ARHU Academic Technology

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Photo credit: Julian Stamerro, UTAP student, English major, 2010.

ARHU Academic Technology

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Photo credits: Heather Rodriguez, IT Coordinator of Digital Media, 2010.

Literature Review

he literature review summarizes information in sources located by Heather Rodriguez, ARHU Academic Technology IT coordinator. The information is very current, as all of the referenced articles were

published no earlier than 2005. To see a bibliography of works consulted, go to: http://www.zotero.org/groups/13039/items

Common Denominators for Success

The Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness (A-HEC) published a study in 2005 entitled “Achieving Success in Internet-Supported Learning in Higher Education: Case Studies Illuminate Success Factors, Challenges, and Future Directions.” The study summarizes the experiences of twenty-one institutions that have successful online learning initiatives. The institutions studied come from across the Carnegie classifications. In 2009, the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities – Sloan National Commission on Online Learning published a similar summary report intended to guide institutions building online learning initiatives. Entitled “Online Learning as a Strategic Asset” and based on interviews conducted at forty-five public institutions, the Sloan report’s findings were similar to the results of the A-HEC report.

According to the A-HEC study, the following factors correlate consistently with successful online learning initiatives.

Objectives align with student needs

Successful institutions have compelling reasons to implement online learning initiatives, primarily stemming from the institution’s mission and vision combined with a desire to serve student need for flexibility, lower cost education, and/or improved learning experiences.

Leaders communicate long-term support

A specific leadership style correlates with successful online learning initiatives. Successful leaders, defined in the study as Provosts, Deans, Chairs, and

Presidents:

1. Are highly involved in deciding where to focus efforts.

2. Commit long-term to implementing the initiative.

3. Invest significant resources toward the initiative

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Common Denominators for

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4. Market the initiative clearly and effectively to get faculty buy-in

Initiative is program specific

Institutions with program specific initiatives reported “overwhelming success” four times more frequently than institutions focused on putting individual courses online. Successful leaders put their most successful and highest demand programs online. They focused on units that have already demonstrated success.

Rewards are clear to faculty

Faculty must understand why they should spend time creating quality online courses. Along with programmatic initiatives, successful leaders nurture grassroots efforts to put courses online. They communicate with faculty frequently about why the initiative is critical to the institution’s mission. They make efforts to alleviate non-content related teaching burdens, so the faculty can focus on interacting with the students in the online environment. Faculty should receive:

 Online technology and pedagogy support  One-on-one instructional design consultations

 Development courses requiring faculty to experience online courses from the student perspective

 Recognition for teaching

Students receive additional services

Students will experience problems with the online environment, and they must have someone they can contact when they have technical issues. Successful initiatives have a single point of contact to serve students with technical woes.

Leaders create metrics for both quality and progress

Successful online initiatives establish milestones for measuring progress toward the objectives. Online courses should be assessed quantifiably for quality. The most favored comparison metrics included:

 Student retention in online programs compared to on-campus programs  Learning outcomes in online courses compared to a normalized set of

factors

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Report written by: Jennifer Patterson, Assistant Director of ARHU Academic Technology, 2010.  Student learning satisfaction compared to a normalized set of factors  Online course quality determined by students rather than administrators Since online environments are evolving rapidly, online learning initiatives need ongoing institutional assessment and review.

Best Practices in Online Teaching

Scholars have published hundreds of articles about quality online teaching, and they are all in agreement on many points. Most emphatically, to be effective online teachers, faculty must change the way they deliver content and interact with students. Predominant themes include:

Restructuring learner-content interactions

Alison King’s 1993 exhortation that faculty evolve “from sage on the stage to guide on the side” is critical to successful online teaching. In online

environments, instructors must be effective facilitators. Student time on task correlates highly with successful teaching initiatives, and learning outcomes result directly from the learning activities required of students. Suggested ways to engage students with the content include:

 Linking students with ample material for self-directed exploration and learning

 Using multimedia and a variety of content to appeal to a range of learning styles

 Asking open-ended questions requiring critical thinking about content.  Requiring students to locate resources and create content and meaning

from them

 Holding students accountable for their own learning

Establishing clear expectations and guidelines

Students should not be confused about the course objectives, what is expected from them, what they need to deliver, where they need to go to find

information and get help, or what they can expect from the professor. Faculty can decrease their own workload as well as student frustration by:

 Avoiding changes to the syllabus

 Organizing the course space modularly by topic or assignment  Arranging information logically and consistently

 Creating strict timelines and due dates for deliverables Best Practices in

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Report written by: Jennifer Patterson, Assistant Director of ARHU Academic Technology, 2010.  Presenting simulations and sample deliverables

 Affording students low-stakes practice with all technologies they must use to complete assignments, tests, or graded interactions

Professor/student interactivity

A note about professor/student interactivity

In their “7 Principles of Good Practice” published in 1987, Chickering and Gamson noted "frequent student-faculty contact in and out of classes is the most important factor in student motivation and involvement.” Many studies indicate the same is true for online courses.

