This semester I tried Google+ Hangouts for real-time discussions with my online classes.  I offered the students multiple online meeting times and let them choose the ones that worked for them.  The students had the the discussion topics and readings ahead of time. and each person was to bring a key idea or question to share.  So the discussion format itself was pretty standard.  What was new, and I thought very special for the online learning environment, was the opportunity to see each student and hear his or her voice.  Not only that, we could all see a small personal slice of everyone’s life — that piece that was projected to us as the backdrop to the person’s webcam headshot.  We saw offices, libraries, and all the various spots people set up their work stations at home. This is really something we have been waiting for in online courses — an opportunity to get to know each other in a more personal way than we can do when we communicate only in writing.  The audio and video quality are great; I even used Google Chat last semester to bring in a guest speaker to a f2f class, and it was extremely successful.

Google+ Hangouts does not replace the potential of Web conferencing, which for us is Blackboard Collaborate.  I see BB Collaborate as being the better tool when you have a more formal, one way presentation such as a lecture or a series of student presentations.  Also, since Google+ Hangouts are so far limited to ten people, you would still go with a more robust system for larger numbers.  Right now the Hangouts can’t be recorded, although you do get a list of participants with the date and time for an online session.  As with all the Google basic products Hangouts are free, and anyone with a Google account can participate.  If you don’t have audio or video, you can still hear the conversation (pretty much everyone these days at least has sound), and you can use the text chat feature. However, when I saw a commercial the other day for video chat via a smart phone, I was reminded once again that electronic communication is fast expanding around us.

I’m thinking I will expand my use of Google+ next semester, using the Circles and the Hangouts for full classes, individual teams, and discussion groups.  Let me know what you think.  You can email me at kmarek@dom.edu — or use my kgmarek@gmail.com address to invite me to G-Chat or to a Google+ Hangout!

Being surrounded by 2,000 people who were passionate and knowledgeable about the cutting edge of higher ed technology was of course both intimidating and exhilarating.  Everyone is there to learn and to share.  As with most conferences, keynote speakers deliver the big ideas and breakout concurrent sessions provide more practical information.  This year, I heard keynotes from Seth Godin  and danah boyd, as well as several other featured speakers interspersed throughout the conference.  I’m looking forward to describing these presentations in more detail when I present next week’s Technology Bytes session (Thursday, November 3, at 1:00 in the CTLE).

In general, attending EDUCAUSE really gets one thinking about what’s going on in higher education and how we at Dominican University are navigating the rapid changes in our society.  For example, here are some of the ideas and phrases from the big ideas part of the conference:  the demise of the college-industrial complex, the unbundled university, precision education, assessment analytics, fundamental shifts in the learning process, and the social nature of learning facilitated virtually through technology.  Here’s a thought that could seem mundane (i.e. so 19th century), or could seem incredibly cutting edge:  education = content + socialization + accreditation.  What does that mean in the 21^st century?  Answer:  we truly don’t know yet, but we all need to be in the mix as it evolves.

Here are some of the more practical areas of continuing education and emphasis:  mobile applications, online teaching and learning, open access to educational content, and institutional information policies regarding social networking.  Of course there were also excellent exhibits, where one can often find ideas for the most immediate innovations and/or solutions.  I am going to try Google+ Hangouts, which looks like an easy, high quality way to gather online via voice and video (kind of a group video chat program for up to 10 people).  There are other things I found in at the conference that I will use immediately in my teaching.  I also hope to extend the value of the conference by talking to lots of people about these big ideas, the practical applications, and possibilities for Dominican University.

I’ve been a little slow to incorporate social networking into my classes, mostly because I’ve been a little slow to incorporate them into my life!  But knowing this is a regular part of our students’ lives, and teaching students (future librarians) who must provide services using social networking, I decided it was time to move forward.  I added an assignment in my online class that includes posting Tweets, using a hashtag (#) specifically for our class.  The hashtag in Twitter basically allows you to add a subject heading (in librarians’ lingo) to your Tweet.  Then, everyone can search that hashtag and see others’ Tweets about things they are sharing relevant to our course.  Here’s the Twitter information page on using hashtags. So far it’s going well… I’ll keep you posted!

