Tag Archives: faculty spotlight

The Online Learning Community as Digital Village Green: Interview with Joan Thormann Part I.

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Over the next few weeks, the e-Learning and Instructional Support Department (eLIS) will be publishing a series of interviews with author and Lesley University Professor  Joan Thormann, exploring topics in online learning design and facilitation.  Joan Thomann will be presenting at an upcoming eLIS Brown Bag event, The Online Learning Community as Digital Village Green.  This event will take place on Friday, November 15th from 12pm to 2pm at Lesley’s University Hall at 1815 Mass Ave in Cambridge on the third floor, within the Creativity Commons. The interviews were conducted by eLIS Instructional Designer Sarah Krongard.

joan

Joan Thormann co-authored the book The Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Designing and Teaching Online Courses with her colleague Isa Kaftal Zimmerman.

What was your interest in writing this book?

Joan Thormann: I started teaching online in 1996, when there was no guidance available.  Distance learning did exist, but mostly involved mailings, videos and/or televised lectures.  There was very little happening with online learning, and not much research available — there was certainly no eLIS!  In 1996 I was asked to teach a course online and was given one sample syllabus.

Initially I learned about teaching online by trial and error.  I also learned from my students’ feedback.  Eventually – slowly but surely – research about teaching online started to appear.  So, I began to follow the research, as though I was writing my dissertation again.  I wanted to know more.  I wanted to know how other people dealt with online learning and how to make it better.  This is something I am always doing. Much of my own research has come from trying new things in my online classes.

I wrote The Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Designing and Teaching Online Courses because over the years, I learned so much and wanted to share my knowledge.  I didn’t want others to have to flounder in the same way I did.

Were you provided with any university-supported tools when you started teaching online?

Thormann: In the very beginning, Lesley provided a threaded online bulletin board system and email. That was it.   I spent most of my time and energy developing websites for my courses and updating materials.  There was no gradebook. The technology was very primitive. Therefore, when Blackboard appeared, I grumbled a bit because I had to jettison most of what I had built.  But after I got over my grumbling and adapted to using Blackboard, I could focus on course content and interacting with students rather than maintaining my course infrastructure.

In working with Blackboard, I began to realize the amount of time that I spent in the past on administrative work. Blackboard liberated me from this.  And even though I hear my colleagues complain about Blackboard, I appreciate this tool, since I worked in the “Dark Ages.” Despite its virtues I have found it necessary to create Blackboard workarounds when I feel Blackboard gets in the way.

Now there are many tools available within Blackboard such as wikis, blogs, journals, discussion forums, and the grade center.

What are some of your current specific research interests?

Thormann: My research generally revolves around the incorporation of pedagogical approaches for online teaching and student participation.  Each time I use a new tool or approach I do action research to find out how well it works.  I have done research on the use of Skype, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and student moderators. My research shows that all three of these approaches are viewed positively by my students.   I have presented my research at meetings and written articles about these topics.  There are also descriptions of it in my book. Currently, it seems that others find my work with student moderating the most interesting and useful.

To research student moderation, I sent out a survey asking students questions such as “What were the most beneficial and least beneficial aspects of moderating?”  The students who responded to the surveys were very positive about student moderating.   I now use student moderators regularly in almost all the online classes I teach.

I learned that each time I added a new pedagogical element to my course, I want – and need – to check with students to find out if the new element is, in fact, something I should continue to incorporate.  I use my students as a gauge.  Both ongoing feedback and end of course evaluations also help guide my pedagogy and research.

My latest research involves incorporating UDL in online courses. My future research may focus on gender differences in participation in online courses.

Stay tuned for Part II of this series.

Designing an Online Course with Brandon Strathmann – Part 2

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Brandon Strathmann

Read Designing an Online Course with Brandon Strathmann – Part 1

I am a visual and linguistic storyteller who uses the communicative powers of the drawn character along with physical acting to engage my students. These are the personal touches that keep my students engaged in the learning process. The only way I could replace my lectures and demonstrations of original artistic lessons was by making videos of my teaching, so I prepared transcripts for the dozens of visual demonstrations that accompanied this class, where I provide all of the visual examples and instructions for the course’s many lessons. Without the content I put into these video transcripts, I would not have been able to write the in-depth weekly modules I needed to envision how the class would run online.

You design a very different course for students online than you do for a traditional class, one that has a great deal more in common with writing a book. It’s not a how-to-manual, but rather an autobiographical novel that tells in writing the things that would be difficult to convey without the written word.

