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Resource to share

Like many of you, I’m working currently to align my formerly in-person classes to fit online-only remote delivery for the first time, ever. With that has come exploration of Hyflex and Hi-flex (highly flexible) learning environments, and awareness that many of the students I’ll be meeting have limited access to technology or to bandwidth.

Over and over again, I’m reading that we should be gearing our courses towards the lower bandwidth students as much as possible. I ran across a great diagram today through a BCcampus webinar that I wanted to share:Matrix showing one axis from low to high bandwidth, the other with low to high immediacy. Different quadrants have different activities in the quadrants. Low immediacy/High bandwidth has Pre-recorded video and audio, asynchronous discussions with video and audio. High Bandwidth/Immediacy shows video and audio conferences. Low Immediacy/Bandwidth shows readings with text and images, discussion boards with text and images, and email. Low bandwidth/high immediacy shows collaborative documents and group chat and messaging. The matrix is by Daniel Stanford with a Creative Commmons License.The image approaches some of the questions I had about what activities were going to be more appropriate for the incoming students. I particularly liked that the whole thing is visualized on this high/low immediacy axis along with the high/low bandwidth axis (click on the image to be taken to the slide deck. This image is on slide 12).

Reading through the BCcampus lecture linked above and considering this diagram has led me to choose a lower immediacy, lower bandwidth set of activites for more of the courses than had been there previously, including adapting one of the assignments to fit within that quadrant.

Hope all is going well with your development, and that you are finding the resources you need.

 

A brief reflection

I’ve struggled a bit with this course – not because of the content or organization, but because of my life circumstances right now. There have been several things that have taken the time I thought I had available away over the last 9 weeks, and some of them aren’t done with me yet.

This part of the experience has highlighted for me both how important organization is, and how profoundly important self-care is. Without those two things, I’m not sure where I’d be right now.

I’ve used reflective practice ongoing in my personal life. I have been keeping a journal as long as I can remember (the earliest one I have is from when I was 8), and have been a devotee of ‘morning pages’ since first reading The Artist’s Way (Cameron & Bryan, 1993) sometime in the early 2000s. Given this long relationship with the page, it only made sense that when I began my professional career that this would continue. In my first years of teaching, I took time to write after each class – what went well, what could have gone better or differently, and endeavored to make those changes. That frequent writing has become more sporadic in recent years, but my reading has become wider. Now I spend as much time reading as I did writing after class, and listening to podcasts that inform my work. Conversations with my co-faculty and articulation partners has become part of that reflective time, and given me a broader Community of Practice.

This digital learning project has been informative. There were new things in the discovery process, things that changed the end goal substantially. Thinking through ways to display and share my final Digital Learning Resource (DLR) has led to new ideas even yet, thanks to the recursive nature of reflective practice. Usually in my work, I co-create something with other faculty members and we change course along the way a time or two, but this was different in that the changes were reasoned and deliberate – I felt like there was less guesswork involved. Staying informed by the student/consumer voice has been so important. It’s been an ongoing learning that students’ goals for themselves are different than my goals for them, to the point where I’ve got a note on my monitor to remind me as I work.

I’ve been in conversation with other faculty members about this OER, about the implementation and roll out. We’ve embedded support for students into the first semester of school, and I’m so looking forward to implementing everything in a few short weeks.

References:

Cameron, J., & Bryan, M. (1993). The Artist’s Way. Sounds True Recordings.

Team four’s Initial Summary of a Learning Event and Approach to Critical Inquiry

The current global pandemic and resultant restrictions on gatherings, has challenged educational institutions to rapidly transition from in person, to remotely delivered courses. Among the challenges this type of transition presents is how to preserve academic integrity in a remote, uncontrolled setting, particularly considering assessments. Respondus (2020) offers solutions for remote assessment proctoring. For our shared learning experience, our team  selected video tutorials created by Respondus (2020) about two of their products; Respondus Monitor, and LockDown Browser. After viewing all of the available videos and conducting further research, we have gained an understanding of how this software works and some of the rationale driving institutions to adopt it. Each team member agreed that the products could be a user-friendly and straightforward proctoring solution for both institutions and students alike.

Respondus Monitor and Lockdown Browser provide “cost effective, scalable, and convenient solutions for protecting the integrity of online exams” (Respondus, 2016, 3:10). Essentially, Lockdown Browser works by preventing learners from accessing unauthorized content or resources during their exam, while the companion Monitor feature offers a means of authenticating a user’s identity via facial recognition and then monitoring their behaviors during an exam by use of a webcam (Respondus, 2020). Teclehaimanot, Hochberg, Franz, Xiao and You (n.d.) noted that in order for educators to prevent the issue of academic dishonesty, student identification and authentication is vital. Both Lockdown Browser, and Monitor are available to be used within many popular Learning Management Systems (LMS) (ex. Brightspace, Blackboard etc.), which renders these tools as accessible solutions which are easily integrated into existing LMS’s. The Respondus company offers easy-to-understand arguments and pitches for how and why to use their software.

