Work

I’d explored podcasting several years ago - looking at educational uses of podcasts and making my first attempt back in 2004 when the term was first coined - but, everything about “podcasting” has changed since then, and the term has become a genericized label for “I want to share some media”. We’ve been getting requests from instructors who are interested in using podcasts (or “podcasts”) in their courses - whether as part of the instructional materials, or for students to produce media as part of their learning. So. Here are some current resources and links. I’ll update this page with any suggestions.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and learning about online exam proctoring, to prepare to act as the “business lead” for an online exam proctoring project that ramps up this week, aiming to have a pilot in the summer and a tool available for use (as a last resort) in the fall.

It’s a complicated solution to a complicated problem. Not all courses are able to adjust assessment away from high stakes exams, and those don’t translate online in all contexts without some form of proctoring. Yes, it’s better to redesign a course to use more interesting forms of assessment. Yes, high stakes exams are problematic on their own. Yes, the concept of surveillance makes me twitch. And the idea of pushing that surveillance into our students’ homes is the stuff of privacy nightmares.

When we talk about processes, there’s a balance between traditional Project™ “waterfall” approaches - dependencies, critical paths, charters, etc. and what happens in practice - rapid prototypes, DIY experimentation, communities and networks, and emergent designs to support practice.

Now that the Winter 2020 semester is wrapping up, I took a look at the stats for our various online learning technologies to see what effects the whole COVID-19 Online Pivot had on our technology stack. Each platform has their own sets of data to describe activity within the software, and they’re not directly comparable. A simple “logins” comparison wouldn’t capture activity in some platforms where only instructors login and students are anonymous (like YuJa). I’m just looking for interesting spikes or patterns in the data to see if/how people in our blended and online courses have shifted their use of these applications.

I was interviewed by John Dujay (from HR Reporter) for an article on digital credentials and blockchain applications in higher education.

Micro-credentials indicating courses and competencies that have been successfully completed are also offered by the University of Calgary, in the form of badges.

“On our badges platform, [students] log in with their UCalgary email address and it’ll show any of these recognitions that they’ve accumulated over their career as students,” says D’Arcy Norman, manager of technology integration at the institution.

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Since we launched Zoom as a campus platform on March 13, 2020, there have been 36,439 meetings conducted by our community. And 3 reports of ZoomBombing (so far). There may have been others, but we have only 3 reported cases at this time¹.

We have spent much time and effort adjusting the configuration of our campus Zoom account to address security and privacy concerns. Default settings for meetings have been modified, making it more difficult (if not impossible) for intruders to barge into a meeting/class and ZoomBomb it. But, since making those changes, we’ve still had reports of ZoomBombing in classes - which should be impossible if we were looking at a simple “external people finding unsecured meetings for laughs” situation.

I drafted this as a briefing doc to help with decision making related to how we handle online exams for courses that are now being conducted remotely as a result COVID-19. It was circulated for feedback, so it may be useful to have a copy for reference here. I wrote it based on information gathered from the various vendors’ websites, and from conversations with colleagues. The doc was intended to give a high level overview of online exam proctoring software without delving into technical aspects. I’m intentionally not linking to vendor websites so this doesn’t turn into a sales pitch.

We’ve been getting questions from instructors who would like to use Zoom to conduct online exam proctoring, for up to 800 students. I mean. Golly. That’s just not a great idea. Aside from the philosophical issues involved with using a videoconferencing tool to surveil students during an exam, there are technical issues. How would 800 streams of video be recorded? How would that be viewed?

Also. The video feed isn’t necessary trustworthy. Not quite to the level of Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun, but definitely something that shouldn’t be trusted 100%. Even if the software was able to fully lock out the feature, there’s nothing to prevent someone from using a doctored input as the source for their video. At the simplest level, here’s what’s possible directly within Zoom:

An article by Mehreen Kasana on Input Magazine made the rounds, talking about the “attention tracking” feature in Zoom, and how creepy and invasive it is.

It is. But it can also be disabled for any account - and if disabled for a campus account, it can also be locked out for all users.

With the COVID pandemic still picking up steam in North America, all universities had to make a rapid shift to online teaching as campuses were closed. Mine was no different. We’d been talking about possible pandemic planning since mid-february, but at the time it was all speculative and seemingly so far in the future. Things started to get real around March 11, 2020. There were local cases of COVID (although all travel-related), and it was time to start moving classes online - or cancel the semester outright. The impact on students of cancelling a semester would be severe, so all efforts went into avoiding that. We would shift courses online as classrooms were closed.

One of the major projects our team¹ has been working on for the last couple of years is the University of Calgary’s Curriculum Links application.

From the project website overview:

It’s an application that supports curriculum design and review - an entire program can be designed before it’s submitted to a faculty for approval, allowing for pre-flight testing of the program. Do all of the claimed program-level outcomes get incorporated appropriately? Are there gaps? Redundancies? Is every course trying to teach one outcome, but none are teaching another one?

In our Learning Technologies Advisory Committee Processes Working Group meeting this week, we were discussing how instructors access new tools, or enable existing tools. Much of the discussion was about communication, rather than the processes directly - instructors aren’t aware of the tools that are available, or what they can be used for, so they ask for new tools.

We have several applications available as the core online learning platforms at UCalgary: