Daily Archives: October 17, 2017

Review of Canadian and U.S. Survey Results on Online and Distance Education in Post-Secondary Education

I’m attending the ICDE World Conference on Online Learning 2017 in Toronto, Canada and blogging the sessions I’m attending.

Presenter(s): Tony Bates, Ross Paul, Brian Desbiens, Denis Mayer, Eric Martel, Tricia Donovan, Russell Poulin

Babson & IPEDS have been collecting data in the U.S.; it has impacted policy at the state and federal level. But no comparable Canadian data across the whole system. So hence the new survey that is being reported on for the first time here at ICDE, and released to the public today.

This survey was done with a volunteer team, plus Babson and WCET to assist. Funding was raised, there wasn’t a federal base for it. They developed a national database of institutions to do the survey as well.

They had a 69% response rate; about 78% of the student population covered. Almost all of the post secondary institutions offer online for credit. They also checked websites and provincial records to identify what institutions were doing, even those who didn’t do the survey. It’s really a mature market – institutions have been offering online learning for 15 years or more. The growth rate has slowed because most institutions are already doing online (it’s about 2% measuring institutions; 15% colleges; 10% growth for universities 2010-2015). Online is about 16% of the teaching at the university level.

They made a distinction between distance education and online – print based being included in their distance education definition.

72% institutions rate online learning important and are developing a strategy for online.

Some technologies are hard to track because it might be at the individual professor level instead of at the institutional level.

They defined hybrid learning as a reduction in face to face time to allow time for online – that’s our blended learning definition at Andrews too. 

On hybrid learning – faculty were rethinking their teaching to better use online and face to face pedagogies. This type of learning is hard to track.

There’s no MOOC mania in Canada…. it’s neat and interesting and might be helpful but it won’t change our business.

Benefits of online learning: flexibility, increased enrollments, innovative teaching.

Challenges included lack of resources, faculty resistance or lack of training, lack of government support (lowest in Ontario, highest in Quebec).

Challenges with the survey – many Canadian institutions aren’t counting their online enrollments regularly; and even basic student counting of data is widely different across provinces; the need for a standard method of counting; post-secondary oversight is entirely provincial. FTE definitions are not the same across provinces.

Another challenge with the survey was whether to do a snapshot or an annualized version of the learning. A snapshot, for example, may not take into account summer online learning.

Comparisons between Canada and the U.S.

  • Similarities:
    • Difficulties with definitions for data collection
    • Institutional commitment and growth rates
    • Larger institutions are more likely to be doing online / distance ed
    • Institutions see online education as a strategic part of the institution moving forward
  • Differences
    • Canada: course enrollments / U.S. headcounts
    • Canada has almost all public institutions offering online; U.S. about 3/4ths public institutions involved in online

Implications

  • Scaling up faculty support – do faculty have to go to a central unit? can they get the support on their own and on demand?
  • Planning for digital learning
  • What about small institutions and the resources they need
  • What could or should the government be doing?
  • Organizational issues
  • Online course enrollment data

Links and Resources

UX Design for Learning

I’m attending the ICDE World Conference on Online Learning 2017 in Toronto, Canada. This session is just one presentation shared by the Centre for Extended Learning at the University of Waterloo.

Presenters: Meagan Troop, Darcy White, Pia Zeni; Matt Justice, Kristin Wilson (University of Waterloo)

They have instructional designers, media developers, technology consultants, librarians, copyright specialists and more.

UX Design – popularized by Donald Norman. “Design decisions should be based on the needs and wants of users rather than informed solely by clients or developers.”

Desire Path by Wikimedia
Desire Path by Wikimedia

For us, the user is the learner. Why should I involved learners in the design process? Design without user input results in the user sometimes not even using what you designed. i.e. a “desire path” where users pick a path more efficient.

They got funding from ecampus Ontario to do a large research project on what users want in their e-learning experiences.

How do we keep the focus on the UX design where there is a big production pressure for getting courses launched?

Peter Morville is an information architect, UX expert. He developed the UX honeycomb – with valuable in the middle of the honeycomb.

UXLDL 1.0: They surfaced the literature on these areas, and focused on the various areas of the online learning experience. See their honeycomb website.

In this session, we are looking at two cells from the honeycomb: useful and desirable.

Useful

How can we create useful learning experiences for students? building on Richard Mayer’s work. 

Not just putting out information – but how do we get students to engage in “appropriate cognitive processing”. The idea is that we are processing visual and verbal information using different channels. We experienced watching a video where the words being spoken didn’t match the words – which is a problem because the brain is working on both but then can’t make sense of it because they don’t match. We need to engage both channels of the brain – visual and verbal – in a way that they match. If you add audio, you need to give the user a choice to use it or not. Also the visual should enhance the learning and add meaning or make the meaning easier to grasp, not just be added on.

The honeycomb website goes into much more detail on how to work on all of these areas.

Sometimes new material is complex, learners are novices. We need to help students process the new material. Segmenting short chunks, introducing key concepts first, using narration, not text to accompany pictures.

Four different kinds of visuals – decorative (they add nothing), representational (they represent one element of the concept; they don’t really enhance learning), organizational visual (depict relationships between one or two elements – do help with learning), and finally explanatory visual (like the water cycle – these help with learning). Need to focus on visuals that help explain the concepts. Metaphor visuals can act as a visual cue for retrieval of memory.

Media done poorly distracts learning!

Desirability

It should Look Good (visceral design), Feel Good (behavioral design), and Make You Think (reflective design) aka Beauty, Function, and Reflection.

How do we create positive affect in online learning? Read more from the honeycomb here. We want to capture student’s attention, curiosity. Students need to watch the content to learn it, so how do we get them involved?

Surprise, a story, emotional design. How are we ensuring this is included in our courses? Is it easy for students to go from text to video and back to text? For function, do they have to mess around very much to get to the content and to engage in the course? We want to be creating a positive affect within the course.

What about the fact that some of these things take so many resources to create? And we have so many courses to create?

Images that engage emotions, that catch attention.

Researching the Honeycomb

The honeycomb was launched in 2016, and spring 2017 the research questions are around validating the honeycomb.

They focused on the literature on cognitive and affective work in online learning. They identified a gap in the literature. They are collecting data via surveys, in depth interviews, and user research.

They are looking at four courses – STEM and non-STEM – that were intentionally designed with the honeycomb in mind.

Results include students wanted: ongoing interaction, self-directed, self-paced, high quality, meaningful, fair assessments, same rigor in a classroom experience, flexibility, social aspect of learning, individual learning, humanizing learning.

The honeycomb is really about content – which would make sense because it is based on web design principles. For 2.0 they want to include the other types of interaction also – with the instructor and with peers.

Students ranked features in order of importance to them. Content and activities being easy to find (top feature, findable & usable on the honeycomb). Easy to read instructions, also high. Only 2% wanted opportunities to interact with their classmates. They think that interaction seems inauthentic or forced (i.e. discussion forums). This was undergraduate (and only a very small percent were adult learners) – I really think that undergraduates struggle much more with discussion than graduate students.

The honeycomb doesn’t really focus on humanizing learning, and this is an area they want to work on more.

I really appreciate a session where a team of people took a concept or framework and worked on it deeply, exploring the concept deeply, researching, experimenting with course design, etc.

Turning the Page on Digital Textbooks

I’m attending the ICDE World Conference on Online Learning 2017 in Toronto, Canada. The set of presentations I’m reporting on are all around open, digital textbooks, OER, open publication, etc.

The Value and Experience of Open Publication

This section is presented by Dianne Conrad, co-editor of IRRODL, Terry Anderson, retired from Athabasca University and Rory McGreal, co-editor of IRRODL.

The open movement, you know, includes open society, open educational resources, open acces, open data, open source software, open licenses.

What is an open access journal? No price barriers. No permission barriers. Subsidized by an academic institution, learned society or government.

IRRODL is the first open access journal in Canada. In 2008 they started the open AU press too. It’s linked to the OER knowledge cloud. SSHRC-funded. The most cited journal in distance education. The readership and manuscripts come from around the world.

The Directory of Open Access Journals, they have the DOAJ Seal which means they adhere to open access best practice. Something to check on other open journals!!

Discussion of the publication of monographs via the AU press. University support is critical for the press. Goal of 1% of the AU budget to go to the press.There are grant funds. Issues in Distance Education – series.

Next Rory McGreal talked about the advantages of open textbooks: cost, adaptability, updating, localisation. Challenges: entrenched practices and special interests. Increase in textbook prices. Publishers are selling less textbooks so they keep increasing their prices.

Main leaders in OER: BCcampus, SOL*R, ecampus Ontario.

Developing an OER Digital Interactive “Textbook:” Challenges and Opportunities of Modular and Flexible Design Principles

Presenter(s): Gail Morong, Shannon Smyrl. 

This section is creating an open learning course for introduction to academic writing. There are dozens of projects. This is one that every institution has, but needs significant adaptation for local. They wanted to build an open textbook that supported both students and faculty through the experience.

