BLACKBOARD 8 – INSTRUCTOR TUTORIAL

Elissa Baker

Informations

• Publié par: Erni
• Nombre de lectures: 25
• Langue: English

Extrait

 

  DISTANCE LEARNING DAY JUNE 18, 2008   KEYNOTE SPEAKER CHARLES DZIEBAN PRESENTS   Sue Gallagher: “So, let me tell you a little bit about Chuck, it’s Charles Dziuban, but he says we could call him Chuck. He’s the Director of the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida, where he has been a faculty member since 1970 teaching research, design and statistics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. Since 1996 he has directed the Impact Evaluation of UCF’s Distributive Learning Initiative examining the student and faculty outcomes as well as gauging the impact of online courses on the University. He has coauthored or edited numerous books and chapters on blended and online learning, including Handbook of Blended Learning Environments , Educating the Net Generation  and Blended Learning Research Perspectives of which he is the co-editor. In 2005, Chuck received the Sloan Consortium award for most outstanding achievement in online learning by an individual. He has published in numerous journals including Multivariate Behavioral Research, The Psychological Bulletin, Educational and Psychological Measurement, the American Education Research Journal, the Phi Delta Kappan, the Internet in Higher Education, the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, and the Sloan-C View . In 2007, he was appointed to the National Information and Communication Technology Literacy Policy Council. In the past few weeks, Chuck has given talks in Budapest for the Hungarian, Civitas Association, The State University of New York, the University of Southern California, Suffolk Community College System, Westfield College, Coppin State University and the Sloan C Blended Learning Conference. Now, if that’s not enough, tomorrow, Chuck is going to Africa. So we have to whisk him out of here after his presentation and when he is there he will be consulting with the Tanzanian Government on online learning and then going on a safari. So, without further ado, Chuck Dziuban.” Applause. Charles Dziuban: “Thanks.” Charles Dziuban to Sue Gallagher: “Thanks for that wonderful introduction.” Sue: “Oh, you’re welcome.”

   1   Center for Distance and Online Learning |   Last updated: 7/28/2008    

    Charles Dziuban:  “Good Morning, everyone, it’s really nice to be here with you this morning. I guess, the way I should say good morning is Jambo.  You know? Hmm. I’m really pleased to be here this morning and looking over your program. You have an excellent program! I mean it’s small, but it’s a program of very, very important kinds of topics. I think it’s really important that your chief academic officer is here, introduced it and will be here for part of the presentation. The student panel, I might add the student panel should be very interesting. Um…Every year at UCF, we sponsor a conference for presidents, provosts, and CIO’s, from around the country. We’ll be doing it in July. We’ll have twelve universities at the UCF campus and students do the majority of the presentation talking about what their lives are like on higher education. And, I remember the first year we did it four years ago. Jason Rosenblatt, one of our students, presented…made a presentation on Information Search, and what he did is he showed presidents Wikipedia and one of the presidents was absolutely a gasp. It wasn’t vented, it wasn’t valid, it wasn’t real, it wasn’t anything. How could people be doing research like this! And Jason’s response was, “Well, yeah, Dude. You better get up with the 21 st  Century.” It’s in...it was interesting to see the interaction in terms of what happened and the transformation of academic officers when they began to see what students were doing and what they really were…so congratulations at a wonderful conference. Your first assignment, okay, your first assignment is to go to U-Tube and look at a video called a vision of students today. Okay. Look at that video, it’s very interesting. Michael Wesh and the students at the University..Kansas State University have made this video. It is really worth a look.. It’s three minutes of Whoa. In terms of the way we are viewed. Okay, Now. At the University of Central Florida we’ve been evaluating our distributive learning initiative and it’s obvious you’re way ahead of the power curb here at HVCC, way ahead of the power curb. We’ve been doing it about the same length of time, since 1996. And we have been evaluating the impact of online learning, E-learning, distance education, Asynchronous learning networks, blended learning, hybrid learning, mixed mode learning or whatever you choose to call it for the last decade. And it puts me in mind in my favorite Russian parable, ‘When you dance with a bear, you can’t quit when you’re tired’. It is changed, it is morphed, it is changed into so many different things over the years that we really have no idea what it’s going to be like in the next five years. We suffer from and I know you do in this campus, landscape amnesia. You can’t even remember, and we can’t, what UCF was like before we had a distributed learning initiative. We were all there, but we can’t remember it. It’s been here forever. Now, we‘re big fans of Jay Forester and his work on complex systems. And he’s got three adage s . One is you can never really anticipate how an intervention will ripple thru a Complex System. Have a ring to you? It really does. Secondly, you can’t intuit the outcomes. I’m going to show you some very non-intuitive outcomes this morning. And lastly, there will always be side effects—positive and negative—do you know what I mean by that? Have you ever raised children? And there are very positive and negative side effects associated with that. So, my provost, Terry Hickey, talks to me and he says “Chuck, when I look at this, this learning initiative, when I look at the net generation, when I look at what’s happening to higher education,

