Blogs as an assignment/instructional tool

Please let me know some or all.  Short answers fine:

• Do you have students create blogs or post on blogs for your class(es)?
• How often do you do it?
• What are the goals/objectives?
• What have the results been?  Did they live up to or exceed your expectations?
• What blog software did you use, why, and how did that work out (did you try different ones)?
• Did you link back to Canvas?  How?
• Did you (have the students) do anything regarding viewership (check stats, promote?)
• Anything else?

I will post responses to my eLearning blog, or you can post them directly there, yourself.  I'll attribute them to you by first initial, last name, unless you prefer something else.  If you send a link, I'll link it to your name.

WA Canvas Users' Group - First Conference.

I went to the first ever WA Canvas User’s Group conference in late March in Tacoma. Recordings of the sessions are now available. Below is a selection of ones I went to, or that may be of interest to the CBC community as we transition to Canvas.  Links to all the recordings and session descriptions are at the bottom of this message.

Curious about Canvas by Alissa Sells, SBCTC.  This is a basic intro to Canvas.  The recording is almost 1:15 because there were lots of questions.  Good basic info.

Getting into the Module Mentality by Sherry-Anne McLean, Math Faculty, LWIT. Modules are central to the Canvas Paradigm, and worth considering as you move your class over. This was a good session. It covers considerations in moving your course from Angel to Cavnas.

Integrating WAMAP into Canvas by David Lippman, Math Professor, Pierce College. This is primarily of interest to Math instructors who use WAMAP, or are interested in using it with Canvas.

Canvas Analytics by Andy Duckworth, Director of eLearning, TCC. Canvas has analytics that you can access to see how students are doing in your class. You can use this info to find general problems, or to identify problems with specific students. Students can also view analytics on their own performance.

Piloting Canvas: Stories and Cool Tools by Betsey Barnett, et. al. Shoreline CC.  They “share how we are using announcements, discussions, quizzes, question banks and how students use the built in media tool as a warm up for student speeches. [They] also share … personal stories using Canvas.”

Working with Canvas and Google Docs by Peter Agras, et. al., EWU & WWU. 57 min. Part one, covers integrating Google Docs into Canvas as a tool for collaboration and peer reviewed projects. Includes embedding docs into Canvas for live updating. This part is useful for any instructor.  The second part is more technical, showing using the API to pull analytic data from Canvas. Watch the first part, for sure.

If you want to check out other sessions, here’s the full list of recordings. Some of the subjects are: Importing files (13), flipping the science classroom (22), preventing plagiarism with Turnitin integration (25), MOOCs & CCs (16) and more! The full descriptions are on the program PDF.

Cheating on Quizzes? My students wouldn't do that, right?

It recently came to our attention in a (face-to-face) class that two students were collaborating on online quizzes.  It came to light because a student claiming to have taken a quiz called and mentioned taking it about the same time as his study buddy.  Whatever happened, that particular quiz was not accessed by the student, but looking at other quizzes, the two students had increasingly similar results on their quizzes, and typically their access times overlapped, sometimes turning in the quiz at the same time.  On one occasion, they accessed the quiz from the same IP address (meaning they were likely at the same location).

So, out of curiosity, we looked at other students in the class and found five other examples where it appears the students may be collaborating.  This is a face-to-face class with supplements and testing online.

So, this brings up some questions.  

• Are students cheating in your class?  
• How can you tell?  
• And, how can you minimize the likelihood of cheating in online quizzes and tests.

Well, are students cheating in your class?  From Jared Stein's PowerPoint presentation on cheating¹, he cites figures that 75% of students admit to cheating and 95% of cheating is undetected.^2,3

I'll leave detection for another post.

Does this mean you have to avoid online quizzes?  They're very convenient and in some cases necessary, so how can you discourage cheating on your quizzes and tests?

• Make clear statements about what is permissible, and what is not.  Our syllabus boilerplate refers to academic honesty and the academic honesty web page specifically mentions collaboration on quizzes and tests.  Still, it would be helpful to make it completely clear by posting your policy in your syllabus addendum, and perhaps sending a message or posting an announcement at the beginning of the class.
• Have students sign an academic honesty statement, and/or provide a quiz that they take that has them indicate they know what is permitted and what is not.
• Make your quizzes more cheat-proof.  There are a number of approaches to this.  Here are some of them.
• Deliver a random subset of a larger pool of questions.  In the incident mentioned above, the questions and answers were randomized, but they were the same set for all.  The students learned quickly enough they could find the same question even though they were in different order.  If you randomly delivered 50 questions out of 100 (randomized subset), students would get substantially different quizzes, making this kind of collaboration more difficult.
• Include some essay questions.  Yes, it makes for more work for you, but it also means the student has to do his own work.  You could also use the randomized subset technique for these too, so they couldn't discuss their answers.
• In the same vein, move away from objective questions and assessments and move towards subjective responses.
• Time limit your quizzes so that they can be completed, but without a lot of extra time which can be spent coordinating the answers.  
• You may wish to allow open-book quizzes, since it is virtually impossible to stop in un-proctored quizzes
• Employ the 'nuclear' option of proctoring quizzes.  Tegrity provides a proctoring function to record the student's work on quizzes, and other options are available.  Note that in-person proctoring of distance students in other states may trigger rules that require CBC to register and in some cases pay exorbitant fees, and should be avoided.  There are on-line proctoring services that could be used if there is interest. Contact eLearning for more details (or maybe I can do a blog posting on this later).
• If there is interest, we could look into licensing Respondus Lock-Down Browser.  This won't prevent students from collaborating, but could prevent them from viewing other sites while taking a quiz.  This would work best in a proctored setting, though, because there's nothing to stop a student from having another computer next to the locked down one.
• Apply other strategies that minimize the impact of quizzes, such as a variety of assessments, including essays and papers or other original work.
• Require that students share drafts and work in progress.
• Make more quizzes formative, with lower point values (along with some of the other suggestions) in conjunction with other assessment strategies.
 

