Instructors as learners

Instructors who are new to online teaching face a steep learning curve as they grapple with the challenges of presenting material effectively using technology, engaging with students, guiding students through online work, and evaluating the outcomes. Penn State University has a helpful online Self-Assessment Tool for Online Teaching Preparedness. Many institutions offer help from instructional designers and other educational professionals in preparing faculty to teach online. As online learning grows, the number of faculty able to teach this way will also need to grow. Many of us over a certain age have no experience with this form of learning, yet we may be faced with having to incorporate online elements into existing courses or even teach fully online.

One of the most helpful things a new online instructor can do is experience what it's like to be an online learner.  Designing such a course would obviously depend on the nature of online learning the instructor is going to do. At my institution we offer several blended courses that deliver about 50% of the course online and the remainder in the classroom, plus the odd fully online course. We use Moodle as our LMS, but instructors are free to go outside Moodle to deliver course content or communicate with students as they see fit.

What online learning experiences would best prepare a new online instructor for teaching? While there is a plethora of emerging technologies that online instructors can employ in their courses, there is a smaller set of experiences that most courses with an online component will require of students:

• engaging with course content online in written, audio, video or other formats
• communicating and engaging in discussion with other students and the instructor
• collaborating with other students
• completing online quizzes
• uploading assignments
• troubleshooting technological problems
• managing time independently
• having regular access to the internet

I would suggest offering a Moodle course incorporating these components to new online instructors as a professional development activity - perhaps for a few hours a week over 4 weeks preferably with a cohort of at least 4 or 5 participants and an experienced facilitator. One of the side benefits to this of course, would be the instant peer group and online community for the new instructors.

Last year I was a participant in an Instructional Skills Workshop Online offered through Royal Roads University. It offered some of these experiences and also provided participants an opportunity to practice online facilitation skills as they guided their colleagues through discussion activities. The course reinforced for me the importance of well-timed, careful communication from the facilitator - not enough and you feel adrift, not timely or relevant and you feel unheard. I also really got the challenges of asynchronous discussion - you do end up waiting for people to post and potentially feeling like your time is being wasted. And the absence of verbal cues and body language was a good reminder to try to build in some substitutes in my communication with students.

What are the other online experiences that would help instructors?

Fun with word clouds

Word clouds are very fun - I created this one at tagxedo with my blog as the word generator. Let your creativity run wild - you can change the words, colours, shapes, fonts, layout . . . .

A great tool for creating visual impact!

Going mobile

When Going Mobile was released by The Who 40 years ago this year, telephones were - if I remember correctly - hardwired into the wall, with no functionality beyond dialing and speaking. Although the party line allowed you to meet online with at least one other person . . . .

I want to talk about the use of mobile technology in education, or mLearning. Our students have embraced mobile technology. The Chronicle of Higher Education states that over half of all college students accessed the internet using a smartphone or a tablet like the iPad in 2010. Only 2 years before, this number was only 10% of students. They are using mobile devices not just to telephone, but to connect with others via text and on social media websites, to access materials on the web, and to interact with a huge variety of apps.


Institutions will be forced to respond to the growing demand for easy mobile access to their offerings. This means not just reading the university's website on a smartphone, but finding and registering in courses, and interacting with course components that are web-based. Students in distance education taking hybrid or fully online courses will become increasingly likely to use mobile devices to post comments to online discussions, access course materials, etc. Indeed, students may well use mobile technology exclusively. It's hard to envision students continuing to lug laptop computers around unless they need them specifically - so much of what they use laptops for has now become available on smartphones and tablets.


Online instructors and those with web-based course components are under pressure to understand how mobile technology can be used in order to make informed decisions about how that might affect they way they present material to students and interact with them.  Not only the format of course material may change. The way educators do their jobs will also likely change as more of them adopt mobile technology. Even adding a few simple apps can change the way educators manage their professional lives.