   2   Center for Distance and Online Learning |   Last updated: 7/28/2008    

    I sleep like a baby. It doesn’t bother me a bit. I sleep for an hour, wake up and cry for an hour, and so on and so forth through the day. Okay. Community Context. This is the University of Central Florida. I use it actually to torture people from around the country, this photograph. In 1970, my wife and I drove up to then Florida Technological University, a three building university. In our red Volkswagen, from the University of Wisconsin. And we drove up to this building, and my wife turned to me and said “What the hell have you done! Where are you taking me? There are three buildings in this campus.” I said, “No, no baby. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. It’s got great potential, and I’m going to be at Stamford in two years. So don’t worry…don’t worry. Well it’s 38 years later. Stamford only has a very few minutes to call, with that next year we will pass 50 thousand students. We’re the sixth largest university in the country. It is amazing. The good news is we’re growing. The bad news is we’re growing. Okay. One of things that can only save us from a infrastructure perspective is distributed learning. It’s the only thing and it extends the University. Now, why do I say this? We’re fifty thousand; I don’t know what your population is. We’re a university, you’re a community college. But let me say this--some of the best teaching in the world is going on in community colleges. Some of the great experimentation with distance learning. And I’m going to talk about that in a minute. But we have this one thing in common, among others. We’re here to serve our community. We’re here to serve our community, both the University of Central Florida and Hudson Valley Community College. We need to do that and that’s our…that’s our task. So, the first thing I do is I invite you to come. Come visit us. And I’m going to say this now. I’m going to talk about a lot of resources they’re all yours. Anything I talk about today you can have. You can have anything that we have at the University of Central Florida. And I’ve met with some of your faculty…and I know some exciting things that are going on. Now. I think this is what the landscape looks like, okay, and you know that’s what the landscape looks like. On this extreme side of this, on the right side of this, are fully online initiatives. Any you have a lot of them here and we have a lot of them. And we do them, this is an institutional perspective. On line happens that way. Okay. On the other side is our technology enhanced courses. I know you have many technology enhanced courses at HVCC. Now, I’m going to ask you something. Does anyone remember what episode 42 of Star Trek was? It was called The Trouble with Tribbles.  Remember Trouble with Tribbles? What Tribbles were were that fuzzy animal that overwhelmed the Starship   Enterprise . That’s what technology enhanced courses are. Everybody is enhancing their courses with technology in some way or other. We have faculty members on our campus say “No, I’m not doing that!” I say, “It doesn’t matter, they’re doing that.” The students are enhancing your course with technology. They are doing that. We on our campus say no longer do we have any face to face courses. They are all technology enhanced in some way or other. Now it’s very interesting to me. I’ll tell you several stories about this in terms of the net generation in terms of enhancing the technology. Okay. In the middle are the blended courses. I know you’re experimenting with blended courses. Partly on line, partly face-to-face in some way or other. We are doing     3   Center for Distance and Online Learning |   Last updated: 7/28/2008    

