not help! If we are supposed to be designing an online course utilizing the traditional pedagogical paradigm tools that we have been studying, why call it a MOOC? As far as I can tell, MOOCs throw the traditional pedagogical paradigm tools right out the window! I do not get it!

Here is what I would like to know about MOOCs:

First, what is the role of the teacher? Sorry, that question presupposed facts that are not yet in evidence. Does a MOOC even have a teacher? It seems from the vague and amorphous image of MOOCs that I have in my mind’s eye, the teacher is not really a teacher at all. Rather, she or he is a facilitator whose sole role is to throw out the proverbial bread crumb like idea to the students.  They can then seize upon it and, on their own initiative and powered solely by their own self-discipline and motivation to learn, research, filter, refine, and then consume the resultant knowledge.

Second, who in the United States is the intended audience? I do not know about Ivy League students but, I doubt that many traditional American students have the motivation to self-teach themselves. Think about it. If they wanted to teach themselves, why would they be paying tuition to have someone else teach them?

Third, what is the course objective of a MOOC? Yes, knowledge is its own reward. However, that cannot be it. There has to be something more. My students seem to want the grade and the credit way more than they want the knowledge.

Fourth, if they are free, where is the financial incentive to offer them? We live in a capitalist world. While charity is wonderful and all. Universities, especially private for profit universities are not in the business of giving away free, all be it of dubious value, education. Who pays the facilitator? Where is the profit?

Obviously, my mental image of MOOCs is not a very flattering one. I do see that MOOCs do offer a way to put the present educational paradigm on its head. However, I do not think that the world is ready for that yet. Students still need teachers to lead them and help them learn how to learn. MOOCs seem to assume knowledge and self-discipline on the part of the students that I do not think most possess.

In conclusion, MOOCs as I understand them, make no sense. They seem to be attempts to manifest educational chaos. That leaves me with very little choice about what to do for my final project. I guess that I will have to just accept the answer that I got from the professor and his helpful teaching assistants. I will design an online course around the pedagogically sound educational tools that we have studied in the course. When people ask me what I am designing, I will just cross my fingers behind my back and tell them, “Oh, I’m designing a MOOC.”

Tweeting vs. Blogging…

Let me be honest. While I do have high hopes for this blog in the future, at present writing it is just another burden heaped upon my overly laden shoulders. I write these blog entries not because I want to do so but rather because they are required by the graduate course that I am taking. To make matters worse, they are not the only required precious time wasting requirement of the course. I also have to tweet at least two times a day.

At first, I thought that tweeting would be the more onerous of the two tasks. Unfortunately, I was wrong. I normally read the news every day. It did not take long to get into the habit of tweeting stories of interest. In fact, it has become something of a habit of mine. I now have many followers. I like to think that they are becoming better informed individuals because of my tweets.

I wish that I could say the same thing about myself. I am so busy tweeting that I have very little time to look at the feed from the people and organizations that I follow. Once in a blue moon I have the time to check the feed out but, even then I rarely have the time to follow the links to the stories that interest me. Even when I do, finding the time to do more than just skim the story is all but impossible. Reflecting upon it now, I cannot escape the feeling that I have somehow managed to miss the boat on this whole tweeting thing.

This brings me back to this blog. I am supposed to make a weekly entry. It is supposed to be reflective of the material and the concepts that we are covering in the course. Sounds reasonable and pedagogically sound, right? It might normally be pedagogically sound. Unfortunately, in my case, the time/value ratio is all off. Writing this blog just takes too much time! To drive the point home, think about this. It has taken me over two and a half hours to write what you have just read in the last few seconds!

Why does it take so long for me to write a reflective blog entry? The answer is simple. I have to be very careful about what I write. Blogs are open to the world. One has no reasonable expectation of privacy when they post a blog entry. The internet never forgets. Once someone puts something out there, it is out of their control. It will always be out there.

Why does this matter to me? I am naturally a very open and honest person. I tell it like I see it. That may be fine in Never-Never Land, but in the real world that kind of honesty can cost one their job! When I reflect upon the material that we are covering in the course and imagine trying to apply it to some of the courses I teach, the discordant chaos that ensues just breaks my heart!

I so want to apply the educational technology that we are studying to my courses. I so want to use that technology’s pedagogical advantage to help my students better learn the material that I teach. However, I cannot. My students lack the technological sophistication to utilize and therefore benefit from the educational technology that we are studying.

When I reflect upon the material that we are covering and apply it to my real world experiences my heart fills with the desperate need to express its discordant discomfort. When I run those thoughts through the filter of “better judgment” very little comes out the other side. Consequently, trying to write my weekly blog is a very time consuming, unproductive, frustrating, irritating, and heart breaking waste of my time. Consequently, I would rather be tweeting!

Is It Okay to Share?

This entry builds upon the last entry to my blog…

To recap briefly, as an educator, I have created material to help my tuition paying and college credit earning photography students learn how to use a very powerful photo editing and organizing program called Lightroom. I have also created material that explains the basics of photography. This material not only explains important fundamental concepts, it also clearly explains in a step-by-step “cookbook” type format how to control the camera to accomplish specific photographic goals.

My goal in writing the material was to make learning the fundamental basics of digital photography as easy as possible. Having been designed for a college level course, the material not only explains the how and why of each skill or knowledge base, it also clearly lays out a project designed to help the student learn by doing. This, in turn, provides me with a means by which to evaluate whether the students are actually learning the material.

I am quite proud of this material. I have mentioned it to many of my photographer friends. Most of whom have never taken a photography course and have only learned photography through trial and error. Their excitement at hearing about my material is palpable. They have all expressed an interest in seeing my material.

The truth of the matter is that my very long term aspirations include offering non-credit photography training workshops to people like my photography friends. I cannot help but see that letting my friends have access to my teaching material will help them learn about photography and help me, through their feedback, learn about a different audience of learners.

If I make the material available to them, I will do so through a publicly viewable web site that I will design and create specifically to help people learn digital photography. Initially, I will allow free access. In time, however, I intend to add more content to the site and make access to it require a fee.

There is one more thing that I have to keep in mind as I consider setting up this educational web site. I teach at a community college. My students come from many different backgrounds and their ages range from still in high school to retired and beyond. I always revise my material as required to meet the needs of my students. (I plan to write another more specific blog entry along these lines later.) The fact that I get to meet them face-to-face really helps me with my revisions. The web site will lack this sort of face-to-face connection and feedback. It stands to reason that its material will remain potentially more static than the material I revise for my college students. I am worried that some of my more industrious students will find my educational site, compare the content, and then ask me why their material is different. Or, if it is not different, why they have to pay tuition to get the material that I give away for free on my site.

Either question does not make me look very good. Both questions also beg the question whether I can even ethically use my own intellectual property that I created for the benefit of my employer’s students to benefit the users of my educational web site.

While I really do want to share my material with my photographer friends and the world, I cannot help but wonder if using the technology of the internet as an educational technology in this case is a good idea.

What are your thoughts? Please think about it and let me know!

Mahalo.

Perhaps Paper IS better…?

As an educator, I have created material to help my tuition paying and college credit earning photography students learn how to use a very powerful photo editing and organizing program called Lightroom. I have also created material that explains the basics of photography. This material not only explains important fundamental concepts, it also clearly explains in a step-by-step “cookbook” type format how to control the camera to accomplish specific photographic goals.

My goal in writing the material was to make learning the fundamental basics of digital photography as easy as possible. Having been designed for a college level course, the material not only explains the how and why of each skill or knowledge base, it also clearly lays out a project designed to help the student learn by doing. This, in turn, provides me with a means by which to evaluate whether the students are actually learning the material.

I am quite proud of this material. However, I am always trying to make it even better. I do not simply recycle the same material over and over again each semester. Rather, I always try to revise as required. I make adjustments to the explanations and the project requirements. I tailor it as much as possible to help my students. This, however, has lead to a slight problem that has only just now come to my attention.

As I am always custom tailoring my material, I usually do not upload it to the class’s site until the day I present it. Thanks to my mid-semester evaluations, I now realize that some of my students want me to upload the material earlier. It seems that they want to be able to download, print, and presumably read the material before I go over it in class.

Of course, I am more than happy to oblige my students. My reasoning behind not uploading my material until the proverbial last minute, while very cynical, is that there seemed no need to upload it early. My experience has shown that the vast majority of my students do not read for the course. They do not read the textbook. They do not read the material I write for them. The material I write for them even includes checklists to help them double check their work before they submit it for their grade. Judging by the questions I get when they are working on their projects in class, they do not even look at the checklists! There seemed no point in uploading the tailored material before I went over it in class.

Now that I know at least some of my students want to download, printout, and presumably read the material that I write for them, I am presented with an interesting educational technologies question of a sort. Up to this point, I have kept my course very digital. Except for the textbook, which is printed but which is also available as an ebook, all of the material for the course is saved as a PDF and uploaded to the college’s secure server where only students enrolled in my courses can gain access.

My expectation was that my students would download the course’s material to their thumb drives and read the material on their computers. Their need to print out the material makes me wonder whether I ought to start printing the material out for them. If they actually want to read printed “handouts” shouldn’t I support such behavior by making it even easier for them to do so?

Technology is only valuable if it provides a tangible benefit. I wonder whether going back to paper and backing off from my digital push might not be a good idea. I wonder….

What are your thoughts? Please think about it and let me know!

Mahalo!

