Archives for April 2010

 Lead Presenter: Tova Duby; Babson College

Babson is a small private college in Wellsley, MA. Babson has been working on blended learning for the past 10 years.

Babson offered its firts blended course back in 2001. Faculty would not have stood a fully online course, so a blended course was the best compromise. Especially at a small college (2000 students) that values the personal touch. At first, Babson started partnering with private companies. But they were “in it for the money”, which, according to Dr. Joel Hartman is not the way to begin a blended learning program. Babson bled money for some time before they finally found a partnership that worked (Intel).

In 2006 they started an Innovation in Blended Learning Faculty Fellows Program. So far 50 faculty fellows have completed the program. There are currently 60+ faculty fellows. These are qualified to design and deliver online education.

Phase 1 of developing blended courses is to find faculty pioneers. Faculty don’t like to be told what to do by external contractors, so it is important to find faculty on campus who are really keen on doing blended learning on their own. This is true on our campus just as it was at Babson college. In other words, it is important to build the on-campus relationships with faculty who are already doing what needs to be done. Then the campus can begin structuring solutions that leverage the work of the pioneering faculty and expand the resources to support both those faculty and the faculty “fast followers”.

Phase 2 is to encourage “faculty fast followers” to adopt some of the tools and techniques the faculty pioneers have developed. This is where a group like EdTech can really help by putting the fast followers in touch with the pioneers. We can also provide guidance and resources to implement blended learning strategies. EdTech and CERTI working together can highlight new technologies for the fast followers and spread the word amongst the faculty on what tools work (and which don’t).

Phase 3 is the full campus-wide implementation on blended learning with full institutional support from all administrative offices on campus (Registrar, Vice Provosts, Provost, Chancellor, etc.). The eLearning Initiative sponsored by UM-System is laying the groundwork to go from Phase 2 into Phase 3.

Key components of program design include faculty (students/designers/teachers); one-on-one consultations; debriefings & revisions; regular programs offered; and flexibility of options. EdTech is currently working to improve the level of support available for each of these components. The blended course this blog shows up in is a perfect example as this is an area where the community of practice for blended learning can share ideas.

Faculty should play different roles within a blended learning development program. First they should be a student, learning what blended learning means and the different tools that are available. This is, in fact, then purpose of the CyberEd course in Blackboard. Then they progress to the design stage where they begin to apply everything they have learned for one or more of their courses. Finally, they get to teach the course they created. As with anything newly created, this can be a period of trial and error. However, EdTech and CERTI can offer support and resources to ensure success with their course.

One-on-one support with both technologists and instructional designers is important for success. EdTech is currently in the process of hiring for these positions within our group. The designers supports the pedagogy used in a blended course while the technologist provides more technical support for the tools used to enhance the blended course.

Throughout the process, the instructor needs to go through constant debriefing and revision of their course so it turns out as expected.

A formal program should be structured to take into account the needs of the campus community. In our case, we are trying to structure the program so that the faculty use one semester to go through the training process and then the next semester is used to teach the course they created. As we move forward, we will adjust as needed to account for the needs of our faculty.

Babson’s program was successful. They eased faculty through the transition to online/blended learning. New faculty hires participated in the program. They found a dedicated group of adjunct faculty. They established connections between learning technologists and faculty. They also created and used more self-learning modules online.

Babson had to meet several challenges, some of which are ongoing. Their program is not totally embedded in the faculty review system. It is a stand alone program, not tied to any other faculty development program. One of the reasons EdTech works so closely with CERTI is to give faculty a good path forward in professional development. As always, limited resources are a major challenge to meet all of the increased demands. As more faculty become interested, the demands will continue to increase, while the resources may decrease. Their program is also only focused on their fast-track MBA program and they don’t have as much support for other programs. However, their success in one program demonstrates that their is significant potential for other programs. Finally, it is difficult to disseminate new techniques. EdTech and CERTI use our faculty learning communities to address this challenge.

Babson’s next steps include going global, establishing quality control assurances, and more network development & faculty mentoring.

