Monday, September 21, 2009

Designing for social presence

How do we move whole groups of students forward, making progress, while personalising their learning and getting them to participate online ?

I went to a workshop / lecture on "social presence" in distance education. The presenters defined social presence as the ability to see each other as 'real' people based on collaboration, therefore reducing the psychological distance between teacher and student, teacher and teacher, student and student.

Online course designers can build in opportunities to maximise student engagement, and teachers actively network with the students regularly to keep the contact. This was evident at the Florida Virtual School, for example, which had a daily target for each teacher to make 'social' contact with 10 students each day, just to say 'hello and hows it going'.

Teachers could push the boundaries of social contact in their teaching. They could be creating avatars, their personalised online characters, to deliver notices and messages, audio announcements and give and recieve feedback. Testdrive this programme, which was recommended by the presenter - www.voki.com

Teachers could be putting visuals, graphics and animations into their emails as simple and effective ways of gaining interest and appearing more personal. Although this may not be their generation's ideas of a personal approach, it is the learners definition.

Teachers might like to create social spaces outside of the students own social networking. Students don't necessarily want their uncool teachers appearing on Facebook. In fact, a friend of mine's teenager was recently in trouble for the same reason. One of his teachers went into his facebook site to give him a telling off, and he promptly responded with a short video of how he felt about his space being invaded. His response was sufficient for the school to ask him to leave. Not to worry - his father is a human rights lawyer and the parents still found away of being proud of their boy!

One of the recent trends in online learning, is to create the social presence of teachers and students. One idea within a school environment, is the Student Cafe. This is a space dedicated to simple but effective ways of getting students to engage with each other, knowing that there are 'school rules' involved. Asking them to introduce themselves, post their comments on current affairs or homework etc, helps bring about conversations that help positive social contact. A recommended tool is www.gabcast.com

Teachers are able to make students responsible for their own participation, contribution and working with others. These techniques are particularly relevant to our new curricuum, as they are some of our key competencies. While we think of ways to implement these key competencies in schools, we should, at the same time, be thinking of introducing them into the design of online learning.

Techniques such as getting students to participate and contribute to discussion threads and forums, and then to summarise their own and others contributions, as an assessment event. This helps teachers gain insight into the students competencies, higher order thinking and social presence.

In summary, students can be experiencing a disconnect between the 'voice' of their teacher and their online participation. They want social experiences such as debating with their teacher online, through devices such as voicethread.com . They want to be working socially alongside their teacher, perhaps through acrobat.pro, which shows their work being marked by their teacher on screen, in real time, while they talk it through with them and discuss feedback together.

Other practical, simple ideas include:
- Inserting youtube or video clips in your emails to students as conversation starters.
- Assessment rubrics can be designed to look at student online particpation in social discussions ( a rubric such as : not completed / interested / exploring / connecting ideas / applying new ideas ).
- Play with these web tools that develop collaboration between teachers and students : bubble.us, mindmeister, learninglab.org

If you are interested in these themes, I purchased some books for our library from the conference :
" 147 practical tips for synchronous and blended technology teaching and learning "
" 147 practical tips for teaching online groups "
" Learning in real time : synchronous teaching & learning online "

I also have a handout from this lecture titled " The role of a successful online/blended teacher " which looks at ways of self assessing course design, course organisation, facilitating students learning and direct teaching.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Your views are welcome, so please contribute to the Blog.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Growth and change management in distance education

This session at the International Conference of Distance Teaching & Learning was delivered by Susan Biro, Carlos Morales and Peter Shapiro, all of whom are PhDs in distance education and work in distance education environments across the United States. They participated together via video conference to the audience.

The question they were posing was, "Distance education often evolves 'organically' but when it is time for an organisation to change, what happens ? "

They idenitified what they see as current 'challenges' for distance education organisations, as being :
- Getting courses online.
- Where the responsibility for the online courses may lie, in the structure of the organisation.
- who carries the 'Vision' for online teaching, and who has the interest ?

Everyone in the group seemed to nod and raise their eyebrows.

They identified pressures on distance education, as :
- Dwindling local and semi rural populations in the United States for local education providers such as trade schools and community colleges ( Polytechnics )which sees those organisations having to go on lone or lose business to online providers.
- Online courses are now seen to be a competitive advantage for students, and the growing reason as to why they choose one education provider over another.
- The avaiability of experienced and committed online course teaching staff, and their access to further study to retain them as online teachers.

They saw these pressures and challaneges as positive reasons for organisational change. They and talked of how distance education organisations could :
- Provide access for students, if and when local education providers such as trade schools or polytechnics, close down or relocate their campus to urban centres.
- Provide opportunities for organisations to develop local and regional content for their courses, rather than online courses appearing to be generic and universal.
- Provide opportunities for growing numbers of new groups of students ... for example, the fastest growing student populations in distance education in the USA at the moment are students with disabilities who do not access F2F settings, and older students coming out of the workforce and doing retraining. The average age for enrolling is now 27 years old, rather than school leaving age.

The obstacles for organisational change and getting more courses online are:
- Pace and time it takes for organsiations to develop online learning, and the lack of preparedness of teachers when the courses go online.
- Reluctance of teachers to to work outside of usual timetables and in new time slots that reflect when the students are actually online.
- Problems when teachers no longer report to teaching managers for their online work but report instead to an online course administrator.
- Seperate contracts being issued to teachers for online teaching or development, and the dissonance that it creates when it comes in opposition to their usual teaching duties.

They see the pressures and challenges being categorised as :
- Programmatic.
- Administrative.
- Institutional.

