Category Archives: edtech

Mahara at Pace University

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When you live in New Zealand, you are bound to get up or stay awake at strange hours to participate in webinars that are held overseas – which basically means every time. ;-) But it’s definitely worth it. The case in point is the EPAC webchat with Beth Klingner and Linda Anstendig from Pace University: “Mahara: The Journey From Pilot to University-Wide ePortfolio” which took place on April 7, 2011, at 10 a.m. PT and translates into April 8, 2011, 5 a.m. NZT.

I learnt about this webinar on the UBC Portfolio Community of Practice a day before the event thanks to having reviewed my Google alerts and Twitter search on #mahara. The archive of the webinar will be made available online shortly.

Beth and Linda took us along their timeline of getting involved in ePortfolios and then getting started with Mahara in 2010. In contrast to other institutions that use Mahara out-of-the-box, Pace University has a developer who can implement customizations and make the system fit the university’s needs better. Recognizing the need for a lifelong portfolio, they linked their students’ Gmail accounts to Mahara and thus also allow alumni to keep their portfolio after graduation as they can keep their university’s Gmail account. Currently, every students gets 100 MB of space, but they can apply for more if that is necessary.

Mahara at Pace University is not only used for portfolios in classes, but also by Career Services and for their Leadership Certificate. The latter has built-in reflection questions that the students answer on the ePortfolio system. Starting in Fall 2011, they will also use it for faculty who are up tenure.

The ePortfolio team at Pace University has created a number of resources to support students and faculty in getting used to working with an electronic portfolio. They have:

  • an assignment guide
  • a blog
  • step-by-step tutorials
  • ECHO 360 videos (lecture capture videos)
  • short 30-60 min. face-to-face workshops
  • virtual tutorials for distance education students
  • promote ePortfolios on the university web site

Among their current initiatives are training librarians to support students in their use of ePortfolios, training academic advisors, and developing rubrics to use for ePortfolio assessment. They have some more initiatives of which you can learn when you view the recording. ;-)

A really great idea to promote the use of ePortfolios among students is their contest. Students can submit public portfolios and a committee decides on the best. These will be published on the university web site. That way, excellence in using ePortfolios will be recognized and students can see some good examples and are encouraged to use ePortfolios themselves in a meaningful way.

Summer 2011 sees some exciting things for them in the ePortfolio space:

  • implementing the faculty review
  • starting a research project on the impact of Mahara
  • re-doing the customizations for the new version of Mahara

The latter will hopefully be aided by the fact that we plan to release Mahara 1.4 at the beginning of May (a little bit later than we had hoped but a second security release threw the original plan a bit out of the window).

It’ll be interesting to watch what Pace University is doing in the ePortfolio space and read up on their research projects to understand better the use of Mahara at the university level.

Moodle and Mahara at ASHS

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Mark Osborne, Deputy Principal at Albany Senior High School (ASHS) spoke at Aotea College today about how his high school uses Moodle and Mahara. Albany Senior High (near Auckland) is New Zealand’s first open source school that promotes using open source software but also engages in open education beyond the software aspects.

Since my arrival in New Zealand two months ago, I have been hearing about Mark’s promotion of open source and reading posts by him, particularly on the MLE Reference Group, and finally had the pleasure to meet him and learn more about how his school uses the learning management system Moodle and the e-portfolio system Mahara.

ASHS tries to place as many software tools as possible online so that differing operating systems can still access them without problems and students can also work with their own laptops connecting online through Wifi.

It is up to the teachers to use Moodle with their classes or teach without it. Thus, the knowledge about Moodle can be situated on a continuum. Mahara, however, they have to use for their appraisal process. At ASHS professional development is called professional inquiry because it is an exploration and reflection. Thus, teachers get acquainted with it even if their students happen to not be using it yet.

From next year on, all student portfolios will be e-portfolios. Currently, they can have a paper-based portfolio alternatively.

Mark showed us some of his favorite modules in Moodle, informed us how he uses them in his classes, and how easy it is to set them up. He uses a number of Moodle activities to get feedback from his students on his teacher which he then can also use for his appraisal documentation. For example, students fill in questionnaires about his classes. He also looks at the statistics of activities, e.g. Hot Potatoes quizzes, to find out where students may need some more time because they did not answer certain questions correctly or it took them a very long time to get the answers right.

In just two hours he gave a small group of interested teachers from the Porirua region a good overview of what can be done in Moodle and how Mahara can be used as e-portfolio by both students and teachers and answered questions.

I am looking forward to his talk at KohaCon on October 26, 2010, when he will present on his school’s use of Koha, the open source integrated library system.

Best practice: #IOC2010

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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!

Debating a sermon about online facilitation in the late night show

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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.

History & Future of of Online Facilitation

View more presentations from Nancy White.

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

TechLunch 2009 and 2010

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On October 9, 2009, Bob Reuter and I held our first TechLunch on Campus Walferdange (Faculty of Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education – FLSHASE) of the University of Luxembourg. We had initiated this informal lunchtime session to give students, teachers, and researchers the opportunity to learn about digital technologies in a relaxed setting. Often, people at university do not have a lot of time to participate in workshops. Furthermore, 3- or 4-hour workshops are not always the right format to whet the appetite for a topic. To get people interested in something, we thought that a shorter session could be more beneficial. Participants would not have to invest much because they could eat their lunch at the same time. Thus, TechLunch war born.

We planned to hold it approximately twice a month also depending a bit on the internship schedule of the BScE (Bachelor in Educational Sciences) students who are a primary target group for us as we are both involved in that study program. However, we also welcome anybody else from the university, i.e. students, researchers, teachers, and staff from all 3 campuses, to join us. We have had 4 sessions up to now with 4 to 12 participants. All sessions are video recorded and uploaded to YouTube in case anybody who could not attend the sessions wanted to review them.

Although we are happy that anybody shows up, we would, of course, like to have a larger audience.

TechLunch survey

We set up a questionnaire to find out what further topics would be interesting to our potential audience now that they may have already heard about TechLunch or even attended one. Within the last 4 days we have received 23 responses. Now that everybody is in holiday mood and preparing for the festivities, I do not think that we will receive many more responses, but we will keep the questionnaire open.

Out of these 23 people, 5 had already attended a TechLunch. We also already have a couple of regulars who have come to 2 and 1 already to 3 TechLunches.

TechLunch time

One concern of ours is the time to offer TechLunch. With students not having classes every day, researchers and teachers also being on campus often irregularly, it is very difficult to come up with a time that would suit most. We had opted for Friday 12:00-12:45 p.m., but wanted to see if other times might be more convenient.

Friday does not seem to be too bad, but our preferred time was not among the ones chosen most (only 3 people agreed with that time).

  • 6 participants preferred Friday, 1:00-1:45 p.m.
  • 5 participants opted for Wednesday, 12:30-1:15 p.m.
  • 4 participants each voted for Monday, 1:30-2:15 p.m., and Thursday 1:30-2:15 p.m.

One person suggested to offer a date with several time slots before each TechLunch and see which one is the most popular. In theory that might be a good idea, but bringing in a sign-up process would complicate everything. We had asked people to sign up for the first TechLunch (Zotero for Beginners) because we knew the topic was a favorite for our students, but it generated more emails than people actually came to the session because some could not come in the end and apologized or asked if they could come late etc. Having the sign-up process also feels as if it is something formal whereas we want to keep TechLunch open and just as a gathering to exchange ideas and opinions about using digital technologies for learning, studying, teaching, and researching.

TechLunch topics

Before planning the coming “summer” semester (it starts in mid-February ;-) ), we wanted to get an idea if the topics that Bob and I would offer would also be of interest. We proposed 13 topics:

  • Bookmarking: synchronization and sharing with others
  • Electronic notetaking
  • Advanced features of Zotero
  • Facebook and Twitter
  • Alternatives to PowerPoint
  • Setting up a personalized start page in a browser
  • Mahara [this eportfolio system doubles as social network and is in use in the BScE] as social network
  • Creating cartoons online
  • Open Educational Resources: What’s that?
  • How do I find photos online that I can use?
  • Why should I have a blog?
  • How can I subscribe to online content and view it easily?
  • Password management

Only “Creating cartoons online” got less than 5 votes. Maybe we should have added “… for learning purposes / with kids in the classroom” or something like that. ;-)

The top 3 topics with 14+ votes are:

  • Alternatives to PowerPoint (17)
  • Open Educational Resources (15)
  • Using online images legally (14)
Interest in proposed TechLunch topics

Interest in proposed TechLunch topics

Some people also provided their own suggestions for future TechLunch topics:

  • Troubleshooting common error messages on a Mac (I guess, also Windows computer owners could find some); unfortunately, no examples were provided and also no email address to contact the commenter
  • Chrome OS
  • Cloud Computing
  • Privacy Issues
  • Image, audio and video editing
  • Using Word optimally
  • Google Wave (that was already on our list, but we did not put it forth because it is not out yet for everybody)
  • iTunes U
  • Zotero for beginners (two times)
  • OpenOffice (two times)
  • R as alternative to SPSS
  • SPSS
  • Creating online surveys with tools other than Grafstat
  • Tools for creating handouts (which tools are there? compatibility PC-Mac, preferably free)

We also asked if anybody would be interested in leading a TechLunch. Although up until now we have led all 4 TechLunches that doesn’t mean that that needs to stay that way. We welcome others who want to share their experiences and use of software or online services. Two people were interested in doing just that. Yeah. :-)

Comments in the survey

In the general comment text field we received encouraging comments to keep up with TechLunch. However, we need to make it clear that the language in which TechLunch will be offered will depend partly on the audience. The first posters were in German thus discouraging some people to attend. However, the last two sessions were conducted in English as we had some non-German speakers in them. Thus, we can be flexible, but it must be clear to our audience. Initially, we used German to encourage the BScE students to attend. The language issue is a bit complicated because the University of Luxembourg has three official languages: English, French, and German.

Originally, we intended TechLunch for students, researchers, and teachers. However, administrative staff can also benefit from some of the sessions. Therefore, TechLunch really is for anybody at the university.

Where to go from here?

So how will we continue? Well, the last session for winter semester 2009/10 will be held on January 15 (time to be announced) and we will look into using polls in the classroom and for research. The online service PollEverywhere will be introduced. Then there will be a brief semester break and TechLunch will be back in summer semester 2010. We will come up with a schedule and take all the topic suggestions as well as preferred times into account to allow more people to join us.