UPDATE: Quality Matters was one of several presentations at this webinar series provided courtesy of Sloan-C. Although Quality Matters has worked with Sloan-C in the past, it is a separate organization and not actually a part of Sloan-C. Quality Matters has asked us to clarify this point. Now back to the regularly scheduled post about Quality Matters:

Quality Matters is a set of standards for online and blended courses.  It is a peer-to-peer process for reviewing courses and sharing know how.  It can be used for faculty and staff development.  But it is ultimately about assuring quality online learning opportunities for students.

The value of adopting Quality Matters is to improve online and blended course quality.  It helps to stimulate a campus dialog among faculty and instructional development staff on best practices in online instruction.  Quality Matters can help build a campus culture dedicated to the continuous improvement of online learning at the institutional level.  It becomes integrated into the culture that drives quality instruction on the campus.  It is also a mechanism to share with the community of learners that the institution cares about delivering quality courses in online and blended formats.

There are 8 general areas in the Quality Matters Rubric.

1. The Course Overview and Introduction -What do students first see when they log in to the course?
2. Learning Objectives (Competencies) – Measurable that forms the structure of the course
3. Assessment and Measurement – What tools are you using to measure student learning?
4. Resources and Materials
5. Learner Engagement – The more the students are engaged, the better they do in the online environment.
6. Course Technology
7. Learner Support
8. Accessibility

40 Specific Standards with extensive annotation can be found under the 8 general areas. Each standard has a point associated with it which helps to evaluate or score a course to determine where it fits on this rubric.  72 is considered to be a necessary for a quality course.

• 17 Essential – all of these standards have to be met to be a quality course
• 11 Very Important Standards
• 12 Important Standards

There should ultimately be a course plan in order to map out the online components and face-to-face components to ensure that both are “mutually reinforcing”. This course plan should be clear and easy for students to understand and follow.

Courses don’t have to be perfect but Quality Matters aims at better than just “good enough”.  The Quality Matters toolset is based on national standards of best practice, the research literature and instructional design principles that are designed to promote student learning. The goal is to encourage the continuous improvement based on quality standards.

Quality Matters wants to encourage a continuous cycle of improvement.  It doesn’t want anyone to think of a course, once developed, as being in the can.  A course should face review and tweaking each semester.

 Presenters: Matthew Russell & Gerald Bergtrom; University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

This is a clicker-enabled presentation using an older generation of TurningPoint’s clickers. Matt has a Ph.D. in comparative literature and Gerry is a professor of Biology at UWM.

Collaborative learning (CL) is about students working together, whether on the content of the course on reflecting on it or through carefully constructed activities. CL activities seek to do the following: increase students’ ability to analyze concepts; allow students to practice critical thinking and collaborative skills; promote synthesis of new knowldege by getting students to work together with instructors and fellow students.

Research tends to broadly support pedagogic value of collaboration techniques. Collaboration also supports accommodation of dfferent learning styles (both traditional and non-traditional).

CL prioritizes active learning instead of lecture and discussion model. Leads to better reasoning skills.

CL is active learning. It fosters better communication and contact between participants (students & instructors). Students develop learning networks with emphasis on group and individual accountability.

CL is the best tool for integrating benefits of both online and face-to-face learning in a blended environment.

To construct collaborative assignments, you should develop outcome-oriented exercises. Decide on a learning goal (what students should be able to do) after going through the module. Decide how students will work together to meet the goal. Decide on a rubric to assess whether students achieve the learning goal.

Classroom assessment techniques (CATs), clickers, discussions, and dropbox are all tools that can be employed for collaboration. CATs are short assignments that provide feedback about student learning (e.g. one-minute points; ‘muddiest point’; summarize/paraphrase). CATs are designed for small groups, useful in face-to-face but also in blended courses. Group discusses a case study, problem, or provacative point.

Gerry gave us an exercise where we defended or disputed a statement in small groups. We then had to turn in our index cards with our statement (and signature). The responses collected stimulated commentary and discussion on the topic in question (in this case, whether or not driftwood is art). Questions can be derived from content that has been delivered online. Another example of an index card question relevant to Dr. Bergtrom’s biology course is, “What is life?”

