ADTED 531 Unit 7 - Reflections

Digital Diploma Mills

In David Noble's 1998 "Digital Diploma Mills" article, he says that we are "rushing headlong" into new technology with "little regard for deliberation of the pedagogical and economic costs, and at the risk of student and faculty alienation and opposition." He uses the bulk of his article to rail against commercialization of higher education as the primary reason why new technlogies are being adopted so haphazardly.

Overall, I completely disagree with his perspectives, and I believe that history that has elapsed in the 12 years since he wrote his article has since proven him wrong. However, there is still a major argument he makes that I'd like to respond to, which is still a salient issue today:

"In addition to the vendors, corporate training advocates view online
education as yet another way of bringing their problem-solving,
information-processing, "just-in-time" educated employees up to profit-making
speed. Beyond their ambitious in-house training programs, which have
incorporated computer-based instructional methods pioneered by the military,
they envision the transformation of the delivery of higher education as a
means of supplying their property-prepared personnel at public expense."

In my work as a corporate training project manager, on the much-harangued private side of industry, I see this point of view a lot amongst my government clients. They always feel that they can use new technologies to provide their own [employee] workforce education and training needs, because they theoretically have the "same" technology and access to it that we do. However, what I see is that most public employees simply don't have the time or the expertise in the new technologies to really learn them and implement them as legitimate training vehicles to educate public employees.

Under the Obama administration we're finally getting away from the traditional face-to-face training and starting to adopt virtual technologies, which has provided a huge cost savings to the government. We, as the dreaded private consultants, provide our government clients with the suggestions and expertise to know which technologies to use, when, and for what. Because we have expertise in both training AND technology [and if we don't we just hire someone who does], we can recommend new technologies that are right for our clients, not just what's popular or nifty. We can then easily provide implementation plans and help our clients adopt the new technologies, and provide hand-off strategies for them to eventually take them in-house. Our role is not to provide a crutch for the client, but to help them come into the 21st century in a way that works for them.

So, I'm not quite sure why that's a bad thing, and I can attest personally that when technology is left up to the feds, it stagnates. The role of the private sector is not to take over the public sector, but to act as a strategic partner and consultant to share the fruits of the innovations on the private side with our federal counterparts. This is the way that online distance education technology gets adopted in my world, but I'd like to hear about others' worlds, from different perspectives. Do you agree with David Noble?

ADTED 531 Unit 6 - Reflections

Suggestions for DE Teacher Training

Ahhh yes, one of our favorite subjects: Teacher Training in DE. I think we'd all agree by now that:

• It's really, really important the our DE teachers know how to use the technology
• Most institutions don't provide enough training for their teachers to get comfortable with it
• It's better to use old technology and do it well, rather than try to always implement the "latest and greatest" but have teachers struggle with it

I'd add to this list a lesser-aired point about how it's important to have teachers use the technology consistently across different courses, and organize the materials in a consistent manner. As I spoke about in my Discussion post for Unit 4, it's really frustrating for DE students when they have to hunt around each week for relevant course information and assignment details which may be posted in a variety of places. We need to teach our DE instructors to post ALL the details/materials/instructions in ONE place on the online platform, and stick with that so students know where to go each week.

So, the next question, which we don't usually get to, an important one: HOW will we train our DE teachers to deliver their course materials? This is a sticky question, because many DE instructors may not be on-campus in the first place. So, I would recommend actually using the DE platform itself to teach your DE instructors how to deliver their courses over it. That way, they have a firsthand perspective of what it's like to be a student using this platform to receive their course materials, and they can figure things out just as the students will. Then the instructor will be best positioned to answer student questions as the lesson rolls along, without always having to refer to tech support. Also, the instructor may see a better way to organize or deliver the information once they're actually using the platform itself.