I’m also trying to expand community in my online courses by being more visible (literally) in the online environment. (See Ken’s discussion of this in a post from last March, “They Really Need to See Me!” )  I’m experimenting with this using an easy, web-based program called Jing Pro.  Last Spring Jodi Cressman and Ken Black did a Technology Bytes program on interactive feedback in the classroom, and Jodi reported on her use of Jing.  I’m using the Pro version, which costs only $14.95.   Jing Pro allows you capture your desktop, including your webcam (they can see you!), and your narration.  It’s got a five minute limit, but that’s about our audience’s limit as well, so I think it’s fine.  What I’m doing this semester is providing an ongoing series of short mini-lectures using these Jing Pro videos.  I do a brief on-camera greeting and introduction, and the rest of the video I use to show documents or websites from my desktop as I continue to talk.  Jing Pro gives you a variety of options for storage and dissemination; I’m using a cloud-based solution for now and will see how that goes.  I give the students a URL to the website, where they can watch the video. So far, students seem to really like the increased sense of connection the videos provide.

Coming up at Dominican:  iPad: Effective Use in the Classroom – See Ken’s email this week which announces our Dominican access to this webinar on Tuesday, October 4.  This looks like it will be a very interesting presentation, and it will be fun to watch it together in the Springer Suite and then discuss.  This year I’ll also be adding blog posts on my progress with our web conferencing system Blackboard Collaborate, the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference  (October 2011), and on other technology related topics.

Never an organization to take failures too much to heart, Google is diving into the world of social networking again with the new Google+ application.  Launched exactly one week ago on Tuesday, June 28 to a select group of invitees, Google+ has been widely seen as a threat to Facebook.  Not that I would know from personal experience, since much like the failed Wave project, Google has limited its access to a select number of invitees, and early demand was such that “insane demand” caused them to stop their issuance altogether.

Even with a limited number of invites, it has not taken long for the always-on-top-of-things Search Engine Watch site to run not only an article on privacy issues, but a second article that was concerned about Google+‘s requirement that users define their circles of friends.  Let’s hope that sounds easier than it is, since it’s primarily the Wave interface that caused that project to fail.

Actually, from an educational perspective, the idea of “circles” of friends has some interest.  Most of us don’t—and shouldn’t—invite current students to be “friends” on Facebook, unless you’ve developed a course site to be a “fan” of.  With Google+, it SOUNDS like one can post things that only apply to a specific circle.

Detailed information—from the Google perspective—is available via several videos posted on their blog site. If you scroll to the end of that entry, you will find LOTS of links to other sites that talk about the project.  (Selected by Google, of course.)

If you’re interested in seeing what the welcome screen, at least, looks like, it’s available here:  http://plus.google.com. At the time of this writing, however, don’t bother with signing in with your  Gmail account; you will get a screen saying that it has “temporarily exceeded our capacity.”  

As with everything Google-related, this bears watching.

Each hour over 20 workshops and presentations were offered.  Over the next weeks, I’ll be sharing some of the work presented there.  In a colloquium, “Students’ use of sources in academic writing,” several faculty members presented findings from their study of graduate students’ use of citations that may have important implications for our work.

After conducting a study through interviews with faculty and students in an MA TESOL program, in her talk entitled, “Graduate students’ motivations for citing sources,” Charlene Polio of Michigan State University identified several types of problems for students in the use of sources for a book review assignment.  First, Polio did not find plagiarism to be a big problem.  Rather, students had problems with “hanging citations,” that is, citations in a text which do not clearly indicated what it is that the cited person said and how the cited article contributes to the text.  She also found lack of agreement with faculty on what common knowledge is and therefore does not need to be cited.  Finally, she wondered if the writing genre of book review was an appropriate one to require outside sources be used as support.