 

  the same kind of thing. And it’s very, very interesting. We, we anticipated that what we would do with blended courses is that we would leverage blended courses, a Monday, Wednesday, Friday course, we would leverage three sections out of it. One on Monday, one on Wednesday, one on Friday. Faculty are blending all over the lot. They’re doing all kinds of things. Now, Blending has turned out to be really transformative. Let me give you an example. What do students love? They love these. They love these. We have a faculty member who teaches a large blended learning course. And what he does is, he teaches a large psychology course, and he says, what do we all say to him, we say, “Turn off your cell phone.” What Jay Brofrey does is he says “Leave your cell phone on. Let them ring.” And when they ring, he answers them in the class. Whatever, whatever happens kids ring he answers it and somehow he integrates what’s happening on the cell phone into the class. Whatever the lecture is he can do it. He’s an amazing instructor. He’s teaching psychology. Talks to the father; talks to the mother; they say, “How was he, you know, how were they in elementary school?” and he integrates that into the lecture.

Now…what he then does with this blended learning course is when you come in one day, and you all bring their cell phones in, you all bring your cell phones in. And if he get them to ring at the same time, I will give you 100 free points. And of course they love it, 100 free points, they love it. So they all come in, their cell phones are ringing, it’s like a U2 concert. All waving their cell phones and they’re doing this. Frivolous, trivial, maybe; but the thing they needed is I understand your technology. I understand that you love these things. And I’m not going to check them at the door. He has acknowledged their lives and it works beautifully. Now. his syllabus in this course is six questions. Who are you? How did you get that way? Can you change if you want to? Can you change someone else once the bloom is off the rose? What groups do you belong to and why? And, why do people do stupid things? That’s his syllabus. Now, it’s not really his syllabus, but they love it. Now, he says, “I’m like a Jesuit.” What I do is I say, “I understand you and accept you. Then I convert you. Then I convert you.” Then he does what Linda Ryder does. Her scaffolding, backward engineering, all of that kind of thing. Now let’s transform you. Let’s tell you one more story about this blended notion about using online and face-to-face together. We have a faculty member who’s excellent—Bob Bledsoe. He retired, like I did. Couldn’t stand it! Be very careful of retirement…be very careful of retirement. Bob came back, but the only way he could come back is to teach with technology. That was the caveat. You could come back Bob, but use it. He teaches political science, he was teaching his course and he said this happened to me Chuck. He called me to tell me this story. He said, I was teaching Viet Nam in my political science course and somebody was out there with their laptop, you know, you think they’re taking notes, but of course, they’re surfing. Okay, and he said suddenly I was teaching Viet Nam and a hand shot up and this happened. He said. “Dr. B. Dr. B.! There is, there are tanks in Bankok. What’s all that about?” And Bob said that was a teachable moment. The student was actually surfing the net in political science and found that there was a coo going on in Thailand. And Bob said, “I had a choice either to go on with Viet Nam or to change to the coo in Thailand. He said, “I knew it and I did it.” Your course is extended. It is always out there. We have instructors who come to me and said, you know Chuck this student said to me the other day. You know, this course you’re teaching, it’s okay,     4   Center for Distance and Online Learning |   Last updated: 7/28/2008    

 

  but there’s someone at Hudson Valley Community College who’s teaching the same course. And I looked at their web site and actually it’s a quite a bit better than yours. Okay. There are really some very interesting learning experiences on that. I think that you would be well served to go and look at his or her course because I think you could get some real teaching tips. Your courses are out there and they see them. They see them all of the time. Let me tell you how we look at the outcomes of this. And I’m going to, and I’m going to spend a little bit of time on this. Are we doing okay? Give me some feedback here. Give me some feedback here. Are we doing alright? Alright, alright. I dread keynotes. You know. The only thing worse than giving one is listening to one. Let me say this about keynotes though. The important thing is not what happens up here today on the stage. The important thing is what happens after. In terms of is there follow up, is there something that happens. And I’ve got some ideas about that I want to share with you. First of all we look at the outcome of all of this that you are doing and we’re doing the same thing in terms of success. What are the relative success rates in these courses compared to, our, what we have to do is compare them to face-to-face courses. We look at success. And I’m going to talk to you about how we compare students’ success in these courses. Because there’s always this that comes and I face this all the time; yeah, there are online courses, there are blended courses but are they as good as…fill that in. Face-to-face courses. Don’t you find that interesting, we don’t really find face-to-face courses until we has online courses? Don’t you find that interesting? Don’t you find that interesting that there were no acoustic guitars until there were electric guitars? I mean, it’s very interesting that face-to- face courses became the gold standard once technology came on board. It’s very interesting.

