Doug Connery e-portfolio

It is one thing to read about a framework such as the SECTIONS framework from Bates and Poole (2003) and it is another to actually apply it. In this course we have had two recent exercises where I had an opportunity to apply it in the context of selecting a learning management system (LMS). As this is a framework for selecting and using technology, it can be applied to more than an LMS, for example when deciding if a particular technology is appropriate to add to a course.

I also started to think if the broad categories of the SECTIONS framework could be used to guide the design of a course before it is developed. I work in a Post-Secondary Institute where curriculum development is very process oriented and curriculum excellence is based on following this process. Developing a course is a two-step process: first a learning design is developed and approved, and then the course moves into the development stage. Prior to implementing the second stage, the learning design is reviewed and approved by the Academic Chair or has been validated by co-faculty in the subject area or program. Without the design stage, and I have been guilty of this, Instructors and Subject Matter Experts dive into developing content without a plan that has been reviewed or validated. Not all institutes take this 2-stage approach as I found out in a group project in another MET course where the team members, all from Post-secondary institutes, spent a lot of time negotiating the importance and value of charging ahead developing a course without first creating at least a basic course design to guide the development of the course.

Course design is a challenging process as it forces the instructor to think about and write down many aspects about a course including the outcomes, how they will teach it, how the students will learn, course pacing and how the assessments will tie the course into the outcomes. Course design sometimes results in Instructors stopping the process and getting advice from others before proceeding. SECTIONS provides a framework that could guide instructors in asking themselves questions that would help them put a design into play before developing the course. If an Instructor was to apply the SECTIONS framework before developing a course, it could trigger key questions and provide insights that could be missed before, during or after the course development.

Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003). A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In A.W. Bates & G. Poole, Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 4.

This case study like others, and the questions they ask seem simple at first but once you dive down into the details, it becomes evident the problem is more complex and several solutions may arise. The task then is to try and determine which solution is best for the situation and sometimes there is not just one solution but several or a hybrid. One has to make several assumptions to come to a solution and these assumptions may be right or wrong depending on your perspective. In a case study situation, there is no opportunity to ask questions or clarify the assumptions that you make. For example in this diabetes case study, one might assume that all seniors would have access to a DVD player, or access to the Internet or be comfortable watching videos on a computer. Without the knowledge and experience of working with seniors, we have no way to validate or reject these assumptions.

This is where the social aspect of constructive learning adds value. Whether through a group project or through posting your unique solution in a discussion forum, different perspectives come in through contributions and discussions with our classmates. You can then make adjustments to your understanding based others perspectives, the questions they ask, comments they make and assumptions they have made. The purpose of the exercise is not to come up with an ultimate solution but to think about all of the possibilities and complexities to solving a problem.

Below are the case study and my response.

Case Study: diabetes education

Anju is a dietician in Port Alberni, BC. She works part-time at both a nearby senior’s home and a community centre. “Port” as it’s known locally, is an ethnically diverse community whose economy is largely resource-based.

One common community health issue she provides care for is late onset (or “Type 2”) diabetes. In fact, among South Asian and Chinese new Canadian women over age 45 in Port there is a diabetes epidemic. An integral part of self-care for adult diabetics is about diet: eating healthily and understanding the role different foods play in maintaining blood glucose levels.

All of Anju’s clients are fluent in spoken English, but struggle with materials written in English. Those who attend her one-hour workshops say they help a lot… but it’s difficult to remember all the information afterwards.

Anju thought she might videotape her next workshop and then create a DVD. That way clients could rewatch her talk whenever – and as often – as they wish. She’s bought a video camera and has a laptop.

Now what?!?

Discussion question

You are Anju’s neighbour. As a teacher, she wants your advice – would a DVD be a good idea? What should she include in it, particularly for an ESL/EFL audience? Post your estimation in weeks in the Diabetes DVD discussion thread. Be sure to explain how you came up your answer.

My Response to this Case Study

I would ask Anju a few questions to try and get my head around the problem a bit better. Producing the DVD is one process but deciding how to host the videos is a different challenge. I think producing a video or a series of videos is a great idea to capture her presentations so her clients can replay them as much as they need. However, there may be existing multimedia available already that she could tap into on the Internet: videos and audio pod casts. This would save a lot of her time creating her own; however she does have a video and a laptop and may want to experiment with the technology.

