Top 5 sites every edtech professional should know about

Some of you may be familiar with these and may have found them useful too, if not I am sure you will:) These are sites that I have found myself coming back to regularly and that help me to design blended and online activities to engage my course colleagues (I don’t say students as my ‘students’ are professionals working in edtech and education related fields and I see them more as colleagues).

1. Gilly Salmon: The e-tivities page has useful resources that can help educators design learner-centred blended and online activities. I think it’s a bit more accessible for the majority of educators and is a nice lead into slightly more complex processes such as her Carpe Diem approach to learning design.
2. Jan Herrington’s site describes a model of authentic learning. It is useful for folks thinking about designing authentic learning activities in particular.
3. Nancy White and her colleagues from Full Circle Associates put together this online community toolkit. While it might be a bit dated, it is still useful, as well as her online facilitation wiki.
4. Open educators and researchers Catherine Cronin and Maha Bali really inspire me and I think they are both really great exemplars of open education practitioners. Even if you just ‘lurk’ on their blogs for now, you are likely to pick up some great tips if you’re thinking about blogging and how to start engaging with others in an explicitly open way.
5. Technology mediated assessment feedback via the Learning with New Media research group at Monash University has been useful to me in various ways. Last year colleagues and I used audio recordings for formative feedback on student assignments and we are currently working on a journal article. I also really like how this particular page is structured. It got me thinking about how to structure online self-help staff development resources.

What I’d love to see is more colleagues from Africa developing similar online resources. Perhaps there already are some really good ones out there and I’ve just not come across them? Please share:) I am also looking forward to course colleagues Top 5’s that they will share via Twitter using the hashtag #EdTechUCT

Image CC0 via Pexels.

 

Time required to develop and facilitate online courses

CC BY-SA 3.0 NY

In the Facilitating Online course today I received the following question:

When developing an online course, how does one decide how much time it would take to facilitate the course? Does one do an estimate per course participant? Are there other ideas?

I have decided to blog my response for broader conversation. Here’s my response:

I think it depends on the class size and nature of the course, what do other folks think? Do activities require a lot of facilitation for example – think about the intensity of communication around the PDPs for example. You email it to the course team or share in your learning journal, get feedback from the course team and fellow colleagues and then revise it. That’s quite different to just submitting an assignment. The facilitation, activities and course principles should align when developing the course. Like in this course, experiential and reflective learning is very important so interaction between people forms part of most activities. In another kind of course which might be more content driven it will likely be different. The course may also change in nature and be quite heavily facilitated at first and then once a community is established the course participants take on some of this role. David Merrill’s notion of dynamic support is also useful because it allows us to think about this process.

From the perspective of this course, I believe a facilitation team is crucial. With this course we have lead, support and back-up facilitators and we create a schedule of roles before the course. Our facilitators are advised to spend 4-5 hours a week facilitating. Of course in some weeks we take more time depending on the task and/or our roles that week. A lead facilitator for the week generally takes responsibility for posting the announcements for that week (although others generally contribute and check). We have a shared gmail account for course communications so we share that and completing the progress reports. So aside from actual facilitating there is quite a bit of admin too which is easier when the work is shared. This team has been facilitating together for quite some time, so practices around ways of working together emerge. When starting from scratch bear in mind that this will take time to develop practices among your own team and will likely develop further over time.

If you are a course convenor, you’d need to think about how to involve lecturers and tutors. It helps when you’re all working towards a shared goal and knowing your roles and responsibilities. Fellow lecturers and tutors will also need training and support. So a convenor is often double facilitating – for your facilitation team and the people on the course.

In a previous run of this course we had around 60 people and it was hectic. We realised the course may need some redesigning for upscaling. That’s partly why MOOCs have a high dropout rate – upscaling facilitation is not easy – good facilitation is resource intensive (facilitators). 10 people per facilitator on this course I think is a rough guide as we want it to be quite a connected learning experience. But the course is also free because it’s part of a funded project and facilitators are paid per hour. Would this be sustainable in other courses? While facilitating on a volunteer basis to gain experience and connect to like-minded professionals is an obvious win, at the end of the day people need to pay their bills. So asking people to facilitate for free for too many hours without pay (as in the case of some MOOCs) is not sustainable. Developing online courses involves not just designing course content, but designing a learning experience for course participants bearing in mind available human capacity. So while a heavily facilitated learning experience might be first prize, sometimes you have too few people to facilitate with and you don’t want to get burn out. So you go to plan B which is thinking about what you are able to do realistically with current capacity.

