Nicholas’ 23 things that online teachers need to learn:

1. Have the right attitude/approach to online teaching: Don’t be afraid to “play” with new technology and/or tech tools to discover better ways to teach/guide your online students.

2. Learn by playing: Some of our best learning occurs whilst we are experimenting/playing.

3. Ease students in to your online course: Make sure you build in time for your students to get comfortable with all the tools and tech involved in your online course. Consider “icebreaker” type exercises that do this in a fun way.

4. Don’t get carried away by the “wow” factor of certain tools: it is important to fairly evaluate how the tools enhance or detract from educational objectives.

5. Know what you already have: Make sure you have a thorough understanding of all the great tools at your disposal on your own institution’s Learning Management System before turning to free public tools and services.

6. Be alive to privacy issues: not all tools are created equal in this regard. Make sure you understand what information a tool or service collects about you and your students, how this might be used, and whether you can keep content you create with such services private if you so choose.

7. Consider copyright: There are many concepts you need to be aware of such as fair dealing (Canada), fair use (US), public performance rights, etc.

A great guide to this has been put together by Concordia University and is available here: http://library.concordia.ca/help/copyright/?guid=fdvsfu

8. Get comfortable with collaboration: collaborative editing of blogs, wikis and other documents in real time are a true revolution in terms of the “creation” process for all sorts of content… leveraging these tools and tools such as discussion forums, Twitter etc. can help build the kind of learning communities so many of us have come to believe are the key to a compelling and valuable online educational experience.

9. Use Web 2.0 tech: Before the widespread availability of Web 2.0 technologies and applications, educational institutions provided information, data and course materials to students and the public but very rarely allowed students/the public to comment on it, or discuss it publicly in synchronous or asynchronous forums, as is common today. With Web 2.0 technologies, an educational institution’s marketplace of ideas has also become the public square where these ideas can be debated by students, broadened or narrowed, and challenged as in no other point in history. Encourage this in your online teaching and all participants in your course will be the richer for it.

10. Small group synchronous discussions can be challenging: Simply getting everyone to discuss something synchronously is challenging given varying schedules, technical proficiency and the inevitable technological “glitches” and “breakdowns” that can occur with real time communication. When you do connect synchronously, coordination of efforts can sometimes get bogged down when everyone wants to chime in at once or offer different opinions and don’t want to compromise and “move on” past potential roadblocks. Whatever the challenges, however, there is tremendous value in synchronous discussions getting real-time feedback

11. Embrace the Cloud: Your physical location is no longer important – access to your information and content no matter where you are and on whatever device you have handy is invaluable. A great service in this regard is GoogleDocs:  take a tour at http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour1.html 

12. Use Dropbox: Dropbox allows you to sync your files online and across your computers and mobile devices automatically as well as have a “public” folder that you can post files to and then share links to those public files with anyone – real-time publishing to the Internet has never been easier! http://www.dropbox.com/features

13. Use InstaPaper: A simple tool for you and your online students to save web pages for reading later on your computer, Kindle, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. http://www.instapaper.com/

14. Use students to help with content creation for your course: Students can be a rich source of original content and can take many roles when it comes to content creation: researchers, content developers (authors, artists, animators, etc.), directors, presenters, actors, producers (audio, video, multimedia, etc.), editors and reviewers, to name but a few. The students learn a great deal during the content creation process – reward them for it by giving them marked assignments that tap into their creativity and outside interests. Finally, make sure you get the appropriate releases etc. from all students involved in the creation of this content so that you have the ability to use it in the future from an intellectual property perspective.

15. Get familiar with mobile computing: It has exploded in popularity and should be considered when designing courses, learning materials and methods of collaboration and communication. A good article on this can be found at: http://www.universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=1233

16. Consider using “open content”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_content

17. Learn how to use tools you already for audio/video creation: For example, Powerpoint has a voice-over capability and a new in 2010 video creation feature which gives you more control over file size, quality of the video etc. See: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint-help/turn-your-presentation-into-a-video-HA010336763.aspx?CTT=1

18. Backup your online courses: Learn what that entails – is there a tool that simplifies this for you?

19. Go “virtual”: Consider setting “virtual” office hours and then conduct them synchronously via Skype, Elluminate, GoToMeeting, Adobe Connect or any other such service.

