The LMS... again...

There are many important issues that Michael Feldstein raises in this big and useful blog post — Dammit, the LMS — and they relate very much to one of the main issues that I've been pondering as part of Connected Courses over the past couple of months. I've found it stimulating and exciting to connect with people who share my beliefs about teaching and learning, mostly because I don't feel that connection at my school. So, yes, I see serious problems with the teaching culture at my school, an inability to grow and change that is really harmful to our students, and I get frustrated because I believe deeply that the students deserve better. So, sadly, I do share Michael's pessimism about the LMS and teaching culture in higher education today, but I'll lay the blame somewhere that he does not mention: graduate school.

First, though, some background about the problem as I see it: like Michael, I've been thinking about and working with LMSs since back in 1999, and I have to agree with Michael's overall verdict — "I find the topic to be equal parts boring and depressing." Also like Michael, one of my biggest frustrations is that the mainstream LMSs haven't changed hardly at all in the past ten years. For example, we've used Desire2Learn for almost ten years at my school, and it is virtually unchanged in that time. Oh sure, it is not Desire2Learn anymore; it's D2L Brightspace (yes, D2L BS)... whatever. The name may change, but the LMS remains essentially the same, as if the social transformation of the Internet had never happened.

I also agree that the problem is cultural, not technological. And here's where I would put more of the blame on the standard LMSs for perpetuating a conservative culture of closed by default, instead of open by default (see Martin Weller's nice post: Open by Default). When a faculty member uses some permutation of lecture-quiz-discuss in the closed environment of D2L because that is the only option they have, they do not even have the opportunity to experience the different kinds of learning that can happen in more open environments. So, when I show faculty members what I am doing with student web publishing in my classes, powered by some great aggregation and syndication tools, they like what they see, but when I tell them that D2L does not provide any of the needed tools, they shrug and move on. Would they like to do things better and differently? Sure, I think so; I am not so pessimistic as to say that faculty don't care or cannot tell the difference, especially when you show them some impressive student learning outcomes. But if the only tool the university offers them is completely inadequate to the task, it's understandable that they would just carry on with the same-old same-old. Even worse is the deceptive and dangerous way in which the LMS pretends to offer services and tools which are such poor imitations of the real thing: lousy blogging tool, lousy portfolio tool, etc. (On that, see Mike Caulfield: Maybe the reason people don't use LMS collaboration tools is the tools are not collaborative).

So, I agree with much of what Michael says, but where I disagree is when he wants to entertain the possibility of a "perfect system," as if the quest for a learning management system even makes sense. By way of contrast, let's look at the many different tools faculty use for their research (including a chemistry lab, for example, as Michael invokes in the post). When we think about research tools, it's clear that there is a whole wide range of tools that faculty use both to do research and also to promulgate their research. They don't expect there to be one "research system" that all the researchers will use to do all their research, some sort of Swiss Army knife for research that will "do it all" ... and anyone trying to promote such an approach for research purposes would be laughed off campus. There is no RMS. And so we do not have a decade of blog posts about the problem of the RMS. Faculty are instead busy using real tools for research, and they are also creating great new research tools all the time.

So, since an RMS is such a laughable idea, why haven't we also laughed the idea of an LMS into nonexistence, replacing it instead with whatever range of tools faculty need to support their teaching? (And that is the approach I would advocate BTW.)

Sadly, to answer that question, I think we have to go back to the professional training that faculty receive. In graduate school the future faculty learn all about the research tools they will be using in their research. Laboratory tools, bibliography tools, computing tools, and on and on. They learn about those tools intensively as graduate students, and their success in graduate school depends upon their effective use of those tools.

But teaching tools...?

Uh, nope. It's just not part of graduate school training in any discipline: there is very little training in teaching at all (and thus most people teach as they were taught), and there is even less training in the wide range of digital tools now available to support new kinds of teaching that can be very different from how classroom teaching has been done in the past.

So, it's easy to mock the faculty for their limited and skewed perspectives as Michael does here in the bullet points near the end of his post, and as I have done likewise in my frequent moments of frustration. But if we step back and ask about the causes of the problem, I think we have to look at graduate school programs and the fact that preparation for a teaching career is simply not part of most programs. As a result, we end up with sophisticated scholars, experts in the research tools of their discipline, who are nevertheless inexperienced in the basic tools of teaching, a lack of experience that is most acute in the digital teaching world, new as that world still is. Combine that lack of experience with the poor quality of the LMS, and you clearly have a recipe for disaster.