The end result is a very different sort of classroom experience for my students and myself which required the development of it’s own teaching philosophy. Writing out the plans for these lessons I found that I could use exactly the right words to communicate the necessary concepts to I wished to teach my students. Creating these classes is a real test of how well you know your material; everything has to be planned in advance. I would have missed out on the opportunity for personal growth if I had immediately produced instructional videos for this class without making my write-ups.

Writing this course out in advance of teaching it required that I generate many thought provoking questions to provide for students I would never meet in person. In person critiques generate a fair amount of interesting comments and challenges to the artwork that is being presented by students in response to their assignments. But they do not come up with questions as insightful and instructional as the ones that an experienced artist, like myself provides. There is no way I could have each student in a traditional classroom answer the number of complicated questions I am able to pose to them as participants in this class. There is more time for students to give feedback on one another’s artwork in an online format, something I think will be very artistically enriching for everyone.

The saddest part about teaching online for me is losing the interaction between students and myself. I suppose some of this can be made up during on-campus office hours. There is a spontaneity that occurs in the chaos, urgency and danger improving the creative process that is missing for my online students since I’m not controlling the time they get to spend on the drawing exercises. You lose the benefits of the energy you feed off of a class when you lecture, but you gain absolute control of the classroom experience.

I found generating the all-encompassing content for this class to be very demanding, since it was an entirely new experience for me. I recommend that you give this learning process the time it needs so that you can reflect upon it as you go through the steps. I was lucky to have been able to plan for this class a year before I have to teach it. Online classes are designed to be accessible by a wide variety of learners through student-centered learning and require multiple examples of clearly described instruction. A huge advantage is that students have the opportunity to pause the content for breaks and have the chance to review the content at their own speed.

Making this class was a very time consuming process, due to my experimenting in intellectual territory I was unfamiliar with. That being said it was neat to test my ability to create a course that removed myself as a physical entity from the teaching process. I regret not accumulating more imagery resources early on during this process, as this would have made it easier for me to role-play and visualize how the class would go, rather than muscling through the content in a multitude of written attempts. But, I made a richer and heavily researched class as a result having to write it out, minus all visuals. So the struggle of writing taught me new methods of learning strategies and uncovering new ideas and working processes.

Collaboration is essential to succeeding at this difficult task, there is still a fair amount of work left to-be-done on this class before it is ready to be automated. I am grateful that I have help from the Learning Technologies Department to bring this class to life. Our student body is ever-changing and online classes provide them with new ways to learn with hi-tech tools.

Note: Image orignally published on aquariumofthepacific.org

Designing an Online Course with Brandon Strathmann – Part 1

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Brandon Strathmann

Note: Below you’ll find Brandon Strathmann’s description of his experience working with eLIS to develop his first online class.

First let me commend all of you who contribute to this blog for the excellent variety and quality of content posted on it. It’s a great reflection of the dynamic and growing world of online teaching. I’m glad to have been introduced to such a useful resource.

I’d like to share my positive experience building an online class with all of you. I’m an Associate Professor of Animation and Motion Media Art at LUCAD (Lesley University College of Art and Design) who learned about the opportunity to design an online class at a Faculty Development Day event last Fall of 2012. I spent the past few months building an all-new “Advanced Character Design” class. It is designed to provide artists the chance to improve their skills of perception and rendering of caricatured humans and animals. I delve into the psychology of how humans are manipulated by the things they see. Artists learn to play around with the physical traits that viewers make conscious and unconscious judgments of when they look at a character. They end the class with a portfolio of the art they have done.

I entered this online academic realm with some practical computer and programming skills, hoping to expand the sort of content I could offer to students. I have seen technology innovate and improve the field of animation and video games during my own career, and learned that it’s always good to be one of the earlier practitioners of a trade to adopt advancing technology. Technology isn’t so much of an inevitability as it is an opportunity.

The training process for this class took two stages, that eased me into the unique methodology required in designing an online class. Part one was an online group class where participants learned how to modify existing classes to work in an internet-connected environment. This stage was challenging for me since I was designing a new class that had to be an advanced part two to an existing class that also needed to exist as a stand-alone graduate class. I was introduced to the various online tools to instill knowledge and skills in my students through four weeks of challenges and exercises done independently and in groups. The class ends with a complex final project testing the skill accumulation along with the creativity of the student.

The second part of this training was getting to work one-on-one with a Senior Learning Technologies Designer to build the written framework for this class. My course needed a customized format to provide a rich environment for students to learn in online. There was some trial and error in designing this since I was becoming better at understanding how the online teaching tools worked. I had to write a few drafts of my weekly course modules, honing in on how I might best communicate with online students as part of this learning process. It took me a while to learn what tool would be best for addressing various lesson plans but luckily my trainer was very patient and helpful.

