Discussion at faculty Facebook group regarding the syllabus directions for students’ work in online class:
how many hours of regular student work do you think is appropriate to expect from students for an online course of this nature? The class would normally have 3 hours of in-class instruction.
Determine if a breakout room activity will be the most effective use of your live session time given the purposes of the course and the learning styles of the students in your section.
Consider the amount and size of the breakout groups. For most breakout activities, we recommend that you have 2-5 students in each group to ensure everyone has the opportunity to contribute. Depending on the number of key concepts and size of your live session, it may make sense to have more than 1 group doing the same activity.
Providing instructions to students is important for a successful breakout session. There are several different instruction delivery methods.
Covid-19 is being described as both a crisis and an opportunity for higher education. But how “opportunity” is defined depends on where one stands in the academic hierarchy. While some hope the pandemic provides a chance to reverse troubling trends toward the adjunctification and casualization of academic labor, administrators may see it as a different sort of opportunity, to realign institutional priorities or exert greater authority over their faculties.
A statement by the Tenure for the Common Good group offers 20 recommendations for administrators, including that they “resist using the current crisis as an opportunity to exploit contingency further by hiring more contingent faculty into precarious positions.”
As faculty members are asked to take on greater teaching, advising, and administrative responsibilities, faculty development and retention “will be more important to institutional resilience — survival — than ever before,” Kiernan Mathews, executive director and principal investigator of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, wrote on Twitter.
To DePaola, the pandemic doesn’t pose new problems to academe as much as it magnifies existing ones. “Everything was held together with gum and paper clips, and coronavirus came and just sort of knocked it all down at once,” DePaola said. “I think none of the crises that this virus is causing are new. They’re just accelerated greatly. And the contradictions of the system are heightened all at once for people to see.”
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The Small World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus
Beginning in March 2020, many universities shifted to on-line instruction to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, and many now face the difficult decision of whether and how to resume in-person instruction. This article uses complete transcript data from a medium-sized residential American university to map the two-node network that connects students and classes through course enrollments. We show that the enrollment networks of the university and its liberal arts college are “small-world” networks, characterized by high clustering and short average path lengths. In both networks, at least 98% of students are in the main component, and most students can reach each other in two steps. Removing very large courses slightly elongates path lengths, but does not disconnect these networks or eliminate all alternative paths between students. Although students from different majors tend to be clustered together, gateway courses and distributional requirements create cross-major integration. We close by discussing the implications of course networks for understanding potential epidemic spread of infection on university campuses.
Second, another reason that there cannot be a definitive answer to this question is the diversity of stakeholders in online education. Yong Zhao: Does it Work? The Most Meaningless Question to Ask about Online Education https://t.co/LNqv2YYb40pic.twitter.com/SKG1jCyudo
— Ana Cristina Pratas (@AnaCristinaPrts) April 2, 2020
One of the most frequently and persistently asked questions about online education is “does it work” or “is it effective.”
The question is meaningless because there cannot be any definitive answer for a number of reasons.
First, online education (and its variants such a online instruction, online teaching, distance education and distance learning) is a big umbrella that covers a wide array of different practices, which vary a great deal in terms of quality. Comparing the effectiveness of online education with face-to-face education has been the most common research approach to examine the effectiveness of online education. And the answer has been, for a long time, that there is no significant difference between the two. This answer, however, does not mean online is effective or not, it simply means there are plenty of effective and ineffective programs in both online and face-to-face education. In other words, the within variation is larger than the between variation.
Second, another reason that there cannot be a definitive answer to this question is the diversity of stakeholders in online education.
And unfortunately what works for one stakeholder may not work for the others.
Third, even within the same program and with only students as the stakeholder, there cannot be a definitive answer because no program can possibly have the same effects on all students equally.
Fourth, yet another reason that the question cannot have a definitive answer is the multiplicity of outcomes. Education outcomes include more than what has been typically measured by grades or tests.
Fifth, the rapid changes in technology that can be used to deliver online education add to the elusiveness of a definitive answer to the question. While pedagogy, design, and human actors certainly paly a significant role in the experiences of online education, so does technology.
Moving instruction online can enable the flexibility of teaching and learning anywhere, anytime, but the speed with which this move to online instruction is expected to happen is unprecedented and staggering.
“Online learning” will become a politicized term that can take on any number of meanings depending on the argument someone wants to advance.
Online learning carries a stigma of being lower quality than face-to-face learning, despite research showing otherwise. These hurried moves online by so many institutions at once could seal the perception of online learning as a weak option
Researchers in educational technology, specifically in the subdiscipline of online and distance learning, have carefully defined terms over the years to distinguish between the highly variable design solutions that have been developed and implemented: distance learning, distributed learning, blended learning, online learning, mobile learning, and others. Yet an understanding of the important differences has mostly not diffused beyond the insular world of educational technology and instructional design researchers and professionals.
Typical planning, preparation, and development time for a fully online university course is six to nine months before the course is delivered. Faculty are usually more comfortable teaching online by the second or third iteration of their online courses.
In contrast to experiences that are planned from the beginning and designed to be online, emergency remote teaching (ERT) is a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis circumstances. It involves the use of fully remote teaching solutions for instruction or education that would otherwise be delivered face-to-face or as blended or hybrid courses and that will return to that format once the crisis or emergency has abated.