20. Sign up for Twitter: Choose who you follow wisely and you will get the tremendous value of their recommendations and insights respecting current events and valuable content that you would otherwise have missed. Twitter is also great for real-time research. http://twitter.com/

21. You are not alone: Find out if there are any online educator groups at your institution and join them. There are many great groups on the Internet, like the Sloan Consortium: http://sloanconsortium.org/ . Follow them on Twitter and you’ll be kept up-to-date on the exciting world of online education and teaching (amongst other things): http://twitter.com/SloanConsortium

22. Be bold: Take a “just do it!” approach to creating your online course and to teaching it.

23. Have fun! For when you find the fun – SNAP – the teaching job’s a game!

Something new I’d like to try – Second Life

I recall having played with Second Life the summer it first came out (in 2003!) and being extremely impressed with the 3D virtual online world its creators had started. It also allowed for its users (known as Residents) to create their own Avatars (virtual representations of themselves), explore the world (full of real world and fantastical places), create all the “things” in the world (limited only by a user’s imagination), meet and socialize with other users and, for me the most intriguing from an educational use perspective, participate in individual and group activities (like attending virtual classes/lectures and creating virtual movies).

Realizing I did not have enough time for my first life, I resisted the urge to dive into Second Life. It has come a long way since! It is amazing! You can check it out by visiting its web-site at: http://secondlife.com/

I am particularly impressed with the sheer number of educational institutions and non-profit organizations that have set up shop in Second Life (79 as of March 12, 2011).

One that caught my eye is Athens Academy:

Athens Academy is a Greek community dedicated to learning within the environment of Second Life. It aims to offer free education-focused classes and events to all members of its group “The Power in Unity.”

Can’t wait to see if I can brush up on my Greek philosophy!

In terms of this tool meeting an instructional need, I was asked during this course how I might adapt a content creation project I had run for a face to face class (creating a video illustrating a legal concept via fact scenario, court case and trial) to an online course.

Adapting this idea to an online course would be challenging, for obvious reasons… but not impossible! Second Life might just be the perfect tool to support my pedagogy respecting the learning of legal concepts through acting out illustrative scenarios!

One idea I’d explore is getting all my online students to create an avatar in Second Life and getting them to try to make a “virtual movie” with these characters… from what I understand it is possible to record the interactions.

In some ways, this would be superior to creating a “real world” movie in that you can do many more things in Second Life’s virtual world like fly and use virtual environments and props that would be difficult if not impossible to depict/find/secure in real life.

As with all things, one must be mindful of the amount of time students have to invest in learning new “tools” like Second Life and one would have to allow them ample time to explore and experiment with it on their own. While the potential for distraction is undoubtedly large, with Second Life, the educational possibilities appear limitless!

Free Assesment Creation Tool – ProProfs Quiz Maker

I chose to create a quiz about Tablet PCs with the free trial version of ProProfs – http://www.proprofs.com/.  

Tablets seem to be dominating tech news these days so I thought it might be fun to come up with a quiz about them.

You can take the quiz by clicking this link: http://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/story.php?title=tablet-pcs-weve-come-long-way .

Pro Profs offers a free basic account for personal use that offers:

• Unlimited quizzes- Create an unlimited number of quizzes for free. You can add an unlimited number of questions to a quiz.
• Unlimited quiz takers- No limit to the number of people who can take a quiz.
• No tracking- Available with the premium option. Free account tracks only 10 users per quiz to allow a trial.
• No storage- Available with the premium option. Free accounts stores results of only first 10 users to allow a trial.
• No analytics- Available with the premium option. Free account analysis only first 10 attempts on a quiz to allow a trial.
• Contains advertisements after 7 days- Free quizzes contain advertisements.
• No custom branding- Available with the premium option.
• No copy feature- Each quiz must be individually created.

