How to Ensure 'Regular and Substantive Contact'

Yesterday, I attended a discussion about 'regular and substantive contact' in online courses at the Online Teaching Conference held at Long Beach City College. In the state of California, 'regular and substantive contact' initiated by the instructor is required in order for the state to reimburse the college for that course. Correspondence courses, where information is broadcasted to the learner with minimal or no feedback from the instructor, are not funded. Ph.D. candidate Margie White led the discussion and shared some simple and practical ways to satisfy the requirement for 'regular and substantive contact' while providing a truly rich learner experience. Here are a few highlights:

1. Start in your comfort zone.

Consider how you provide 'substantive' contact to your face-to-face (f2f) students. Do you enjoy facilitating class discussions? Do you prefer one-on-one meetings where you provide feedback? Do you have journal assignments where you communicate with your students through extensive feedback on their journal comments? Do you have a hands-off approach to discussions because you want the students to direct the conversation, but then offer concluding remarks and a discussion summary highlighting the key takeaways? Whatever you already do, start with that and just apply it to the online experience. Once you are comfortable with those familiar methods, you can expand your modes of 'regular and substantive contact'.

2. Know your students, content and technology tools.

See what methods fit best with your students and content area, and can be accomplished using technology you have at your disposal.

3. Track student participation.

Have prewritten emails you can send to your students when you notice they are not participating in class, or are not engaged enough to be successful. This is especially important in the first weeks of the course when students are just figuring out how to use the technology, while learning how to effectively study for a new subject and exercise time management. Take advantage of early alert tracking technology and/or statistics tracking if your LMS offers these tools, since they will save you a lot of time and oversight.

4. Facilitate strategic discussions.

 Be actively involved in a way that shows you are present, and that encourages deeper thinking on the part of the students. Don't answer questions that your students could answer for one another, and don't ask right or wrong questions since there is nothing to say after the first person correctly answers the question. Be sure to offer incentives for participation (I.e. grades/points) and use rubrics so students know how they are being graded.

5. Offer public feedback.

Public feedback to students can take place in discussion summaries or weekly summaries; highlight the efforts and actions of individual students as you sum up the key takeaways. You can also respond to student discussion posts to offer direct feedback in a public setting.

6. Offer private feedback.

Private feedback can take place through grade feedback, virtual meetings, and through journal comments. Be sure to tell your students where they can find comments and feedback in their course.

7. Use synchronous tools.

Tools like Blackboard Collaborate, CCC Confer, and Google hangouts are great for office hours, study sessions, final reviews, moderated group work and interactive lessons.

8. Use asynchronous tools.

Create asynchronous presentations, videos, podcasts (with transcripts), and/or voice thread (with transcripts) so students can see you or hear your voice, and feel connected to you directly. For example, you can create a welcome video, weekly video summaries, and quick tutorials.

MOOCs and the Future of Education. Highlights from Stephen Downes' Keynote

As I mentioned yesterday, I am attending the Online Teaching Conference held at Long Beach City College. This report covers the keynote speech presented by Stephen Downes, specialist in online learning, new media, pedagogy and philosophy, and one of the two individuals who designed and instructed the first MOOC. Here are some of the highlights.

What is a MOOC?

MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course. While parts of this acronym seem self-explanatory, I like how Stephen Downes went deeper into the meaning of each term, since it really added clarity to its original mission and character. Stephen joked (though I think he was serious) that a student accused him of being a techno-socialist, and this is why:

M is for Massive. 

Massive does not imply the number of students enrolled, but rather the capacity to handle an extremely large number of students. The first MOOC was created with foresight; the infrastructure was designed to support massive numbers of students. Stephen emphasized that broadcasts are not MOOCs even though they are intended for massive audiences; a true MOOC involves interaction and engagement as opposed to one-way communication.

O is for Open.

When Stephen Downes explained "open" he offered a poignant definition: Open does not just mean that the course is available to the public. Rather, it is truly free. Anyone is able to attend at any time without registering, submitting credit card information, or purchasing supplies, subscriptions, or equipment. Course materials are open-source or open-licensed. Internet is needed, but in many communities, internet can be accessed for free from libraries. Language is also not a barrier; individuals can participate in their own language, and they do. Free tools like Google Translate could be used to help speakers of different languages communicate with one another.

O is for Online.

This one was self-explanatory.

C is for Course.

This was mostly self-explanatory, except for one key point; the course Stephen Downes described is one in which the core of the learning process takes place through the interaction between participants. This definition is in stark contrast to teacher-centered instructional styles such as lecturing, where an expert basically fills "empty vessels" with his or hew knowledge. In Stephen's MOOCs, students and instructor alike bring their experiences, creations, ideas, questions and observations together to enhance and deepen the learning experience for everyone. Stephen went on to explain how connectivism was the founding philosophy of the original MOOCs (which are now referred to as cMOOCs, to differentiate from xMOOCs, represented by Coursera and edX.)

What is Connectivism?

In a nutshell, the connectivist philosophy has four components:

Aggregation: 

Knowledge and information is aggregated by the students and instructor through research and creation, as opposed to traditional courses where material is developed ahead of time.

Remixing: 

Materials are reorganized through correlating and comparing with other materials found online and in the course.

Re-purposing: 

The aggregated and remixed materials are then re-purposed on an individual basis; students collect, reinterpret and re-purpose knowledge based on their individual goals.

