On the Horizon

by John Doherty and Lorraine B. Elder

The annual Horizon Report, published by the New Media Consortium (NMC), describes educational technologies that are ripe for adoption in the coming year, the next 2 to 3 years, and 4 to 5 years out. The 2011 Horizon Report is now out. The full report (.pdf) is available on the NMC site. The work that went into the report is documented in NMC’s Horizon Report wiki.

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2011 Horizon Report Predictions for
Educational Technology Adoptions During the Next One to Five Years

1 year or less	2 to 3 years	4 to 5 years
Electronic books Mobile devices	Augmented reality Game-based learning	Gesture-based computing Learning analytics

Dead on or dead wrong?

Past Horizon Reports have included some notable hits and misses, perhaps stemming from the biases and interests of the researchers, many of whom inhabit the leading edge of educational technology and are removed from the laggard community. For example, the 2005 Horizon Report said social networks would be adopted within education in four to five years. Social networks went mainstream long before that but have seen less adoption in education than expected, perhaps partly because until recently they weren’t well integrated with learning management systems, and partly because many educators often viewed—and still view—social networks with suspicion.

Another element of the 2005 report suggested that educational gaming would be widespread by 2008. The 2011 report says that game-based learning is still two to three years away, evidence that prognostication is an inexact business.

Still, it’s worth contemplating some of this year’s predictions.

Electronic books and mobile devices

These two technologies do seem to be obvious choices, and they’re not unrelated. For example, Amazon Kindles and Apple iPads are good devices for displaying ebooks, and both are popular with consumers (the National Federation of the Blind’s lawsuit against Arizona State University for its Kindle use notwithstanding). Last July, Amazon’s ebook sales outpaced hardcover sales, with 143 ebooks sold for every 100 hardcover books.

However, digital rights management still acts as a bottleneck for adoption of ebooks in education, especially for books published outside the U.S. For example, the Kindle edition of Jerusalem: The Biography, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, is receiving very good reviews in British publications but is not yet published in the United States and won’t be available here until at least November 2011, a year after its British publication. Fortunately, some publishers realize the value ebooks can bring to teaching and learning, and they are decoupling the purchases of ebooks and printed books. McGraw-Hill now allows students to buy or rent—for much lower cost—an ebook without forcing purchase of its physical counterpart.

A new report by Rob Reynolds of Xplana indicates projections for the digital textbook market over the next five years. Their projections agree with the Horizon Report regarding coming adoption of ebooks, but their time frame is more conservative.

The 2011 Horizon Report notes that some tablet devices, such as the Apple iPad and the Samsung Galaxy Tab offer enough compelling additional features to make ebooks “a potentially transformative technology” because they can now include rich media and supplemental material not possible in a printed book. Inkling’s edition of Raven Biology is cited as one example of a title that “brings the study of this science to life with detailed illustrations and animations, in-line keyword definitions, and interactive quizzes embedded in each chapter.”

On the mobile device front, the 2011 Horizon Report notes three converging points:

• Within the next year, Internet-capable devices will outnumber computers.
• In Japan, 75% of Internet users already choose mobile devices as their primary means of access.
• By 2015, 80% of people accessing the Internet will do so from a mobile device.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has an interesting infographic showing rates of ownership of several types of mobile devices by age group. Tablets and ebook readers show comparatively low rates of ownership, but laptops, MP3 players, and cell phones show high rates of ownership across age groups. Only 9% of adults don’t own any of the devices, and 63% of those non-owners are age 66 or older. Take a look at the full-sized graphic for details.

Many educators are already challenged by the presence of mobile devices in classrooms, with some instructors issuing blanket bans on phones and tablets. We think that’s the wrong reaction. Instead, instructors should capitalize on the devices. Have students use mobiles to search for, create, and present content and to collaborate and interact with each other and with the instructor. For example, envision students examining 3D models of chemical structures while they work on lab experiments, or consider getting feedback from students by polling them and letting them respond from their mobile devices. Instructors who object to mobile devices in the classroom are missing a golden opportunity.

