Tag: Innovation

Team 4 – Final Post

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All four of our team members are instructors and while our teaching environments vary greatly (our students’ backgrounds range from middle school children to post secondary learners to members of the Canadian Armed Forces), we are all facing one common issue relevant to our current situations – preserving academic integrity after being abruptly shifted into online learning environments. As
our shared learning experience, we chose to view online video tutorials provided by Respondus, and the solutions they offer in remote assessment proctoring: Lockdown Browser and Monitor (Respondus, 2020).

Our original assessment of Respondus’s products informed us that with the use of their tools, we can thwart students from accessing restricted content during exams as well as verify student identity. Though these features are beneficial to institutions administering conventional exams to students from their homes, each of our team members’ individual research led us to realize that Respondus’s products may not be an appropriate solution for all digital learning environments or intended learning outcomes, and could be deemed unnecessary, or even intrusive. Should we be more concerned about cheating in a digital learning environment as opposed to in our traditional classrooms? Are online proctoring services and software the answer to these concerns, or are there more suitable solutions?

A study conducted by Watson and Sottile (2010) suggests that academic dishonesty in an online learning environment does not happen any more often than in a face-to-face classroom, thus there is not much cause for concern. Contrarily, one who is determined to cheat can easily access YouTube video tutorials on how to cheat during online exams. A famous YouTuber, Tec4Tric (2017) for instance has had hundreds of thousands of views on his instructive videos, therefore proving that there are in fact students out there currently planning to cheat. Lee (2020) indicates that instructors themselves can foster an online learning community based on honesty and integrity which in turn will curb the learners’ desire to cheat in the first place. She suggests such practices as discussing integrity with the students, building a sense of community and personal relationships through online communications, using various
assessment tools as opposed to just testing, and contemplating open-book assessments instead of memorization testing. When instructors use performance-based assessments in order to appraise learning outcomes, it ordinarily doesn’t make sense to cheat as we are not testing memorization, but rather expecting students to exhibit skills learned throughout the course that may be required in future employment. Harwell (2020) discusses the negative experiences and feelings that post-secondary students have been enduring through the recent transition to online proctored exams. Some students have reported that they are appalled at the level of surveillance and feel that their privacy has been invaded and they are treated as if they are worthy of mistrust. Is this how we want our students to feel?

This leads us to our final thoughts and queries. Are Respondus’s products suitable for online testing? It depends on the learning environment and outcomes. Perhaps the more crucial questions are what do we want our students to learn and how do we want them to learn it? Furthermore, how should our students be assessed on said learning?

References

Harwell, D. (2020, May 9). 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/technology/2020/04/01/online-proctoring-college-exams-coronavirus/

Lee, C. (2020). How to Uphold Academic Integrity in Remote Learning. Retrieved
from
https://www.turnitin.com/blog/how-to-uphold-academic-integrity-in-remote-learning

Respondus. (2020. May 9). Retrieved from https://www.respondus.com/products/monitor/Tec4Tric. (2017). Cheat online exams like a boss! Part-1 [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yay-gjyZ10

Watson, G. & Sottile, J. (2010). Cheating in the Digital Age: Do Students Cheat More in Online Courses? Retrieved from https://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=eft_faculty

 

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/