Monthly Archives: November 2014

Faculty Presence

While you focus on building your online course, keep in mind how you will be “present” in your online course. How will students feel that you are “there” in the course? Creating a sense of instructor presence is an important aspect to student satisfaction in online courses.So what are some ways to be “present” and visible to students?

Faculty Initiated Interaction

  • Send a weekly email to students. Consider it your “housekeeping” message to students at the beginning of class. Include:
    • Overall feedback to the class on the previous week
    • A teaser to hook them into the next week’s content
    • Reminders
    • Updates on grading
    • A suggested schedule to help students organize their work for the week
  • Be present in the discussion forum. Don’t overpower, but let students know you are there.
  • 5-4-3-2-1: Countdown to Course Management (see pages 2,8): Tips for how often to interact with students in various ways in your online course.
  • Live interactive sessions and video lectures also increase your presence in the course.
  • Be yourself! Use humor, self-disclosure, and personal interaction to help students feel that you are human and really “there” in the class.

Feedback

Another crucial and often overlooked area of presence and teaching in an online course is feedback.

Talk to your Instructional Facilitator for more ideas or assistance with applying these ideas to your course.  Find these tips and more online in the Online Course Development Support Site.

 

Web Design Quality

As you continue building your course, keep in mind a few principles to make your course easy to navigate for students.

Organization

  • Does your course have an organization pattern that is easy to follow?
  • Is your course organized by weeks or modules?
  • Do you have an introduction to the course?
  • Are assignments and activities labelled consistently within the syllabus, the schedule, and the layout online?
  • Structure and routine in your course can make learning easier for your students.

Universal Design Principles

  • Is content presented more than one way? Reading? Watching? Hearing?
  • Is the text large enough or can it be enlarged? Can students increase or decrease the sound on media?
  • Have you provided scaffolding to assist students in learning the content material? Do they need any background knowledge? Could additional resources assist them? Are the important points and big ideas highlighted? Read more

Visual Appeal

  • Is your course more than just lots of text? Does it have visual appeal as well?
  • Are photos used appropriately throughout content?
  • Do you have video clips, either from online or of your own lectures?
  • Are image and media sources properly cited?
  • Do students get to “see” you in the course? A friendly instructor photo provides a sense of instructor presence.

Talk to your Instructional Facilitator for more ideas or assistance with applying these ideas to your course.  Find these tips and more online in the Online Course Development Support Site.

Collaboration and Collaborative Tools

Blogging the 2014 AECT International Convention.

Cognitive Tools to Support Collaboration: Technology and Pedagogy at Work

Presenters: Rose Marra and Christopher M. Larsen, University of Missouri

The goal was to help engineering students learn collaboration and communication skills as these are needed for the workplace.

There is a perception that engineers like to work alone. Faculty struggle to create learning tasks and activities that require collaboration; and may not have the knowledge base needed to teach these skills.

They developed a tool to support engineering student collaboration in the context of doing engineering design. Used a tool called Google Drive Environment for Collaboration.

The study was really focused on whether students were able to learn collaboration skills through the use of these online tools.

The course studied had 40 students and was an Industrial Engineering Ergonomics and Workstation Design course. They worked on project where they had to consider a human factors problem and designed a solution for it. They did all of their work, and turned in final work in the GDEC environment. The environment was technology paired with pedagogy to facilitate learning.

The technology part (2012) was Google Drive. They wanted something easy to use and free for the students to use. Mind tools are like spreadsheets and databases we have talked about for years; now we are moving mind tools onto the cloud. Simultaneous editing, folder structures, and trace data were important affordances.

Instructor had global access to all folders. Folders were created for each team. Students could see their folder only.

They had tried pbwiki before and found it too hard – it wasn’t easy to produce reports and documents.

This was a face to face course, not online.

Students don’t use the affordances of the technology unless they are coached (Hsu et al 2014), used scaffolds and scripted prompts to support each part of the project.

Scaffolding is assistance from an expert that enables learners to accomplish things on their own (couldn’t see the 1976 reference). Need to eventually fade the scaffold.

When they started, partially completed google docs were already in their folders to scaffold their work.

Issues that needed to be addressed from previous sections of the course: projects read as they were bolted together; divide and conquer mentality, collaborative writing challenges, students’ in ability to provide constructive feedback to one another. They conducted in class workshops where students were walked through a constructive peer feedback experience so they could learn how to negotiate and collaborate (not just cooperate).

