Should Online Classes Be Fun?

Posted on March 14, 2017 by JimS

Jim ShimabukuroBy Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

There’s fun as comic relief, then there’s fun as passion.

The first is temporary and a diversion. In the classroom, it’s the seventh-inning stretch in a long lecture. The piano stairs (see the video below) falls into this category, a diversion from the dreary commute from one point to another in a big city. The jokes in an otherwise long and boring speech, too, are diversionary, sugar coating for a bland or bitter pill. The assumption is that the speaker has a captive audience that requires some form of relief.

The fun that makes the most sense for education is passion. Think of our personal interests, joys, hobbies. These aren’t haha funny. They’re aha fun. And the interesting thing is, we don’t need comic relief in these pursuits because they’re inherently engaging, absorbing. We lose ourselves in them. In a word, this type of fun is what Dewey calls “educative.”

When we have passion for something, we have an insatiable hunger for all there is to know about it. My son, growing up, wasn’t the best student, but I never worried because I knew he was bright. Even in grade school, he knew all the NBA teams and players and was an expert on MJ and the Bulls and, later, Kobe and his Lakers.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Community College, Course Design, Higher Education, Instructional Design, Online Course, Online Learning, Professional Development, Teaching Composition, Writing | 2 Comments »

A Successful Public Health MOOC: Interview with Dr. Satesh Bidaisee

Posted on August 24, 2016 by JimS

Jim ShimabukuroBy Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

One Health, One Medicine: An Ecosystem Approach was a five-week public health MOOC offered by Dr. Satesh Bidaisee1 at St. George’s University, Grenada, in summer 2016. The course attracted 582 students from all over the world and was especially popular with students from the Caribbean, United States, and even Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe.

Among the 582 who enrolled, participants, or “students who took at least one graded activity in the course,” numbered 98, which is 17% of the total enrolled. Of the 98 participants, 52 completed the course. Completion is defined as achieving “at least a 50% in the course, which required them to get full participation and quiz credit and at least one additional exercise (case or presentation).”

Calculated in this way, the completion rate among participants was 53%, four times the rate in previous years. Of the 50 students who completed the survey, 98% rated their overall experience in the course as good or excellent. To the question “Would you be interested in pursuing a degree from St. Goerge’s University?”, 82% answered yes. Of this number, 30% preferred online courses, 16% preferred on-campus classes, and the remaining 36% had no preference either way.

Dr. Satesh Bidaisee, St. George's University, Grenada.

Dr. Satesh Bidaisee, St. George’s University, Grenada.

ETC: How would you explain the high rate of completion for your MOOC?
Bidaisee: The key factors were: (1) A user-friendly online course management system, SGUx, which is built on the EdX platform. (2) Accessible course team. (3) Interactions with students through live seminars, live office hours, discussion blogs, Twitter communication. (3) Case study reviews, peer-review evaluation of student-produced seminars. (4) Focused course topic and content on One Health, One Medicine.  Continue reading →

Filed under: Course Design, Ed Tech, Higher Education, Innovation, Instructional Design, Instructional Media, Instructional Technology, International, Interview, MOOC, Multimedia, Online Course, Online Learning, Open Source, Professional Development, Social Media, Trends & Issues | 1 Comment »

Irritating Software Upgrades and the Spirit of ‘Gaman’

Posted on March 4, 2016 by JimS

Jim ShimabukuroBy Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

With technology, experimentation and improvement go hand-in-hand, so we expect to pay a price. In some cases, such as drugs and cars, the cost can be horrendous. In others, such as software applications and operating systems, the cost isn’t as dramatic, but it can be irritating.

The most irritating in my current experience involves WordPress.com. The problem is they’re making changes piecemeal, and after many months, they’re still not done. In the interim, we, the users, are on our own. This means we’re forced to switch between the old and the new interfaces to complete tasks that were once simple and routine. The result is confusion and dozens of additional time-gobbling, mind-boggling steps.

For example, in the new composing interface, I can no longer insert links in text mode. I have to switch back to visual mode to do so. Compounding the problem is that WordPress sometimes seems to hang frozen for a while before switching between the two modes. A similar problem involves categories. In the old interface, I can no longer set categories. To do so, I have to switch to the new.