If you are interested in the “business” account you can get the above with the premium additional features for US $9.97/mo. on an annual plan.

After giving your Quiz a title and word “tags” (keywords, topics etc.) and a description, you can create the following types of questions with ProProfs Quiz Maker:

• Multiple-choice 
• Checkboxes 
• True/False 
• Fill in the Blank 
• Essay type 

I included all types of questions in my quiz and tried to insert graphics above questions to make the quiz more interesting/stimulating… ProProfs also allows you to embed video if you so choose. The image add feature is quite limited and while you can size your images (imperfectly), you can’t format how the images are presented – for example, I tried to force the system to show all the graphics at the top of a question, in the same row. When presenting the questions themselves ProProfs didn’t consistently do this – though when you were taken to the answer and feedback page, the images did all appear on the same row at the top.

The feedback feature is called “Explanation” and it is limited in that it uses plain text… no hyperlinks possible that I could see.

The fill-in-the-blank feature of the free version of ProProfs Quiz Maker only allows for 5 answer options (this is to allow for alternate spellings, alternate options, synonyms etc.)… this can be a limiting factor if you choose to allow for multiple correct answers.

With respect to essay type questions, you can select how many characters maximum are allowed for the answer and whether the question is graded or not. If you choose it to be “graded”, the quiz taker gets it counted as a mistake (losing whatever mark value it is worth)… a mark for it will have to be given by the quiz’s creator, and I saw no easy way to do this within the quiz interface at all. I told the system to not grade this question so you’d have an accurate idea of how you scored on the quiz.

Other settings you can tweak for your quiz include:

• Maximum score 
• Result type (Pass or Fail, etc.) 
• Minimum Passing Score 
• Whether to password protect the Quiz 
• Quiz Visibility (Public or Private) 
• Comments (Public or Private) 
• Order of Questions (Sequential or Random) 
• Number of Questions 
• Max. Time to Complete Quiz 
• Language 
• Quiz availability (e.g. always available or only during certain dates or times) 
• E-mail notification (for Premium accounts only) 
• Browser security (Disable back button and Disable Print – only for Premium accounts) 
• Quiz category (e.g. Tech and Computer) 

At the end of your quiz you get a certificate with your name on it, score and the title of the Quiz you took, along with a list of all the quiz questions (complete with graphics), answers and feedback. You can embed your quiz on your own website or blog if you’d like, link to it, post a link to it directly to Facebook and/or Twitter.

Finally, you get access to 10 quiz results (organized by date & time and name supplied by the Quiz taker) and Quiz stats on quiz results overall etc. The system also tracks a quiz taker by IP address, for what that might be worth (could be useful if your quiz taker is using a home computer with a single static IP address but not as useful if their ISP assigns them a dynamic IP address or they are taking the quiz at a college’s computer lab).

Overall, I found the learning curve with the web-based quiz making tools to not be too difficult, though they were rather crude and not very configurable. I chose this option because no one else had and wanted to compare this online quiz creation experience to that of the one I am most familiar with – the quiz making feature in Desire2Learn. Desire2Learn has a much more robust quiz creation tool with all of the above types of questions possible and with the added benefit that quizzes can be directly linked to a course’s online gradebook such that a student’s quiz results get automatically added without any instructor intervention and/or inputting. The only way I`d potentially use this web-based quiz making application with my students is if I wanted my students to get their friends and family, and other individuals who did not have student accounts with our content management system to do a quiz that would spark a discussion in our class about the public`s knowledge about a topic etc.

ProProfs Quiz Maker would undoubtedly be more useful to institutions, businesses and individuals who do not have quizzing capabilities within their IT infrastructure or who wish offer a public quiz for marketing or other purposes.

My attempt at creating a video introduction to a course I teach

Spielberg has nothing to fear… though I have a newfound respect for anyone in video creation/production!