Okay. Retention—the classic thing is do they retain in these courses. It’s a particularly interesting problem and we do deal with that. Reactive Behavior Patterns. Clearly the whole notion of learning styles comes to play in this. This is our alternative to learning styles. Learning styles are very, very controversial in the country. There are those people around the country who will tell you that the study of the learning styles is absolutely and completely vacuous. That the study of learning style tells you nothing about a student or tells you nothing about whether or not they are going to succeed in the course. Those people who say you should gear instructional materials to learning styles really, really don’t know what they’re talking about. In fact Tony Gracio has an interesting question, from the University of Cincinnati. He says, “If you’re teach to someone’s learning style all the time, don’t they get bored? I mean..that’s an interesting question in terms of that. To on the other side of this, people who say INTJ is spoken here, who believe that you should do everything with respect to learning styles. And we’ve taken an alternative route to that, I’m going to share that with you this morning called Reactive behavior Patterns from a medical school model. Looking at students behaviors in classes in their communications pattern from the way they train adolescent physicians—physicians who deal wi th adolescence. It’s very interesting and it’s worked quite well. And, why do we choose adolescents. Because there are so many adolescents running around in our campuses. And so many are the faculty…you know. Ha, ha. You know it’s the greatest job in the world and I know it. And I’m going to talk to you about that, in fact, I’m going to leave a resource with Susan. There’s a great resource that came out of England called Should We Use Learning Styles . It’s online and downloadable. The Brits always do very     5   Center for Distance and Online Learning |   Last updated: 7/28/2008    

    thorough research. And it is a summary of 71 learning style instruments and what they measure and I’ll leave this with you and you can l get it and look at it if you’re interested. But, I’ll share that with you this morning. And there’s a lot of stuff like that . And then we do some things with the generations. Certainly we have other generations. I can look around here and see that we have many generations on this campus. And I deal with generation issues all of the time. And we’ll talk a little bit about that this morning. In the middle we look at both of this…Satisfaction. Student satisfaction AND faculty satisfaction. This is very, very important. Okay. Demographic profiles—after ten years here at HVCC, you should probably know who they were and who they are likely to be. Where are the targets of opportunity are for this. Strategies for success…I know many of you have solved a lot of problems with this. We harvest all of those strategies and you should too. Okay. And then Information Fluency—we are trying to deal with the notion of how students become information fluent. How they gather, use and evaluate information. It’s amazing, isn’t it, the amount of information that’s out there? I’d like to spend some time a little bit sharing with what we are doing with this. Because this generation of students is amazing to me. Let me tell you something. I don’t know what today is like, but it looks like you have plenty of parking space. Our nickname at UCF is—are you taping this—Are you taping, Susan? Oh, yes, oh well. Okay. The students at UCF our nickname is you can’t finish . Okay, okay. And one of things is a student, the subculture says, UCF is a six year program…five years to get a degree and a year to find a place to park. Okay, I was riding in the elevator the other day with a girl, who was calling her circle of friends on her cell phone. And it was an interesting conversation. I said, “What are you doing?” And she said, “I’m doing this. When any of us leave a parking place on our campus, we call everybody in the circle to see if they’re cruising the parking lot looking for a place. And if they are, we won’t leave the parking space until one of our circles comes and gets the space. Now, as an older generation, would you ever think of doing that? Never, Yeah, I’ve got mine, the hell with you. I mean, Yeah, that’s our generation in terms of the... But that’s the kind of collaboration that they want to do that. So. We’re working on that also. Historically, what information fluency has been from the American College and Research Libraries is critical thinking, information literacy, and technology literacy. The new model now that’s coming out is browse, search, and ask. That’s information fluency in terms of the way you begin to deal with information. Okay. Do any of you remember the Smith-Corona portable, blue typewriter? Then your generation is showing. Okay, this is a good urban legend, and it’s also true. The CEO of Smith- Corona got its crew together and said, “Congratulations. You’ve produced near perfection…probably the best electric, portable typewriter in the world…my congratulations to you!” His second statement to his staff was “Unfortunately, you have perfected the irrelevant.” Smith-Corona is no longer in business. Smith-Corona is no longer in business. You can still buy these on E-bay. Okay. Umm, it’s very intriguing. There are disruptive innovations in our future and they are here all of the time. We’re dealing with it, I’m dealing with, you’re going to be     6   Center for Distance and Online Learning |   Last updated: 7/28/2008    

