Going online fast, quick and easy with a university course of study

This is not a blog about how to design an online course.
This blog is about doing a better than bad job quickly, in one week.

It's for those already working within learning and teaching environments in higher ed whose workplace already provides an online platform such as Blackboard, canvas, moodle, d2l...

This is not e-learning by design, this is online learning by necessity. You did not come into this space because of philosophical love for anywhere anytime learning, for open education or social justice  (all of which are great reasons btw). And nor did your students.  Pedagogies of freedom to learn can still inform this work, so let's get serious while also understanding that the most important thing in your students lives, your colleagues, as well as your own, is probably not the course you need to adapt.  If you do find yourself being sucked into a whirlpool of philosophical navel-gazing on educational pedagogies, save this for later.

For my colleagues being told to put the remainder of their course online, now is a time to get really pragmatic. This is not the time for the tiara and ballgown, this is the t-shirt and jeans style. What is offered here is a very pragmatic approach, fast quick and easy guide to going online.

The following is important to your confidence in this space and to your student's confidence in you:

1. Your students want to learn, you have subject knowledge and you already have a relationship with them.
2. You have expertise in the platform, or you have colleagues and support services who do. Your workplace will have in-house specialists; Learning technologists, educational technologists, e-learning and online expert academics and those involved in research into distance education.
3. Students and yourselves will not be the only members of their families needing to be online. Assume limited access to computers, laptops and the internet. Neither they nor you signed up for a totally online course. Assume they will access courses through their phones (at least some of the time, so again keep things simple). Don't waste time on surveying students on what they will be using, just keep it simple.
4. Students and yourselves will probably be sharing not only technology but study spaces with others, now is not a time to assume they will be putting more time into their studies or even the same amount... they may have demands for childcare or care of other dependents that was not expected when the course started.
5. Some of your colleagues and students will get stressed if not sick. Everything suggested here is to mitigate against this. 
6. If you work with a team of staff, use teams on office 360, or skype... then delegate. Have your meetings through office 360 teams or skype when possible.

So keep it simple: be kind in these circumstances with students, their families, your colleagues, yourself and your own family.

redbubble.com

Having got kindness as a primary concern, let's get to pragmatics.

1. Deal to any event with required attendance. Exams, presentations and change these to an online format asap.  (More about this in the next block labelled assessments.)
2. Students should not be required to show up at a specific time for anything. This includes face to face AND online. They will have other pressures on their time; they will be involved with self-care but may also be caring for others.
3. Use what is already freely available; you will be unlikely to have time to develop new learning objects. Plenty of Creative Commons licensed content is available online. Searching for it takes time though, but less time probably than making your own.
If you are providing course content such as lectures, where possible think short. Chunk them down.  (Don't really want to burst any enthusiasm here, but two hours of you is sadly going to be less captivating than two hours of running repeats of Breaking bad, Suits, Game of Thrones...etc.)
5. It is not unusual for a pre-recording to be shorter than a face-to-face class.  However, still, chunk it down. Two one hour blocks are preferable to one two hour block... three 40 minute blocks even more so... 6 major concepts supported by readings even more so. Some of these concepts you are wanting to get across may already be available in the creative commons or public domain.
6. Don’t fuss too much about when making any videos. Now is not the time for fussing on pixelation or resolution. or redoing patches because a phone rang etc. Good enough is good enough. Editing is a waste of your time right now.
6. Be gentle on yourself; where things can be left as they are, leave them as they are.
7. Ideally, all courses would have a similar layout online so students don't have to learn to do things differently in each course or paper. This would allow them to concentrate instead on learning course content. However, consider this a task to work on in the next semester moving forward.
8. Any material that you would be cautious of showing in a public space, needs to be forwarned; if your course involves images not fit for the family, then give notice of this, say things like the next image is of...