Very annoying is the photo insertion process. Photos posted via the new interface are no longer clickable for enlarged views. To make them clickable, I need to re-enter the same post via the old. And this is where irritation climbs to a whole new level. There’s no clear or simple way to switch back to the old.  Continue reading →

Filed under: Ed Tech, Innovation, Instructional Media, Instructional Technology, Online Course, Online Learning, Op-Ed | Leave a comment »

Creating Community: Part 3 – Hard Conversations in an Online Classroom – ‘Heart of Darkness’

Posted on February 25, 2016 by JimS

Judith_McDaniel2_80By Judith McDaniel with Tim Fraser-Bumatay, Daniel Herrera, and Ryan Kelly1

Thinking about Heart of Darkness

The questions we were left with at the end of the Othello discussion included one that came up again later in the course. I asked, how do we know what we do not know — or how do we know we have a cultural bias/perspective in order to shed it? We usually don’t, except for our relationship to others and their perspectives — when we can say, Oh, right, I missed that. And I rarely hear students say, Oh, sorry, I was thinking like a white person or thinking like a patriarch. So we need to know the context in order to think intelligently about our own constructed world-views, don’t we?

Herrera Kelly Bumatay McDaniel

Daniel Herrera, Ryan Kelly, Tim Fraser-Bumatay, and Judith McDaniel.

Along with the Conrad story, we were reading an article by a professor who advocated banning it as a racist text. Ryan found this account amusing. “While he cites the fact that Heart of Darkness is racist and offensive and because of that he no longer sees the value in teaching it, what resonates from this piece is actually his point that proves the opposite. He describes how marked up his book is and explains how each time he read the novel as a student he found new things to underline. The time, the place, the teacher, and the lens changed, and as each did he was able to look at the novel in a new way and gain a different piece of valuable insight into it’s meaning….”

“For me,” Ryan continued, “this is the true test of a novel’s worth. The reason we reread things in the first place is because we always notice more the second time around. Once we generally understand the plot of a story we can focus on other elements and find deeper meaning, and Heart of Darkness seems to be one of those stories where those deeper meanings are fluid and can change with the times. While it may be true that Conrad was a racist, I don’t think that’s enough to invalidate this text.”  Continue reading →

Filed under: Course Design, Ed Tech, Higher Education, Instructional Media, Instructional Technology, K-12 Schools, Minorities, Online Course, Online Learning, Teacher Role | Leave a comment »

Creating Community: Part 2 – Hard Conversations in an Online Classroom – ‘Othello’

Posted on February 23, 2016 by JimS

Judith_McDaniel2_80By Judith McDaniel with Tim Fraser-Bumatay, Daniel Herrera, and Ryan Kelly1

The four of us are all teachers in face-to-face classrooms, and we have all needed to have difficult conversations about race with our students in those classes. Some teachers would maintain that it is “better” to have these conversations in person in order to monitor how the students are doing and ease them over the rough spots.

All of us have also been part of an online classroom in which we needed to have those conversations about race and ethnicity as we discussed Shakespeare’s Othello and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Is one format — online or in-person — better than the other? While our response won’t be definitive, we can say that our online discussion did succeed in creating an “immediate and vital community of learning” as we insisted in Part 1 of this series. And for each of us, the learning in this class carried over to the face-to-face classes we teach.

Herrera Kelly Bumatay McDaniel

Daniel Herrera, Ryan Kelly, Tim Fraser-Bumatay, and Judith McDaniel.

Thinking about Othello

In addition to reading Shakespeare’s play, I assigned several critical articles that discussed race in the play. Kim Hall’s “Beauty and the Beast of Whiteness” and James Aubrey’s “Race and the Spectacle of the Monstrous in ‘Othello’” seemed to be the most provocative.

The issue of beauty, virtue, and monstrosity

The discussion prompt for the question about Othello asked whether Hall’s portrait of “beauty and the beast of whiteness” gave the reader a path into considering Othello as an Elizabethan might have seen him. Tim’s immediate response was “[Yes,] an in-depth look at style would tread upon the contextual setting of the play’s conception, for if one were to question why Shakespeare chooses words such as ‘beast,’ ‘horse,’ and ‘ram’ to describe Othello, it would inevitably lead to 17th century cultural opinions of Africans.”

