Technology & Instruction for UNEX

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.