Online Courses in the University: Where are the Students?

Posted on October 29, 2014 by kmclinnin

It’s no secret to anyone remotely part of higher education that online courses in all of their formations (hybrid or blended, MOOCs, fully online, asynchronous, in-real-time, etc.) have been promoted as the education of the future. The sense of skepticism about these technological advancements is increasing, as demonstrated in the new Gallup study “The 2014 Inside Higher Ed Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology” (sponsored by Inside Higher Ed, Pearson, and Blackboard). Here’s the brief rundown:

Approximately 91% of faculty members don’t believe that online courses can achieve equivalent learning outcomes to face-to-face courses
83% of faculty members believe the quality of student interaction in online courses is lower than face-to-face courses
Faculty feel that they have been left out of university decisions/discussions about the move to online courses

I’ll be responding to the full Gallup report in a later post because I’m especially interested in what we can do about these perceptions and what this means for pedagogical training or implementation. But for now, I’m trouble because once again I find a significant voice remains unheard in this conversation. Where are the students? What do they have to say about their higher education experiences?

To be honest, it’s a terrible time to be a student. Once again, none of this is new to anyone who works with students, but it needs to be repeated:

The cost of a college education is rising, and students are increasingly shouldering more of the burden as state and federal governments have removed funding from public institutions. From 2001 to 2011, tuition/room and board at public universities rose 40 percent, and the cost of a private institution rose by 28% (according to National Center for Education Statistics)
Percentage increase in consumer goods since 1978

Subsequently, students have an increase in extracurricular responsibilities, namely work. An AAUP survey found that 45% of traditional, full-time undergraduates worked while enrolled and 80% of part-time students worked.
Percentage of traditional college students enrolled full and working
Not only has the number of students who work increased, but the amount of time students spend working has also increased. 21% of students work 20-34 hours per week (this represents an increase), and 8% work at least 35 hours (this is a slight decrease from the initial 2008 recession but is still up from prior survey years).

Students are facing very real, very difficult material circumstances. And yet, very little of higher education has changed up until this point to accommodate the changing circumstances of these students. Universities still function on temporally-bounded semesters or quarters, the general education curriculum still requires 30-60 credit hours, courses generally require the same amount of face-time as the number of credit hours, and courses for the most part require the same amount of work if not more as universities become increasingly concerned about maintaining rankings and the possibility of government-sponsored ratings. Meanwhile, professors lament the demise of their students’ curiosity, popular books argue that students aren’t actually learning anything in college, and students (and politicians) are failing to see the value in a college education.

And at this point, who can blame them? College isn’t working for the students anymore because it’s not responding to the students who are currently here. We’re still teaching in a state of nostalgia for a student who probably never really existed but that we reminisce about fondly. The student who showed up for class prepared by reading all of the required and supplemental material, the student who was driven by intellectual curiosity and not the looming specter of a terrible job market, the student whose primary responsibility was to be a student.

I’m not suggesting that maintaining standards is a bad thing, or that we need to move to a 60 credit hour degree program that guts the general education curriculum. I’m not even arguing that online education is the way to fix these problems. What I’m suggesting is that we (faculty, administrators, university staff members, students, community partners, etc.) need to seriously reflect on what we are currently doing, why we are doing it (“Because we’ve always done so” is not a convincing reason), what are the current needs for the various stakeholders, and how can we meet those needs.

I do believe that online education is one way that we can meet some of the current needs of students. In my own hybrid classroom, students consistently mentioned they liked the flexible class format because it allowed them to work on their own time, and it alleviated one of their major concerns about how to juggle school work with pay-the-bills work. I won’t claim that this approach worked for everyone, but we should make the option available to students to take these courses. But we also need to make sure that there is adequate training, support, quality control, and assessment practices for these online courses and for those who design, teach, and take them, not just a blind rush to throw everything online and call it a day.

Coming up in Part II: Full breakdown of the Gallup report, what it means for technology on campus, and ways to break down the anti-online culture

Thoughts on Higher Education and Technology

Posted on October 9, 2014 by kmclinnin

Last week I had the opportunity to Educause, which is ostensibly the largest higher education information technology conference in the United States. It is a large conference with approximately 4,000 attendees, most of whom are identified as Senior or Support IT specialists. According to this breakdown of 2014 attendees, I was one of 4 students there, and fewer than 300 faculty were present.

My experience at Educause was mixed. It’s an overwhelming conference not only because it is so large but also because of the emphasis on consuming information technology. The vendor hall had over 200 booths with salespeople who promised to offer the technology that will solve all of higher education’s problems. I was able to find folks interested in talking about the pedagogical uses of all this technology, but the overall message I got from the conference was “Buy this shiny thing! It will fix [insert problem here]!”

