The 8th International Online Conference for Teaching and Learning was held from 17-19 March 2010. And it is actually not over yet because the topics can be continued to be discussed in the forums. However, I have not yet ventured into that aspect of the conference as I was still catching up with the presentations and poster sessions. But to back up a little bit:

IOC includes a variety of ways to connect with and learn from colleagues. Each day of the conference features several live online sessions during which you interact with panelists and peers. All sessions are recorded and posted immediately for those who cannot attend live. Asynchronous discussion forums and resource sharing areas — for the collaborative collection of practical teaching ideas, links, handouts and learning objects — are a vital part of this very community-oriented event. The emphasis during IOC is on sharing, networking and generating a universe of ideas that everyone can use immediately in their practice. (Quote from the conference web site)

Altogether there were 25 live sessions of 50 minutes each and 50 poster presentations to choose from. Nancy White kicked off the conference on Wednesday evening with her keynote “Should We Be Using Communities for Learning?” in which she led us on a journey through learning online in various constellations (alone, in a community, and in a network). Dan Porter had taken the job of capturing Nancy’s presentation visually giving it his own angle (when I find out if I can post one of his images, I will do so). As always, Nancy had her audience on their fingertips and engaged the entire time.

Having had to choose from parallel sessions, I was happy that all sessions were recorded so that I could review those that I had missed. Thus, I did not miss any good sessions. Besides Nancy’s, I especially enjoyed the following sessions.

Live presentations

The 6 Bad Habits of Online Learners, and How to Address Them Successfully by Pat Wagner. She introduced us to 6 types of learners and discussed in the group how they can be engaged in online learning to draw out their potential so that they also participate in the course to their benefit. The 6 types are:

• the passive learner who wants to be entertained
• the lone-eagle learner who thinks he is the only one doing work
• the pass-the-test learner who only comes to class for the credit and doesn’t care about anything else
• the perfect learner who makes himself crazy by trying to do everything perfectly
• the one-style learner who is stuck in his patterns of learning
• the competitive learner who sees a challenge in everything and wants to win it

Her presentation showed that we are all familiar with these types of learners and have encountered them aplenty. In order to draw these learners out of their usual behavior, they need to be challenged (not necessarily in a competition though ) away from their well-trodden ways to face other ways of learning, to see that learning can be fun and rewarding.

Elluminate, which was this conference’s web conferencing tool of choice, lent itself well for presentations that required the participants input. Pat, for example, had prepared slides in which we could put our suggestions of how to get learners out of their comfortable environment. Although the slides usually got overcrowded very quickly, it was still a better way to capture the answers than to have everybody just type into the chat box. With over 100 participants the chat flew by quickly at times and it would have been very difficult to read and discuss the answers. Additionally, Pat put us into groups so that only a certain number of people put their answers onto the whiteboard for each learner type.

The take-home message from her presentation for me is that there is always a way to address each learner to draw out their potential and to avoid bad habits to take place. However, sometimes it is not so easy to spot the styles, as many are in-betweens. Furthermore, there are not just the one-style learners, but also the one-style teachers. Everybody has a preference for teaching that may not be the most suitable way for the learners. Thus, it is important that we also adapt our teaching style and venture off and try out new things.

Maintaining Academic Integrity in Online Classes by Lori McNabb. As this featured presentation was scheduled very late, I only watched the recording but wished I had been there live. Lori’s presentation about cheating and plagiarism was a tour-de-force in learning about crafty ideas for cheating that none of us would have thought about before she mentioned them. Thank goodness, the recording is password-protected for IOC participants.

She mentioned a study by McCabe, Trevino and Butterfield published in 2001 for which over 50,000 students on 60 campuses were asked about their cheating behavior. The percentage for cut-and-paste plagiarism was at 40%. I am wondering if that percentage is actually not even higher because sometimes students may not be aware that they plagiarize, e.g. because they come from a culture where that is accepted or even the norm or they simply don’t know.

She then brought up three ways of dealing with cheating and plagiarism issues:

• virtue (promotion) approach: appeal to students to not cheat / plagiarize, have them sign the honor code, etc., have guides available that tell them precisely what academic integrity means, e.g. Ryerson University’s The Illustrated Guide to Academic Integrity, Dalhousie University’s Academic Integrity
• prevention approach: aid students in their academic writing and researching; for online tests etc. don’t allow copy-and-paste in a browser or the opening of additional windows
• policing approach: have student papers run through plagiarism detection software

Often, these three approaches may be combined. In the Bachelor in Educational Sciences (BScE) at the University of Luxembourg for example, we use a combination of the virtue and policing approach: students need to submit their papers with a signed honor code for not having plagiarized, and they upload their assignments in Moodle to Ephorus.

Lori also talked about authentication methods that ranged from challenge questions to biometrics all the way to special devices that track noise and movement and switch on a 360° camera if anything is unusual.

Retaining Online Students: Making Connections Outside the Classroom by Anita Crawley. Like in many other presentations, the key message was that students need to be engaged in their learning, but also have the opportunities to meet outside of the classroom which is not always so easily done in an entirely online-based study program. Thus, tools that foster communication – asynchronous and synchronous – are very important. Today’s tools that include blogs, wikis, social networking, instant messaging, web conferencing, virtual reality, and podcasting help facilitators and learners to stay connected.

Educational Social Networking: The Benefits of Social Networking for Education by Steve Hargadon. From his many years of experience as online community initiator and leader, Steve shared his findings with the participants of the usefulness of educational networking and how it can be done successfully. He is, for example, the founder of Classroom 2.0, a network of educators that has been in existence for 3 years (since March 18, 2007) and currently has about 40,000 members. Steve rightly said that “The Internet is becoming a platform for unparalleled initiative, participation, productivity, and creativity.” It is not just about consuming information, but participating and creating your own information and thus gaining knowledge. The tools that are available to us (today) do not have value themselves, but it is always how we use them that will make or break them.

When creating an educational network, Steve advices that you must determine your core goal and fill real needs of the people for whom the network is set up. Furthermore, early adopters need to be supported to get the network off and not have it sitting there without any activity.

Poster presentations

Besides attending the live sessions, I checked out a number of poster presentations. These are redefined when produced for online viewing. Most presenters had opted for a PowerPoint presentation with the occasional screencast. Some presenters uploaded a narrated version of their slides that allowed them not to crowd their slides with only text to read, but to give a mini presentation.

Several presentations expounded on the tools that are available for online learning, and it became apparent that Jing by Techsmith is a tool of choice for many when it comes to screen recordings. The basic version allows you to record up to 5 minutes of video while the pro version has many more features. I use Camtasia for Mac for my recordings, also by Techsmith, and love it’s many features to enhance the screencast.

Conference organization

Some final words on the conference organization. Susann Manning, Kevin Johnson, Jonathan Finkelstein, and their team did a wonderful job organizing this online conference and making it a success. Each session had an experienced moderator, they always gave a brief tech introduction to Elluminate which got shorter and shorter with each presentation as most people had already heard it at least once, and they also provided support throughout the sessions where necessary.

The length of the sessions was very adequate with 50 minutes so that it was also easy to keep the schedule in mind. Some sessions had closed-captioning support which I thought was a fantastic way to make these sessions more accessible to people who either can’t hear well, don’t have speakers or can’t turn them on or also for non-native speakers who may have difficulties with English.

Having Dan’s visual input for Nancy White’s as well as Susann Manning and Kevin Johnson’s session at the end was a great experience for me. I just wished I had two screens. It got a little crowded with 4 Elluminate windows (whiteboard, chat, participants, Dan’s application sharing) and Evernote for taking notes, not even to mention the browser that was open in the background.

In my opinion, this year’s International Online Conference (I had not participated in previous ones) can serve as a best practice example of how to organize a conference entirely online and how to support it. A second best practice example is the annual LearnTrends conference, which is not only a conference, but a year-around community.

Thank you very much for this great conference!

On Wednesday and Thursday, March 10-11, 2010, I witnessed my first software launch. After 8 years of development and already substantial use, TAO, an open source computer-based assessment (CBA) platform was officially launched. The development of this online assessment tool started as a partnership of the Research Unit EMACS of the University of Luxembourg and the CITI department of the Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor in Luxembourg in 2002.

The two days were filled with presentations about CBA in general, the partnership, the history of the development of TAO, and its use in international assessments such as PISA and PIAAC. Although TAO was not officially released as open source software until now, it has already been in use for some time now testing it thoroughly and improving it constantly.

Besides presentations, there were user and developer sessions dealing with all aspects of getting to know TAO. The workshops ranged from setting up TAO on a server to creating test items and running the tests. Thus, we could gain first-hand experience of the software.

TAO is being developed as a versatile and generic solution for CBA instead of being geared towards a very specific test. The aim was and is to create a system that can accommodate as many CBA tests as possible allowing also for the exchange of tests among the TAO users.

The launch did not only kick off version 1.0 of TAO, but also marked the beginning of the user and developer community for this open source system. The developers know that this official start is not the end of their work but the beginning of a more public development to improve the software.

In the user workshops which I attended we learned how to set up users, test takers, tests, test items, and the delivery of the test. I was very impressed by the possibilities of TAO, but also saw that there is a lot of work to be done in regard to usability. Being used to a great number of easy-to-use social media, some of the steps I had to take in the TAO system seemed not necessary and sometimes even annoying. However, I also learned that the usability guys and gals had not taken up their work until a few months ago and are working hard to make the software more user friendly.

During the final round of presentations, William Thorn, senior analyst with the OECD, brought the metaphor of haute couture vs. prêt-à-porter into the discussion. This metaphor was taken up by Marilyn Binkley and Romain Martin (both University of Luxembourg). Haute Couture was seen as where creativity goes on, where new developments are brought about to further CBA. At the same time it also signifies developments that have not yet been thoroughly tested and that cannot be applied everywhere, e.g. for technical reasons. On the other hand, prêt-à-porter assessment is well-tested, easier to administer, immediately usable. However, that does not necessarily mean paper-and-pencil tests, but can also be CBA. In contrast to haute couture CBA, it would only have little added value to paper-and-pencil tests. Just having multiple choice items on a computer screen instead of on paper is not very innovative. Like with elearning activities, the real added value must be something else, e.g. the use of multimedia, new forms of test items etc.

Altogether between 80 and 100 people attended this two-day event at the Abbaye de Neumünster in Luxembourg City. There were plenty of opportunities for discussions in the workshops and the breaks where developers, users and potential users mingled. The TAO Days were very well organized by the TAO team and also included a Walking Dinner for a selected number of guests (photos).

The coming months will show how quickly the word can spread about TAO and hopefully get the community to a good start.

I love conference recordings especially of conferences which I could not attend. Thus, I am very grateful to the conference organizers who decide to record their (keynote) events and make the recordings available to the general public. Such a recent event was eLearning 2010 (#ITC10), the conference of the Instructional Technology Council in Fort Worth, 20-23 February 2010.

The speaker line-up was excellent: Nancy White, Jim Groom, and Jared Stein among others. I particularly liked the following:

• Nancy White with “Online Facilitation 14 Years On: Where are we headed?”
• Jim Groom with “A Sermon: ‘For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things?’”
• John Krutsch Sr. and Jared Stein with “Late Night Learning LIVE!”
• Carol Spalding and Paul Harrat debating “Colleges Must Monitor Student Social Networking”

Nancy White and Jim Groom did not only have well-thought out arguments, but also presented them in a very engaging and funny way. Where have you ever won chocolate, books or a bottle of wine at a keynote (Nancy White)? Or has a sermon about social media tools been more compelling than Jim Groom’s rendition? Just these two examples show that keynotes do not have to follow the standard set-up, but could and should depart from them. Of course, it helps when the speaker has a great sense of humor and can respond on their toes.

Jared Stein’s and Marc Hugentobler’s “Late Night Learning LIVE!” touched upon current learning issues with a sarcastic, ironic, humorous tone, interspersed with ads that drove home their points very well.

