Writing and the Online Teacher

Recently, I was asked, “What is the single most important skill for an online and/or blended teacher?”  I’m not fond of questions that force you to pick “the most important,” “your favorite,” or “the best” of anything, but I took a stab at it.

I’d say the most important skill for an online teacher to have is communicating through writing. Despite the growing availability of visual and audio tools, the bulk of communication—at least in online and blended learning courses that rely heavily on asynchronous activities—is through writing. As we’ve learned, even the use of video and audio presentations demands written captions and/or transcripts. From the syllabus to instructions for activities to discussions and one-on-one email exchanges, the teacher constantly communicates with students through writing. While a face-to-face class involves a certain amount of written communication between teacher and students, spoken communication dominates; just the reverse is true in online teaching. Whether taking the online stage as instructor, social director, program manager, or even technical assistant, much of the role is performed through writing.

Online teachers need to be both fluent and versatile writers. Because they need to write so much, they need to be able express their ideas quickly. Because they need to write for so many purposes (e.g. explaining course goals, prompting discussions, building community, clarifying concepts, giving feedback, reinforcing expectations, encouraging participation, nurturing the anxious or uncertain student, establishing rapport), they need to be able to write in both informal/conversational and academic styles with equal proficiency.

Three Considerations for Online Assessment

As we think about implementing formative and summative assessments in the online and blended environments, there are three considerations to keep in mind.

Good assessment is good assessment.

Whether working online or in a face-to-face classroom, the basics of assessment are the same.  In their primer on online assessment strategies, Jeanne Sewell, Karen Frith, and Martha Colvin propose a set of eight characteristics of exemplary learning assessments:

• Authentic – reflects real life experiences
• Challenging – stimulates the learner to apply knowledge
• Coherent – serves as a guide for the student to achieve the learning goal
• Engaging – attracts the learner’s interest
• Respectful – sensitive to the individual learner’s beliefs and values
• Responsive – includes a feedback mechanism to assist the student in the learning process
• Rigorous – requires applied understanding of learning to achieve a successful outcome
• Valid – provides information that is useful to meet the intended learning outcomes

That’s quite a lot of things to think about every time you make a quick quiz or compose a discussion prompt.  However, if your bandwidth allows, W. James Popham also urges us to create assessments that are both informative and sensitive.  By informative, he means assessments that actually tell us something about what the student knows and does not know.  Such tests are truly diagnostic, not just posing as such.  By sensitive, he means sensitive to instruction.  In other words, if a teacher has done a good job teaching, students will do better on the test than if the teacher did a poor job.  That may seem like a truism, but don’t you remember having at least one rotten high school teacher who taught you nothing and yet you got A’s on the tests?

Know your technology.

Technology can automate much of the drudgery that used to be associated with creating, administering, and scoring tests, as well as recording and analyzing the results.  Technology also makes possible practices that were previously too impractical to be used, such as presenting test items in random order to each student.  Every learning management system affords you a host of options and opportunities for efficient assessment; take the time to learn how to use them.

You also have to be aware of the limitations of the technology you’re using.  For example, you may have a system with a large database of test items from which you purportedly can easily create parallel forms of tests or equivalent pre- and post-tests.  Beware!  Creating test items that are truly equivalent is not an easy task.  Also, just because the system says a test item measures a certain skill, that does not mean it does.  There can be “junk” even in a commercial item bank.  At the very least, eyeball the items and see if they have at least prima facie validity.

Cheaters sometimes prosper.

Cheating has always been an issue, but it appears to have increased over time.  One review of research on cheating at the collegiate level found a “dramatic” increase in some types of cheating over the previous 30 years.  In particular, the study found “disturbing” increases in collaborative cheating—i.e. unpermitted collaboration among students on written assignments.

One might predict that, given the lack of visual supervision by the teacher,  the incidence of cheating in online classes  would be even greater than in face-to-face instruction, but to the contrary, Sewell and her colleagues cite research that finds “Online cheating is no more prevalent than classroom cheating.”  Other research suggests  that teachers can reduce cheating by “clearly communicating expectations regarding cheating behavior, establishing policies regarding appropriate conduct, and encouraging students to abide by those policies.”