Augmented reality & game-based learning

Think about the benefit of using augmented reality applications on anthropology or geology field trips. Star Walk, a popular astronomy app by Vito Technology, puts a virtual planetarium on your phone or tablet, showing you a real-time view of the night sky with informative overlays. These kinds of applications have obvious potential in higher education, and their cost is often low, once you discount the initial expense of purchasing devices capable of using them. Many developers have already jumped on this bandwagon, so the choices should increase rapidly.

Northern Arizona University’s Cline Library augmented an exhibit, Route 66 in Arizona: Don’t Forget Winona!, with a Google Maps add-on that lets users look at photo archives of towns highlighted along the route. The map works in web browsers and on smartphones.

Game-based learning has spawned several conferences and studies (.pdf), a sure sign that the topic is gaining traction among educators. However, given the time and cost of developing high-quality games across the many academic disciplines, as well as possible bias against games among faculty, we suspect widespread adoption of this technology will take more than three years. Pioneering educators are gaming already, but the masses will follow more slowly.

Analytics

At the 2011 ELI Annual Meeting, David Wiley, Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University, defined learning analytics as a way “to harness the power of advances in data mining, interpretation, and modeling to improve understandings of teaching and learning, and to tailor education to individual students more effectively.” As an example, he described the development of strategic tutoring, which relies on data to help predict the need for proactive student support. You can view a video or download his slides for that presentation and others on analytics and openness in education.

Businesses have already capitalized on analytics. Think of the recommendations you get from Amazon or Netflix or the coupons you receive when you pay for your groceries. Given the current budget-slashing climate for higher education, analytics are a no-brainer, and savvy institutions are getting on board now, using the data they already have and not waiting five years. Any university seeking funding or even tuition dollars is going to have to rely on data to demonstrate the effectiveness of its programs. No convincing numbers? No dollars.

Northern Arizona University has already started using analytics in its Grade Performance Status (GPS) tool, which uses data on students’ academic performance, grades, attendance, and positive feedback to identify students who might be headed for trouble in their courses, and to prompt instructors to reach out to those students to assist them.

So what’s the immediate message of all this for educators? We think it’s get moving on getting mobile, look toward ebooks, and start analyzing your data now.

Rethinking Your Course with Student Learning in Mind

by Dr. Sue Pieper, Coordinator of Assessment

It’s official! During this year, Northern Arizona University will be moving to a new learning management system, Blackboard Learn. As you move your courses to the new system or use the new system for the first time, take advantage of the opportunity to rethink your courses, adjusting them as needed to incorporate a learner-centered approach in line with the university’s values.

Effective learner-centered courses are distinguished by five characteristics outlined by Maryellen Weimer in Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice (2002). According to Weimer, who also edits The Teaching Professor,  the following course elements change when teaching becomes learner-centered:

• The balance of power
• The function of content
• The role of the teacher
• The responsibility for learning
• The purposes and processes of evaluation

In a learner-centered course power is shared among teachers and students, resulting in a more engaging and motivating course environment. Content in a learner-centered course is used to promote students’ knowledge as well as their learning how to learn. The role of the teacher is to guide and facilitate student learning, with the students assuming the primary responsibility for learning. The purpose of evaluation includes not only grading, but also fostering improved student learning (Weimer, 2002).

Let’s consider some ways you can incorporate learner-centered teaching in your
own courses.

The Syllabus Quiz

The syllabus is an essential part of every course, providing information about learning outcomes, required textbooks and materials, a course calendar, and student and instructor responsibilities. We ask students to read the syllabus at the beginning of a course. Then we typically spend class time reviewing the syllabus, or we spend time answering multiple questions because students haven’t read the syllabus.

An alternative approach is to require students to pass a syllabus quiz, which can be set up as a brief true/false or multiple-choice online quiz that can be graded automatically by the learning management system. Many instructors have found that using a syllabus quiz as a “gateway” is effective. Students must pass the quiz with an acceptable score in order to gain access to the rest of the course. As a result, responsibility for reading and understanding the syllabus is placed on the students, not the teacher.

Self- and Peer-Evaluation of Group Work

Group work can be challenging in a face-to-face course, and effective group work is even more challenging in an online environment when instructors and students are at a distance.

If you want to improve group work in your course, consider involving students in not only completing the group assignments, but also in evaluating how they function as a group. First, teach them about the dynamics of group work and the various roles in a group. Then teach them how to assess their participation in their groups.

