Future Tense podcast

The geekier readers among you may be interested in one of my favorite podcasts, American Public Media's Future Tense. Topics have ranged from password security to Ida Lovelace, free movies online (which I mentioned last week), online identity and many, many more. Most podcasts are less than five minutes, so are quick and easy to include in your course, as well.

To v. or not to v.?

The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses whether More Professors Could Share Lectures Online. But Should They? Be sure to read the comments following the article for further debate on the pros and cons of putting videos of lectures online. The issues are complex--ranging from costs to copyright to being made fun of to being misquoted to who benefits and more.

Using Rubrics to Evaluate Online Projects

Here is the Elluminate recording of the latest NCLC Faculty Forum presentation, "Using Rubrics to Evaluate Online Projects."


An alternate method to reach the recording (and to link directly to the accompanying powerpoint) is to log onto the NCLC website, and follow this path: Archives - Faculty Forums - 3/11/10 Using Rubrics, etc.

Best Practices in Online Teaching: Don’t Assume

"Best Practices in Online Teaching: Don’t Assume" shares four things to not assume about your students as you start up a new online semester. Their short ideas can be easily implemented and should help your students, especially those new to online, get off on the right foot.

Thanks to Scott for sharing this article with a faculty member and me today.

Common mistakes made by first-time online faculty

Glenn LeBlanc, Instructional Designer at University College (Maine), shares the following 20 common mistakes made by first-time online faculty, wisdom he's gained over years of working with faculty:

1. Thinking that you have to reply to every posting in every discussion forum (and that students have to do the same).

2. Not being clear about what students have to do in order to submit their assignments (save their documents in a specific format that you can open, how to submit using whatever method you use, how to name their files, keep a copy just in case…)

3. Loading the course with so many resources that students get overwhelmed, and not distinguishing between what's critical and what’s “nice to know.”

4. Not reminding students to set up mail forwarding so they can get e-mail sent from Blackboard. You don’t want to have to keep track of non-UMS e-mail addresses like “catlover@roadrunner.com.”

5. Not starting far enough ahead to design the course. (This becomes a BIG issue when you use materials that require copyright approval. If it doesn’t work out, you need time for “Plan B.”)

6. Posting PowerPoint slides from your on-campus lectures and calling it an online course.

7. Using technology for its own sake. Do you really need the webcam talking head in your screencast? Keep it simple – especially your first time!

8. Failing to establish reasonable expectations for turnaround time to grade and give feedback on written assignments. (Just because students can submit with a click, you can’t grade this way!)

9. Failing to give very clear guidelines on posting to discussion board forums, including such things as: Post as a Thread /Reply to help keep forums organized, netiquette, maximum post length, timeliness (don’t post at the last minute), relevance, assertions supported by evidence, posts must build on previous discussion, etc.

10. Not spending enough time to become familiar with the technology you will use. (Especially tools in Blackboard.)

11. Not thinking through the setup of the Grade Center before you start recording grades. Faculty have sometimes begun with one approach only to learn that calculating grades the way they want to will require making major changes.

12. Not making your course site “Available” far enough in advance. Course sites have to be made Available before the program that adds your students can do its thing.

13. Not posting an announcement during the week before your course starts that welcomes students, and reminds them of the starting date.

14. Making technical support your responsibility. Give your students the Technical Support contact information they need.

15. Using online testing for a major portion of the course grade. While there are safeguards to help reduce cheating, having multiple methods of assessing students can minimize the risk and help to validate test scores.

16. Not using regular assignments to make sure students stay on track and are ready to participate when required.

17. Establishing unsustainable grading and feedback policies that can burn you out over time.

18. Expecting to respond individually to every student all the time. (You can give generic feedback in Blackboard and limit your comments to unique issues on a student-by-student basis.)

19. Forgetting that your students are adults, and, as such, have to be responsible for reading instructions, asking when they need help, and completing assignments on time. Forgetting that as adults, students also have important family and job responsibilities that may require you to sometimes be flexible. (The challenge of finding a good balance.)

20. Assuming that free time and weekends are things of the past because you have to be present in your course site all the time. Assuming that you now have all the free time in the world because your students are “self-directed learners.” (Find a level of engagement that works for you and supports your students without supplanting their own cognitive strategies.)

Watching movies online

Do you want to show a movie to your online class? I heard a short podcast this morning from Future Tense with some ways to legally watch free movies online (links to the show are near the top in a variety of formats, about 4 minutes long). At Open Culture, find a list of 100 classic movies to watch followed further down the page with a list of sites to find 100s more free, ranging from classics, European, indie, Australian, B-movies, documentaries, and many, many more.

Find a movie you want to use in your class, and just provide a link and any site-specific instructions to your students.

If you find video content on a site like GoogleVideo or YouTube, be absolutely certain the entity who uploaded the video has the rights to put it out there before you ask your students to watch it. Otherwise, you are encouraging copyright violation.

If you a Univ of Main System faculty or staff member and you want to use a movie you can't find in these resources, you can get assistance in getting copyright clearance from Donna Bancroft, Off-Campus Library Services, 800-339-7323, donnaban@maine.edu. If your class will be watching a lot of movies, consider including a NetFlix subscription as a required item for the class. However, if the movies aren't current or popular, be sure to give flexible viewing dates. NetFlix cannot get 30 copies of the same old movie to Maine on the same night (or maybe even within the same week).

These can be resources for personal use, too! I can't wait to find some great classic sci-fi B movies now!

7 Things You Should Know About eReaders

EDUCAUSE has an excellent series of 2-page quick reads/handouts called 7 Things You Should Know About.... We'll be sharing a number of these in the blog in the coming weeks and months.

eReaders put books, newspapers, magazines, and other materials in a book-sized device that holds thousands of pages. I never thought I'd like digital books until I installed the Kindle app on my iPhone and discovered how much easier it is to hold than a book and how handy it is to have a book everywhere I go. eReaders aren't generally as small as an iPhone, but they are still more portable than carrying dozens of books at once. 7 Things You Should Know About E-Readers (PDF) will give you some technical details about eReaders along with how they are and can be used in education. This quick to read 2-page guide covers what it is, how it works, who's doing it (including textbook publishers), why eReaders are a significant technology, what the downsides are, where it's going, and what the implications are for teaching and learning.

Possibly the most popular, or at least the most well-known eReader is Amazon's Kindle. If you'd like to see what it's like, we have a Kindle DX at CTEL. Just contact a course designer or David Vardeman (vardeman@usm.maine.edu) to check it out. We're particularly interested in what you think of reading a textbook on an eReader, so if you use a textbook that has a Kindle edition, let us know!

For additional related reading, Knowledge@Wharton delves into the economics of digital textbooks and The New York Times reports on the ability for profs to create their own or change existing digital textbooks.

YouTube plans to caption most videos automatically

"YouTube said Thursday that it will start automatically captioning videos on its site, opening up a huge share of its content to people who are hearing-impaired, and a first step in creating a network of videos that could be subtitled between many languages."
This heralds a huge benefit for people with auditory deficits as well as ESOL learners.