Technology & Instruction for UNEX

If you want to manage the backup and reloading of your Blackboard course yourself, you should use the Export Course or Archive Course options, along with Import Course when you are ready to reload. Export gives you a choice of which course areas you want to save while Archive makes a copy of everything, including student records. Student records are not available with Export. Here's a short step by step set of instructions on how to use Export Course and Archive Course [PDF] .

Our first couse for online instructors, Introduction to Online Instruction, has 20 students enrolled, and we may still get a few more. It may be the catchy title, or the fact that the course is free, but it might also be a sign that there is some interest in teaching online for UC Riverside Extension. We should have 2 or 3 additional online courses available in January and February.

It's probably the biggest event between Halloween and Thanksgiving in the US -- National Distance Learning Week is coming up from November 12-16th! You could celebrate by enrolling in an online course, or by listening to Rod Jefferson's interview with the NDLW National Chair, Dr. Ken Hartman on Rod's Pulse Podcast from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

from the Educational CyberPlayGround NetHappenings Mailing List Speak Up Survey Through December 15, K-12 students, teachers, administrators, and parents from across the nation have the opportunity to share their ideas and opinions on how technology should be used in the education process through Project Tomorrow's fifth annual Speak Up survey. This year's survey features new questions, addressing student interest (and parent support) in math, science, and technology careers; utilizing web 2.0 tools, like MySpace, in school; the merit of 21st century skills, such as learning a new language; the value of emerging technologies, such as video games, in education; and designing the ultimate, 21st century school. Results are shared with participating schools and school districts so they can use the data for planning and community discussion. Results are also used by government agencies and various organizations to inform new programs and polices.

Our free four week course, Introduction to Online Instruction, starts in less than a week. We could use a few more students, so contact your department programmer if you are interested.

Check out the debate on the Economist site. Sir John Daniel and Dr. Bob Kozma go toe to toe on the topic of "Effectiveness of Technology in Education - Does new technology add to the quality of education?". As far as I know, both guys (can you refer to a "sir" as guy?) are technology proponents, but in this debate Kozma has the positive perspective and Daniel has the thumbs down position. A poll running on the site is at 52 percent con and 48 percent pro at the moment. Although can add your own comment on the site, it suffers from poor implementation. There's no way to reply to specific comment and are no titles for comments, so you get a very long list of text to look through if you want to find something. There is also a comment from Linda Darling-Hammond , professor of Education at Stanford University which is worth reading.

You can add a YouTube video to your Blackboard course by including the URL of the video in a link, but a slightly more elegant way is to add the Embed code from YouTube to any course content. That way, you can include a video in an assignment or other item and it will stream from the YouTube (or other) website. The same technique works with TeacherTube also. Here are the step by step instructions [PDF] .

There is an interesting article in today's NY Times about the use of iPods and music as tools to help students learn English more quickly. Most schools ban mp3 players, but the schools mentioned in the article make them into learning devices. Making learning relevant is a tough job sometimes, but new technologies can be a part of it. "Grace Poli, a media specialist at José Martí, said that she approached district officials about buying 23 iPods for an after-school bilingual program in 2004 after being struck by students’ passion for them. Spanish-speaking students seemed bored by their English-language textbooks, she said, which they found outdated and irrelevant."

Zotero is a Firefox plugin which helps with online research. You can save PDFs and websites and it integrates with Word and OpenOffice and WordPress. Scott McLemee has a nice review of Zotero on Inside Higher Ed. Zotero is free and open source, developed at George Mason University.

The new podcast features in Blackboard 7.3 are actually part of the Podcast Learning Object from LearningObjects.com . This learning object makes it possible to easily add podcasts to your course and syndicate them to your students using an RSS feed. In English, this means your students can subscribe to the podcasts you make available, whether you create them yourself or download them from someone else. This way, students will be automatically updated with the latest podcast in your course and they can listen/watch them on an iPod, Zune(!), or a computer. Here's a 4 page overview of the podcast tools [PDF]. You may also find these resources useful: A tutorial from Dave Taylor on subscribing to podcasts in iTunes. Create your own Podcast (CNET). Kirk's Eight Rules of Effective Podcasting .

An early warning system sounds like a great thing for earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis, but it's also useful for instructors in online courses. When students don't set aside time to do their online work, they can quickly fall behind and may end up dropping a course. Blackboard 7.3 has a new feature, the Early Warning System, which can be used to keep tabs on student performance which may be a sign of potential problems. Rules can be created based on test scores, late work or course activity, and it's easy to monitor student progress and send warnings via email. A summary of the features of the Early Warning System in Blackboard is here [PDF].