While Polio reported that students were able to identify errors in their peer’s work, they reported that they themselves cited at times because they knew the instructor wanted more references and they wished to impress the professor with their diligence, or they did so to support a definition, or tried to “mix and match” their ideas with outside sources, and in some cases the students had not fully understood the sources they had read.  While instructors had students read professional literature with a lot of citations, one issue is that many citations in literature require the reader to know what the cited study is about.  In addition, what does not need to be cited, that is what can be considered common knowledge is relative to where a writer is in her career.  Common knowledge for the professor may be new information for a graduate student

Polio recommended that when we are reviewing another writer’s work and we question whether a source is cited appropriately, we, instructors, tutors, or peers, ask the writer the function of a citation. The answer will give insight into the appropriateness or inappropriateness.  Finally, Polio suggested that we acknowledge that the way one individual cites is not equal to the way another cites. 

Polio’s findings may invite us to reconsider teaching students how to use sources in their writing.  We may want to acknowledge that using and citing sources appropriately is a complex task and one that varies depending upon the individual and upon how familiar one is with the field.  We may find it helpful to ask students why particular citations are used and how they can be more appropriately used.  And since students seem better at identifying errors in their peers’ papers, we may wish to have students do peer work on citations.

This was one of the more interesting presentations that I attended, particularly since it was from a school that is of similar size to Dominican—not to mention a similar religious affiliation.  They have a enrollment of 3,898 according to their web site, though they have fewer graduate students than we do.  Like Dominican, they are Catholic, though in their case founded by a Benedictine order.

The subject of the presentation was Scholastica’s RN to BS online program.  Although they had been offering online courses for 10 years, an initiative was started in 2009 with the goal of increasing student enrollment in this program.  (Helping matters along was the fact that they secured a federal grant for nursing education.)  One institution they looked at was St. Leo’s University in Florida, which is another Benedictine institution.

The information Hamre and Hyndman shared presented a great way of how a program can essentially “re-start” from the ground up.   They hired a consultant to create a business plan and do the necessary market research, financial planning, etc.  They had measurable objectives and a personnel plan.  They emphasized that collaboration was a must between the following entities on campus:  academics, marketing, admissions, student services, administrative services, and information technology.  To state the obvious, planning an online program is more than getting IT and the deans involved!   It was interesting to see that they went with third parties for many of their services.  Their LMS (Blackboard) is hosted remotely, but that’s not the only one.  They also offer online tutoring services through SMARTTHINKING and a 24-7 help desk through Presidium.  They went with the latter because it has always worked closely with Blackboard and was recently, in fact, purchased by Blackboard and is soon to be renamed “Blackboard Student Services.”  However, they said that working with Presidium has been “a challenge.”  (I have to add that I can verify this by virtue of the fact that various Blackboard listservs I’m on have tended to not have many good remarks lately on Presidium and their services!)

St. Scholastica went with an accelerated (8-week) format in nursing courses, and they use a standard template.  They mentioned that they are “still working” on faculty orientation, though they DO have what they call a “Blackboard Boot Camp” for training on that specific system.  As for intellectual property, while they pay faculty to design a course, the course ultimately belongs to the college and not to the faculty member.  The average online class size is 20, but they emphasized that the courses are not capped at 20 and they have not set a maximum number of enrollments per course.  Helping matters considerably, I imagine, is the fact that they have three instructional designers who build the courses for the faculty members!

All in all, a very interesting session to see how one school tackled the topic of (re)launching an online program.

The speaker addressed some of what faculty mistakenly expect when going to teach online for the first time:  that it will be easier and that it’s not as time-consuming.  At the polar opposite, some also see it as MORE work, and MORE technology.  Many also fear that there will be no engagement with the students.  (Hence the title of the presentation.) 

David Letterman-style, Wilkinson listed the top 10 reasons faculty can be unsuccessful in teaching online courses: 

10. “I’ve been doing it this way for years.” 
   9. “It’s what I know.”
   8. “I know it works because I used it.”
   7. “I don’t know how to use the tools.”
   6. “It works in all my ‘required’ courses.”
   5.  “I’m not comfortable doing new things.”
   4.  “Lecture is important in my discipline.”
   3.  “I don’t want to change.”
   2. “It’s too much work.”
   1.  “Students want to see me.”

