Google Docs is great and certainly has achieved its fair share of fans and positive press (Wired Campus, SquaredPeg) in higher education. Not only does it benefit from high name recognition and a very familiar interface, but it saves faculty from the tedious cycle of downloading and uploading MS Word docs. One of the few features where I find MS Word still wins, though, is when it comes to annotations. Periodically, I want to use the scribble or arrow tool to call a student’s attention to something in their draft (e.g., recommend organizational revisions) and MSW’s tools for doing this are quite handy. I’d love to see the big G add this sometime in the not-too-distant future.

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Google_Docs, Microsoft, Word

STOP PRESS – AN INVITATION

Party Party Party

ONLINE DISTANCE EDUCATION

US study finds  ‘blended’ learning

benefits compared to classroom

Even when used by itself, online learning appears to offer a modest advantage over conventional classroom instruction, according to the US Department of Education’s  recently published

Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies.

The study was based on a systematic search of the research literature from 1996 through July 2008  which identified more than 1000 empirical studies of online learning.

Analysts screened these studies to find those that (a) contrasted an online to a face-to-face condition, (b) measured student learning outcomes, (c) used a rigorous research design, and (d) provided adequate information to calculate an effect size.

Meta-analysis of the 51 screened results, mainly for undergraduate and older students, not elementary or secondary learners, found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction but did not demonstrate that online learning is superior as a medium.

The difference between student outcomes for online and face-to-face classes—measured as the difference between treatment and control means, divided by the pooled standard deviation—was larger in those studies contrasting conditions that blended elements of online and face-to-face instruction with conditions taught entirely face-to-face, they said.

Noting that these blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in control conditions, the analysts said, the finding suggested that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se.

But the fact that  blended instruction had been more effective, provided a rationale for the effort required to design and implement blended approaches.

The key findings included:

• Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.
• Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction.
• Studies in which learners in the online condition spent more time on task than students in the face-to-face condition found a greater benefit for online learning.
• Most of the variations in the way in which different studies implemented online learning did not affect student learning outcomes significantly.
• The effectiveness of online learning approaches appears quite broad across different content and learner types.
• Blended and purely online learning conditions implemented within a single study generally result in similar student learning outcomes.
• Elements such as video or online quizzes did not appear to influence the amount that students learn in online classes.
• Online learning can be enhanced by giving learners control of their interactions with media and prompting learner reflection.
• Providing guidance for learning for groups of students appears less successful than does using such mechanisms with individual learners.

Full report PDF here.

Online education picture: courtesy Trinity International University, Florida

This summer I’m teaching a technical writing class and as I’ve done in previous semesters with this online class, I’m using a wiki. One of the collaborative writing assignments is an FAQ and although I don’t require them to use the class wiki for this particular assignment, I encourage them to do so (and for any other similar sort of group work).

In order to get some sense of the collaborative dynamics, I ask them to write a reflection memo that they usually submit a day or two after they’ve submitted the assignment. Today while I was reading their reflection memos I noticed an interesting pattern: heavy reliance on email. They describe how they used email to exchange drafts, delegate responsibilities, and coordinate other related project management details. Now on its face, this doesn’t seem all that remarkable, but rather entirely predictable; however, with this particular class, I aim to make the wiki a more central feature. And even though I’ve posted various materials that describe the ways in which wikis typically work better than email for group projects, their memos document a gravitation towards that ol’ stand-by.

In mulling over this hesitation to adopt the wiki as their workspace, a couple of thoughts come to mind. Maybe it’s not just out of habit, but also an anxiety of working on projects in a more public space. Working in the wiki not only makes their group processes available to the members, but the other students in the class as well. Another speculation is that they perceive it as another kind of LMS or stratified space that should be managed and maintained by me, the instructor. Or maybe it’s just inertia: email works well enough and the evidence for migrating to a wiki needs to be more dramatically displayed when they’ve got busy schedules and a myriad of responsibilities.

