Do You Know the Way to San Jose? (OTC)

We're barely a month away from the Online Teaching Conference in San Jose.  I'm looking forward to great sessions and wonderful networking with the state's best online instructors and practitioners from around the world. Here's a small sample:

Yong Zhao: "When Distance is Dead: The Implications of Global and Open Education."  Yong Zhao will speak on issues related to globalization and education, creativity, global competitiveness, educational reforms, and educational technology. Topics include how education should focus on developing children’s strengths, not “fixing their deficiencies”, how education is much more than the addition of instruction of course content, especially in a number of limited subjects, and what makes a nation, a community strong is diversity of talents and creative citizens, among others.

"@ONE Certification Showcase" with Donna Eyestone and Anna Stirling. Here's your chance to see what some of the best @ONE Certification program graduates have created for their online courses. Get some new ideas about how you can take your online course up a notch -- and discover more about what the @ONE Certification program offers. 

"Best of all worlds: F2F, Hybrid and Online All Together! " with Alex Cheroske. College student learning needs are diverse and benefit from varied instruction and delivery to match. Advances in Web conferencing have made it possible. This session will demonstrate how a college biology class was developed to provide an engaging learning environment in a variety of formats for today's students.

"DE 101: Preparing Students for Online Learning" with Geoff Cain and Barry Tucker. Barry Tucker, an academic advisor, and Geoff Cain, director of distance education, will present their innovative online orientation to distance learning. DE 101 unfolds like a "real" online course over two weeks that reviews the tools and skills needed to be successful in an online setting. In their course, Barry and Geoff emphasize the three "C"s: community, communication and collaboration. They will present the course and their research on how it has improved student success and retention rates.

"Designing an Online Writing Center for Student Support and Success" with Alisa Klinger and Ingrid Kelly. Discover how to provide 24/7 online writing support to students and how to enhance your college's efforts in “Student Success,” “Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC),” and “Writing in the Disciplines (WID).” The College of Marin's Online Writing Center offers students free and easy access to writing resources, peer-to-peer support, and live help from instructional specialists. With access to the Internet and self-registration, writing support is just a click away for all registered students in any discipline.

"Digital Library in the Digital Learning Age" with W. Cherry Li-Bugg and Alicia Virtue. Librarians at Santa Rosa Junior College have been watching the digital learning trends, including the shift of e-learning to mlearning, i.e., human presence in digital learning and digital storytelling to create persistent connections with students. As a result, the SRJC librarians have adapted their practices to address the digital learning needs of students. By offering discovery services, telling digital stories, creating digital art galleries and injecting human presence in the digital library, the SRJC librarians have successfully transformed themselves and positioned the library at the forefront of the digital learning age.

"Distance Education Issues from the Chancellor's Office's Perspective" with LeBaron Woodyard. There are number of issues impacting the 112 colleges of the California Community College System. This workshop looks at those issues and the activities the Chancellor's Office have undertaken to address them. Including recent research on retention rate costs to the State of California, state authorization, student financial aid for distance education discussions, organizing distance education coordinators, communication and collaboration of distance education professional in the system, and any impending legislation being discussed at the State level.

"Enhancing Online Learning with Video Elements" with Glen Jenewein. It has become apparent in the last few years that online learners either avoid reading or cannot read specific and important information in an online class. However, with the advent of social networking and multimedia on the web and cell phones, online faculty have the opportunity to present important concepts to their online students. The ability to enhance online courses with simple video elements helps students to complete assignments, readings, and discussions, and it motivates them to check into their classes more often which in turn helps instructors retain their students. This presentation will demonstrate how to create a simple video, compress it, and access code to embed the file into a course management system or even upload it to a website, blog or YouTube. No expensive equipment or software is required, there is little to no cost, and the process is fairly quick and straightforward.

"Extreme Makeover: Online Instructor Edition" with Kara Kuvakas. How would your students describe your online classroom environment? Do they experience a sense of community or isolation? Whether you are new to online teaching or a seasoned pro, you can enhance your online personality and improve student engagement. In this session, you’ll learn fun, simple ways to breathe new life into your online classroom by integrating creative ideas and free, easy-to-use programs. We will also use existing tools built into your CMS to offer a more personalized and cooperative experience for your students (with little time invested!). Pull up a chair and get ready for your online makeover.

"Going Online for the First Time" with Linda Morrow. Going online for the very first time? Concerned about making your course interesting, collaborative and effective? Want to make certain your SLOs are adequately addressed in the online environment? This session will show how the @ONE Online Teaching Certificate courses as well as personal experience can be used to build your own course, and then share it with colleagues for feedback. 

