Sunday, October 27, 2013

NERCOMP Conference

Last weekend I attended a very cool Instructional Design Symposium up in Albany hosted by NERCOMP, the NorthEast Regional Computer Program. I was able to meet the person at SLN who is running my internship, Rob Piorkoski. I also was able to meet a previous SLN intern who is now working for SLN Diane Hamilton.

The workshop was very informative. I just love going to these instructional design workshop. Maybe because it is so rare that you meet an instructional designer at a dinner party and the workshops are full of them.

The Symposium consisted of 3 main presentation,

  1. Albany College of Pharmacy presented on how they run their instructional design department along with some case studies
  2. The University of Albany presented on their systematic instructional design model.
  3. Mount Holyoke spoke on their instructional technology group.
The Symposium also had a panel of professors speaking about instructional design from their perspective.

And the even concluded with an interested instructional design group project that was able to get the room working together and collaborating on an interesting project.

Albany Pharmacy
The Albany College of Pharmacy talked about the mechanics of their design process. They study what their team already knows. They review what they have done in the past that works. They study their faculty and students habits. And they study the research, to learn what has worked with others.

One part of their presentation that I liked was how they really study and know the faculty and student population that they deal with. This knowledge really helps them design courses to meet the needs of their unique population. For example the designers spoke about their unique students, who are extremely busy. The students have classes and are expected to work. This leaves them with less time to study. Because of the unique time constraints the student population has very little time to waist so every online activity, assessment, and group work has to have a visible purpose. If the students cannot see how their online work will help them pass the next text they will not waste their time doing the work, and they will probably not sign up for online courses again. 

One way the designers at Albany College of Pharmacy get to know their faculty is by studying the course material that the faculty use in their course. In one example the designers prepped for the first one on one meeting they were having with the faculty member by watching a ton of online video lectures that the faculty member was using with their students. This allowed the designer to become more knowledgeable of the material and also learn about the teachers strengths and weaknesses.

The Albany College of Pharmacy had a great evaluation program set up to make sure their design work was working. They approached this in a few ways. One way was to look at the quantitative data to see how students fared in the same course, with the same professor, where one course was online and the other was face to face. They also looked at the data of a particular student to see how he did in online course work compared to face to face. 

The students were also survey. But the most interested part of their evaluation process and maybe their entire presentation was that at the end of the semester the designers will have a focus group of students meet with the designers without the faculty member and ask them to talk about their experience in the course. The students felt comfortable talking with the designers instead of the teacher because their grade would not be effected. 

I have studied a few evaluation processes but I have never heard of this one. But I really like it. My first thought was how would you get the students to participate, which the designers answered for us. The teachers were told before the class started, in the design process that a few students would be needed so the teacher could ask the student at the beginning of the course, and many times the teachers offered incentives in the form of extra points for students participation. 

The evaluation process might be my favorite part of the design process because you get to hear from the horses mouth what worked and what didn't, what the  students liked, what challenged them, and what provoked the most learning. In the end the students are the major clients at any College so why not ask them how they liked their experience.

I will discuss the University of Albany in a minute, but while they had a very systematic, formal design process they really did not have an evaluation process. 

University of Albany
Wow. These guys really have a beautiful, formal, systematic process to train new faculty to teach online and to prepare them at every stage along the way for developing online courses. 

They began their presentation with a group activity that ended with a concern, that many faculty have a hard time taking off their teacher hats and putting on their learner hats to be able to learn how to teach online. And just like many schools provide a document to their students explaining that taking online courses is not for everybody, Albany hinted that maybe teaching online also, is only for a specific type of teacher. And that some kind of structure needs to be in place to weed out those who are not ready to teach online. They even mentioned a faculty pretest to see if faculty are ready.

This segways into the main portion of their presentation where they discussed two models they use to prepare faculty for teaching online. The first model is designed for teachers who are ready to teach online. They build their course and deliver their course the follow semester. The second model is for faculty who are interested in teaching online and would like to learn more but are not ready to teach an online course right away.

I think this is a great idea. Right now, my College, SUNY Old Westbury only has one model, where you commit to teaching an online or hybrid course, than you come to workshop and complete and online course to learn about teaching online and in a hybrid method. But very recently I was speaking with a faculty member, where I was trying to convince him to teach online. He was interested but was going through his tenure proceedings and did not have the time to add more to his plate. That is understandable. But while I have him interested it would be a good idea to get him enrolled in a self paced course where he can learn about teaching online without having to commit. Even if a professor did have the time they might feel nervous or too boxed in, if in order to learn about teaching online they HAD TO COMMIT to teaching online. So I definitely think their should be two paths.