Alongside that view of course is the parallel portrait of Othello as the most noble and honorable man in the Duke’s court. When Shakespeare introduces the “Moor” himself, he presents “an intriguing character who breaks from the stigma; he is calm, courteous, and even noble.”  Continue reading →

Filed under: Ed Tech, Higher Education, Innovation, Instruction, Instructional Technology, K-12 Schools, Minorities, Online, Online Course, Online Learning, Professional Development, Teacher Training, Trends & Issues | Leave a comment »

Creating Community in an Online Classroom: Part 1 – Getting to Know You

Posted on February 9, 2016 by JimS

Judith_McDaniel2_80By Judith McDaniel with Tim Fraser-Bumatay, Daniel Herrera, and Ryan Kelly1

Is it possible to get a “real education” from an online class? Several years ago a professor from the University of Virginia published an opinion piece about online education in the New York Times and insisted that it was impossible. “You can get knowledge,” he continued, “from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning.”2

I teach literature in a fully online Master’s program. My students enroll from all over the United States and from overseas. Our asynchronous discussion forums give students an opportunity to interact, to be thoughtful in their responses to my discussion prompts and to one another. I find the online classroom to be stimulating, diverse, and creative. It is different from a face-to-face class experience, but it can be different in ways that enhance student learning through the creation of an online community.

Herrera Kelly Bumatay

Daniel Herrera, Ryan Kelly, and Tim Fraser-Bumatay

I am joined in writing this article by three of the students who have just completed their Masters degree in Literature and Writing in this online program. We have created an article that has two parts. In the first we talk about building community and how that happens, how students from very different backgrounds begin to interact, enjoy one another, challenge one another. In the second part of the article, we recreate some of the conversations we had about difficult subjects and difficult texts. We talked about race extensively when we read Othello and Heart of Darkness.  Continue reading →

Filed under: Course Design, Ed Tech, Higher Education, Instruction, Instructional Design, Instructional Technology, Online Course, Online Learning, Professional Development, Teacher Training, Theory, Trends & Issues | 8 Comments »

Review of ‘Towards a European Perspective on Massive Open Online Courses’

Posted on December 4, 2015 by JimS

Jim ShimabukuroBy Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

I was drawn to some of the articles in this special issue1 and found insights that I feel are worth mentioning. One that stands out is in Schuwer et al.’s article,2 in a summary attributed to Fairclough3: “MOOCs are perhaps best understood as ‘imaginary’… a prefiguring of possible and desired realities rather than a unified and coherent domain around which clear boundaries exist.”

Fairclough’s observation takes us a step closer to unravelling the MOOC conundrum. The expanding list of acronyms for different MOOC constructs should tip us to the fact that MOOCs are reifications, figments of our imagination or, more accurately, a specific set of ideas bundled in different ways. In short, MOOCs don’t exist.

By “don’t exist,” I mean they’re not a separate or unique specie. They’re simply a class in the genus online course. Add openness to a traditional online course, and you end up with a MOOC. By “openness,” I mean removing most of the formal trappings that we associate with college courses: capacity limits, traditional registration and pre-requisite requirements, tuition and fees, semester or quarter time frames, required textbooks, and grades and credits.

In other words, MOOCs are projected variations of standard online courses. As such, they represent the outer limits of what online courses could be. The point is that the issue isn’t MOOCs themselves but the innovative features that they present for possible incorporation in online courses.

In this context, Schuwer et al.’s warning that, “in the long run, a threat to MOOCs may manifest, if they are not well-integrated in broader university strategies and do not establish their own role within the university offerings” is only half correct. That is, for the open features of MOOCs to evolve, they must be integrated into existing online course policies and procedures. However, establishing “their own role within the university offerings” may not only be redundant but a costly failure in terms of the growth of 21st century practices.  Continue reading →

Filed under: International, MOOC, Online Course, Review, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

MOOCs and Traditional Online Courses Are on a Collision Path

Posted on July 26, 2015 by JimS

Jim ShimabukuroBy Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

Updated 27 July 2015

In everyone’s bucket list, under the heading “Education,” is “Attend an elite college.” Until recently, however, this item has remained unchecked for the vast majority. According to Jonathan Wai, “Only about 2% to 5% of all US undergraduates went to … elite schools.”1