Then, AFTER the instructors have used the platform itself to try out a lesson or two of the material, they should all have some sort of "standard" course on DE teaching best practices. Since they've just gone through the course material as learners, the best practices should then make a lot more sense and the instructors will realize their importance. For a great set of resources about Best Practices in delivering DE, visit the Learning Putty website, and specifically start with this article about Tips for Teaching Online Courses. I think that a course on how to teach EFFECTIVELY online may already be out there, or can easily be developed and included as a standard part of DE teacher instruction.

After the experiential and the best practices components, I think that most people who are already qualified as teachers would be pretty good to go to teach DE courses. Instructors who are "into" technology will take it from there and find new and better ways of presenting the online material; instructors who aren't will simply teach the existing material. Either way, both should do a good job once they've had the proper training.

ADTED 531 Unit 5 - Reflections

From our course material this week: "There are three general approaches that one may take to acquiring a learning management system: (1) custom designing from the ground up; (2) purchasing a system off the shelf; (3) assembling a system from commercially available building blocks."

In my work experiences, I've had the firsthand opportunity to design Community of Practice learning management systems two of these approaches: (1) custom designing from the ground up; and (2) purchasing a system off the shelf. I'd like to share some of the benefits and drawbacks of both.

Custom Designing from the Ground Up

Example: https://21stcenturyapprenticeship.workforce3one.org/

Nearly 3 years ago, the e-learning and training consulting firm that I worked for decided to build a customized Community of Practice for our client, the US Department of Labor, Employment Training Administration (USDOL-ETA). We looked at lots of different off-the-shelf solutions, but the government just had too many specific requirements that we just could not achieve by using a ready made solution. So, we decided to build one ourselves. Three years later, we can see the benefits:

• Can completely customize the look & feel, the pages, and everything about it.
  
• Can meet all federal requirements, such as 508 (Disabilities Act) requirements
• Can integrate it with other tools that the government already has built, like their current websites and learning materials
• Can integrate ANY new tool that comes along -- recently we added the IdeaScale crowdsourcing tool as an application on our Apprenticeship Community of Practice
• Can build it so you don't need a programmer to upload content or make basic changes to the site
  

We can also see the drawbacks:

• Need a programmer to make core structural changes to the site, or fix glitches
• Clients often want the same features as various "off the shelf" tools provide (Facebook, etc), but they want them all in their single, customized Community. This often takes us a lot of time to "reinvent the wheel" when trying to program features onto our site, that other sites have. On the other hand, at least we can add all the best features from other sites, all on ONE single site.
  
• It's more expensive for the client to initially bring up a custom Community. We can't just walk into a conference, talk about how great Communities are, and sell 10 of them. It's a big undertaking if a client wants one.
  

Purchasing a System "Off the Shelf"

Example: http://scte2010.ning.com/

Two months ago, my company decided to create a "quick" community for the purposes of demonstrating Communities of Practice for an upcoming cable industry trade show. We didn't want to create a Community using our custom platform, because that would take a lot of time and effort and money to bring up. Instead, we opted for an off-the-shelf solution that I, PERSONALLY designed (I'm not a web programmer) in about 4 hours. After using it for the past two months, we can clearly see the benefits:

• Was quick, easy, and cheap to bring up!
  
• Can make structural changes instantaneously
• There are a lot of available widgets to integrate other programs into your Community, and if you don't see the one you want you can have a programmer design one pretty easily.
  

We can also see the drawbacks:

• Many of the Community's features, such as blogs, are not as advanced as we have come to expect from commercial blogging features such as blogger.com or wordpress.com. For example, there's no way to see upcoming scheduled blogs, until the day they appear live on the site
• Many of the Community's built-in standards, such as the process to sign up and become a member on the Community, are not able to be changed. For example, we had a user who was very upset that the Community asked him to provide his birthday in order to sign up and become a member. I contacted the off-the-shelf Community provider (www.ning.com), and was told that their sign-up process is standard and can't be changed. So, there are limits to what you can/can't change on a ready-made solution.
• There are many things that I wanted my community to do, such as post a Podcast, that I had to find major work-arounds in order to make it happen. Some key features that I wanted my Community to have, just weren't there, and there wasn't a widget that I could add to make it do what I wanted.
  

