"Post Mortem" for a Lightweight

This week’s topic concerns a look at what went wrong with a project undertaken in the past.  It is termed a “Post Mortem” in the field of project management and is a useful analysis after-the-fact in order to learn from the commissions or omissions that occurred in developing a product for a client.  My reservation and caveat to readers is that the projects that teachers undertake aren’t “organized” in the manner or with the depth of management that compares with the caliber or type of management performed in instructional design projects.

     We may recall reading in our primary text that there are basically three types of organizations used with projects requiring the level of management sought for this week’s discussion – central, functional, and matrix (Portny et al, 2008).  As a teacher I’m engaged in management involving the finding or producing content, pacing and scheduling, and assessing performance.  The project, however, is more of a one-person operation; the management skills mentioned previously are evident but don’t carry the same impact as a project involving multi-departmental operations or organizations with an interdependent hierarchy.

     The activities that perhaps compare only marginally with the level of management of a multi-dimensional project as we’ll experience in our management course are usually in the form of committee work.  With that distinction being understood, and perhaps limiting my ability to see a project in the same way, I’ll mention a research group that was formed at a former school.  The principal was very much interested in teachers following “best practices” and especially in conducting mini-research projects to validate some of these best practices.

     The group I was in specifically was formed to investigate reading practices for high schools.  The group consisted of 7 teachers who would meet during the lunch period to discuss considerations in setting up a mini-experiment.  Working from the book Teaching What Matters Most, we decided to establish a classroom experiment utilizing what we named Rigorous Monday.  Each Monday for 4 weeks in a row we’d devote time in our classes to putting the students through four reading techniques related to improving comprehension.  We’d monitor each technique and report our results after the 4-week time frame for the experiment. 

     We reviewed and finally selected four pieces of reading material to use in the experiment.  The articles were varied and not specific to any teacher’s subject area.  The idea was to utilize readings outside of the subject areas.  We did not develop a specific order for the articles and so we could not report our results until the end of the 4-week time frame.

      When we finally did convene to discuss our respective results, the information proved to be only anecdotal with no statistical data to support the conclusions.  Unfortunately, teachers more than other professionals tend to draw conclusions based on general observations without any type of data to support those conclusions.  Consequently, the findings of the experiment tend to be broad generalizations.  Can this effectively be termed a good example of research?

     Perhaps we should have concretized our procedures by putting them in writing before beginning and made sure that everyone understood and could agree to follow the written explanation of our procedures.

      Perhaps we should have insisted that we each used the same reading material each week instead of allowing the members of the research group to sequence the articles to their own preference.  Requiring everyone to use one sequence for the reading materials would have allowed us to meet each week to bring our findings and discuss as we went along through the experiment.

     Perhaps we should have agreed upon a written survey to be used after exposure to each reading strategy.  In that way we’d be able to gather concrete data on the students’ reaction to the technique used.  Also it would have allowed for greater consistency in the data among the seven of us who conducted the experiment.

     Perhaps a longer period of time should have been allowed to prepare and/or review the report before submitting it to the principal.  Six teachers were satisfied with the anecdotal approach as a viable method for experimentation and research.  I wasn’t satisfied and voiced diplomatically my disappointment.  Consequently I prepared a separate report using the data from the survey I utilized.

     As projects go, the results seemed to have been sufficient for the principal.  We heard nothing back from either the main report showing the groups findings or my report.  One might say that the dominant weakness in the functioning of the group was communication and accountability.  Because all information until the final report was oral rather than written, and because the frequency of communication on the research experiment was limited, there was too much opportunity for each teacher to run the experiment his/her own way.  Allen and Hardin in their article “Developing Instructional Technology Products Using Effective Project Management Practices” the importance of communication (2008).  “Communicating effectively is probably the greatest challenge that people encounter during any project so it is imperative that instructional designers model and establish good communication techniques and patterns at the onset of a project” (2008, 79).

     Perhaps we should have had a mock practice of each reading technique before allowing teachers to take the task to the classroom.  Perhaps the procedures needed to have been written with more detail.  We didn’t seem to have a “meeting of the mind” even though we did read and discuss the appropriate chapters from Teaching What Matters Most.  However, it can be said that teachers are famous for “fabricating” what they may not really understand – (b.s).

