VCCS Chancellor's Professorship Project

I am starting a project to rethink how I teach my campus (and to a lesser extent my online courses) to rely more on current technology (the smartphone), but at the same time I do not want the technology to interfere with my content teaching.  I will be relying more on online apps and websites to teach content.  I also want to figure out a way to make the study of history more personal for students who do not seem to grasp that history is the history of the lives of real people who have lived and died.  I will post a link to my project site as soon as I get it up.

The Impossibility of Innovative Tech Projects at a Community College

The problem is tech support (better to say the absence of it). The tech guys have to spend so much time just managing email (someone is always responding to a phishing email and bringing down the entire system) and college resources (virtual drives to store virtual documents) that they have no time to support anything that is outside of the box.  Plus none of them are trained to do that.  They are network and security guys and just have a hard time dealing with any kind of academic support. I have reluctantly moved project after project that I have tried to work on to locations outside of the community college, literally because it is too frustrating trying to get any support.

New Digital History Course

Right now I am working on developing a new "intro" to digital history course, which I hope to be able to offer in both online and on campus forms in the future.  This has been a lot of work so far, and I still need to write up some more notes to go with the syllabus.  Here is the draft course site:
http://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/evans/HIS295/Index.html

Role of Technology in Undergrad Education

I was wondering today, just what exactly is the role of technology in undergraduate education today (and probably more specifically in the intro survey courses at a community college).  Just what exactly can it do?  Can it do anything?

I was prompted to think about this a bit because I was considering putting together a round-table discussion on technology for all of my colleagues, and the question that I wanted us to consider was: why is no one using technology?  With all of the social media out there, why is none of that being used in courses?  With all of the web 2.0 and now 3.0 tools, why has none of that been adopted.  And actually, we can get even simpler, why are so few people even using web 1.0 tools?

In reality, all faculty are supposed to use Blackboard--and there is no point in me getting into that here.
Many faculty use that to post a syllabus, create a discussion board and keep track of grades.  Some, more adventurous faculty, will also use it to run group projects or to set up blogs.  Some will also use email features, but is that the extent of our use of technology?  It seems so.  Technology in a box.

There is really no widespread use of web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 tools/technology at the college.  There might be 1/3 of the full-time faculty who maintain active professional home pages with links to information about their courses.  Then there is the 1/3 of the full-time faculty who can't even manage their email!  There is probably 1/3 of the full-time faculty who have never used the instructor work-stations in the classrooms to access anything on the web.  What about the entire adjunct instructor population?

Most syllabi, if you look closely at them, follow a pattern something like:  read this for class on Thursday, and in class on Thursday we will discuss this topic.  There is little or no technology use anywhere to be found.

Why?

• despite assumptions to the contrary, students are not necessarily tech savvy
• it takes time for faculty to figure out how to use tech, and there is often little incentive when the school's priorities are enrollment or something else
• there are no instructional technology people available to help them
• it is not clear just what critical-thinking skills can be worked on with some technology

Blackboard and the Veil of Darkness

I quote from one of my recent posts elsewhere;
'Finally, while I am no big proponent of Blackboard for various reasons, one of the big problems that I have with it is the veil of secrecy that drops over everyone's courses. It is almost as if we are back to the secrecy that surrounds me teaching in a campus environment. If there are great innovative assignments or technology being used, who can find out about it. It is also hard to share information across courses. One of the great advantages of the web is its universal access and availability, and we can see what is being done in other courses. The MIT open courses, while not a great example, are a kind of good example of what can be done out there.

Online Course Design

I am re-posting here some comments that I recently made re the growing emasculation of instructors with the course design process at NVCC. This is a big step backward, and it seems that we are now encroaching on the way that hgih schools use Blackboard. I am also unclear whether our admin and staff, supposedly concerned with student success, really wants to engage in a discussion of this topic.