Reflections on Making a Screenr Screencast and Other Related Thoughts…

This blog entry, much like the assignment I am writing about, has taken much more time to write than I expected. There is so much associated with this topic that I want to say. Without first outlining my thoughts, I began typing my way down a rosy path that, while quite cathartic to write about, was rather thorny and not appropriate to publish in this very public forum. Some thoughts after all, no matter how truly perceived and reflective of reality, should remain secured in one’s own mind. Ofttimes, discretion is the better part of valor. After spending a lot of time on that path, I realized that I simply could not publish what I had written.

That experience somewhat echoed my experience creating the Screenr screencast.  When I began working on the video I had a plethora of ideas. Like with this blog entry, I took the first idea that came to mind and ran with it. When I hit the five minute limit before finishing, I realized that I had to rethink my chosen path.

When I reread the instructions and realized much to my chagrin that even five minutes was too long, I decided that I had to go back to the proverbial blackboard. Returning to square one, I soon had the intended scope sufficiently limited. If only I would have followed my formal training in video production, things might have gone a lot more smoothly.

I know from my training that I should have scripted out my entire presentation, practiced it to perfection, and then (and only then) attempted to shoot it. I, however, decided that I knew better than my training, that I knew my material well enough, that I did not need to go through all those “unnecessary” steps. What a fool I proved myself to be when I began walking down that path!

I wasted so much time! I had to shoot, reshoot, re-reshoot, re-re-reshoot, over and over and over again. I have no idea how many times I had to, just like with this blog entry, start all over again and again and again!

By the Grace of God, my stubborn persistence paid off. I finally had a work product with which I was happy. That is when my stress really mounted. Despite six different attempts on my part, Screenr was unable to upload my work!

No matter what I tried, nothing worked. I was afraid that I would lose all my hard work. I could not even conceive of a way to save my work! I feared all was lost.

Then I remembered the following quote credited to Albert Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.” I decided I had to try something, anything, different. But what could I do differently? I decided that my only choice was to try to upload the Screenr screencast from a different WiFi network.

To facilitate this course of action, I put my MacBook Pro to sleep and drove home. Once home, hoping for the best, I woke up the computer and tried to upload the file for the seventh time. Imagine my joy when my efforts were finally rewarded with success!

The Screenr screencast assignment was a lot harder than I expected. It was, however, a very good learning experience. Judging by the positive feedback I got from Annette and Colleen, I believe that I can produce screencasts of great value to many of my students.

Thanks to my enrollment in ETEC 622, I now realize that I should make screencasts. Thanks to my painful but educational experience in completing this assignment, I now know how to make them and just how much time, work, effort, and hard work is required to do so.

Don – Sitting in Starbucks Waianae, about to put my “Captain’s hat” back on and head back out to sea.

A Small Leap for Me, A Large Stride for my Students….

I am exhausted and yet exhilarated. After years of thinking about creating a whole new presentation to support my lecture on the topic of visual composition,  I finally sat down and did it last night. What was supposed to take me a couple hours took more than eight and deprived me of my run last night. It took so long that it cut into my sleep and even my other class prep time. However, judging by the student response I just received, the time was well spent!

Up until this morning I had been lecturing on the topic of visual composition from a PDF kindly supplied by a fellow photography instructor. Judging by past student performance, this method has been very successful. The readings that I have been doing in ETEC 622 made it clear however that in order to help my students more, I needed to expand both the methodology and the material that I use to teach. This new presentation was my attempt to begin to make that change.

I made the presentation with PowerPoint. I boiled down the material in the chapter to its most basic points. Where possible and reasonable I found images that were different from those found in the textbook but which demonstrated the  concepts under discussion very well. There was no sound. I did not program any fancy transitions. It was very straightforward. However, it was also very clear and contained many more examples than even the textbook.

I realize that moving from a static PDF to a PowerPoint presentation is not really a great leap in technology, especially in light of the technology that we are using in the ETEC class. It was, however, greatly received and appeared to impart the necessary information very well. The assignment I gave to test the effectiveness of this new presentation is due next week. I wonder how well I really did with the new presentation. Time and the students’ work will tell! In the meantime, I will just keep enjoying the happy feeling of success that the questions and smiles from my students gave me.

On Blogging, or Rather, on Commenting on the Blogs and Project Submissions of a Few of My Fellow Classmates…

I am troubled. Not because I have to read the blogs and submissions of my fellow classmates. No, I rather enjoy doing that. I am troubled because I feel that I have to censor myself and limit my comments to only positive ones.

For the sake of online community building with my fellow students I not only pull my figurative punches, I refrain from throwing them at all! No matter how sloppy or carelessly thrown together a blog or a group submission seems, my comments, if I make any, steer way clear of anything that might seem even a little negative.