Professors need to engage with students privately and publicly in the online environment. Since non-verbal cues are absent in most online environments, faculty should use humor, personal stories, and other thoughtful, conversational styles to build student trust. Ways to interact with the students include:

 Posting a welcome message  Sending personal email messages

 Participating as a facilitator in discussion boards  Sharing biographical vignettes

 Leading synchronous chats

 Holding synchronous office hours in a web conference room

Student interactions with others in the class

Students need to have opportunities to engage with other people, either other students or subject experts, in the online environment. Faculty should grade student interaction and provide participation rubrics. Typical online student interactions include:

 Creating student profiles

 Posting questions and responses to discussion boards or during web conferences

 Having students research, write reviews of articles, and read their peers’ summaries prior to engaging in online discussion

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Frequent assessments

In a face-to-face class, physically absent students raise red flags. Faculty must make sure students are properly engaged with the material, and online, lack of student engagement is hard to measure without frequent assessment.

Prompt feedback

Students will be submitting work and interacting in the online environment twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week. Instructors must check email and the online environment daily, answer student questions promptly and meaningfully, and return assessed materials quickly. Faculty must solve student problems as soon as possible, so the students can reengage with the course materials.

Amount and Types of Time Spent by Faculty

Online courses make unique demands on faculty time. Most studies

demonstrate that developing and teaching online courses requires more time than faculty spend when teaching face-to-face.

The following factors frequently cause significant complications for instructors:

Restructuring the course for online delivery

In “The Impact of Online Teaching on Faculty Load: Computing the Ideal

Class Size for Online Courses,” Tomei found faculty spend 14% more time

presenting instructional content in online courses than in face-to-face classes. Models for effective faculty support offload locating and creating content and building the online environment to specialists, so faculty can focus on content delivery and interacting with students. In “A Model for Developing High-Quality Online Courses: Integrating a Systems Approach with Learning Theory,” Puzziferro and Shelton suggest allotting fourteen weeks to prepare a quality online course with six staff members, each with a different

specialization, assigned to assist the faculty member.

Fragmented course interactions

Instead of engaging in short conversations with students two or three times per week, instructors of online courses must write to students extensively and/or record and post audio and video messages daily. They must provide more frequent assessment of student deliverables. During periods of advisement and assessment, student demand for faculty attention increases.

Since more time is spent interacting with students, class sizes should be kept small. Tomei calculated the ideal class size for online courses is twelve students.

Amount and Types of Time Spent by

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Report written by: Jennifer Patterson, Assistant Director of ARHU Academic Technology, 2010. According to one longitudinal, annual study of community colleges nationwide, the average online introductory English course is capped at twenty-five seats. Also, instructors of online classes must make students understand that

instantaneous response is not usually possible. They must establish a

reasonable timeframe for responding to student inquiries, and students must learn to work around it.

Student technical issues

Instructors get caught up in trying to assist students with technical issues. A technical support person should be available to assist students with problems, and instructors should direct students to them for technical assistance.

Existing Campus Resources

he campus already has many resources and services in place to support an online learning initiative.

The Office of Information Technology

OIT provides many enterprise solutions critical to a successful online learning initiative, including:

 Authentication, restricting course materials to students officially enrolled in the course

 ELMS and other hosted learning management solutions, such as Mediawiki and WordPress

 Learning Technologies events in which faculty can learn about instructional technologies and network with instructors campus-wide  Instructional Designers who may be available for free consultation  Sloan-C membership affording faculty opportunities to takefree online

courses from nationally recognized online learning experts

 Contract with AliveTek, a company specializing in online course design and development

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University Libraries

The Libraries’ Digital Collections unit and the Subject Specialist Librarians recently expressed a desire to provide more services to the academic units on campus. Currently, the Libraries provide:

 Course Reserves, a service which compiles, digitizes, and makes articles available to students in ELMS course spaces

 Streaming video collections available via Films@UM and Research Port  Subject specialists who can help faculty find content and media to make

available to students in online courses

Center for Teaching Excellence

CTE offers one-on-one teaching consultations and a Summer Institute on Teaching and Learning with New(er) Technologies for select faculty who want to explore pedagogies that implement technology with a group of their peers.