Rubrics — documents that describe an instructor’s grading criteria and levels of performance expected from students for each grade possible in an assignment — are very helpful for both instructors and students in assessing group work. An example of a team and leadership skills rubric, which assesses criteria such as group organization and coordination, is available from the e-Learning Center’s website.

When you create a rubric and share it with your students, you enable them to take responsibility for evaluating their own and their group members’ contributions to the group. Consequently, students learn content while also developing an awareness of how they work with others.

Student-Designed Exam Questions

Designing exams has traditionally been the purview of instructors, but what if we ask students to design an exam? Weimer offers examples, including a math instructor’s experience with giving students an end-of-the-course option to develop a final exam. She evaluated the assignment on criteria such as how well the exam questions corresponded with the intended student learning outcomes for the course, the solutions for the problems, and the point values assigned to the problems, taking into account their relative importance in the course content. The students told the instructor that they spent more time designing the exam than they would have spent studying for it.

Involving students in constructing exams and other course evaluations transforms the goal of assessment from just obtaining a grade to promoting student learning and development. Especially in an online environment, where students can sometimes feel isolated, designing exams, particularly as a group, can be an engaging and empowering course assignment.

Assess Your Courses

Are you incorporating learner-centered outcomes, assignments, and assessments? Are students assuming the primary responsibility for learning? Are you taking the role of guide and facilitator? If you think you could make some course improvements in these areas, try one of the ideas described here. For assistance in changing to a learner-centered approach or choosing the best learning management tools to accomplish your goals, contact us at the e-Learning Center. We’re here to help!

Pedagogy and the iPad

by John J. Doherty and Kevin Ketchner

Perhaps the hardest part of owning an iPad is trying to avoid the addictive world of Angry Birds, the favorite game app of the new British Prime Minister. For just $5 you, too, can attack pigs with hard-headed flying birds.

That kind of distraction is exactly what many faculty worry about when we ponder the place of tools such as the iPad in the classroom. We fear that our students will be more engaged with their games or Twitter feeds than with our lectures. But the iPad, the iPhone, the Droid, and the flood of other new tablets and smart phones finding their way into our classrooms are not the cause of student inattention. These gadgets are just tools, and student engagement depends on good teaching whether or not a cool gadget is present. In Technological and Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge (.pdf), Punya Mishra and Matthew J. Koehler note that we need to understand not only various technologies but also how the technologies affect our pedagogy.

The iPad is a good case in point. Since the iPad’s launch in April 2010 some educators have begun to examine its place in education. Our experience in using the iPad for teaching is that it is useful in two distinct ways, consumption and production, although it currently is more useful for the former than the latter.

Consumption

The iPad is very obviously a tool for consuming information and media. Reading publications such as the New York Times or watching movies through the Netflix app seems to be a natural fit for the device. In the classroom, we have been using iPads as a way to deliver information to our students.

For example, in a course on Reinventing King Arthur, John used the Kindle app on his iPad to give his students access to some of the course readings. In fact, he chose the course readings based on their availability in ebook format, and in one instance, John was able to bring back into his course a text that had been out of print for almost 20 years! In another case, students who chose to download the Kindle version of a new book were able to do so several days before others were able to order the printed version (although this might have been an error on Amazon’s part). The students used their own devices, mobile or otherwise, to read the ebooks, which was possible because the Kindle app is no longer limited to the Kindle device. The app can be used on PCs or Macs, desktops or laptops, iPads, iPhones, Droids, and iPod Touches. One of its best features is that you can read the same book on various devices, and the app will remember where you left off. You can start reading a book on your laptop and then later switch to reading on your phone without losing your place.

Kevin has been using the iPad for an Honors course on the cultural impact of comic books. Marvel, DC, and other publishers have iPad apps (iTunes link) that present comics in sharp, HD-like quality. When you can zoom in on details of comics in high definition, the panels take on an immersive quality.

The following panel is a screen capture of the Iron Man (2004) #1 book, available in the Marvel app.

Students in the course can download the movies Iron Man (2008) and V for Vendetta (2006) via the iTunes Store or other media sources. By examining both the comic serial and the movie versions of these stories, students see how the superhero movie genre has reinvented the comic.