A full-course development project can take months when done properly. The need to “just get it online” is in direct contradiction to the time and effort normally dedicated to developing a quality course. Online courses created in this way should not be mistaken for long-term solutions but accepted as a temporary solution to an immediate problem.
IM 690 lab plan for March 31, online: Virtual Worlds
If at any point you are lost in the virtual worlds, please consider talking/chatting using our IM 690 zoom link:https://minnstate.zoom.us/j/964455431 or call 320 308 3072
Readings: Currently, if you go to the SCSU online dbases
,if they are working at all, don’t be surprised when clicking on EBSCOhost Business Source Complete to see this msg:
and if you execute a search:
“AltSpaceVR” + “education”, you will find only meager 1+ results.
Google Scholar, naturally, will yield much greater number.
So, search and find an article of your interest using Google Scholar. I used “immersive learning” + “education” for my search.
I chose to read this article: https://journal.alt.ac.uk/index.php/rlt/article/view/2347/2657
since it addressed design principles when applying mixed reality in education. What article did you find/choose/read/are ready to share your analysis with?
Tuesday, March 31, 5PM lab
As usually, we will meet at this Zoom link: https://minnstate.zoom.us/j/964455431 All of us will be online and we will meet in the Zoom room. Please come 10 min earlier, so we can check our equipment and make sure everything works. Since we will be exploring online virtual worlds, please be prepared for technical issues, especially with microphones.
For this lab, please download and install on your computers the AltSpaceVR (ASVR) software: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/altspacevr/9nvr7mn2fchq?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Please consider the impediment that Microsoft has made the 2D mode for PC available only for Windows. If you are a Mac user and don’t have PC available at home, please contact me directly for help.
In addition, pls have a link to the video tutorial; https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2020/03/13/im690-asvr-2d-tutorial/
pls be informed about MediaSpace issues of the last two weeks, which can result in poor rendering of the video. If issues persist and you still need help downloading and installing the software, contact me directly for help. Please do your best to have ASVR installed on your computer before the lab starts on Tues, March 31, 5PM, so we can use our time during the lab for much more fun activities!
Intro to ASVR.
Please watch this 5 min video anytime you feel a bit lost in ASVR
pls consider the issues with MediaSpace and be patient, if the video renders and/or does not play right away. The video is meant to help you learn how to navigate your avatar in ASVR.
the first 15-20 min in the lab, we will “meet” in ASVR, figure out how to work on our ASVR avatar, how to use the computer keyboard to move, communicate and have basic dexterity. We must learn to “make friends” with Mark Gill (ASVR name: MarkGill47), Dr. Park (ASVR name: dhk3600) and Dr. Miltenoff (ASVR name: Plamen), as well as with your class peers, who will be sharing their ASVR contact info in the Zoom Chat session. Once we learn this skills, we are ready to explore ASVR.
Mark Gill will “lead” us through several virtual worlds, which you will observe and assess from the point of view of an Instructional Designer and an educator (e.g. how these worlds can accommodate learning; what type of teaching do these virtual worlds offer, etc.)
Eventually, Mark Gill will bring us to the SCSU COSE space, created by him, where he will leave us to discuss.
Discussion in the COSE ASVR room
We will start our discussion with you sharing your analysis of the article you found in Google Scholar for today’s class (see above Readings). How do your findings from the article match your impressions from the tour across virtual worlds in ASVR? How does learning happen?
Final projects
the rest of the time in the lab will be allocated for work on your final projects.
Dr. Park and Dr. Miltenoff will work individually with your groups to assist with ideas, questions regarding your projects,
VIA (very important article):
McDougall, J., Readman, M., & Wilkinson, P. (2018). The uses of (digital) literacy. Learning, Media and Technology, 43(3), 263–279. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2018.1462206
breaking up synchronous sessions with hands-on. This requires strong skills for virtual presenting. A nice little simple book on this: https://www.amazon.com/Exceptional-Presenter-Goes-Virtual-Person/dp/1608320464:
Koegel, T. (2010). The exceptional presenter goes virtual (1st ed.). Austin, Tex: Greenleaf Book Group Press.
The book, unfortunately, is available through ILL and ILL is suspended.
IM 690 lab plan for March 3, MC 205: Oculus Go and Quest
Readings:
TAM:Technology Acceptances Model
Read Venkatesh, and Davis and sum up the importance of their model for instructional designers working with VR technologies and creating materials for users of VR technologies.
UTAUT: using the theory to learn well with VR and to design good acceptance model for endusers: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2020/02/20/utaut/
Watch both parts of Victoria Bolotina presentation at the Global VR conference. How is she applying UTAUT for her research?
Read Bracq et al (2019); how do they apply UTAUT for their VR nursing training?
joining a space and collaborating and communicating with other users
Assignment: Group work
Find one F2F and one online peer to form a group.
Based on the questions/directions before you started watching the videos:
– Does this particular technology fit in the instructional design (ID) frames and theories covered
– how does this particular technology fit in the instructional design (ID) frames and theories covered so far?
– what models and ideas from the videos you will see seem possible to be replicated by you?
exchange thoughts with your peers and make a plan to create similar educational product
Post your writing in the following D2L Discussions thread
Augmented Reality with Hololens Watch videos at computer station)