Work

I’ve had the opportunity to work with leaders from various faculties, to develop work plans for developing communication/support, inventory, and procedures that are involved in providing and integrating learning technologies into courses. There are a few themes that keep coming up (paraphrased):

1. we need to be led by pedagogy, not technology
2. our tools shape what we do with them
3. campus platforms are designed for the institution, not the people within
4. our processes for requesting/implementing new tools can be prohibitive and stifling

Looking at Brightspace, our campus LMS¹ is automatically available for use by every course, in every faculty. If a course exists in Peoplesoft, the instructor is able to activate a course site in Brightspace and use it for whatever they need. The courses are customized slightly for each faculty (some navigation tweaks, some default content, maybe some grade schemas…). The instructor then builds the course - adding course content, setting up discussion boards, gradebook, assignments.² Then, typically on the first week of the semester, the instructor activates the course and students can access it.

Our Learning Technologies Advisory Committee met last week to start to brainstorm what the current issues on campus are, with respect to learning technologies. One of the key themes was a need to systematically evaluate learning technologies to make sure we understand what people need to do, and how the tools/supports/resources can best meet those needs. After the meeting, I was asked to pull together some links to resources that can be used to help evaluate learning technologies from an instructor/admin and student perspective.

At the COHERE 2019 conference, the informal theme this morning was on modularizing and disaggregating¹ - breaking out of the traditional 4-year degree program, breaking away from the semester-long course, enabling access to content and resources and people outside of the traditional contexts. Dr. Reid opened the conference with a description of this shift, and in reframing how we as an institution think about online experiences - that they aren’t “less than” traditional face-to-face experiences. They can be liberating, enabling, enhancing, amplifying. Dr. Karen Willcox gave the opening keynote, describing projects she’s worked on through MIT in an effort to make sense of the complexities of programs and courses through mapping the curriculum. This is something we have a lot of experience with at the University of Calgary, having built a pretty powerful curriculum mapping application that is already being used across the university. Her application of network graph visualization looks like it provides an interesting interface to exploring the curriculum data once it’s been collected.

After quickly (and I mean QUICKLY - it took less than half an hour’s worth of fiddling around with code while sitting on the couch watching garbage TV) building a way for people to markup chunks of text using the TIDraw.net -powered digital whiteboards, I wanted to test it in action. It’s one thing to try it on my laptop or iPad, but digital ink is a different experience on a 50" display. The classrooms have been so busy this semester, I didn’t get a chance to try it until this morning.

We hosted a “TI Instructors Gathering” this morning, where we invite folks who are teaching in the Taylor Institute to come together to share their experiences and we can learn from them about how they use the spaces and technologies. This gathering was predominantly Languages profs - french/spanish/russian/french - and we got to talking about how they’d like to be able to have their students break into groups and use the “Collaboration Carts” to mark up passages of text. That’s not a thing that’s readily done - there are web-based text annotation tools, but not ones that are based on ink. Having students sketch on text is a useful activity, pedagogically, and so I got to thinking…

Robert Kelly has been hosting his Design Thinking course in the TI for the past several years.

I was away over the summer, so missed the latest instance of the course. Giant lobsters! Thankfully, they documented the course and published a video of the shenanigans.

It’s a bit of a challenge when the course is going on, because it’s so profoundly unconventional. Classroom? Classrooms? Nah. Buildings! But - it’s been amazing to see what the participants do, how they work together, and what they build.

Several interesting points by Joshua Kim, on the nature of innovation in higher ed.

A focus on institutional learning innovation may involve the decision that all new classroom spaces and renovations will result in active learning spaces, with flat floors and moveable furniture. Or it may revolve around an initiative to embed academic librarians with professors throughout the course development, teaching, and redesign process.

…

One example comes from the world of online learning. On its own, an online learning program is not all that innovative. What is innovative is when the school tries to figure out how to bring the lessons, methods, techniques, and resources from online courses to residential courses.MOOCs are not innovative. What would be innovative is to leverage what is learned from MOOCs to improve traditional online and residential courses.

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4 interesting articles in the most recent issue, in no particular order:

McDavid, L., Carleton Parker, L., Burgess, W., Robertshaw, B., & Doan, T. (2018). The Combined Effect of Learning Space and Faculty Self-Efficacy to use Student-Centered Practices on Teaching Experiences and Student Engagement. Journal of Learning Spaces, 7(1). Retrieved from http://libjournal.uncg.edu/jls/article/view/1597

Instructors who teach well in one kind of learning space don’t magically translate that ability into teaching well in another kind of learning space. They need support/PD/consultation when moving, say, from a lecture hall to a flexible learning space (or vice versa?).

I was asked to pull together some links to resources that can be used to get started in evaluating learning spaces - how are they used? how effective are they? what kinds of interactions are enabled by the spaces? etc. There are some great resources - best to share the list here rather than just in an email…

EDUCAUSE has some really fantastic resources on evaluating learning spaces. They have a book full of concepts and case studies:

I’ve been involved with edtech at my institution for… awhile. We’ve worked on many projects over the years, and one of the common problems has been related to authoring, publishing, and managing videos. It’s been left as an exercise to be solved by every individual, which has resulted in people publishing content in various platforms all over the internet.

Which is fine, until you realize that in doing so, they’re hosting university-related content for courses along with their dog videos and vacation videos and whatever else, in individual YouTube/Facebook/Vimeo accounts. And those platforms are injecting their own tracking and surveillance software to monitor who watches what and then connect it with their advertising platforms so you can be force-fed ads and algorithmic recommendations based on what you’ve watched ¹. And to vigorously defend the copyright claims of corporations by taking down legitimate academic content that legally contains clips of commercial media ².

As a university, we’ve had two major issues related to the use of the campus learning management system.

1. Sharing of personal information with third party services/companies¹
2. Copyright of materials uploaded to courses, and subsequently downloaded and shared with third parties as per above. Copyright compliance is a pretty big deal at Canadian universities.

We needed a way to provide a reminder of university policies, to provide guidance about what is allowed and not allowed, and to document that people have acknowledged these.

It’s not a SPLOT per se, because it’s intended for use in face-to-face learning rather than online. SPLF2FT?

At the Taylor Institute, we have a bunch of active learning classrooms - we call them “learning studios”. They’re designed to enable active group collaboration, through the design of the rooms, to the furniture available, and the technology provided. There are 50" touch-enabled “collaboration carts” ¹ that can run almost any web-based tool.

One of the more common uses of the displays involves digital whiteboards. Each display has an actual physical whiteboard beside it, but the digital whiteboard integrates with the AV systems that run the room. Which means we can do things like say “hey - group 1 is doing some cool stuff. check it out!” and push their display to the projector (or even to all other displays in the room) for everyone to see. Much harder to do with traditional whiteboards.