This article mentions levels of facilitation and expected number of hours per week. How does this relate to your course? What level do you see your course at?  This blog post with the main findings of a recent study on time requirements for developing and facilitating online courses may also be of interest.

Keen to hear what other folks think

Connecting to students in times of crisis

The #feesmustfall protests are happening across universities in SA. As I write this, UCT academics are preparing to march to parliament to urge government to provide additional funds to sustain higher education. As many lecturers may be feeling out of touch with teaching and learning at this point, it is highly likely that students are feeling disconnected too. So what can lecturers do?

You could try sending students a voice message using Vocaroo or even making a short narrated presentation using Screencast-o-matic Both of these are free tools which allow you to create an mp3 or video which can then be added to an announcement on an LMS like Sakai (Vula at UCT) or Moodle. Or even shared via social media, WhatsApp or email. Send a few words that acknowledge diverse perspectives and updates on the current situation. Keep your communication neutral and supportive. If you have assignments due for your course or any formative feedback you could share these too. I imagine there will be many extensions. Communicate such processes with patience and understanding. Some of my colleagues and I have sent personalised voice recordings with formative feedback to postgrad students and they reported feeling more connected hearing their lecturer’s voice.

During this difficult time feeling connected is vital so I urge fellow educators to think ‘out of the box’ about how we might support students, foster connection and create spaces for dialogue. Personalise official institutional communications, as these can be experiended by students as bureaucratic and alienating. Your voice counts and your students are likely to trust you more and find your words more accessible. As many of us are working from home this is also the ideal time to get creative and experiment with how we might use the tools at our disposal to facilitate and support students’ learning experiences. We need to come up with innovative ways to do business as usual in unusual ways. Feel free to share some of your strategies for how you are doing so with your students.

Digital scholarship in Africa: A personal reflection

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the practices, tools and online behaviours of digital scholars and how what I see in various spaces may suggest that these are not universal. I’m not seeing many African edtech folks doing what those in the Global North are doing. Please note that this is based on a ‘hunch’ and my personal experience of being quite active in a range of online spaces, particularly Twitter.

Facilitating Online Course (October – November 2015) OPEN for applications until 18 September 2015

The next run of the online course I co-facilitate on is coming up. Here are the details:) Also here on the e/merge Africa website.

We invite applications from educational technologists and educators based in African Higher Education Institutions to participate in a free five week course in online facilitation funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The activities stretch over 8 weeks from 5 October – 27 November  including Week 0 to address any technical issues and two consolidation weeks (after Weeks 2 and 4) for reflection and catch-up. A maximum of 50 participants can be accommodated.  Course participation will be entirely online and will require up to 8 hours of participation per week. Facilitating Online was developed by the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) at University of Cape Town and is registered as a short course at the University of Cape Town.  A certificate of completion will be awarded for successful completion of 75% of the assessed activities of the course.

Application for the October – November run of this course will be open until 18 September 2015. We are also planning to offer further instances of the course during 2016. Please contact us on facilitationcourse@emergeafrica.net if you would like more information or for us notify you when registration opens for the 2016 courses.

Target participants:
The course is aimed at experienced educators and educational technologists at higher education institutions in Africa who have reliable internet access and the opportunity to run courses or components of their courses online.  
Selection criteria include:
·         previous experience of online teaching and learning
·         at least five years’ experience as a university educator or educational technologist
·         willingness to teach future online facilitation courses in their local/regional context or
·         willingness to be a conference host for the e/merge Africa online educational technology network across African universities.
 
All applicants will require a letter of support from their line manager or Head of Department.
To apply, please use our online application form by 18 September 2015.
You can address queries by e-mail to facilitationcourse@emergeafrica.net

Endorsements from past course participants:
Dr Judith McKenzie, Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Cape Town says “I learned many facilitation skills that I am now able to apply with my own students. I would recommend the course highly to anyone embarking on the online teaching and learning journey.’