Thanks to MOOCs, the economic and scholastic barriers are going down. And thanks to Natalie Morin,2 students in the U.S. and the world over don’t have to look far for elite offerings. Among the 31 in her list are:

Harvard (“Science and Cooking; Tangible Things: Discovering History Through Artworks, Artifacts, Scientific Specimens; Poetry in America: The Civil War and Its Aftermath”); MIT (“Introduction to Computer Science and Programming; Circuits and Electronics; Molecular Biology; User Innovation: A Path to Entrepreneurship; Introductory Physics: Classical Mechanics”); Princeton (“Computer Architecture; Effective Altruism; Imagining Other Earths; Paradoxes of War; Reinventing the Piano; Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technology”);

Yale (“America’s Unwritten Constitution; Capital Punishment: Race, Poverty, & Disadvantage; Introduction to Classical Music; Moral Foundations of Politics”); Stanford (“Planning for a Sustainable Future with Wind, Water and the Sun; Behind and Beyond Big Data; Careers in Media Technology; Environmental Risk and Resilience; Online Certificate Program in Novel Writing; Adventures in Writing”); Columbia (“The Civil War and Reconstruction 1850-1861; The Civil War and Reconstruction 1861-1865; The Civil War and Reconstruction 1865-1890”); University of Pennsylvania (“An Introduction to Corporate Finance; The Global Business of Sports; Modern & Contemporary American Poetry; Introduction to Key Constitutional Concepts and Supreme Court Cases”);

University of Chicago (“Asset Pricing; Internet Giants; Global Warming; Understanding the Brain; Critical Issues in Urban Education”); Dartmouth (“Introduction to Italian Opera; Introduction to Environmental Science; The Engineering Structures Around Us”); Cornell (“The Ethics of Eating; American Capitalism: A History; The Computing Technology: Inside Your Smartphone; Introduction to Global Hospitality Management”);

Johns Hopkins (“Psychological First Aid; Confronting Gender Based Violence: Global Lessons with Case Studies from India; Major Depression in the Population: A Public Health Approach”); Northwestern (“Teaching the Violin and Viola: Creating a Healthy Foundation; Career 911: Your Future Job in Medicine and Healthcare; Understanding Media by Understanding Google”); Berkeley (“The Science of Happiness; Biology for Voters; Electronic Interfaces: Bridging the Physical and Digital Worlds”);

Wellesley (“Shakespeare: On the Page and in Performance; Introduction to Global Sociology; Was Alexander Great? The Life, Leadership and Legacies of History’s Greatest Warrior; Introduction to Human Evolution”); Georgetown (“The Divine Comedy: Dante’s Journey to Freedom; Globalization’s Winners and Losers: Challenges for Developed and Developing Countries; Terrorism and Counterterrorism”).

MOOCs are free and completely online, they’re open to everyone, and the registration process is simple. You’re free to plug in when and where you want for as long as you want, and if you decide to complete the course, you could earn a certificate. In some cases, a certificate requires a small fee.

Developers are beginning to design a second generation of MOOCs, or MOOC2, that can be taken for credit toward college degrees. For example, see “edX-ASU Global Freshman Academy: Will It Work?” As these evolve, the distinction between online courses locked into traditional structures and MOOCs will gradually disappear.

A key obstacle to the growth of MOOC2 has been pricing. MOOCs that cost as much as traditional onground courses are simply out of reach for nontraditional students who make up the bulk of participants. However, a recent trend toward drastically lowering the cost of traditional courses in completely online degree programs is underway at Texas Tech and other universities. A critical element in this business model is the removal of out-of-state tuition, the final barrier to the expansion of online programs.

MOOCs and traditional online courses are on a collision path, and the impact will change the face of higher education forever, obliterating the class and geographic barriers that have limited access to elite colleges. The promise of online, from the very beginning, has always been access, and here, in the middle of 2015, the promise is gaining traction.