HI375

This course covered all aspects of laws pertaining to family issues in Canadian history, from residential schools, to women’s property laws, to child abuse, to the education of children in Japanese internment camps, just to name a few topics. I really enjoyed this course!

Papers:
- book review of The Heiress vs. The Establishment
- the changing rights of the married woman in Canadian history

HI347

This course focused on the roll of Canadians at Dieppe and on D-Day when I took it, but it is up to the professor what he wants to cover.

Papers:
- the impact of Dieppe on the outcome of the D-Day Invasion
- the Canadian involvement in the Normandy Campaign

HI247

This course focuses on the Battle of Britain and the Holocaust. I took it at the same time as another WWII course, and by the end of the summer, I was a bit run down… However, the Holocaust part of the course focused on other aspects besides just concentration camps and death, such as the reaction of Jews in other areas of the world, etc, which was interesting.

Papers:
- Myths and realities of the Battle of Britain
- The Holocaust – behind the scenes

FR230/231

If you took French through high school, these courses should be incredibly easy. It gives a review of all grammar up to grade 12, starting with present tense and ending with plus-que-parfait and all that other fun stuff… If you intend on doing anything with French in the future or just want to refresh your memory, these courses are definitely for you!

I’m thinking about offline or local wiki solutions that can run in a lab or on a classroom computer. Next week, we’ll be discussing web-based solutions that can work in the classroom and I’m hoping to put together a list of solutions that will work even in a classroom with only one computer.

So far, I have the following solutions:

• Swiki (http://wiki.squeak.org/swiki/)–the first wiki I ever deployed. It has served us well for many years and can run on just about any old computer (Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Windows 2000-Vista).
• Tiddlywiki (http://www.tiddlywiki.com)–a new favorite. This gem can be run from your local hard drive or uploaded to a server and served up over HTTP.
• MoinMoin desktop edition–This is a Python based wiki that is quite functional. I have not had a chance to use it much though.

What are you using for a standalone wiki engine?

An interesting case study on using Twitter in a face-to-face classroom to help facilitate discussion.  There are many open questions regarding the effective use of Twitter in the classroom, and for that matter anything other than marketing, but these related articles and posts provide some instructional practices as well as some things to think about.

“Monica Rankin PhD., an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas who was looking to incorporate more student-centered activities in her U.S. History course this past spring. How she accomplished this goal is what makes it so intriguing. She used Twitter the micro-blogging site.” Read more and watch the 5-minute YouTube video >>

Here is an additional related blog post to this story with some additional points and comments.

For those of you new to Twitter, below are a few additional links of interest:

• Twitter in Plain English video by Common Craft.
• A Comical YouTube video explaining Twitter: Twouble with Twitters.
• An article in Chronicle of Higher Ed about Twitter: 10 High Fliers on Twitter.

Examples from faculty teaching online science laboratory courses.

Universities using lab kits and other methods to offer lab sciences at a distance, University of Arkansas Distance Education Task Force Blog

Free online physics, chemistry, biology, earth science and math simulations, PhET project at the University of Colorado.

Home Dissection Kits and More, Inside Higher Ed

Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger Web Based Virtual Experiment, Department Process & Chemical Engineering, University College Cork

Physics simulations with Java, MyPhysicsLab You’ll see them animating in real time, and be able to interact with them by dragging objects or changing parameters like gravity.

No Test Tubes? Questions Arise On Virtual High School Science, New York Times

Interactive, online simulations for the life science laboratory or for earth science field studies, Sciencecourseware

Science Labs: Virtual Versus Simulated, THE Journal

Virtual Lab — Vivid Animations Help Students With Science Experiments, Science Daily

Science Labs of the Future, Converge

Biology Online Labs, McGraw-Hill Higher Education

In 2002, SDCCD Miramar College faculty developed and pilot tested an online biology laboratory course for non-science major students, Innovation Express