But what exactly are higher education’s problems? There have been a few blogs posts lately that have criticized Educause because it doesn’t address “real” higher education problems. Educause is on the cutting edge of technology, and there are tons of smart people at that conference, I don’t deny that. However, as a student and an instructor, I felt that there was a lot of misdirected attention to products and not enough attention to the problems that I encounter or how these products could be meaningfully incorporated into the classroom/university experience.

Combined with my experience at Educause, my friend Blake Wilder pointed me to an article about MOOC enthusiasm waning in IT offices. The issue presented in the article is that MOOCs have not disrupted higher education as expected, and the realization that making course material accessible does not necessarily ensure quality. My problem with this article has been my problem with the hype surrounding MOOCs from the beginning (replace “MOOC” with disruptive technology of your choice such as iPads, smart boards, etc.). What exactly were MOOCs disrupting, and why did it need to be disrupted? According to the article, it appears that branding and extending the reach of the university was why IT groups got so involved, but I think there has been more wrapped up in the MOOC phenomenon than just branding. What about the student and instructor perspective?

So here’s the issue. We have a ton of smart people in IT roles who are responsible for creating the technology that is used in higher education, we have a ton of smart people in instructional roles who are responsible for education, and we have a ton of smart people in student roles who are using this technology in their educational career. And there’s very little conversation happening amongst these three groups. We can’t do a good job of identifying the problems that these three groups face without discussing them, so how can we propose to offer the silver bullet in the form of a MOOC, flexible seating, a better LMS, etc?

Where are these conversations happening? What conference puts students, instructors, administrators, and staff people together at one table to talk about what the actual problems are and how to work on solutions? Please let me know, because that’s a conference I want to go to.

What Does It Mean to Teach?

Posted on August 12, 2014 by kmclinnin

Fall semester begins at OSU in just two short weeks. After a year of teaching new (and in some cases, very new hybrid format) courses in our first year and second year writing program, I’ll be teaching another new-to-me class of digital media composing. This is the first time I’ll get to teach a class outside of a one or two year writing curriculum, so it’s quite a change in some ways.

I’m also preparing for the OSU University Center for the Advancement of Teaching new TA orientation next week. Over 600 new-to-OSU TAs from across the disciplines will come to a three day teaching bootcamp. In many cases, it may be the only pedagogical training the TAs receive (not for lack of resources on campus but more for lack of time and incentive to attend extra co-curricular events hosted outside of departments).

The new class prep and new TA orientation curriculum combined with my own fun reading has made me particularly reflective about teaching and learning: what I do as a teacher/scholar and why I do it.

1- Being more inclusive in a variety of ways

I read Margaret Price’s Mad at School (2011) this summer and had one of those revelations. This book changes everything. As someone who is a proponent and critic of classroom communities, this book forced me to confront the assumptions I had about who was in my classroom. One of Price’s arguments is that the university and writing classes are founded on the principles of rationality. “Good” writing is linear and rational, it makes sense, and it represents a rational, able mind. But mental diversity and disability disrupts this concept of “good” writing and rationality– what happens when linear thinking is not . How can we teach writing in a more inclusive way that doesn’t just accommodate individual instances of mental diversity but encourages and celebrates it?

Price also questions the concept of participation and how it is invoked in policies such as attendance. Participation has been one of those nebulous terms on syllabi; often it seems as if it’s used as a stick to punish students who don’t fit an instructor’s image of what a “good” student looks and acts like. I value classroom interaction especially because I rely on a student-led facilitation model of my class (see below), and participation is one that I can explain my expectations to students. But until reading Price’s text, I didn’t think about how my expectations for what participation looks like can be excluding many students. Not all students can or want to speak aloud or engage in large or even small class discussions. For some, simply showing up to class is a form of participation.

I’ve been brainstorming alternative ways to get students involved in the course content in a variety of ways that will not only fit diverse learning styles but all of the other invisible forms of diversity and ability that often students won’t want to disclose to me. I’ve also tried to focus more on bringing diverse learning styles into the classroom. I’ve written about The Doodle Revolution here and here, so I plan on incorporating more visual opportunities into my course. I also want to explore multiple forms of reflection in my class, such as allowing students to complete optional blog responses (in a variety of formats such as video journals, images, or alphabetic text) in which they can engage the course content and the class discussion but on their own time in their own way. I want students to learn in my class, and that means rethinking and possibly moving away from a “teaching style.”