I think it helps to be an experienced teacher when you design one of these non-traditional online courses. You need to really understand the specific challenges that your students face based off of your personal mastery of their educational medium. Art courses rely upon a lot of creative energy in a student’s learning environment to keep them interested and passionate about the material. I felt very challenged having to come up with an advanced class in character design as an online class. When I first embarked on this creative journey I felt that this would just be a correspondence course, something where I would provide instructional videos and provide written critiques about the work my students turned in.

Most of what a character designer does is hands-on and experiential in nature, these artistic factors are complicated visual elements that were challenging to translate into a written format. I designed symbolic language that my students could use as a guide to envision and review the topics covered in the lessons. Taking lessons that are primarily hands on and instead building them as systematic, written steps required me to predict how students would experience each portion of the designing process.

Early in the process I saw that I would need to plan out my lessons from the start to the finish for each of these class sessions, and that these lessons would have to planned out in a written form. Writing provided me with powerful tools to summarize my lessons. I’ve learned that I form ideas and describe them differently when I use the written as opposed to the spoken word. I enjoy getting feedback from my pupils and had to envision how students working in my class would react and feel about the lessons they are taking in class. So my pedagogical approach had to be modified to one where I was entirely reliant upon my existing understanding of student behavior in the classroom. This required me to research online content delivery methods and the educational philosophies of many other teachers to see what educational techniques I might use.

Click here for Part 2 of Brandon’s story…

Note: Image orignally published on aquariumofthepacific.org

Blackboard IM: A Brief Survey of One Lesley Professor’s Experience

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BBIM

Dr. Paul Naso, an assistant professor in the PhD in Educational Studies Program at Lesley GSOE, has adopted Blackboard Instant Messaging for a variety of communication tasks.  Below is a list of some small steps he and his students have taken during recent semesters:

In his online course Critical Contexts for the Principalship:

  • Office hours, by appointment meetings, and occasional unscheduled meetings with students
  • Use of audio, video and text message functionality
  • All students were Bb IM users and approximately 75% of students used Bb IM frequently for within-cohort interactions, in pairs or small groups

As part of the online component of Adult Learning and Development Semester IV:

  • Office hours, by appointment text chat
  • Audio chat with students to get individual feedback on plans for how they would approach their assignments

In the Educational Leadership PhD specialization:

  • Unscheduled, student-initiated text chats to
    • Check-in about program requirements, program schedules
    • Request suggestions for research topic literature
    • Schedule appointments

Through his use of Blackboard IM so far, Paul has observed that as the numbers of his students using the tool increases, the more uses for it become evident.

If you would like to learn more about Blackboard IM please review the help documentation on the eLIS website.

Using VoiceThread In Counseling Courses

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irle_vt-screenshot

Student, Cheri Weber’s midtern created for Irle Goldman’s Human Development course.

WHY I LIKE AND USE VOICETHREAD In My Counseling Courses
By Irle Goldman, PhD

  1. Counseling is a relational, symbolic and creative experience. Having students describe it in a paper makes it too one-dimensional. It looses it’s depth and possibilities. Voicethread allows us to add pictures, voice, and video to create a richer, more useful and communicative product.
  2. Voicethread allows the students to see each other’s work and learn from it. You have a more relational/mutual educational experience.
  3. Voicethread allows students to react/respond to each others’ work in a way that’s easy to see and connect to. This helps to build community for the class.
  4. Voicethread allows you to see the whole picture… all of the classes creations in one screen; all the pages of individual creations in another screen. I get a better sense of the whole gestalt.
  5. Because of this, it is easier to mark. You can see what is included and missing in one-fell-swoop.
  6. What the students produce is much more interesting to read/see/hear.
  7. Because it uses so many modalities (kind of like life) the students tell me that it’s more interesting to create. They can start from a picture or a text or a song and build their piece of work around any of these and add to it and re-organize it.
  8. I have used it for projects, for midterms and for finals in my Theories of Counseling and Human Development classes.
  9. It is always available in the cloud.
  10. It can be archived in a student’s portfolio.

Challenges: It takes a while to learn how to connect and use it and I have not yet figured out the way to communicate with students individually on it.

Join Irle Goldman, Licensed Clinical Psychologist and Adjunct Faculty and Liv Cummins, Asst Professor of Drama and Literature for a lunchtime conversation about VoiceThread on Feb. 27th at 12pm in UNIV 3-098. They will discuss the different ways they have used VoiceThread in their courses and answer questions.