4 Simple Steps for Lesson Planning

Break is over and summer session has officially begun! It's time to bring us back together with fledgling and veteran course designers in our Power Through Series (e-course development workshops) beginning next week. We'll talk about course design and redesign, about the powerful course infrastructure built with effective learning objectives.

This quick lesson in mapping out the design of lesson plans includes a cool infographic and lists important decisions to be made to determine the direction of your teaching and subsequent learning outcomes.

Stay tuned! The summer is just getting started!

Rubrics!

In the world of assessment, there are few tools with as much power and mutual benefit to both teachers and learners as the rubric!

Does the idea of using a rubric leave you a little mystified? Puzzle no more! HERE is a fabulous guide that will have you up and running in no time!

Of course, that's not ALL there is to say about great rubric design and how they impact learning outcomes. Anyone wanting to take a deeper look is encouraged to read Introduction to Rubrics: An Assessment tool to Save Grading Time, Convey Effective Feedback and Promote Student Learning.

We'll be hosting workshops this summer and fall that cover both great design AND cool tools for rubric design. Stay tuned!

Staggering Literacy Data Infographic

Infographics are a great way to present data. This one is sobering; the presentation really helps bring home the story told by the numbers, don't you think?

We can help you make infographics! Email me if you're interested!

APP Mania: Workflowy

Every once in awhile, an app floats along that changes your life. Changes EVERYTHING! Picks you up by the feet, rattles upside down until everything falls out and then puts everything neatly back together better than it ever was before. Most recently, that app was Workflowy.

It's difficult to articulate but with Workflowy, it's simplicity is its power. It's easily the most accessible and easily learned app I've seen yet. And yet its power to contain, organize and SERVE every single detail of your life is frankly breathaking.

You begin your (free) account with a blank page. Then you make lists, which become category headers in function. Mine began with WORK  and PERSONAL but I later added SCHOOL rather than wrap in under my personal heading. Within each list, I can sublist ... and sublist and sublist. So within each, I have a TO DO list and several lists within each of those. Then WORKSHOP IDEAS, BOOKS TO READ and a quickly growing LIST of everything relevant to every aspect of my life. If I taught several courses, I  can easily see having a list for each course that included content links, organization, notes, design structure and records as well as lists for research projects, service projects and writing endeavors. There is literally nothing that can't be fit into one of these lists. So finally, a centralized repository of information related to your life in an easily accessed (phone, tablet, laptop, desktop) format and free to lightweight users.

And it works like a calendar! Because you can tag each item for later recall by search, I tag deadlines with the date in this format #041114 (for April 11, 2014). Then each morning, I can recall my day's deadlines by tag search on that date and suddenly everything I need to do for work, home OR school are all combined into one easy list for me to review and work through. As I complete tasks they can disappear (or be brought back). And I can set reminders by adding multiple date tags. So if I want to be reminded of a deadline a week in advance, I can tag #041114 #040414 and get a reminder on the 4th of April about the deadline on the 11th.

You can also share individual lists (by section, keeping the entirety of your list private) via link for viewing and/or editing by collaborators. And the new capabilities are being added all the time! I can easily see that I won't be able to function without Workflowy to keep me organized from now on.

I am also using Workflowy to organize my curriculum design by course, by module and by activity. Imagine how many ways that this tool could help in both teaching and learning in every subject area! Perhaps we should begin a list ...

(This is an authentic user review for which I receive absolutely no compensation or acknowledgement of any kind. The APPMania series will feature apps that enhance productivity, the teaching and learning process—or BOTH!)

Friday Funny!

Just click on the graphic to enlarge it! Happy Friday!

I Will Not Die an Unlived Life

I am just finishing up the last week of this semester's Power Through Series, an experience I have grown to love and savor. Each semester for the past year (and for the foreseeable future), the Power Through Series gathers faculty from across our university community into a computer lab for an eight-week series of workshops geared toward online course development. By the end of the series, I always feel I have made new friends as well as deepened my relationships with the faculty and staff I serve.