2- Focusing on learning as opposed to teaching

I’ve been reading Facilitating Seven Way of Learning by James R. Davis and Bridget D. Arend (2012). In my field, there isn’t much training regarding learning theory, which seems like a gross oversight considering that there is a good century-worth of information out there to help us be better teachers without having to reinvent the wheel. I’ve taken it as a personal challenge to learn more about learning so as to make my classroom an accessible learning environment for all students.

Subsequently, I’ve been re-thinking my role as a teacher or instructor as well as my teaching philosophy. I want to reject those terms at this point in favor of “facilitator” and “learning or facilitating philosophy.” I like the term facilitator because it better describes what I do in my class. I don’t tend to lecture much; I prefer students to read for homework (what would constitute the subject of a lecture) and come to class ready to discuss and take part in activities to put the readings into practice. Most of my day-to-day job is facilitating opportunities for students to practice what they’ve read and experience learning. But it’s really up to the students to learn; I can only guide them so far, but they are the ones who are empowered to make the course content their own.

This student-empowered classroom is also why I want to move away form a teaching philosophy. The teaching philosophy, already a statement that has been criticized for multiple reasons, strikes me as detrimentally teacher-centered. It asks potential instructors to focus solely on their position and approach to the classroom without considering that the instructor is simply 1 person out of a class of 25+ individuals who all have an investment and responsibility. So although I think it’s necessary to reflect on one’s role in the classroom, I’m not convinced that a teaching philosophy is the best way to do so.

I suggest a learning philosophy instead as a way to recognize that 1- these are the things that I do as a facilitator and why I think they are important; 2- these are the things students bring to the class and how they can engage with the course structures/curriculum 3- this is the end result, which is probably a more collaborative approach to learning that emphasizes both student and instructor. I believe a significant mission for universities is to serve the students and provide them with learning opportunities (of course that mission is complicated and conflicted), so let’s recognize that mission as we prepare and hire instructors for the future.

These are just some initial thoughts as I prepare for the semester, and I’ll chronicle how these actually play out in the day-to-day life with pressures from real students, real administrators, and real time constraints.

Qualitative Research Resources for Journal Coding

Posted on August 4, 2014 by kmclinnin

I’ve recently started my dissertation project research. The dissertation has several moving parts including two national surveys, follow-up interviews, and classroom observations. Currently I’m waiting on my IRB approval to get started on collecting data from real people, so while I’m in a holding pattern I’ve started to work on my first chapter. I’m looking at how “community” has been used historically as a term in the journal College Composition and Communication in order to understand (1) what compositionists mean when we say “community”, (2) how this definition has shifted over the past ~70 years, and (3) what that means for “community” and composition today.

I started my research with a quick search in JSTOR and other databases to see how many times “community” shows up in the 64 volumes of CCC, and I got a manageable 1700 hits. Can you imagine if my term had been even more generic like process? Needless to say, even 1700 instances of a term can be a lot for one researcher to handle. Luckily, there are some great resources that currently exist to organize the research process, facilitate coding, and analyze and visualize data.

The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers by Johnny Saldaña (2012)

I cannot emphasize how important, useful, and accessible this book is for anyone who is interested in coding data. Becky Rickly introduced me to it a couple of years ago, but I had no idea what coding was (“Wait, it’s not about HTML?”) or that I would eventually use it in my dissertation. Like many compositionists, my background in research methods is rather limited. I took one graduate course that was useful but had to cram so many methods into a relatively short period of time. We went over coding but stopped with grounded theory methods. Saldaña’s text actually gets into the nitty-gritty of qualitative coding and offers many models for how to code. Developing categories of codes can be very intimidating especially when you don’t know the best way to approach your data (yet), so his breakdown of different ways to look at data makes coding more accessible to scholars. I haven’t gotten to the sections on analysis or visualization yet, but I’m looking forward to those explanations! The text also includes some screenshots of a variety of programs that can be used for qualitative research, and he also discusses hand coding for smaller data sets.

I’ve also tried out a few qualitative research programs and wanted to share those experiences.

HyperResearch from ResearchWare, Inc.

We used HyperResearch in my graduate research methods class, and it’s a good intro to qualitative research programs. It allows researchers to code data in text, audio, and video format. It’s very easy to highlight text and create a new code or apply a previous code to the text.