"Harnessing the Power of Prezi to Teach Critical Thinking" with Lene Whitley-Putz. Prezi is an online tool that offers the ability to create dynamic presentations. However, this online tool has power that moves it well beyond simply creating interesting visual aids. First, groups can use Prezi for both synchronous and asynchronous remote group work -- a super valuable feature for encouraging interaction between students. In addition, Prezi has unique features that allow students to consciously organize and rank information. This workshop will focus on exploring ways you can use Prezi in your online classes to enhance critical thinking and group work.

"How to Design a Successful Hybrid Mathematics Course" with Rena Petrello.

In this session, components of a successful online developmental math course will be demonstrated. Tips will be included on how to quickly and easily create video lessons (without a camera) and a demonstration of highly valuable communication tools (Wimba/Elluminate) will be given for holding study sessions and office hours online. A highly detailed syllabus will be given for participants to draw from for their own classes.

"Optimizing Instructional Time in an Online Environment" with Amy Gross. Ever feel like you’ve worked yourself to the bone but still have not made “sufficient” progress on all of your work-related tasks? In an online environment, it is not uncommon to feel as if you have a million things to do and not nearly enough hours in the day to do them. This session is designed for those who are struggling to find a time management strategy that honors the unique needs of the online instructor. In this session, we will leave the traditional concept of “multitasking” behind and introduce session participants to a unique and effective approach to time management. At the end of this session, participants will have the knowledge and tools necessary to build a time management plan that supports balance and efficiency.

"Potential Use of Google+ in Education" with Grace Esteban.  A new, socially oriented group of services that promises to rival Facebook was successfully launched by Google the middle of last year. This new social networking craze has the potential for educational use. The instructor will demonstrate the potential uses of Google+ features in education, promoting some highly technical classes. This is a hands-on presentation/demonstration.

"The Power of Open Educational Resources (OER) to Improve Outcomes for Diverse Learners" with Una Daly and Jayme Johnson. Open Educational Resources (OER) can be freely used and modified to support learners with special needs. The ability to easily customize open instructional materials can make education not only more available by lowering cost but also more accessible by removing physical barriers to learning. The High Tech Center Training Unit (HTCTU) and the Community College Consortium for OER (CCOER) team up to share best practices on finding and creating high-quality OER while ensuring that it supports all learners regardless of disability. Learn tips for verifying accessibility of instructional materials and the resources available to you for making improvements.

"Student Generated Content: YouTube, Google Documents & Structure" with T.L. Brink. This course describes how T.L. Brink uses student-generated content in online classes, e.g., psychology, world religion and critical thinking. Brink gives guidelines and specific recommendations for getting students to make useful videos (that are then shared on YouTube) as well as traditional projects such as case studies, book reviews, surveys, experiments, service learning and policy analysis, which are written, corrected and rewritten on Google Documents. The benefits are not just better quality student work, but the building of community and the accumulation of future learning objects.

"Student Learning Outcomes: How Are Online Students Doing?" with Lisa Montagne. Online students should be performing equally to face-to-face students on student learning outcomes, but are they? How effective are online learning platforms and pedagogy in helping students to succeed? Come to this session to hear and discuss original research on this topic.

"They Want Me to Teach Online...Now What?" with Donna S. Eastham. You've made careful comments on student writing, but what will students do with those comments? Do they learn from them, or simply move on? This session shows a simple step-by-step process that helps nourish self-evaluation by putting those comments at the center of students' attention.

New Tips and Tricks for Confer Users

I finally got around to uploading more videos to the Confer YouTube channel and there are some dandies. The information here could save you time as you plan your Confer classes. Here's a sample:

By setting up a profile, you allow your audience (students) to find out more about you. Even the simple addition of a picture gives students a sense of connection.

Before you actually have a session, you have to set it up. Chris Riegle explains how he sets up his Teach & Confer classes above, and Donna Eyestone gives advice about setting up Office Hours below.

How long should you plan your sessions? How should you schedule them?

There's a lot more of this kind of tried and true advice than I can share here. Visit the channel and take a look around at the great teachers who've taken time to pass along their experience and insights to the rest of us.

What You Know That Isn't Really So

"Will Rogers once said, 'It isn’t what people don’t know that hurts them. It’s what they do know that just ain’t so.' All of us – teachers, parents, and students – retain outdated ideas about learning that are based largely on our previous experiences in school." - ICG, the Independent Curriculum Group, from the Web page.