For this project I decided to create an introductory video for my Legal Applications course. I have posted it to my Dropbox and you can access it by clicking:

• here for the Windows version (28.5 MB) – link removed;
• here for the iPad friendly version (47.08 MB) – link removed; &
• here for the iPhone/iPod version (23 MB) – link removed;

This video took me approximately two and a half hours to put together and another 40 minutes to do the video conversions and post them. Logistically, I had to draft the script of my introduction and ensure I could present the content I wanted to cover in two to five minutes. I shot the video with my webcam (it took a couple of takes) and edited it with Windows Live Movie Maker (a free video editing tool available for all Windows OS computers). After some editing, I got the video down to two minutes and 54 seconds, including introductory and closing animations.

Windows Live Movie Maker creates final videos in the .WMV file format only. Some operating systems do not have native support for this format so I decided to convert the video to a format that would be compatible with most other Operating Systems and especially with iOS. I used a free piece of software by the name of Free iPad Video Converter to create the iPad and iPhone/iPod friendly versions. Interestingly the iPad-friendly version got significantly bigger when converted to the .MP4 format. I’m not sure if this an issue with the codec used for compressing the .WMV file into .MP4 format or if the .MP4 format itself is inherently not as efficient in its compression of video as the .WMV format.

From a time input vs. final tangible benefit perspective, there is no arguing that doing this introduction at the beginning of a face to face class in real time is more efficient… but I can see the benefit of perhaps doing a generic introduction and then splicing it together with specific course introductions for wholly online courses where our students wouldn’t get to see us in person. The process would be more efficient the second and third time around and the production value would go up.

There are a couple of improvements I’d make to this video given more time and some more sophisticated video editing software like Adobe Premiere Elements 9:

• Audio captions- Ideally I’d like to ensure hearing impaired students were accommodated by creating captioning for the entire audio portion of the video;
• Information screens:
  • text based for some parts of the video, for example, when listing the practice areas (while having the audio continue in sync in the background);
  • screen grabs from the main software applications I mention with their name prominently displayed;
  • overlay of my e-mail address at the end when discussing how the students can contact me;
  • Have someone hold my script notes at the proper level and flip to the next page at the appropriate time;

Finally, if I was to actually use this video I would perhaps post it to YouTube with a link to it from my course’s homepage in Desire2Learn so it could be streamed to the students and not require them to download the entire file before they could play it. Windows Live Movie Maker can export and upload the video directly to YouTube and YouTube itself is pretty adept at converting your source video material into its own format for streaming to any device you might have.

All in all, this exercise was very worthwhile and I learned a great deal about the digital video creation and production process. I was so enthused by this project that I spent another hour and a half researching alternative tools that could be used to accomplish everything on my wish list for this video. Adobe Premiere Elements 9 seems to be the best video-editing tool on Windows and I am looking forward to purchasing it in the future to try out all its features.

Using ready-made (and preferably free) content

My Office Systems for a Modern Law Office course covers the use of Microsoft Outlook for e-mail, contact, calendar and task management. My students have traditionally used a textbook that teaches them about Outlook and its various features and gives them end of chapter exercises to do.

I would like to add some multimedia training to my course and will need it to cover Outlook 2010 which our College will be fully implementing in all computer labs by Fall 2011. I am hoping to find free multimedia/online training resources that might take the place of the textbook.

I started my search for some multimedia training videos for Outlook 2010 by conducting a Google search on the keywords “training videos outlook 2010”. The first hit on the Google search results page featured a link to “Training – Microsoft Office” which listed free training resources offered by Microsoft organized by Office Suite year (e.g. Office 2010, Office 2007). Under Office 2010, I found a link to Outlook 2010 which took me to a list of PowerPoint-based training presentations. The first one that peaked my interest was entitled “ Tame your Inbox: Organize messages by conversation ” which was a feature I wasn’t familiar with and which I think my students might find useful. Total time to find this resource – one minute.

