2006 TBR Distance Education
 Conference Podcast
 
 text transcript

with 
 

 Jason Green, DSCC
 Andrea Sanders, CSTCC
 Brenda Kerr, MTSU
 Sharon Shaw-McEwen, MTSU
Bill Teem, CSTCC
Audrey Williams, PSTCC
Skip Sparkman, VSCC
John St. Clair, TBR, moderator

St. Clair: Good afternoon.  Welcome to today’s session.  We’re going to talk about the 2006 Distance Education Conference at Nashville, Tennessee.  We’re very fortunate to have participated and gone to a lot of interesting sessions that we’re going to share with each other.  My name is John St. Clair, and I’m with the Regents Online Degree Program, and I’d like to introduce our participants.  We have Jason Green.

Green: Hi.  I’m a Distance Ed. Coordinator at Dyersburg State.

St. Clair: And we have Andrea Sanders with us.

Sanders: Hi, nice to be here.  I’m from Chattanooga State.

St. Clair: And Brenda Kerr.

Kerr: I’m Brenda Kerr.  I’m an instructional technology specialist at Middle Tennessee State University.

St. Clair: Sharon Shaw-McEwen.

Shaw-McEwen: Good afternoon, I’m an online faculty member from Middle Tennessee State University.

St. Clair: Bill Teems [sic].

Teem: Bill Teem, and I teach English at Chattanooga State.

St. Clair: Audrey Williams.

Williams: Audrey Williams, instructional technology specialist at Pellissippi State Technical Community College in Knoxville.

St. Clair: And Skip Sparkman.

Sparkman: Hi, good to have you with us, and I’m with the Distance Learning at Volunteer State College.

St. Clair: Well, thank you all for coming and sharing this time with us and our listeners.  I’d like to begin by talking in general about the concept of mega-courses versus instructor-designed courses.  You know, long ago when e-Learning started, there was this fear out there that, you know, Harvard University would create this “World’s Most Wonderful Philosophy” course, that, you know, Duke would create this “World’s Most Wonderful So-and-So” course, and that we would all become – as professors we would become the teaching assistants for these mega-courses.  And of course that didn’t happen.  And then we have the opposite spectrum where, for example, in the Tennessee Board of Regents Regents Online Collaborative program, we suggested to faculty and, with a lot of input from the faculty themselves and from various committees, that courses were really better-designed by the individual professor.  If the individual professor was deeply involved with the development of the course, that made both the course itself better and more insightful and the professor more able to teach with it.  And so it’s kind of opposite spectrums.  Long ago – not that long ago, three or four or five years ago – maybe the publisher content and the mega-courses were not such good quality, but they’ve come a long way since then.  And so some of the publisher content – some of the mega-courses – are beautiful courses now.  So, my question is where do you see us in Tennessee, or where do you see online learning in general, going with this spectrum of mega-course versus instructor-only materials?

Sanders: Well, I’m very interested in the subject myself because – this is Andrea speaking here – because, as you know, John, I’ve been involved in the Regents Online Degree Program since it began, and many others of you sitting here have.  And I remember our initial unease at creating what we were calling at the time – was it “Master Courses”?

St. Clair: Right.

Sanders: I forgot the term we gave them.  But we were going to create these courses that would then be cloned or copied; and then other people would teach these courses.  And I remember, as we all know the tradition of academics is, you know, your isolated instructor in his or her own classroom with his or her own piece of chalk and his or her own chalkboard conducting his or her own class and taking total control of that and controlling every utterance and iteration in that class, and so it made me uncomfortable in two ways.  In one way, I was uncomfortable forcing someone else to do my stuff, and putting myself, you know, on the other hand, I didn’t want to – I wasn’t totally comfortable sharing all of my stuff with someone else.  But as I’ve taught along all these years, I’ve become more and more and more comfortable with it, and I think it’s a change in mindset, really, because what’s happened is I’ve learned so much from the other instructors teaching the course, and they’ve helped me redesign my course and enhance my course and supplement my course in so many useful and productive ways.  So it has really become a collaborative effort, and that’s where I see the trend in online education.  And even a step beyond that to, you know – we all know the term learning objects now, and I see that as another trend – that the course is not a neat thing in a box tied up with a bow, but rather a place where you can go and pull out chucks of information that you can use at will to design something that you need at the moment and pick and choose what you need.  And so, rather than a mega-course, maybe the term repository or something like that, or mega-course as we saw in the keynote presentation – some kind of design where you could go and get a course or a piece of a course or a part of a course, or in the keynote we saw a sample that was wonderful of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and at dinner that night we were saying “Well, I could use that in my English course when I teach literature, American literature.  And I could use that in my sociology course.  And I could use that in my psychology course.  I could use it in a number of different courses; it wouldn’t have to be a history course,” which was what the presentation was about.  So that’s at least a part of a response to your question.