    dealing with it. Disruptive innovations…what if we change platforms? Will the world end—no. But it will be a disruptive innovation. There is no question about it. And clearly, there is another very important disruptive innovation on the scene. Makes me crazy, makes me crazy. There’s one a day. There’s a new web 2.0 something every day. Have you seen Voohoo? No. I have not seen Voohoo. I mean, I mean I have in terms of…this is the new what’s happening. This is the new web 2.0, the process of what’s happening out there. This is what they’re using. Wikipedia is a web too. I can go across any campus. I can go across my campus. Wikipedia, yes. Wikipedia, no. You can use it, you can’t use it. Wikipedia is good, Wikipedia is bad. Personally, I love Wikipedia. I love Wikipedia. Okay, when our, in fact, let me do this. When our faculty come complaining about our students, we give them this quiz. Have you ever created your own web page by yourself? Have you ever used a collaborative multiplayer environment like Second Life or Wow? You get a chance to see Second Life today, Wow! world war craft. Have you ever downloaded, installed and used an open-source software? Have you ever contributed to a public Wiki? Have you ever kept a Blog? What are there, 80 million Blogs going now? Okay. Have you ever contributed to any open-source project? Have you ever used an internet communication tool like Skype, Web-Ex or ooVoo? Skype is our favorite tool in our household. My grandson lives in Tampa with my son. When he won’t go to bed Grandma calls him on Skype and says ‘Auston, go to bed’. Reads him a story on Skype, Web 2.0. Have you ever used a Shopping Bott to find anything? Can you use advanced search techniques, like can you find 500 credit card numbers. Can you do that? Have you ever participated in…you’d be surprised at our faculty, how few of them have done any of this in terms of looking at their work. This is web 2.0, it’s coming. All the time. Have many of you have face-book profiles? Yeah, why not…join them. I mean. Do you know about Pandora. Pandora is an internet radio station. Go to Pandora. It’s based on the semantic web. If you go to Pandora, it will ask you what artist do you want? Name them an artist. And then it will ask you yes or no. Then, based on your yes or no response, what happens is, there are 400 meta tags for that song, rhythm, whatever is going on in that song. Based on your yes or no response, it selects another song for you, based on your preferences. Yes or no again and again and again and again and it builds a radio station for you. It builds a radio station for you. And your like…I have nine Pandora radio stations that I listen to depending on my mood and my self confidence. Okay. I listen to them all the time. When I write, when I write, I like to write listening to Led Zeppelin. So I write at my desk, listening to my Led Zeppelin radio station. And my graduate students say ‘What are you doing Chuck?’ And I say listening to my oldie goldies and they say ‘no, your listening to geyser rock.’ I mean, I mean, that’s a generational kind of thing. But, I mean, it’s our responsibility to at least know some of things that are going on. Wikipedia. Jimmy Whales lives 60 miles down the road from us in Sarasota. And he says that he gets one letter a week saying ‘Jimmy, I got an F in the course because I used Wikipedia! Can you help me out.’ And his response is, “For God’s sake it’s an encyclopedia. We stopped using encyclopedias for references in the ninth grade.” It’s an interesting sort of paradox in terms of doing this. There is some buzz that maybe Wikipedia is developing a search engine. Wouldn’t that be interesting…wouldn’t that be interesting. Okay. We know about social networking. We need to know about this. When I surveyed my students and asked them, “How do you select a course?” The response is very clear. I go to rate my professor.com and then I go to Facebook     7   Center for Distance and Online Learning |   Last updated: 7/28/2008    