Daniel Adeboye, Online Maths Tutor, Tutor for the Future reports that “This course doesn’t just teach you ABOUT online Facilitation, it actually gets you to facilitate, setting this above other online courses I have taken on this subject. It’s a real opportunity to learn and develop. And what’s more? It has an African taste…” 

Dr Speranza Ndege,  Director of the Institute of Open, Distance and e-Learning, Kenyatta University reflects that “The rigorous demands of the online course you took us through have yielded positive fruits. I find it much easier to handle my students, and my online class activities, forums, assignments, feedback/grading are no longer complex. In fact it is fun facilitating online.”

Phil Hill on online & hybrid education

Today we had the privilege of listening to Phil Hill’s presentation. Phil @PhilOnEdTech is an educational technology consultant and analyst who has spent the last 10 years advising in online education and educational technology markets. For me the main takeaways of his talk were that comparing traditional and online teaching is unhelpful. This slide shows that the landscape of hybrid and online learning is more complex (see slide 5 below) than an either or.

(insert photo of Phil with hands in either/or gesture)

He also discussed how questioning the integrity of online teaching has led lecturers to pay more attention to their face-to-face teaching. While some may see online education as a threat to traditional notions of Higher Education and the core missions of a university, he highlights some of the opportunities.

What I hope the PGDip students took note of was how he prioritised the need for university lecturers to think about the educational challenge they see online education being a response to. Is it about increasing accessibility for students who are unable to attend more traditional offerings, for example. Or is it around student-centred learning? Third stream income for a department? Often I meet lecturers who want to engage in online teaching but are not sure why or there is a mismatch between the problems they are facing and the online space. Sometimes there are even deeper social issues where online is not the best solution. Phil highlights the need to be purposeful which I liked because he is also questioning the rampant solutionist discourse of the edtech industry.

Listen to a podcast of his talk here.

Phil’s slides via SlideShare:

I managed to catch the first part of his talk on video: (insert here)

Also check out:

e-Literate blog (Phil is one of the contributors)

e-Literate TV

From digital footprint to digital scholar and beyond

I did a presentation last year entitled ‘Digital footprint: leaving a trail for others to follow’ (presentation via Google Slides with commenting enabled here) for lecturers on the seaTEACH programme. I thought I’d share this with the EDN4052W group (Research and Evaluation of Emerging Technologies in Education, postgraduate course at UCT, details here) since the first overnight task involves blogging about one’s online presence. The online visibility guidelines referred to have been updated (links here) – Michelle Willmers and Laura Czerniewicz leading by example:) I look forward to co-teaching on EDN4502W with my colleagues Dr Cheryl Brown, Tabisa Mayisela and Shanali Govender this week. And of course, our students, many of whom have travelled far and wide to attend the week’s face-to-face teaching for this module.

Advice WANTED: Sketchnoting teams at conferences

I have been asked to put together a ‘strategy’ – let me call it an ‘action plan’ so that it sounds less formal (we’re in academia so that explains the want for formality which kind of clashes with the conversational tone of a blog post) – for a sketchnoting team at an upcoming conference and I was wondering what other folks are doing in this area. The conference is in the educational technology field, see http://etinedconf2015.com/

Please share info as a comment:

• Are you a lone sketchnoter at conferences or part of a team?
• If you are part of a team, what is the size of your team and how you manage roles, responsibilities, etc.
• Do people pick sessions they are familiar with or interested in and sketchnote those or does it ‘just happen’ i.e. is there a plan of action and someone coordinating what is done where and by whom
• Do you recommend that ‘official’ conference sketchnoters read speakers’ papers beforehand? Or at least the abstract and title to develop a template? i.e. how familiar do ‘official’ conference sketchnoters need to be with the content of a presentation
• If you have a small team, how do you prioritize who or how much to sketchnote?
• Any tips for team processes and mentoring new conference sketchnoters? (not that I claim to be an expert)
• What do you think about the idea of a t-shirt for a sketchnoting team at a conference that one can also use as prizes at workshops on sketchnoting?