Assessments

http://allthings learning.wordpress.com 

Assessments will change. You will not want to have any student or staff member being required to be in a room with others. So the picture above is figurative; it points to how assessments involve our working alongside our students and ensuring the assessment meets the learning need and does so while caring for their and our own safety and mental health. For example, now is not the time to suddenly decide on wikis etc. for groupwork. While wikis are an excellent groupwork strategy, that would be course design and would already be underway, if you use any platforms for students to connect through, use ones that they are familiar with already. If groupwork was a part of your course, fantastic, but make sure it requires no synchronised presence physical or otherwise. If it involved a group presentation rescope it to be a report instead.

1.  Discuss any changes with your student disability support services. Also, notify students of such services being available in case a change in assessment results in differently-abled students requiring different support.
2. Keep it simple. Where there was an in-class test or exam, keep to the test or exam but place it online.  If there was groupwork, keep the groupwork but instead of a group presentation where all would have to be physically present have the submission of a group report. If there was an individual presentation, keep this but have it submitted as an audiovisual file whether into the LMS or through youtube. if it's through youtube make sure you have asked students to set the privacy setting and also a reminder to them afterwards if they want to delete the clip.
3. Assume you cannot control the environment for any exams or tests. Change it to open book /open internet/ etc.  You do not need new software or surveillance software adding to your own or the student's sense of anxiety in current times. While there is software that can watch what a student does during an exam such as whether any other online browsing occurs, this is a violation of privacy which was not agreed to prior to the course starting. Instead, engender trust and kindness when possible, and it is always possible (Dalai Lama). Assessments can provide an opportunity for learning not only of learning. If students sit an assessment while debating answers with others by phone or online, does it matter? Always worth considering is whether it is learning or obedience you are wanting. However, if you are wanting to have greater environmental control and greater confidence in individual learning, the learning management system (LMS) will have features that make this more likely.  (See section below on  strategies to increase the integrity of online testing)
4. On the LMS it is possible to set up a test or exam as a synchronised event (this is similar to having all students in same time and place as with an exam). This approach does prevent the same person sitting the test for others. However, do consider the earlier statement about synchronised events and consider how essential this is and if there needs to be arrangements made for alternative assessment opportunities for those needing an extension etc.
5. You can set up tests and exams as time-restricted though if doing this please allow some leeway.  Not everyone's household clocks or watches can be relied on to be accurate. If its a one hour test, have it open 5 mins early and close 10 mins late. The amount of student distress and extra contact this generates with the lecturer or the IT support services is worth it folks.
6. My advice in contrast to 3 and 4 above is to set up a test or exam so it can be taken more often. This means a tech problem is already sorted. Any internet problem already sorted. Any urgent care of self or loved ones, already sorted. Just make sure you have explained this in announcements to students about how it will be set up.
7.  Where possible, automate the marking. If using standards-based/outcomes  / or outcomes based  assessment linked to learning outcomes this remains possible online. For example,  a mid-semester exam and an end of semester exam can be converted to two online exams.  Where there was a one-hour midsemester multiple choice question (MCQ) exam which assesses three learning outcomes, you could set this up as three 20 minute tests, one for each learning outcome. This has the advantage of having the LMS  calculate grade totals. Set the LMS up to total learning outcomes across assessments. Then have it calculate a course final grade. However, the final grade is only released for students where all learning outcomes were achieved.
8. Strategies to increase the integrity of online testing:

• If using MCQs many textbooks and publishers provide tests that can be placed into the LMS. This would save a lot of time in writing MCQs and for some texts these can be uploaded straight into a test pool on the LMS. If you use outcomes-based assessment methods, tag the questions to your relevant learning outcomes. This will make uploading a test of a specific learning outcome so much easier.
• However MCQs from texts are also readily googleable, so if you don't want students just googling the answer, do consider varying the wording. 
• Make the pool of questions bigger than the number of questions required for the test or exam. Setting this up through the LMS in pools means a specific test for any one student is selected from this larger pool.  This means each student will sit a different mix of questions. 
• Set up the test or exam so that the questions only open one at a time. This helps prevent the whole test or exam being copied and circulated online.
• Set it up so there is no backtracking, this prevents students advising other students and having answers then being altered.
• Randomise the order of answers for MCQs. If any question being loaded into the LMS assessment pool has an answer such as "all of the above" or "none of the above" you might ditch the question, or edit so that it says all of these answers. Alternately tick the box on the specific question so this question does not have randomised answers. (Now may not be the best time to debate the pros and cons all or none type questions, save this for when you have time for deeper consideration. 
• After getting through this semester, in preparing for the next, learn how to run the test analysis software in your LMS (for example on Blackboard have a look at  https://www.etskb-fac.cidde.pitt.edu/blackboard/test-item-analysis/). Then remove questions from the test pool that are too easy, or too hard (or teach this content area differently...)

9. Remind students when work is due, or an online webinar etc. Remember they will probably have less social cues about when things are due when learning at a distance. The LMS has an announcement system that allows you to write announcements for release later. Make it friendly and supportive. With all online media it is too easy for things to be misinterpreted as authoritative or impersonal and remember you never know whats going on in their lives.


Don't reach for the stars right now, be gentle on yourselves and on students.
Do keep the communications lines open, provide positively framed announcements telling students these changes are being made to support them during these times. Remind them of the discussion board or online chat space in the LMS. That way questions can be answered once rather than multiple times in multiple emails (which could mean some students being advantaged when others are not).


Further links you might find useful, when you have more time:
https://teachfromhome.google/intl/en/
https://hybridpedagogy.org/about/
http://www.steve-wheeler.co.uk/2020/03/coronavirus-classes-and-communication.html

Opportunities and Resistence CCK08

I am surprised by some of the ironies involved in the approach taken to connectivism and learning in the CCK08 course.
First jolt was a separation of those doing it for credit from those not. A two tiered system became established and no one commented negatively on this?
Then there was a philosophical intent of learning being because you want it to happen, but there's still a timeline and a curriculum of sorts. Admittedly, not doing it for credit means i dont give a damn beyond the fact that some level of social organisation is needed to make it possible to even bump into the people one might want to dialogue with. So serendipitous and individual learning benefits from at least some structural supports.
There was also a tendency to maintain one's own silos. Maybe an activity to deliberately select and cross from areas of habit would have helped here. I might have been enticed into 2nd life beyond the arrival space ... i might have been required to intersect this with that in terms of identifying a new area with one i had previously explored. I did this anyway, placing ANT (Actor-network theory) alongside connectivism, but will connectivism start having a look at ANT?

Nonetheless, I took opportunities to go where i hadnt before...and enjoyed the banter of connecting with dead people, as well as finding real live people who could expand on my own thinking of the intersect between ANT and connectivism. People such as Keith Lyons with a delightful treatise on wayfinding and both Roy Williams and Frances Bell brought a curiosity to ideas and applications I shared.

But the question i find most curious, is well addressed inside of ANT.
"Why is it so difficult to change the practice of education? What kinds of opportunities can we embrace if we are able to make fundamental and systemic changes?" For this is where ANT is most useful. For a formal read I recommend reading Latour on Reassembling the social." For a quirky approach, try Latour's Aramis. Not explicit about education but a great study in change, resistence, resilience...
If making the intersections in networking the ideas is in the too hard basket, take a more direct route, have a look at Bigum, C., & Rowan, L. (2004). Flexible learning in teaching education: myths, muddles and models. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 32(3), 213-226.
It is the network, the connections in place that sustains, and this also points to what might be altered. For it might always be otherwise, what's configured always takes work in being held the same and is always subject, at least potentially, to being reconfigured differently.