A disaster for which students are paying the biggest price of all.

So, while I would like to vow not to write about the LMS for another ten years as Michael does here, and while I would like to stop caring about the lack of progress at my school, I cannot seem to make myself stop caring. Thanks to a new tool in my toolbox, Inoreader, I am actually enjoying the best semester I have ever had in my fifteen years as a college instructor. Does that mean I think everybody should drop whatever they are doing and use Inoreader? No, of course not. But since none of the concepts that drive Inoreader can even be glimpsed in an LMS like D2L (aggregation? syndication? nope), it's going to be very hard for me even to have a conversation with other faculty about this. Still, I can keep trying. And hoping.

Spe exspecto.

I wait in hope.

D2L Trick: Flags in the Roster

So, I thought I would share this little D2L trick that I use for keeping track of students during the churn of add/drop enrollment. D2L's Roster has an "Enrollment Statistics" view that shows you the students who have withdrawn more recently, but it does not show you the students who have added!

So, that's a problem: I need to know who has added the class recently because I keep a separate roster — and I keep a separate roster because D2L doesn't actually have the data I need about students, so I have to run the roster in Google Docs; that's where I record the link to their blog address, their website address, student athletes plus athletic advisor email, all kinds of other info I need... and since I have to synch that class list manually with the actual enrollment in D2L, I need to know both who dropped AND who added the class.

Here's the trick: when I add a student to my roster, I FLAG them in the D2L roster (there's a flag in the roster that turns on and off just like the flag feature in the Gradebook; I use the flag feature in the Gradebook a lot too). This works because the flags are persistent in the roster view, and you can search by flag / not flagged.

That means I can search the D2L roster for "NOT FLAGGED" in order to see who has added the class recently so that I can be sure to add them to my list. After I add them to my Google Doc list, then I flag them in the D2L Roster. Then I check the "enrollment statistics" for most recent withdrawals to see if I need to remove anybody from my list.  Presto: the lists are synched, and it just takes less than a minute each time.

It bugs me that the D2L Roster and Gradebook are not like real spreadsheets where I can create my own columns, build my own filters, formulas, etc. inside the sheet, but at least this little trick helps me synch up the class list with the Google Doc spreadsheet without any trouble at all.

Grading in a Digital World

This post is not about a specific tool, but instead a more general post about grading in an online class and what a big difference it makes. Elsewhere I've written up a statement about my grading philosophy which I share with my students (indeed, I consider it vital to share that with my students), and in this post I want to reflect on how the grading system I use is really possible only in a digital environment.

When I started teaching at OU in 1999, I was stuck with a very limited range of options. We didn't even have an LMS back then, so it was really all about what happened in the classroom: either quizzes and tests administered in the classroom, or papers that students handed to me in the classroom. As my professors had done, so did I: I graded based on some combination of quizzes, tests, and papers. I wasn't very happy with it, and the students weren't very happy with it either. Not that they complained; it was that way in all their classes. But still, I felt stuck - not just because of the limited assessment options in a classroom, but because of all the classroom's limitations. Not enough time, not enough "stuff," not enough of anything. I wanted more and better for my students and also for myself as a teacher.

So, when my school first decided to start offering fully online classes, I leapt at the chance. In fact, I resigned my job as a tenure-track professor and became an online instructor instead; my interest was always in teaching rather than research, and I realized that as a professor I could never give my teaching the time it deserved. The job my school had created was ideal: my only responsibility was teaching online, and I had three sections of 25-30 students each to teach. Perfect: 40 hours per week, and around 80 students to work with. The job of my dreams!

I realized immediately that the model of quiz-test-paper was meaningless in this new world of teaching abundance - an abundance of time, and an abundance of resources, too. So, I began the process of inventing classes that would take advantage of that abundance. Luckily, I made some very good choices right from the start; my classes have grown and evolved over time, but at the core is the same basic model I created when I first got started over ten years ago.

Time for reading and writing. There would be no more wasted time with students passively sitting and listening to me talk too much in the classroom (and I always talked too much, as you can imagine from the length of this blog post, ha ha). Online, the students could now spend their time - all their time - doing something really useful: reading and writing. I knew that I could reasonably ask about 6-8 hours per week of my students' time, and I knew that my main goal was to have them create things - to tell stories and share them online. I decided to divide the class into two roughly equal areas of activity which together would take appx. 6-8 hours of their time every week: reading stories (myths and epics) so that they could write new stories based on the old ones, along with a semester-long project where they would choose their own topic and do something similar but on a bigger scale, retelling traditional in creative new ways. They would do the weekly reading/writing assignments in a blog, and the semester-long writing project would be a website.