You can evaluate your course using the Measure of Course Cheatability, which includes many of these items and more with annotations (note that getting 100% is the 'holy grail' and Jared Stein, who co-developed this rubric, says he hasn't seen anyone get better than 80%.⁴  There is a Collaborate recording from the eLearning in WA group on Academic Integrity with Stephanie Delaney, Renee Carney and Connie Broughton.  Unfortunately the sound goes out multiple times during Stephanie's part, which is annoying and hampers the flow.  Nonetheless, there's good info there. 

Added note (12/17): turnitin, the cheating detecting system, has published a white paper on the top 10 types of plagiarism.  This also linked from an article in eCampus News, if you're interested in a summary.    

¹From PowerPoint notes in Jared Stein's presentation on cheating. He has a lot of references on the linked page and more links on his diigo site.
²Dick, M., Sheard, J., Bareiss, C., Carter, J., Joyce, D., Harding, T., & Laxer, C. (2003, June). Addressing student cheating: definitions and solutions. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 35(2), 172-184.³Kaczmarczyk, L. (2001). Accreditation and student assessment in distance education: Why we all need to pay attention. Proc. 6th Conf. on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, Canterbury, UK, 113-116. 
⁴ Ibid. (Stein) 

Spring Quarter WebCT Wrap-up

This message pertains to the quarterly transition for WebCT, and should be read carefully (printing it out may be helpful) by instructors and others using WebCT. You can see some of the changes I made to this message over the quarters because some are in blue (or a very subtle light blue/gray).

Some words about the transition to Angel.
We are moving to Angel and would like to have everyone migrated by Fall 2010.  Practically speaking, this means you should plan to migrate your Fall classes during Summer quarter.  This is especially important for classes that are going to be online.  Moving support for face-to-face (F2F) classes is less critical, however you will probably have a better experience if you start working on Angel now.  Brad is planning on at least one more F2F session, and there are online opportunities to learn Angel during Summer.   David and I are available to assist on an ad hoc basis, as well as some instructors, such as Brad Sealy, or in Health Sciences, Eric Nilson may be around to assist.  I can do a F2F training.

After December 31, 2010, we will not be licensed to use WebCT for instruction.  As long as the server does not croak, we will keep it running to retrieve course backups and to support transitioning courses to Angel.

Spring quarter finish
I am planning on backing up and resetting Spring quarter classes on Thursday 6/24, starting at about 2 a.m.   I probably won't take WebCT off-line to do this.   You may wish to print this out.  Please, at a minimum, read down to the second bullet point. 

In general, it is better to let me backup and reset your classes (feel free to backup your class, but let me reset it). 

 The backup and reset only apply to classes which have had students loaded and updated for Spring quarter, other classes are untouched.

• Given the gap between the end of the quarter and the reset, your students may try to contact you when you aren’t checking the class.  It would be a good idea to set your e-mail address in the private mail settings and turn forwarding on.  See text description below or a quick video tutorial on doing this (see below for text description). That way, you will get their messages in your regular e-mail box and they won’t be lost in space.
• If you have special needs to retain a class with the student data, or need to keep a class from being reset, please contact me.
• If you have discussion messages you need to save, you can select them, then click the compile button and save them as a text file for copying and pasting back into the class.  The discussion folder structure (and probably mail) appears to be left intact.
• The reset procedure clears all student data, discussions, e-mail, student homepages, etc.  It does not affect organizer pages, quizzes, content modules, etc.  This also includes conditional or selective release, so if you have conditional release on anything, it may restrict your next quarter students from accessing the resource.  This is something you need to check if you are using selective release for anything.
• The backups I make can be restored to a snapshot of the class as it was when the backup happened, including all postings, student data, etc.   If I do not take WebCT down to do the backups, it may result in some student (or instructor) activity between the backup and reset.  That activity will be lost.   From 3-6 a.m. there should not be significant activity. 
• Students with current logons should be able to continue to access those after the reset, but their old classes will not be available.
• If you do end up needing data from a reset course, I can restore that snapshot and it will be just as it was before it was reset.

If you need to preserve calendar entries, you can download them prior to the reset and upload them afterwards.  You can see a tutorial on this at http://faculty.columbiabasin.edu/distance/faculty/export_import_calendarV4_viewlet_swf.html . 