I would be interested to get some feedback on these points and please share links to your flickr albums, Twitter handles, etc. for added inspiration – I would love the opportunity to network with fellow sketchnoters:)

In addition to the questions, what are your favourite apps or drawing tools? Are there any collaborative sketchnoting apps out there? Google Draw? We had an activity in mind as part of a workshop. Does anyone have the main elements of their visual library as images in a gallery that you import into an app like Papyrus? I found this strategy useful for adding a CC license.

RE Open Licensing: I was also wondering if adding a CC and making sketchnotes ‘open’ is okay when what the person is saying at an academic conference might not be? What if they are presenting on a paper that is in the review process for a journal or published and has an embargo period, etc. How would a sketchnoter know and do you have any advice? Should a sketchnoter ask permission from a speaker first in the same way as taking a video clip or making a sound recording if you are planning to share it online?

My colleague Rondine @RondineCarstens and I (below) currently do workshops for university staff on sketchnoting for conferences and for teaching and learning as part of staff development workshops at CILT at UCT. Here are some of photos of us and some sketchnotes that form part of my sketchnoting journey (you’ll find more via Twitter) and we also use the hashtag #TLCdoodles on Twitter and Instagram for our own doodles and encourage our workshop folks to use it to share their sketchnotes with us. (FYI: Yes, those are hula-hoops in my office LOL!)

6 Things Good Teachers KNOW about Technology in Education

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The following is based on my own observations and interactions with a range of teachers, both at university and in other sectors. I think good teachers are able to use technology in education effectively because they know some of the following things:

1. A critical mindset is key
Good teachers know that technology is not a substitute or replacement for good teaching and that there is no tool on the planet which can provide a ‘quick fix’ for educational challenges. They don’t see it as a delivery mechanism. They have a critical outlook and interrogate assumptions – their own and those of others.

 

2. Good teaching with technology is invisible
How does a teacher know when they are using educational technology effectively? When it becomes part of the learning experience to the extent that it becomes invisible. Its educational use becomes a natural part of classroom life (and outside). Good teachers use technology like an extended arm – it is part of his or her practice. Good teachers blur the boundaries between online, offline and formal and informal spaces. Their blended learning practices are seamless.

3. Good use of edtech is integrated rather than tacked-on
Technology is integrated in curricula and learning design rather than being treated as an add-on. Good teachers understand that technology isn’t like hairspray that can just be sprayed on. They build it in from the bottom up.

4. Is purposeful and used appropriately, matching learning tasks
Good teachers are able to make good choices – there is congruence between the tools they select to use, learning activities and outcomes.

5. Play is part of learning
Good teachers learn through play. They understand that they have to play with new tools to better understand their affordances. They have an open mind are are keen to experiment. When things don’t work out as planned in a classroom situation, they have a plan B. They don’t give up – they go home and play around some more.

6. Understand the importance of being agile and reflexive practitioners
Good teachers are able to adapt their edtech pratices and feel comfortable to learn through trial and error. This helps them to know where they need to adapt next time. They reflect on their practice as part of the process.

I am sure there are other points that can be added to this list – feel free to add them as comments:) Let’s see if I can make it to 10. Feel free to suggest any revisions:) Seems like I have a bit of a tension here between knowing and doing – how might I fix this?

I will then use this list to create an OER infographic.

Some other ideas I had was:
– they are able to do more with less
-are inspired by best practice examples but are able to adapt to local needs because they understand their students

Social Network Analysis with Marc Smith

On 19 November 2014 Marc Smith gave a public lecture on Social Network Analysis (SNA) at UCT. Afterwards he lead a workshop featuring short presentations by UCT NodeXL users working in social network analysis and visualisation. He came to visit us all the way from Silicon Valley, California, where he works as an adjunct lecturer and is also the director of the Social Media Research Foundation. As a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction, Marc helped develop NodeXL. For more info on Marc, read this interview. My notes from the lecture can be viewed here. I really enjoyed the range of examples and applications of SNA and NodeXL that he discussed. I think there is a lot of scope for marketers to use NodeXL as part of social media strategies and to better evaluate the status of brands on social media platforms such as Twitter. But there’s so much more to it, as the rest of this post explains.