AWOL is a military acronym for “absent without leave,” and it has been one of my biggest challenges in teaching hybrid courses.  The first hybrid I taught met face-to-face (F2F) for 2.5 hours every Monday evening, and students were required to work online the rest of the week. I quickly saw a negative pattern forming.  Students would go AWOL from Tues-Sat, and suddenly reappear on Sunday evenings, when assignments were due.  Although many stayed on task, it didn’t sit right with me, and here’s why:

• Cramming at the last minute is a poor way to absorb and retain information.  This is well documented, but it’s worth re-visiting.  According to a 2006 study by Purdue professor Jeffrey Karpicke, PhD, and Henry Roediger, PhD (Yale ’73), students retain two-and-a-half times more information when they study in intervals (as opposed to cramming).

• A good instructor knows the importance of cohort camaraderie.  Likewise, he or she knows there will be critics who question the lack of face time in hybrid courses.  When students go AWOL it exacerbates these challenges.

• Fewer “touches” devalues your course, but only if you let it.  Let me put this into context for you.  Say I sell you a cheap health club membership, but you can only use it on Monday’s and Saturday’s for a total of five hours per week.  I sell your spouse the same, but she can go any day of the week.  If you perceive your value to be less than your spouse’s, even though you both get five hours per week, you catch my drift.

So what’s the solution?  The obvious answer is to remove any chance of AWOL, and the good news is that it’s very doable.  Here are a few tips (and there are many more)…

◊ Post a video lecture online, but only make it visible on Tues/Wed/Thurs

◊ Have a weekly online “Water Cooler Discussion.”  Students study a course related video, or journal article, and post an initial response to your discussion starter by Wednesday at midnight.  They must return to comment on two classmates’ posts by Sunday at midnight.  To earn their points, students’ posts must be thoughtful, as opposed to, “Yeah, I agree John.”

◊ Online Journaling?  In grad school, I had an innovative professor who gave us online “journals.”  Every other day we were required to make a journal entry pertaining to what we had learned in the last 48 hours.  Every now and then he’d ask us to exchange journals.  It wasn’t a time consuming thing, but it kept us from going AWOL and helped us connect with, and learn from each other.

◊ Assign students to four-person teams.  Build each team a wiki site where they can collaborate.  Wikispaces.com is a great resource for this, and it’s free to educators.  When the instructor builds the site, he/she becomes the site manager and can opt to receive e-mails that show individual student activity.  By assigning a team project that must be produced on the wiki, and requiring each team member to contribute twice per week (M-F), you enhance collaboration and avoid AWOL.  In other words, it’s a “two-fer.”

NY Times best-selling author and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen predicts that online learning will begin to “flip” in 2012, and online enrollments will increase from 5% to 50% in secondary schools by 2019 (Christensen, “Disrupting Class,” 2008).  This is encouraging, because those high school students are likely to create a bigger demand for hybrid and online courses in higher education.

Aside from the obvious benefits of saving time and fuel, there are other factors that often go overlooked in online learning.  For example, it levels the playing field for shy students.  These types are often excellent writers, and don’t hesitate to mingle with classmates or ask questions via the written word.  And, think about our human nature in F2F classes – we tend to sit by the same 2 or 3 classmates all quarter.  Conversely, a wise online instructor will have the entire class introduce him/herself on Day 1, including a family photo.  And thereafter, the instructor will devise team activities and online discussions that encourage interaction with the entire class.  The relationships I’ve made with classmates as a fully online graduate student in two years have equaled or surpassed those I made in four years as a F2F undergrad.

Hybrid courses will change the lives of people who might otherwise be stalled in their careers.  But just as we shouldn’t let students go AWOL, neither should we.  We have the knowledge and the tools, so now all that’s left is to embrace hybrid courses, and design them properly.