    to see who’s in my course. It’s very, very interesting to me. The power of Facebook is amazing. We have a web site for our information fluency initiative, which I hope you’ll go to and look at and I’ll leave it with Susan. We couldn’t get any students to come to it. So we went to the student government, got an appointment with the president of the student government, and asked, “How can we solve this problem?” By the way, getting an appointment with the president of the student government is harder than getting an appointment with the president of the University. Okay. They said advertise on Facebook. We did. And in two weeks we had 26,000 hits. 26,000 Hits from Facebook alone. MySpace, I mean, there was just a big thing in the paper about MySpace redoing the social networks, extremely powerful, extremely powerful, in an interesting sort of way. RatemyProfessor.com--my daughter who taught for ten years at the University of Tennessee…fortunately, I don’t teach anymore, so I’m not on rate my professor, but, I went and looked at my daughters ratings and as a dad I said, “How could you say that, you know, how could you say that. Give me your email address. I want to speak to you.” In terms of what they do. Um, the social networking has a very interesting power. I’ll mention three things in a negative kind of way. I’m uncomfortable doing this, but I’ll. This is a slide of mug shots of eight cheerleaders. Polk County Florida, Didn’t like something one of their colleagues, one of their cheerleaders said, so they invited her to their house, assaulted her, felony assaulted her, taped it, and put it on the internet. These are their mug shots from when they were arrested. We have issues here with maturity, we have issues with maturity. Here’s another one that I found just recently…Man indicted on My…Mom indicted on MySpace suicide case, harassment, harassment on MySpace. Another one, Man gets more than six years for posting police threat on a video standing with an AK 47 saying come and get me. So the police said, Okay. They came and got him, they came and got him. Okay. Those are important things, how we investigate how these tools relate to what’s going on because it’s going on. I made a presentation to my student government organization. We’d like to learn to use MySpace as an instructional tool. Do you know what their response was? It’s MySpace…you keep off it. Literally, in terms of this is where we talk about you. Okay. Alright. Let’s do the Students Success. I’ll show you what we do. Have any of you read Zen in the art of Motorcycle maintenance? Oh…the generation, the generation is showing. There’s a superb quote in there. Superb straight quote. “There is such a thing as quality, but every time you try to measure it, something goes haywire. You just can’t do it.” Don’t you love that? Don’t, I mean, that it just resonates. And the other thing he’s got in there that I love that he’s got the idea of gumption drainers. Gumption drainers are those little bumps in the road…one of which don’t wear you down, but when you line them all up they just absolutely lay you low. Don’t you have a day when you just have a bunch of gumption drainers…one little thing after another that just lays you low? Okay, now. We look at student’s success a lot of ways. Oh, oh, oh, I’ve got to go back, how do you go back? Right? Do you right click to go back? The arrow? Oh, now I’m technology challenged. I want to go back to this…I got to go back to this for a minute. I went back a lot…pretend it’s a UTube video. I, we do all of this stuff, now, I left out the most important part of this, the faculty. When I do all of that institutional kind of thing, my faculty say this to me. Great, Chuck! All of that stuff you do for papers and stuff is wonderful in the Board of Regents, but it doesn’t have one thing to do with what’s going on in my class. And     8   Center for Distance and Online Learning |   Last updated: 7/28/2008    

