I plan to use LiveBinder as an open resource for FW 540, Vertebrate Population Dynamics.  This tool gives me a place to start presenting online resources for students, from helpful Khan Academy video bits to links to tutorials on using Excel.  I can embed my own jing files in this notebook also, demonstrating spreadsheet tricks needed for laboratory exercises.  Students will be encouraged to add their own links and materials, from interesting websites, links to documents that they found helpful, or to upload their own content.  From my preliminary explorations of this tool, I believe that not only can all students access it to add things to it, but the URL can be kept active so it ends up being a resource that they can collectively keep after the course is over.  At least, that’s my understanding of this tool.  Comments, anyone?  Am I right about that??  I am also considering having subgroups of students work together on a notebook in which they will keep their group laboratory assignments, so they can collaborate on creating the models and exploring the questions I give to guide them in exploring model behavior and in its interpretation.  I would like students to just have to become familiar with using ONE tool, so I am hoping LiveBinder will work for both.  Another option is Zoho Notebook, has anyone played with that one much?  I found for myself that LiveBinder was more intuitive, but that may not be true from the students’ perspective…

Tags: collaborate, learning tools, LiveBinder

Teaching a course which focuses on promoting health and wellness I found the search tools very helpful, especially the NPR link. This was a great resource for audio and text materials. One of the topics my course focuses on is the idea of energy balance for weight management. I was able to find a lot of recent NPR stories from a variety of different programs which related to this topic. One thing that was really appealing to this was that the stories covered a variety of populations (young, old, different cultures and ethnicity). One challenge I have had in the past with online course instruction is that there is more diversity in the background of the students enrolled in my course. Although health and wellness impacts us all, often it can be a challenge to provide relevant information all the time to everyone. Using NPR is way that I may be able to increase the relatability of the course content to a broader population. It’s at least worth a try!

Tags: "real world" content, NPR as a resource, relating to students

I have yet to experience teaching an online course, so comparing traditional lecture to an online course is beyond my experience.  For both venues I imagine one of the first priorities is to spark student interest and clearly define activities that encourage the student to engage the course content.  I like to believe that my own enthusiasm when describing the biological context (I teach biology courses) of a given subject, and how that subject relates to the student perspective, is one of the most significant ingredients to sparking student interest.  Given the tools available for inserting audio and video into presentations, I should be able to convey online, as I do during face-to-face interactions, my enthusiasm for the subject.

Writing activities that are clearly defined seems independent of the course venue, but providing feedback to students whom are struggling with a given activity seems to me to possibly be the most difficult without face to face interaction.  I find face to face interaction helpful in working through a problem with a student and in trying to understand what concept a student is missing, or how a student is thinking.  Google-hangout or skype might help with face-to-face, online interaction, so this may not be an issue.  Thus, I imagine that the main ingredients of a good course, sparking interest and clearly defined activities, can be achieved equally well for both online and a traditional lecture.Sp

Tags: F2F vs online education

I have only taught online courses, so it is hard for me compare and contrast F2F and Online Teaching and Learning. One thing I have been wondering about is Teaching and Learning during Office Hours.

I do not offer traditional office hours for my online courses. Instead I respond to students’ questions through emails within 24 hours. This seems to work out well for most of my online GIScience students as they tend to be independent and comfortable with technology.

But in some cases, on-campus students who self-identify as doing better in a F2F learning environment end up taking my online courses because of their schedules. These students would probably benefit from more than just email interaction.

If the student struggles with email interaction due to poor writing skills, should I encourage them to improve their writing skills?

Learning how to write a good email is a good career skill. For an example, students could learn that to help write a good email they could:

“Start with a subject line that clearly labels the topic, and maybe includes a status category [Info], [Action], [Time Sens] [Low Priority]. Use crisp, muddle-free sentences. If the email has to be longer than five sentences, make sure the first provides the basic reason for writing. Avoid strange fonts and colors.” – The Email Charter (http://www.emailcharter.org/)

Are there other reasons why a student would struggle with email interaction versus F2F interaction for Office Hours? Could they be more visual and want to see things drawn out/shown? What other technologies would be useful for that? For example, with GIS software, would it be better to create a nice video to step them through a series of actions they would need to take to install the GIS software, rather than providing a list of steps?

[I think so, as I have enjoyed the tutorial videos for the "Developing an online class" course.]

Tags: education, f2f, online

Currently,  I am translating my on-campus version of FW315 (Ichthyology) for online delivery, and am certainly running into some challenges!  Chief among these is the fact that by necessity, this course is information-dense, and requires students to comprehend a set of foundational information that they need to succeed into subsequent courses in the curriculum, such as fish ecology, fish physiology, or my own 400/500-level Advanced Ichthyology course.   While this doesn’t prevent me from including some degree of synthesis and analysis in my course, it does mean that some of the learning objectives focus on lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy . . . if a student fails to comprehend the basic mechanisms of respiration and buoyancy in fishes in FW315, they’re going to struggle when they reach the 400-level physiology courses and need to apply that knowledge!

The necessary information-density of the course presents something of a problem for online delivery, because I find that the online format supports analytical and evaluative goals and assessments (discussions, projects and so forth) better than it does lower-level information delivery.  I am working to include a variety of discussion-board topics and activities that will help students engage with the information presented in the course, such as an opportunity to place fishes that live near them geographically in the context of the evolutionary family-tree of all fishes.   This is a good application/analysis-level assessment that provides some reward for digesting and comprehending a set of information-dense lectures on fish classification.    Even so, it doesn’t circumvent the need to present a ton of data and facts to the students that they’ll need to understand and apply in this and subsequent courses.

Even in my on-campus course, I sometimes feel like I’m turning a firehose of information on my students . . . . we cover evolution, ecology, behavior, physiology, reproduction, anatomy, conservation and other topics all within a single quarter’s course, with a taxonomic scope spanning more than 30,000 species!    I am hoping that I’ll still be able to teach this information effectively in an online format, but doing so still a involves a lot of reading assignments and recording of lectures, neither of which really play to the strengths of the online format (such as facilitating interactions between students).   Hopefully the course will still meet its objectives and prepare the students for higher-level classes that more closely target the pinnacle of Bloom’s pyramid!

What are we doing? Why are we here?

Learning objectives for blog assignments in our workshop:

• To use social media to reflect on learning and to connect with a real audience
  • Posting your blog entries is one part of what you’ll do here, but commenting on others’ posts is just as important. Who knows? You may also see comments from visiting readers, such as colleagues here at OSU, colleagues from other campuses, authors we’re discussing, or tween pop star Justin Bieber. (Well, it could happen … this is a public blog!)
  • To gain experience with a common social media tool and try something that you might use in your class
• To share artifacts created for your courses
  • Collaboration = Inspiration!
• To learn from each other’s reflections and creations
  • Two heads are better than one!

How often do you need to blog?

• Participants will need to post two original blog entries during this six-week professional development. However, you are welcome and encouraged to post and comment on each other’s posts more often.

What are these categories and tags all about?

• Categories have been created for you and are based on the learning outcomes for our training. (Each category name is an abbreviation of a learning outcome.) Each post you write should relate to at least one of our class categories. Placing posts within categories is an organizational strategy, but it’s also a form of metacognitive reflection.
• Tags are up to you. Try to come up with at least three tags for each post. Tagging a blog post is kind of like creating an index; it helps you and others find information in the blog.

How long do blog posts need to be?

• Use as many words as you need to get your idea across. Keep in mind that blogs are not dissertations. Most blog posts are between 100 and 500 words. This one is about 300, which makes this a good place to stop!

Tags: community, connection, getting started, welcome