Addendum 7/27/15: Read Ray Rose’s comment re learners with disabilities and the accessibility challenges they pose for MOOCs and online courses. Also see his Access and Equity for All Learners in Blended and Online Education, INACOL, Oct. 2014.

__________
1“Frank Bruni Is Wrong About Ivy League Schools,” Quartz, 22 Mar. 2015.
2“31 Elite Colleges That Offer Free Online Learning,” Tucson.com, 23 July 2015.

Filed under: Higher Education, MOOC, Online Course, Online Degree | 11 Comments »

Why Teaching Is No Longer Relevant in Online Courses and MOOCs

Posted on July 7, 2015 by JimS

Jim ShimabukuroBy Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

Harry Keller raises some hot issues in his comment on “Attrition in MOOCs: Is It a Problem or an Advantage?” The good news is that most are attributable to course design, which exposes a critical difference between traditional and blended courses, on the one hand, and online courses and MOOCs, on the other. In contrast to a series of teacher-led onground classes, an online course is more like a pattern of codes in a complex software program.

As such, it shares a trait common to all programs, and that’s bugs. In other words, it’s a perpetual work in progress. It’s never completely free of bugs. In fact, you don’t know what the bugs are until users expose them or bring them up. To make matters even worse, some of the bugs are intermittent, lying dormant for weeks or months and suddenly popping up when least expected.

This is where debugging in the form of creativity and problem solving enters the picture. In short, setting up an online course is just the beginning of a long-term commitment to debugging and improving the “code” until the course does what it’s supposed to. It’s not a matter of a semester or two but years, and the process is open-ended, never ending.

This means that abandoning a MOOC or online course because it fails in the first go around is like expecting a software program to work perfectly the first time it’s used. It’s never going to happen.

A great online course is great because it’s always evolving even after many years. It never stops growing and changing. By the same token, a poorly designed course can only get better IF the debugging is effective. Thus, teachers, students, and administrators really need to be patient and give the process a chance to evolve.  Continue reading →

Filed under: Course Design, MOOC, Online Course, Theory | 13 Comments »

edX-ASU Global Freshman Academy: Will It Work?

Posted on June 25, 2015 by JimS

Jim ShimabukuroBy Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

I really wanted to get excited about this Global Freshman Academy (GFA) idea of completing first-year college courses via MOOCs. It presses all the right buttons. You don’t need to go through the tedious process of applying, submitting transcripts, waiting for a letter of acceptance, etc. And it’s free, in the finest MOOC tradition. That is, if you don’t want college credit. For credit, you pay $200 per credit. Not cheap, but affordable. But it gets even better. You “only pay when you know you have passed the course.”1

But clicking into the details quickly reveals some shortcomings. First, the link to the How It Works video doesn’t work.2 However, the Try the GFA Orientation Course button, directly below, does. In the “About this course” section, clicking on the See more button takes you to a Q&A list, where you finally find some answers to basic questions.

To take the orientation course, you need to click on the Enroll Now button, which takes you to the Create an account page. I didn’t register, but the process seems simple and quick. You have the option to create an account via your FaceBook or Google accounts.

As it stands, the GFA is really just a single course, Introduction to Solar Systems Astronomy, which “is now open for enrollment, and starts in August 2015. Two additional courses will be offered starting fall 2015, with the remaining courses scheduled to be released within the next 24 months.” I’ll let you decide whether this lives up to the hype of a global program that “reimagines the freshman year experience” and “creates a new path to a college degree.” Even after all the courses are in place, there’s no guarantee that the aggregate will form a typical freshman year experience that will allow students to move directly into their second year.

Costs are a bit fuzzy. You have to pay an upfront $45 fee to enroll in the “Verified Track,” required “to ensure you are eligible for credit once the course is over.” And this, I assume, is in addition to the $200 per credit if you decide to go that route. I’m also wondering if the verified track registration is just a ploy for the usual tedious college application process. Furthermore, it’s unclear whether the $45 fee is required for every course and not a one-time fee, but the implication is that you need to pay the $45 upfront for every course to reserve the option to convert to credit. Again, I’ll let you to decide if this is or isn’t a variation on the old bait-and-switch.  Continue reading →

Filed under: Higher Education, MOOC, Online Course, Online Degree, Online Learning | Leave a comment »