So she wants to produce a DVD, however I would ask her if hosting the videos on U-Tube would be an option, perhaps both would be potential solutions. Also there could be existing videos on U-Tube that would complement or reduce what she wants to produce. Seniors like familiarity, so they might want to see Anju again, rather than a different person or voice, this could cause some confusion. She would need to find out if the senior’s homes that she visits have the technology to show DVD’s and U-Tube videos. Some could be limited to just DVD’s, but some may be able to show U-Tube videos. Also, would the seniors homes show the videos or would each senior be expected to have a DVD disc and player or a computer to access U-Tube. I have an 88 year old Aunt who has neither, instead her TV and stereo/tape deck is all she needs. “I never got into this DVD and computer stuff!” The answers to these questions should provide some insight into which way Anju should go.

Anju would also need to find out if seniors are comfortable watching a “movie” on a computer whereas they may prefer to watch movies on what they are used to: television. If they have a computer, then they probably have a DVD player, maybe they have Internet access also? As more and more baby boomers come into seniors homes, the acceptance of U-Tube and computers should increase. So Anju would need to do some research by asking her senior’s how they would prefer to watch the movies.

A DVD is fairly quick to burn, I did the DVD exercise in the e-learning toolkit and it took about 5 minutes to setup and about 5 minutes to burn the DVD with a couple of videos and over 500 images totalling about 75% of a DVD capacity. This one off process was easy however burning one at a time could be time consuming, so the number of seniors that Anju needs DVD’s for would be a factor. Burning 50 DVD’s based on my trial would take her over four hours. Uploading this much information to U-Tube would take much longer than 5 minutes, perhaps an hour, but it would only need to be done once. If Anju wanted to update her videos or add more, then she would need to burn new DVD’s, so she should not stock pile too many.

So to DVD or not to DVD? Anju would need to do some research by asking some key questions to her seniors and the administrators of the seniors homes that she visits plus look at existing resources available to help her decide if this is the right way to go.

In the summer of 2011, my son Linden and I went on a 14-day wilderness backpack in the Canadian Rockies. I was the photographer and took many pictures. Once we got home and down loaded the pictures to a computer, I organized them and deleted the not so great pictures. In the end there are about 560 pictures or about 40/day. From there the next question was what do we do next other than use them as a slide show screen saver. I did use one of the pictures on the mast head of my ETEC 565 e-portfolio website seen above.

Over the fall I took MET course ETEC 540: Text Technologies. We had some self-directed time to play around with some technologies. I took the opportunity here to create a video of the pictures of our trip. I used Windows Movie Maker and did two versions with the best pictures, full length, 16 minutes and a 4 minute trailer. I posted the trailer on U-Tube and gave the U-Tube link in my course discussion posting so all could see. The link is here: Ball to Boine to Burstall trailer. I created the full length version so we could show friends. The trailer is about 400 Mb and the full length version is about 1.6 Gb.

At the end of each year on December 31 or January 1, I always do DVD backups of files on my computer. So I did this with several DVD’s as I had taken lots of pictures throughout the year. I make two copies and send the second copy’s to my son’s house for redundancy.

For this exercise I decided to create an additional backup CD just of the two video’s (trailer and full version) and the 560 images. In total there is about 3.4 Gb of data, plenty of room on a 4.7 Gb DVD. As I had just completed doing my yearly back-ups four weeks ago, the process was fresh in my mind. However when I only burn DVD’s once /year it does take a while to figure out where the blank DVD’s are, which of the two DVD players on my PC to use, which software to use (default windows or specialty) and how to use the software. So this exercise with everything fresh in my mind, only took about 10 minutes to do: five minutes to find the DVD, find the files, the software and hit ‘burn” and five minutes to create the DVD. As I don’t have a second computer or DVD player in the house, I made sure it worked on the PC’s second DVD player. Since I was familiar with the process I found the process was not labour intensive, not challenging and there were no surprises.