Students can also use reference apps such as Wikipanion (Wikipedia) to find out details about characters in these stories (such as Guy Fawkes, the original fundamentalist terrorist who is burned in effigy in the UK every November 5th).

The ebooks John uses in his course include built-in dictionaries that make it convenient for students to look up unusual words, which is invaluable for texts based on older versions of the English language. The iPad apps can also read the texts aloud.

Here are some other apps that we’ve experimented with and have found useful for teaching.

App	Description
iAnnotate PDF ($9.99)	Syncs PDF documents between your desktop and your iPad. It also lets you highlight and underline and add commentary, which is great for our e-reserve readings.
CineXPlayer ($3.99)	Delivers Xvid movies to the iPad through iTunes. Includes subtitles and TV/VGA output. The advantage to this app is that it supports more than just iTunes native formats.
Netflix (Free)	The app is free, but you need a Netflix subscription to use it. You get access to the Netflix streaming library. John has had his students view the BBC TV series Merlin (2008) and the movies Camelot (1967) and Excalibur (1981).

Accessibility

The iPad is opening doors for some differently abled users. Its built-in text reader can give voice to anything downloaded to iBooks. Dragon Dictation is a free iPad app that uses voice recognition to create text email messages and even Facebook and Twitter updates. The iPad’s magnification and closed-captioning features also make content available for a wide range of people. The New York Times recently reported on how an iPad elicited reactions from a 7-year-old boy who has a severe motor neuron disease. The same article noted that autistic children are also engaging more with this tool than a regular computer.

Production

As a production tool—that is, for generating rather than just consuming content—the iPad has plenty of potential, but it still has lots of room for improvement. Much of this post was written in the Pages app on the iPad, using the on-screen keyboard. Or at least it was until we started getting annoyed when we typed too many extra n‘s and m‘s because those keys are uncomfortably close to the space bar for our not-so-nimble digits. So we just synced the iPads to our desktops and continued typing from there, using real keyboards.

The on-screen keyboard works well enough for some things: browsing the web, searching the App Store, typing things into Wikipedia. In our opinion, though, an external keyboard is an essential add-on if you want to use the iPad for serious writing.

In addition to Pages, the other two iWork apps—Numbers and Keynote— for the iPad are useful production tools . Each costs $9.99 from the iTunes Store. iWork will soon be available to the NAU campus through a site license, and it is a decent alternative to the MS Office applications. John developed some of his course documentation in Pages and Numbers.

Drawbacks

Some of the drawbacks to using these apps include lack of easy cloud syncing and inability to print directly from the iPad. That said, the MobileMe iDisk app does provide some access to the MobileMe cloud (which requires a subscription) or the beta of iWork.com. There are rumors of an about-to-be-released Google Apps app for the iPad and Android that will allow for editing of Google docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Apple is undoubtedly working on updates to their products to fix these and other shortcomings, and they are also exploring cloud-based computing, but if you want to take the iPad plunge now, you should be aware of these limitations. Syncing the iPad to your computer also leaves a lot to be desired, because you need to go through iTunes to make it work at all. The advantages of using the iPad over a netbook as a mobile production tool are currently few.

Recently, we discovered two note-taking apps for the iPad that let you use your finger or a stylus. We tested Penultimate and WhiteNote in meetings and in the classroom. The former is pretty slick but simple. The latter needs some work, especially in how it uses the screen and the writing space. But it offers the bonus of letting you browse and import from the web, PDFs, and other formats, and it also uses cloud-based resources for saving and sharing PDFs via Google Docs.

The iPad and some smart phones are beginning to offer access to learning management systems (LMS), such as Blackboard Learn and Moodle. Mobile apps are available for both of these LMS, but their functionality is quite limited, although the Blackboard Mobile Learn app syndicates content from that LMS quite well. For the moment, though, both Blackboard Learn and Moodle are best accessed on the iPad through a browser.

Lessons Learned and In Progress

The iPad holds much promise for education, but it is still in its infancy. Missing but available soon with the impending release of iOS 4.2 release are the ability to multitask (that is, to run more than one app at a time), print from the iPad, and even output information to other devices through AirPlay. The ability to easily display the content of your iPad on an overhead projector is essential for educators, and we hope Apple addresses that shortcoming quickly. Apple’s prohibition of Adobe’s Flash on the iPad means that some of our preferred media sources, such as streaming films available through our university library, are not viewable on the device. However, the Skyfire browser, which converts Flash video to a format that works on Apple’s mobile devices, might soon solve that problem.

