We have an open position in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, as part of my team. I think it’s a pretty great place to work, with an amazing group of people, doing important work that has the potential to transform the university and improve the teaching and learning experience for the entire campus community.

This is a Learning Technologies Specialist position, with a strong focus on “program innovation” - working with instructors on the development and implementation of new academic programs, providing consultation and expertise on the design and integration of learning technologies to support the pedagogical goals of each program. It’s a full-time, regular position (not a term position), and is a great opportunity to work with the entire team at the TI.

I’d always intended for these posts to be part of some kind of reflective practice, but they’re basically just “holy crap we have a lot of stuff going on” snapshots. Maybe that’s part of it. Anyway.

⚙️ Work

I was interviewed by Katie Deighton, for an article on online exam proctoring in the Wall Street Journal’s Experience Report. I’ve been very-occasionally interviewed by journalists, mostly for technology-related topics.

🤔 PhD

This week, I’ve been focussing on playing with transcript data. I set it up as fancy DIY wallpaper in my home office and did a few passes through it to try to identify themes. After a prompt from Paul, I realized I’m basically just LARPing NVivo. So I brought the transcripts into NVivo 12 and started coding them there. Files and Cases and Nodes galore. The interface is awkward as hell. So. Many. Clicks. But it’s working nicely… The command-slash shortcut speeds it up a bit.

I was interviewed recently (via email) by Katie Deighton, from the Wall Street Journal’s Experience Report. She was writing an article on online exam proctoring, and wanted to follow up with me about the categories of proctoring software and to get a university learning technologies perspective.

The article was published yesterday. I’m officially a critic. She wasn’t able to use the entire response, so I’m putting the rest of it here:

Katie:

What are the biggest challenges that online proctoring companies face when it comes to both reputation and customer acquisition? How big of a problem is the user experience, when compared to issues surrounding privacy, security, etc.?

⚙️ Work

Lots of work going on to prepare for scenarios for F2021. Lots of work with the hiring committee, filling an opening for a new position on the team. Lots of committee work, with a focus on how to better handle 3rd party tools and integration with existing learning technologies…

🤔 PhD

I’m doing a PhD on experiencing teaching and learning as a game. I was about to do some qualitative coding of transcripts using spreadsheets, as I did for the transcript analysis for my MSc thesis. The exact opposite of game-ness. So. I’m taking a lesson from Dr. Sheelagh Carpendale¹ and will play with the data to see what that tells me about it.

⚙️ Work

We’ve got a bunch of learning technologies workshops scheduled for April. (Destiny1 apparently doesn’t like direct linking to months…)

And the next round of workshops in the Blended and Online Workshop Series is coming up. Register early, register often.

I was interviewed (via email) by Katie Deighton for The Experience Report at the WSJ, for an article on online exam proctoring. Wherein your humble protagonist tries to a) say the important things that need to be said out loud about online exam proctoring software and b) not get fired in the process. The article should come out in the next couple of weeks.

⚙️ Work

I think I may need to stop having a “work” section for these. So much of the work recently has been fundamentally unbloggable and would cause some pretty big issues if I even hinted obliquely at stuff. Which is an oblique hint to say that there’s a lot of stuff going on, but that I won’t talk about it on the internet for a number of reasons.

I’m still, a year into remote work, trying to figure out the best microphone setup for Zoom calls. I’d been using an Audiotechnica lav mic, which sounded pretty good but was fussy - I had to make sure I was wearing the mic, that the power was on, and then remembering to turn it off afterward and - more importantly - to remove it before walking away from my desk. I’d tried a Snowball mic, but just didn’t like it, and it took too much desk space. So, I’m back to using my el cheapo USB condenser Yeti-knockoff mic, mounted on an el cheapo boom stand. It seems to work well enough, but I need to be pretty close to the mic for it to pick up proper levels, which means part of the mic is visible on camera. Which is kind of dumb.

March 18, 2020. It’s now been a year since shifting to work remotely due to the pandemic.

It’s been 2 years since I started chemo on March 19, 2019. So, in the last 24 months, I’ve spent 17 of them in isolation at home.

It was also 3 years ago, March 19, 2018, that I took a trip to Arizona to hang out with amigos after getting the diagnosis.

I guess this has historically been a big week for me over the last few years…

⚙️ Work

We’re looking for a new CIO again. I think that’s 7 CIOs I’ve worked with so far.

🤔 PhD

I spent some time refactoring the whole dissertation. Collapsing chapters. Scrapping chapters. Expanding chapters. The new outline feels good. I need to let it steep for a bit more, but it feels like progress.

📚 Reading

Scholz, K. W., Komornicka, J. N., & Moore, A. (2021). Gamifying History: Designing and Implementing a Game-Based Learning Course Design Framework. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 9(1), 99–116. https://doi.org/10.20343/9.1.9

⚙️ Work

Brightspace quizzes and “no backsies”

Lots of work over the last week to put together resources about setting up quizzes in Brightspace. Turns out, instructors were trying to prevent cheating by turning off the ability to “go back” in quizzes. Some students had been doing speed-runs of quizzes, sharing the questions in Discord, and then going back to take the quiz. And other hijinks. So some instructors disabled “go back” in quizzes. Except that’s not an awesome experience for the 99.9% of students who weren’t cheating. Anyway, this is a side effect of our decision to not offer online exam proctoring - some instructors come up with DIY solutions that have unintended consequences.

⚙️ Work

Queering Zoom, and preferred names and pronouns

Paul Pival has a great post on the need for being able to modify displayed names and pronouns in Zoom.

This goes beyond Zoom, of course, but is especially noticeable in the virtual classroom videoconferencing platform that displays a name card over each person’s video or avatar image, and in the Participants list. We’d initially set it so that anyone could change their names in Zoom at any time. Because that’s a thing that should be possible because we’re all grown-ups and why on earth wouldn’t we leave that setting enabled? ¹

⚙️ Work

Hiring

We moved to the next stage of hiring a new team member. The posting for the Learning Technologies Specialist - Program Innovation position in my team went live on Friday. This posting will recruit a team member who is able to work on course- and program-level projects to consult on the design and integration of learning technologies in order to support the Provost’s Program Innovation Hub initiative. The posting is up for 2 weeks, and closes on March 5.

⚙️ Work

Participating in the campus “congress” engagement sessions. Interesting…

I’m still trying to track down the cause of Zoom screensharing sometimes just being black boxes on my macbook pro. Zoom support thinks it might have to do with UDP vs. TCP connections, so I’ve switched to the TCP screensharing for now. The problem has been intermittent, so maybe it worked? Who knows. I’d bet that the issue isn’t related to TCP/UDP, but has something to do with the dual GPUs in this laptop and automatic switching freaking Zoom out somehow.