Interesting that many students hadn’t seen GoogleDrive before and they found it very useful. Comment: I’m not sure that time passing will make it more likely that students are just organically start using tools such as GoogleDrive to collaborate? I think it’s really unlikely – they tend to gravitate to their social media, but not voluntarily using tools that support work-like collaborative environments without a real need for it. 

Faculty or Instructional Designer? Creating a Culture of Collaborative Course Design and Development

Presenters: Lisa Johnson and Gina Connor, Ashford University

Presentation slidedeck is online here

This presentation is on the pilot of a course design and development process within the College of Education. They built a handbook for course design to support the process. We have a new handbook as well, and hope to put it online as soon as editing is done. It will be online here.

Lisa worked before in a culture of open source and sharing.

Some challenges were:

  • The culture emphasized cooperation over collaboration. The roles and jobs weren’t synchronized and people weren’t necessarily talking to each other and sharing resources.
  • Another challenge was a very small ID team – 4 IDs for 200 courses that were new or revised. Communication processes were important – delineating workshops with distinct goals, unique cultures for accountability and sharing. Faculty needed tools to put in place to support the process. They may tend to do what they’ve seen before instead of thinking through developing outcomes and assessments. It’s important to remember everyone was working really hard and working well. The goal here was to maximize what was already working. A proactive approach was essential.
  • A mix of processes and expectations, including accreditation, Quality Matters (98% of their courses are QM certified), mixed workstyles (asynchronous and semi synchronous) caused challenges as well.
  • Audience challenges: purpose, goals, keeping everyone heading the same direction
  • Audience challenges: role confusion, who is doing what between the faculty member and the ID
  • Audience challenges in requiring faculty to go through Quality Matters for their online courses
  • Other comments / tips
    • It’s important to help the faculty realize that ID support is a resource, not as oversight; the positive framing is really important

How the challenges were tackled/overcome

  • Course design cafe – they have the handbooks, templates, and resources to support the process. It’s a social platform for sharing content, having groups, tracking projects, etc. Resources, articles, discussions, etc. are also included to support the course design process. The Instructional Design team is active in the online cafe as well.
  • “Dangerous Designers” Community of Practice. It’s grown to be university wide – there are about 75 faculty who participate every month. They bring in different stakeholders to share with faculty how they can support the course design process. It’s a growing group that supports faculty talking to each other about designing their courses and curriculum.
  • Roles included in the team for course development
    • Faculty developer / designer
    • Program Manager
    • Quality Assurance
    • Assessment Analyst
    • Instructional Designer
    • Career Services, Library & Writing Center Liaisons
    • Curriculum Coordinators/Specialists
    • Curriculum Design Specialist Faculty
    • Instructional Design Specialist Faculty
      • One point is pulling in faculty to work as instructional design support to supplement a small team of trained IDs. They are like a lead faculty support for instructional design.
      • Lisa is a professor, but doing ID work and has the skill set of an ID.
      • Faculty egos are less bruised when they receive feedback because Lisa is a peer – she is also a professor.

The main point is creating structures for supporting communication and collaboration – finding ways to connect people with each other for sharing.

The Role of the Instructional Designer

Blogging the 2014 AECT International Convention.

Understanding the Collaborative Relationship between Instructional Designers and Clients: A Typology of Instructional Designer Activities

Presenters: Bill Sugar, East Carolina University; Rob Moore, UNC-Chapel Hill

Slides online here

Based on instructional designer log entries, interviews, project information. They were trying to see what happens in the “day in the life” of an instructional designer. The study was done on one instructional designer’s daily life over a whole year, and 111 unique activities were categorized. Most of the clients thought they saw the instructional designer monthly or once every two or three months.