Clickers facilitate active and collaborative learning. Clickers can assess preparation, help students engage in the content, practice critical thinking, assess instruction, provide constructive feedback, and increase attendance.

We went through several clicker slides to demonstrate how they work. Of course, we are quite familiar with clickers on our campus. Gerry described how slicing data can be used for more refined analysis of clicker responses (e.g. demographic information can be tied to clicker responses to show how different groups of people answer a question).

This session didn’t provide me with a great deal of information I didn’t already know, since we spent a lot of time talking about clickers. However, it did validate everything that we have been doing on our campus to introduce collaborative learning techniquest to our faculty. Both Dr. Bergtrom and Dr. Russell have been using these techniques in their diverse courses (biology and comparative literature, respectively) with great success.

 Presenter: Ike Shibley; Pennsylvania State University

Dr. Shibley (and Penn State) uses class guides in his blended courses to add a level of additional organization to how each of the classes is run.

A class guide is a simple document that describes how the content in a blended course is organized. Students are expected to click through the class guides before they start class. Dr. Shibley showed class guides in a PowerPoint/PDF slide format and in a web-based format. They typically fall into three basic types:

• Daily — This is the most detailed and most restrictive format. Each daily guide lays out exactly what the learning outcomes for that day’s lesson are. It also specifies the assessments for measuring that lesson’s learning outcomes. Dr. Shibley showed us an example of the daily guides used for Penn State’s Chem 1 class (comparable to our own Chem 1). According to him, it took 7 faculty around 1000 hours to compile the class guides. However, the advantage of using the guides was in the fact that all of the faculty for his department were on the same page when teaching the content.
• Weekly — This is still fairly detailed, but less restrictive than the daily guide. It is a broader approach for handling content, laying out each of the desired learning outcomes on a weekly basis. Many class syllabi include components of the weekly guide by establishing what content will be learned that week, but they generally don’t include the desired learning outcomes.
• Topical — A topical class guide will detail all of the expected learning outcomes for a topic for a a course, even if that topic may span chapters or units. As long as the content is related to a particular topic, it can be included. This is the most flexible type of class guide, but it may be confusing to the student if it doesn’t mesh well with other content for the course, such as their text book.

All of the types of class guides have several features in common. They all contain learning goals for the content and content is divided into activities that create opportunities for students to learn before, during, and after class.

When creating learning goals, it is important to use active verbs. This stresses what students will be doing while learning, instead of providing a vague general statement of what is to be learned. For instance, a learning goal for an introductory physics course might be: “Calculate [note active verb] work done by frictional forces”. Learning goals should also help you assess the learning that takes place. The more specific the language, the more effective the goal.

Content should be divided up so that students have opportunities to learn before class begins, while in class, and after class ends. Before class starts, you can use on-line resources to engage students in lower-level learning and prepare them for the classroom discussion. If you choose to grade the before-class activities, use low-stakes grading. Once class starts, you can use more traditional face-to-face and collaborative learning activities to provide further learning opportunities. After class ends, it is possible to continue the learning process through additional online and collaborative resources, with assessment vehicles (quizzes and tests).

When assessing student learning, it is (as always), up to you how to allocate points. Dr. Shibley recommends using low-stakes assessments for before-class activities, high-stakes grading for in-class activities, and mid-stakes grading for after class. But also remember that not everything needs to be graded (as long as students feel that they are being fairly assessed on their performance).

Dr. Shibley’s key factors to keep in mind are as follows:

• Grading — use a combination of high-, mid-, and low-stakes assessments
• Communication — takes place both in and out of class
• Group work — use technology to minimize student meeting outside of class
• Textbook — if you use one, find ways to make it useful to your students
• Plagiarism/Cheating — try to find ways to encourage students to do the work

Anyone interested in seeing for themselves what Dr. Shibley and Penn State have accomplished with class guides is invited to contact Dr. Shibley. He said he could give access to people as a “friend of Penn State” account or something so that interested people could see their class guides.