Example of HyperRESEARCH

It also allows some limited data visualizations such as word clouds and word frequency reports. There are some drawbacks. The main issue for me is that all text has to be a RTF file. I used the program to code discussion forums from the Rhetorical Composing MOOC, and the formatting in RTF was all messed up. I had a limited data set (only 10 albeit extensive discussion threads), and I wasn’t sure if there was a way to get HyperResearch to autocode a much larger data set that I could then check. This could simply be researcher error. Overall I would recommend HyperResearch for small data sets and new coders. It’s available as a free download, but the free version limits the number of codes you can create and the number of documents you can include in one study. There’s an educational rate for the program, and I think it was about $200.

Dedoose

Dedoose markets itself as a qualitative and mixed-methods program created by qualitative researchers. It’s an online app, which means that you don’t clutter your computer and limited hard drive space with large study files, and you can access the files from any computer without needing to install software. It also makes Dedoose open to collaborative work-flow.

Dedoose study home page

Like HyperResearch, Dedoose can work with multiple data types including text, audio, and visuals. Even better, it can take text files in multiple formats including RTF, .doc and .docx, and HTML (unfortunately not PDF). I was really impressed by Dedoose’s options for collaboration. There is a training center option that allows for inter-reader reliability training and testing on dummy data before coding the real data set. It also offers more data visualization and analysis options. It’s also much cheaper than the other options I’ve used: it’s based on a monthly subscription model, and for a student rate it only costs $10 a month.

However, I ended up not using Dedoose. For me, the ability to be able to upload PDFs was very important (all my documents are PDFs, and to export in a new format was adding a significant amount of time per article). Dedoose was very buggy for me. I tried uploading text in multiple formats, and it would often freeze, which required me to refresh the page and have to log back into the app. I also did not find the program very intuitive for the coding process; it seemed better suited to importing spreadsheets with coding results. I think Dedoose has tremendous potential, and the collaborative work is very exciting, but at this point it’s not what I need (a PDF reader, easy coding workspace).

NVivo by QSR International

My final program is NVivo, which is probably one of the best known qualitative data programs out there. It’s another desktop program, and luckily it works for both Windows and Macs (unlike QDA Miner, which looks good but unfortunately I can’t run). So no collaborative work available in this program, but it offers a much better coding workspace than Dedoose (as in, I can actually figure out how to code in it!).

NVivo study home screen

Once again, NVivo works with text, audio, and video data. The best feature is that it accepts text in PDF format, although it is buggy for the non-OCR PDFs that I’m currently working with (has issues highlighting). Coding isn’t as intuitive as it is in HyperResearch; you can highlight text, but codes are called “nodes,” which took me a while to figure out. You can create in vivo codes easily or code using recently used nodes, but to create a new node or a node you haven’t used for a while requires several clicks. NVivo allows for pretty good source organization, and there’s an awesome query feature that allows for quick data analysis or selections to code (great for me because I’m coding one term). There are some autocode options that I haven’t used yet, but I have noticed that there is a feature that will create a graph based on the term “community” and show me all of the words that surround it. I also like that it allows you to create analytical memos and keep those organized with your materials. NVivo doesn’t make it as obvious that a particular section has been coded as HyperResearch does; there’s a small view that shows coding stripes, but it isn’t as glaringly obvious as HR.

Overall, I like NVivo the best simply for it’s ability to work with PDFs, and I’m sure the Query and Analyze functions will come more in handy as I work through this project. There is a free 30 day trial, and the Mac educational rate is only $90, which makes it the cheaper option.

Update: I ended up switching back to HyperResearch. NVivo for Mac had serious limitations (the Windows version was much more robust), and my file became corrupted so I was unable to do some of the limited functions available on Mac. It was easier to convert all my PDFs to TXT files for Hyperresearch. I also found that Hyperresearch’s customer suport was phenomenal; they responded to emails and tweets at all hours to help me troubleshoot. They also provided me beta access to some tools. There are still some frustrations with Hyperresearch (difficulty in organizing articles, needing to select individual articles for coding, etc.), but the HR folks assure me these issues are on the list of updates in the future.

Reading Reflection: The Doodle Revolution

Posted on June 2, 2014 by kmclinnin

Currently reading: The Doodle Revolution: Unlock the Power to Think Differently by Sunni Brown (2014)

I recently picked up this book after a conversation on the always fascinating #womenintc conversation on Twitter. Some of the scholars had been posting pictures of their writing process, and many of the pictures included pictures of elaborate drawings, flow charts, and visual representations of works in progress. So I went in search of some texts about the power of visualizations, but I was really looking for a low-stakes form of visual thinking that I could use in any writing class.

Enter the doodle.