    they’re absolutely right. So, I’m going to say this to you…here’s the offer that I make to my faculty. If you want to do some research in this area…and why am I telling community college people about research…because I think research should be going on in community colleges. It should be published. I’ve got an idea about that. If you want to do some research I will help you. I will help you design the study. Anything you want to do in this area. If you want to do angel, you want to do online, you want to do blogging, whatever you want to do. I’ll help you design the study. I will find, write, design construct the data collection protocols for you and I will get them to you. If you need institutional data, I will get it for you. If you can’t collect the data, I will collect it for you, I will go to your class and collect the data for you, and I will analyze it, and I will give it back to you in publication quality format. And I want you to publish your results. I want you to do it. Now. I’ve got a small travel budget. I’ve convinced my provost to give me some money to, for faculty travel. And, I will help you go present it. Now, if you go to somewhere like Budapest, or Lahina, or Dublin, I will go help you present. Okay. If you go somewhere else, you’re on your own…you’re on your own. I’ve hired graduate student editors. Okay. I’ll help you edit your manuscript. I can’t write it for you. I can’t do what Linda Ryder does. But I’ll help you edit it, I’ll help you edit it, and I’ll get you published. It’s been the best thing that we’ve done. Done on the cheap, and I think this should be, I know this should be going on at community colleges. I know you’re not rewarded for research, but this is where the great teaching is going on, this is where the great teaching is going on. Let me give you some examples. We had three faculty working on a project – Faculty 2.0. They’re working on what’s it like in your life in the academy to teach fully on line. How does your life change. They’re writing about that. It’s very interesting. Side effect: office hours. One of these faculty members…their department didn’t know what to do with virtual office hours. They had a big to do about it. They finally allowed that she could have virtual office hours. Her argument was ‘Why should I sit in my office and type at the terminal? I can do that anywhere, just as effectively.’ So do you know what the department wanted--her office back. They wondered do you really need an office. I mean, that’s the kind of side effect you get out of this, Okay, that’s the kind of side effect you get out of this. The Writing Project Model—Our word for surviv al, one of our words for survival besides distance education is adjunct. Okay. Is adjunct. We have most of our Comp I courses taught by adjuncts. They’re disenfranchised, they are marginalized. They are called contingent faculty in the vernacular these days. What we do now is we build learning objects for them so that they can interact with each other teaching Comp I. Tremendously successful—they feel part of the university. Higher Order Evaluation Models—Don’t they cheat on line? Duh! Of course they cheat on line. Okay. The question is do you expect technology to make up for a lack of character. There are other issues involved in this…Higher Order Eval uation Models. There are some amazing things going on on this campus on Higher Order Evaluation Models. Moving evaluation from stuff that is objective, non-contextual, and non-authentic to reflective, authentic and contextual. The multiple choice test on line is dead. It just doesn’t know it. I mean, that has to change in terms of what happened. I mean, it’s a lot going on.

   9   Center for Distance and Online Learning |   Last updated: 7/28/2008    

    Convergent Theater — I had a faculty member come to me and say Chuck, I want to produce a play Antiguiny . I what half the audience to be at Bradley and half the audience to be at UCF. I what half the actors to be at Bradley and half the actors to be at UCF, and I want to broadcast it over the internet. I said, Whoa, John, whatever you’re smoking, stop. Okay. Tremendous success, tremendous success. Now he’s done it three universities producing Alice in Wonderland . Convergent Theater. Actor’s in different places, audiences in different places, he’s become an instant superstar and an instant villain in theater. The technologists love him, the traditional theater people hate him for destroying theater. But he’s become, I mean, it’s a very, very interesting research project. Student Evaluation of Instruction—I can go on and on on all of this. Here’s what I think, here’s what I think. I think there’s a lot of great research that should be going on at HVCC. I would love to help and work with you. I’m not sure my provost will let me send you to Dublin, but I would like to make you the offer to hook you up with people I know around the country to work on certain projects. To begin, I think it would be an exciting experiment. And I have one place in mind in particular. Hillsborough Community College in Tampa. They’re like you, they’re big, they’re sophisticated, and they’re doing amazing kinds of things. I would like to be able if it’s possible to hook some of this faculty up with some of their faculty and see if we can get some synergistic kinds of research going on in the community college area. More of that really does need to come out. I just think it’s important, since your chief academic officer’s here I think we should go to Lahyna and have a conference. Okay. I don’t know if you’re at all interested in that, but I think that would be great. Success – Alright. I have to use grades. That’s all I have for the moment. Unless I have to do individual projects. So here’s what I do with grades. I declassify grades. If you get an A, B, or C, you’re successful. Anything else is not successful. It’s not failure, IT’S NOT SUCCESS. It’s an interesting bouillon kind of intersection. So here’s what I do. I do this. If I look at my departments, and I don’t know if this is true here, but the grade distributions are wildly different across departments and there’s a great repartee that goes on in departments about grading, grading inflation, you’re too easy, you’re too hard. But that’s what I do with this. And then what I do is I track by these modes. What are the success rates in enhanced courses, fact to face-to- face courses in blended courses, in on line courses. And I look at this and I have been looking at this for years. Let me show you some of those results. You may be interested in that. Here’s what the early stuff looked like. You know and this is kind of interesting. This is what the early stuff looked like. So here we are. Now, in our parlance, you know face-to-face is face-to- face. That’s what we have. Blended, you know, is the yellow and on line courses. What we did is we matched up the courses as best we could. Now, when I show this to the Board of Regents for the first time, you know what question was they asked me? Why are they so smart in the summer. You have to be so careful when you present data, because what you think is patently obvious is not obvious to the other people. The obvious has nothing to do with the modalities it happens what goes on in the summer. The kind of curriculum, the kinds of program, what’s offered, what’s not offered, that kind of stuff. But originally, what it shows is that blended format has a marginal increase over the other the other formats. When blended is

