Best Practices

One thing I have learned from the NGLC blended learning and from working with various edu-tech tools and developers, is that the market is very much in flux. Inspired in part by the success of blended learning and the buzz around MOOCs, many companies are working on many different innovative tools and courseware packages, often in response to real needs identified by teachers and students. This is great news, but for the immediate future it means that most of us at some point will need to teach and learn with a tool that is still "in beta" and lacks the robust customer support or functionality of older, more established software.

I've written before about how difficult, yet ultimately rewarding, it can be to get used to working in a "live beta" mode, in which you publish or publicly try something you know to be half-baked, in order to get feedback on how it works in a real-world setting. A recent EdSurge article also offers some concrete logistical tips for instructors who find themselves in this position, due to the newness of the software tools they are trying to use -- such as workarounds for tools that lack "single sign-on" functionality.

A recent report from the Babson Survey Research Group and education company Pearson, reviewed by Faculty focus, found that college faculty member's use of social media has continued to increase in the last year. Their results, which are based on an annual survey of 8,000 teaching faculty, looks at both personal and professional use of social media, and found increases in both areas.

On a personal level, faculty's use of social media is on par with the usage level of the general population, reporting in at slightly about 70 percent. Use of social media in professional context has increased almost 11% from last year, up from 44.7 to 55 percent. These gains also reflect an increasingly diverse use of sites and platforms, fulfilling various personal and professional needs.

Our study suggested that blended learning was successful in part because faculty used the online materials to provide students with more opportunities for formative assessment. In the best cases, these included exercises designed to help students develop metacognitive skills, or the skills needed to judge their own learning and the effectiveness of their learning strategies, and identify things they can do to improve. In a recent edition of the faculty development mailing list Tomorrow's Professor, Rick Reis introduces us to Marsha Lovett's concept of "exam wrappers," or short metacognitive exercises for students to complete shortly before and after an exam to get them thinking critically and integratively about their preparation, their performance, and the instructor's feedback. In the article, these are described primarily as in-class and/or on-paper exercises, but they could just as easily be adapted as online exercises for a blended course.

A recent article in Faculty Focus by Dr. Ronald Jones from Ashford University approached the difficulty of keeping students engaged in an online classroom to the same level of a traditional classroom. Dr. Jones research showed a statistically significant correlation between the time a student spent logged in to an online course and his grade. While he admits that correlation doesn't imply causation, the research seems to suggest that maximizing student engagement can significantly improve student outcomes. In a blended classroom, the instructor has control over how much time students spend in the classroom, so the variable becomes introducing that same level of engagement into the blended aspects of the course. While Dr. Jones focuses his five tips on the online course, they can be easily adapted to work for a blended course. The tips reproduced below are Dr. Jones' original tips, with modified descriptions to fit with blended learning classrooms.

While the Blended Learning group is focused on the liberal arts classroom (including flipped and blended classrooms), many of the technologies we profile have uses outside of academia as well. Joshua Kim at Inside Higher Ed addressed some of these uses in "The Growth of the Hybrid Meeting." The article describes how tools designed to facilitated online meetings can be used not just for creating virtual classrooms, but also for hosting and improving the quality of distance meetings. The article doesn't focus on reviewing the technological options, but some of the tools we've reviewed elsewhere like Jing or Twiddla could be used to perfect the hybrid meeting.

While some of Kim's tips are relevant to academic settings, his suggestions are focused primarily on business settings and creating a productive atmosphere for meetings among colleagues. Some of his suggestions which could be equally applicable to the classroom and the business world include:

Facing declining retention rates and dropping grades, many universities are looking for new ways to increase student engagement and, as a result, educational outcomes. Ball State University's Institute for Digital Education and Entertainment, in an attempt to develop tools that would engage students and teachers in a way that took advantage of web-based technology, turned to multimodal learning strategies.

Ball State came up with a resource called Vizi, an online-based platform that uses multiple forms of media, integrated into targeted courseware that is flexible and engaging. While Vizi is an interesting platform in and of itself, Ball State's research and analysis of Vizi's results are what's really interesting: the designers behind Vizi wanted to use multiple channels to simultaneously engage many parts of the learner's brain. Part of their design was to create sections and sub-sections whose objectives students had to meet to move on, and to assess their understanding. They also attempted to integrate both linear and nonlinear paths.

The question on the mind of the educator, blended learning enthusiast or otherwise, when faced with online courses is always the same: as EdSurge asks, "Do online courses work?" Supporters and detractors alike have been attempting to answer this question for years, citing mixed anecdotal result and conflicting research. Now, SRI International is attempting to provide closure to at least one part of the question by extensively reviewing online Alegrba 1 courses in a report called "Supporting K-12 Students in Online Learning: A Review of Online Algebra 1 Courses." The report, which is the first phase of a larger study, examines six online course providers and profile their strengths and weaknesses. Algebra 1 is slightly outside the purview of most college-level educators, but the report doesn't stop with reviewing these courses. The study is focused on three research questions:

In their collection of teaching strategies for higher education, Faculty Focus includes an article suggesting strategies to increase the efficiency of grading. Specifically, they address how to improve the efficiency of computerized (as opposed to analog, pen-and-paper) grading using what the article calls a “comment archive.” The article discusses strategies for taking advantage of the options built into your basic word processor to increase the speed and ease of your grading without sacrificing the quality of your comments. The most user friendly and simple option involves building your frequently used comments into the AutoCorrect feature of, for example, Microsoft Word. Then, instead of typing and retyping a comment each time you use it, simply use the shortcut you designated. The article includes step-by-step instructions and a video tutorial.

Our previous Comparing OER Repositories post explored how to find basic economic video lectures. There was a clear best option: Khan Academy, whose focus on video lectures made it the easy winner. With this post, we are going to run a similar series of tests, looking for thorough and extensive libraries, finding resources at college level (not just K-12), making sure that resources are reviewed. To get a sense of what’s available and where to find it, we will write a series of posts combing through four different OER repositories – OER Commons, Khan Academy, Connexions, and FREE – looking for three very different sets of material and evaluate the results as well as ease of use.

1)      Interactive materials for chemistry students reviewing volume-related concepts
2)      Video lectures on introductory economic concepts
3)      English grammar and style exercises that faculty can use to evaluate and target students’ specific writing issues

Many of our recent posts have focused on how to find and curate resources available in OER repositories that have been created by other users and institutions. However, sometimes you already have the material you need -- either you’ve created born-digital or digital-ready content, or you have traditional content you want to turn into a blended resource. In either case, your content needs a host, particularly if you want that material to be shared with other potential users. This post will compare the options to create and host content from various repositories and suggest which sites are best suited to various types of material. While there are any number of ways to create and share your educational content online, we will tackle them a few at a time. This post will start by comparing three - Connexions, MERLOT, and Molecular Workbench.