You may wish to check your class the night before the reset to see if students sent you any new messages prior to the reset.  Alternately you may adjust the mail settings to forward messages to your regular e-mail box. To do this, click on your Private Mail icon, then the Message Settings button.  In the Mail Forwarding section, make sure the Allow users to forward ... setting is checked (this is the default), then check the Forward my mail to: setting and put your e-mail in the text box. See video tutorial on setting forwarding.

As always, let me know if you have any questions.

P.S. Blackboard bought out WebCT several years ago and now the version we are using has a Blackboard name, however for convenience, and due to the familiarity, I have continued to call it WebCT.  The Bb name is something like Bb Learning System 4.1 CE.
--
Jerry Lewis
Director of eLearning and Web Services
WebCT/Bb Senior Level Certified Trainer
Columbia Basin College
Pasco, WA 99301 -3379 jlewis@columbiabasin.edu
509-542-4465, direct
509-547-0511, ext 2465
509-546-0401 fax

SLanguages 2008 Conference

I attended parts of the SLanguages 2008 Conference on Friday 5/23 and Saturday 5/24. The conference was about language education in virtual worlds. It ran from 10 a.m. to 10 a.m. - 24 hours (attendees were from around the world - China, Japan, Ecuador, Europe, Dubai, as well as at least one from Pendleton). I had mistaken the date and so I showed up late on the first day. Still, I managed to attend seven sessions, plus the conference wrap-up.

The sessions were mostly interesting, and compared favorably to face-to-face [F2F] conferences I've been to, with the added benefit of being able to attend from work or home at no cost other than the electricity and the time.

The presentations varied from slide-show talks to virtual tours. There were over 350 attendees and some of the sessions must have had 50 or more participants.

Education in a virtual world

The question may come up - why use a virtual world to do the same thing you could do in a physical class. It has been asked why the virtual world has buildings, chairs, TVs, etc and why you walk around (although in Second Life (SL) you can fly and teleport also).

This is a question that is being tested in many ways beyond the scope of this post, but let me offer a few ideas.

In many ways it's fantastical (I haven't seen a fat person yet - everyone is good looking and above average - my avitar came out of the box at 2 meters tall - over 6 ft.), and yet you have more of a sense of being somewhere with other people, even though they may be half-way across the world. Even though it's all virtual, you feel like there's a connection. Certainly more-so than asynchronous communication, and perhaps more than synchronous methods, such as text based chat, audio and/or video (all of which are available in SL).

When I first went in, I searched for some interests - Japanese and French languages. I found a site that offered English tutoring. I signed up to be an English tutor and have had two sessions this week tutoring Japanese students. The first was pretty last-minute and it took a while for me to get my bearings and figure out how to use the 'book,' which was projected up on the 'wall' of the room like a PowerPoint presentation. The second went more smoothly. We used audio, which worked much like a telephone, and was critical so that they could hear me speaking and I could hear them practicing speaking and correct and reinforce them.

Plus you have the capability of having simulations, such as the nursing one. The instructor demostrated a simulation where a 'patient' lies on a hospital bed/guerney. There's a big display with the patient's vital signs above it. Near the bed, there's an IV stand, oxygen tank, defibrullator and maybe other gadgets. The instructor has a control where he can change the vital signs and the student has a control where he can interact with the abovementioned objects to respond to the changes. So if the patient's oxygen level dropped, the student could give him oxygen, etc.

I also watched part of an archived presentation on using SL for education on the Edunation II Island (Centralia CC has an island, as does the SBCTC which is for the CTCs to experiment with.)

Second Life & Virtual Worlds in Education

A few days ago, I sent out a notice about a demonstration of using the virtual world, Second Life, in a Nursing class. The demo has been postponed, due to real-life floods in western Washington (the course is a Centralia College course).

In preparation for attending that, I set up an account and an avatar [the virtual person you use to navigate Second Life] and did some exploring. My avatar's name is Gerard Latte (your first name can be anything, but you choose the last name from a long list).

It can be confusing and hard to understand at first, because it's so different from the applications we use regularly. Bit-by-bit, though, you learn how to do things. At first I found some videos on YouTube that helped learn basic things, like changing your avatar's appearance. Yesterday, I met some of the other eLearning Council (SBCTC group) members and with the Nursing instructor as a guide, we looked at a simulation like the one he uses in class. He also answered a number of questions and demonstrated some things.

Since it's so new (well, not that new, but reaching a point where it is usable), the question is bound to surface asking whether this is appropriate or useful for education, or is it just a gee-gaw for the technologically obsessed. Although I think it's more than the latter, there is a lot of experimentation going on with the former. Some useful things will, no doubt, come out of it, as well as failures and time wasters.

A reformed online gamer asked me if it was a game, or like a game, with an objective and the ability to collect objects and points and such. While it resembles online games, there is no specific objectives, and while you can collect stuff, it isn't in the scope of 'winning.' The point is more to build and create your environment and interact with others. He then warned me that it could suck up my life, so to be careful.

There are other virtual environments. If I get a chance, I'll look at them and report back, or at least provide some links.