Types of Activities

  • Design: elearning, graphics, instructional design planning, PowerPoint, social media, webinars
  • Production: audio, images, video
  • Support: courses, elearning, just-in-time support, LMS support, social media, webinars
    • Webinars included supporting the back channel and making sure things go well. They do a lot of webinars.
    • Just-in-time support includes walking the hallways for a break to just see if anyone needs anything
    • On faculty support: Anything you only use every six months is going to be hard and you will need support for. good attitude towards faculty asking for training over & over.
    • It really helps to know the faculty, to know what’s happening with their families, travel, etc. and to negotiate on deadlines.
  • Non-Instructional design activiities: administrative tasks, meetings

ID Roles

Interesting Notes and Reflections

  • About 19 hours per course
  • In our shop, we split these different functions across different positions and roles on our team
  • The next step after this study is to generate a survey or instrument for instructional designers
  • Lit review prepping for this study is published as a book: Studies of ID Practices

Instructional Designers and Faculty Developers: Pedagogies, Perceptions and Practices in Mobile Learning: A Qualitative Study

Presenter: Kim Hosler, University of Denver

This study looked at how nine instructional designers were supporting faculty with mobile learning efforts.

Mobile learning definition: learning happening across locations, times, topics, and technologies using small hand-held, and possibly in the future, wearable devices. People can interact with their surroundings using digital tools. See Mobile Learning.

The instructional designers had to have education in either instructional design, educational technology or curriculum and instruction (yay here’s evidence that using C&I folks as my instructional designers is appropriate)

One thing she found as a surprise of the research is that really not much was happening on the campuses with mobile learning – and faculty weren’t as involved as expected.

What frameworks were they using to support faculty with mobile learning? Some said ADDIE, some said Bloom’s and Dee Fink’s Significant Learning Experiences.

In this study, each instructional design created a visual representation of how they would approach mobile learning on their campus. Interesting on their focus. Most of these instructional designers were working in centers for teaching on university campuses.

  • One started with mobile learning jumping off from the LMS.
  • Another one took a high level administrative and planning perspective.
  • Another started with a faculty centric view and worked out thrugh faculty issues such as workload, support, resources, etc.
  • Another one said we don’t have time for mobile learning because we are working on pedagogy, andragogy. If faculty can’t write learning objectives well, how can we focus on mobile learning?
  • Another found the infrastructure support as the foundation of implementation of mobile learning and thought about institutional needs.

One thing to consider was how teaching and learning centers are organized. They have different names, different foci, etc.

I’m inspired by the focus in this research on how instructional designers are using models and frameworks to guide their work. There are additional models and frameworks that are built around educational technology that we could be using more effectively to guide our work.

Advances in Instructional Design

Blogging the 2014 AECT International Convention.

Influence of Autonomy, Scaffolding and Audience on Engagement and Performance in Student-Centered Science Learning

Presenter: Eunbae Lee, University of Georgia

This research is design-based and mixed methods.

Student centered science learning is helping students to think and act like scientists. See Next Generation Science Standards.

Connections to writing also – narrative writing in science classes. Stories are a great way to communicate science to a lay audience. Students had to create research narratives – interview a scientist, learn about the research, and write a narrative, to understand the process of science.

Design-based research – work with a practitioner (i.e. teacher in the classroom), integrate known and hypothetical design guildlines as a solution to problems, and the validate, refine and use the design strategies in broader contexts. It’s socially responsible research because you are working with real problems. (More interviews on design-based research here.)

It was essential to start with a problem – and so she did a needs assessment to understand what was already happening in the class. The issue was that there were varying levels of engaging, and students were deviating from the instructor’s goals.

The theoretical framework included: self-determination theory, constructivism, constructionism. Conceptually, students were owning the learning (facilitating endorsement of goals, personal goal setting, choice and flexibility), learning it (explicit directions, support selection question prompts, integrate discipline terminology), and then sharing their learning with others (students had the option to publish, encourage thoughtful peer review).

Data sources included presurvey, postsurvey, scores on their writing, as well as student interview transcripts, observations, and document analysis.

The results suggest that the more engaged you are, the higher the learning. The study also looked at the changes in student motivation throughout the course. The results also suggest that writing for real-world audiences would allow for increased motivation, engagement, and performance.

The Future of Instructional Design Programs

Blogging the 2014 AECT International Convention.

Facilitator: Anne Mendenhall, University of Nevada Las Vegas
Presenters: M.David Merrill, Retired Utah State University; Vanessa Dennen, Florida State University; Joel Gardner, Franklin University; Charles Morgan Reigeluth, Indiana University; Wilhelmina Savenye, Arizona State University

Opening Comments

David Merrill:  Instructional design needs to move to undergraduate. If you have a Masters, you’ll be a manager and you’ll manage people who aren’t trained in instrucitonal design – you need to create templates and tools to support the people under you.