ARHU Academic Technology

ARHU Academic Technology assists faculty with their use of technology in teaching and research. We are flexible and responsive to the needs faculty express. The services we provide include:

 Consultations, one-on-one assistance, and departmental workshops on demand

 Pairing faculty with UTAP students for one-on-one, ongoing support  Detailing technologies we support on our website, along with ways to integrate technology into teaching, examples of faculty projects, and a calendar aggregating campus wide technology events

 Publicizing a blog with up-to-date news about educational technologies on campus

 Maintaining four instructor digitization workstations  Recording and formatting audio and video

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Suggested Action Plan

omparing the results of the literature review to the campus support landscape, ARHU Academic Technology recommends the following course of action:

Make Rewards Clear to Faculty

Instructors need to understand why online teaching is critical, how they will benefit from online teaching, and how the students will benefit. ARHU should:

 Create a quality vision statement

 Establish objectives and milestones to progress  Create explicit metrics for judging progress  Market the initiative to faculty

A note about marketing the initiative to faculty

In a study entitled “Institutional Efforts to Support Faculty in Online Teaching,” Orr, Williams, and Pennington found that strategic communication was the area that offered the greatest potential for institutional improvement of online education initiatives. Faculty must know: How does the initiative fit into the larger plan for institutional advancement? How will their efforts contribute to the future of the institution?

 Provide release time and compensation. Consistently, studies show that time to develop online courses is more important and necessary to faculty than compensation.

 Hold instructors to standards and processes designed to ensure success  Recognize online teaching in tenure and promotion

Ensure Quality Teaching and Learning

Faculty members are experts in their disciplines, but typically, they are not experts in pedagogy or effective uses of technology in teaching. Instructional designers are. Developing an online course without extensive consultation with

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Report written by: Jennifer Patterson, Assistant Director of ARHU Academic Technology, 2010. an instructional designer is usually an egregiously hubristic act with terrible consequences to the student learning experience.

To actively encourage quality teaching, ARHU should:

Establish faculty online teaching certification

A team of faculty and instructional designers should assemble to determine steps required of faculty who want to teach online. The steps should be

quantifiable and required of all instructors receiving release time, compensation, or a reward for developing online courses.

Require instructional design consultations

The team of faculty and instructional designers should stipulate a time frame during which faculty developing online courses must meet regularly with an instructional designer. During the meetings, instructors should be expected to brainstorm, develop, and refine a structure for online delivery of the course with the instructional designer’s help. The instructional designers can ensure compliance with the Section 508 US Congressional amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, a proper balance of activities to promote content mastery, interaction, critical thinking and higher level cognitive processing, and synthesis of course objectives.

Faculty should be required to evaluate the quality of the required consultation, and the instructional designers should be asked to evaluate faculty

responsiveness and engagement in the process. If demand, needs, and/or priorities exceed the scope of the services provided by the OIT instructional designers, then the College should either hire instructional designers to work internally or contract with a company to receive additional instructional design support.

Courses align with rubric for quality online courses

The rubric should align with accreditation standards for online programs. Quality Matters is a nationally recognized, web-based, fully interactive rubric intended for online courses and available by subscription. California State University-Chico, whose first strategic priority is “to create and enhance high quality learning environments,” makes their Rubric for Online Instruction available for free.

Executive review of processes, rubric, and results

Since online environments are evolving rapidly, online learning initiatives need ongoing institutional assessment and review. Executives should review teaching

Ensure Quality Teaching and

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Report written by: Jennifer Patterson, Assistant Director of ARHU Academic Technology, 2010. certification processes, instructional design evaluations, the course assessment rubric, and student course and instructor evaluations. They should develop course and instructor evaluations with quantifiable metrics specific to the online environment.

Offer More Services to Faculty

Online instructors require special services. ARHU should put the following resources into place for online teachers:

Reward participation in learning communities

The learning community will provide online teachers with opportunities to share experiences, learn from one another, and develop strategies for success. A core group of faculty could be rewarded for participating, perhaps a group of Faculty Fellows who receive release time for participating; however, no online instructor should be excluded from participating in the learning community. A senior online teacher or a group of online teachers should be rewarded for spearheading the implementation of a learning community for online teachers. The Women’s Studies graduate students have demonstrated concern for and felicity in online learning. They might be employed as community organizers. The community organizers should:

 Consult CTE about how to implement successful learning communities  Meet with CTE, OIT Learning Technologies, and ARHU Academic

Technology to see what kinds of brownbag lunches, workshops, and webinars they can offer to the community.