     Often the success of an undertaking is as much the relationship of the individuals in an endeavor as it is unique talents, or money, or political support.  The seven of us knew and respected each other having worked together at the school for a number of years.  Our commitment to the endeavor, however, perhaps was not established.  If we had developed the relationship to include a true commitment to verifying the reading techniques as best practices, we might have done more.  In a short article from Project Smart Michael Young states, “Ideally you develop a strong working relationship with a client….  You become a partner with the client” (Young, 2011).  Perhaps our interest in this research experiment was more a matter of appeasing the principal and providing a modicum of effort.  Perhaps we should have performed the experiment for ourselves, making each other our partner and the client.  This is where the true value of collaboration comes into play.  It’s not just the sharing of information, but it’s also developing that relationship. 

 References:

Allen, S., and Hardin, P. C.  (2008).  Developing instructional technology products using effective
project management practices.  Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 19(2), 72-97. 

Portny, S.E., Mantel, S.J., Meredith, J.R., Shafer, S.M. and Sutton, M.M.  (2008).  Project
management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects.  Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley &
Sons, Inc.

Strong, R.W., Silver, H.F., and Perini, M.J.  (2001).  Teaching what matters most: Standards and
strategies for raising student achievement.  Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and
Curriculum Development.

Young, M.  (2011).  Stakeholder Management: Building relationships in project management. 
Retrieved from http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/stakeholder-management.html

Reflection on Current and Future Trends in Distance Education

Here we are at the end of our seventh course in the master’s program for instructional design and technology.  This current course has focused on distance learning which essentially encompasses several delivery systems: correspondence, audio, video and online methods.  The most popular form today, because of the impact of the computer in our schools and homes, is obviously online instruction.  And that has been the area of greatest focus.

     This particular form of distance learning has been used in a variety of ways including corporate training, higher education course and degree programs, and K-12 blended and virtual instruction.  The formats for these programs have been synchronous and asynchronous, involving standard web tools as well as cutting edge web 2.0 tools to foster social and collaborative aspects of learning and instruction. These new tools have caused education to revise its “best practices” for effective instruction, and the influence has been so great that one can predict that we can never “put the genie back in the bottle.”  Because the benefits tend to outweigh most of the challenges, society will probably never want to revert from the telecommunication age back to the simple information age of the last century.

     Perhaps some readers will remember the 1983 movie Educating Rita with Michael Caine as the cynical, bored professor who through Open University is assigned to tutor a young woman from Liverpool seeking a “higher education” without knowing what that really entailed.  The movie has many themes but here it is a metaphor for the idea that each “world or personality” is influenced by the other.  Education is influenced by technology which has already influenced many of today’s students.  So education must change.  It no longer can be the elitist view of the Harvard and Princeton educated but must also consider the practical knowledge obtained through ITT Tech or ECPI which offers training for technology and for medical careers and the culinary arts.

       I recall starting this degree program last September and signing up for a number of online newsletters in the computer technology field in order to educate myself on the latest trends in the field.  In December there was an article indicating the importance of mobility in the industry (2010).  Of course, kids have been playing their iPods for years, but the idea here was an educational application and a transition to other tools being accessed through wireless mobile technology.  For education this means the interest is in accessing instruction through the ipads and iphones instead of sitting in the stodgy classroom. 

     A newspaper publisher recently told me that the ipad will eventually replace the desktop and laptop computers, given the many apps that can be downloaded.  I also recall attending two webinars last year also on mobility and education.  One was a research experiment that provided audio feedback to students on their mobile devises for returned written assignments (March 2010).  The research team contended that the students enjoyed the tech form of feedback more so than the traditional written feedback in the margin of the paper.   Students also thought they’d implement the suggestions for improvement as a result of the audio feedback.

    Another area that seems to be gaining importance as an educational application is the use of gaming programs to generate involvement.  Online instruction stresses the importance of interactivity and gaming processes applied to classroom activities will surely generate the involvement that can make learning, even online, more enjoyable and beneficial.  Another area that is fast becoming an important application for education is the use of virtual worlds.  These programs are used to generate virtual meeting places but also can be used to reinforce skills and concepts in just about any type of lesson.  A more authoritative source providing some trends in e-learning for the next 10 years comes from WorldWideLearn.com in an article E-Learning Trends (2011).  The trends it foresees concerns gaming, integrating e-learning into company infrastructures, cuttings costs and equalizing the playing field, government involvement in e-learning, and wireless technology.