Vanessa Dennen: Everything new is old; and everything old can be new again; a new label is added to something – we panic; but actually we have foundational knowledge that still applies to the new tools. We have a challenge with accreditors looking for those classes on social media on your transcript, and of course they aren’t there; need to show how we apply foundational knowledge. I resonate with this; where my social media and videoconferencing expertise is not represented on my academic transcript, but instead via my digital footprint.

 

Charles Reigeluth:  Transfer from teacher-center to learner-centered systems. The implications for instructional theory; implications for what graduates will do when they finish.

Joel Gardner:  What are instructional designers actually going to be doing when they are working; what is the context in which they will be working; working with people, managing projects, using interdisciplinary knowledge; direct people to do instructional design; being a leader or manager – those with Masters or PhDs will be leaders or managers and may need skills in that area.

Wilhelmina Savenye: Where are these degrees within our colleges; are we ed tech? we aren’t just that? how do our institutions see what we do?; tension on proving our value; graduates are going into corporate, non-profit, government; there’s a lot of opportunity to prove our worth.

Online Boom = Boom for Instructional Design?

Audience question: Will the online boom transfer into a continued boom for instructional design and instructional technology? (Noticing – it seems some in the audience are using instructional technology and instructional design interchangeably)

Merrill: Putting things online is getting easier and easier and the quality of the instruction is getting worse and worse; MOOCs the ultimate level of “shovelware” – put stuff online; study of 175 MOOCs to see if any of them have the First Five Principles of Instruction; a lot of stuff out there without quality; our contribution is not just HTML but that we have something to add in terms of instruction. We definitely need to continue to sell ourselves. Instructional design is an underappreciated academic discipline, and so is education in general. The way to sell, is to work with a few, the ones who are willing, and use those as examples to show what instructional design can bring to the quality of online courses.

Gardner: In higher ed, a greater push to show accreditation that we have outcomes connected to what we are doing, instructional designers are especially able to do this.

Reigeluth: We need more tools created that help SMEs create high quality instruction – when we have those tools, we won’t need as many instructional designers; the tools can support the design in the future

Dennen: The issue of how many instructional design programs that we need; at the moment we probably need more instructional designers than we have; to put more students through our programs – what will they do? maybe we will have more faculty development jobs – doing workshops for faculty, for example; how do we evangelize for ourselves

Instructional Design or Learning Design?

Question: What about names – change from Instructional Design to Learning, Design, and Technology; or Learning Design and Technology; the word instruction or instructional is seen as pejorative. Should we be changing names?

Dennen: If names are changed, does anything else change?

Reiguluth: Learning is what happens inside your head; instruction happens outside your head. Instruction facilitates learning.

Thinking. How does this conversation connect with the strands of behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism in AECT thinking? Pegi Flynt’s dissertation.

Advice for Young Instructional Designers

Question: What ideas or rules do you have for young instructional designers?

Dennen: Know your learners, your context, your objectives. Don’t let the technology drive the instructional design process. Instead of following a shiny object; start with what I know about supporting the learning process. Media selection is an important part of instructional design models and it always has been. What is happening now is that tools come out so quickly and are so accessible to everyone so quickly.

Merrill: First Principles of Instruction – those principles are critical for whatever delivery mode you have – online, MOOC, face to face, blended, with ipads, etc. etc. Story: How to select the media. Put on a blindfold and go to your media closet and pick something. It’s not the media that matters. It’s the principles of instruction that matter.

Brain-based Learning

Question: Connections with brain-based learning?

Reigeluth: It’s important to understand learning theory and instructional theory. Brain-based learning theory isn’t as practical of what specifically to do in the instruction. Learning and instructional theory can help bridge to when to use different methods of instruction.

Leadership and Management in Instructional Design Programs

Question: Let’s connect back to leadership and management. My instructional design taught me about courses and modules; but I didn’t learn about selecting an LMS for my institution, for making decisions on personnel and resources, how to meet the requirements for programmatic and institutional accreditation. The accrediting bodies are now focusing on measurable student outcomes for the programs. The accreditors are parroting what we’ve said on instructional design, but they don’t know it as well as we do. Studies of ID programs found only 11% had leadership or management training. Are our programs able to provide this, or are we stuck too much at the course and learning outcomes level? Are we capable within our structure with meeting the higher leadership needs? or do we have to teach others what we know?