In the online environment, technology offers some specific ways to frustrate potential cheaters.  These include:

• Using surf-lock type devices during online exams
• Timing the release and closing of tests  and requiring special passwords to access them
• Using parallel forms of tests (be sure they are parallel!)
• Randomizing both order in which questions are presented and the order of answer choices
• Checking IP address logs
• Using application or higher level questions

All that said, the most powerful way to combat cheating, online or offline, is to promote a culture of honesty and ethical behavior in the first place.

359 Connections and Counting

I’ve been a member of LinkedIn for a number of years.  When friends who don’t use the site learn that I do, they often appear puzzled and ask, “Why?’

Good question.  I sometimes wonder about that myself, especially when I’m reviewing my credit card statement at the end of each month and see the $19.95 fee I pay for an upgraded account.  What do I get out of it?  Does it help my personal learning?  Facilitate communication?  Strengthen my attachment to a professional community?  Actually, I think so!

Should you, dear reader, be unfamiliar with LinkedIn, it is what is called a professional, as opposed to a social, online community.   It serves as a huge, 24-7 networking event.  When you join, you create a resume-like profile and let the world know what you’re generally interested in—making new contacts, renewing old acquaintances, consulting, finding a new job, and the like.

A basic activity on LinkedIn is to make “connections.”  As in Facebook and marriage, people become connected only by mutual consent.  When I first joined, most members worked in high tech, sales, or marketing fields.   Over the years, though, the breadth of occupations represented as grown remarkably, and I’ve built up a stable of over 350 connections.  These range from fellow educators to lawyers, business managers, and artists.  Each of these people is someone I’ve worked with somehow, somewhere, or been introduced to by a friend or colleague we have in common.  Occasionally I scan through my connections and, like looking up at the face of Heavenly Valley after you’ve skiied your way down to the base, it’s a rather satisfying and reassuring experience.

While I have not called upon this network often, when I have it has been very useful.  Let me give you a recent example.  I was doing informal research for an article on, “How, in a school setting, can you get the most value out of the technology you already have.”  LinkedIn makes it very easy to communicate with ad hoc groups of your connections.  I selected 50 and sent them a brief message that asked for an “off-the-top-of-the-head” answer to that question.  Within 24 hours I received replies from nearly everyone from which I garnered all sorts of good ideas that served as the foundation for my article.

Periodic “updates” are another LinkedIn feature I find useful.  These come to your mailbox on a schedule you choose.  Like a beneficent tattler, they offer little tidbits on what your connections are up to.  This one just got a new job.  That one published a book or article.  Another one is off to consult in Singapore.  This offers a great opportunity for serendipitous discovery.  I will often find someone doing something that’s either relevant to a current project or gives me an idea for a new one.

Despite its usefulness, LinkedIn can be a distraction and an annoyance.  Updates on my connections’ activities land in my mailbox and I read them, even if at that moment it’s the last way I should be spending my time.  Or I log in with the sole purpose of making a 5-minute update to my profile; the next thing I know I’ve spent 20 minutes perusing lists of “suggested connections” LinkedIn so thoughtfully provides.  And annoying?  I hate it when I get an “I’d like to add you to my LinkedIn connections” message from someone I’ve never heard of, only vaguely remember,  or whom I do know and with whom I’d prefer not to be associated.   Even though it is superbly easy to decline (just a simple click; no explanation needed), I can’t bring myself to do that.  So I struggle to come up with some face-saving response or, worse, just leave the request unanswered in my queue where it gives me twinges of guilt every time I see it.

Reflecting on my experience with LinkedIn leads me to think more generally about how the Internet has impacted my personal learning as well as that of my adult students.  For me, it’s my own personal, instant, world-wide library.  It provides easy, deliberate access to peers, friends, and colleagues.  It enables serendipitous discovery by providing a continuous information flow.  The Internet also distracts me, enables if not encourages procrastination, and deters if not disables deep thinking.