Myths are difficult to destroy. They are self-supporting and have the power to inspire and propagate faith in those who repeat them. In time, a myth can become an accepted ancient truth; when that happens, the myth can actually prove itself by becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Valerie Strauss recently listed seven myths about education that may apply to the foregoing and your approach to teaching in the Confer classroom. Let's be myth-busters:

1. Basic Facts Come Before Deep Learning. Why do we insist that students study boring details before we give them fun and engaging materials? Why is memorization a necessary precursor to analytical thinking? Of course, it isn't, and we are most successful when we begin our teaching with activities and ideas that allow students to use the "basic facts" to solve problems and experience meaningful insights.
2. Rigorous Education Means a Teacher Talking. Teachers love to talk, of course, and if they didn't, students might be disoriented. But learning requires more than hearing and listening. In the Confer classroom, students have plenty of opportunities to interact with one another and their instructors. The instructor who integrates these opportunities with the learning materials will find that students are making rapid and meaningful progress.
3. Covering It Means Teaching It. You've shown your slides and discussed the text. So you've done your part, right? No! Unless students are allowed and encouraged to do something with the content, they'll quickly forget it and will have little hope of ever understanding it.
4. Teaching to Student Interests Means Dumbing It Down. Student interests aren't stupid; they're based on present knowledge. It's that present knowledge that must be the basis for future knowledge. If we ignore it, we perpetuate students' own myths.
5. Acceleration Means Rigor. Each of your students is unique, and each can be used by others to reinforce learning. It makes sense to take advantage of diversity, rather than to try to fight it by separating advanced students and moving them ahead. The dynamic of class learning is enhanced when you're able to encourage students to dig deeper into content they understand and share their insights.
6. A Quiet Classroom Means Good Learning. A quiet Confer classroom is a bit scary. It may well mean that your students are no longer paying attention, that they've moved on to other online interests. Let them speak up, both for them and for you.
7. Traditional Schooling Prepares Students for Life. In the real world, people are required to make things, exercise control over what they know, analyze new facts, communicate with one another, and work with others with different talents and insights. They're not generally required to listen to a teacher and study for tests. 

Ten Reasons to Attend the Online Teaching Conference in 2012

San Jose, home of the silicon-based integrated circuit, the microprocessor, and the microcomputer, and the home of electronic innovation for over four decades. In 1909, Charles Herrold started the first radio station with regularly scheduled programming here.Today, there are more than 6,600 technology companies employing more than 254,000 people in San Jose. The Milken Institute continues to rank the San Jose metropolitan statistical area as the #1 high-tech area in North America.High-tech companies make up nearly 12% of private-sector businesses in San Jose, the greatest concentration in the U.S. and almost three times the national average. San Jose has 182.5 high-tech jobs for every 1,000 private-sector jobs: 47% higher than any other market.

OTC's portal keeps all attendees and presenters in touch with one another by means of discussions, captured sessions, presentation materials, and a vibrant social network. The conference continues even after the last booth has been disassembled and the planes have taken off.

Change is rapid and constant in the online education world, and you -as a professional - need to keep up with the changes. At OTC, you'll get a chance to hear from practitioners and insiders what's happening, what's new to the industry, and what's ahead in online teaching.

There are many faces of online learning, and here's a chance to see them together and up close. Your heros and mine come to this conference, and they're here to meet and get to know you.

Hands-on experiences with new tools, new applications, and the technology you're interested in using make this conference invaluable to educators.

There's a track and presentation for everyone, from the novice to the seasoned pro. If you want to know more about educational policies and best practices, we've got that. Want to hear about course design and accessibility? Yep, it's here. How about real-life disaster-preparedness and best practices from online educators who know from real experience? No problem.

OTC doesn't just skim the surface: it covers topics in depth. Although the novice can find plenty of information that's understandable and digestible, the educator who wants to know more will find enough to satisfy in the in-depth panel discussions and higher-level presentations.

OTC doesn't present one-sided or uni-dimensional pictures of online teaching choices or issues. We're vendor-neutral, solution-agnostic as a conference, so you'll be able to hear what works from many different angles. As much as we love our sponsors, we won't let them squeeze you into a single world-view.

All this for a mere $125 (early bird)? You'd pay twice that for half the content at most technology conferences!

We designed the Online Teaching Conference with you, the online teacher, in mind. Online teachers do most of the talking, teaching, and work at this conference, and they have the biggest say in how the conference will be structured and delivered. This is YOUR conference; thanks for making it work!