As an addition to this exercise we should ask ourselves, are DVD’s still relevant in this day and age where we can post our videos and images on the cloud, for example through U-Tube and Flicker. This question came to me when I brought the newly minted full length version of the video over to my son’s house in November on a flash drive so he could have a copy. His comment was why didn’t you just post it on U-Tube like you did the trailer, this eliminates the need for flash drives and DVD’s. I really did not have an answer to his question that fit into his digital age context. For me however, I am happy with a DVD backup (several now) of my video Masterpiece and all of the pictures.

After reflecting for a week on my quick response to these two case studies and reading my class mates responses, I realized that I live and breathe these types of scenarios on a day-to-day basis and I did not even need to think when I created my responses. My responses were based on my experiences from my institute and I realize now that most of my classmates have very little experience in this area so struggled a bit. This is a change as many of the theory based discussion topics in other courses have been a struggle for me; however this a good way to learn when placed outside ones comfort zone. I believe we covered this in one of the learning theory’s – zone of proximal ….?

Scenarios like this; deciding on which LMS option to choose and scoping out the time to create a course is difficult to do without knowing many factors not provided by the case study. That of course is not the purpose of this exercise, it is to think about the factors involved using one of the two frameworks we are studying this week: Chickering and Gamson and the SECTIONS model from Bates and Poole. This was a great exercise to apply the frameworks mentioned above in a case study.

Below is the case study and my responses:

Case Study: Moodle or WebCT/Vista?

Benoît is a sessional instructor in the English department of a large, research-intensive university. Previously he has used WebCT to disseminate lecture notes and readings for his face-to-face Business Writing course.

His department head has approached him about offering an online version of Business Writing. However, WebCT is no longer available at his university and Benoît must choose either WebCT/Vista or Moodle. WebCT/Vista is the university’s “official” LMS and has university-wide IT support, but the Help Desk is difficult to get a hold of and can be very slow in responding to e-mail. Moodle is hosted within the Faculty of Arts, but operates as a stand-alone tool with no real technical support: instructors need to set up their own courses from scratch. More and more faculty and instructors in the English Department now use Moodle, since it isn’t administered by IT support: less paperwork, less red tape.

Benoît is very comfortable in the design mode of WebCT; he has also done some general web design, mostly for personal use. In terms of web design he’s developed content, uploaded it via FTP and then left it there. He’s heard from colleagues that WebCT/Vista is dreadful, that doesn’t have half the functionality of WebCT, though he has not yet had time to do any evaluation himself.

Because of his teaching load, Benoît estimates he could spend up to 5 hours a week developing the online version of Business Writing. The course would go live next semester.

Discussion questions

Please answer in the discussion forum:

1.  Moodle or WebCT/Vista for Benoît?

How might Benoît go about deciding whether to go with Moodle or WebCT/Vista? What questions might he ask himself? Come up with one specific question and post it in the Benoît discussion thread. Be sure to explain why this is an important question.

My Response:

This case study has so many hidden messages and there is a lot that can be gleaned by reading between the lines. It sounds like it is based on a real scenario somewhere.

Designing and developing a fully on-line course is no easy task, Benoit may not know what he is in for. As a sessional instructor he may not know all of the politics in his department and the institute in regards to the switch over to WebCT Vista and the real reasons why faculty are using Moodle. He has heard lots of things, but he needs to validate what is real and what is not as one factor to help him decide which LMS to use.

Institutes quite often have funding and resources available to help with the development of courses and for changing delivery modes; for example from F-2-F to fully online. Funding could amount to some offload so he could have more than 5 hours/week available. They may also have resource support available: Instructional Designer so the course is designed and developed so students will be successful, multimedia support to ease the burden of uploading content, Writer/editor support to review and edit his content and copyright support to advise him on what he can upload/access freely and what will need permission or what he should not use. Any funding or institute resource support may depend on the LMS he uses; the institute LMS: WebCT Vista or the “Lone Ranger approach” (Bates, 2000) and use Moodle.

He should do some reading about online course development, for example Bates (2000), Bates and Pool (2003), Bullen and Janes (2007) and Garrison and Vaughan (2008). He should also talk to colleagues in his institute and perhaps other institutes about developing on-line courses to get a sense of their experiences in general and with different LMS’s. He should also talk to the person responsible for distance education in his department to determine what is expected in a fully online course. Then with a list of questions, meet with his department head to clarify what is expected of him and any institutional resources available to support him. Then he should have enough information to decide if he is still interested in developing the course and if he is which LMS to use.

References:

Bates, A.W. (2000). Managing technological change: strategies for colleges and university leaders. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003). A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In A.W. Bates & G. Poole, Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 4.

Bullen, M. and D.P. Janes (2007). Making the Transition to E-Learning: Strategies and Issues. Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing.

Garrison, D.R., & Vaughan, N.D. (2008). Blended Learning in Higher Education, San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass.

After a request from the Instructor to give one question only, my response was:

Okay, round two without reading between the lines and knowing what goes on in the background.

Benoit would need to consider whether no technical support is better or worse then poor technical support. Considering that technical support not only applies to the instructor, it also applies to the students, he would need to ask himself: “Which would be better for the students?”

2. Benoît’s time

How much development time (in weeks) would you estimate Benoît would need to develop Business Writing, the online version? Post your estimation in weeks in the Module 2: Business Writing development timeframe discussion thread. Be sure to explain how you came up with this number.

My Response:

This is a variable with many factors. Many a project has gone off the rails without first reviewing the quality and quantity of the “content” promised by the instructor. Another unknown factor is the quality expectations of the institute, or by provincial education bodies for fully on-line courses. If institute funding and resources are available to Benoit then he may have an opportunity to update or even redesign his course as he is putting it on-line. It also depends on the institutes approach to developing courses, do they require the Instructor to work with an Instructional Designer to create a learning design or a blue print first before they start developing content. What value does the institute put on instructor time in terms of their content expertise verses their time doing other things such as loading content to an LMS that could be done more effectively with a multimedia specialist. Based on costing models and centralized technology support at my institute, and the 5 hours/week that Benoit has available, I would estimate Benoit would need the following time frame:

• Learning Design supported with a facilitated workshop: 50 hours @ 5 hours/week = 10 weeks

• Course development including updating his current course: 120-150 hours @ 5 hours/week = 24-30 weeks.

Total weeks needed: 34-40 weeks based on Benoit’s timeframe. He would need to either have his department head get a nice grant to give him a significant offload or he would be best to turn down the offer.

As I was reading through the SECTIONS model by Bates and Pool, I found it resonated with me more than the Chickering articles. I was tempted to do a critique of the SECTIONS model as even though they state that it was modified from the distance education ACTION model to fit with campus-based universities, I am not convinced it does in all aspects. In addition, the book is now almost 10 years old and many things have changed since 2003 that could justify a revised edition, either as a rewrite or an update much along the lines that Chickering did in 1996 with Ehrmann.

Student Demographics:

Bates and Pool talk about how student’s fresh out of high school need more support as they are less independent learners. He alludes to the idea that they may not be ready for full on-line technology. Third and fourth year students are more prepared as are students who come back to post-secondary after working in the workforce. From a polytechnic or college perspective most of our programs are 3 years or less so according to Bates and Pool, we can’t expect them to study entirely through the use of technology. I wonder if 10 years later, if this is still true. I remember reading somewhere that the Net generation who are great at using technology from a social networking context, do not transfer their digital native skills well out of their comfort zones into educational technology or business technology applications. I saw a presentation from Dr. Kelly Edmonds this week about challenges of blended learning. She commented that in general, students in her study who experienced blended learning for the first time, struggled with many aspects. After thinking about this, the struggles seem to be around lack of independent learning skills so Bates and Pool ‘s comments are probably still correct.

Costs:

Costing technology in education is a hair ball, and probably not a small one from a house cat! Reading through Bates and Pool illustrates this point. They talk about the costs of using technology in education including production of technology-based materials, graphics, simulations and games, purchasing and licensing software and equipment costs, however they also weave in the costs of creating content, instructional costs, copyright costs, department photocopy costs, course development costs, thus everything blends together.

Once you factor in the mode of delivery along the e-learning spectrum from a basic web site to house the course outline and a few documents to support an F-2-F delivery through the broad range of blended learning to fully online, the question is what percentage of these costs can be attributed to technology. Another factor that was only briefly touched by Bates and Pool is how to factor in non educational technology or industry specific technology. For example in a Dental Assisting program, the X-ray equipment; is it considered educational technology or industry specific technology, perhaps educational technology? What about the tools and heavy shop equipment used in a heavy duty mechanic program, is it industry specific technology because it is not electronic, maybe, but these tools are technology and are used to help teach the skills of the trade. Another blend.