 Invite diverse support staff to discussions involving their respective areas of expertise

 Schedule events at times not likely to conflict with other faculty obligations

Enhanced technical infrastructure

The campus technical infrastructure is weak in at least two ways relevant to online teaching initiatives.

First, the audio and video streaming service provided by OIT to the faculty is no longer secure. The service delivers clips to computers in ways which can be easily captured. Circulating copies of copywrited material violates principles of fair use. At minimum, faculty need to be able to deliver portions of copywrited audio and video into the ELMS environment without giving students an easy

Offer More Services to Faculty

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Report written by: Jennifer Patterson, Assistant Director of ARHU Academic Technology, 2010. way to copy and recirculate the files. Instructors who assign entire creative works to the course should have the student purchase or consume the work as course material through iTunes, Netflix, or some other content providing service. ARHU should work with OIT and the Libraries to identify an enterprise solution to the problem of delivering portions of creative works. Secondly, many of our faculty wish to employ open source systems in their teaching. The OIT Learning Technologies group used to employ a

programmer who would install and maintain the programs with which faculty wished to experiment. He has left the University, and the Learning

Technologies group has discontinued the service. The College should identify a way to support faculty who want to use open source systems.

Project manager

A course development process and team must be established and supervised. Their goal should be to flatten the technology learning curve and free faculty to focus on content and student interactions. Roles and expectations for the various participants should be clearly communicated. In addition to the project manager and instructional designer, the following individuals should assist faculty efforts:

Subject expert to assist with locating materials

Faculty should start with consulting librarian subject specialists. A graduate assistant could locate content and media for use in the course and identify gaps in the available material and activities. A lot of what the faculty says when teaching face to face will need to be communicated and made available to the students for consumption in different ways in order to ensure a quality student experience.

Content and media digitizer

Course Reserves should be used for digitizing and posting readings. A course technician should be responsible for digitizing and formatting audio and video clips when pre-existing digital copies cannot be located by the subject experts. The digitized media should be cataloged and stored in an object repository for future reference and use. A non-exempt multimedia technician could be hired to digitize materials or the College might be able to contract with AliveTek.

Online environment developer

An instructional technologist, graduate assistant, or UTAP student should be presented with the content materials and a plan for organizing the online

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Report written by: Jennifer Patterson, Assistant Director of ARHU Academic Technology, 2010. environment. They should be responsible for implementing the online environment, uploading content into it, and testing the environment for usablility prior to the first day of class. Again, the College might be able to contract with AliveTek to have them set up and test the online environment.

Provide Student Services

The College does not provide services to students taking online classes. Successful online learning initiatives universally provide student services, such as:

Single point of contact for student technical issues

Faculty should not be spending time trying to solve technical problems. Support for online students should be provided as an enterprise solution. The College should consult with the OIT Helpdesk to see if they can serve the needs of the online student population. Also, faculty should maintain a discussion board in their online course spaces where students can document technical problems and solutions for student reference.

Create technical course descriptions for Testudo

Course descriptions should outline all technology necessary for completing the online course. In addition, the course description should explain the amount and types of online interactions and work required for the course (both synchronous and asynchronous) and qualities of successful online students. The instructor and instructional designer should work together to develop the course description.

Determine and support student preparedness

The instructional technologist, GA, or UTAP student should design a training module for each online course to give students a chance to learn all of the technical skills necessary for interacting in the space before the students are required to submit deliverables for assessment.

Provide Student Services

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ARHU Academic Technology

ARHU Academic Technology

Table of Contents

Literature Review

Common Denominators for Success

Objectives align with student needs

Leaders communicate long-term support

T

Initiative is program specific

Rewards are clear to faculty

Students receive additional services

Leaders create metrics for both quality and progress

Best Practices in Online Teaching

Restructuring learner-content interactions

Establishing clear expectations and guidelines

Professor/student interactivity

Student interactions with others in the class

Frequent assessments

Prompt feedback

Amount and Types of Time Spent by Faculty

Restructuring the course for online delivery

Fragmented course interactions

Student technical issues

Existing Campus Resources

The Office of Information Technology

University Libraries

Center for Teaching Excellence

ARHU Academic Technology

Suggested Action Plan

Make Rewards Clear to Faculty

Ensure Quality Teaching and Learning

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Establish faculty online teaching certification

Require instructional design consultations

Courses align with rubric for quality online courses

Executive review of processes, rubric, and results

Offer More Services to Faculty

Reward participation in learning communities

Enhanced technical infrastructure

Project manager

Subject expert to assist with locating materials

Content and media digitizer

Online environment developer

Provide Student Services

Single point of contact for student technical issues

Create technical course descriptions for Testudo

Determine and support student preparedness