Blackboard, Elluminate, and Wimba (Oh My!)

On July 7, 2010, Blackboard announced that it is buying Elluminate and Wimba, two Web conferencing systems very familiar to users of CCC Confer. The intent is to create Blackboard Collaborate, which will focus on synchronous learning technologies. Since the announcement, many have called and written me with concerns about the future of Confer and the general prospects for Web conferencing software in education.

This Looks Familiar
Way back in 1989, I wrote a book about utility software for personal computers. The dominant operating system at the time - MS-DOS - needed a lot of help to get things to work well, and I used 256 pages to describe disk defragmenting programs, backup utilities, DOS shells, screen capture software, and the like. Within a few years, nearly everything my book described was unnecessary because Microsoft had incorporated these utilities into its operating system, either by developing them or by buying the companies or software that already accomplished the task.

Ten years later, I was at a college of education trying to support an online tutoring project for middle schoolers. We settled on software from Tutornet because it allowed us to connect graduate students at our college with students in remote classrooms for live, interactive chat and whiteboard activities. Within a year, Blackboard acquired the Tutornet software and incorporated it into a new product the company called Virtual Classroom.

I came to CCC Confer in 2003. We were working at that time with a company called HorizonLive, a supplier of Web conferencing software that made real-time interaction and content delivery possible. HorizonLive later became HorizonWimba when Wimba - at the time a developer of voice tools - joined their team, and still later the company shortened its name to Wimba. Many longtime Confer users will remember that we made a switch from Wimba to Elluminate at about this time - not because of the name change but because of a detailed analysis of both software packages and the needs of our users.

What's the Point?
My point is that good companies look for ways to bolster their product lines, and this is nothing new. Microsoft acquired many of the utility software companies I wrote about and incorporated them into their own system. Blackboard acquired Tutornet, and HorizonLive acquired (or was acquired by) Wimba to make its Web conferencing software more competitive.

So now, apparently, Blackboard has taken a bigger interest in synchronous online learning. Great! We've known about and worked with this kind of powerful collaboration for years, so it's certainly time that major "Learning Management Systems" (I admit I have trouble with the phrase) recognize the importance of real-time online learning experiences. We've even known who had the best options available, so it's heartening to know that Blackboard expanded its synchronous software portfolio by choosing the two companies that had the best products, as indicated by our own experience.

Now What?
According to Ray Henderson, President of Blackboard Learn, "we intend to sustain the product integrations and business partnerships Elluminate and Wimba enjoyed with our competitors. Both had projects underway to integrate with major open source products, and both had business partnerships and integrations with the major commercial platforms. Our message to the industry is that we intend to sustain this work and the partnerships." Maurice Heiblum, the new President of Blackboard Collaborate, assured me of the same thing earlier this week. The posted FAQs say, "We’ll honor all existing contracts for Elluminate and Wimba clients. We’ll also honor all renewal agreement terms that have been extended." So nothing has changed - yet.

I'm glad my friends at both companies will be able to work together at what they know and love, and I hope Maurice, Carol and Ray will forge bonds quickly that bring out the best of both Elluminate and Wimba worlds. On the CCC front, Confer continues to serve a very large user base with the same small and talented team, so there will be no effect on our communications or services to our end users. And our mission remains the same, regardless of which partnerships we forge (or undo) to fulfill it.

Write me if you have any questions or concerns. I'm interested!

Go Figure

"Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write." H.G.Wells

To teach statistics, it's important to think statistically, of course. But stat teachers also have to be strong motivators, since many of the ideas and rules of statistics are counterintuitive - and, frankly, hard work to understand. To get to these ideas, students need math skills (algebra, decimals and fractions, for example), and these may require reinforcement or refreshing. There is also a lot of language and logic in statistics, which works in this area differently than the way language and logic apply in other arenas. Words like "normal" and "average" don't mean the same thing in a statistics class as they do in students' every day lives, which presents a challenge to the statistics instructor.