This semester, we had a strong turnout from the English Department! And they graciously hosted our series in their own Writing Center computer lab. So in homage to our beloved English Department and in honor of National Poetry Month, I share this:

“I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible;
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.”  (Dawna Markova)

And to celebrate the month, I am going to award the FIRST AAMU employee to contact me via EMAIL a $25 Amazon gift card, just for reading my blog! In order to qualify, please mention this offer in your email!

Creating a Climate of Possibility

Prepare to be inspired! Spread the word!

Scale (How you can help!)

In my personal studies, I have developed a keen interest in the issue of scale within the context of our e-learning mission within traditional institutions of education. I read in one source (I have tried to find it again to cite it, but to no avail) that the educational sector is the slo-o-owest of all sectors to adopt and integrate technology. Everyone who works in education would likely agree.

The challenge of helping to increase that momentum and move technology further and more deeply into the educational experience is the source of both my greatest excitement and my greatest fear. 

I recently decided to pursue my doctoral degree. As I am more interested in program administration than classroom teaching or research, I decided on an EdD with a specialization in higher education leadership. I have been thinking long and hard about what focus I would like to apply to my studies. I didn't have to think long to realize that the issue of scale is the one that is calling my name. 

I know that there are administrators who read my blog as well as faculty, students and other stakeholders in the e-learning revolution. For those of us who are involved in developing programs and scaling them into larger integrated functionality, I have added a section of resources labeled simply "Scale" and will be adding valuable resources there for your consideration and review. I welcome any conversation or insights on the topic as well. 

Of particular challenge to those struggling with the issue of scale is the proper assessment and evaluation of the current state of affairs in a given educational ecosystem or community. It's not enough to know what we want to happen next, we have to first do the hard and uncomfortable work of developing (and fixing broken or outdated) infrastructures with a thoughtful consideration of the future.

Taking those first steps in a way that doesn't frighten or intimidate stakeholders (colleagues, primarily) —while still demanding the full extent of forthright change that is required—is a very delicate and complicated problem to solve. We'll be exploring those issues in our conversations here as well. 

What's most important to say at this juncture is that the conversation around innovating our learning communities to keep up with our new millennial learners is one that must take place with all of us in the room. Where traditional management practices have had closed door meetings and decisions made for stakeholders by those who are signing the checks for goods and services, the successful scale strategy keeps the conversation open and interactive with every stakeholder, including the end learner. 

In a successful design, there will be layers of learning and teaching. Administrators willing to learn and to teach, e-learning staff willing to learn and to teach, faculty willing to learn and to teach, and end learners willing to both learn and teach (the value of peer teaching and learning becomes very apparent in the outcomes). 

So where do we start? We start by talking to each other. By adopting the tools and letting them sink into our daily living. By participating in faculty advisory opportunities presented by our institutions' administrations, quite frankly. Institutions have adopted that filled-room come-one-come-all policy of seeking stakeholder input, but often those stakeholders don't show up to actively participate. Apathy is a common theme across the many fields, not just education. But, as educators—we're different, aren't we?

The time is nigh! Are you coming?

Why MOOCs (Still) Matter

Mind maps!

We'll be creating Mind Maps on a Hangout soon! (Click the graphic to enlarge!)

Friday Funny!

Tip: Just click on the cartoon image for a larger view and more legible caption! Happy Friday!

RoboPhot: It's in the Details!

You need to CLICK HERE and then zoom in. Zoom way in. And then zoom way out. And then think about how this type of photo could be used in online education.

This detail is achieved by taking 600 shots over 30 minutes and then tiling the image together in a supersized graphic file. The effect is breathtaking! And our favorite e-word: engaging!

Be warned: RoboPhot is addictive!

Watch to learn more!

Let's Get Critical!

Serious eLearning Manifesto

From the venerable Stephen Downes' OLDaily, the Serious eLearning Manifesto:

We believe that learning technology offers the possibility for creating uniquely valuable learning experiences. 