Green: I’d agree with you that I don’t think we’re going to get all the way to mega-courses.  This is Jason.  But I think there’s some economic reality that’s going to push us at lest in that direction.  I mean, certainly in this state there’s been a lot of concern about duplication of resources and duplication of development efforts.  At the local level, you can have a situation where a faculty member develops that course individually and leaves, retires, decides they don’t want to teach online, and you don’t have the resources at the campus level to pay for the course development again.  And so there’s a need to, as you develop those courses at the campus level, end up with something that your whole department is at least able to teach and perfectly willing to teach so that that section can possibly move from faculty member to faculty member in different semesters as your staffing needs require it; and so that’s going to push us toward a more collaborative model, and I think there were a lot of things at this conference – the keynote on Thursday morning, the Pathways presentation on Friday morning that was about a state-wide program to tie career objectives to degree programs at TBR institutions – trying to maximize our bang-for-the-buck, as it were, by doing collaborations both on our campuses and between campuses in the system.

Williams: And I’d like to add something else.  This is Audrey.  When John first asked that question, what came to my mind was, as we start preparing courses, now we’ve kind of  grown up, we’ve been teaching online now for six, seven years, and it’s come so far from static pages, yet that’s what so many of the classes still have in them.  And I think most faculty who are really reflective and thinking about making their courses better want to add media interaction, e-gaming, simulations, podcasts, whatever, but don’t have those technical skills.  So while the instructor in the model we’ve had at my school and throughout – I think – throughout TBR, the instructor has had to be the creator and the subject-matter expert.  What I’m wondering is if we’re going to go back into more of a collaborative thing, like you were mentioning, but collaborating not just with other faculty members but also with instructional technology folks, media technology folks, you know.  Our students coming in now, they’re the digital natives, and they’re going to be expecting that.  And as we talked about in the last session, if we’re wanting to prevent the decline in enrollment because the classes just aren’t what the expectations are, then –  

Sparkman: I think I would agree with you, Audrey – this is Skip – but, expanding on what each of you have [sic] said, I think we’re looking now at collaboration among faculty members who are developing these courses.  And I don’t want just to add stuff to my course that other faculty members say might be a good idea.  I want something that’s grounded in good teaching and learning principles -

Williams: Right.

Sparkman: – that’s a proven learning object now.  And those other faculty resource people have that from me.

Williams: Right.  I’m wondering if – I was thinking of mega-course as almost like [having] a mega-menu, and then, you know, I can go through from my mega-menu and pick because, as the instructor, I know my students.  I know in the online environment we’re going to be drawing students from a broader spectrum, but generally I think we’re still seeing that the folks taking online classes are pretty much “our folks.”

Sparkman: Sure.

Williams: So I know that what’s going to be the appropriate examples and demonstrations that will work with my students that may not work with a student from, you know, inner city – if I’m teaching in a rural area – or perhaps, you know, from another country.  So I like the idea of a smorgasbord of learning.

Sparkman: The box of goodies illustration that Andrea used becomes a playhouse of organized rooms of stuff from which you can take these items and use them.

St. Clair: Yeah, and you know, when Andrea was mentioning the instructional design experts, you know, the professor a lot of times has to be the instructional design expert, the subject-matter expert, the delivery expert, but we seem to have come to a maturity of understanding where we realize we need the individual instructional design expert and the person who’s expert in services for the disabled students and how that impacts our online courses.  Brenda, I know you did a session on ADA issues regarded in relation to online courses.  Do you think we’re making progress in the area, and do you think professors have a closer understanding of that?  Are the publishers coming along?  What’s the situation there with those issues?

