Technology & Instruction for UNEX

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.