Canvas speed grader

09. May 2012 · 1 comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

One feature I’ve really enjoyed in Canvas this semester is the speed grader. It allows the instructor to grade each student’s submitted work in sequence. Blackboard has a similar functionality that allows you to go through each student’s entry for an assignment in the gradebook, but with Canvas, there’s more flexibility for what students may submit and the design requires fewer clicks. In Blackboard, the instructor can view details for an assignment and then scroll to the next student for the same assignment, but it requires additional clicks to view the assignment or edit the grade. In Canvas, the Speed Grader scrolls directly from one student’s assignment to the next, allowing the instructor to enter the grade on the right side of the screen. Additionally, Speed grader allows the instructor to design a rubric that shows up alongside each submission:

Enter points for each category, and the assignment’s graded. Canvas also allows for a good bit of flexibility as to what constitutes a submission. In this instance, the assignment was a blog, so the required submission was a URL. What you see here alongside the rubric is not the current version of the URL rendered in a frame, but a screenshot taken at the time the assignment was submitted. At the top of the window, you can see a link to the student’s website to allow viewing of the full blog. Canvas also allows the instructor to accept file uploads, text entries, and media files:

The one bug I found in Speed Grader involved students who used Tumblr instead of WordPress for their blogs (and the fault appears to be with Tumblr, not Canvas). When you’re logged into Tumblr and reading your own blog, the URL takes the form of http://www.tumblr.com/blog/[username]. That URL only works for your own blog–the external link to read someone else’s blog takes the form http://[username].tumblr.com. So if the student just copies his or her URL from the address bar (like I told them to in my instructions for submitting their assignments), the Canvas gets redirected to a login screen when it tries to take a screenshot, and the instructor doesn’t have a record of what the website looked like at the time the assignment was submitted:

It wasn’t the end of the world for me because it only happened with two students, but it is something to be aware of. It also wouldn’t be hard to work around, either by giving more specific instructions for Tumblr users or by instructing students not to use Tumblr (which I’ll be doing in future semesters because of the added hassle of having to add Disqus to allow comments—something only one out of three students did, even when specifically instructed to).

POTCERT11 Summary post: second semester

08. May 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Week 13: Creating Class Elements Part 1: Images and screenshots

Week 14: Creating Class Elements Part 2: Audio and video

Week 15: Creating Class Elements Part 3: Screencasting and multimedia

Week 16: Our Students Online

Week 17: Classroom Management

Week 18: The Course Management System

Week 19: Web-Enhanced, Hybrid and Open Classes

Week 20: Introduction to Educational Technology and Instructional Design

Week 21: Introduction to Online Education Theory

Week 22: Personal Learning Networks

Week 23: Presentations

First, the quantitative analysis using the rubric:

  • Quantity of posts: here I’m very likely to achieve high learning objectives, because I did post regularly and frequently (though I fell off a little at the end).
  • Quality of posts: I had some good posts, but a few were perhaps not as thoughtful, so I think I’m probably somewhere between moderately likely and highly likely to achieve high learning objectives.
  • Length of posts: I had at least one post of several paragraphs for each module, so I think I’m very likely to achieve high learning objectives. I didn’t do many video or audio posts, but I generally prefer writing and reading to recording and watching or listening.
  • Completing and absorbing readings: once again I’m probably somewhere between moderately likely and highly likely to achieve high learning objectives, as I did all the readings, but I did fall behind a little and have to catch up.
  • Studying videos and other content in the prompts: I watched all the videos and read all the articles, so I am highly likely to achieve objectives.
  • Time spent per week: I easily spent 5 hours or more per week, so I’m highly likely to achieve high learning objectives.
  • Commenting on colleagues’ blogs: Here, I think I’m moderately likely to achieve high learning objectives. I read and commented on others’ blogs, but I should have commented more. Once again I fell off a little at the end, and didn’t respond to comments on my own blog as quickly as I should have.
  • Extending participation in the online teaching community: here, I did better first semester than second. Throughout the year, I participated in most of the synchronous events and even led one. I don’t do Facebook because I don’t like their cavalier and ever-changing privacy policies, so I didn’t participate there at all. I’ve continued to be active on Twitter, but the big change has been Google+. I was pretty active on Google+ the first semester, and not at all after February (more below).