Improvise or Stick to the Script? How to Plan Your Online Interactions

"Creative teaching is improvisational, and participatory classroom discussions gain their effectiveness from their improvisational, collaborative nature... Once we recognize that creative teaching is improvisational, it opens up a new range of opportunities for training teachers, because teacher-training programs can take advantage of the training that aspiring improvisational actors receive. Aspiring improv actors begin by taking improvisational acting classes, and these classes teach a set of basic principles that encourage collaborative and emergent performances." - R. Keith Sawyer, "Creative Teaching: Collaborative Discussion as Disciplined Improvisation."

The Confer classroom provides ample opportunities for communication and interaction, including audio conversation, shared content, text chat, and polling. Many researchers - Wang and Hsu, Saw et. al. Ciekanski and Chanier, and Hampel to name a few - have demonstrated that students appreciate and value these features. The instructor in this environment can lecture, answer questions, lead a brainstorming session, organize group activities, role-play, conduct debates, and critique student work - and this doesn't come close to the possible options available.

For some instructors - especially those new to synchronous online instruction - all these options - with the attendant tools needed to facilitate them - can be daunting. To effectively switch from lecturing on whiteboard material to chatting with students, you have to pay attention to the whole screen. To set up an impromptu poll and share the results with the class, you have to be comfortable with the polling tool. Switching between breakout rooms requires some dexterity, as does effective desktop sharing. This "split attention" can overload the teacher, and it can also be hard on students, who may become confused by the mix of media. Many Confer instructors find a "comfort zone" that involves the use of one or two tools only, and they stay in that zone for all of their classes.

A new study by Karen Kear and her colleagues at The Open University suggests that careful planning and design are helpful for successful synchronous online instruction, but that "the real-time aspect means that learning and teaching in these environments is never predictable." Instead, say Kear et. al., "effective teaching in web conferencing environments ... requires a skilled balance of planning and moment-by-moment adaptation." R. Keith Sawyer calls this "disciplined improvisation." The Open University researchers were interested in how experienced tutors would adapt to tutoring in the online environment and how they learned to improvise in a disciplined manner.

One thing these tutors discovered is that improvisation requires "a repertoire of things to choose from." Because slides have to be pre-loaded, it's necessary to have these ready to go in case you need them. They also placed great value on preparing students to use the various Web conferencing tools so that they were comfortable in the online classroom (although the students overwhelmingly reported that they enjoyed the environment). Practice, practical training, and prepared materials for use in the virtual classroom were viewed by the OU tutors as most necessary for success. Here are some of the most revelatory comments:

• "The thing that really impressed me is how enthusiastic my students were to be able to hear each other, and how much more personal Elluminate felt to them than the forum."
• "For me one of the real benefits of Elluminate is that the preparation time is completely focused on the topics for the tutorial rather than logistics of how to get there etc."
• Of course by writing on the board they got my attention more easily, but it also became a bit more collaborative – typically one student would start an equation, the next would finish it and a third would add the units. Then I would suggest another way of solving the problem or someone would ask a question ..."
 

I haven't thought of myself as an improv actor, but the shoe fits. I've definitely become a better Confer user by interacting with other Confer users, improvising as the situation and audience demands. I've used scripts with some online lectures, but I'm able to leave them when there's a reason to interact. The key is to feel planned, to be ready for interruptions, but to allow the moment to be something that's never been before.

2011 Year in Review

"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." - Mark Twain

"Another fresh new year is here/ Another year to live!/To banish worry, doubt, and fear,/ To love and laugh and give!" - William Arthur Ward

2011, we barely knew you. You brought earthquakes and tsunamis, unemployment, an Arab Spring, and an Occupy movement. There were blizzards when you first arrived, drought and wildfires as you took your first steps, tornadoes, floods and stifling heat waves as you reached midlife, and strange storms in your latter days. You saw the end of the Space Shuttle program, Oprah's 25-year reign over daytime television, Borders bookstores, and American troops in Iraq. You take with you Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Taylor, Joe Frazier, Amy Winehouse, and many more we will miss. From my desk at CCC, here are four things I'll remember you for:

1. TTIP Consolidates. We learned in early spring that TTIP (Telecommunications and Technology Infrastructure Program, which funds CCC Confer and several other statewide projects) was going to experience budget cuts. To cope with reduced funds, a plan was developed to consolidate TTIP projects into two centers. Tim Calhoon, Director of the California Community Colleges Technology Center, will be directing the California Virtual Campus (CVC) along with CCCApply and CCCTran. My end of the deal will include CCC Confer, 3C Media Solutions / Edustream, and the @ONE project. My sincere thanks to Bill Doherty, who will be retiring at the end of next month, and Lenora Pinkston (who will remain at Evergreen Valley College) for their help in the transition and planning for this consolidation, and to all of the staff from these projects who have collaborated to ensure an effective alliance of minds and efforts. We're a terrific team and I'm fortunate to be part of it.