Larry Green insists that teaching statistics is easier online than in a face-to-face setting. For example, the use of tables - an intrinsic part of most statistical operations - requires the instructor to tell students to consult a page, look down this column and across that row, and find the proper value. (S)he can only hope that students will follow correctly. In the Confer classroom, everyone is looking at the same table (online) and finding the same value together.



Irene Palacios echoes Larry's comments, adding that it's infinitely easier for her to use the whiteboard tools in Confer to highlight the columns, rows, and values that students need to see in order to work out problems.




Irene Palacios is similarly enthralled by how much better it is to teaching graphing concepts online. In a face-to-face environment, it's difficult to show students different functions in such a way that they can understand what's being differentiated. In her Confer classroom, she can draw over her graphs with different colors in order to emphasize what she's trying to teach. She can annotate in real time to make sure students "see" the functions that are important.

Garfield, Chance, and Snell, in their examination of how technology resources have impacted the teaching of statistics in colleges and universities, list these factors:

• Improved visualization of statistical concepts and processes. "Students are better able to 'see' the statistical ideas, and teachers are better able to teach to students who are predominantly visual learners."
• Dynamic representations and analyses. "Discussions or activities may focus on 'what if' questions by changing data values or manipulating graphs and instantly seeing the results."
• Empowering students as users of statistics. "Students are able to solve real problems and use powerful statistical tools that they may be able to use in other courses or types of work. This allows them to better understand and experience the practice of statistics."
• Allowing students to do more learning on their own, outside of class, using Web-based or multimedia materials. "This frees the instructor to have fewer lectures during class and to spend more time on data analysis activities and group discussions."

The day may come when face-to-face statistics instructors, who aren't able to incorporate these tools fully or immersively in a brick and mortar classroom, will feel the need to compensate with more dynamic substitutes. Meanwhile, Confer statistics instructors are discovering and documenting effective methods for teaching students to think statistically.

The Borderless Classroom

“U.S. high school graduates will: Sell to the world; buy from the world; work for international companies; manage employees from other cultures and countries; collaborate with people all over the world in joint ventures; compete with people on the other side of the world for jobs and markets; and tackle global problems, such as AIDS, avian flu, pollution, and disaster recovery… We need to open global gateways and inspire students to explore beyond their national borders.” - Vivien Stewart.

The synchronous online classroom both enables change and stimulates it. Where once the classroom had physical and geographical dimensions, it now has no walls and no border agents. This raises several issues for academia: does (or should) the whole world now have access to my classroom? How can my institution control access to or from "outsiders" and how is that access paid for? When boundaries blur, as they do in online education, new values and new thinking necessarily emerge.



Laurie Huffman (above) collaborates with tutors from Guatemala to enable real-world and real-time conversations between students and Spanish instructors. Her use of Web-conferencing software caught the attention of a textbook publisher, who wondered if it might be possible to offer this kind of virtual collaboration as part of a Spanish language textbook package they are producing.



Jeanne Guerin (above) provides online tutoring for students at Sierra College's Online Writing Center. In the session above, a student contacts her for help with a paper she has to write, and Jeanne does a great job of defining the problem, exploring options, and counseling the student. What is extraordinary about this session is that the student is interacting with Jeanne from Brazil!



Jeanne's student was able to get help on her paper from Sierra College even though she was thousands of miles away at the time. Laurie's idea (above) is to find ways to help students who can't physically travel to other countries. She teaches online for California Community Colleges, Florida State University, and the University of Maryland (another great example of teaching without borders), and is piloting a language immersion program that gives students weekly contact with tutors in another country.



Laurie herself summers in Costa Rica in a sixty-acre rainforest jungle. She teaches while she's there, making it possible for her students in the United States to learn from her and her adventures abroad.



Many college students are required by work or military commitments to travel, even while they are taking classes. With the Confer classroom, as Grace Esteban (above) describes, this presents less of a problem than might be expected. MPICT (the Mid-Pacific Information and Communication Technology project) is able to provide learning opportunities to students from as far away as Australia and Japan.