Their main criteria for the project was to have a user-driven resource vs. a textbook-driven resource. The learning resource should support and facilitate the course design rather than dictate. The idea is that the teacher shouldn’t have to be held hostage by the textbook. In activity based learning, you need things to work with in the classroom – and sometimes textbooks don’t provide that.

The design criteria then were modular, open, flexible. Think of how sometimes you only use 3 chapters from a $200 book. Academic writing courses shouldn’t need a textbook. Maybe first year theory courses need it, but you really need something flexible. It should be flexible for 60 students or in a computer lab, or in self-directed online, or whatever.

It’s set up so the different activities can be used. It has a coherent theme, but doesn’t require that students follow through. You can put your own theme in, or you can pick and choose.

From a faculty member’s point of view – what was needed was institutional support, technical support, media support, instructional design support. There was also huge disciplinary support – as part of the work load of faculty.

Development Methodology of Interactive Digital Textbook for Experimental Subjects

By Kwang Sik Chung and Sooyoul Kwon (Korea National Open University)

The challenge with creating digital textbooks is coordinating all the different people. So, a methodology for creating a digtial textbook would be helpful. They were creating their textbook for the smartphone – he showed an example of having the user tilt or shake the phone to fill a beaker for an experiment.

Interesting model from data to information to knowledge to wisdom – moving up a pyramid. How do we get to wisdom? How do we design to bring students to the level of wisdom, not just data at the bottom of the pyramid.

They created a methodology that included: plan & analysis; design; development and implementation; evaluation stage. It includes a variety of roles and a coordination timeline as well.

Developing OER Degree Pathways in the US and Canada

Una Daly, James Glapa-Grossklag; Amanda Coolidge (BCcampus)

James started: The idea here is, how could students have a complete pathway for their whole degree – with the benefit of students the end result. James is from California and is working on the Zero Textbook Cost degrees – it means community college associate degrees or career technical education certificates. It’s about the student – the student getting done. It’s a big deal in California as they serve 2 million students in 114 community colleges; 1/5th of all the U.S. community college. 1/10th of all US [community? ] college students are in a community college in California. 25 colleges are working on a ZTC degree pathway.

In British Columbia they are doing the same thing – Zed Cred – using the Canadian pronunciation of Z. Fun!

It’s significant cost savings to students, increasing in enrollment, persistence and performance (Hilton et al 2016). It makes it easier for student to learn better and more quickly.  What would it take to have an Adventist initiative like this? Maybe different institution could collaborate on specific courses? Funding for development and adaptation of open textbooks for the faith perspective would be critical. Would be so cool!

Another initiative is Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count. This effort is privately funded, and is including research in it’s focus. This effort requires open resources – it can’t even be library resources that are stuck behind a paywall. Very interesting to make sure it’s totally open.

They are also working on what is needed to move from an OER course to an OER degree. They think about total institution cost too – not just the cost benefit to students – costs like instructional support, the departments involved supporting, as well.

Research questions include – do students complete better if they have OER courses; and what are the institutional costs and support? Advising, registration, advertising so they know. Articulation agreements with 4 year degrees. The 4 year degrees should be prepared to accept the courses. It’s very worth while having that conversation with the institutions will be going to next.

Discussion

An accreditation question. U.S. accreditors don’t require that materials are published by a commercial publisher – what they require is that the qualified faculty is the one making the choice on the materials. Thomson Rivers response – the accreditors are looking at the learning outcomes. The resources are chosen by faculty to meet the learning outcomes.

Someone wondered if students might do all the learning resource activities on their own, and then come to the institution for assessments. The responses were that most of these were used for traditional courses.

OERu is another initiative in this area – where students can use OERs to get a credential.

The value for OER and digital textbooks is really for the students.

Someone else in the audience said this is a cost shift from the students to the institutions and/or faculty. Response: there are faculty incentives. Questioner: why are you doing it? Response: plan for student success – better pedagogy – students completing. In Canada they are government funded – it saves provincial money in the long run because otherwise the province is paying for textbooks with funds for student education. Passionate response: the bike rake is free, the wifi and the library are free, why not the learning resources? That’s the main thing that students are here for.

Another huge aspect of the open textbook is that it can be a different format  – not just print and graphics. Maybe we should call it something instead of a textbook. That’s why we have OER. It’s kind of a workbook – it’s all the things you need. Things you copy, things you use for activities.

On the faculty side, development in this area must count towards tenure and promotion.

Fascinating discussion and presentations. An area where creative and innovative work continues.