Back in action... and bidding farewell (sadly) to Ning

The weekend is here, school starts officially on Monday, and it's pouring rain outside: I would say those are three good reasons to get back into the habit of writing some blog posts here about the technology I use in my online classes. And for this posts, wow, I have big news to share about one of my most valued tools: Ning.

I discovered recently that this will be my last semester using the Ning as my virtual classroom (for student blogs, discussions), which is both a sad and exciting discovery to have made. I like the Ning so much that I never would have made the choice to leave it on my own but, as with so much software,  the decision is being made for me: Ning is transitioning to a new version, Ning 3.0, and the legacy mini-Nings (a holdover from its foray into the education market and a partnership with Pearson some years ago) will not transition with the other communities. Ning has promised 12 months for communities to make the transition, which means I won't have any trouble making it till the next of the semester, and I might squeak by in the fall semester also, but for a change as big as this, I will need to devote a considerable part of my summer to working on it.

So, as a result, this will be my last semester with the Ning, and I am 99% certain that the students will be using Blogger blogs starting next fall. Blogger is my own blogging platform of choice so I know I can give the students good support and encouragement based on my own experience, plus I am enormously inspired by all the work I see Gideon Burton and his students are doing with Blogger as their shared platform (for example, the new "Literature of Awe" course blog).

I could, of course, transition to a real Ning and use their 3.0 platform. But that would cost me $25/month (as opposed to the $20/year I currently spend), and I really cannot justify that cost. If my university assumed the cost, I would gladly stay with Ning since it has some enormous advantages as a community space for online students. My university, however, has no interest in this kind of thing. I'll save those complaints for a separate post. Suffice to say, the microscopic amount of social capital I have accumulated at my school would not be well spent in trying to get my school to support a Ning community for my online classes.

Plus, I know that it is time to move on. Ning has some advantages, but it has some real disadvantages also. In particular, I no longer see any need to use a closed community. When I first started using Ning for my classes, which was back in 2008, the world of social networking was still something relatively new and the idea that students positively needed to learn how to use social networking tools as part of their education was really not something that crossed my mind. Now, however, in 2014, it seems to me very important for students to know how to use the kinds of tools that they will help them to build their professional presence by networking with others online. This is something badly neglected at my school, which seems to put a higher priority on promoting Internet FUD (fear-uncertainty-doubt), encouraging students to try to "cover their tracks" online, keeping things private, rather than helping them learn to make a distinction between private and public so that they can decide just which things they can, and should, share as they begin to build a professional identity online. So, I am not worried, as I once was, about using public tools, provided that the students have the option of including their name, or not, on their web publications, just as they make that same choice for the websites that they build for their class projects.

What I am going to lose, though, is the nicely integrated "feel" of the Ning, where all the blogs come together in a single shared webspace, with the newest blog posts appearing on the homepage of our Ning site. I use a single site for all my classes, which gives it a really exciting look as the images being used by Myth-Folklore students in their blog posts appear side-by-side with posts from students in the Indian Epics. It's a really stimulating and thought-provoking space in which to ask students to spend their time (unlike, UGH, Desire2Learn). When I go to the Ning and take a look, it just makes me feel good. I'm able to have that space with zero effort on my part; I have written a few widgets for the sidebars of the Ning, but for the actual site design, I've been happily able to use a Ning template without modification.

Now, as I contemplate leaving that behind, I will have to think about how I, on my own, can get that sense of a lively, shared group space. If not a portal, then one really good aggregator page. My current thinking - but luckily I have some months to think about this before summer comes - is to go with individual Blogger blogs for the students (which has the enormous advantage of putting them in control of their own blog, which I like very much) while I figure out some creative use of RSS to bring together the latest posts in some way that is both useful and visually attractive. I'm not a programmer or even a tinkerer on the level of someone like Alan Levine or Stephen Downes to come up with something really sophisticated like the wonderful ds106 website, for example, but I am guessing that with some hard work over the summer I can build some kind of aggregator that will suit my needs, creating a simple single landing page to bring together the flow of student activity that I would like to see as a kind of "window" into the work we are doing together as a class. I love RSS as a technology (even though it may be dying a slow death, I know, I know), and the time I would invest in learning more about RSS and aggregators would, I think, be time well spent and very enjoyable, too.

And, since I am deep down a lazy soul who likes to find shortcuts for things, I am also thinking I might be able to use a software product like Feedly or Flipboard to provide the solution I am looking for. At Google+ someone told me that Feedly has something in the works like the old Google Reader bundles (eegad, how I loved Google Reader bundles! I still miss them!), and that indeed might solve my problem for me.

Moreover, I will really welcome the opportunity to encourage the students to feel like owners of their blogs in the same way that they are the owners of the Google Sites that they build for their class projects. Even if I am not able to come up with a good solution for the "group space" that I have enjoyed so much with the Ning, I am sure I could make this work even if the blogs are free-standing, with students going from blog to blog using links that I provide in the same way that I now provide links to their Ning blogs and, for some assignments, their Ning posts. I will have the advantage of Blogger RSS and Blogger labels to build on (RSS and labels being poorly implemented in Ning, it's true), so I really don't have any doubts about being able to come up with a workable solution for fall that will offer all kinds of great advantages compared to what I am doing now with the Ning.

So, while I am very sad to see my Ning days come to an end, I am very excited about what I will do next. It's been fabulous run with the Ning, and I have no complaints about it - it's been a great tool for me and for my students, and I think it is more of an indictment of the education culture in this country rather than Ning itself that Ning's foray into the education market did not turn out to be profitable for them. I wish them well in their future growth, and I will always be grateful for the six years during which I had the pleasure of using Ning as the social platform for my classes!

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)