    Personally when I consider the distant future for society and education, I can’t help but think about the world created by Gene Roddenberry with broadcasts of the different Star Trek series.  Each presented a society that was based on the use of computers and for education seemed to provide a limitless possibility for self-development or for seeking academic degrees.  Whether it was through an ipad or through a holo-deck, an individual could surely find a way to improve himself.

  When I consider what I would like to see in education for the future, I’d like to see greater opportunities for open education.  If we want a society that can think more philosophically about the world’s problems and work to solve them, we need to make access to all types of courses, academic or practical “how-to” courses and tutorials, so that the diverse population of the world can operate on an even playing field and equalize the idea of opportunity.

     What part in developing such a future or at least in providing quality instructional programs might I play?  I would hope that my 37 years of classroom instruction might have provided some experience, but certainly pursuing this degree has helped jump-start my perspective such that I can easily consider newer and different techniques and tools for instruction – the 21^st century tools of technology.  The application of what we’ve learned easily extends beyond the traditional classroom.  With a master’s degree the impact can extend to the creation of training and instructional programs.  Such a degree also opens the door to teaching opportunities in higher education.  These two avenues provide the opportunity to influence those who are and those who will become the teachers of tomorrow.

  Although online learning has been available since the latter part of the last century, there still are pockets of resistance to the idea of this form of education.  Working with these teachers to ease their transition into technology-based or online instruction can be another way to influence the field of instruction.  Utilizing the points mentioned by Dr. Siemens in the Laureate video Facilitating Online Learning, we can make the transition to online instruction easier for the college professor, the elementary school teacher, or the corporate trainer and thereby influence the quality of the instructional program they develop and use.

References:

Gilbert, L. (Producer & Director).  (1983).  Educating Rita [Motion Picture]. With Michael
Caine and Julie Walters [actors].  United States: Columbia Pictures.

Laureate Education, Inc. (2010).  Facilitating Online Learning [video]. George Piskurich [ interviewer].  Retrieved from http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com/ec/crs/default.learn?CourseID=5693699&Survey=1&47=5871191&ClientNodeID=984650&coursenav=1&bhcp=1.

Staff writer (2010, December). Top 10 Wireless Predictions for 2011 [PowerPoint].  IT Business Edge.  Retrieved from http://www.itbusinessedge.com/slideshows/show.aspx?c=85597

Staff writer (2011).  E-learning trends: Top ten trends in e-learning.  Retrieved from http://www.worldwidelearn.com/elearning-industry/trends.htm   

Reshaping A Training Manager's Approach to Training

It's interesting how one can take advantage of past experiences to help address a new and different challenge.  That is the situation that I found myself in this week as we considered how to convert a traditional training program into a Distance Learning Format.  Fate must surely have been on my side this week as I was able to use the effort put into the Course Project for the second of two Instructional Design courses for this week's application activity.

In the latter of those two courses, I chose to redesign a training program developed by a group in the earlier  course.  They, like the training manager in this week's scenario, designed a 4-session face-to-face training program.  My recommendations were to develop the first three units as online instructional modules and use a face-to-face workshop for the fourth module and for the final assessment for the training program.  The outcome would provide independent and private performance toward achieving three of the company's desired objectives for training but also would save the hotel a great deal of money in terms of time away from the job and  travel to the many hotels by the trainer to conduct the training.

Here is a link to the article explaining the features of that hotel training program and therefore its use in the scenario in this week's assignment. 

Reshaping A Training Manager's Approach to Training

Open Source Education – a Different Breed

(A look at Yale’s Open Yale Courses)

An issue worth consideration concerns the scope of Distance Education.  Too often we may view distance education as online education and surely like a Venn diagram, the two areas do overlap.  Distance Education, however, is broader and can include those forms of education that link the separate partners of the endeavor through print correspondence or television. But Distance Education is more popularly thought of as associated only with education via the internet.  That’s actually the venue of online education.

Another consideration in the scope of Distance Education is the concept of Open Source Education.  The distinction is that the latter embraces the idea and ideal of education for all, very much like the Lyceum Lectures of the 19^th century.  Open Source Education makes available to anyone with a computer courses on a variety of subjects and topics without the formalization (or tuition and credit) that attends to a traditional or online college course.