Then, after I had decided on the class activities, I needed to find the best ways to do the assessments, both for feedback and for grading. I was really not at all interested in assessment-as-grading, but I was very interested in assessment-as-feedback, and going online gave me so many great new opportunities for more and better feedback.

Feedback: Reading. For the reading, students could take quizzes that were graded automatically. I could build big question pools with questions coming up at random, allowing them to re-read and take the the quiz again if they did poorly. The reading quizzes were now a self-diagnostic tool to help the students make sure they had not accidentally slept through the readings or skimmed so quickly that they really got nothing out of it. Since students are not used to the idea of quiz-as-diagnostic, I make sure to explain to them how that works: Reading Tips. Right now I use Desire2Learn for this, but the way it manages question pools is incredibly poor, giving me no useful statistics from semester to semester; indeed, it does not even track questions re-used from quiz to quiz. I need a better quizzing tool (Quia.com, for example, is far superior).

Feedback: Writing. By having all the writing in blogs (Ning) and websites (Google Sites), it was now easy for students to give each other feedback, in addition to getting feedback from me. So, each week, the students comment on the stories in their blogs and websites, and they also get detailed feedback from me. I'll explain in a separate post exactly how all that works, but you can get a sense of the importance of feedback and revision from what I've written here: Web-Based Projects and Pacing the Semester.

Grading. In terms of my own teaching philosophy, I'd be happy to stop there, with assessment-as-feedback. My school, however, demands that I give grades, and my students (college seniors) have also become deeply dependent on grades - you might even call it an addiction - after 16 years of full-time schooling dominated by grades, grades, and more grades. So, as I explain in my grading statement, my goal is to find a way to take a feedback-focused system and have it result in letter grades at the end of the semester. To do that, I use a points-based system. The quizzes are worth 10%, the blog posts are worth 25%, the website project is worth 35%, and commenting on blogs and websites is worth 30%. Note that these are all points that accumulate week by week. There is not a final grade even for the semester-long project. No grades, just points. When they get the points they need for the grade they want, they are done. (Some students who are really busy with work in other classes opt just to get a B or a C in the class, and that's fine with me.)

Results: Fabulous. The end result of this system is that the students work hard, and they often comment in the evaluations that this class is more work than any of their other classes. I'm not sure whether that is true or not, but I am pretty confident that they are doing more writing in this class than in any other class - and getting far more feedback about their writing, too. As a result, they learn a lot, and they produce some amazing projects. You can see the projects for this semester in Myth-Folklore and in Indian Epics. Even students who openly declare that they hate to write end up with really good projects. Why? Because instead of putting everything off until the last minute (you know that is what happens in most classes, right?), they work on their project every week all semester long, with abundant, supportive feedback from me and from the other students.

Work: It Works! Although some people think of online classes as being less work than a classroom-based class, that is not the case in my classes. Just the opposite: the students work really hard. That's an inevitable consequence of how the class is set up; there is no other option. For almost all of them, it is the first time they ever created a website. Even more importantly, it is often the first time they ever made a commitment to their own writing and to sharing their writing in public. If you are a student who struggles with writing, you are used to giving the teacher something you scribbled off in haste, knowing you will get a bad grade - and you just say to yourself, "Whatever." This class is different: doing poor quality work is just not an option. Students revise (and revise and revise) their writing so that it improves, and they also share their writing with other students - it's not just for the teacher. For a lot of students, that experience is downright scary at first... but by the end of the semester, they see their own success and are justifiably proud. As for me: I am proud of what they do too!

Grade Inflation. And that is why I get angry - really angry - when I read articles like this one about grade inflation: Can Harvard stop awarding so many As?  by Stephen Joel Trachtenberg. It's fine with me if Dr. Trachtenberg has a different approach to grading than I do; everybody should do what they think is best - best for their students, best for their school, best for their subject matter. The problem, however, is that Dr. Trachtenberg seems to think that there is one way, and only one way, to grade. He apparently supposes that every teacher must be a "judge" whose success is measured not by the number of good grades earned by their students but instead by the number of bad grades. That may sound good to him; to me, it sounds like a recipe for failure. I could never teach that way, and I am very disappointed that Dr. Trachtenberg seems not to have even considered the possibility that there are alternatives to the grading model that he takes for granted. He may contend that I have "abandoned my responsibilities" by the way I grade, but I see myself instead as finally living up to my responsibilities as a teacher, making sure that each one of my students has a great learning opportunity, a chance to work hard and achieve more than they even thought possible at the outset. Does Dr. Trachtenberg think my class is easy because I give mostly As? Well, he is wrong. And since my students put their projects online, he has a chance - if he wants - to see just how wrong he is. I would say the single best thing we could do for our students, in fact, is to stop putting so much faith in the sacred formula of the GPA and instead have our students show what they can do online.