The most obvious lesson we learned is that students like using the iPads for classes. It wasn’t at all hard to get the students to use the iPads. It was hard to get the students to give them back.

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John J. Doherty is an instructional designer at Northern Arizona University’s e-Learning Center and an instructor in NAU’s First Year Seminar and Honors programs. He has been studying the Arthurian Legend formally since 1989, but has been reading and writing about it much longer. Kevin Ketchner is a librarian with NAU’s Cline Library and also teaches in Honors. His love of comic books has generated a strong interest in visual literacy and narrative.

 

Blended Learning: It’s Coming Our Way

by Sue Pieper
Coordinator for Assessment, e-Learning Center at Northern Arizona University

You’ve probably heard about it. You might even be engaged in it right now.  It goes by many names, including hybrid and mixed-mode learning. It’s blended learning, and it’s coming our way.

I came to this conclusion after attending a recent two-day EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative webinar, Blended Learning: The 21st Century Learning Environment. Blended learning is a complex mix of face-to-face and online elements in a single course. After learning about and reflecting on the latest theory and research on blended learning, quality considerations, design and implementation issues, and practical applications, I came away with a few ideas.

Thoughtful design can promote student learning

I learned that blended learning, if designed thoughtfully, can promote student learning. As one webinar participant put it, “intentionality,” is necessary for the success of a blended learning course. Obviously, thoughtfulness or intentionality is important in designing any course, but it may be paramount in designing a blended course. Combining components of face-to-face and online teaching can be challenging, even for instructors who are experienced at teaching in both modes. So what does an instructor need to think about when designing a blended course?

This question is addressed in Ten Questions to Consider when Redesigning a Course for Hybrid Teaching and Learning. One question is particularly important:

As you think about learning objectives, which would be better achieved online and which would be best achieved face-to-face?

This question asks instructors to think carefully about how they and their students can best use their time in class and online.

Rethinking class time

Gerald Bergtrom

A striking example of rethinking teaching, learning, and time was provided by webinar presenter Gerald Bergtrom at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Bergtrom described how he transformed his face-to-face biology course to a blended learning course that provided content coverage and promoted student learning at the same time. In his original face-to-face course, he devoted all of his class time to lectures and in-class exams. In the blended course, he eliminated all lectures in the face-to-face meetings and replaced them with critical thinking and interactive exercises: muddiest point writings, clicker questions, and small group index card activities. Content was delivered online through a variety of modes, including text readings, PowerPoint lectures, discussions, papers, and quizzes. In this way, Bergtrom integrated and mutually reinforced face-to-face and online activities. Bergtrom found that, although creating a blended course required effort, he enjoyed teaching more and his students learned better in the new blended course.

The idea of rethinking how time in class and online can enhance student learning was also discussed in episodes #26 and #27 of Tuesday Tips on Teaching with Technology (iTunes U link), a podcast series produced by Northern Arizona University’s e-Learning Center. Wally Nolan and John Doherty explained how offering online learning activities before and after class and linking them to in-class activities can improve instructor and student productivity. They described a common instructor experience: students arriving in class without having read the assigned readings. To address that problem before class, instructors can have students complete an online quiz on the readings. During class, instructors can then devote their time to clarifying and enhancing student learning through discussion. After class, students can extend their in-class conversations through an online discussion or an activity that lets them apply what has been learned.

You can find other examples of effective blended learning designs in Blended Learning in Higher Education, written by two other webinar presenters, Randy Garrison at the University of Calgary and Norman Vaughan at Mount Royal University. Garrison and Vaughn organize their examples around three scenarios common to higher education: small class courses, large enrollment courses, and project-based courses. Each scenario has its own challenges that can be addressed through different blended learning designs.

Your thoughts?