Gardner: Our program is Instructional Design and Performance Systems – this helps students to see the big picture and the bigger system. We teach them how to see the process; but not how to lead people. What are the skills for leading in a knowledge society? Critical thinking skills, leading others, etc.

Reigeluth: Our graduates go into so many different lines of work: museums, corporate, many different types of jobs. This makes it a challenge to provide what they need to be successful in their work.

Audience Comment/Question: This is an instructional design problem we are looking at. We could use an instructional design approach to offer the right level of training – and to realize that a successful graduate will not be able to rely on just what they learned. It seems we should work on minors, even ID as a minor. Another possibility would be to consider how to work across the university to have various specialties – instead of competing with one other. It’s the beauty of our field that it is applicable to so many areas. Instructional design could be a stealth component of any kind of design out there. We need to train our people with an eye towards
what market they want to go into – and what do they need to work in that area?

Dennen: There is also a right moment for training; and some of our young students aren’t ready for leadership because they haven’t yet had very many years of experience. As junior instructional designers they may not be ready to take advantage of leadership training. It may be the job of employers or organizations to provide leadership training.

Merrill: Moving ID to undergraduate level will allow for more credits and more opportunity. If we did that, then we could add some of these other skills to the masters level. A class example of having students work in groups to create a proposal for a real client addressing a real instruction problem. Then he’d mix up the groups and choose the team leaders by, for example, having a woman or international student be the team leader with a couple of
chauvanistic men. Lots of leadership learning happened as they tried to sell their proposal to the client while working within a group. In this class they learned to meet deadlines and work with others.

Gardner: So far our comments are around we use instruction to help people learn. Embedded in this discussion is the idea that we need to help people learn. We need to help our students learn how to be independent learners. I’ve learned by continuing to read after my PhD. We have to help people become independent problem solvers.

AGILE vs. ADDIE

Question: I vote against teaching instructional design at the undergraduate level because they aren’t interested in learning. At the undergraduate level, you have to have classes at 40-50 students. How can you teach higher order thinking skills with such large class sizes? You need to have a certain amount of life experience in order to learn how to be an instructional designer. … We are starting to run into people in the field who are using SAM or AGILE and moving away from ADDIE. How do we address that?

Gardner: At our institution, the dean said we are going to be agile now and we’re going to do SAM instead; but our IDs don’t like it. It does seem the same as ADDIE, but there are more iterations.

Merrill: He’ll be debating SAM in an upcoming TechTrends. After 50 years in the field, it is fun to see the same ideas keep coming around and around. It’s possible to teach undergraduates and international students First Principles of Instruction at the undergrad level. There are ways to use technology to deal with 40-50 students.

Merrill: Don’t just design a bit; design a shell so that you give designers assignments to fill in the shell. Create an interaction template in PowerPoint; and then you can plug in other content. Teach masters students how to design a shell. You don’t need expensive authoring tools.

Rabbit Trails I Followed

Getting Professionally Published

Blogging the 2014 AECT International Convention.

Presenter: Donovan Walling

His latest book: Designing Learning for Tablet Classrooms

Understanding the publishing process is the key to getting published WHEN and WHERE you want to be published.

The Idea

  • Publishing is a futures game – you want to know what is going to be of interest and salable 1-2 years down the road. It’s going to take 1-2 years to get published.
  • Think about new topics; current topics; and enduring

Information Gathering

  • Expertise – what experience do you bring to the project? What education do you bring to the project? What credibility do you bring to the project? What do you bring to the table as an author? What can you write about from your personal knowledge base?
  • Interests – how does your vocation contribute to the project? What are you really interested in?
  • Market research – what is the marketplace for your project? Know the journals in your field. Those journals are your specific journals. What specific market best suits your project? Does your project match the market? Most journals have a set focus. Find where you fit in. Don’t try to plow new ground. Read the journals. Read a book or two from the publisher you’re aiming for. What type of writing style and scope does this publisher look for? This may change over time, so look at recent editions. What will the market accept? Tailor your efforts to what looks like that market.

