My Helen Keller Moment

Does anyone remember when Helen Keller wrote a story and then got in trouble because it had already been written and published? She had heard it as a child and thought she had come up with it? Well, I am feeling similarly silly as I realized when I posted the study that I heard of it because I had read the lesson. Sorry to have shared my "Helen Keller" moment with everyone!

Assisting folks with different learning styles

I've spent the past ten years researching ways to bridge the gap between the digital natives and digital immigrants in faculty development sessions on instructional technology. I would be happy to share my paper on that topic with anyone interested. My "fictitious" learner is named Margaret, and she is very nervous around technology. She is a digital immigrant who believes that technology cannot be trusted, therefore, if she just complains about how it won't work before she even tries it, she believes she can 1) get lots of attention and 2) come out ahead of the class. She is in a hybrid course, and to motivate her, first, she needs a clear goal and set of benefits for succeeding in the course. Second, she needs a clear path--with step by step, goal oriented resources designed to assist her to achieve her goals. Third, she needs support and the knowledge that when she claims something won't work, someone will show up to assist her. Knowing that the "truth will out," as they say, motivates her to stay honest. Also, staying calm when she is shrieking that nothing works diminishes the attention she gets for her outbursts and, eventually, stops the motivation for the outbursts. To assist her, I should make sure there are benefits to her applying herself in the course. I should also make sure she has access to resources and support, and that she believes that if she succeeds in the course it will be a good thing for her personally and/or professionally.

Barbara Means at SLOAN C

In her talk on Nov. 4th at SLOAN C, Means described a study by Lovetter, Meyer, and Thille (2008) where students in an online course learned more content and learned it at a higher level than a group in the same course, only f2f format. However, in a test a few months later, both groups were performing at the same level. The study has been replicated at various levels. It strikes me that these findings mimic those found in Montessori students, where they perform better than their peers in non-Montessori schools, but once integrated, both groups even out.

The "so what" of Means' metastudy was that purely online instruction is equivalent to face to face. It's not the medium, but the redesign of classes to put them online that makes the difference and helps the online class "perform" better than the face to face course.

The superior online courses, and this information was also repeated in a later presentation by David McCollum from University of Maryland University College in a later presentation called "An Online-Instructor Efficacy Self-Evaluation for Identifying Profesional Development Needs," require student-student, student-instructor, and student-content interaction. They adhere to a schedule (are not self-paced), and they use a variety of tools to deliver content. These types of courses are the type we create at KSU in the CHSS training courses.

In the presentation by McCollum, he also found that students learn more and retention improves when instructors use the learning module feature in a learning management system (as opposed to simply grouping content in folders). In addition, stduents learn more and retention improves when instructors use a variety of tools such as wikis, blogs, interactive exercises, etc. This last finding flies in the face of the "common sense" idea that if you do send students outside the lms to a blog or wiki, that they will get lost and confused.

Hearing Barbara Means speak

At Sloan-C in Orlando. Just got the chance to ask Dr. Means about the bias that face to face is of course superior to online. She answered with, "Why do we assume that what we have been doing is ideal?"