With the recent update to Blackboard, it's a good idea to test your computer system for compatibility with Blackboard. Saginaw State University has a nice page which will run through a number of tests and give you an easy to read report on your setup. Check it out at their Blackboard Browser Test page .

The Discussion Board is one of the areas that changed quite a bit with the update to Blackboard 7.3, although many of the changes are just restoring functionality that was available in previous version of Blackboard. Here's a 2 page summary of some of the changes [PDF].

One of the add-ons that showed up with the update to Blackboard 7.3 over the weekend is a podcasting learning object. It doesn't help you create a podcast from what I could see, but it does allow you to upload one and distribute it. The uploading part takes place in a course content area using the learning unit menu. In the Control Panel under Course Tools you will find the Manage Podcast option. I'll be adding a tutorial on how to use podcasts in Blackboard later this week.

Today's Washington Post has an article about using clickers and PowerPoint in large class lectures . There's no agreement on whether either of these is an improvement, but there are some interesting points in the article. I'm not a fan of the huge lectures myself, but they do exist at most big universities and they might be considered a labor-saving device. I don't think they do much for learning myself, but maye the clicker at least keeps students awake and helps the lecturer cover the right material so most students understand it.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has summaries of the ways five people in higher education are using Second Life in instruction . Campuses created by many colleges in Second Life mirror their real campuses. But Phillip D. Long, associate director of the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, envisions the virtual campus as a student-led laboratory. Only about one-quarter of MIT'S island resembles the university's actual campus. The rest is dedicated to student projects. Mr. Long designed the space, and the New Media Consortium did the construction. MIT "wants to do this in strong collaboration with students," he says. "And we don't want to get ahead of them or project whatever idealized notions we might have, as people who work here, onto what we think the cultural practices and interaction styles of our students might be." In one part of the island, speakers can mount a dais and address a crowd thr...

Software updates give and software updates take away. I know I heard lots of complaints about lost functionality in the Discussion Board feature with the 7.0/7.1 update. You wonder why some of the features were removed...Well, some are returning with the 7.3 update. Here are some key changes: Restoring the capability in release 7.1, the Instructor can again view the Course Discussions in a Tree View, in which the post titles to a particular thread are visible. The use must select the Tree View icon located on the right side of the Course Discussions page. Selecting a post from the Course Discussions page will navigate the user to the Thread Detail page and will display the post as well. On the action toolbar, there are new icons. Mark as Read and Mark as Unread allow the Instructor to classify which forums have been read or not. The Search area has been rolled up into a graphic icon of a magnifying glass. Selecting this icon will drop down the search area. Within the Search tool, it i...

There is online help available for UCR Extension students who are using Blackboard , but not all of them may be aware of it. An easy way to make sure students can find the help is to add a button to the course menu which is a link to the Getting Started with Blackboard page. I've put together step by step instructions which go through how to add the button [ PDF ].

Blackboard will be unavailable from about 10 AM Saturday until 10 AM Sunday while UCR upgrades the system. If you are an instructor in an online, hybrid or web-enhanced course, please let your students know about the upgrade.

The Sophie project released an alpha version for Mac, Windows and Linux on July 31st. It also comes with documentation, so it should be a good chance to create some interactive multimedia projects for use in online courses and in other contexts. Here's what Sophie is designed to do: "Sophie's raison d'être is to enable people to create robust, elegant rich-media, networked documents without recourse to programming. We have word processors, video, audio and photo editors but no viable options for assembling the parts into a complex whole except tools like Flash which are expensive, hard to use, and often create documents with closed proprietary file formats. Sophie promises to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of creative people." I've been on vacation since the end of July and haven't tried out the Sophie alpha, but I hope to get to it soon.

Test-taking in online courses often leads to discussions about cheating and possible ways to minimize cheating. In some cases, proctored exams solve the problem, but that's not always a good solution for everyone and it may require that students pay money for the serverice. Course management systems may allow for randomly generated exams using a bank of questions, something which can minimize the kind of cheating where students share information about tests. Another way to address this is to use project-based learning techniques rather than multiple choice tests. This can help avoid the temptation to cheat, but it would still allow someone else to do the work for a student enrolled in an online course. Apparently cheating on tests is a very big issue at Troy University in Alabama, home to 11,000 online students. They will soon require their online students to purchase the $125 security webcam made by Software Secure in order to monitor student work in online courses. The device in...