I downloaded the PowerPoint presentation (it took only a minute or so), launched it and played through it. It was fantastic – not only did it have engaging slides with colourful illustrations but it began with a couple of really well done videos that employed a voice-over narration that was synchronized to animations and “software in action” demonstrations. The PowerPoint presentation really made clear the value of organizing messages by conversation and I believe law offices should look seriously at training their staff on its use. Our hope, of course, is that our students will have a leg up when they go into these environments having already received training on great Outlook features like conversations.

The PowerPoint presentation can be uploaded to our content management system and can be accessed by our students 24/7. The presentation can be paused, restarted, or “fast forwarded” as desired by the student, which allows students to learn at their own pace, repeat portions which they didn’t quite get the first time through and jump ahead to more advanced sections if they already know/have mastered the introductory material.

At the end of the presentation are some suggestions for practice with a link to an online practice module (Outlook 2010 required) and some simple test questions which I would assign them to do in lab or as homework, depending on whether they had Outlook 2010 at home. Once they had completed this homework, during their next lab session I would probably want to do some real-time, interactive in-lab work with them that reinforced and tested their knowledge of this feature.

As far as special instructions are concerned, I might want to create a page of instructions that would detail the requirements and installation process for the ActiveX extension that is required for the online practice feature to work and give them an overview of what to expect, including an FAQ as to technical glitches/issues that may arise. For example, as I was working through the online practice feature a requester box came up behind the help window that the system employs to give instructions to the user… anywhere I clicked I’d get the “ding” sound and it was not clear if the system had crashed as the system was unresponsive. When I minimized the help window I found a requester box awaiting user input… once I responded to this requester box it disappeared and I was able to continue with the training.

All in all these free training resources provide by Microsoft are excellent and I’m looking forward to adding them to my course for the Fall.

Texting & Polling with students, etc.

I can see the value of texting… asynchronous yet with the potential to be almost real-time. Ubiquitous (well, at least anyone who has a cell phone) and generally with a negligible cost, if any to end users.

I could see myself using texting to do some real-time polling of my class, in much the same way I’ve used “clickers” in the past. I’d want the texts the students need to send as short as possible, so as not to overly distract/frustrate them. And I’d have to be able to show them the results instantaneously once everyone was finished voting.

My experience with the poll used for this assignment points to one of the weaknesses of this kind of tool – the potential lack of universality in implementation and support – e.g. only those on a certain carrier can send texts that will be recognized by the polling service (as, apparently, the polleverywhere.com service only works with texts from US carriers).

I can also see using texting as an asynchronous communication tool to send students reminders and announcements, though this should also be done with e-mail and your institution’s content management system in case students don’t having texting capabilities.

I’m more intrigued with using a tool like Twitter for simple polling, and have posted a link to an article on Diigo and via Twitter which reviews six apps that help with that: http://rww.to/ev4Weq . Of course using Twitter to do your polling probably restricts you even more as it is probable fewer students may have access to it on their phones and you would be tweeting a question that potentially all your followers would see, not just your students.

Finally, with all of these tools, I’d want to examine their privacy policy with respect to whether they harvest your personal information (like cellphone #, twitter username, e-mail address etc.) and sell it to marketing companies, etc. before deciding which one to potentially use.

Ellumination!

Elluminate Live! is an amazing tool for synchronous communication, optimized for eLearning and collaborative environments. If you record your Elluminate Live! sessions with its built-in recording feature you can create content that is available to your students asynchronously on demand. It’s homepage can be found at: http://www.elluminate.com/.

Our TechTools Elluminate Live! session was very educational. First, I really appreciated how Norm handled the unexpected audio limitation on our session… instead of letting this limitation derail our session, Norm expertly moved on with Elluminate’s other tools and proceeded to gives us a great tour of Elluminate’s features. This really demonstrated how to handle technical glitches/problems on the fly. Don’t waste too much time trying to fix what may be unfixable. Make use of the tools that are working and give your students that best experience you can in the circumstances. Most students will not only understand, but appreciate your poise and “grace under fire”.