Kerr: Well, I guess I can’t really speak broadly because I don’t know, but I think with a lot of professors we will go and create things and then we’ll try and make them accessible afterwards, and I think one of the biggest things we need to learn to do is start off from the beginning making things accessible.  And whether we’re designing websites or web pages or media or even the software developers, you know, they start with that first and then build – then build the program on top of it all.  I think a lot of those things will go away.

St. Clair: Yeah, yeah.  Sharon?

Shaw-McEwen: I do like the notion – I was in the workshop on “Good Teaching is Good Teaching” –

St. Clair: [By] Jim Formosa.

Shaw-McEwen: And – right – and one of the things that I liked that he promoted was that teaching in any classroom – whether it’s on-ground or online – ought to be student centered, and while that sounds very unprophetic and, you know, as though anybody who taught anything ought to know that, my experience in looking at classroom and in listening to professors is that we don’t really practice that.  We talk about it, but we don’t really practice it, and online I’m not sure that I agree totally that they’re pretty much our folk, because I don’t know who our folk really are.  I know I’ve had students from Germany in my class, I’ve had student’s from Florida in my class, I’ve had black students, I’ve had white students, I’ve had Hispanic students.  Because I teach Cultural Diversity, I know that these students all have different learning styles and learning needs, and so if I’m teaching to a mainstream whoever “our” are, I’m really probably going to miss without even knowing that I’ve missed a lot of students.  And so I think – I think the collaboration that you speak of is going to have to be a lot of what several people have mentioned – not only technical – not only our colleagues, and not only our peers, and not only technical experts in terms of the technology, but also teaching experts –

St. Clair: Right.

Shaw-McEwen: – who can help us think about all the things that we have to think about as – when we’re really practicing good pedagogy and good teaching skills.

St. Clair: And so many of us, when we were trained as mathematicians, as biologists, et cetera, we don’t really get the training in pedagogy that we really need, and one of the things that has occurred to me over the last few years is, I think fortunately at all of our Tennessee Board of Regents schools is that we have a number of people like Audrey at Pellissippi that understand teaching and learning, and while they doing their technological training for online faculty, at least the online faculty are beginning to consider how teaching online needs to be well thought-out, and I believe they’re probably taking those same skills of thinking about teaching, of the meta-cognition as Jim Formosa would say, back to their traditional classroom.

Teem: This is Bill.  And I think, too, the whole concept – this is Bill Teem from Chattanooga State – is changing.  I mean, what is the definition of an online class?  Is it simply one that is taught exclusively online, or do we have ground classes that have a large online component?  We’ve got hybrid classes, so I think the definition is shifting.  And maybe an online class might even have a meeting at a central location.  I mean, the definition is not as clear as it was; and, more important, I think that’s a good thing.  I mean, I think the merging of all that is a good thing.

St. Clair: And, you know, Bill is involved in Podcasting in his course, and here we are producing a podcast.  Podcasting is a useful tool and one of the things that it does – like Sharon mentioned – is it addresses one set of students whose learning style is specifically the audio learner.

Teem: Absolutely, and that is, of course, in this particular thing that I’m doing this semester, it is an on-ground class that’s supplemented with a website.  But, I can see that that could bring an aspect to an online class because one of the things that’s missing is, well, the personality of the instructor, perhaps, in a way.  I mean, certainly through e-mails, but you know, what’s one way to judge someone’s personality?  It’s their voice.  It’s not only the learning style, but am I going to feel closer to the instructor if I’ve heard that instructor’s voice, for example?  In that, even that thing, even that one aspect of it I think can make a difference.

Green: We see some of that – referring back to that same learning object that we saw Thursday morning about Japanese internment – that was I think at least two layers.  There was a video presentation that was narrated – or as the presenter said, “Ken Burns-esque” – and then there was a text version. And so the learning object was designed on the front end as something that could address both visual learners and people who had a more auditory bent with the narration.  And I think, you know, the availability of these learning objects and designing them – because in a regular classroom, we try one way, and if we think it’s working, we move on to the next thing because we have limited time.  If it doesn’t work, then we’ll try something else until the students get it at some level.  Well, we don’t have the opportunity in the online class to look out at the room and see if they’re getting it, and if we wait until we find out that they’re not getting it in an online class, that’s three, four days down the line often with asynchronous courses, and then you’re really behind.  So maybe the key in an online environment is to design – kind of like what we already said, like what we said with disability – to design at the front end for those multiple learning styles, and be ready to deal with it before it happens.