The Confer classroom can meet whenever teachers and students are available, not only at the convenience of the host institution (or country). It empowers teachers to teach from anywhere and students to learn from anywhere, making it "the real thing" for today's learners, not a substitute. With the right instructors, it's possible to maintain effective contact and engage all learners, even without physical touch or artificial boundaries.

Confer Rules

Rule A: Don't.
Rule A1: Rule A doesn't exist.
Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or non-existence of Rules A, A1 or A2.

- R. D. Laing

Most teachers have rules they share with their students. "Come to class on time." "Silence cell phones during class." "Cheating is not allowed."

What are the rules for the Confer classroom? I've collected a few suggestions (not rules) that you may want to consider when setting your virtual class ground rules.

1. When class begins, ask students to close their e-mails, instant messengers, and all other open applications - and tell them that you're doing the same thing. Assure them that you're doing this to make sure you and they can pay attention to one another without outside distractions or interruptions.

2. When recording your session (making an archive), “Be sure to tell participants they are being recorded!” This from Jennifer Hofmann in The Synchronous Trainer's Survival Guide (2004). As   Anderson et al observe in Best Practices in Synchronous Conference Moderation, "it should be noted that privacy regulations or expectations may require that participants be informed of this intention [to record]  before the session begins.”

3. When conferring over the telephone, "Ask participants to mute their phones when not speaking so extraneous sounds are not picked up. Also, tell participants not to put their phones on hold. If a person’s telephone system has a ‘music on hold’ feature, it can be very annoying and puts the event on hold until that person returns.” (This also from Jennifer Hoffman.)

4. When conferring using Voice Over Internet Protocol (computer audio), "participants can be required to raise their hands before being granted the ‘mic’ to speak. Even when this is not a technical requirement, hand-raising can be a useful etiquette. It can help to ensure that more learners’ voices are heard, which can lead to greater sharing of ideas and experiences.” From Joe Tansey in Learning to Effectively Use the Virtual Classroom.

5. In Chat mode, Ruth Clark says "we sometimes ask everyone to type in their answers but not to press send until the instructor says ‘Send.’ In that way, reflective learners have more time to consider their answers without the distraction from the first answers to appear in the chat window.”  Clark and Kwinn also observe, "A disadvantage of chat is the limited amount of screen real estate dedicated to text messages in most virtual classroom interfaces. When the response box fills, new text messages cause older responses to scroll up. If you have a larger class, you may want to use some crowd control mechanisms to limit who sends messages. For example, you might ask everyone to type in an answer but only the women or only a certain division to actually send their answers. Alternatively, you may provide a workbook in which everyone responds and, then, after a pause, call on only some participants to type in their answers”



6. Larry Green (above) has a "no-dissing" rule for his class: You're allowed to make comments about other students in the Chat area, but those comments always have to be positive. Clark and Kwinn are even more restrictive about chat comments: "we ask participants to use chat for on-task communication only during instructional activities – no passing notes in class.!”

7. Jennifer Hofmann also recommends these ground rules for students:

• “If you run into technical problems, contact the facilitator or producer. Don’t waste a lot of time trying to solve them yourselves.
• “Assign someone to manage the exercise, someone to capture information, and someone to report back to the larger group.
• “Don’t leave the breakout session just because the trainer isn’t ‘watching’ you.
•  “When using collaboration tools within the breakout rooms (whiteboard, chat, application sharing, web browsing) the ground rules for those tools apply.”

8. Jonathan Finkelstein has a rule for Polling: If you ask, do something with the answers. “It is important to remember to actually do something with the results of polls conducted in real time. If one asks a series of questions but does not use any of the responses to affect the direction of the learning activity, learners begin to wonder whether their responses matter.”



9. Donna Eyestone (above) has this rule: Tell your students how long your class session will be, and then respect that. If you say you'll be done in an hour, regardless of how much material you cover, be done in an hour. (Period.)