So, those are my real-life experiences as a practitioner who's tried 2 out of 3 different ways to acquire a learning management system. Has anyone else tried any of these? Does anyone have any experience with (3) assembling a system from commercially available building blocks? I'd be really interested to hear others' experiences!

ADTED 531 Unit 4 - Reflections

The Changing Scape of E-Learning

There is A TON of e-learning material out there online, and it's growing by the minute. It's hard to put a number on it, but some articles say the number of learning objects posted online doubles every month, and some say it doubles every three months. Regardless, it's growing FAST, and there's a whole lot of new content out there on the Net. I'm betting that there are a few very obvious questions that most people would ask about this situation as it unfolds, so let's use those questions to guide this reflection. Our first question is, why is there so much new learning content out there?

As Moore & Kearsley put it in their book Distance Education: A Systems View (2005), “As high-speed access to the World Wide Web becomes more generally available, course designers will be given more opportunity to offer a richer variety of media with much higher quality video and audio programming.” Also, there seems to be more need for distance learning material: “One effect of the continuous expansion of information is that the process of turning information into knowledge –that is, learning—must also be continuous” (Moore & Kearsley, 2005). And finally, with the advent of so many easy-to-use and widely available (and mostly free) content development tools of all types and purposes, it seems that nearly anyone can create educational material: “Now ordinary people not only have access to huge amounts of information, but are also able to create gigabytes of data themselves and publish it to the world via internet” (Moore & Kearsley, 2005).

So clearly, what this means in the larger scope of things is that every Joe Schmoe out there now has the technological gizmos available to develop content and post it on the web. GREAT. Our second question is, how do we define "e-learning content" vs. just plain old "e-content?"

Recently, the e-learning industry seems to be moving towards the creation of standards-compliant Learning Objects. “One of the important trends in the area of design and instruction, with enormous implications for how distance education is organized in the future, is the movement to design learning objects” (Moore & Kearsley, 2005). Learning objects are “products which in the future could be bought and sold by different institutions for assembling into their different educational programs” (Moore & Kearsley, 2005). A learning object might be a video, a podcast or audio recording, a document, an online toolkit, a Breeze course, an online self-assessment quiz, etc. These are the “bricks” out of which an educational program is constructed, each assembling them according to the program’s purpose. “By using the standard bricks, every institution would save the cost of manufacturing their own, and – just as important—would have raw materials that were of a common standard” (Moore & Kearsley, 2005). Using the same learning objects not only creates standards adherence and lowers the cost of creating an educational program, but it also decreases the time to create the educational program as well. This means that more programs can be created, cheaper, faster, and of a higher quality.

Learning objects are also an important response to the emerging “demand-driven” model of distance education wherein the consumer –that is, the student- is the driver of the curriculum content and design (Moore & Kearsley, 2005). Serving student demands instead of the demands of the educational system has led to the “unbundling” of educational services and components, resulting in more of a “buffet-style,” resources-on-demand type of system. In this system, designing individual learning object components of a curriculum makes perfect sense.

Okay, so we get that there are lots of learning object "building blocks" being designed and put out there on the web. Our third question is, how do we know if what we've got is good learning content or Joe Schmoe's random musings?

There are many different systems that are currently used to standardize learning objects and make sure that they "play nicely," in a technical sense, with other learning objects. One of these standards is called SCORM – the US Department of Defense’s Shareable Content Object Reference Model. For more information on SCORM, check out SCORM Explained.

However, although SCORM is a set of technical standards for the development of learning objects, it is NOT a set of quality standards. To date, there does not appear to be ANY set of quality standards that govern what a learning object must be, in order to be called a learning object. So, I throw the question out there to you:

DOES ANYBODY KNOW OF ANY LEARNING OBJECT QUALITY STANDARDS???

Aside from the quality issue, the fact remains that we are now moving as an industry towards creating learning objects as educational components that can be assembled in various ways. There are tons of new learning objects being created every day. This leads us to our fourth question: How are we going to share our learning objects with others so that they can use them too?