Williams: The session that I did was on exactly on what you were saying, Bill.  We were talking about video and how we’re adding video to our online classes, but the whole impetus that got me to do my project was how can we humanize instructors inside the course? So the first videos my faculty created were purely, “Hi, I’m your instructor.  This is how the course is organized.”  Things like that.  We really didn’t focus on content at all, and we’ve gotten very positive feedback from the students, like “Oh, this is great, you look like this, and I’m getting your personality.”  And then an interesting side note is that I’ve started also using this same software to send out information to my faculty about WebCT things, you know, and stuff going on on campus, and – ‘cause I’ve been sending out e-mails, you know, I send out bunches of e-mails, and I think they get read when they have “time,” which doesn’t always happen, and I appreciate that.  But I send out my first video, and I got like five e-mails back within ten minutes going, “That was great!  I loved it! And I get so much more out of it, I remember everything!”  And I’m like, “Hmm, where else could we use this?”  Evil laugh, stroking me little goatee.  Yes.

Teem: I think it would be interesting, too, as some of you said, an interesting study would be – how does that affect retention?  In other words, if I have a class that has a video component where the instructor introduces his- [sic] or her- self, or an audio podcast component, I found in my on-ground class that I’m doing the podcast, when I change something, I start adding music, just a little bit of music to what I was doing, the next day the students came in and said, “Boy, that was terrific; I loved that!  You know, that was like Masterpiece Theatre.”  So the students are responding to little things like that, but I think and interesting study would be to do, “How does this affect retention?”  Because I think, you know, we know in retention that if a student has a connection with an instructor, they’re more likely to stay in the class and to stay connected; anything we can do, so maybe even just a short video –

Williams: You should have been to my session.  That’s exactly what we would do.

Teem: Well, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Williams: I’m just giving you a hard time.

St. Clair: You know, we’ve started publishing a series of podcasts on the TBR site, and Andrea has done one already on Nonjudgmental Rigor, but the next one we’ll be putting online is David White from Walters State, who’s done one on Professor Presence, and I think that’s another indication of how we’re all maturing as educators.  We’re beginning to think about different learning styles, professor presence, nonjudgmental rigor, et cetera.  And what occurred to me as Audrey was talking was Audrey is using – correct me if I’m wrong – but aren’t you using a fairly inexpensive video production tool?  What is that?

Williams: Right.   Serious Magic’s Visual Communicator Pro.  The Pro version’s about $140.

St. Clair: And, you know, the tools – I personally use iMovie quite a bit, which is under $100, part of the iLife package on Apple.  The tools are becoming within reach of the professor.

Williams:  And I just discovered that Serious Magic now offers another product called V-Log or VLog – for Video Blogging – it’s like a $40 package; it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, but if you’re just wanting to have a little short video of the instructor, or maybe, you might be able to bring in some images – I’m not sure what all the limitations [are].  But I just saw that the other day when I was preparing for the presentation.

Sparkman: A couple of questions come to mind for me in listening to this discussion.  One is, can we devise a way to determine and assess learning styles of the students in our online sections rapidly within the first few days of the course?

Green: We can –

Sparkman: And then can we address those, too?  Can we develop sections of courses – various sections of English 1010 or of any other course based on specific learning styles, and then notify students up front that these are the learning styles –

St. Clair: Now that’s an interesting idea.

Sparkman: Most dominant?

Shaw-McEwen: We can, we can do that.  There are assessments.  In fact, one of the things that my students have to do in the Cultural Diversity class is to determine their own learning styles, because many of them have not.  So there are lots of assessments that allow us to do that.  Whether or not you would want to segregate students based on their style, though, is an issue that’s up for debate.

Sparkman: I agree.

Williams: Maybe you want to call out parts of your course.  Say, if you discover you’re a visual learner, be sure you hit the video.

Shaw-McEwen: And that’s the kind of thing this collaboration does, that we’re doing now, talking about ways to make that happen.

Sanders: The best designed learning objects – in the reading I’ve done on learning objects, they do say – hit the four basics in the same module.

St. Clair: Are you talking about –

Sanders: The module’s going to have visual, aural, -

Shaw-McEwen: Audio -

Sanders: Kinesthetic, -

Shaw-McEwen: Experimental –

Sanders: So you come at it from separate ways, give choices.

Teem: Rather than having separate courses.

Shaw-McEwen: That’s right.

Teem: And this goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning – a whole smorgasbord to choose from where, rather than having separate courses, why not put all the different learning styles into one course, so students either, as you say, can be directed or students I think to a certain extent will naturally go to that which appeals to them.

Williams: They will, but then if you also offer the other options they can – you can learn to adjust and adapt because even out in the workforce you may not have it handed to you in the style that’s strongest, so you’re like, “OK, I know that I’m not the strongest audial [sic] learner, but that the way to have to get this particular X or Y.  I’ve got to concentrate, and I know I’ve got to concentrate and can’t be cooking, washing the baby and the dog at the same time.”

Sparkman: And if we use these tools, and if we find those various stimuli for those learning styles, then I think it’s important that we find that we almost – and you might want to disagree with this – almost disguise what we’re doing and say to these students – now, rather than say, “This is for you who are visual learners, and this is for you who are auditory learners;” let’s say, “Watch this, listen.”

Teem: Absolutely.

St Clair: Right. Excellent.

Teem:  Another thought, too – I know we divide people off to visual, audio – but I know that some days I’m a visual learner, some days I’m an auditory learner.  So to be better, there are some days I want to watch something; and there are some days that I don’t want to look at something, I want to listen.

St. Clair: I think Jim Formosa would tell us, “Let’s disguise some of this learning, let’s address visual or audio learners; but some places during the course, let’s actually instruct the learner in meta-cognitive skills – the thinking about how they learn, how they think.”

Williams: You can’t always use – you need to learn to use your other areas.

St. Clair: That’s right.

Shaw-McEwen: I do want to throw in – while we’re on this discussion – that a lot of our students won’t know what kind of learner they are.  So to do it all is really important, but the other thing is, even if they know what kind of learner they are, they can learn to also have some skill in different kinds of learning, because they’re going to have professors who only know how to teach – and teachers not necessarily in education, but teachers who only know how to teach one way.

Sparkman: We need to remember their learning styles are dominant, not necessarily exclusive.

Shaw-McEwen: So that’s why it’s so important to add all of them that we can.

St. Clair: One of the things that’s occurred to me during the conference was – and again I return to the concept of maturing as educators – we are all very aware of student learning styles now – the concept at least.  And that wasn’t true so long ago, but I think we also need to be aware of each other’s – our fellow professors’, our colleagues’ – that they also have teaching styles, and whereas we might like to share the concept of blogging or podcasting with them, I don’t think we should expect all of our faculty member to be heavily involved in technology or heavily involved in this or that technique.

Williams:  Yeah, that’s why I call what I offer all the faculty at my school the Faculty Tool-belt.  It’s like you can pick and choose what you want out of the tool-belt that you’re going to deploy, you know.  And I’ve got some folks who’ve got every tool that I offer and more out there and other folks are like, “I’m just going to take this little screwdriver, and we’ll go one thing at a time.”

St. Clair: Speaking of tools, and you’ve all already mentioned the low cost tools that we saw at the conference – I believe there was a session on free tools by Don King from Pellissippi.  I wasn’t able to get there.  Did anybody hear that one?

Teem:  It was a good session.  This is Bill.  There were several of us, and it was a very good session – and just another plug for podcasting, you’re talking about vodcasting costing only a few dollars.  I’ll point out that the tools that I need to do my podcast cost exactly zero dollars.  So, that’s something, but it was a great session because there were a lot of tools not only for professors, but a lot of these tools that he talked about can be shared with students, and it’s really the students that need these tools because they don’t have the financial resources. So these were tools that not only we could use, but we could share with our students.  For example – gosh, what was the Microsoft Office –

Williams: He talked about OpenOffice.org, and as he pointed out – which I didn’t know – was the license allows for distribution of OpenOffice, so if you even have students who are on 56k and instead of pointing them to OpenOffice.org and saying, “You can download this is you can’t afford [Microsoft] Office; have fun with a 40 megabyte download on your modem.”  You actually can download, burn it to a CD, and give it to them or mail it to them.  That’s part of the license.