10. With Web tours, Jennifer Hofmann recommends this strategy: "When independent navigation of hyperlinks is available, don’t start clicking until the trainer tells you to. When leading the class to a website, be sensitive about the nature of the content.”
 
There are ten of these, but they are not commandments. Consider them suggestions from folks who've been around the synchronous online classroom for a while.

Be Prepared!

"Emergency preparedness is a team sport." - Eric Whitaker


Teachers work in a private world entered only by themselves and their students. Rarely does anyone else visit this world, and rarely does a teacher enter into the private world of another teacher or classroom. This is true both online and in the physical classroom. But when emergencies happen in the physical classroom, the teacher generally relies on an infrastructure of helpers and resources that can be summoned quickly. Where does the instructor turn when an emergency occurs in the virtual classroom?



Grace Esteban describes the "perfect" disaster recovery tool for MPICT's online classes. She and her colleagues - relative newcomers to Web conferencing - have learned to call Client Services whenever they encounter a glitch they can't figure out. (The "Bobo" clip was created using xtranormal and can be viewed here.)

One strategy that Grace and Dr. Pierre Thiry use is to keep a second computer logged in to the Confer classroom. This is especially useful if it happens to be connected from a different Internet Service Provider. If the first service fails, you're able to log in using the second. In my office, I connect to Confer with a campus connection, a DSL connection, and (when necessary) a broadband wireless connection. I'm always sure I'll be able to get online because I have options.


Marc Knobel discovered the value of Grace's disaster recovery plan on his own. In two years of teaching with Confer, he encountered two disasters. The first was a result of a power failure, for which there was no timely solution and resulted in a cancellation of class. The second came at 7:30 AM as he was preparing to teach his 8:00 AM math class. He fired off an email to Client Services, explaining that he could not login to his class, and within 15 minutes got an answer from Donna that solved the problem. Disaster averted, and the class was none the wiser. As Marc relates, having to be embarrassed by the technology in front of his students would be horrible, and would actually have deterred him from experimenting further with Confer. Without a recovery team, there would be no online classroom.

CCC Confer's Client Services team provides this kind of security to online instructors. They're the First Responders who assess the situation and provide immediate care, the Firemen who put out the fire and rescue trapped victims, and the Long Term Care Providers who follow up emergencies with therapy and instruction so that future problems can be avoided.

Michael McKeever is the kind of techie instructor who likes to push the limits of his computers and networks. When he occasionally pushes too hard, he relies on his students to help one another with disaster recovery.


Michael, who teaches classes with both face-to-face students and online students, asks the f2f students to chat with their online peers to let them know that he's rebooting or recovering from a blue screen. It's nice to know that when the instructor crashes, students are not "thrown out" of the online classroom, but can continue to collaborate while the teacher recovers and returns.

Being ready for disaster allows you to act reasonably and responsibly when things go wrong. At a minimum, keep the Client Services numbers and e-mails handy so that you don't have to face problems alone. Have a backup computer and Internet connection ready, if possible. If you have students with different abilities, give emergency instructions both orally and via text chat so everyone understands and can follow your lead. Don't panic. We can get through this together.

Make Your Classes Accessible: Archive Them

"There's a guy at the record company who's 30, and he says, I would not listen to these songs except in this context. Somehow the recording process, the arrangements, make it more accessible." - Tom Wopat.

Accessibility is the key word for recording your class sessions. Students, like the "guy at the record company" who appreciates the recording process, find it difficult for a number of reasons to a) attend an online class session; b) pay attention to everything that's going on during an online class; or c) learn and assimilate without the opportunity to review and reflect. Fortunately, you have lots of options to record and share your Confer sessions with students.

Archives are easy, as Irene Palacios of Grossmont College demonstrates in this video.
 Once a Confer session has been recorded, it is posted on the CCC Confer website, and the links can, of course, be copied and pasted into your course syllabus, e-mails to students, etc. By clicking on the link, the students can view the entire recording, receive all files or quizzes you sent during the session, and read everything in the chat area that was posted.