For me as a teacher, that online option has made all the difference.

Teachers open the door; you enter by yourself. 

(Chinese proverb)

Active versus Interactive

I hope everybody had a great holiday break. I'm getting back into the swing of things: the last week of school is next week, and then I have a few weeks to re-tool my classes for Spring semester, which is something I always enjoy. I hope that having this blog in place will be a good addition to my blogging routine for Spring, too! For today's post, I wanted to pick up on an item from Google+ today which I have embedded below. As you can see there, I was reacting to the use of the word "interactive" to describe students taking online quizzes. I use Desire2Learn for online quizzes and all the learning management systems include some kind of quizzing software; machine-graded quizzes are probably one of the most ubiquitous feature of online courses, and they serve a purpose sure, but to my way of thinking, there is nothing interactive about taking a machine-graded quiz. This reaction on my part led to a good discussion at G+ (click the voice bubble icon in the embedded post below to see the comments), and I thought I would spell out here more specifically my concern about this use of the word "interactive" as a kind of all-purpose synonym for active.

So, to reiterate, I'm all for active learning as opposed to passive learning... but I do not consider taking a machine-graded quiz to count as interaction. When a student takes a quiz, that is indeed something active on the part of the student: they read each question, decide on the answer, enter the answer, and then they get feedback (usually a simple right or wrong) from the computer. In a more sophisticated computer program, there might be more extensive feedback, including additional learning activities and/or follow-up questions as a result of the student's quiz performance. So, yes, that's very active. More active than just reading.

That is not to say that reading is entirely passive, but reading with some kind of machine-graded quiz is more active than just reading alone. Likewise, if a student takes notes or highlights while reading, that is more active than just reading. If students write up responses to what they read, or if they share the reading with others, that something active. If the student annotates the reading or modifies it, then the student's learning is more active than just reading. Hence the term "learning activities."

But what does it mean for learning to be interactive? The way I see it, the "inter" prefix there requires that there be two or more people interacting with one another (the Latin word inter means "between, among" as you can see in this Latin-English dictionary). So, taking a quiz which is graded by the computer is not interactive; I am not prepared to accept the surrogate human intelligence of a computer program as a sufficient substitute for a real human presence in order to call that "interactive." Active, yes, but not interactive. If the student takes notes, that is active; if they share their notes with others, that is interactive. If the student bookmarks the reading, that is active; if they share the link with others, that is interactive. If the student annotates the reading, that is active; if they read annotations made by others and share their own annotations with others, that is interactive.

I value active learning highly, and I value interactive learning even more highly. When I look at tools for learning, I value tools that promote active learning, but I value tools that promote interactive learning even more highly. It was refreshing for me today to have to think this through and spell out my assumptions more clearly, and I hope I can make use of this distinction as I discuss different learning tools in future posts at this blog.

Meanwhile, I should also note that one of the things I value most highly about Google+ is the high degree of interactivity there. I have decided it is important for me to keep this blog as a kind of public record of the tools I use in my teaching and the teaching goals that prompt me to choose these particular tools... but I've never experienced interactivity in a blog space that is anything like what I enjoy every day at Google+! There don't have to be lots of people... but it does take two to tango - and likewise it takes two to interact. :-)

Nos duo turba sumus. We two are a crowd. (Latin saying: details here)

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GoogleDocs Spreadsheet for Student Data (and Desire2Learn #fail)

Yesterday, I wrote about spreadsheets as a tool I use for developing content. Today, I want to write about using spreadsheets for student data. I was prompted to do this because I received an email from Coursera that made me laugh: although that company claims to be gathering all kinds of "big data" about their students, I don't see them making very good use of it (see G+ post below with discussion comments).

Meanwhile, the course management system we use at my school, Desire2Learn, does not really give me a way to manage student data either. The Gradebook is sort of like a spreadsheet, yes, but it has none of the functionality of a real spreadsheet. I cannot perform any truly complex/useful filters and searches. Worst of all: I cannot add my own columns to keep track of student data that really is important and useful to me.