I suspect that the adults I teach experience similar effects.  However, testing that hunch will be an important first step in working with any new group of students.  Such a test would include some simple survey questions as well as class discussion designed to draw out the various ways people structure their time on the Internet to enhance its usefulness, overcome distractions and other drawbacks, and cope with the negative aspects beyond their control.  From such a discussion could emerge a very useful list of suggested components for a personal online learning space and guidelines for constructing and using it.

Using Web 2.0 Tools in Online Teaching

Web 2.0 tools are proliferating like fruit flies.  Perhaps only smart phone apps reproduce at a speedier rate. However, despite their purportedly promiscuous proclivities, Web 2.o tools are not only a boon to online education, they enable it.

The now commonplace blog is a case in point.  The online teacher can use a blog as a home base and clearing house for a course.  Students in a course can use blogs to complete assignments, record their thoughts, and house their portfolio of accomplishments.  Using the comments function, the instructor and students can interact with one another.  While not a learning management system, an integrated collection of teacher and student blogs can be a powerful platform for online learning.

Here’s one example.  Last year, I taught a series of blended learning courses for school administrators to “certify” them as technologically savvy educational leaders.  I created a blog as our online meeting place.  It served as the portal for our program by providing links to syllabi, assignments, polls, and resources—not to mention a bully pulpit for me.  Each student created a blog to post thoughts and ideas in response to class assignments, compare and analyze different types of technology and evaluate their impact on learning, and create and collect artifacts to demonstrate what was learned during each course in the series.

While a few of the administrators had some prior experience of blogs, including a couple who had actually started a blog for personal use, most had a very limited understanding of blogs and almost no practical understanding of how they work or how one might use one.  What’s a post?  How is it different from a page?  No clue.

I quickly realized that I needed to slow down and take time to “teach the tool.”  These adult learners could already think lofty thoughts, but they could not express them in the context of their personal blogs until they learned some basics of how blogs work.  It was critical to start slow, introduce basic vocabulary, and demonstrate how to accomplish key tasks.   Tools like Screenr were indispensable for this purpose.

Whether in the face-to-face, blended, or online learning environment, blogs can be a versatile and engaging tool. However, like any Web 2.0 tool, their educational value depends on how they are used.

So you’re going to teach online?

You’re an experienced teacher with years in the classroom under your belt.  You know kids.  You know schools.   You know your subject and how to teach it.  But now, for whatever reason, you’re going to teach online.  That raises at least two big questions.

How might your instructional methodologies need to change?

I can’t speak for you, obviously, but I can reflect on how my own methods might transfer online, or not.  My first inclination is to say that almost everything I’ve learned over the years will serve me well online.  In an earlier post, New Lease on Life for Old Innovations?, I talked about many of the concepts and approaches to teaching I learned many years ago or picked up along the way, all of which were considered to be “innovations” or “reforms”  at the time—and many of which still seem to be considered so today.  Ideas like individualizing instruction, project-based learning, mastery learning, Socratic dialogues, outcomes-based education, multi-age classrooms and non-graded schools all have their parallels in the current online learning literature.  These are all approaches I’ve built into my teaching over the years and which I think would stand me in good stead in an online classroom.

When I think about what I would need to change, what comes to mind are some of my habits, rather than my approaches.  I love to build learning experiences along with the students.  I like to get them involved in planning what we are going to do.  I  enjoy spontaneity and seizing the serendipitous.  From my recent reading about online teaching, it appears these habits I’ll need to dampen, if not abandon as online teaching seems to require that a course is fully and completely “packaged” before it starts.

What skills and strategies might you improve or expand upon in order to best support student learning in a blended or online environment?

Here I definitely can come up with a To Learn list.  Thanks to an elective typing class I took in 8th grade, I am a typing whiz.  I may not be able to make a free throw or bat .500 but I sure can burn up a keyboard.  I’m online all the time and totally comfortable communicating in writing.  The area where I’d like to learn more is in creating multimedia.  In particular, I want to become more skillful at editing audio and video files.  Also, I’d like to become a better photographer.  For that, I need to learn more about both the technical aspects as well as how to frame and compose a photo.  If I take 100 pictures, I’m lucky to get one good photograph; the rest are snapshots at best.  Acquiring such skills would enable me to create more effective learning resources to support any courses I might teach.  And heck, they’d be useful in my personal life as well.