What is your experience with blended learning? If you have taught a blended course, what has and hasn’t worked?  If you haven’t taught a blended course, what do you think will be important to consider in course design? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Twitter Spreads Wildfire News Like, Well, Wildfire

by Lorraine B. Elder

Smoke plume from the Schultz Fire in Flagstaff, Arizona

Some people still think of Twitter as a tool for sending out 140-character messages about trivia such as what you ate for lunch, but during Flagstaff’s wildfire crisis, Twitter turned out to be one of the best sources for up-to-date information on the Hardy Fire (282 acres with 95% containment as I write this) and the Schultz Fire (currently 14,800 acres with 40% containment) as well as the Eagle Rock fire near Williams. Anyone could use the Twitter hashtags #flagstafffire, #hardyfire, #schultzfire, #schultz, #wildfires, or #flagstaff to find or tag information about the rapidly unfolding drama in our mountain town. Hashtags are short text identifiers preceded by the # character to indicate the topic of a message. Twitter messages are often called tweets.

One person in our department who was following Twitter was able to notify another about an impending neighborhood evacuation even before county officials had knocked on the evacuee’s door. Flagstaff’s mayor, Sara Presler, or @sarapresler in Twitter notation, used Twitter effectively to send out information about the status of the fires and to inform citizens about upcoming press conferences and public meetings related to the fires. Tweets from government organizations, individuals, and various groups got information out much more quickly and frequently than conventional media could. Of course the local newspaper and radio and television stations also used Twitter, and their tweets fleshed out the picture of the fire situation in advance of their regularly scheduled publications or broadcasts. Speaking of pictures, many Twitter users posted photos of the fires from their vantage points, which was an incredibly effective way to calm (or terrify) loved ones from afar. Tweets about the fires generated so much traffic on Twitter that the story was picked up by Mashable, a popular technology-oriented social media site.

Sunset view of smoke from the Schultz Fire enveloping the San Francisco Peaks in Flagstaff, Arizona

If your impression of Twitter is that it’s only an endless stream of inane chatter, think again. If you judiciously choose the people and groups to follow, Twitter can serve as your up-to-the minute personal newsfeed. Of course you need to view some tweets with a critical eye. Not everyone who who uses Twitter follows the journalistic standards and ethics we’ve come to expect from mainstream media, but many regular folks do a fine job of reporting the situation.

Here are some of the Twitter users who provided valuable information during the fires. Click the links to see their Twitter pages.

• @ArizonaDOT (Arizona Department of Transportation)
• @azds (Arizona Daily Sun newspaper)
• @AzEIN (Arizona Emergency Info Network)
• @AZFireInfo (Arizona Fire Info)
• @AZPubRadio (KNAU radio)
• @coconinocounty (Coconino County official information)
• @CoconinoNF (Coconino National Forest official information)
• @dsoltesz (Deborah Lee Soltesz, Flagstaff resident)
• @ENeitzel (Eric Neitzel, national public information officer from Show Low Fire Dept.)
• @inciweb (national incident information system)
• @FLAGscanner (live scanner feeds from police, fire, and EMS groups in Flagstaff)
• @naztoday (students at NAU’s School of Communication)
• @sarapresler (Flagstaff’s mayor)

Let us know in the comments about other good sources of information on Twitter.

If you’d like to learn more about how to use Twitter, either as a newsfeed or an educational tool, contact the e-Learning Center. Or follow us on Twitter (@nauelearning) or Facebook. In the meantime, hug a firefighter. They’ve worked hard to save our town and our forests.

College Is for Everyone, So Attendance Is Mandatory!

by Larry MacPhee

Amidst the flurry of bad press over SB 1070 (.pdf) and the resulting boycott of Arizona, you might have missed something interesting on page two. NAU made the Chronicle, and Slashdot picked up the story. It has been spun as a privacy and digital rights story, but it’s really something much bigger. It seems there’s a plan in the works here at NAU to use student ID cards with embedded RFID (radio frequency identification) chips to record class attendance. We’ve been using clickers to do this for years. So why are university administrators increasingly interested in mandatory attendance? The answer is complex, but it has a lot to do with a societal shift that is having ripple effects in academia. Michael Wesch says it this way: College is for learning, and learning is for everyone. So college is for everyone. It wasn’t always this way.