Albany faculty that commit to teach online enter the OCD training course, which consists of the following;
  1. Log into blackboard and complete some modules, where they read about teaching online, and make sure one of the articles scares them, to weed out the faculty who think this will be a pushover activity.
  2. One day face to face workshop, where big issues and concerns are discussed.
  3. 1 on 1 meeting, usually face to face, for 2-3 hours. Talk about their specific course, plan it out. Talk about specific course objective and concerns. The point of this meeting is that the faculty member leaves with a focus and goal, and they know where they are headed as they begin building their course.
  4. Benchmarks are established to make sure the faculty member is meeting their timetables, so the course will be ready for the start of the semester.
  5. Designers check in for progress reports.
  6. There is a final connect day when faculty come back and share their experiences and their courses with each other, experienced faculty can come by and share their expert tips.
  7. Finally, the designers review the course and approved it or send it back to be corrected.
The OCD Flex is a course less stringent, for faculty who would like to learn more about teaching online with having to commit to teaching online.
  1. 3 hour face to face workshop
  2. enroll in blackboard course
  3. Can meet with designers but don't have to.
I really like this model. The teacher kills two birds with one stone by learning about teaching online by becoming a student and going through online modules just their students will. I think it is beneficial for the teachers to experience what their students will experience, it develops empathy and understanding.

I also like how the cohort of new faculty learning to teach online will have one face to face meeting to learn how to technologically build their course and also learn about some of the bigger concerns facing online teaching. While later have a one on one meeting to learn about some more specific concerns facing their class, 

Albany discussed how the one on one meeting was one of the best parts of their design model because the faculty would enter those meetings still concerned, not sure exactly how to do what they set out to do, yet they would leave those meetings with a different attitude. They were focused, had clear goals and objects, and they knew exactly how to get to their goals. 

Marist IT Department  
Marist was the last of the morning presentation. They spoke about their department which ranges from computer support, to instructional design and library research. 

I had two major take aways from their presentation

First is that documentation of how your department does things is important. They spoke about issues that would come up only once a year and how they would never remember the solution so they began to document the issue and solution.

I also began to do this at my position at SUNY Old Westbury. We also do not have procedures written down, and I too was faced with the same issue, of certain problems that would occur so few and far between that I would forget the solution. So I began my own internal knowledge base. And it has helped out tremendously. Right now I am friendly with all my coworkers so it's not such a big deal to ask for assistance. But one day I will be at a new job and I don't want to always be asking for help. I have had coworkers in the past who would ask me how to solve the same problems every week and it does get annoying. 

The second takeaway was to pre-empt problems. So every semester you have new faculty teaching on campus who are not aware of procedures, even simple things like what do I do if my classroom technology is not working. Instead of waiting for them to need assistance and have the new faculty spend more time than needed trying to find help it is a good idea to reach out to them, to welcome them to the College, and hand them a piece of paper with info they need on it.

In one of my position as technology support we deal with password resets. And we don't have the best system. For students to reset their own password they need to do two steps, 1. sign up for our school's emergency alert form, using a text messaging number, and 2. visit the website and reset their own password. The issue is that if they visit us without having signed up for NY alert and fill out the form, it takes 2 hours for the system to process. So our approach has been to get involved with student orientation and have the students sign up before attending their first course. This way if they ever run into a password problem in the future their is no wait time.


Panel Discussion
The Panel discussion made some really good points that I would like to address.
One issue that was brought up was that new faculty who are not tenured might be unwilling to try online teaching or hybrid teaching or other innovative pedagogical approaches like the flipped classroom out of a fear that they might get bad evaluations.

Some students that might not be on board with alternative pedagogical approaches like the flipped classroom might give teachers a bad evaluation. And for new, non tenured faculty, this might hurt their tenure process.

One person in attendance raised a great point that a College in Arizona (not sure which one) give more points to teaching who are willing to go out on a limb and teach risky pedagogy. And this looks better on the tenure application.

The last takeaway that I got was to continue the evaluation process of course design while the course is live. One idea is to pop into the course and monitor the teachers presence by seeing how quickly they respond to emails, or discussion questions. 

Also you can contact the professor during the course, to ask them if their concerns are coming to fruition or not, and if new concerns are arising.

In the end it was a great symposium. 

You can visit the following website to see the slides from the days presentation.
http://nercomp.org/index.php?section=events&evtid=292




2 comments:

  1. hey Ian : ) nice blog. How do i follow it? also what happened to your etap640 blog? : )

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  2. I just added the follow by email widget, here is my etap blog,
    http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=676321479955121453#overview/src=dashboard

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