Instructors in the classroom can also incorporate mobile technology. For example, if your institution does not supply clickers, you can use mobile (and web) technology to create an audience response system. Use something like Poll Everywhere to display a question from your classroom computer to your overhead screen and give students the option to respond using text messaging, email, the web or Twitter. Poll response are displayed in real time.


Students from less advantaged places on earth will also find increased access to educational opportunities through digital media accessed by mobile devices that are cheaper and more portable than desktop computers.


So, the growing use of mobile technology poses several challenges for educators:

• get familiar with it and understand how students are using it - our students may be literally anywhere
• consider how mLearning might be incorporated into our courses
• contribute to the scholarly debate concerning mLearning other educational technologies
• conduct empirical research on the use and efficacy of mobile technology in education and use evidence-based practices wherever possible

For a recent review of many of these issues see Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training (2009) edited by Mohamed Ally.


Currently we are in a transitional state - mLearning is here and burgeoning, and scholarly research on how to best use it is a field that will grow with it. How are using mobile technology in education?

Using narrated PowerPoint slides to create videos for youtube

Sometimes I want to create a resource for students that exists outside of the LMS. In this case, I had  material on research methods and statistics in psychology that I wanted to make available to online students. This can be a pretty dry topic, so rather than giving them something to read, I wanted to combine visuals with narration.

I used PowerPoint 2010 to create a slide show, and then used Record Slide Show (under the Slide Show tab) to add narration. This is an easy way to add narration - basically, plug in a mic and speak. PowerPoint saves the slide timings, and you can change the narration for individual slides if you make a mistake.

If you plan to upload your slide show to youtube, be aware that youtube only permits 15-minute videos. In my experience, the youtube video can be a little longer than a 15-minute PP slide show, so give yourself some leeway: create PP slide shows that are about 13 minutes in length (i.e., if you have a longer PP show, divide it into Part 1, Part 2, etc).

Use PowerPoint to create a video of your slide show that can then be uploaded to youtube. Click Save and Send in PP and then Create Video. This takes some time so plan to create the video when you have plenty of time for this part. Once the video has been created, sign in to youtube, upload the video with title, tags, etc., and you're good to go. Your youtube videos can be public or private, so you can control who your audience is. You also have the option to embed your youtube videos in a blog, Moodle, etc.

The future of originality

Online learning facilitates communication, interaction, and collaboration between students in an unprecedented way. Students are not constrained by time, geography or economics from linking up with other who share a common interest. Professors and other experts are now vastly more accessible to students by email and websites, and indeed, students may casually request information and opinion from experts and expect to receive an answer more or less instantly. The very existence of the internet encourages open sharing of ideas, words and objects.

One of the potential consequences to such openness is that students are learning to use what they find on the internet without sufficient thought or background reading. Because Googling a topic will instantly throw up thousands of hits, students can - and in my experience, sometimes do - use the first 5 or 6 hits as the authority on the topic, without reading deeply or widely enough on the subject matter. They are searching, but they're not investigating.

Furthermore, the potential to use material found on the internet without attribution is enormous. Students are accustomed to copying and pasting, to downloading, and to sharing material found on the internet - this begins in elementary school. The plethora of information on the internet provides unlimited possibilities for creating a pastiche paper on any topic imaginable. Obviously, the further along in their education a student gets, with an increasing demand for specialized knowledge and language, the more difficult this copy-and-paste approach will be. But are we teaching schoolchildren and university students how to use the technology to create knowledge and, at the same time, to understand where that knowledge came from, and to cite it properly?

The New York Times recently ran a series of articles on cheating and plagiarism in education which report widespread plagiarism in higher education. Organizations like plagiarism.org cite other research confirming that plagiarism is common and accepted among many students.

Cheating and plagiarism breach  principles of academic honesty. Most institutions have policies about academic honesty, explicitly require students to learn about them, and have developed procedures for dealing with students who violate them. This Youtube video by Capilano University film students and Patrick Donahoe, Vice-President Student and Institutional Support, illustrates one strategy for informing students about plagiarism and cheating:



Institutions are now using plagiarism-detecting software such as Turnitin. Professors are becoming more canny in assignment and test design. At the same time, the potential for students to plagiarize and cheat using the internet continues to get bigger and bigger. It would appear that a silent arms race is underway.