These courses don’t meet the rigid requirements of instructional design or the elements of online instructional strategies.  The courses provide no synchronicity because there is no contact between instructor and learner.  The courses, in a very few instances, may have a “study group” but the nature of the groups tends to address basic questions posed by the learner rather than provide guidance or direction for the course material. The groups actually are “manned” by people outside of the original course.

We’ve read often that it is wrong to transplant a traditional course into an online setting.  The concept of “equity” inherently calls for an online course to adapt the traditional course and outfit it with different activities and tools that are intended to duplicate only the outcome of the original course.  I took a look at the Open Yale Courses.  I looked at courses in the classics and music, two of my interests, and found that basically the courses were merely transplants of original courses offered at Yale, in some cases four years old. The course on Ancient Greek History called for an “in-class midterm and final examination” but the course was originally presented in 2007.  Do you think Professor Kagan is still willing to administer those assessments?

The Yale project did recognize the importance of multiple methods of presentation. A learner had the choice of html transcript, mp3 audio, or flash video as the means of delivering the course content.  The courses were laid out according to the suggestions made in our text by Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, and Zvacek (2009, 249).  Each course had a general overview, a syllabus and schedule of lessons, and an instructor biography.  The course navigation was easy to follow.

According, though, to our understanding of instructional design for online/internet courses, the Yale, MIT, Stanford and I suspect any course offered by a recognized institution of higher learning (ivory tower) for Open Education do not meet the requirements for providing adequate synchronous or asynchronous communication.  There are also no activities in which to engage a learner or assessments to determine whether the objectives of the course might be met.

Another “deficit” to Open Education courses is the lack of a design that is oriented around a specific audience.  Instructional design considers the specific attributes of a course’s potential learner; the Open Yale Courses inherently acknowledge a universal liberal arts learner but nothing further than that description.  Although there is a lack of interactivity and social learning via discussion or collaboration, the intent is to provide learning not otherwise available to a non-collegiate audience.  The learner who willingly works through the lessons and limited assignments and readings does so because of an intrinsic interest in the subject or in learning and expanding his knowledge or understanding about life from a variety of perspectives – historical, political, current trends, scientific, etc.  Getting credit or proving what he knows is of little concern to the learner whose interest is self-improvement.

So, perhaps the standards for Open Education courses should be different.  It isn’t a case of holding these courses to the standards of online - for credit/tuition courses, but of devising criteria that acknowledge that Open Education is more anytime/anywhere than today’s typical online course.  Open Education courses need to stand independent of the original institution in order to be available to learners at any future time. 

References:

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S.  (2009).  Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education  (4th ed.).  Boston, MA: Pearson.   Chapter 5, "Instructional Design for Distance Education."

Yale University, (2011).  Open Yale Courses.  Retrieved from http://oyc.yale.edu  

Tools of the Trade

The purpose of this week’s blog is to take the part of an instructional designer by recommending appropriate training tools for one of the three scenarios presented.  I’ve chosen the first scenario which is a typical example of required training for a large national corporation with six regional offices.  Rather than call all designated employees to one site at considerable expense to the company, it seems a more efficient form of training would be the utilization of tools appropriate for computer-based distance training.

Two requirements stressed by the corporation are that the training involve sharing information via screen captures and documents, and also involve participation via ongoing collaboration.  A requirement outside the scenario that frames our decision-making is that we recommend Web 2.0 tools beyond the use of a course management system (CMS).

A computer management system such as Blackboard, Angel, Moodle, or D2L is necessary to manage the logistics of registration and notification for the training, a delivery system for course content, dropbox capability for submitting activities, a discussion board for asynchronous communication and reflection, an internal e-mail system for private communication when necessary, assessment capabilities to further verify participation and knowledge gain, as well as a grading system to record compliance for the training program.

One technology recommended beyond the CMS is a screen capture and editing program to be used by instructors and students as a way to utilize visual communication.  A second technology must meet the need for both a synchronous workspace and communication.  For that a web-conferencing software either hosted or licensed is recommended.

There is a plethora of software available both free or at cost fulfilling the requirements of screen capture and web-conferencing.  The suggestions here are to consider SnagIt  [click link and scroll down to video clip] as the screen capture tool and Elluminate as the web-conferencing tool.