A college education used to be something one aspired to, but it certainly wasn’t a necessity. For many students today, going to college no longer feels like a choice. The bachelor’s degree is the modern-day equivalent of the 1950 high school diploma. Students increasingly resent the liberal studies courses that teach “critical thinking” but don’t give them the tangible workplace skills they think they need. Given the number of times a modern worker changes careers, critical thinking, the ability to write, and other versatile competencies are more important than ever, but we haven’t done a good job selling that argument. Many students now see college simply as an expensive and time-consuming obstacle that must be overcome on the path to a good-paying job. Knowledge for its own sake is no longer the primary motivator. As Ronald Reagan once said, echoing the growing public sentiment, “Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?” So while the public is less interested in a classical education, demand for diplomas is at an all-time high. But universities are slow to change and haven’t really adjusted what is taught or how it’s taught. As a result, universities are admitting more students who are unprepared for—and less interested in—acquiring that classical education. Can you see now why mandatory attendance is becoming an issue?

Retention, High Standards, Relevance, and Choice

Administrators want to give students—including those who are unmotivated and unprepared—more opportunities to succeed, which keeps tuition dollars flowing in, so they sometimes focus on reducing the D/F/W (drop, fail, and withdraw) rates. Faculty sometimes see this as pressure to lower standards, so they push back, blaming K-12 for sending them unprepared students, refusing to teach remedial material, and resisting efforts to change the way they teach. Both groups need to realize that lowering standards and refusing to change won’t solve the problem. Instead, courses need to be redesigned to make them more compelling, practical, and relevant. Otherwise, faculty will be forced to deal with a lot more dissatisfied students who will disrupt the classes in which they don’t think they are getting what they paid for, and the perennial conflicts between administrators and faculty will continue to escalate.

Think back to your own education. What was the biggest difference between high school and college? Students acted out or tuned out in high school classes because they were required to be there and didn’t, for any number of reasons, want to be. Classroom management, a life-and-death skill for K-12 teachers, used to be mostly unnecessary for higher ed instructors. In college, students who didn’t want to be there quickly stopped showing up and, until recently, colleges have been mostly ok with that. The old attitude was that “college isn’t for everyone” and “it’s your money.” We are teaching young adults to take responsibility for their choices, the argument goes. A university is a place for free thinking, and if students choose not to attend class, who are we to tell them otherwise? But retention is the new mantra, and mandatory attendance is seen as one way to enforce it.

Unintended Consequences?

What will be the effects of mandatory attendance on college classes? On the surface, it seems like a good idea. Numerous studies show a strong positive correlation between attendance and student success. Students need to know that attendance matters and that we’re serious about it. But if we dig a bit deeper, there are several problems. In most studies, student success is only strongly correlated with voluntary attendance. If you make attendance mandatory, the effect is considerably, but not entirely, diminished. Also, we don’t achieve our goal if the students can easily defeat the mandatory attendance system; all a student has to do is give his ID card to a buddy who attends class. So will mandatory attendance actually improve student success? Yes, for a few students on the fence, attending class more often will make the difference between a pass and a fail, and some of our students do need a push in the right direction. But what worries me more about mandatory attendance is a negative unintended consequence. University instructors unaccustomed to unruly and disrespectful students are in for shock. They will be spending more effort on classroom management and it will negatively affect their ability to teach. Effort expended on making the courses more relevant, interesting, and engaging without lowering standards is a far better return on investment. If a course is compelling, students will gladly attend and value the lessons you deliver. Isn’t that better than forcing them to sit through a dull lecture?

Further reading

A Case Against Compulsory Class Attendance Policies in Higher Education

Skipping class in college and exam performance: Evidence from a regression discontinuity classroom experiment

Does Mandatory Attendance Improve Student Performance? (.pdf)

Do students go to class? Should they?

Should class attendance be mandatory?

The Times (and LMS) They Are A-Changin’

by Larry MacPhee

By the end of this year, the Provost’s Academic Computing Advisory Committee (PACAC), with input from the NAU community, will select a new learning management system (LMS) to replace Blackboard Vista, our current LMS. Vista has been in service about five years, which is a pretty good run in the fast-changing world of technology. But now we must move on.

Why change?

The first question we always get is, “Why?!” Nobody likes change. We’ve already learned to use Vista, and changing to something else is costly, time consuming, and disruptive. Vista is working well, and we have more people using it each semester, so why change? Because we have to.