Second, I was inspired by Norm’s suggestion that Elluminate could be used for virtual office hours. As a new coordinator, I have some fixed office hours at the College but have been thinking it would be great to provide my Program’s students with some more flexibility in terms of reaching me. Virtual office hours via Elluminate would provide the ultimate in flexibility for my students and I could use the breakout rooms to help individuals when/if necessary. My use of Elluminate to date has been limited to being a student participant in a few sessions… setting virtual office hours would force me to take the plunge and lead some sessions and get some real practice with the tools before tackling using Elluminate to teach an online class.

I’ve had some experience working with the video conferencing and collaboration tools offered by Webex and Adobe Connect and found Elluminate to offer comparable features, though its educational focus provides superior tools in my opinion for polling students and group work via breakout rooms.

I’m excited to try out Elluminate Live! for both virtual office hours and in an online class setting (both synchronously and asynchronously)! Thanks again Norm for a great session!

P.S. Norm had referred to a free vRoom (powered by Elluminate). Here is the link:

http://www.learncentral.org/user/vroomreg

Here is what they advertise you get with vRoom:

With Elluminate vRoom™ you can meet online FREE with up to two others! That’s right. No cost. No time limit. No kidding!

What You Get: Two-way VoIP Interactive whiteboard Application Sharing File Transfer Synchronized web tour Multipoint video

What You Can Do: Meet online up to three people Hold virtual office hours Collaborate on a global level Take students on virtual field trips

Blog recommendations

Slaw is a Canadian co-operative weblog about any and all things legal. It can be found at: http://www.slaw.ca/ . It is a blog because it has regular posts with commentary, descriptions of events, and other material such as graphics and video. Entries are displayed in reverse-chronological order.

I plan to use it with students as a starting point for finding current legal issues to research, to stimulate group discussion, and to keep up to date on interesting developments in the law. I will have my students subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed and also comment on various posts that strike their fancy, for marks.

My personal favourite law blog, however, is Michael Geist’s blog at: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/

His posts are always interesting and well reasoned and he often “breaks” stories of import to the tech industry in Canada and the world. For example, he is the blogger who exposed the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) talks between nations and the agenda behind them.

I will get my students to subscribe to this blog and use it in the same way as slaw.ca, though its subject matter is primarily focussed on Internet related law, IP Law, Privacy Law etc.

My experience with Twitter (so far)

 

 

 

Twitter experience – under construction

 

Twitter Account set up, etc.

The hardest part was deciding whether to use an initial for my first name or go with my full name… I decided to go with my full name as it better reflects my “brand”. I also decided to allow public searches on my account name for the moment… we’ll see if privacy concerns appear, but for now, I aim to explore this social networking tool publicly.

I enjoyed learning about hash tags (thanks James and Norm) and especially found the search feature extremely powerful. More on the potential uses of Twitter searches below.

Instructional need, pedagogy etc.

I can see many potential uses for Twitter in my pedagogy.

1. Twitter searches

Twitter is like the central nervous system of the Internet… if something happens of note anywhere in the world, news about it spreads to the rest of the Twitter body in an instant.

No wonder Google and Bing are trying to incorporate more “instant” searches… nothing beats a Twitter search for current information about a topic… and this is something of incredible value to both students and educators alike. In some of my courses, students are asked to research a legal topic and prepare a legal brief… I will be asking them to do Twitter searches on their main topic’s keywords from now on.

2. Curation of content

This is where I see more of Twitter’s true power… no one can read and keep up with all the great content that is being published on the Internet. However, if you follow the right people, you will get the tremendous value of their recommendations and insights respecting valuable content that you would otherwise have missed.

I can see recommending people to follow on Twitter to students in some of my classes where we are studying a topic for which they are leaders in their field. For example, in the field of Canadian Copyright and International Internet Law, I’d recommend that my students follow Michael Geist: http://twitter.com/mgeist to stay current on many developments in these fields.

Ultimately I’m really thankful to ION for getting me to finally take the plunge and try Twitter… I’m looking forward to using this amazing technology in both my professional and personal life.

Click this link to follow me on Twitter