Regarding number 6, the speaker pointed out that required classes have a certain set number of things to get done and are often driven by a common text.  Therefore, it can be somewhat easier to package things like that into an online course.  That’s not necessarily the case with higher-level courses, where the content must be laid out differently and where one has more majors and upper-level students. 

Wilkinson also said (but failed to cite a specific study) that research shows that students, in fact, do NOT have to “see” faculty—it’s the content that’s important.  Regarding number 1; she’s had faculty complain there is no “aha” moment in an online course like there is in face-to-face courses.  Speaking for herself, she said that some of her best teaching moments have come in online courses.  She suggested that faculty should not concentrate so much on content in online courses as they should on interaction, facilitation, process, and method.  Change to a student-centered model, in other words.  Use multiple communication channels.  She cited her own use of immersive feedback, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear that she uses Jing in her feedback—rather like our own Jodi Cressman did this past semester for her face-to-face classes that Jodi and I did a Technology Bytes presentation on.  (Login limited to DU faculty.) 

Interestingly, rather than being a Quality Matters program, her program endorses the use of the National Standards for Quality Online Teaching .  It was only after I got back to my office that I realized this is a K-12 program from the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (oddly abbreviated as iNACOL), so I’m curious how the Higher Learning Commission views this—much less ISU’s faculty—although to be sure the standards can be equally applicable in higher education situations.  (Wilkinson pointed out this decision was driven by cost; it’s not inexpensive to become a fully-certified Quality Matters program.)  While I don’t see Indiana State listed as an institutional member on iNACOL’s listing of members, there are several post-secondary institutions listed, such as Oral Roberts University, University of Central Florida, and University of Hawaii at Manoa, as well as various virtual university programs.  And let’s face it, standards such as “A clear, complete course overview and syllabus are included in the course” should be true for any online course, regardless of level of education.

Anyway, it was good to learn of a new set of standards out there as part of this presentation.  Wilkinson also talked about things that are true in any online program:  faculty members don’t take advantage of (or don’t even know about) the many tools that LMSs such as Blackboard have to offer, and the fact that online testing remains an issue everywhere.

More reports from EDUCAUSE Midwest will be forthcoming!

The keynote was from Michael Wesch (Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State).  If you don’t recognize the name, you will recognize some of his videos.  He is the creator of two of the more frequently seen videos in higher education regarding our “net generation” of students:  A Vision of Students Today (with a staggering 4 million+ views on YouTube), and Web 2.0….The Machine is Us/ing Us, which has an even more staggering 11 million+ views on YouTube.

Wesch’s presentation was titled From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able: Building New Learning Environments for New Media Environments.  Among his observations were that while we view today’s students as incredibly computer-savvy, they are in fact not as computer-literate as we thought they might be.  For example, when he polled his students on such terms as Fair Use, Net Neutrality, and HTML5, the majority did not know what the terms meant.  (“Somewhere around zero percent” knew what “fair use” meant, I remember him saying.)  And it’s easy for them to get false information from the Web.  He used the example of the real website for the World Economic Forum (http://www.weforum.org) and an extremely well-done mock website that conveys very critical information about that same group (http://www.we-forum.org).

Nevertheless, students have become “meta-media fluent” and are clearly digital citizens.  PowerPoint alone will not fit the bill anymore.  (He cited Edward Tufte’s quote:  “Power corrupts; PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”)  They need to become information literate, and that is our role as educators.

Though EDUCAUSE was not allowed to record Wesch’s presentation, there is an earlier version from 2009 that EDUCAUSE recorded that is here.  If that full version is a tad too long for you, a briefer (18-minute) version from a TED meeting is available here.

The person who introduced Wesch (I can’t remember her name) had an interesting quote that helped put Wesch’s keynote in context.  It’s a Chinese proverb that rings true regardless of when you (or our children) grew up:

“Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in a different time.”