The use of screen capturing tools has the obvious advantage of showing visually the step-by-step process required in executing a skill.  It also is helpful in visualizing a difficult concept.  With the added use of editing tools, one can turn a plain screen capture into something that is both captivating and instructional.  Captions and objects such as arrows, callouts or boxes can be added to highlight important and key points in a visual.  These screen  captures can be utilized independently for presentation in the computer-basd training or employed in a PowerPoint or video presentation created with a video production tool such as Camtasia Studio.

A web-conferencing tool may prove to be more useful for instructional and collaborative purposes than a video-conference.  Many web-conference products provide four components: participant privileges, chat box, audio capability, and especially important, a whiteboard for displaying drafts of documents, notes, graphics, even videos.  These web-conferencing programs or sites provide breakout rooms, web-cam capabilities to see participants, and again especially important, the ability to record and archive live meetings.

A tool like Ellluminate serves the moderator/teacher for instructional purposes if needed beyond the course delivery via the CMS but also serves the students by providing a joint workspace and asynchronous communication for collaborative projects.   This is probably superior to workspaces provided through a wiki because the communication can be live/synchronous.  San Jose State University utilizes Elluminate and the Library & Information Services provides substantial assistance to students and teachers in the use of this particular web-conferencing tool.  Especially helpful might be the Elluminate Participant Orientation Slides. Here’s another PowerPoint presentation about Elluminate from the Wimba/Elluminate which is in the process of being purchased by Blackboard.

Here’s a final link with excerpts from two articles / sources concerning the use of screen capture for instructional use by both teachers and students and an analysis report by what-when-how.com comparing two web-conferencing systems.  Although not a discussion of Elluminate, the excerpt presents information about qualities to be sought in a web-conferencing program.

Although this was an exercise for a course in the Instructional Design program at Walden University, these two Web 2.0 tools should be considered as standard tools for any web-based / computer-based course or training program.  Whether it’s SnagIt for screen capture or Elluminate for web-conferencing, these tools help augment the capabilities of a CMS program and even can be appropriate authoring or collaborating tools for non-instructional use.  With so many competing versions of these programs or sites, especially the ones that are free, open or for trial use, these tools are surely worth investigating.

MindMap for Distance Education

I. Wk 1 Assignment: Define Distance Education

Our understanding of distance education has naturally developed over time but also seems to have progressed exponentially with the advent of electronics and those little things called micro-chips and sub-processors.  I dare say that if you ask most people about distance education they will usually think of e-learning and online learning.  Forgotten are the days of the old correspondence courses that were offered for professional development, not for academic, degree-seeking programs.  But in time that changed and as our main text reveals, by the beginning of the 20^th century, colleges were getting in on the deal and offering first correspondence courses for certain academic courses and eventually for an entire degree program.

The first influence of technology was, of course, the use of radio and records as the medium for distance education. These forms of the phenomena lacked the important component of 2-way synchronous communication and interaction that made these courses perhaps more challenging to take and complete than the highly interactive e-learning courses of today.  The radio, as has been true in the commercial market, was eventually superseded by television and eventually closed-circuit television which provided first of all the visual element to education and human relations and also eventually allowed for the telephone to be used as a tool making the communication 2-way and synchronous.

In the 80s I participated in the Eastern Virginia Writing Project and my project was one of ten selected to be presented on local cable TV for English and writing teachers in the Williamsburg area.  A video camera was set up in my school’s library for the session and we used the regular landline telephone for asking and answering questions.  The local station videotaped the sessions and that was the equivalent of today’s archiving web-conferences, available for viewing by those not able to attend the live session.

Of course, the cathode ray tubes of television were eventually replaced with circuit boards and transistors and micro-processors.  We were entering the age of the computer with user-friendly interfaces and wired networks which eventually gave way to wireless networks like the World Wide Web.  All of this is what makes up the internet which now seems to be the only form that one thinks of concerning distance education.  The interest in social learning has led to other phenomena that seem to be part-and-parcel of distance education.  That’s the integration of social tools such as Twitter and Facebook, but also the use of social viewing through YouTube, Vimeo or Slideshare and Prezi.

What will be the next avenue taken in the advancement of distant education?  I suspect it will come through the phenomenon of open education.  Whereas distance education currently has the appearance of academic institutional-ization, open education suggests the idea that education truly can’t be bound by corporations or academic institutions but conforms with the thought that knowledge is free and should be made available to everyone.  Of course, many will want to get credit for what they learn for free, and open education will probably succeed at developing a system that acknowledges a person’s achievement in learning.