Here is my original note:
In a recent post to the ELI discussion about student success, Thomas Mora raised a very important point, a point that several other faculty commented upon throughout the discussion:

“Being one of those faculty who do not fully follow these course design principles, I would work with the faculty member to learn what their learning philosophy is and how it is evident in the design of the course. There is an assumption that there is ONE "correct" way to design a course. I do not subscribe to this philosophy. I believe we need to respect the expertise of the individual faculty member and find ways to work with them. I have felt that I am expected to follow these design principles without question. I do not remember being asked what assistance I need, but been told I need to participate in this process even though my courses have high completion rates. I do not feel respected for the expertise I have developed over the years of developing my course and working with
students. This creates (for me at least) a level of defensiveness for I feel I need to " protect" my territory. I feel ever increasing pressure to submit to course design principles (and changes to my
blackboard site) without consulting with me.’

I have the distinct impression from my conversations with my colleagues at ELI over the past year or so, that faculty teaching at ELI have lost control of the course design process, and that course design is being forced upon them without recognition of faculty’s specific expertise, course goals and intentions. (What Tom wrote is an excellent expression of this.) And it is pretty clear that the instructional designers, many of whom have far less actual course design and teaching experience than the faculty with whom they are working, are telling faculty what they must do in their courses instead of presenting faculty with what they could be doing, i.e., some options of what might work in their courses.

I like the way that Tom Mora wrote about the issue, and I believe that this issue of faculty course control is an important issue re the design and development of ELI courses, and while I recognize that
there may (and I only say “may) be some considerations re specific “good” distance learning practices, it is also clear that there are few, if any, “rules.” It remains pretty clear to me that a faculty instructor is the one who should have the final say about instructional content and process, not a course design, or redesign, team.

I think that the nature of the faculty/designer relationship at ELI merits some discussion to clarify the issues and processes involved. That relationship used to be pretty clear, but it is not so anymore. I do not think that this is a discussion that can take place on the discussion board or via Centra.

Blackboard and the Compartmentalization of Knowledge

Well, here is another thought that occurred to me about why Blackboard is a step-backwards on the web. I was working on some background notes for an assignment, and I asked one of my colleagues if she had any relevant information on the topic in her literature course. Turns out that she had great informative notes, but the problem was that the information is buried within her Blackboard course, and there is no easy way for me to link to that material from my course or send my students to view it in her BB course. So, the interdisciplinary sharing of knowledge and the breaking down of classroom walls, which was so lauded with the onset of the internet, is no longer there. We are now back inside walls, this time Blackboard's walls. Almost all of our course development now focuses on putting course content within the secure framework of BB instead of on the open web.

Is Teaching with Blackboard Teaching?

Been wondering about that. I have a lot of colleagues who spend considerable amount of time in the classroom, working with students, developing new assignments and activities, personalizing their instruction. But then they teach online with Blackboard. They create reading assignments from a textbook, set up some multiple-choice exams that are automatically graded by Blackboard, maybe have students look through some textbook-publisher-provided Powerpoints, and, oh, yes, have students post to one another on an online forum. Is that college-level instruction?

Digital Humanities Project

Well, we have gotten off the ground something called the Loudoun Digital Humanities Project. Right now it is largely just a single website, but we hope to use this as an organizing focus for a series of workshops and also digital projects for the faculty at the Loudoun campus. The "problem" is going to be trying to interest/involve faculty in collaborating. I am not sure that too many faculty are ever really involved in collaborative projects, even though they pay lip service to that idea.

Digital Teaching Workshop

Right now I'm directing a NEH-funded, year long workshop focused on teaching/studying the humanities with current and future digital technologies. I am not quite sure yet what will come out of this, but currently I am working on separating content from course assignments in all of my online history courses. It is a bit laborious to do that, but I'm hoping that this will give me more options in considering which, if any, web 2.0 applications I can begin to use in the courses. Separating out the content will also allow me to develop my content a bit more and add in a lot more images.