From a more quantitative perspective, dropping out of Google had a big effect on my participation in the class. I was very active in Google+ the first semester, and enjoyed the hangout feature immensely. At the beginning of the year, Google announced changes to their privacy policy in ways I didn’t like, so I killed my Google account. I don’t think it had a noticeable effect on Google, but I’ve felt much less connected to the class since then. The hangouts are a really effective way of holding synchronous meetings (except when I’m in the lab and can’t talk). I don’t check my newsreader nearly as much as when I used Google reader, so I’ve fallen off on my RSS feeds as well. I’m really conflicted–I don’t like Google’s new policy, but I like the social tools they made available to me. The semester’s over, and I’ll be out of the office for the summer soon, with summer to think about how I’ll connect in the fall. I’ll be back, but I’m not sure how.

I’ve really enjoyed participating, and I intend to continue to do so. I’ve made some great connections, and I have some big issues to wrestle with over the summer. I have ideas for next fall’s courses, but they’re still pretty amorphous at this point. My classes will be different in the fall, but I don’t know exactly how yet.

Final presentation

08. May 2012 · 3 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

For my final presentation, I decided to follow a suggestion (was it Walter? I can’t find the comment to give credit where it’s due) to use the least advanced technology that will work. In this case, I’m just going to talk:

I didn’t get exactly what I wanted, but I did get what I needed.

Web-enhanced, hybrid and open classes

07. May 2012 · 3 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,


cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Pig Monkey
I’m certain that it indicates a lack of imagination on my part, but I have a hard time conceptualizing how I would put together an hybrid or blended class. (Then again, I’m still struggling with how to teach my online classes.) I know plenty of instructors teach such classes, and I’m sure many do them well, but then again, lots of people lecture to hundreds of students at a time, and I can’t see myself doing that either.

Online and face to face teaching just seem so different, that I have a hard time seeing how I can put them together successfully. In either case, there’s the real challenge of getting to know one’s students. I have strategies that I use in my online classes, and strategies that I use online, but I don’t know how well they would combine. It seems to me that I would wind up diluting both, and neither would be effective.

Classroom management

07. May 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , ,


cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by The University of Iowa Libraries
For me, classroom management issues in my online classes mostly deal with ensuring a sense of instructor presence. I’ve handled it several different ways in the past. I’ve kept a course blog for several years now, so I make sure that I post an entry about what we’re working on at least once a week, sometimes more often as I find relevant articles and resources.

For awhile, I posted a weekly video. For the first semester, I filmed them around town and offered bonus points to the first student to ID the location of each video. That lasted a semester. First, it was a lot of work coming up with two new locations each week (for two online classes) and then taking the time to visit them added to my workweek. Second, I noticed that many of the students seemed to be guessing the location from the still rather than watching the video.

I continued for a while with weekly videos, but without the location gimmick. In order to make them accessible, I also posted a transcript of the video (which I usually annotated with links). I found that the number of views for my videos dropped pretty rapidly to almost nothing by the end of the semester–since there was a transcript, why watch the video?

What I’ve settled on more recently is just a weekly post with an introductory video and various embedded videos and slidecasts I’ve put together.

This semester, I’ve added another step. In addition to the weekly post, I send out an email each week on Monday or Tuesday. I really liked the emails we got during the first semester of this year’s certification class, so I’ve adopted the practice as my own. At least one of my students agrees–she commented when she turned in her class project that “Most online classes that I have taken, the teachers do not provide any communication throughout the semester. ” Yikes!

Going forward, videos will be fairly intermittent, but I think having both a weekly post and a weekly email does a good job of reminding the students that I’m there, and this isn’t just an online tutorial. The weekly email also adds a nag factor, that I think may be helpful to those borderline students–it’s a lot easier to ignore what goes on in the LMS or in your feed reader than it is to ignore a weekly message in the inbox.

The value of catching up

25. April 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,


cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by tonystl
I’ve still got a few more posts to write to get caught up for the semester, but one of the reasons I wanted to take an online course about teaching online is so that I would have the experience of being an online student. As I’ve watched my students submit a flurry of posts to their blogs over the past week as the assignment deadline approached, I recognized that I was doing the same thing here. I’ve spent a lot of time as a student in a classroom to understand what my face to face students go through, but this is the first time I’ve been in an online class to get a sense of what my online students experience. It’s not much, but it’s a start, and I’m glad I’ve done it.

More on the course management system

23. April 2012 · 3 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

For the LMS module, we were assigned to learn more about an LMS with which we’re familiar. My institution has been using Blackboard exclusively for years now (and for nearly as long we’ve been trying to decide whether to change to a different LMS). This semester I’ve been using a Canvas demo account to teach my online class, so I’ve spent a good deal of time learning an unfamiliar LMS. I find the interface much easier to use than Blackbord’s, but some of the design decsions behind Canvas are a real problem for me. The messaging system works more like SMS than email–no subject headers and no threading. Messages are listed in strictly chronological order. That design is only slightly ameliorated by the addition of a search feature a month or so ago. Canvas can follow an RSS feed in the class, but it must go on the Announcements page, and it credits all posts to the instructor, not to the author of the source feed. The navigation buttons are fixed: you can’t add, remove, or rename them. On the whole, I’d say that Canvas is a no-go for me, even though they are picking up a number of new clients.

The search continues.

Playing catch-up: History of Educational Technology

23. April 2012 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

It was interesting to see Schwier trace the history of educational technology all the way back to the ancient Greeks.

Years ago, my wife wrote a dissertation on the history of educational technology (though she started with the Magic Lantern). What she found was a pattern that repeated itself over and over: new technology is used in education (magic lantern, phonograph, radio, telephone, TV), adopted widely, proclaimed as a revolution that will forever change education, technology fizzles, education remains more or less unchanged. If we look at distance learning and internet technology, will the same pattern unfold? I remember when the English department at UGA started offering online classes back in the late 90s and wondering why they bothered: over 90% of our students were on campus; why have an online class for students who were already here? Since then, I’ve worked for a series of administrators who were at best skeptical of online learning and often downright hostile (one interim president called internet classes a “fad”).

I’m not sure that it will, be even if it does, so what? Some technologies that have fizzled are still in use (what is PowerPoint but a fancy magic lantern? what is Google+ but a modern videoconferencing system that doesn’t require a dedicated facility with a satellite link?), and others have fizzled because newer technologies have replaced them. So we use the internet until something better comes along (or until it gets destroyed by silos and regulation). The we move on to the next thing. Just because this particular technology may not be forever doesn’t mean it isn’t what we should do now.

One might even argue that the scary thing about the internet is that it might just be that revolution that changes things forever. What if the movement replace K12 public schools with for-profit “virtual academies” spreads to higher education? What happens when employers write the curriculum, and full-time faculty are replaced with low-wage temporary and part-time employees? Do we get Universality, Inc.?

Perhaps we need to be involved in teaching online because it’s not going away.

“It is perfectly fine to arrive at class confused, bewildered, or unsure about what the reading means.”

17. April 2012 · 4 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

What is not fine is coming to class without having engaged with the material by making a sincere attempt to think about it.

An alumni magazine arrived in the mail yesterday, and it included an article that surveyed “a wide variety of surprising, interesting, and amusing notes that faculty members have included in their syllabi.” Some of them are a bit technophobic for my tastes (“the temptation of using laptops, smart phones, etc. in class for other purposes than note taking is simply too high, and I ask that you do not bring them to class.”), but many are worthwhile: “I am not a TV; discussions in class are an important part of [class].” We talked about the syllabus way back in September, but this article made me consider how impersonal my syllabus is. My institution has a standard syllabus that everyone is required to use, basically filling in a few blanks and calendar dates, which does much to obscure the instructor and de-personalize the course. Indeed, the standard formatting pushes the instructor’s name to the second page–it’s taken some judicious editing on my part to get my name to the bottom of the first page. Even that’s not much, so it looks like one of the many things I’ll be thinking about over the summer is a syllabus re-write.

“You owned it. You just discovered it with your own eyes.”

13. April 2012 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , ,

Hyundai CEO John Krafcik describes his mentor Yoshimitsu Ogihara and his teaching method in a recent interview. “He taught me so much but never through saying it.” Krafcik worked with Ogihara on the NUMMI joint venture between Toyota and GM at the notorious Fremont Assembly plant, home to the “worst workforce in the US auto industry.” To teach Krafcik about manufacturing methods, Ogihara sent him to observe two manufacturing facilities, one GM and one Toyota, and draw his own conclusions from the differences.

Krafcik’s subsequent leadership style seems to echo Dewey’s progressive education model that learning should be practical and problem-based, but it also requires structure and teaching:

I like to leave a cookie trail to the right answer. I find sometimes you can bring a horse to water but you can’t always get it to drink. But I don’t like to say, ‘Look, this is how we should do it.’ I like to provide some approach that helps the team that’s thinking about the problem get to that answer. And when they get there, I might say something like, ‘That’s terrific. I was hoping you’d end up there. What a great solution.’ It’s hard, though, when the team doesn’t get to where you want it go to. And then you have a difficult decision to make. Do you enforce your will or do you let the team learn from their approach?

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