UNC TLT Conference, Day Two

And here are my notes from Day Two of the UNC-TLT conference.

One note about the hotel, the Raleigh Hilton, and a surreal moment today. I was in the washroom during lunch and heard the Rolling Stones's "Paint It Black" on the Muzak system - a version played by a Mariachi band.

Developing Online Primary Source Specialists
Presenters: Elizabeth Coulter, Pamela Johnson

This session presented an overview of Adventures of the American Mind, a pilot project, just completing its seventh year, that was funded by the Library of Congress and was designed to introduce the use of primary resources in K-12 classrooms. The program went through different iterations. Initially, they gave laptops to K-12 teachers in exchange for taking a graduate level course and they had about 120 teachers that went through the program. More recently, to broaden the impact, they produced a series of professional development workshops, dubbed PROPEL, for media specialists at schools and worked with them to come up with activities the media specialists could do in cooperation with teachers in their local schools. They're also producing a Flash-based SCORM compliant module on using primary resources. More information is at http://www.aamonline.org/.

e-Texts
Presenters: Darwin Dennison, Michael Worthington, Catherine Fountain, Elizabeth Deifell

This panel concerned the experiences of some faculty in producing electronic textbooks. Darwin Dennison at UNC-Wilmington developed a "Dine Healthy" textbook with nine chapters and a 72 page curriculum guide that could be used for a short Continuing Education class or as a supplement to a health or PE course; the etext also included an application to analyze student diet and physical activity and presentation slides from the etext can be used with the Video iPod. Worthington's ebook was tied to the ECU's freshman seminar and the freshman reading at the university; it's in HTML format so it could be used in Blackboard. (They also saw it as a way to acclimate students to using Blackboard.) Fountain at Appalachian State is using a web-based e-textbook that's under development for a fourth-semester Spanish course; it uses authentic language material from and information about the local Spanish-speaking community as a basis. The textbooks is free and includes multimedia.

http://www.appstate.edu/~fountainca/1050/

The panel discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of the ebooks. They liked the fact they could include links and multimedia information in the texts, that the etexts can be ADA compliant, and that they are inexpensive to distribute. Some of the issues highlighted included the dependence on an electronic device to work with the material, difficulty for students to annotate or highlight materials; lack of standards for ebook formats; and difficulty in reading lengthy material on a computer or device. There were still several students in all the classes that wanted to print out the pages primarily for highlighting or taking notes, but they were surprised at how many read all of the material online (over 50% in the case of ECU). They noted that they thought the larger trend was to move towards PDF format since it allowed for highlighting and taking notes, in addition to links and multimedia, and could be formatted for viewing on-screen or printed, if needed.

I also had a brief conversation with one of the presenters after the session about the difficulties in formatting etexts for different output devices - the ways that students use computers, the Web, iPods and cellphones and the different displays used on the devices require that the material not only has to be reformatted for the devices, but that the writing style has to change as well.

Effective, Efficient, Easy: Managing the Teaching with Technology Workload
Presenters: Linda Lisowski, Joseph Lisowski

In this session, two faculty members from different discipline areas - English Literature and Special Education - presented about methods they use to minimize the time required to manage their course. Many of the methods they're using - planning the course schedule ahead of time in detail, preloading content into the course before it starts, using the automated grading features of Bb, and getting students to do peer review of their work on papers or in discussion boards - are one's we commonly advocate at Duke when working with faculty.

Social and Emotional Presence in Online Learning
Presenters: Ginny Sconiers, Robert Hambrick, Martha Cleveland-Innes

This presentation looked at a study on social presence in distance courses conducted at East Carolina University. Using a defintion of social presence as a "sense of being and belonging in the course", they recruited faculty teaching distance courses to carry out the study. The faculty members received training about some of the research in online social presence and ideas for implementing activities for their course. The faculty and students were surveyed as the course progressed to see the impact of these activities.

Basically, the researchers concentrated on practices in four areas. In self presentation, faculty members sent out initial contact letters and created an instructor bio on their course site; they were also encouraged to use "ice breakers" when starting the course and to have the students create profiles about themselves and their interests. For creating a safe environment, the instructors were encouraged to set expectations for the course, publish rules about interactions and behaviors in the course, and a "pre-lesson" to get the students familiar with how the course worked. The instructors also made the students aware of contingency plans if some part of the technology didn't work for an activity or assignment. The instructors were also encouraged to do activities that would get the students interacting with each other - having an informal "coffee shop" for discussions, using group activities and having students act as moderators and do peer review.

Part of the presentation dealt with efforts by North Carolina State University's Delta program as they put some of the ideas into practice with distance courses they designed with faculty. One of the items they developed with a kind of "course preview" that included information about the course, the expectations for the work and a five minute video introduction from the faculty member.

One of the presenters (who is in Canada) was supposed to be brought in through Elluminate video conferencing software, but there were problems with the network connection.

Generally, the principles being used in the study would probably work well in a face to face or blended course to increase student participation and engagement in the class.

Plagiarism Police or Teaching Tool?: Building Research-Based Writing Connections with Turnitin.com
Presenters: Amy Martin

This session looked at how Western Carolina University instructors use Turnitin.com as a teaching tool with student writing. The presenter acts in an instructional technology support role, teaching workshops on how to use the software. She found that many instructors don't know many of the capabilities of the software and were just using it to turn in final drafts of papers. She encourages them to get the students to set up turnitin.com accounts and use the originality reports on drafts of a paper with students to discuss how they're using sources. She also noted some of the legal issues in using the software since turnitin keeps all of the papers in their database. (They offer a template letter at the site that can be used by instructors to get permission to upload student papers.) She encountered some faculty who use it without telling students, which would be a FERPA issue. During the main part of the presentation, she demonstrated what different drafts of a sample paper might look like at the site.

Around the World of Learning Objects in 30 Minutes: A Tour of Discipline-Based Collections
Presenters: Hilarie Nickerson
Handout from session (Word format)

The presenter in this session put together a list of discipline based repositories of learning objects; she demonstrated Merlot and other sites and discussed some ways to more effectively search for materials at the sites. She noted that she didn't find any specifically for the Humanities; many of those in the Sciences have had major grant funding to get started and there haven't been similar efforts in the Humanities.

Poster Session
Interactive Models of Tonal Pitch Space
Presenters: J. Williams
A faculty member at UNC-G has developed a set of web-based learning tools that let students explore tonal music; it uses theories presented in the text "Tonal Pitch Space" to represent sounds visually.
website for the project

Essential Collaborations for Large Enrollment Course Redesign
Presenters: Dorothy Muller, Dorothy Clayton, David White, Joyce Newman, Jennifer Raby, Larry Bolen, Kathryn Weegar
PowerPoint presentation from session

This panel discussion looked at a redesign of two large enrollment courses at East Carolina University in Psychology (230 students) and Health Sciences (1200 students). The Psychology course was taught by one instructor and student assistants; the Health course used four instructors and included online assessments and multimedia. The Health course used a blended approach using lectures delivered via Blackboard and class meetings once per week for each section. The redesign was a team effort and included faculty who had previously taught online; they surveyed the students and observed increased satisfaction with the course after the redesign. The Psychology course included more "break out" sessions with smaller groups of students.