We also believe, with a sense of sadness and profound frustration, that most elearning fails to live up to its promise. 

We further believe that current trends evoke a future of only negligible improvement in elearning design—unless something radical is done to bend the curve. 

Finally, we have concluded that in order to elevate elearning to the height of its promise, we need to begin with a personal commitment to a new set of standards. 

Through continuous assessment of learner performance, the elearning experience can optimize use of the learner’s time, individualize the experience for full engagement, address needs, optimize practice, and prepare for transfer of learning to performance proficiency. 

Through our work in developing elearning experiences and helping others do the same, we believe that we need to go beyond typical elearning to the values and characteristics of Serious eLearning ...

Please watch this insightful and inspiring hour-long Google Hangout with the Manifesto team:
     

Read it in full HERE. And then, please—go sign!

Critical Thinking!

In honor of Alabama A&M University's 2014 QEP theme of "Critical Thinking" ... a little humor!

And one of our QEP flyers! (I designed this one!)

Tuition Net Increases to Poorest Students Threaten Access to Higher Ed

I read with great interest Jon Marcus and Holly K. Hacker's Colleges Are Quietly Shifting The Burden Of Tuition Increases To Poor Families from the Hechinger Report on Huffington Post. I don't want to editorialize the issues raised specifically in the article in the context discussed, but want to point out that this entire issue—the evolving landscape of access to higher education as impacted by issues discussed herein—provides profound context for the unfolding discussions regarding MOOCs and their role in higher education.

I believe that the most imminent threat MOOCs present to traditional higher education is the allure of high-quality free/low-cost degrees for the highest achieving, most independent and self-motivated learners. In addition to potentially losing them out of enrollment and retention data sets, we stand to lose their power as peer learners to enhance learning outcomes for everyone enrolled.

Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promise and Perils of Massive Open Online Courses

Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promise and Perils of Massive Open Online Courses is one of the first collections of essays about the phenomenon of “Massive Online Open Courses.” Unlike accounts in the mainstream media and educational press, Invasion of the MOOCs is not written from the perspective of removed administrators, would-be education entrepreneurs/venture capitalists, or political pundits. Rather, this collection of essays comes from faculty who developed and taught MOOCs in 2012 and 2013, students who participated in those MOOCs, and academics and observers who have first hand experience with MOOCs and higher education. These twenty-one essays reflect the complexity of the very definition of what is (and what might in the near future be) a “MOOC,” along with perspectives and opinions that move far beyond the polarizing debate about MOOCs that has occupied the media in previous accounts. Toward that end, Invasion of the MOOCs reflects a wide variety of impressions about MOOCs from the most recent past and projects possibilities about MOOCs for the not so distant future.

You can buy the print copy (or download the free PDF version) HERE.

Engagement and Feedback

We're always looking for ways to engage the learner in content and to gain feedback on how they are progressing with their learning. Check out Edudemic's great short list of practical tips for accomplishing both in your brick-and-mortar or online classroom!

New to MOOCs?

Catch up here!

Moment in Meme

Free Online University of the People Gains National Accreditation

Some said it would never happen. But now the free online University of the People has gained accreditation just in time for its first graduating class. Read about it HERE.

And stay tuned!

Sloan-C e-Teaching Certificate

While the Instructional Design certificate programs I discussed in my last post are academic programs comprised of credit-bearing courses, there are also e-teaching certificates that are less rigorous, less costly and a lot easier to acquire.

Sloan Consortium offers two such certificates with their Teaching and Advanced Teaching Certificates. Each is comprised of a series of workshops (as opposed to more academically rigorous credit-bearing academic courses) that include a required foundation course and a handful of elective workshops.

The cost of these certificates is an allowable use of Title III funding for professional development! If you or your faculty are interested in acquiring credentialed high quality education in the area of e-teaching, these certificates are a powerful addition to both your professional toolbox and your vitae, as well as a sound first step in the direction becoming a fully credentialed e-learning professional!