As I started to talk about in my last post, the creation of learning objects has led to the creation of online Communities of Practice, which are computer-mediated learning platforms that also act as a place to house self-contained learning packages. Communities revolve around one topic, issue, or professional field of practice, and are great places to store, catalog, and retrieve information about that topic. Many training organizations, such as the US Department of Labor's Employment Training Administration (ETA), are forming professional Communities of Practice around certain topics such as Registered Apprenticeship, to help train and connect government workers and employers across a variety of disciplines.

In addition to Communities of Practice, there are several other means of organizing and cataloging learning objects rather than just posting them up on the web and hoping for the best. Some of these include Learning Object Repositories, Learning Object Referatories, Open Courseware Initiatives, and Learning Management Systems. For a quantitative analysis and comparison of these different types of learning object posting options, check out this article on Quantitative Analysis of Learning Object Repositories.

So, in sum, it appears that there are exponential amounts of material being created and posted on the web by just about everyone, and some of it has the potential to be called a Learning Object and classified as such. We still don't really know what classifies a quality Learning Object, and we still don't really have a "best practices" way to post learning objects on the web in such a way that they can be reliably found and used as the educational lesson building blocks they are intended to be. I think I smell some future research directions here!

ADTED 531 Unit 3 - Reflections

Today I spent some time on the phone with Dr. Popp, talking about evaluating Communities of Practice as an online teaching curriculum. It occurred to me as we were speaking how very relevant this topic is to our discussion in ADTED 531 this week - about computer-mediated vs. self-contained learning packages. For those of you who have never heard of a Community of Practice, according to Social Learning theorist and practitioner Etienne Wenger, and anthropologist Jean Lave, who coined the term "Communities of Practice" back in 2003,

"Communities of Practice are groups of people who share an interest in or passion for an activity and who interact voluntarily and regularly to learn how to do that activity better."

Sounds like computer-mediated learning, doesn't it? Basically, Communities of Practice are computer-mediated learning platforms that also act as a place to house self-contained learning packages. If I was a student and I was interested in learning more about a topic, I would want to find a Community of Practice focused on that topic because it would be like finding the motherlode of information about that topic. I would be able to find find information such as self-contained courses, independent learning objects, current news stories, case studies, etc. I would also be able to look on discussion threads or find people to answer any questions I might have about the topic. Finally, I would be able to find innovations and learn about current trends in the topic, from the experts who are participating on the Community. It's a computer-mediated one-stop-shop of learning!

Find Information

Most Communities of Practice house a myriad of valuable resources, such as best practices, videos, outreach toolkits, webinars, e-learning courses, news articles, interactive event calendars, case studies, training models, and more. A good Community should encourage sharing (user posting) of user-found resources. Most Communities make it easy to find resources by grouping information and providing common ways to search for the information you require. Information sharing on Communities of Practice is unique because it’s reciprocal – users obtain AND provide information of value.

Find People, Find Innovations

A good Community of Practice should provide perspective on its topic, through features like Blogs, which bridge the gap between experts and students, and the informal, easy-to-read format encourages conversation and comments. It should also encourage an open and vibrant Q&A dialogue via computer-mediated learning features like Discussion Boards and Live Chat features, which are a great place for learners to ask questions and have their peers or experts answer them. The Community of Practice manager often facilitates discussions by asking an appropriate expert to answer a question that has been posted by a learner.

There are many online education spaces on the web today that claim to be “Communities of Practice.” However, through personal experience, I have found that not every website that claims to be a Community, really is. A true Community of Practice is an actively managed, computer-mediated learning platform that virtually brings together experts and learners in order to share resources (self-contained learning packages, independent learning objects) and brings together people to learn from each other. In my experience, Communities seem to be a "best of both worlds" type of deal, where you can use a computer-mediated learning platform to deliver self-contained course materials as well.

My question to you all would be, have you ever used a Community of Practice before? Do you think that they're useful as computer-mediated learning platforms? Do you think that they're adequate in delivering self contained course material? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.