Online or Off, Is Good Teaching Good Teaching?

Too often, my right arm suffers from DSD—Dr. Strangelove Syndrome.  Involuntarily, it just goes flying up into the air.  Fortunately, it takes not the form of a Nazi salute.  Instead, it eagerly volunteers, “I will.  I will.”  The next thing I know, I’ve accepted yet another assignment or job and my task list grows like Pinocchio’s nose.

Signing up for Leading Edge Certification is a recent example.  According to its web site, Leading Edge Certification is a “national alliance of nonprofits, universities and educational agencies that provides educators a demonstrable way to show they understand how technology changes teaching and learning.”  I signed up for several reasons.

•  TICAL is a member of the Leading Edge Alliance; I continue to work closely with TICAL.
• The Alliance is developing a certification path for school administrators; I’d enjoy coaching them along that path.
• I love teaching and I’m fascinated by—and sometimes skeptical of—online, virtual approaches to teaching.
• I love learning new things and staying abreast in my field.
• Seems like it would be fun.

This past Wednesday, my cohort had its initial and, I understand, only face-to-face meeting.  We spent the day with expert online instructors who provided both an overview of the course content and practical tips based on their personal experience doing what we’ll be learning to do: deliver online education, and training others to do so.  I had not really known what to expect; I just signed up “on faith.”  Now that I see what I’ve gotten myself into, I’m both excited and a bit anxious.  The curriculum, activities, and resources look fantastic.  Where I’m going to carve out the time to actually do what’s required is another matter.  I suspect faith will be the operative word here as well.

One of the things we did on Wednesday was to take a couple of self-assessment questionnaires that purport to rate our readiness to be online learners and online teachers.  I did OK on both, but not great.  My downfall was in the areas of self-discipline and habits of timeliness.   The assessments assume that a person who self-reports as getting distracted, having trouble juggling multiple demands, and inconsistent about meeting timelines will not do well as an online learner or instructor.  On the surface, that seems to make sense.  On the other hand, in my case, I’ve found that when I have firm, non-negotiable deadlines, I meet them.  My tendencies to procrastinate or to let myself get sidetracked are best checked by knowing that if I’m late for the flight, it’s gonna take off without me.  So for this sloth-like fly, the way this course is structured with “adaptive release” of the assignments and clear, no-nonsense deadlines may be a recipe for success.

What’s my highest priority at this point?  I really want to learn how people experienced as online instructors contrast online teaching with teaching in a traditional, face-to-face classroom.  I believe that “good teaching is good teaching,” but I also know that you always have to adapt your teaching methods not only to your students but to the context and environment in which you are teaching.   Like any teaching situation, the online environment poses its own challenges.  How do you read body language when you can’t see the bodies?  How do you give a virtual pat on the back?  How do you deliver the “gimlet eye?”  As an eager, idealistic online instructor, how do you avoid “online teacher burnout?”  I’m going to be on the lookout for skills, strategies, and tools that can help answer those questions.

Who are they kidding?

I’m taking a tangent from my usual pronouncements about things educational.  This post is about hospitals and cemeteries.  Yikes.

So the Super Bowl has just ended, and we had a moment of local commercials.  From one, I learned that Catholic Healthcare West (CHW), the owner of a hospital near my home,  has changed its name.  CHW changed its name to Dignity Health.  My immediate reaction was, “Gimme a break.” (Really, it was stick finger down throat.)   The new name does nothing for me.  I’m sure the corporation did not change its name without paying a consulting agency many, many dollars and gathering opinions from numerous focus groups, but I think they goofed.  I don’t like it.  Sounds like end-of-life care.  I can understand they needed to drop the “Catholic” in order not to put off anyone (we can still spell “politically correct,” right?).  Clearly, the corporate goal is to have more and more hospitals everywhere, and ideally have everyone who needs a hospital come to a Dignity hospital, but that goal does not make me happy.

As I reacted to the “We’re now Dignity Health” message, I thought of the equally annoying, to me, revised appellation of what was once Los Osos Valley Cemetery.  Now, it’s “Simple Tribute” Los Osos.  As I said earlier, “Gimme a break.”