Another factor is how the program is delivered. Generally speaking, programs during the day are considered grant based programs where the money to pay for the program comes from a combination of tuition and operating grants from the province. Programs and courses offered in continuing education and distance/fully online are considered earned revenue based, as the money to pay for the program comes from tuition only. They must at least break even, and should make money to go back into maintaining the program or for developing new courses or it goes into the general institute budget. To develop and deliver a new program during the day has a different costing and revenue model than earned revenue. For example, Bates and Pool talk about the unit cost/student and the cost per student over a five year period. This is all about business cases and returns on investment which applies to the earned revenue side of education more than the grant side.

The hair ball is getting pretty big so I will stop here.

Speed:

Speed is an interesting factor and Bates and Pool give a couple of perspectives; however I will introduce some more. Going back to the earned revue vs grant or daytime programming scenarios is a great example of magnitude differences in speed. Speed of implementation on the grant side is measured in and years, continuing education and continuing education is measured in months and some institutes do corporate training which is measured in weeks. So a model to design and develop a technology based grant course will not work for corporate training and will need to be simplified to meet the needs of continuing education and distance education.

How the course is designed and developed can affect the flexibility of updating. Courses developed by central technology units to support instructors can be a nightmare to maintain because the people designing (Instructional Designers) and developers of the course sites (multimedia) generally are not involved with teaching and maintaining their final products. If a course in html is turned over to an instructor who does not work in the html world (the majority), and the course needs maintenance and updating (textbook edition change, updated schedule) at the next offering, they need to draw on scarce and sometimes expensive resources to make this happen. However if the course is designed with maintenance and upkeep in mind, then the components of the course most likely to change will not be in html, it will be in a format that the instructor can easily change and upload themselves. Thus I do challenge Bates and Pool’s comments that a web site is easier to change and update than a printed text because the web site requires specialized skills over and above those required for updating printed text or information in a word document that can be uploaded to the site by the instructor.

Final thought:

I read somewhere that UBC is going to stick with WebCT/ Blackboard and move to a higher version. I wonder if UBC used the SECTIONS model to do an evaluation of their needs and vendor products before making their decision…..

As I am an administrator at a post secondary institute, my posting will be based on general observations of faculty in the programs offered in my department: a School of Business. Many of the faculty are mid to late career Baby Boomers and Gen Xers. As the Baby Boomers retire, new faculty which are Gen X/Y are being hired. These new faculty are gradually shifting the acceptance of digital age learning into a positive light.

Even through I work for a Polytechnic where transforming lives through technology is a core value, many older faculty and surprisingly some new hires, are not embracing technology as much as they could or are encouraged to. My institute is also skills based and it is advised by industry input, thus the need for technology is focused more on competency with industry standard productivity tools rather then social media or alternative presentation tools such as Prezi.

So when we encourage faculty to design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments, many push back and question why they need to change. For example last week I was an observer in a facilitated session with one of our programs where faculty were revising their program teaching philosophy. After developing a philosophy with key works such as technology, interactive and constantly changing, several were surprized to learn that they were going to revise their courses to be close to fully online. The push back was fairly intense as they envisioned re-developing thier courses in a face to face format, even though their courses are currently blended using a learning management system (D2L) and students all have laptops. I suspect these instructors are not using the courses in the LMS and I am not sure what they are telling their students to do with the laptops in class.

For me in ETEC 565, I see an opportunity to learn more about digital age learning so I can help move faculty along the spectrum from entirely face to face towards richly blended and fully on-line. Some of the topics that I would like to focus on are: LMS and other web based approaches, assessment tools, social media and collaborative writing and intellectual property rights/copyright.

I am also experimenting with technology and I am creating this post on the tablet that I received for Christmas. It is a bit clumsy compared to my usual keyboard and desktop computer but appears to be working.

This is the beginning of my journey through ETEC 565a. The first week involved getting familiar with the course and fellow learners and reading and reflecting on the ISTE NET’s for teachers.