The reasons for plagiarizing are cheating are numerous: poor time management, not enough time, laziness, poor writing and researching skills, and so on. The consequences of plagiarism and cheating are that students fail to learn, and more importantly, that they fail to develop the skills of investigation, analysis, evaluation and synthesis that underlie critical thinking and turn one into an educated person. The technology that now allows us to instantly connect, communicate and collaborate, also facilitates cursory and shallow thinking when the amassing of information is easier than thinking about the content. Learning has never been easy, but previous generations did at least have to read hard copy so that copying and pasting in a few key strokes were impossible. Furthermore, they had access to the same works as everyone else - typically whatever was in the library - making it harder to find more obscure sources to copy from. What took days to write a couple of generations ago can now be written in a couple of hours. Taking ownership of a piece of writing is not a prerequisite for writing a detailed and professional-looking paper.

What are some of the strategies that educators can use to encourage students in the acquisition of knowledge, critical thinking, and the ability to synthesize and create knowledge? How can we encourage investigative skills beyond those used to conduct internet searches? Technology has changed our capacity to create - how can we use it to foster academic honesty, creativity, and originality?

Using Twitter in and outside the classroom

How handy is Twitter in the classroom? Let’s look at the basics of what Twitter has to offer first.

Twitter is a microblogging platform that allows you to send out messages known as tweets containing a maximum of 140 characters. Your tweets are seen by everyone in your social network. You build a social network by “following” other Twitter accounts; similar, others will discover and follow you. Your followers see your tweets, and you see the tweets of everyone you are following. If you follow a huge number of Twitterers, you will be awash in a constant and never-ending flow of tweets – your profile page will be updated constantly as those you follow send out tweets. If you follow a smaller number of people, or if they are not prolific tweet-senders, your page updates will be fewer. You can control whose tweets you are seeing. But those new to Twitter sometimes feel overcome by this constant barrage of information – be warned - you may hate it, or you may feel comfortable ignoring tweets you don’t care about.

You can tag tweets using hashtags – putting # in front of a word in a tweet, like #blogging, tags your post – you can search for tweets containing information about blogging using #blogging as a search term. Twitter shows you all the tweets from all users that have been tagged #blogging.  You can keep track of everything you tweet about a specific topic by marking it with a hashtag – convenient for organizing tweets by topic.

When someone you follow tweets something, you can retweet it if you want to recirculate the information to people who follow you. You can append it, direct it specific users, or change it. You can even keep track of which of your tweets has been retweeted by someone else.

You can address a tweet to someone in particular by putting @ in front of their user name. You can also send direct messages privately to other users. You can configure your Twitter account to be public so that anyone can follow you, or you can protect it so that you decide who gets to follow you and only your followers can see your tweets.

Finally, you can send tweets from your computer by going to twitter.com, from your desktop using an app like TweetDeck, or from your mobile device.

OK, those are the basics. There are some options for using Twitter that I haven’t explored here in the interests of simplicity. An excellent video guide to using Twitter is available here.

Now for educational uses of Twitter.

First of all, you need to consider what educational goals you can accomplish with Twitter. Twitter provides a quick and easy way for students to share information with each other and the instructor. Here are some specific examples:

• sharing resources – posting websites and links of interest; you can also share music, videos, pictures,  and document
•  organizing class ideas and resources using hashtags
• asking questions – especially good for shy students who never ask questions in person
•  communicating outside of class
•  sending reminders about due dates, readings, exams
•  instructor clarification of points
•  ice-breaking – getting to know each other
• collaboration by smaller group
• as a backchannel during lectures
• to survey the class on a specific question
• in language instruction – send questions that must be answered in that language
• to create a document such as a story, one line at a time, in turn
• to archive student ideas submitted as tweets by formatting them into a pdf document

Some things to think about if you decide to incorporate Twitter into your classroom:

• Public or private? Do you want to control who is in the social network?
• If you already use Twitter professionally or socially, you will probably want another Twitter account to keep the classroom separate. You can manage those accounts using something like TweetDeck. Have all students follow your class account.
• Will you use Twitter during classtime and if so, how will you deal with Twitter as a backchannel? If using it during classtime, does everyone have access? Do you want to lay out some basic groundrules?
• Are there any potential downsides? Critics of Twitter have argued that it is a time-waster, that 140 characters are insufficient for communicating anything significant, that it is a distraction, and that it encourages poor writing and lazy thinking. I would advise an instructor to have a good grasp of Twitter as a user before considering implementing it as a communication tool in class.

Finally, as academics we are interested in evidence-based teaching practices. The use of Twitter in education has not yet been comprehensively studied. Much has been said in support of using Twitter in education. Yet only about 30% of faculty report using Twitter and the remainder are either unconvinced of its usefulness or unfamiliar with how it works. As Twitter use grows, the opportunities for studying its efficacy for learning will undoubtedly be explored.

Further reading:

Wading through the dialogue about Twitter in education, my personal favourite for best source of information for instructors has to be How to use Twitter for Social Learning by Jane Hart’s Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. This is a comprehensive guide that is well-written and easy to use. You can also consult Twitter basics at Twitter.com.

If you have tried using Twitter in your classroom, please let me know about your experience!

Adding audio comments to Moodle

I have been playing around with ways to provide students with audio feedback. There are many options for this - I was looking for something simple. I wanted a way to comment on something either to the entire class, or to students individually. Here's what I came up with, with assistance from the helpful folks in my Educational Technology Resource Centre.

I began by recording the comment using Windows Sound recorder - located in the Accessories folder when you click on "All Programs". Sound Recorder in Vista allows for recordings over 5 minutes in duration (previous Windows operating systems limited recording duration to 5 minutes). There is no editing of saved files allowed, but if your recordings are brief it's probably easier to redo them anyway if you need to change something. Save the resulting file on your hard drive. It will be a .WAV file, and you can listen to it using Windows Media Player.

To make a comment you want the whole class to be able to hear, you will need to upload your file to Moodle. Ideally, you want the file to be embedded in a resource or activity so that students can see it and click on it in one step without having to download the audio file.

Before you embed the file, you may have to reformat it. Our version of Moodle does not support WAV files, and I was required to convert the file to MP3 format. This was very easy - just download Switch Audio File Converter by NCH Software, and you can convert the file in one step.

Now upload the audio file to Moodle. You can place it in any resource or activity that has an html editor. All you have to do is select the text where you want the file to appear and insert the file, as I've done here in  Label. Find the insert link icon in the editor:

Because you are inserting a file from your computer rather than a URL, you have to browse to find the file:

Click the Browse button to locate your file, then click Upload ,

and wait for the message that Moodle has successfully uploaded your file. Then click on the file, and the link will be embedded wherever you selected it to appear in the first place.

At my institution, there is an embedded audio player in Moodle that automatically plays the file when the student clicks on the link:

If you want your comments to go to students individually, you have several options. You could create a Group for each student in the class using auto-create - each student would be the only person in his/her group. Then create a Forum called Feedback or Comments, with Separate Groups - this way no student can see any other Groups. Then upload your audio comment file for each student to his/her Discussion forum as a new topic. This gives the two of you a way to have a private conversation about the comments if necessary. You can subscribe students to the Forum so that they each receive an email whenever you leave them a comment.

You could use the wiki or assignment modules in much the same way to provide students with individual feedback.

You may get feedback from your listeners about the quality of your sound recordings - if you have static, hissing noises, or the volume needs to be turned right up, you might want to adjust your input recording levels. I created my first comment without any sound adjustment - just opened Sound Recorder, put my headset on and started talking. It wasn't bad - certainly good enough - and when you are used to the procedure, you can play with the levels if necessary.

This was a very easy and straightforward way to add audio comments to Moodle. There are numerous other ways to insert audio comments in your online teaching - what are some of the other methods that have worked for you?