ID Hunter: Instructional Design Graduate certificates

Today, I received an email from the creator of ID Hunter promoting this great resource for comparing graduate certificates in instructional design, e-learning and related topics. Clearly, its author spent considerable time compiling the most critical data for a side-by-side comparison of options.

Any educator who wants to take their course development and delivery to the next level would be well served by a certificate's inherent opportunities for in-depth study, research and practice, even if not teaching fully online. The best classroom courses also incorporate technology and a blended or hybrid approach to teaching and learning. A certificate can also formalize your credentials as an e-learning professional!

Rubrics Made Even Easier!

In the world of assessment, there is no greater tool than the rubric! Well-constructed rubrics both qualify and quantify the assessment criteria and are a key communication tool between teachers and learners.

Do you need some help streamlining your grading rubric? Edudemic is here to help with no less than SIX online rubric creation tools!

Check them out HERE!

The Power of Graphics in Learning

Can a picture paint a thousand words? Can a photo impart instruction, procedure or information?

What do you think about this graphical recipe? Food for thought! (Yes, I admit it! Pun intended!)

You can engage learners with their content by using carefully chosen graphics to supplement your reading and viewing assignments, lectures and discussions. There are lots of free images out there that do NOT hold a copyright ... but a copyleft! That's a kind of license that allows you free use of some content! Also, there's the Creative Commons, public domain, and the old-fashioned thrill of designing your own graphics, with or without the help of expert digital media support!

There are lots of libraries to peruse linked in my LORs (Learning Object Repositories) section of links. Check them out!

Personalized Professional Learning: A Google Hang-out Roundtable

I attended this Google Hangout roundtable hosted by Ben Wilkoff just today and can't resist sharing it here!

How are you managing your own professional learning? And how can I help? Check out the Learning Remodeled Web site too!

 

Grade Change: Sloan-C's 2013 Report on Online Learning in U.S. Higher Ed

Sloan Consortium has released its 2013 annual survey of higher education administrators and is making it available for free download.

This 38-page report is titled Grade Change: Tracking Online Education in the United States, 2013 and surveys administrators specifically in the realm of higher education.

I found this snippet from the summary especially interesting: (bold emphasis is mine in last paragraph)

Are Learning Outcomes in Online Comparable to Face-to-Face?  

Background: The reports in this series have consistently found a growing majority of chief academic officers rate the learning outcomes for online education “as good as
or better” than those for face-to-face instruction.  

The evidence: The 2013 results show a small decrease in the percentage of academic leaders who view the learning outcomes for online instruction as the same of better than face-to-face instruction. 

• The percent of academic leaders rating the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in face-to-face instruction had grown from 57 in 2003 to 77 percent in 2012. The upward trend was reversed this year, with a dip to 74 percent.

• The proportion of academic leaders who believe the learning outcomes for online education are inferior to those of face-to-face instruction increased from 23 percent last year to 26 percent this year. 

• Academic leaders at institutions with online offerings remain positive about the relative learning outcomes for online courses; all of the decrease can be attributed to leaders at institutions without online offerings becoming more negative. 

Happy reading!

What We're Learning from Online Education

"Daphne Koller is enticing top universities to put their most intriguing courses online for free -- not just as a service, but as a way to research how people learn. With Coursera (cofounded by Andrew Ng), each keystroke, quiz, peer-to-peer discussion and self-graded assignment builds an unprecedented pool of data on how knowledge is processed."

Assessment: Telling Our Stories

I am in the process of preparing a presentation for an assessment conference in June to be held at Alabama A&M University. I am very excited about the opportunities to both attend and present at this annual event.

I am speaking on the subject of MOOCs, and whether they can or should be incorporated into our own curricula. The idea of marrying two seemingly disparate entities (MOOCs and traditional higher education) is not unlike struggling with the relationship of qualitative and quantitative assessment strategies.

And it has me thinking about the nature of assessment. It has me wondering how I can convey to the audience my concern for the over-reliance on data that I observe, without giving the impression that I don't value the data at all. Quite the contrary! I'm a scientist, a mathematician every bit as much as I am an artist and a writer. I just don't think that the data tells the entire story when it comes to the important role of assessment.

What kind of assessment, though? Are we talking institutional assessment? Program assessment? Or the assessment of teaching and learning that occurs within our institutions? So often it seems that teaching and learning are segregated in the planning and assessment processes in ways that make both more difficult to both assess and address.

But I think we're really talking about all forms of assessment here. The assessment design is so critical to the analysis of perceived outcomes that there are have to be standards of compliance on all levels. But establishing those standards doesn't have to abolish the narrative that must necessarily accompany the data.

How many of us want to be assessed on any level based purely on data? As institutions, we don't want our accrediting agencies looking only at our numbers with no consideration of the stories, efforts and the context supporting those numbers. Numbers tell a story, but it's not always the whole or even near truth. We all know that.

So when we think of student learning, we must even-handedly afford them the same opportunity for a narrative. Our numbers don't TELL our story, their merely support and document its narrative. There's no doubt that the data, the grades, the statistics all matter. But without the story, they can lead us astray. Data might make us think that a student has learned something that they really have not learned. Or that they haven't learned something that has in fact taken hold inside of them and begun to transform the way they think and process information for the rest of their lives.

One of the worst grades I ever received was on a written exam from a philosophy professor I had in freshman year. The course was all about logic. We were being taught to think logically in philosophical terms. None of us fared well on paper (luckily, that was just an exercise in compliance and those grades were dismissed in the end), but the impact of the professor's teaching on me was so profound that over 30 years later, I still remembered his name, his face and many of the things he said verbatim from our classes that semester. He was one of two professors that I remember vividly even three decades later who had profound life-long impact on my relationship to the world. Neither ever asked me a multiple choice question; one never even gave a test or quiz. They based our final grades on the conversations that they had held with each of us, the narrative that contextualized our performance data.

I was student teaching one semester. My internship grade was based on how many times I had written in my journal that semester. I don't think it was even read, as I received no feedback on its content. The entries were counted and my grade was finalized. I got a B because I had missed a week in the journal due to illness/stress. I was not allowed to retroactively journal. And all I had to show for that internship was this grade on a transcript that was the only physical record of my college experience. Even though my journal told the story of several personal breakthroughs with at-risk youth in my classes.

I want us all to remember that data without a narrative is, at best, dangerous to the mission and its objectives. At its worst, it leads us in circles or down the entirely wrong roads with our efforts.

The Web, in its infinite power, has the ability to help us deliver  BOTH our data AND our stories in ways that have increasing meaning to—and impact upon—not only the learners we serve, but ourselves as teachers. Teaching and learning can no more easily be separated than the wax and wane of the moon, or high and low tides of the ocean. You cannot measure (or assess, which is not synonymous with measurement!) one without measuring and assessing the other. Because for every measurement, there is a deeper story to tell of connection, engagement, risk, effort and ultimately, outcome.

How will we tell our own stories? How will we tell the stories of our teaching and learning? How will we support our students telling theirs? With a transcript? Or an e-portfolio? A body of work (research, art, etc.) ... ?

Because when they tell their stories, they are telling ours, too.

Fun Friday! Time for a Little Levity

Check out this hilarious story of how a learner and instructor engaged through—of all things—a question and response on a written exam!

TED redesign!

It's true! TED is redesigning its Web site and you can sign up for early access! Track the progress and sign up for updates and a sneak peek here.

If you're not familiar with TED yet, you're missing out! Check out the best and most inspiring talks on technology, entertainment and design at TED.com. Many of these talks make great content for online courses and they are always inspiring!

Passing Fads: A Retrospective View

I just received an email update from a source that I will refrain from naming out of professional courtesy because of my reaction to it. This update contained a "paper" which made some pretty bold claims about the nature of MOOCs and other "passing fads" like Khan Academy.

The source alleged incorrectly that Khan Academy is a for-profit institution trying to pass itself off as a degree-bearing academy of higher education. Anyone who knows Khan Academy well knows how inherently misled (I'm going to avoid the allegation of it being intentionally misleading and assume that intentions were good, albeit misinformed and hastily formed) the author of that paper was in making the assertion.

What worries me, though, is that there are folks new to e-learning who read this type of assertion and accept it on face value. And who has the time to dig through the background on every issue in every article we read coming through our email inbox?

Gentle reader, please know that whether MOOCs stay in their current form or whether they morph into something we will not recognize over the next decade, their impact on the higher education landscape is both irrefutable and immutable. If you find speculations (or if those speculations find you) that disparage or minimize the value, the impact or the potential of MOOCs, of LORs (Learning Object Repositories) like Khan, or of any other Web-based technological advancement that impacts our teaching and learning culture, please remember and consider this interview from scientist Clifford Stoll, who claimed in 1995 that the Internet is "not that important," "grossly oversold" and had "so little of value" that it would never take hold. Please review this post by the same fellow.

And stay tuned.

Postscript: Interestingly, Clifford Stoll presented this TED talk in 2006 titled The Call to Learn.

Volunteer to Peer Review Exemplary Courses!

It's that time of year again! Blackboard is now soliciting volunteer reviewers for the 2014 exemplary course competition! I participated as a reviewer last year and it was very enlightening! We were each given a rubric by which to evaluate each course on multiple criteria.

Participating as a reviewer afforded me the opportunity to see work developed by faculty from a diversity of academic disciplines at colleges and universities across the nation! I got some great ideas for instructional design as well as reassurances that we are using the Blackboard environment in accordance with best practice in the field of e-learning!

Sign up here to be a volunteer reviewer. And consider entering your exemplary course in this year!

On the Road: Humans Need Humans

This happens to our students every day, not just during the holidays. Students need human support as much or more than academic support. Imagine what we could accomplish if every student we taught had a human support system!

HOT TIPS: Holiday Buying Advice

Whether a learner or a teacher in the world of e-learning (and ideally, aren't we all BOTH?), there's a great chance that technology is on either your wishlist or the list of someone you love. But how to make the best decisions? It's overwhelming even for the veteran e-geek to determine that all available options are being considered and only the best possible choice made from a global technology market!

Where to turn? CNET. This site has provided the best in technology reviews for years. It's where I always start and where I always end up on those tough investment decisions.

What's on your list this year?

Newbies' Guide to Computer Symbols

THIS FABULOUS EDUDEMIC GUIDE to common computer icons/symbols is most helpful! And not just for newbies! I will link this in our resource sections for easy reference later as well.

(Viewing note: When you click on the link, the graphic will likely be too small to read the type. Your cursor will be a magnifying glass that will allow you to enlarge it and then you can scroll through the Web window to study it! The same cursor will SHRINK the graphic if it is already ENLARGED.)

Sir Ken Robinson: How to Escape Education's Death Valley

Let's Play Jeopardy!

I found this great free Jeopardy simulator that allows you to enter your own questions/answers and play this game with your students! It was a breeze to build one, too!

It could be used in a class discussion/review as well as for individuals doing self-assessment in an online environment.

What fun!

Wicked Cool App Alert!

Anyone who uses BOTH Google Drive AND Microsoft Office to create and manage documents knows the hassle of trying to made edits to an Office document on your mobile devices.

Enter Quickoffice, a free app from Google that allows you to access your Google Drive account and EDIT the Microsoft Office documents contained therein. Yes, really!

It works beautifully and my life just got a whole lot better. Big thanks to Dr. Brian Leonard for the technology tip of the week!

Blackboard accepting submissions!

Everyone familiar with Blackboard's Exemplary Course program? In addition to acknowledging and highlighting best practice in e-learning within the Blackboard community, the gallery is a great hunting ground for tips and ideas for our own course designs. I often send faculty there to peruse and browse the best of what other course developers have created so that they have a better sense of their goal.

The Exemplary Course program is now accepting submissions for 2014! Each entry is developed via a video tour of the course and a fairly extensive application for inclusion. I participated last year as a volunteer course evaluator for the program and learned so much about what Blackboard can do, in addition to getting some great e-learning ideas relevant to any LMS (Learning Management System)!

Do you have an amazing course built in Blackboard? Enter today!

MERLOT II Unveiled!

If you haven't heard of or visited MERLOT, you're missing out! It's arguably the best quality learning object repository (LOR) out there, as its contents are all peer-reviewed by traditionally accepted academic standards. And those learning objects are searchable by keyword and licensed for use in teaching and learning at no cost! The site has blossomed over time to provide a social network for e-learning professionals as well as a host of resources and services related to e-learning.

Join the MERLOT community to expand your knowledge of and access to no-cost, high-quality resources for your learners!

Video: I Will Not Let an Exam Result Decide My Fate

Don't forget that you can go "full screen" by clicking the four-cornered box in the lower right corner of the video screen! Just type the ESC key to return to the normal blog view.

State Authorization Update

We attended a statewide meeting in Montgomery, Alabama last week to discuss the state authorization issue and its latest implications for those serving online education on postsecondary levels.

For those new to the term "state authorization," this simply means the seeking and granting of permission for colleges and universities to "do business" outside of their states' boundaries. In order for us to teach online students outside of the state in which we operate, we must have permission (via a license or exemption, depending on the state) to serve the residents of each particular state represented by our students. If want to teach students in New York, we must have New York's permission to do so, either with a license or an exemption to the license.

That said, the issue very quickly gets complicated (and expensive!) as we navigate the unique and discrete requirements of each of the other forty-nine states in which we want to enroll students. The processes and costs are to be renewed at the end of each license period, which also varies by state. In the state of Alabama, as an example, an institution can expect to spend between $2,500 and $15,000 every two years to maintain license to teach Alabamians online.

In fact, the issue is so complicated that the legal mandate is yet to be set in stone. Courts have been knocking the issue around for a few years, and we do our best to keep up. In that spirit, I have added a "State Authorization" section to this blog (see navigation bar on RIGHT of screen) and will continue to add key links there that will help anyone who wants to learn more or keep a close eye on the state authorization issue as it evolves.

For the time being and for any players new to the game, I recommend a review of the history (beginning with links I've provided before generalized Web searching) and current state of the issue as well as the beginning (or continuation) of good faith efforts at compliance.

While reciprocity agreements are being negotiated and developed, state-to-state licensure is going to continue to be an issue that will require some level of documentation and investment, whether to individual states or to a collective representing an coalition of states. In either case, it's best that the relevant discussions and the consideration of processes, stakeholders and outcomes begin as soon as possible, if indeed they have not already begun.

Faculty Organizations Take on MOOCs

This article published by Campus Technology illustrates a growing anti-MOOC sentiment among faculty across public higher education. While on the one hand, there is legitimate concern for the privatization and the quality of online programs, aiming the 'quality control' issue at MOOCs as a movement—and online learning in general—seems disingenuous to me.

I don't believe it's appropriate here to throw the baby out with the bathwater with wholesale condemnation of the MOOC movement and online learning in general. While I understand the threats that the open education movement represents to public higher education in general, I believe there is great potential for the revitalization of public higher education to be realized through the thoughtful integration of open educational resources—especially MOOCs and their wide-scale accessibility—into the teaching and learning we do at public colleges and universities.

Fighting against online education and MOOCs will not serve these faculty opponents well in the long run, I predict. As long as we view public higher education and the MOOC movement as mutually exclusive, someone has to win and someone has to lose. Neither holds enough cards to claim a winning hand since traditional education has become so expensive and out of reach for so many, and in many public higher ed environments, technological integration is woefully absent. On the other hand, what MOOCs offer in affordability and accessibility cannot compensate for the limited human interaction they offer. So what's a learner to do? If I were shopping for a degree, I would choose an environment where my traditional human faculty have chosen to embrace technology and open access education, and where I would have access to the best of both worlds. The universities and faculty who make that choice for integration of traditional and online/technology-based learning will reap the greatest rewards in terms of enrollment, retention and learning outcomes. And then we have to consider our charge for preparing our learners for the real-world workforce that awaits them.

Although the private e-learning sector arguably has questionably high influence in the movement, I don't believe that privatization is really the core issue in this debate. Before we decide who else to invite to the table, we have to first decide if we ourselves are going to accept the invitation to step into the exhilarating-albeit-sometimes-scary world of new millennial e-learning and MOOCs.

The water is rising, though. And I really don't think there's going to be any option for going back.

What do you think?

Power Through Series returns!

The Power Through Series for e-course developers is back and ready for your registration! We'll be meeting weekly on Thursday afternoons from 2:00–4:00 pm (with open lab from 4:00–5:00 pm for anyone who needs extra help) from October 3 through November 21.

Won't you join us? Check out the agenda and register to attend here!

We'll be adding several more trainings to our schedule over the next day or two, but I wanted to get the word out about this series immediately! SPACE IS LIMITED so sign up now!

There have been days and days filled with busy-ness! I'll return next week! Thanks for your patience!

A quote for the duration:

Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. "Leadership qualities" are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, stubbornness, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head, even when things are going badly. True leaders, in short, do not make people into followers, but into other leaders.” 

John Holt, Teach Your Own

Combining The Nation's Digitized Libraries, All In One Place

Learn all about it HERE.

Six Types of Assessments (And How They're Changing!)

Want a three-to-five minute crash course in assessment models? This infographic is just for you! I'm a big fan of formative assessment. I know there are lots of controversies surrounding the legitimacy and execution of other types of assessment such as the criterion-based and norm-referenced models. I suspect the ideal lies somewhere in the dynamic hybrid that meets the needs of various learning communities but I also suspect that formative assessment plays a prominent role in any learner-centered process. The key word to remember about formative assessment is "feedback"—and lots of it. Continuous feedback has a double-edged benefit in that it helps assess both the learner's learning and the teacher's teaching, if that teacher is so tuned to read and hear feedback to their feedback. The ideal is a continuous feedback loop. With a steady, continuous communication with learners, we learn to adapt to and overcome individual obstacles to learning as well as modeling to learners how to overcome those obstacles by and for themselves.

Desktop Documentaries: Value in Learning and Assessment?

I'm pretty impressed with this Desktop Documentaries site! I have always had a keen interest in producing documentaries and I have a summer at Duke University's documentary filmmaking school on my to-do list. The topics that I'd like to explore and relate via documentary are all topics in which I hold great passion and interest, of course. The topics themselves drive my interest in documentary production, and the technical process of producing a film is of secondary interest. Development of the technical skills and resources required to communicate information and ideas on a chosen topic in a multimedia documentary would be a great bonus outcome for a learner enrolled in any field of curriculum!

What if we used learner-driven desktop documentary production in the classroom (online or brick-and-mortar) for both learning and assessment? While it would be admittedly difficult to manage a high-quality production of any significant depth or length in the scope of a one-semester course, full documentary production provides a great opportunity for a culminating experience, which typically spans multiple semesters (in secondary and higher educational environments) and can be approached as a team effort. I'm especially fond of any type of learning or assessment that stresses collaborative teamwork skills as opposed to merely competitive learning models. Learning communities form around a shared goal or project, and documentary making can be done completely virtually from a variety of source points around the world by using widely available free technologies and tools.

And for those courses which begin and end in a single semester, mini-documentaries of 3-5 minute duration and a more ad hoc production quality (smartphones, tablets, laptops) are ideal for the learning experience measured in weeks rather than years. Public service announcements, mini-documentaries, sound bites or video blogs/memes produced with educational intent provide real-world context to the learning experience and leave the learner with a tangible outcome perfect for an e-portfolio!

I am adding a documentary section to this blog. I will be adding resources as I find them, so please feel free to share yours with us!

What might your learners gain from creating video documentaries? And what might we gain from them?

Moment in Meme