2. Mobile Learning. In January, I was part of the Mid-Pacific Information and Communication Technology (MPICT) Winter ICT Educator Conference in San Francisco. One of the tracks that fascinated me and all of the attendees had to do with educational mobile apps: there are thousands of them, and they're multiplying! The Horizon Report predicted that this would be the year for adoption of mobile learning, and it certainly seems to have been a banner year for iPhones, iPads, eReaders, Androids, and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).  Irvine Valley College hosted a symposium entitled "Mobility Matters" in March, where I joined Craig DeVoe, Jim Gaston, Bob Bramucci, and several others to discuss mobile computing and the impact of mobility on learning and higher education. (Incidentally, I'm going back to MPICT next month for the 2012 iteration; hope to see you there!)

3. Open Learning Heroes. The 2011 Online Teaching Conference at Orange Coast College used the theme "Be an Open Learning Hero" for good reason. Open educational resources are a growing part of the landscape. Early in 2011, the U.S. Department of Labor introduced the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program, a $2 billion effort that mandates the use of openly licensed materials. Open Educational Resource University (OERu) began to take shape this year, along with the Open Course Library. And State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg proposed a bill that will allocate $25 million to create free online college text books and establish the California Digital Open Source Library. View Jane Park's presentation, "Opening the Door to Sharing Content in Education," by clicking here. Eric Frank's talk - "Free the Text! How Open Texts are Disrupting Publishing and Improving Outcomes" - can be viewed here. And Steve Hargadon's keynote, "Open Learning: The Future of Education" is available here.


4. Learning is Social. Facebook now has 800 million users, more than half of whom are daily users. Over 900 million objects (pages, groups, events) are shared every day on the site, with 250 million new photos uploaded daily. 350 million of Facebook's active users connect from mobile devices. It took three years, two months, and a day from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet on Twitter. Currently, it takes a week to send a billion Tweets.  Twitter now adds an average of 460,000 new accounts per day, and saw a 182% increase in mobile users in 2011. Google+ was introduced this year and is nearing 100 million users (all adult). Michelle Pacansky-Brock calls this "The Era of Participation" and we're all (willing or not) participants.

Bring 'Em On Board: How to Get Your Colleagues to Confer

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." - Alan Watts

"I have a mind to join a club and beat you over the head with it." - Groucho Marx

Julian Prior and Marie Salter at the University of Bath recently reported on their pilot of Web conferencing software at their university. With funding from HE STEM grants, and a need to connect teams in partner colleges and organizations, they decided to test the Web conferencing waters. Here's how they got their colleagues to wet their feet:

• Interviews. Almost by accident (literally!), they discovered that candidates can be interviewed without the expense and bother of having to bring them to campus, order a room, and fill it with committee members. A candidate at Bath was hospitalized and could not attend her interview, but with this technology "she was able to respond to questions, complete the interview task planned, and demonstrate skills - just as she would have been able to do in a face-to-face situation."
• Regional Conferences. They tested this with a group of lecturers and technologists who wanted to discuss lecture capture as a strategy. What better way to demonstrate than with a remote technology that allows for capturing and reviewing the proceedings?
• Virtual Open Day. The Clinical Psychology department held a program that was so popular that there was insufficient space and resources for the students who wanted to attend. The solution: take the program online and allow everyone to participate.
• Regional Meetings. Naturally, the far-flung HE-STEM network was quick to discover the ease and convenience of meeting online rather than traveling to meetings.
• Case Study Presentations. The Chemistry department used the technology to present case studies.
• Project Proposals. The Health Department - no stranger to distance education - used the technology to allow students in distant countries to present project proposals to on-campus mentors.
• Postgraduate seminars.  A series of seminars was delivered to Masters students in Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Palestine, Syria, and the UK by means of Web conferencing.
• Professional Development. The Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology made use of the virtual learning environment to deliver continuing professional development training.

The reactions of the Bath experimenters were positive and enthusiastic. They tried several technologies and shared their findings with each other and the larger professional community. Prior and Salter conclude that "we are in the enviable position of reporting overwhelmingly positive feedback from participants who have been involved in a number of different usage scenarios."

If you're feeling lonely on your campus because you haven't found other instructors or practitioners who've taken the leap of faith required to become a virtual instructor, consider trying some of these scenarios with your colleagues. Many of our most ardent supporters and users were first introduced to CCC Confer by means of an invitation to an online event like one of these. They became curious, and later found out for themselves that Web conferencing provides a solution to challenges in their own circumstances. Share it with someone you know.