Hub to your Digital Teaching & Learning Life

Most LMS and CMS tools have the same basic layout … they focus their interface efforts on the folder tab metaphor, or even an old-school CBT main menu structure. These interfaces seem to get worse with every new feature as new tabs, or silly icons must be added to every student’s learning space. One of the tabs is always a syllabus tab … where students are supposed to go in and see their, you guessed it, syllabus. Now, I remember going to high school and even college before the Internet was such a part of the educational experience and I always got a syllabus handed to me the first day of class — and I promptly stuffed it into my notebook.

We all understand the perceived importance of the syllabus — from a teaching perspective; it gives teachers a location to centrally announce what we plan to do over the course of a semester. As a student, it is the spot where we first learn about what is expected of us, when things are due, and all sorts of other procedural stuff. The Internet has not changed our need to produce a paper-based syllabus that articulates the goals and expected outcomes of the course. I am asked every semester to turn in a copy of my syllabus for review at the College level and we as faculty are bound by policy to provide our students with one.

Back to the CMS/LMS model … in the world of teaching with technology we have a few choices, we can use Word (or whatever tool) to produce a syllabus that is suitable for print and then move it online as a PDF, or as a static html document. We can also fight our way through the standard tools inside the LMS/CMS our University or College uses … again, building a static version of the syllabus. We then use all sorts of other tools inside the CMS like the calendar to set up due dates, meeting times, and more … like the email tool to send messages to students, cancel class, and collect feedback … a grading tool to provide secure acces to grades and so on. All of these tools are disconnected across the multitude of tabs or within depths of menus that must be navigated.

The syllabus should be the hub to your digital teaching and learning life.

I am so sick of the tools available to make my teaching life better and I know my students are sick of these same tools as they use them to access information and submit work. You can’t do anything without five or six clicks though poorly structured menus and tabs. Why is it that EVERY class starts with a syllabus and it then becomes the ignored part of the learning experience? Why not make the syllabus the CMS? Why not make the syllabus the central place that students visit everyday to find out what is going on? Why type something in Word — or even DreamWeaver — and then have to retype, print (or PDF), and hand it out again next semester when information technology can change this?

I have maintained for some time now that the syllabus shouldn’t just be typed up and stuffed in a student’s notebook. It should actually replace all those tabs and menus of the CMS … students should just be able to visit a living portal into your class via their syllabus. From there, once logged in, they should be able to see what is going on, read dynamic announcements, communicate with their peers and faculty via email, respond to posts, blog, assess individual and team behavior, connect to readings, assignments, exams, and whatever other resources I choose to assign them to. If we build a hub that allows students to visit one location and link to everything from there and make it a meaningful experience, then we can shatter the typical CMS/LMS paradigm and get on with teaching and learning instead of fighting with technology.

This is just the start of all this … within the year, we’ll have built a syllabus tool that not only does everything listed above, but also intelligently looks at student behavior and begins to work with them. It will pull the best and most read posts to the top, calculate scores and provide students with dynamic feedback, and create reasons why they will want to visit it everyday … the syllabus will become as much of a destination as it is a resource. They will begin to see it the hub to their learning community — when that happens we all win–>

Listen Up! The iPod Can Change Grading

For the last three years I have been an iPod user. When I got my first 5 GB iPod as a Christmas gift a few years back I really thought it was a nice, cool device that gave me a first class MP3 player … what I ended up discovering was that the iPod could enable a whole lot more than just listening to playlists. What does this have to do with grading?

I teach primarily using a hybrid, or blended, approach. In other words, I use the Internet as a huge part of my resident teaching and I don’t usually require students to be in class every week … instead I use computer mediated communication (CMC) technologies, like the PSU ANGEL CMS , or the new features of our own software, Edison Services to assign readings, gather feedback, and discuss things. This usually saves time, but in the last several semesters my classes have become much larger (around 60 students) … the students love the freedom to not be cooped up in class getting the “death by Keynote” treatment from me and it makes the times we do meet much more interactive and engaging.

One of the types of CMC activities I use are called Discussion Activities (DAs). DAs are short, open ended, read and respond style questions that every student in class must answer. There is one DA every week that must be responded to in the ANGEL CMS space. Now, when we came up with the DA concept, class sizes were more in the 25 range. It is very easy to read and grade 25 DAs in a week, provide feedback, and post grades but it is impossible to do the same thing with 50 or more students. What ends up happening is that I just turn the whole process over to a TA and students end up getting very late and unispired feedback.

This is where the iPod comes in. The newer iPods have a feature that we think can turn it into a very powerful assessment tool — ratings. I’ve been talking about the concept of one-click assessment for over two years now. One-click assessment will allow faculty to generate a rubric and assign a simple five star rating system to it. The technology figures out the percentages on the fly and it really streamlines the whole assessment process. Now, imagine having a simple app that would automatically turn text files into mp3 files, drop them into an iTunes library on the fly, and sync them to your iPod. Faculty could simply listen to responses and using the built in ratings system, perform simple one-click assessment on each. When the iPod is plugged back into the computer the files are updated with the ratings in place on the faculty’s machine. Again, a simple script would send the feedback to students instantly via Edison Services. I’ve tested it and it saves me a ton of time in grading DAs.

IM Me

So I’ve been doing quite a bit more with IM technology lately … as an avid Mac user, I should be clear, I use iChat. I have an iSight camera that I carry with me everywhere and it has come in handy for quite a bit of stuff. The other day I had a guest lecture in my PGSIT class I teach … he was so good that I fired up the iSight and invited people from my staff to listen to what he was saying. They ended up coming to the classroom and participating in the discussion. That’s not really a big deal, but it has gotten me thinking about how cool the whole AV IM thing really is.

Another story … I do some work with Apple as the lead of Penn State’s Apple Digital Campus project … this means I get to visit Apple a couple times a year. Something very cool happened the last time I was there — everyone in the room (about 20) had a PowerBook and wireless Internet. Everyone also had their iChat up and running. What’s cool is that Apple has a zero config network setup in iChat that finds other iChat members within your subnet … which means I could “see” everyone in the room. What I found amazing was how there were sometimes three or four IMs flying at me from people I had barely met … asking me to pose questions, offering insight, and just talking about what Apple was talking about. For the first time I started thinking that IM is not just a toy, but a VERY powerful business tool.

Since that trip I’ve required my staff to have their IM clients open and their screen names shared so we can communicate more quickly. Gues what — it actually helps productivity.

So, naturally, I thought I’d start to let my students have their IM clients open during class and it is helping as well. I’ve stopped getting pissed about them doing that and engaging them more and more via the technology. They hand in assignments — its faster than the network — pose questions, respond to polls, and send me presentation files that we can instantly look at in front of the class. Very cool and the students really do like it. I’m teaching again this fall and I am going to use it even more … I am going to ask them what the uses are for it and see if we can’t get an agenda together to look at real functional applications for the technology in and out of the classroom. By the way, IM me at workercole.

More on this later–>