| Educause: 2002: 2003 : 2004 | Distance Teaching & Learning: 2004 |
Educause 2003 Summary: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday
Key presentations:
Wednesday: The Impact of Online and Mixed-Mode Courses on Faculty, Students,
and Universities ;
Thursday: Math Lab in 8am session;
Friday: Chandler
Key themes: digital repositories, knowledge sharing across boundaries
All
materials
Wednesday, 10:30: Strategies for Sharing Learning Content and University Knowledge Across Departments and Campus Boundaries
This presentation showed a progressive approach to changing the knowledge structure in Higher Ed from silos of knowledge to a blending of information across departments. The blending of knowledge would eventually extend out of the academy and into industry. This blending of knowledge seems supported by the growing cross-discipline fields -- bio infomatics for example.
DSpace at Ohio State was shown. PowerPoint has many details.
An exciting knowledge bank idea was presented. When materials are stored with too much context they become less reusable. However, the natural inclination of people is to pad materials with context. The Menagerie Project was presented. Modules are stored in XML with an XSLT. Using different XSLTs the same material can be presented with different look-and-feels. In addition, they use 'user profiling' to guide the user through the material based on their learning style -- visual, aural, read-write, etc.
Hopefully their full presentation will be online soon.
In a nutshell: cool idea, seems beyond the reach
of mere mortals
Wednesday, 11:40: Web-Based Prelaboratory and Postlaboratory Activities for General Chemistry
http://chemelements.ucdavis.edu/CHE2C
This presentation showed some nice activities for a hybrid Chemistry course. Online activities handled common pre-lab and post-lab activities. The TAs time was freed up for more 1-on-1 help and less lab time was spent on prep or training on equipment.
pre-lab
post-lab
In a nutshell: an explemplary use of technology in a traditional lab course
Wednesday, 2:15: Assessment Techniques for Online Courses
Defined assessment for their uses:
- to improve quality of student learning
- not to provide evidence for evaluating or grading
- feedback mechanism about content, what's going on, how well learning
- better prepare students for grading
Broke students into 4 distinct types and tailored assessments to match those
| Novice Content Novice Technology |
Novice Content Expert Technology |
| Expert Content Novice Technology |
Expert Content Expert Technology |
Examples
NC NT :: lower division class, adult students not familiar with online learning
EX NT :: master's level class, adult students not familiar with online learning
NC ET :: lower division class, adult students in technology fields
EC ET :: master's level class, adult students in technology fields
In a nutshell: an interesting approach to online assessments, not what I expected, could be a lot of work to make multiple assessment paths for each student type
Wednesday, 3:50: The Impact of Online and Mixed-Mode Courses on Faculty, Students, and Universities
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~rite/
Very interesting study at interesting university. UC Florida born in 1963! Has 42,000 students now. Growing rapidly. Started online courses in 1996 and started collecting evaluation data from day 1!
3 modes of courses
Faculty Development
They have SO MUCH data. They presented some great decision tree breakdowns of data. Very interesting. Need to see PPT to get it all.
Surprising results - as students got younger, they were less satisfied with a W course. Older students, boomer and older were 55-63% satisfied with W course. While millenials were only 25% satisfied
In a nutshell: interesting results over 6+ years, older students like online learning better
Thursday, 8:10: Redistributed Learning: Integrating Distance Learning Resources with Multiple Instructional Sites
http://learn.ccv.vsc.edu/educause03/ccv.htm
Interesting college with no central campus - distributed over 12 sites. They offer hybrid courses with video conferencing and CMS.
My main interest was an online Math Lab which provided support to their math curriculum. I have contacted the coordinator who runs the lab to find out more about it. They use discussion boards, virtual classroom, learning objects and other online resources to support their students.
In a nutshell: strange college but the math lab is worth exploring
Thursday, 11:45: E-Learning Objects: The Value of SCORM and MPEG-7 Packaging for Digital Media Assets
http://ecommerce.marist.edu/educause/MaristEducause.htm
elearning objects
metadata (SCORM)
SCORM is a reference model, MPEG-7 are metadata specs for multimedia
metadata needs to be
- auto-generated
- harvested
- or human-created
and used by
- end user
- metadata creater/manager
-application
SCORM reference model
- vision and manifest defines learning behavior
Repositories of objects
In a nutshell: great way of organizing, task of creating metadata (tagging) is daunting
Thursday, 2:20: Multipronged Approach to Assessment and Evaluation of Instructional Technology
Nothing surprising or exciting here. Several instructional technology cases were presented.
"Blended courses work but they aren't for everyone"
- that's a surprise.
Used 'Mallard' software in analog circuits course. Immediate feedback on homework
favored by students, can resubmit incorrect answers up to 10 times, homework
grades higher for group that used software - surprise? Mallard students did
better on midterms but no overall improvement in performance between 'paper'
and Mallard groups. Software showed to reduce time (TA grading, faculty grading)
so is a cost benefit to institution.
Last was a study on Blackboard infusion to curriculum. Nothing surprising. Faculty use and motivations are what you'd expect.
In a nutshell: a sleeper, the powerpoint file was enough to get since it was read to us
Thursday, 3:45: Lessons Learned from a Two-Year Institutional Assessment of Educational Technology
http://depts.washington.edu/pettt/
Very smart study done by some enthusiastic people.
Quantitative - faculty survey, student survey, with correlated questions
Qualitative - focus groups of faculty and students
students wanted consistency of technology use across curriculum
- expected course site with syllabi, outlines/lecture notes
they also wanted tech training in classroom
students also welcomed a tech skills assessment -- assess don't assume
they don't have a CMS!
much data is available in report, still disseminating to their campus community
In a nutshell: most lively presentation, data was interesting, waiting for PPT file
Friday, 8:10: Authority of Consensus: Next-Generation Course Management System Features
http://www.educause.edu/nlii/meetings/nlii032/
NLII focus on CMS looks to be a rigorous look at CMSes and what they could do. The session seemed like a NLII promo and an audience listing of what we wish CMSes could do. Why isn't blackboard or webCT present?
In a nutshell: why can't big CMSes do these things? it's too expensive to change them when their fundamental architecure is flawed.
Friday, 9:30: Chandler: A Collaborative Open Source Initiative for Higher Education
What is Chandler?
Heart of Chandler
Chander 1.0 (Canoga)
- Q4 2004
- baseline feature set and some "cool" features
-targeting info-centric users
Chandler 2.0 (Westwood)
- Q3 2005
- institutional adoption - faculty, staff, students
In a nutshell: the holy grail for higher ed PIMs!