These issues include:
- Who are the stakeholders? How do they communicate with each other ?
- What are the reporting lines?
- Who holds the resources / budget?
- How are online students resourced and funded, do they need to be resourced differently if they cost less to deliver to ?
- Losing the focus on the student as organsiations struggle amongst themselves to solve these issues.
- How to upskill and train part time staff as well as fulltime staff to deliver online or blended courses.
- The teacher trade unions in the USA seeing online teaching and course development as seperate contracts to usual teaching duties.

In summary, the speakers saw the greatest organisational challenge for distance education organisations across the USA as being " the acceptance of teachers to work online " .

What do you think ? That comment would be a good starter question to ask ourselves and our organisation. Blog away !

Thoughts from the conference, part 1

Tena koutou -

Welcome to the first email in a regular series about my experiences from the International Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, August 4-7 at Madison, Wisconsin The city of Madison is about the same size as Wellington, but inland and by the side of four lakes. It has a relaxed, liberal feel and is home to a well respected university. It also has a wonderful crumbling old 1920s movie palace called the Orpheum, which even though I was the only person in the auditorium, played a movie for me – on two occasions - at The Orpheum Theatre Madison is also very proud of its cheese and my hotel was next to a great little shop called Fromagination, where you could buy chocolate dipped bacon strips.

The conference itself was in a Frank Lloyd Wright designed building on one of the rivers, which was an unexpected pleasure, called Monona Terrace, and worth looking at if you are a FLW admirer, as I am . The conference was organized to have a number of keynote speakers and then choices of dozens of workshops, down a parade of meetings rooms called The Hall of Ideas, as well as exhibition stalls to browse, chat and buy. They had an interesting display of quotations on posters, such as:

“ Non-traditional learning works for thousands of learners because they link it to their needs, concerns, problems and aspirations” – Charles A. Wedemeyer (1981)

“ I think the most exciting thing, looking at the next twenty five years, is going to be the way distance learning changes as a result of social networking and the whole social turn in culture world wide” – Gary Greenberg (2008)

“Educators who establish clear expectations as to how threaded discussions are used, or who ask specific questions in response to student postings, can expect to encourage rich dialogue amongst their students” – Alan Roper (2007)

These quotes seemed to define many of the workshops and speeches. Big themes around getting students to reduce their isolation ( rather than their distance ) by being social and collaborative, and being assessed on the quality of not just their work, but their contribution and participation, and how they work with others. This is very relevant to our new New Zealand curriculum. So I knew I was in the right place ! But our challenge at TCS is to give students the means to do this, when currently they have little contact with each other, and therefore little opportunity to develop these competencies.

The opening keynote speaker was Dr Michael Moore ( no, not that one ) who spoke about “The Scholarship of Distance Education” . It was basically a history of how distance education has been studied and researched. He started with the fact that in 1926, more Americans were enrolled in distance learning for their trade, than were in face to face training organisations. By 1933, the first distance education council was established, but it wasn’t until 1982 that the first University ( Chicago ) offered distance courses. The 1960s first saw the use of media such as television to deliver distance education ( known as “articulated instructional media experiments” ) but these experiments started academics looking at how learning is done through distance education, not just teaching.

Researchers and academics stopped talking about ‘correspondence’ ways of distance education in the early 1960s ( oops ), to develop new theories called “guided didactic conversation” ( Halmburg, 1960 ) or “ independent study” ( Wedemeyer, 1971 ) and “transactional distance” ( Moore, 1972 ). Despite their grand titles, they still contain much reference to what we deal with today – how do we help create independent learners who have a goal for their learning, and enjoy exchanges with their teachers ?

In 1980 a professor called Keegan developed what he called four principles of distance education :

1. Separation of the teacher and student

2. The organization influences what is taught and how

3. The teaching follows an industrial production model

4. There is possible and occasional face to face contact

This was quite interesting for me, as these principles were developed in the year that I started training to be teacher. I reflected yet again on : How much do we base our practices on this, still? How much are we moving away from this? What is our thinking about the future and developing other principles? What is our resistance to a future with different principles?

The history of the study of distance education also has an international flavour. The first world conference was in 1938, although there had been conferences across Europe and the USA since 1891 on “Extension Education” . By 1962 there was the first world conference on using ‘new media’ such as television.

Being accredited by distance education organisations has a later history, as it wasn’t until 1970 that the first University offered a diploma course, and not until 1991 that a Masters level course was made available by a cooperation between universities in the USA and Germany. Academic studies saw 20 doctorates awarded in 1932- 1976 for “Correspondence “ teaching & learning ( oops, again ) around the world, but from 1981- 2001 over 1200 doctoral studies looked at distance education.

Nowadays, distance education now features in the studies and work of UNESCO and the World Bank, both of whom offer funding and development to emerging countries as part of an overall education improvement plan. The first Distance Education Museum is about to open ( online only, visited by your second life character ! ) and the museum organisers are calling for artifacts, submissions and studies to be posted online. If you are interested in this project on behalf of The Correspondence School in New Zealand, please let me know.

My next emails over this term and next term will follow up on other workshops I attended. The themes will include :

- Creating online students and keeping them online

- Professional development frameworks for online course teachers

- Change management in distance education organisations

- ePortfoilos : designing new systems for assessing learning

- Recruitment and retention of online course teachers

- Social and cognitive presence for students : how to teach it and how to teach yourself to teach it

I hope you’ve enjoyed this message and look out for the next one. For your viewing pleasure, I share with you a short animation from one of John Henry’s students called Grace, on her pumpkin ride ( with not a handsome Prince in sight ! ).

Naku noa, na

BP