As Chris and Leonie say in the paper,

This matters because how we frame our work matters...as patterns are laid down, grooves formed, a kind of template is created which also limits, proscribes, {contains, constrains, constructs} what can come next...we need to be aware of how particular performances of flexibility close down what is possible, rather than the rhetoric suggesting an opening up ....
If we have a technology, a way of doing things, which is, in crude terms, an assemblage of people and things, then to justify replacing or adding to this existing way of doing things, a claim has to be made that things will be done better, faster, more efficiently and so on with the implementation of the new.
This is what Lee Sproull and Sarah Kiesler (1991) identified in their studies of communication technologies and named ‘first level effects’—‘the planned efficiency gains or productivity gains that justify an investment in the new (1991, p. 4). However, as they go on to argue, the only certain outcome of implementing a new technology is that things change: ‘ …people pay attention to different things, have contact with different people, and depend on one another differently’.

In telling of experiences and sharing ideas about how teaching and learning might be shaped, we too are shaped.

9 big class learnings (2008)

To give some context: I teach students communication skills, this runs for 12 weeks and involves 772 students in a Health faculty. This group is split into 4 lecture groups, each receiving one 2 hour lecture per week, and a one hour tutorial (in group sixe of approx 30)

1. Some things take no longer in a big class than a small one;
the lesson learned is be selective.
Favourite task for checking everyone's 'on the same page' regarding concepts crucial to the course and taught within the first couple of weeks. This one came from a MOE literacy cluster. On a word doc make 3 columns, in the first column put the title 'words' , in the second column put a title 'definitions', in the 3rd column again title it 'words'. Then put about 5 words crucial to your topic in the first column, leaving a few lines between. In class give out one of these between 2, have the pairs select to be a or b. Then instruct the a's to define these words, writing their understandings in the 2nd column. Then fold the paper vertically so the partner b cannot see the first column. Their task is to discern what concept was being defined. Provides an opportunity for peer teaching, 2 way, understanding as well as clarity of meanings...

2. Solicited written feedback is richer; I used Stephen Brookfields 5 questions critical incident questionaire. My experience is students like shaping courses.

3. Do the big delivery stuff, but also do the talk with the people next to you.
Tasks in pairs help engage people with the content. My experience is that trust is made on the smaller scale. Speaking out seems easier when the classes engender speaking...

4. Use the big impact of the big venue. I recommend in your face imagery, loud noise dramatics, use of voice; not as gimmicks but integral to content. Helps to use photos over clip art.
My favourites this year include:
The use of strong graphics, red white black...stats that were damning, use of visual images supporting these. (Lessons learned online from death by ppt by Alexei Kapterev, presentation zen, Seth Godin, youtube- how not to make a ppt presentation by Don McMillan...) I have had to rethink my ppts but they are so much better. The medium carries the message, the power of strong visuals wins over lines of writing on a screen.
Use of graphs; my favourite was on how empathy commonly decreases with each year of education that appeared to be drawn insitu. (Inspired from TEDtalks Hans Rosling)
The use of loud noise during a creative visualisation demonstrated the application of CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) as a prompt to consider what goes on in thinking, emotions, behaviours and physiology. And therefore led into a discussion of what might be changed.
The mexican wave affirmed that big classes are better at some things :)
a demonstration piece of verbal and non verbal communications ( I really do need visual imagery of classes, some creative editing and a promotion panel... )

5. Make learning an easy choice. A lesson learned in health promotion. I am not suggesting all learning should be easy or fun, but it helps. The ppts are online, as is a podcast. Talk the content. I think students come because its about engagement.
(the online ppts have fewer graphics to keep the file size down)

6. I tell stories. Transforming knowledge by demonstrating application, and modeling the critique of these, engaging students with questions of the good the bad and the ugly.

7. Plan but also stay flexible. What you want and what you get resource wise will always be less than promised and less than ideal.

8. Stay idealistic. I invest in seeing what's possible and adapt to what's possible.
Stephen Downes site Oldaily is great for updates.

9. Post the great ideas, either blog them under big class teaching or post to del.icio.us that way others share too :)