Brown’s whole goal is to unlock the power of visual thinking and to silence the inner critic who says that you can’t draw. Doodling is not art, she argues, but doodling is valuable because it provides an alternative way of viewing and thinking that can lead to new problem solving strategies. Brown has a lot to say about visual literacy, and it really fits nicely with multimodal composition theory. But I really value this book for its practical applications. Throughout the book, Brown breaks down line-by-line the elements that make up a doodle so as to make doodling accessible to even the most unartistic among us. If you can draw some sort of circle, you can doodle. The doodle itself isn’t the important component; it’s really the process of taking complex information, relationships, processes, etc. and breaking these aspects down into a visual representation.

I’m trying to think of ways to best incorporate doodling into the Intro to Digital Media Composing course that I will be teaching in the fall. I want to start the class off with doodling as a low-stakes, less threatening way to start thinking about visual representations. I’ll probably assign part of this book or a podcast that The Student Affairs Spectacular recently released on doodling. I may ask students to doodle themselves as a class introduction activity in the hopes that they may find it easier to start visually representing themselves. Brown provides some great group activities to build doodling skills like an exercise to help create doodles ranging from the concrete to the abstract. I’d also like to ask students to doodle a section of an alphabetic text, probably one of the course readings, in order to practice translating or remediating.

Reading Reflection: Digital Habitats

Posted on May 29, 2014 by kmclinnin

Currently reading: Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John D. Smith (2009)

Wenger is best known for the concept “communities of practice,” which I will get to in future posts as I work through Communities of Practice and Cultivating Communities of Practice. CoP maintain a focus on the practice of knowledge through learning, and the authors emphasize the social orientation of these practice groups. CoP can best be characterized as learning together.

Digital Habitats is an interesting text because it doesn’t cater to a traditional academic audience. I initially picked up the book because it seemed to combine a focus on community with more attention to how technology influences the community experience than CoP and CCoP do (makes sense as CoP was published in 2000). DH is intended for multiple audiences including academic researchers, business professionals, and community activists who are interested in more effectively leveraging technology for their specific community purposes. I really appreciate that the authors make a point to understand how technology and community interact with one another; they recognize that the community influences what technologies and how the technologies are used, and they also point out that technology also influences how the community comes together and engages in practices. This helps to mitigate the potential of falling into an instrumental or determinist view of technology and community.

A few aspects of DH I find particularly useful:

Technology stewardship– the focus on a technology steward as an individual who takes responsibility for a community’s technology resources (Chapter 3) Tech stewards are generally already part of the community and as such are able to assess the community’s tech needs and what technology can be used for these needs, and then they aid in the adoption/transition/integration of the technology into community practices.
Importance of habitats– communities require a habitat or a space to learn together (Chapter 4). This habitat doesn’t have to be physical or synchronous, and the authors propose that a habitat is constructed of tools, platforms, features, and configurations.
Typology of community orientations– communities learn in different ways, and this typology of orientations allows tech stewards (and researchers!) a way to assess how the community works (Chapter 6). Some of the orientations include: meetings, open-ended conversations, projects, content, access to expertise, relationships, individual participation, community cultivation, and serving a context. Basically, these orientations help stewards understand how the community is already learning together, and from there the steward can help select an appropriate technology to continue the community’s preferred practice method.

I’ve been thinking about CoP as I’m working with Erin Cahill on a collaborative project about the Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC). We’re interested in how DMAC functions as a professional development institute to teach individuals digital composing skills, but what I find most interesting is how these 30+ individuals form a learning community at DMAC in less than 2 weeks. I also am interested in how this learning community breaks up at the end of the institute, and then these individuals have to return home, and in many cases, the DMAC participants are expected to act as technological stewards to facilitate a CoP at their home institutions.

So from what I’ve read in DH, I think this issue of technological stewardship is a critical one. Cindy, Scott, and the other staff are the DMAC stewards, but what about the DMAC participants? They have to transition from being a participant learning from tech stewards to being tech stewards themselves in less than 2 weeks. Many of the interviewees told us that they needed to be preachers or evangelicals at their home institution in order to gain support for digital media and composing, and one person even used the “returning native” image. What are the differences among these understandings of their roles: the technology steward, the preacher/evangelical, and the returning native?

Erin is most interested in spaces, so I’ll leave that to her to think about, but I think that it’s an area that needs much more development (it’s only a paragraph in DH, and there’s not much attention paid to how the social fills a space or what practices are found in habitats).

As I work on this video piece for the DMAC showcase, I’ll be focusing on the social interactions and the community formation at DMAC. This concept of the tech steward will undoubtedly be a central concept that I explore in my section.