With my own students, I do not hold back so completely. As their teacher, it is my duty to help teach them past their errors. I have to let them know when their work is not up to the expected standards. I have to show them their errors and help them self-correct. That is, after all, part of my job.

In this graduate level course, I am just a student. I am not the Professor or even a teaching assistant. Yet, when I see sloppy, careless, and/or even lazy seeming work, I so want to say something. Unfortunately, I cannot. I do not believe that is my place to do so. Besides, in the spirit of building a strong sense of online community with my fellow classmates I feel that I should just ignore the problem.

Fortunately, most of the work is excellent and I do not encounter the problem often. I guess that just makes the rare example of poor craftsmanship standout all the more prominently.

What are your thoughts? What do you do when you encounter subpar work from a fellow classmate? Do you, like me, ignore it for the sake of online community building? Or, do you let them know that more is expected from a student or a group of students in a graduate level course?

Reflecting on the readings for Week 3…

The purpose of this blog entry is to reflect upon this week’s reading material and to answer four specific questions. The questions and my answers to them are as follows.

Question #1: How could this material help you?

The material that we read this week could help me improve the pedagogical value of the courses I am currently teaching as well as the courses (both F2F and online) that I have been tasked with creating. Through this material I have gained a clearer understanding of the different ways people learn. Moreover, I now have a better idea of the educational needs associated with these various learning styles. Perhaps most importantly, the material has provided me with the tools, both in terms of general concepts and specific suggestions, that I can now use to craft future courses and make my current courses even better.

Question #2: What considerations seem to be most important for creating dynamic online learning? 

According to Dr. Menchaca’s 2008 PowerPoint presentation, the following considerations seem to be most important for creating dynamic online learning.

First, when working with multimedia, words should be presented with related images and not just presented alone.

Second, the spatial contiguity of the words and the images is important. The words need to be near their related images.

Third, the temporal contiguity is also important. The words and their related images should not be presented successively but rather should be presented simultaneously.

Fourth, coherence is important. There should be no extraneous media.

Fifth, where feasible, e.g., when presenting animation, the words should be vocalized instead written.

Question #3: Why (be specific)?

The reasons why the previously listed considerations seem to be most important for creating dynamic online learning are as follows.

First, research into the human brain indicates that we process visual and textual/auditory information both separately and simultaneously. By combining words with images we are able to maximize the learning potential of our students. However, we have to be careful to not overload our students with information. There are limits to the amount of simultaneous and serial information one can reasonably process. Research indicates that our brains reach their processing limits at four visual and seven textual/auditory objects.

Second, when working with complex material, knowledge transference is increased through manipulating the material. Combining words with images where appropriate, appears to be an effective form of material manipulation.

Third, though only tangentially related to the points made above, it is worth noting that multimodal educational designs are more effective than ones utilizing only a single mode of imparting knowledge. Students able to learn through a multimodal educational approach outperform students subjected to the traditional single mode approach.

Question #4: Reflect on how the material might fit within your own work, community, or personal environment.

As I stated in Question 1, the material has provided me with the tools, both in terms of general concepts and in terms of specific suggestions, that I can now use to craft future courses and make my current courses even better. Specifically, now that I am aware of the R2D2 model of designing and delivering courses, I can evaluate the courses I currently teach and assess into which of the four quadrants, if any, the various elements fall. After completing this analyses, I will know where I can improve my courses. More importantly, I now know how I can make those improvements.

In addition to the information and insight gained through the R2D2 article and Dr. Menchaca’s 2008 PowerPoint presentation, I also benefited from getting to review the Quality Matters Rubric Standards for 2008 – 2011. This document also helped inform and guide me. I will also utilize this information as I design new courses and polish my current ones.

On a different note, I was not satisfied with it being out of date. Accordingly, I looked up the current Quality Matters Rubric. It presents the standards for 2011 – 2013. You can find it here. It the link fails to work, the URL is as follows: http://www.cetla.howard.edu/workshops/docs/QM%201-Page%20Rubric%202011-2013-3.pdf. The current version has a few more items listed for consideration. Not that it really matters but, the layout and presentation of the current form is actually better looking than the outdated one.

The focus of this blog…

My goal for this blog is to use the knowledge that I am gaining through taking ETEC 622 and apply it to my past and present teaching experiences as a running monologue of my thoughts and ideas. With luck, my fellow students on this course of discovery will comment and help me either improve my ideas and or help me avoid the pitfalls associated with trying new (to me at least) ideas in the dynamic world of the community college classroom.

I am most interested in learning how technology can help me help my students learn the fundamental basics of digital photography.

My perspective is that of the teacher who knows enough to know that he still has a lot to learn about getting the knowledge in his head into the heads of his students.

For the duration of the Fall semester and the ETEC course, my target audience is my fellow ETEC 622 students, the teacher’s assistances, and the professor.