Carol Spalding and Paul Harrat argued about monitoring student social networking in a friendly though thoroughly researched debate in which the moderator, Michael Catchpole, who has a knack for making people laugh, watched over their allotted times because they could have debated for much longer.

If I had to choose the keynote that I liked best from the recorded events that I watched, I’d definitely go with Nancy White’s presentation. She presented the history of online facilitation, what has changed over the years, and what needs to be done in the future along with a very personal style of presenting that kept me attentive the entire time, and she also tested a couple of new presenter tools incorporating her own learning in real-time.

Update: Nancy’s reflection on her presentation and the Twitter experiment.

From 25-27 February 2010 I was at the AKS-Tagung in Bochum, Germany. I was invited to give a brief presentation on the project “imMEDIAte TEACHing” for which I had worked at LMU München a few years ago. In particular, the organizers of the workshop “Lifelong learning also for language teachers?!” were interested in our concept for a language teacher training program.

These are the slides that I used for the presentation. More details can be found in the “notes” section below the slides directly on the slideshare web site. They should make it a bit easier to understand the presentation. If you cannot see the embedded presentation, view it here.

I liked the new concept of this conference very much. Everybody had to choose one specific workshop in which s/he stayed the entire time. No “workshop hopping” as is so frequent at other conferences. Thus, the workshop participants could get to know each other better and could really discuss the proposed issues over the three conference days. We had 4 ca. 15-minute presentations and the rest of the time for discussions and group work.

At the end we were very pressed for time to generate a presentation of our workshop results. Luckily, our workshop organizers, Sigrid Behrent (University of Paderborn) and Gunter Lorenz (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg) had already categorized most of the results the previous night. It was too bad that there was only little time to view the results of the other workshops. If this conference concept is continued, I would prefer to have a specific time slot for brief summaries from the workshops besides the slides or posters because then these could be put into context better, and it would be possible to see the connections between the individual workshops more clearly.

The biggest results from the workshop for me are the following:

• Continuously training language teachers is necessary (nothing new there) and is done differently at individual institutions. Some have in-house workshops, others organize external trainers, others have a mix, but many do not have any scheme in place.
• Sharing resources and workshop facilitators between language centers will help to offer a wide range of workshops. Language centers should try to pool their resources and see if they can profit from their respective expertise.
• Any training program should be accredited to command respectability and offer real value to the participants for future employment (especially for freelance teachers) and professional development in general. Other professions already have such certificates – why not language teachers in higher education in Germany?
• The idea behind “imMEDIAte TEACHing” is still current and provides a good ground for discussions to venture off to new grounds.
• We have set up the AKS-NetworkING space where the discussions can be continued, resources shared, etc. The conference was just the start for the actual work.

George Siemens presented today at LearnTrends 2009 on “Finding New Points of Balance”. In his presentation, which was attended by 120 participants on average, he employed a very nice online presenter technique. He offered (almost) empty slides encouraging participants to drop their ideas on them and thus engaging in the presentation more than just through the backchannel.

I had already seen that others had done this before. Recently, Dave Cormier wrote a good post on this method that he also tried for one of his presentations with great success entitled “Presenting with live slides“.

This technique is great to interact more with participants and to bring in their voice. Of course, one could use the backchannel or the audio chat. However, by putting everything on a slide, the contributions become part of the presentation visuals, and the presenter can use the ideas more easily than if he had to sift through the chat log which can move rather quickly with a large group.

The slides that George provided were filled quickly because he had approx. 120 other minds chiming in and bringing ideas forth.

In a way, this session showed that online conference sessions can be more engaging than f2f conference sessions because everybody can participate at any time by using the backchannel without interrupting the speaker. By offering a white slide for putting down ideas, people will do so actively and I had the feeling more willingly than in an auditorium where we would have had to raise our hands and shout our ideas to the podium where the speaker may not even have heard them. It was also suggested that the nature of the writing on the whiteboard assisted the involvement as it was anonymous.

One slide from George's slide deck on which we participants put down our ideas on the continuum of using online tools for learning.