Green:  We saw a lot of that because Audacity that Bill mentioned in his podcasting – you know, thing that are GPLed – sorry, GNU Public License – especially as we look at budgets getting tighter and tighter and resources being absolutely at a premium, that segment of the software market – although it certainly doesn’t have every feature and every type of software package – there are certainly some very viable options for audio editing, for document things, that we can use to save our students money and our school money and get our stuff done at lower cost.

Sanders: Name names.  OpenOffice, what else?

Kerr: OpenOffice.org -

St. Clair: Andrea’s taking notes.

Kerr: Anti-virus AVG.

Sanders: Anti-virus AVG?

Kerr: That was a free anti-viral package that’s free for home use and needs recommending.

Teem: I’m looking for his notes because he gave us a list.

St. Clair: I’ll contact Don.  We’ll see if we can get some show notes and point to that.

Williams: If he’s created an entire site, I could share the URL with you.

St. Clair: Are you all aware of the website called Writely?

Williams: He mentioned Writely.

St. Clair: Did he mention Writely?

Williams: He did.

Green: That’s a different animal with the whole idea of web-based tools.  I’m sure a lot of people have heard of Gmail by now, or Google Maps, or Yahoo Maps that are using advanced web technologies.  So things that you used to have to do on your desktop – you know, five, ten years ago you would spend seventy-five dollars on DeLorme’s Street Atlas, and you’d drop the CD into your drive, and you’d do your maps that way.  Now it’s all on the web, and with things like Writely and Gmail , we’re looking at applications that we used to think of as being on the desktop – like e-mail and word processing – now moving in little fits and starts towards web availability.

Williams: And I’m also really excited about RSS and what that’s going to bring to online classes in keeping – especially courses like political science or, well, pretty much anything that wants current information that we’ve had to just go and search and find and then copy and paste and build these links and then they break.  And so that kind of stuff is getting so much easier because earlier – and it still requires a little geekatude –

Sanders: I like that word.  I like it.

Sparkman: I thought it was gekatudé.

Williams: That’s in France, it would be gekatudé, but in East Tennessee it would be geekatude.  But it’s so much easier now to create an RSS feed and put it into your course management system.

Teem: And to say that, I’m not a geek, but I was able to –

Sanders: Yes, he is.

Teem: Thank you, Andrea.  And – this is Bill – Bill the Geek – but I do not consider myself very savvy when it comes to trying software, and yet I was able to do an RSS; it wasn’t easy for me, but I got it done.  And so I think –

Williams: And it’s getting easier, too, I mean there’s all these tools out there, and it’s just something that I think – I guess that’s part of it, the tools are getting easier and there’s web-based, whether its blog-log or Writely or now there’s an RSS calendar that’s slick – I love it – that let’s you embed a calendar that you can just go and edit one place, and if you’ve got RSS out, it gets updated.

Green: I think RSS also takes us to maybe the next thing we’ll get to be aware of, which is attention metrics.  You know, one of the points with podcasting is that if you’re students are listening to your podcast on a portable device – kind of like what you talked about, Audrey – they might be listening while they’re washing their dog and their dishes and their children.

St. Clair: They’re washing their dogs and their dishes and their children at the same time?

Green: Right.  It’s multitasking.

Kerr: That’s what the garden hose is for.

Green: Our up-and-coming traditional students do a lot of that multi-tasking that’s kind of wired into their systems.  And that question of how are we going to deal with delivering instruction in environments where we may not have a hundred percent of the students’ attention – and that’s a change from where you have them sitting in the classroom and at least theoretically they’re paying attention to you.

St. Clair: Well, thanks, everybody, for coming and being with us today.  This has been very exciting, and I think it’s exciting times in education.  There’s so much happening; there’s so many ways to put some creativity and some thought into your teaching and learning.  Thank you very much for being with us.