Sophie is an open source project designed "to enable people to create robust, elegant rich-media, networked documents without recourse to programming". This week they released some documentation for the software and you can also download Early Release Candidate 5 for Mac, Windows and Linux and try it out. An update is coming sometime this month. The history of Sophie goes back to Voyager's Expanded Book Toolkit (I bought a copy myself way back when and then ended up creating my own tools for the project I did) through Night Kitchen's TK3 which was/is an interesting product that I guess never found a large enough audience. I tried that out several times and liked it, but never had a really good use for it. Sophie is potentially a nice tool for adding multimedia content to online courses. It looks easy to use and has some nice features. I think I'll try putting some of my tutorials into Sophie and see how that goes.

Comparing face to face with online teaching is often the first thing people think of when they want to know if online teaching and learning is any good (as if there was some uniformity across courses and the medium was somehow more important than the instructor). My feeling is that they are two different things and it's tough to make valid comparisons, but it's still useful to try, in some cases. In the current issue of The Internet and Higher Education , Kelly, Ponton and Rovai write about their effort to understand how student evaluations of teaching differ between face to face and online courses. Their conclusion is that: Face-to-face students tended to consider the instructor more important than online students, and they wanted their instructor to be of good character and be knowledgeable in the content; however, for online students, the course was more important than the instructor where the course organization and instructional materials were especially important. Theref...

I had not seen this one before, but the Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects looks pretty good. It is published by the Informing Science Institute which also publishes a number of other journals and books which are freely available. The books are provided through Google. It took me a little while to figure out how to read them online rather than purchasing them.

I've always thought that online teaching can force the instructor to rely on things other than classroom presence to get the job done, and this could result in rethinking teaching methods. In my mind, online teaching takes away the option of lecturing for the entire class period, so you've got to find other ways to engage students in learning. Today on chronicle.com there is a very short article which mentions the following: Susan Patrick, president and chief executive of the North American Council for Online Learning, was one of the panelists at the event, held by Blackboard Inc. She said training teachers to teach online not only improved their teaching methods in a virtual classroom, but also in the traditional lecture hall. It helps teachers break out of old habits and gets them to rethink their approach to teaching children, she said, not just by using Web tools but often by reorganizing the structure of the course. It would be nice to back that claim up with some kind of...

Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen has another of his always interesting entries about presentations. While he talks about two questions, "Why does it matter" and "What's your contribution," the key point is that you've got to know your audience when you are talking to people.

EndNote is a nice tool for bibliographies, but it's expensive and for students, it may not be necessary. BibMe is a free alternative -- a website where you can pretty quickly search for and add books and articles to a bibliography. BibMe also has a manual entry mode, so if the journal you are looking for isn't indexed by CiteULike , the service used by BibMe, you can add an article yourself. Of course, it's much faster to have all that done for you automatically. When EndNote added that feature some years ago, it was enough to make me pay the steep $100 upgrade fee. BibMe seems like a great service for students who are creating relatively small bibliographies. It might not work so well for academics since the academic journals it can search are limited.

The current issue of New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education has a number of articles related to online learning. This journal is accessible via the UCR campus network.

There are now a couple of troubleshooting guides for Blackboard in the Online Study area of the UC Riverside Extension web site. You can check out the instructor troubleshooting guide and another one for students . These were originally created for Extension staff who field questions from instructors and students about Blackboard, but now they are online for everyone to use. Maybe these guides will help address some of the questions which tend to come up at the start of every quarter. If you are an instructor who is using Blackboard, you may want to point your students to these guides through a course announcement. Coming soon: Introduction to Blackboard self-paced courses for instructors and students

Most people have heard about YouTube, the video sharing site which is one of the most popular sites on the web. How about TeacherTube ? TeacherTube is a free resource for sharing instructional videos, animations and screencasts. It's been around a couple of months now. It's easy to embed a video from TeacherTube on your site, just copy and paste the embed code into your web page or blog and you'll see something like this: If you can find some material which works with your course, TeacherTube could be an easy way to add some multimedia to your online course.

If you've ever wondered how to present numbers and text in more graphical formats, check out A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods developed by Martin J. Eppler and Ralph Lengler from the University of Lugano in Switzerland. It's an interesting resource -- move your mouse over any of the elements in the table and you'll see a visual example. I like the infomural example, but there are many good ones. A couple of additions which might be nice would be a way to save or print the pop ups and links to the examples.