Feeding Forward: 

Participants are encouraged to share their re-purposed materials, which are their personal conclusions and interpretations of the information researched, assembled and critically-studied during the course.

Concluding Thoughts.

Other, (arguably less altruistic) variations of MOOCs developed over the past few years, but Stephen Downes' variation is one that can change the future of education in a positive way. Along with Open Educational Resources (OER), MOOCs have the potential to democratize education and help break down the socioeconomic barriers that make it difficult for students from the lower socioeconomic strati to advance in their lives and careers. I also agree that in light of this paradigm shift, we need to rethink how we define "success" in education. Rather than having an across-the-board measure of success, perhaps we need to weigh against the goals of the individual students. Through diligent research, we may find general trends that can help administrators quantify success, while staying true to the students' objectives.

iPad Apps for Education Workshop Report

Right now, I am attending the Online Teaching Conference held at Long Beach City College. Yesterday, I attended a great workshop taught by Sam Gliksman, who among other things is the author of iPad in Education for Dummies. The workshop went over iPad apps that enhance the teaching and learning experience. Here are some of the highlights. If there is expressed interest, I will delve deeper into any of these topics.

Technology does not replace experience but rather it enhances. A great example he showed was a student presenting a poem she wrote. She presented it orally, while a related artwork (created by the student) was being projected on a screen, and music she composed on an iPad using Garage Band was playing in the background.

Apple TV combined with AirPlay is a great resource! If students have Apple devices, the instructor can use Apple TV with AirPlay to share student work on their local device by projecting on the board. The lectern computer can be any device, Mac or PC, laptop, iPad or desktop.

Socrative.com is a free resource that can replace the need for clickers and all you and your students need is Internet access on your device of choice.

Flipboard is an amazing and free curating app for iPhone, iPad and Android; it takes the news, RSS feeds, social media feeds, and any other online resources you choose and puts them into a beautiful streamlined e-magazine so that each day you can get the information that is important to you, in a single digest. Teachers can curate resources for their own research or for sharing with students, and students can use the software for sharing resources with one another and for doing their own online research.

Pocket and Diigo are apps, which allow you to save and categorize online resources so that you can reference and share them online or offline. Pocket has a nicer interface but Diigo is better for collaborative work and highlighting specific text.

Book Creator costs $5 and is the best app available right now for publishing small simple e-books, which instructors can use to make resources for students, but also students can use for creating final projects for class. If your students all publish to a single Dropbox account, you can combine all books into one. For longer books, Sam recommends  iBooks Author, which is a free download for Mac computers and can be used to create books for free distribution or for sale on the apple iBooks store. A benefit of using the iBooks store is that when you publish an update to your book, like apps purchased in the app store, the book is automatically updated for all users who purchased it.

Haiku Deck is a free app that helps students or instructors create stunning image-focused presentations (as opposed to PowerPoint, which emphasizes text).

Explain Everything costs $3 but is well worth the cost. It is a screen capture app that combines audio and interactivity for creating presentations. The creator can talk through a presentation using slides, and while showing the slides, annotate and animate. You can pull in resources, such as Haiku Deck presentations, images and video, and publish to your YouTube channel, Dropbox, LMS, and more. It can also be used for assessment.

I'll have more to report soon!

Reduce Student Anxiety About Grades Simply by Articulating Your Grading Process

This week, a couple questions came up in my online course about grading. Specifically, some instructors only received half credit for their work and were wondering why. The fact is that at the time of grading, I may have only seen half of their work for the week. They may have received 100% on that assignment, but it looks like they only got a 50%. This happened because I have a couple designated times for reviewing work and grading, and grade everything I can at those times.

I grade this way for two reasons:
1. It is more efficient for me to grade what I see during the times I designate for grading (rather than wait for all work to be submitted) so that I don’t have to repeat the process and double the time I spend grading.

2. The other reason is to bring to light just how sensitive grades are to students. It is easy for us teachers to grade using a process and at times that meet our schedules and needs, and overlook how this may affect our students. When we have classes that meet in person, you either hand back everyone's graded work at once, or you don't give grades to anyone. But it is very clear to the student if their work has been graded, what they were being graded on, and whether there are aspects of their work that are still yet to be graded or can be resubmitted for a chance at a higher grade. In an online class, you may be in the middle of grading when a student looks at his or her grade. That student may be alarmed to discover a 50% grade, which is due to the fact that you only graded 50% of the work. Or, it may be four days after a major assignment was submitted and your student is anxious because he or she does not see a grade in the Grade Center.

To ensure that your students don’t have the anxiety my instructors experienced when they did not see their complete grades posted when expected, be sure to clarify your grading process. A lot of instructors put a disclaimer in their course overview stating that they look at the discussion boards X number of times per week, or on specific days of the week, and need X number of days to grade assignments, etc. so that students know what to expect. Furthermore, it is good to use the grade notes and feedback sections to elaborate on grades if it is not clear why a student got a certain grade. To save time, I typically won't leave feedback or notes when students get 100% since it is clear how they did (unless they usually get poor grades, whereas then I would congratulate them for their improvement). However, if I deduct points and it is not clear from the rubric why points were deducted, I will explain in the notes section. After all, students will have a hard time being successful if they do not understand where they should focus their efforts for improvement. So, empower your students to "Go Forward" with success and confidence!