One of the obvious advantages to recording your sessions is that it provides access for students who miss class.   You may see this as a two-edged sword: sure, you can accommodate students whose schedules are demanding, but what if this feature actually discourages them from attending your online class? And how do you know they've even bothered to view the archive on their own?

Larry Green at Lake Tahoe Community College uses a tried and proven method for testing student "attendance" at archived sessions: the "secret word."  He embeds a secret word in the archive and requires that students e-mail him the word in order to be credited with having viewed the session. It's also possible to track students' attendance or viewing of archived sessions (especially if you're accessing Confer from a learning management system like Blackboard).

Donna Eyestone is a veteran archiver, and she has learned the hard way to produce archives that are useful.  She no longer begins the recording at the beginning of class, when housekeeping, troubleshooting, greetings, and orienting occur; instead, she clicks the "record" button only once she's actually begun to teach.  She also has learned to build in index marks by changing the screen periodically so that viewers of the archive can jump through the recording to relevant points in the session.

Marc Knobel at Foothill College discovered that archives made it possible to extend his class time.  Although your students have to leave your online session, you may not, which means you can continue to record your session and make it available to students for review later in the week.

You are no longer limited to online, Web-based archives, which may be problematic for students who might prefer to access your recorded lectures via portable media.  The Publish software allows you to capture an archive and store it in a portable format (e.g., Flash, wmv, mpeg, etc.) so that it can be made available to students for... well, for whatever they want.

There's more! Not only can you record your session and publish it to a portable format for students, but you can also have it automatically sent to them.  Podcasting allows students to subscribe to your lectures or class sessions and have them delivered automatically to their browser or inbox. Simple, efficient, and speedy.

We want students to have access to our instruction and learning content. For some of these students, like the 30-year-old record company gentleman, the recording process and post-production options make your sessions more appealing and digestible. It's worth the trouble to learn to archive your class.

First Impressions in the Online Classroom

"First impressions are a constant in society. However, their product, the period that proves or disproves their validity is not; good ones are pleasant and long lasting, bad ones long and difficult to disprove." - Diego Valesquez.

We may not like to admit it, but we're all guilty of judging the book by its cover. The first five minutes with anyone are full of mental judgments, assessments, and categorizing. First impressions often form the basis for all later impressions or interactions. For this reason, it's important for the instructor in the Confer (online) classroom to make a good first impression - before going on to the business of teaching.



Larry Green at Lake Tahoe Community College describes in this video how he handles the first five minutes of his online classes. Instead of waiting until all the students are "seated" and ready to start, he gets students busy with a simple problem so that he can pay attention to entering students and handle "housekeeping" or troubleshooting details without allowing these to become the focus of attention.

 

Marc Knobel actually makes the process of greeting students the first impression of his class, and because he's so patient and friendly with each student, that early activity works especially well as an icebreaker. In fact, it's given him insights into how he might approach the process of teaching in a face-to-face environment with more personal contact with each student.



Irene Palacios of Grossmont College orients students at the beginning of each semester to the Confer classroom, giving them whiteboard privileges and allowing them to become excited about working in this environment and taking advantage of the excitement of a new class to get them motivated to learn more. She confesses that she's even been able to learn new things about using the tools from her students in these sessions.



Donna Eyestone uses music as a mood-setter as students enter the room (both her online classroom and in her face-to-face classroom). She finds that this gets rid of the kind of awkwardness that sometimes results from students entering the classroom in the middle of a conversation. It also allows her to set the volume on her computer so that - when she later uses multimedia clips to demonstrate - her speakers are set properly.

The important thing to remember is that you're trying to create and maintain an environment that is best for students (and yourself) so that instruction and learning can happen. Consciously create an atmosphere where there is an appropriate opportunity for students to discuss ideas, explore the virtual classroom, and interact with you and one another. Most importantly, give them a chance to come away from their first impression feeling that they belong here and are safe in this learning environment. The safer they are at first, the more likely they'll be to open themselves to the risky task of learning new concepts later.