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I was part of an online panel session “You get what you assess: Competency-based education in the digital era.” at EDUCAUSE 2021 this morning (or afternoon, depending on where people were). I talked about how we use competencies and learning outcomes at an institutional level, and some of the opportunities and challenges we’ve seen. It wasn’t a scripted presentation bit, but they turned on the Zoom auto-transcribe feature so I grabbed the transcript for my portion. There was a bunch of Q&A that had some great bits as well, but I couldn’t grab that part of the transcript before the meeting went poof. Also, holy smokes is the spoken word different from what I would have written in text. Yikes. Anyway… Here’s my part, for posterity.

This was over 20 years ago, and there’s no trace of any of this left so I figured I should write something before I forget it, too. This was before photos of everything. Before infinite digital archives. Another era.

Back in 1999, I was part of a team at an elearning company called Discoverware, building a multimedia platform to train people how to use various software applications.

One of the few traces of the company that remain in 2021, is a brief mention on Wikipedia’s History of virtual learning environments in the 1990s:

So this is kind of big news. I’m starting a new role at the Taylor Institute, as Associate Director, Learning Technologies & Design.

D’Arcy Norman will be taking on a new role as Associate Director, Learning Technologies and Design, providing strategic and administrative leadership for and helping to advance learning technologies and design within and beyond the TI.

I’ll be leading the Learning Technologies and Design Team, with both Learning Technologies Group (where I was manager prior to this) and Learning and Instructional Design Group, as well as our team of grad student Learning Technologies Coaches.

Our team is conducting 2 separate pilot projects this semester, to evaluate software that is used in a few faculties for potential use across the university. I’m not going to mention the products or the vendors.

In both cases, the urgent requests for doing a campus pilot project were forms of “we need this in order to do [interesting pedagogy], and we need it to be integrated with our LMS so we don’t have to spend a bunch of time doing admin-y things to use it. also, if it could be funded centrally, it’d be really helpful.”

There’s a bit of a common pattern for designing new and innovative online learning environments¹, to make it game-like. Or, most often, to look game-like. Which often means “make it look kind of retro-y and vintage-y so I can pretend it’s something kind of sort of like a game and hey presto we’re innovating already!”

Most recently, Google hosted their annual I/O conference in a video game environment. Or, more accurately, in an online conference platform that kinda-sorta looks like a video game, despite not actually being a game in any meaningful sense of the word, aside from instilling a fun sense of “hey everyone we’re totally inside a video game together isn’t this awesome and isn’t I/O innovative and aren’t we just so danged cool for being inside a video game together?”

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 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.?

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When I use my MacBook Pro¹ to share content in a Zoom meeting, it occasionally seems to get stuck. Sharing the screen works fine, for a bit, then it freezes, and then it gets replaced by a black box. I don’t find out until a minute later, when people politely cough and say “so… we can’t see what you’re doing anymore…”

The first time, I figured something just got crosswired somewhere, with Zoom and YuJa and Sidecar all trying to do things with my display. I rebooted, and the problem went away. Then, it happened again, and I figured I should try to figure out how to prevent it from happening again.

Trying to track major media consumption throughout the year. I’ve done this for a few years now, but it’s kind of a chore.

Anyway. Here’s most of the media I consumed in 2020.¹

This amazing letter written by Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse, read by Benedict Cumberbatch.

Hesse was frustrated by a creative block and self-doubt¹. LeWitt would have none of it. I’ve had it on playing on loop.

Get out of your head. Just DOOOOOOO.

you are not responsible for the world. you’re only responsible for your work, so just. do. it.

(via BoingBoing)

Awhile back, Ian Linkletter shared links to videos that Proctorio published to their corporate YouTube account. Proctorio apparently wasn’t aware of how the internet works, nor about what YouTube is for, nor how to manage confidential resources (which may be an interesting tell regarding internet security awareness and infosec practices in the company?). It’s a platform for sharing videos. If you have confidential videos, don’t publish them to YouTube.

Anyway. Proctorio could have said “oops. holy crap. we didn’t realize those were public. sorry! hey - would you mind deleting those tweets?” and delete the videos from their YouTube account. They didn’t do that. Or, maybe they did - after they had a public freakout and sued Ian for sharing links to the videos that they had published on the internet for people to see.

We’ve been using Zoom at scale since March, and have learned how to use it well for everything from 1:1 meetings up to classes of 500+ students. Since we launched in March 2020, to prepare for the COVID Rapid Pivot to Remote Teaching™, we’ve hosted 304,776 meetings in our campus Zoom environment. We’ve held 379 webinars. We’ve created over 4 TB of recordings.

In that time, we’ve realized there are a few features that would make life simpler for instructors, especially in these large-enrolment classes.