Four Trends in Publishing

  • Accessibility. How to get information out quickly. Abstracts. Keywords. Epublishing. Anthologies.
  • Personalization. Writing used to be more impersonal; but now we want a face and anecdotes.
  • Distillation. Be succinct, focused, concise.
  • Find the niche that fits your project.

Emerging trends

  • Book as presenter/instructor support. If you aren’t prepared to hawk your own book, they don’t want you to publish.
  • Buying E-Content: buying a chapter, an article, a piece, a section. If people can buy a piece of the work, that changes how the work is structured. i.e. chapters may need an abstract and keywords.

Queries

If you do your research, you should know whether you will be published or not. Find out what the editor really wants.

  • Article for a general issue of a journal – no, don’t query
  • Article for a themed journal issue – maybe
  • Article for an anthology or encyclopedia – yes
  • Book idea – yes – that’s the only way to get in for a book
    • Book proposal: introduction, follow their template, synopsis of the proposed book, annotated outline, sample chapter – usually not chapter 1

Submission Basics

  • Follow publisher guidelines, read them carefully and double check
  • Most academic journals do not have professional staff; someone is doing it on the side to their regular work.
  • You can always withdraw a piece of the journal accepts it but doesn’t get around to actually publishing it.
  • Be a partner with the editor – suggest reviewers; respond thoughtfully to critiques, revise as they ask, proofread carefully.

Post Publication

  • Afterwards, there may be reviewers for a Book Review, etc.
  • Where possible, link speaking and consulting to the publication; conference sessions, etc.
  • Extend through electronic networking, twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
  • Respond to your readers; engage in conversations around the work

Additional digital options: Electronic only; open source; self-publishing; website; blogging; be careful of vanity press concept

Think carefully why you want to be published…

His resources and PowerPoint are online at his site under Resources.

Bits, Pieces, and Tidbits from AECT

Blogging the 2014 AECT International Convention.

A few ideas and notes from three sessions:

  • Relationship between Learning Management System Self-Efficacy, Situational Interest, Self-Regulation, and Learning Engagement of Online Learners presented by SANGHOON PARK, University of South Florida; and Jung Lim, University of South Florida
  • Dissertations in an Online Doctoral Program: Mentoring, Challenges, and Strategies by Swapna Kumar, University of Florida; Catherine Coe, University of Florida
  • An Analysis of Professional Practice Dissertations in an Online Educational Technology Program Kara
    Dawson, University of Florida; Swapna Kumar, University of Florida
  • Breakfast with the Champions: Charles Hodges and Thomas Reeves

LMS and Learner Engagement

Instruments to investigate further

  • LMSSE (learning management system self-efficacy) – it’s a measure of how well the students can use the LMS
  • Situated interest
  • Self-regulation measured by (MLSQ)
  • Types of engagement – behavioral engagement, emotional engagement, cognitive engagement
  • Engagement scale

Results and Ideas

  • LMS self-efficacy was not a significant predictor of all types of engagement (consistent with Sun & Rueda 2012)
  • Course design factors related to situational interest and self-regulation strategies have to be considered.
  • Experimental Sampling Method – Hektner 2007 – a method to use to analyze user experience along with the data logs that come from the LMS; can use it to create a learning experience dashboard

Dissertations in Online Programs

  • Top reason students finish their dissertation – the relationship with their mentor, dissertation chair, dissertation supervisor, depending on how it’s called at your university.
  • Literature in online mentoring is business and healthcare related; more research needs to be done
  • Students really wanted synchronous with their mentor; but they wanted feedback in writing, and track changes in Word
  • We won’t meet the needs for more and better higher education until professors become designers of learning experiences and not teachers. Larry Spence, 2001, in The Case Against Teaching
  • “Online teaching and learning is a wild ride.” Angelica Pazurek, University of Minnesota Learning Technologies
  • Brookfield’s adult learning theory – 2006 
  • FlipGrid – a different kind of discussion tool

Breakfast with the Champions

  • Research idea from the table for students working on theses and dissertations. Have a research fair where the students share their research every year… whether it’s their early idea idea or anywhere along the way to dissertation proposal to defending. Gives them practice in telling others about their research.
  • Self efficacy is very context dependent. Not just one instrument. Instrument will probably need to be revised if you select one.
  • You’ve heard of a cMOOC and an xMOOC, how about a pMOOC? Problem Based MOOC – making something for real clients. Thomas Reeves worked with colleagues in Australia to create a MOOC where participants were building OERs. Read about it in MOOCs: Let’s get REAL.