   10   Center for Distance and Online Learning |   Last updated: 7/28/2008    

    blended and it’s really working, it tends to work. Now, this is the overall university and there are always problems with these kinds of things and I can talk more about those later, but based on 120 thousand students, this was the general trend, that they’re working, that there’s no real debilitating affect, that many of them work slightly better than and they always question well is that a significant difference? Well, with 100 thousand students, everything is significant. I doesn’t matter. But, when you go into the colleges it looks slightly different. There’s the College of Health and Public Affairs. It’s a much different profile, a much different profile. Look at this. The College of Health and Public Affairs has adopted the blended learning model and it is their tour de force. It’s what they do. It has become their cultural icon in terms of the way they offer courses. Completely obscured in the overall picture, completely obscured. Now let me show you another one. Our college of Arts and Sciences. Completely different, all over the lot. Some cases online works better, some cases, it doesn’t, depending those multiple, multiple department. It interacts incredibly, it interacts much differently. Now, let me show you another. Here’s a college of education. It doesn’t make any difference, it doesn’t make any difference, you know, what mode you offer, you still have very high success rates. Isn’t that interesting? Now, that has to all go. Now, when I come up to “Modern Millie”, modern times, since we really have no face-to-face courses any more. All we have are blended and online courses, you track them over a period of time and two things happen. One is they get closer and closer together and it looks like success rates are dropping. And that’s really not a bad thing. Why does it look like success rates are dropping? Because it permeates the whole culture. It’s no longer new and exciting and only the early adopters are joining it, it’s permeating the whole culture. Now, let me show you another way of looking at that. Here’s what we do, too, and I hope you would begin to look at it in this kind of way. This is what we call the decision tree. What I do is I begin the plots success rates and courses by departments. And decision trees are…give you decision rules of what success rates are going to look like. Here’s what’s happening. John McCain and Barack Obama are running decision trees every day and will be ‘til the end of the campaign…looking at what constituencies they ar e doing well with, what constituencies they are not doing well with, in terms of invest their time. The idea of a decision tree is to give you success rates by various predictive models. Here’s one that looks at college, mode and gender as a predictive model. So, look at the top note of that. Can you see the overall success rate was 85%, 85.9. Do you all hone in at that on top. Can you see that? So go down to the extreme left branch of the tree. Overall, it was 85%, but if you were in the College of Arts and Sciences, Business Administration or Hospitality Management, okay, you see that? And if you were a face-to-face in E, an enhanced or an N, a blended course, and you were a female, what is your chance of success? 88%, can you see that? Can you read that? Okay, good. Now, go down the other side of that tree and if you were a male, what is your chance of success? 84%, there’s a 4% differential. My daughter who teaches feminist literature says that’s the only good piece of date that I have. Okay. Now, if you looked at the College of Education in the middle the face-to-face modality tends to perform superior than the online modality. Do you see how that works out? Okay. And if you were to look at the College of Engineering, do you see engineering? the technology modality tends to work better than the face-to-face modalities. It changes by department, it changes by college, it changes by instructor. Now what we do this continually, is, give it to deans, give it to directors, give it to faculty, and say what else would you     11   Center for Distance and Online Learning |   Last updated: 7/28/2008