– Jeff McQuarrie, Centralia College

Using Video in Online Teaching

Here's a good piece I found today in Faculty Focus

DreamBox Learning

I just got reconnected with a long-lost friend and found out he's working for DreamBox Learning, IAA's 2010 Breakthrough Start-Up of the Year.  They offer some unique learning opportunties and cater to multiple learning styles.  Check out this short video message from their founder: 

The “24B4” principle

Regardless of whether I'm teaching college, or high school, or whether it’s my communication, film production, speech or marketing course, I always include Time Management in my curriculum.  Here's a helpful little pdf that we use at Northwest Christian High School.  It might be a little juvenile for college students, so feel free to rip and tweak as you please.  In my high school class, we have a contest to see who can come up with the stickiest message each week.  One student came up with "24B4," meaning that a student should always aim to finish a project 24 hours before the due date.  That way, if he gets sick, has a computer problem, or whatever, he's still got time.

I just spent six weeks with an eLearning director...

Watch this short film and see what I learned about online education; past, present and future.

Eliciting class participation - good article in today’s Faculty Focus

US Dept of Education finances National Center for Advanced Research and Information in Digital Technologies

Here's a short podcast with Karen Cator, director of the Office of Educational Technology.  Thanks Dr. Leslie Hitch for sharing this:

What does acting have to do with teaching?

I took this quote from my favorite professor at Northeastern University. – JM

“Being a good teacher is to elicit knowledge from all of available resources, class readings, video, teacher knowledge and experience, and student prior knowledge and experience...I'd have to say that with each online class that I've taken I've learned a lot about what I think works in this environment and what does not work, and so in my experiences teaching online and hybrid classes at the K-12 and higher education level I've learned from experience as a student how best to perform as a teacher.  I think that one needs to be both a teacher and a student to truly master both.  Similar to my advice to students about acting in front of and behind the camera...one will become a better actress if she learns how difficult it is to be on the other side, and vice versa.”

Patrick Daly
Professor, Northeastern University (and lifelong student)

Money for nuthin’ and your books for free

Public domain HTML books were the brainchild of Eric Eldred, a computer programmer for the Navy in the mid-1980's.  Eldred's daughter had an assignment using the book The Scarlet Letter.  He found it online, but it was unusable, so he cleaned it up, added some links and created the first HTML book.

The beauty of Public Domain HTML books is that you can add links to help other readers, or lead the them to similar works.  And the text can be copied into other texts or easily searched.  Says Lawrence Lessig, in his book The Future of Ideas (2001), “...because it lives on the Web, it is available to anyone anywhere – including to people who can’t afford to purchase that particular work to be included within search engines.”

I can think of a plethora of individual or collaborative assignments that would benefit our students from Eldred’s vast collection, available at Eldritch Press.

Cell Phones in the Classroom, Yay or Nay?

Do cell phones have a place in the classroom?  They’re prohibited at Northwest Christian High School, where I teach, and I used to think the policy was a no-brainer.  But with slow, outdated computers and way too much down time, I’m not sure I agree anymore.  When I spend half a class period troubleshooting one of my student’s computers while he or she twiddles her thumbs, I can't help but think, “This kid has a tiny computer (iPhone, or whatever) in his backpack, why don't we just use that for the time being?”

It seems like most secondary school kids have cell phones now days, but we’re actually laggards compared to many developed countries.  In 2004, Marc Presnky wrote, “In some countries and groups – such as students in parts of Japan, Korea, Europe and the Philippines – cell phone penetration is over 100 percent, which means that individuals own and use two or more of these devices.”

Rick McKinnon, eLearning Director at South Puget Sound Community College, and instructor at The Evergreen State College, says, “Why not have students tweeting suggestions to each other during class?”  Presnky goes on to say, “For as U.S. educators are busy banning cell phones in schools, millions of students in China and Japan, the Philippines, and Germany are using their mobile phones (respectively), to learn English; to study math, health and spelling; and to access live and archived university lectures.”

So, my question for you is, are we fighting a losing battle?  Would our energies be better spent learning how to utilize technology (and engaging our students in the ways they're engaged off campus?)

 

Have you seen The Khan Academy?

Some of you already know about this, but this is for those who don't.  Check out all the free instruction here, and tell me if you're not amazed that this was produced by one man.  Thanks Dr. Rick McKinnon, eLearning Director for South Puget Sound Community College, for sharing this site: The Khan Academy