Not all online assessments require protective software measures and programs, such as those provided by Respondus. Some even feel that businesses in this industry “are selling a narrative that students can’t be trusted” (Harwell, 2020, pp.9),  however, summative assessments that require high academic standards and integrity are arguably definitive candidates for such programs. Particular summative assessments must take verification of student identity and technical issues, such as student hardware usage, software, and bandwidth into consideration (Benson & Brack, 2010). The tests given must be fair, meaning the test environment and restrictions associated must also demonstrate equality to all students taking the exam. This can be a challenge when students are not co-located in the same classroom. The Respondus Monitor program tutorial particularly sought to address the above issues of students taking an examination from different locations. The tutorial program did an exceptional job of visually and cogently describing how the specific monitoring software addresses potential issues of students taking an exam from greater distances; and to give the software credibility, the company was not haughty when describing the fact that students may require greater bandwidth, combined with an adequate internet connection, in order for the software to be trustworthy (Respondus, 2016).

The clear and concise arguments for how-and-why a particular learning provider should use this software, combined with the user-friendly online tutorial environment to navigate the potential software, makes the overall potential of using these softwares a real contender within a plethora of potential learning environments.

References

Benson, R., & Brack, C. (2010). Online assessment. Online learning assessment in higher education: A planning guide (pp. 107-151). Whitney, UK: Chandos Publishing Oxford. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.royalroads.ca/lib/royalroads-ebooks/reader.action?docID=1582338&ppg=128

Harwell, D. (2020, April 01). Mass school closures in the wake of coronavirus are driving a new wave of student surveillance. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com

Respondus. (2016). Respondus monitor: Protecting the integrity of online exams [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=197&v=hv2L8Q2NpO4&feature=emb_logo

Respondus. (2020. April 16). Retrieved from https://www.respondus.com/products/monitor/

Teclehaimanot et al. (n.d.). Ensuring Academic Integrity in Online Courses: A Case Analysis in Three Testing Environments. Retrieved from https://members.aect.org/pdf/Proceedings/proceedings17/2017/17_12.pdf

 

Musings on Innovation

I’ve spent the last three days reading and re-reading Dron’s (2014) chapter in Online Distance Education, thinking about innovation, technology and education. It’s so tremendously rich with ideas I’d not known about previously, or had only thought about in different contexts than education technology.

Some of what keeps me going back to this chapter is the myriad of ways that we, within Western culture, use the word innovation, and the multiplicity of ways that it is used in this chapter. Merriam Webster (n.d.) defines innovation as:

  1. the introduction of something new
  2.  a new idea, method or device

While I’ve certainly used innovation in this way, it would seem that in our cultural context it means more – there’s an implication to the word that suggests technology, and useful technology.

Innovation is something we talk about regularly in my household, as my partner is a prototyper and inventor.  Our conversations about innovation and innovating often center around the use of ideas or objects, their ability to simplify and make life better in one way or another.

The Dron (2014) chapter discusses the adoption of new technologies (innovations) through several models. I investigated each of them, from Roger’s innovation diffusion theory (Rogers, 1995 as cited in Dron, 2014, p. 243) to UTAUT (Venkatesh, Morrris, Davis, & Davis, 2003, as cited in Dron, 2014, p.244) and had several conversations with my partner as we looked at what fit with our own experiences and observations. Ultimately, looking to understand educators in particular, I found  this metaphor (the image is hyperlinked to the original page):

Image of a pencil in which the parts are made analogous to educators adoption of ed tech. The hangers on don't do anything, the erasers undo what is done by the leaders, the leaders take on initial adoption and enthusiastically share their learning, the sharp ones grab the best of what the early adopters have done, the wood represents people who would use the technology if someone managed it all for them and the ferrules are the people who hand on too tightly to what they already know and do not change unless well convinced.

 

 

The pencil metaphor echoes most closely my experience of working with school populations (from K to post-secondary) as to how educators respond to new introductions of technology in the pedagogical or andragogical space.

The ferrules being the corrolary to Roger’s laggards, the leaders parallel to Roger’s innovators. The piece that this (rather un-academic) model has that is missing from the other ones is the erasers and hangers-on, who, in my experience, are as big a barrier to adoption of new technology as the ferrules. They are the architects of or the believers in the hard system, the non-responsive context. It is no wonder that, as Dron points out, adoption of new technologies and change happens most expeditiously in contexts that are tolerant of and promote diversity (Seely Brown & Duguid, 2000, as cited in Dron, 2014), as change happens in places that can entertain a variety of viewpoints.

I’d love to wrap this post up into a tidy bow, but that’s not possible yet. I want to pause with this rich chapter – to not feel rushed to have a final understanding of the richness that is in it. I’ll continue exploring other pieces, as well as digging deeper into some of the technologies that Dron (2014) discusses – some that are already defunct, and others that look promising for possible classroom work.

 

References:

Dictionary by Merriam-Webster: America’s most-trusted online dictionary. (n.d.). Retrieved December 17, 2019, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/
Dron, J. (2014). Chapter 9: Innovation and Change: Changing how we Change. In Zawacki-Richter, O. & T. Anderson (Eds.), Online distance education: Towards a research agenda. Athabasca, AB: AU Press.
The Pencil Metaphor: How Teachers Respond To Education Technology. (2014, August 28). Retrieved December 17, 2019, from TeachThought website: https://www.teachthought.com/technology/pencil-metaphor-how-teachers-respond-to-education-technology/