Say What? Designing, Facilitating, and Assessing for Intersubjectivity within Online Discussions

Blogging the 2014 AECT International Convention.

Yesterday Barb Hall and I facilitated a workshop on intersubjectivity. Our workshop materials are on our intersubjectivity wiki so you can explore further.

As always, when I work with Barb, I learn something new or find new concepts to ponder. I appreciate the partnership that allows for continued learning!

Notes, Ideas & Resources

Here are some notes, interesting ideas, and resources that came out of the workshop:

  • Conversation: Is constructionism a philosophy or a learning theory?
  • Remember: interaction is the process, and intersubjectivity is the product created when citing sources and peers in peer responses to synthesize new knowledge
  • We created synchronous intersubjectivity in the introductions – the participants talked to each other, and then came up with a table name and introduced the table (as opposed to just individual introductions)
  • Sentence starters can assist students in creating responses at higher levels – i.e. “I see it another way”. Accountable talk is a source for additional sentence starts.
  • Participant Representation of Intersubjectivity

    One of the differences to reach intersubjectivity is actually thinking about what the other person said and referring to what they said in your response

  • The difficulty of making connections or thinking of a way to bridge ideas. A safe place is needed online to practice these types of responses, a place that allows for experimenting with the ideas.
  • Taxonomies other than Bloom’s: Webb’s Depth of Knowledge, Hess Cognitive Rigor Matrix of Webb & Bloom; Marzano’s New Taxonomy
  • When teaching adult learners, it is important to include their experience in the discussion prompt
  • For discussion prompts in the STEM fields, have students share how they solved the problem. There is a right answer, but there are different ways of getting there. They can learn from each other’s methods of problem solving.
  • It seems also that creating more structure and direction for peer responses would help. Some of the structures from this Critical Thinking site could be helpful for requirements for peer responses.
  • Tip for facilitators: use the IAM phase and try to work at phase 3 – modeling for the students making connections between the different peer responses.
  • I’m still mulling over the tendency to write discussion requirements about logistics (1 initial post, 2 replies, post by Wed, etc.) vs. the possibilities around writing discussion requirements that are content/intersubjectivity based.
  • F2F teaching techniques such as group roles, fishbowl discussions, 360 evals are all useful online as well.

IAM Phase Sentence Starters

1. Sharing and Comparing

  • I agree because…
  • Something like that happened to me when…
  • I saw the same thing happen…
  • What do you mean by…
  • So, you think the problem is…
  • How would you describe…

2. Dissonance

  • While you think, I actually think…
  • I am not sure I agree…
  • Is it that you think X, or is it that you think Y?
  • Consider that the textbook says…
  • I don’t think we really disagree, it’s just that…

3. Negotiation and Co-Construction

  • If we use your example, then…
  • So taken together, we’re saying…
  • While that may be true, consider…
  • While I still disagree with X, I do think you’re / we agree about Y…
  • So, you’re really thinking that X means Y, when I think that X means Z…

4. Testing Tentative Constructions

  • That hasn’t been my experience, though…
  • That disagrees with Author’s findings that…
  • This doesn’t make sense when you consider…
  • This makes sense when consider Author stated that…
  • I don’t know if that would apply for the X community…

5. Statement & Application of Newly Constructed Knowledge

  • Let’s apply this new idea to X…
  • I could use this new idea when I…
  • In thinking this through, I learned that…
  • So if what we’re saying is accurate, then…
  • As a result of this discussion, I now think…

Getting to Know AECT Thought Leaders

Blogging the 2014 AECT International Convention.

I’m new to AECT, and some colleagues recommended that I attend the Breakfast with Champions on Thursday morning. I’m also new to higher ed educational technology. AECT seems to consider itself THE organization for educational technology and instructional design for higher education. My take is that it is much more research-based and less cool-tool-based than ISTE; more like AERA in it’s research and theory focus.

Because my training is in K12 ed tech, online learning, and leadership, I’m not yet familiar with the big names at this convention. So, I’m doing my own little investigation here to get a feel for the conversations that happen via AECT events.

So I’m listing here the names for the Champions Breakfast, and then linking to info about them, and what their main field/area of research seems to be at a quick glance. I welcome comments and corrections!

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