The problem is that WebCT, the company that created Vista, got bought by its main competitor, Blackboard (Bb), several years ago just as we were completing the previous transition, from WebCT Campus Edition to WebCT Vista. On that fateful day when the purchase was announced to the public, you might have heard a collective groan escaping from the e-Learning Center! In the years since then, Blackboard has kept Vista going, intending to give its Vista customers time to make a transition to Blackboard’s new product, called Learn. But now Blackboard has announced that the “end-of-life” for Vista will be the beginning of Fall 2013. NAU is required, by the terms of the license, to stop using Vista then.

Why now?

(Click to view larger .pdf diagram)

Fall 2013 still sounds pretty far off, right? In reality, NAU’s courses must be off Vista well ahead of that 2013 date because of a variety of university business rules and transition-related issues (see our transition timeline). We have not yet decided on our next LMS; that process will take another six months. Once the decision has been made, we will need to run both systems—Vista and the new LMS—in parallel while we migrate content from the old to the new. That will take at least two semesters and probably more. We also need to allow time for incompletes and grade appeals to play out after the completion of the final Vista courses, and that can take a year or more. What this all means is that if we start right about now, we’ll only just be able to shut Vista down by Fall 2013.

Which one?

Market share of learning management systems over time (Click to view complete .pdf report by Delta Initiative)

There are plenty of good LMSes out there, and they all have generally similar features. Blackboard is now by far the biggest LMS company. They are our current vendor, and they make a good product called Learn. But Blackboard has a history of suing and acquiring its competitors (see LMS market share figure). Some other big LMS vendor that could stand up to Bb might be an option, but going with a smaller commercial alternative to Bb is risky. That’s what happened last time, when Blackboard bought WebCT, and we don’t want to make that mistake twice. Open source options, such as Moodle, would free us from the restrictions of a commerical license, and they are relatively safe from acquisition by Blackboard. That’s how we arrived at our two likeliest choices: Blackboard Learn, the commercial product with the largest base of users, and Moodle, the strongest open source alternative. So how do we decide?

Decision factors

Many factors must be considered in selecting a new LMS, and weighing the importance of each is difficult. How easy is the system to use? How well does it integrate with our other campus tools, such as PeopleSoft, the NAU Portal, and third-party commercial add-ins such as TaskStream? How compatible is the system with content modules available from various textbook publishers? How easy or difficult is it to move our existing courses from Vista to the new system? How easy is it to create and modify content? How well does each system work with the smartphones and tablet computers students are increasingly using for mobile web browsing? What about cost? Although Bb Learn has an annual license fee and Moodle does not, other factors make the cost a relatively neutral consideration. For example, Bb Learn comes with SafeAssign, a plagiarism-detection and writing tool, whereas if we go with Moodle, we would have to purchase something like TurnItIn, a separate product similar to SafeAssign, to get comparable functionality. While Blackboard provides technical support and regular updates for its products, with Moodle we’d have to depend on the open-source community as well as our own programmers for updates, customizations, and integration with our other campus systems. A larger issue might be the license agreement for Bb Learn, which defines and restrict usage of the system in ways that Moodle would not. In short, each product has its own advantages and disadvantages, costs and savings.

Which is best?

We often get asked, “Well, which one is best?” and that’s very difficult to answer because it depends on which features you use most and how you use them.

Both systems have many of the features we’re used to in Vista, such as discussion boards, a grade book, assignments, and exams, but the features work differently, and there will be a learning curve no matter which system we choose. The e-Learning Center is developing some presentations that contrast Vista with both new systems.

How can faculty and students get involved?

At the request of the PACAC, the e-Learning Center will coordinate some faculty focus groups during this summer and early fall, where you will get to try the same tasks in each system and give us your feedback. If you’re feeling adventurous, you could even volunteer to participate in the upcoming Summer and Fall 2010 pilots of a small number of courses in Moodle and Learn at NAU. Likewise, we plan to have a sample course available in both systems for students to peruse in the fall. We’ll keep you posted as the LMS selection process progresses.

In the meantime, if you are an NAU instructor and would like to participate in a survey about how to get involved in the decision process, check your email for a message from Don Carter dated April 27 and titled “Participate in Blackboard Vista Replacement Decision.” The email includes a link to the survey. We look forward to hearing from you.