Looking for teaching ideas or course materials? Connexions is "an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Our Content Commons contains educational materials for everyone — from children to college students to professionals — organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons "attribution" license." Since the content is broken down into smaller pieces, it should be more easily used and adapted than textbooks. Ideally, you could locate and make connections among several modules and use them in a course. While the site has quite a bit of material, it may need some more before it's easy to put together a course this way. Also, the organization of material is in a flat format which might be a challenge as the site grows -- all of the material submitted under one category is listed there. Each module has link...

Because I participated in a Google usability test for Blogger, this blog didn't get updated to the new version of Blogger right away. In fact, it was unavailable to me for many weeks until today, when it was finally upgraded to the new Blogger. I'll finally be able to resume my work blogging.

I have found the Tomorrow's Professor email list from the Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning and MIT to be a good source of information about teaching in higher education. It comes out a couple of times a week and consists of short articles or excerpts relevant to teaching. You can also find the entries at the Tomorrow's Professor blog . A recent entry, Teaching for Transformation: From Learning Theory to Teaching Strategies , offered some practical suggestions for instructors: No matter what you teach, you face the challenge of bringing students from point A--what they currently know-to point B--the learning goals of a course. In many courses, the distance between points A and B is huge, and the path is not obvious. Students must not only acquire new skills and information, but also radically transform their approach to thinking and learning. This newsletter explores theories and teaching strategies that address this universal teaching challenge.

If you subscribe to the feed for this blog in iTunes, in addition to getting any podcasts, you will also automatically receive any PDF attachments. This could be a handy way to keep people up to date on materials available for instructors. It might not do too much for anyone who doesn't want the PDFs, but the files are not that large. For the most part, these guides are specific to UC Riverside, although the ones for the discussion and the control panel might work for other people as well. Here are the completed how-to guides so far: Student Login Student Login (alternate) Participate in Discussions Instructor Login Managing Course Control Panel Managing Course Control Panel (alternate) Using Wikis Using Blogs Feedback or suggestions are welcome either through the comments or via email to breilly at ucrx dot ucr dot edu .

I interviewed Jon Kindschy of UCR Extension last week about the use of distance learning in the Sciences courses here at Extension. The podcast is a little under 9 minutes long. Click here to play the podcast or subscribe through the button in the sidebar.

It's a nice marketing idea -- putting previews of courses online so anyone can download them. Of course, anyone has to be able to sign up for the courses to make it worthwhile, and that is also the case here with Harvard Extension's use of iTunes U to offer video previews of selected courses. Not all online courses use video, but these do, so it's a nice use of the technology. Previews for 15 of the 50 courses are available. Check out the article at Playlist Magazine or visit the Harvard Extension iTunes U site . You'll need iTunes installed to view the videos.

Innovate is an online journal which covers online education and other technology-related topics. The current issue has a thorough summary and commentary by Stephen Downes about the Blackboard patent issue .

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an active discussion board related to Online Teaching . Many of the threads address the use of Blackboard. It's free to use the discussion board, unlike most of the rest of chronicle.com

We had our first informal class last night on Online Tools for Face to Face instructors. There were 7 instructors attending. Next week's repeat session on Wednesday may have a few more. I will be updating the materials for next week, so if anyone would like the updated CD, please let me know. I will also be putting the material online.

If you would like a two page handout on how to login to the UCR Extension Blackboard area, I have one PDF file for instructors and one for students . Each is 276K in size. Right click (Control Click on a Mac) on the links to save these files to your computer. Suggestions on improving these would be helpful. Please email me at breilly at ucx.ucr.edu or leave a comment.

UCR's Blackboard installation now provides access to the Teams LX plugin from Learning Objects . This plugin lets you add wikis to your course. A wiki is a relatively simple tool which lets people create web pages with text, links and images. They are useful for any kind of collaborative project. There are two kinds of wikis available -- a course wiki which can either be edited only by the instructor (not sure why you would do that) or by everyone in the course, and individual or group wikis which can be created in any course content area. For ideas about using a wiki in your course, check out Stewart Mader's blog, Using Wiki in Education , a 4 part video course about Wikis and Wikipedia (Flash) from UW Milwaukee, using Wikis in online education from WikEd at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Curriculum, Technology and Education Reform program, or Eliot Masie's Learning Wiki for some examples.

Lifehacker has an item today about learning a language using podcasts you can download for free from the iTunes Music Store. I've looked at a few of these language podcasts and some are very good. What might be equally useful for learning a new language is to have the students in the class make a podcast.