So, I create a GoogleDocs spreadsheet every semester where on one page I keep track of my enrolled students and the data I need to be able to access and use. On another page, I keep the waiting list of students seeking to get into the class. What kind of data do I need to keep track of for my students? Here are just what a few of the columns contain:

Real Name. A surprising number of students go by a nickname or use their middle name. There is NO WAY in Desire2Learn to keep track of the name that a student uses; instead, we can only see the "official" name on file. Until I started keeping track of this systematically, I had not realized what a large number of students use a nickname or do not even use that first name at all, choosing to use their middle name instead. I think it's dreadful that D2L does not let them choose a screen name that matches their real name. I cannot even keep track of their real name anywhere in D2L.

Email Address. I keep an email address list here so that I can easily send emails related to data I keep track of in the spreadsheet.

Blog URL. Each student has a blog address. I use and re-use this address for creating a variety of assignments (putting students in blog groups, randomly viewing student blogs, etc.)

Introduction Post URL. It's important for me and for other students to be able to access the introduction posts students include in their blog at the beginning of the semester. I use this for my own quick reference and also to create assignments where students are looking at each other's introductions and commenting on them.

Comment Wall URL. The Comment Wall is one of the most important features of the Ning that I use as my virtual classroom (there is nothing comparable in Desire2Learn, sadly - the profile pages are completely static, with no possibilities for interaction). I use the Comment Wall address for the different assignments where students are interacting with each other via the Comment Wall.

Writing Assessment. In the first week of the semester, students complete a writing assessment. It is very helpful for me to view the results of that writing assessment as I give feedback to students about their writing throughout the semester, especially at the beginning of the semester when I am just getting to know the students individually.

There are lots of other columns also, but they are kind of hard to explain outside of the context of my class and the specific information I do keep track of. And that, I think, is the single biggest problem with all the discussions I hear about "big data," including the self-congratulatory claims that Desire2Learn also makes about offering data-driven teaching tools. As a teacher, I really do rely on data that I collect about my students, but that data is closely tied to my teaching practices. It's not something someone can impose on me from the outside.

In terms of a data tool inside Desire2Learn, I would need something a lot more like the customizable spreadsheet that I currently create manually using GoogleDocs. It's not a huge amount of trouble to create it manually, of course - but some of the data I am manually entering into the spreadsheet is indeed available in Desire2Learn, and there is much more data in Desire2Learn that I would love to use if it were easy to extract... but it's not.

So, as often, I have to say THANK YOU to Google for making my job as an online teacher so much easier to manage. And nope, no thanks to Desire2Learn when it comes to student data. Maybe... maybe... they will someday figure out just how powerful a spreadsheet can be and will let us use the Gradebook like a real spreadsheet. Someday. Maybe.

Post about Coursera and student data below:

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Why I Love Embedded Video... and Why I Do NOT Love D2L

I wanted to say something today about the power of embedded video since that is one of my favorite things about video: embedding it exactly where it needs to be! Inside a webpage, a blog post, a course management system - wherever! I really like video services that allow embedding (YouTube), and I am not at all impressed by video services that do not make it possible to embed videos.

I am also very unhappy about something that seems to be happening at the new "secure" version of the Desire2Learn website. Here's the sage of what happened to the video I embedded in my class announcements yesterday. I had embedded two videos, in fact - a short video about the history of the English language from Open University at YouTube, along with a film clip from a Canadian documentary showing on our campus. Here are the two videos:

Yet when I included both those clips in the class announcements, it caused the display of the announcements to break inside Desire2Learn. I use the announcements blog as my landing page in the lower frame of my Desire2Learn course page (and yes, D2L is written in frames... believe it or not). It wasn't just that the offending video clip was not being displayed; the entire frame was completely blank and none of the announcements could be read. This was because, presumably, that Canadian Film Board video clip, embedded with iframe, came from an http source (not https)... so Desire2Learn, in its desire to protect my students from such dangerous stuff, decided to suppress the entire frame. I wouldn't have minded if it suppressed the video... but to remove all the announcements completely was a disaster!

So, I had to remove that embedded video from the announcements, simply in order to appease the D2L security algorithm. As a teacher, that really frustrates me - another example of a machine algorithm trying to rule my life in a completely inappropriate way. I already keep my use of Desire2Learn to an absolute bare minimum... and this is exactly the kind of reason why. Luckily, the class announcements look great at Blogger, and it was very frustrating for me to have to remove the video from the announcements blog in order to appease Desire2Learn.

Details about my D2L woes in the embedded Google+ posts below: