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The CUNY OBD

Last week we got CUNY Board of Trustees approval, and State Higher Ed approval is most likely forthcoming soon, for the CUNY Online Baccalaureate for Degree Completers. I’ve been involved in the planning of this new program from early on, and I’m very excited about it. I expect to do quite a few more posts about it, now that it’s approved and as it goes public.

The program has faced quite a bit of opposition, and some of that has surprised and disappointed me, but I’m convinced it’s going to be a huge success. I want to discuss some of that opposition, and some of what I think is innovative and exciting about the project.

But to begin, as a first post, I thought I’d post the statement I presented to the Board of Trustees hearing last week. The hearing was in a very beautiful and imposing courtroom in Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. I was strangely nervous and intimidated by the setting (and by the antagonism of some of the opponents), but I still feel like it was a pretty good statement.

I am an associate professor of English, and director of teaching and learning with technology, at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. I have been at BMCC since 1985, and a member of the full time faculty since 1993.

I began teaching online at BMCC in 2001. Even before that time, I took online classes as a student, and since that time I have observed other faculty’s online courses, I have trained faculty to teach online, and I have been trained and certified to evaluate online degree programs as an Institutional Capability Reviewer by the State Board of Higher Education. I have researched and published on asynchronous online discussion, as well as the scholarship of teaching and learning with technology, social software, digital storytelling, and electronic teaching portfolios.

As a teacher, a scholar, and a student, I have seen the benefits of online education, including online degrees, and as a member of the SCORE committee and the OBD curriculum committee, I have been working to make those benefits available to our students at CUNY.

I want to briefly describe some of those benefits.

  • Meaningful personal contact with instructors and fellow students—students in online classes, almost universally, report that they have more contact and more meaningful educational contact with their professors than in face-to-face classes. Even more important, the opportunities for collaborative learning and student-centered education are much greater in the online class than in face-to-face classes.
  • Depth of intellectual exploration—in the online class, because discussion is asynchronous, students have the opportunity to explore subjects and ideas, even when tangentially connected, motivated by their interest and desire, and not constrained by the limits of a synchronous face-to-face class session. Students and instructors alike can make connections and links to material outside the classroom, as the entire range of information resources provided by the internet are within easy reach.
  • Opportunities for reflection—discussion in online classes leaves a persistent trace, rather than being ephemeral—students not only have time to think deeply about statements and responses, they can go back and review what they and other students have said in discussion, when reviewing material, thinking further, or preparing for exams or writing papers.
  • Strengthening of essential skills (reading/writing/critical thinking across the curriculum)–because the work in online classes is conducted by reading and writing, along with associated other media (audio and video), reading and writing become part of the medium of every course, not just specialized composition or literature classes.
  • Access—Online courses allow students to have the full academic rigor and intellectual stimulation of a college education, on their own schedules, with flexibility and adjustment to meet the demands of work, family, and other personal obligations.
  • Participation/Equity—in online classes, students can participate without apprehension about their accents, physical appearance, or discomfort with interrupting others. In the face-to-face classroom, no matter how equitable and student-centered it may be, it is impossible for every student voice to be heard. A few voices, more forceful or more confident or more eloquent than the rest will always be dominant. In the online classroom, every voice not only can be heard, but can be responded to, valued, and encouraged.

There are more advantages, too, but because time is limited let me emphasize that my experience has shown that online education, like any educational experience, is not appropriate for every student, not for every subject, and not for every faculty member.

But in working on the proposal for the CUNY OBD, my fellow committee members and myself, all experienced, dedicated, CUNY faculty, have been conscious throughout of CUNY’s mission of access and excellence, and I am certain that the CUNY OBD will support and enhance that mission.

When I presented this orally, I started to run over time (there was a strictly enforced three minute maximum time limit), and I added some remarks about our experience with the Sloan Semester for Katrina victims, so I had to cut some of this. I also had a bad asthma moment, unfortunately, so I had to do some gasping for breath! But that might have added a little pathetic appeal–so maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing.

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Local Learning Objects–the BMCC-GLO

As so many others have pointed out, there’s something so broad and so inclusive about the term “Learning Object,” that it becomes shallow and almost meaningless. The standard or accepted definition is something like “a reusable, interoperable, educational activity, digital or non-digital, with meta-data attached for classification.” That’s my paraphrase of many different definitions, but the basic idea is that you build up a large collection (usually called a repository) of these things–usually a website, or set of instructions for an activity–make that collection public and searchable, and then sit back and wait for teachers to come and check it out. Then they’re so ecstatic about the range of items they find that they use them in their classes, and everybody benefits from the collective wisdom of the whole community.

There are plenty of repositories already–with MERLOT (I’ve had some involvement with them) being probably the biggest. But for the most part, these repositories in particular, and the idea of learning objects in general, seem to miss an important point about education…and that’s the importance of context.

Reusability is good, and interoperability is good, but so much about education is specific and local and contextual. Generic solutions can be foundations, but what seems to be often the case is that they’re best seen as inspirations for local, focused, directed solutions. An explanation or activity or tutorial which is essential, and monumentally productive for a student at Bard or Sarah Lawrence might not have any good use at all for students at West Point (or make your own extremes of your own continua)…even if they’re taking, at least nominally, the same course at the same level and working on the same skills or content.

FireflySo thinking about this led me to the idea of the BMCC Gallery of Learning Objects (BMCC-GLO…hence the firefly. I like the idea that it glows!). My thinking was that we could assemble (gradually, over time) a collection or gallery of locally-built, locally-useful, locally-focused objects. I know that objects is a problematic term–but I’m just bracketing those problems. Objects, activities, tutorials, whatever–I’m thinking that these are small, self-contained, and specific. And that they’re designed by BMCC faculty, for BMCC students in BMCC courses, with the idea that we here at BMCC know best what’s most helpful, and what’s most needed, for these students in these courses. We’ll pay faculty for their time and work in developing these, we’ll give them technical support in accomplishing the instructional design and whatever (minimal) programming or multimedia or coding they need to do. And the concept and the realization will be driven by the local, contextual, experience of our students and our classes.

And I’m going to take this localization to yet another step, too. I want to involve students, not just faculty, in the selection and design of these objects. I haven’t worked out all the details of that yet, but my basic idea is that a faculty member will be paired with a student designer/tester…who will confirm that the object is understandable and productive for students, and that the learning goal it addresses is one where students really do need help, and really can benefit from this particular type of help.

If I can get a few built each year (semester?), bringing in more faculty and more students from different academic areas, I think there’s a chance we could have something (the Gallery, the collection), which could be a truly relevant, useful, local and contextualized resource for our students.

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Email Overload or Teachable Moment?

email overloadLast week the New York Times ran a story with the somewhat cutesy title “To: Professor @ University. edu Subject: Why It’s All About Me” (as usual with the Times, you may have to be registered to read the article). The complaints of the quoted professors seem to echo a lot of what I hear these days–but I think that in many cases these complainers (not just in the article) are missing the point.

A colleague of mine counted 300 emails from students last semester. The professors in the article complain that students are asking questions that are too obvious, or too demanding, or that reveal too much personal information, or that expect responses too immediately.

Others feel that the overload of messages adds to their workloads in ways that they just can’t sustain. That’s the one that I hear most often–especially from people who have never taught online or who have quit teaching online, and are using the possibility of increased workload as a reason (or an excuse). “300 emails?! How can anyone possibly answer all of those?”

But I think (as some in the article, and others online, have also pointed out) that teaching students how to interact with professors (and by extension, all kinds of other audiences, personal and professional) is actually part of our responsibility as college teachers. Students are, as the name implies ;), capable of learning–or at least that’s our primary assumption in doing this work. So it’s up to us, in setting up class rules, in discussing class policies, in thinking and teaching about writing and communicating across the curriculum (and across life), to work on email skills and techniques, and to discuss those, and the reasons for them.

Beyond this, though, the Times article raises another, more subtle, point about what’s beginning to happen with education more generally.

At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much more approachable. But many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance.

and

While once professors may have expected deference, their expertise seems to have become just another service that students, as consumers, are buying. So students may have no fear of giving offense, imposing on the professor’s time or even of asking a question that may reflect badly on their own judgment.

I think this might be really the heart of many of the complaints–and it’s a phenomenon with much broader implications. We’re seeing a re-structuring, a re-imagining (or, as my favorite art historian points out, a return to an earlier structuring and imagining) of what a university education can and should be, and what the relationship between a teacher and a student can and should be.

Instead of passively absorbing, or jumping through hoops in order to be “certified” (some of this resemble hazing, I think), what if students move towards a more active picking and choosing–a deciding for themselves what to learn, what authority to trust, what information is relevant, how much help or assistance they need, how much personal contact they want, and so on.

If the authority, the deference, that professors are used to starts to break down, that’s a scary thing, for the people (me?) who have been through the hoops and the hazing, been certified, and now expect to pass along the tradition that formed them. But it’s an exciting thought, too. What was so wonderful about that tradition? How much of it, if students can argue about it, rather than being forced to accept it, will remain relevant? or desireable?

Maybe the email overload is not just a moment to teach students about netiquette and effective email and traditional teacher-student hierarchies. Maybe it’s also a moment to teach us (the teachers) about what’s not valuable, and what is, in the boundaries, the healthy distance, and the defence.

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Eportfolio Progress

Well, maybe not real progress, but it feels to me like I’m reaching a definite conclusion. After lots of looking around, flirting with open source (Sakai/OSPI), discussing and checking recommendations from all over, including the good folks at TappedIn, and the solutions in use by colleagues at other CUNY schools, I came to a list of criteria/needs for any eportfolio solution we could use.

Let me lay it out–

We’re going to be starting in fall 2006 with a group of students (200-250) starting the Teacher Education program. Eventually we’re going to extend the program to other departments, and other student groups, but we won’t find a 100% one-size-fits-all solution, especially not one that can work well for more technically advanced programs like Multimedia Programming or Video Arts and Technologies.

So with an eye toward the TED students to begin, and enough flexibility to expand later, these are the criteria.

  • Ease of use–the system has to be clear and simple enough for technologically unsophisticated students (and faculty) to learn with a minimum of training and support.
  • Reflection-centered–the system has to include not just opportunities, but demands, for self-reflection and comments from others. A plain collection of documents won’t be sufficient–the system needs to build reflection into design and implementation from the start.
  • Transportable–the material in the eportfolio needs to be easily assembled into a presentation that can be available on the web, or burned to CD, or moved to another eportfolio system, when the student graduates or transfers.
  • Brandable–we need to be able to create separate templates, with logos and distinctive setups, that will identify the portfolios with our institution and with specific departments/programs within our institution.
  • Institutionally-funded–we need a solution which is supported and financed by the college–not by students. This rules out many of the commercial publisher’s products. We may explore other options for continued access after graduation, but for enrolled students, and for a period of time (how long?) after enrollment, the college should pay the costs.
  • Robust–we need a system built on reliable back-end programming, scalable for large numbers of students in the future, and relatively crash-free and minimally bandwidth intensive.
  • Versatile–we need to be able to use many different file types (including various multimedia formats), and have choices (at least within reasonable limits) about graphic interface and design templates (“skins”).

And there’s probably more I’m not thinking of right now. But that’s the major list, in no particular order.

The one system which seems to come closest to meeting all those criteria is Johns Hopkins’ EP. It’s a bit on the expensive side, but the license is perpetual, for any number of virtual installations or users. So it’s a fixed one-time expenditure for the license, and ongoing costs are limited to hardware upgrades and ongoing training. That’s a big plus, because once the system is in place, I can use the budget line where it’s going to be most needed, for training faculty and supporting students and faculty. That can get expensive as the project grows, and I don’t want to have to keep throwing money at licensing.

I’m about 90% convinced at this point that this is the best solution for us. I still need to get the buy-in, of course, from my IT folks, faculty, and higher administration. But there’s an open window here, and I’m hoping that in the next week or two I can pull something through that window.

If we’re really going to be up and rolling in fall 2006 (as I want to be), it’s time to get the pieces in place.

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Sloan Semester Update

We’re over a week into the Sloan Semester at BMCC, and although enrollment wasn’t what I hoped for (we’re only running five of the ten courses we offered, and only have about 24 students, out of the 250 we had room for), I still think something very positive is happening for these students. The ones who are participating are getting the academic content of their courses, certainly, but more than that they’re getting the experience of studying at BMCC…without leaving wherever they are after dealing with the relocations of Katrina. Sort of a “virtual study abroad” experience. They’re getting to see the different world and culture of a large urban community college (or at least the slice of that culture which comes through the mediation of an online course–the online culture). For many of them, that’s entirely new.

Beyond that, for me at least, it’s a very rewarding experience to see a completely different type of student. It’s a “virtual teaching abroad” experience. Don’t get me wrong, I love our BMCC students–they have plenty of strengths of their own, not the least of which are enormous diversity, rich life experiences, and a level of motivation, interest, and desire to actively participate which no other students in no other institution can match (I would claim with some partisanship). But the students I’m seeing in my Sloan class have a level of preparation and academic experience that I don’t see very often at BMCC. I’ve never thought that I pitched my classes or my teaching to a low level…but I’m definitely seeing that pitching to a high level (in terms of vocabulary, experience with complicated ideas and reading, and writing skills) can have its own appeals.

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Worlds Collide

Amazing (but not really unexpected) news today…Blackboard and WebCT will be merging. There will be only one company, called “Blackboard.” Blackboard was already pretty much the de facto monopoly on proprietary CMS’s, but now, by absorbing their only realistic competitor (in terms of numbers), they’re really going to be the Microsoft of CMS.

Will any open source initiative (Sakai, Moodle, anybody?) have any chance at making a breakthrough? Or a breakin?

Here’s the official word, in bonafide, verbatim, corporatese:

Greetings,

We are writing you today to directly communicate some momentous news. Earlier today, WebCT and Blackboard signed a formal agreement expressing our intent to merge our companies.

This decision is one that has been made based on careful consideration by both entities. We believe that this union will have a positive impact on the global e-Learning community and on the individual clients of both companies. We want to communicate the rationale behind the merger and to provide some of the early details on what this news means for you.

By leveraging the best of Blackboard and WebCT, we believe we can improve the online learning experience for educators and students worldwide. As a single company, we will bring together some of the brightest, most experienced talent in the e-Learning industry, and we will be uniquely positioned to share and deliver proven best practices to the combined client base. Most importantly, the combined Blackboard and WebCT community of practice will represent the largest and most comprehensive network of e-Learning practitioners in the world. We will work diligently to bring this community together to broaden access to shared expertise, reusable technologies, faculty and developer networks, and to promote exemplary course programs.

The combined company will continue to develop, innovate, upgrade, improve and support both Blackboard’s and WebCT’s products, WebCT Vista and WebCT Campus Edition, and Blackboard Academic Suite and Blackboard Commerce Suite. Following the merger, the combined company will be actively engaged in industry standards efforts. We will develop common, standards-based APIs, based on Building Blocks and PowerLinks, that will allow the existing product lines to interoperate with one another as well as provide a means for clients of both Blackboard and WebCT to share their applications, innovations and experiences with the global client community. Over time, the combined company will incorporate the best features and usability characteristics from the two product lines into a new, standards-based product set.

While we are eager to realize the benefits of combining our clients’ collective expertise and designing future solutions, we remain overwhelmingly focused on your success today. We will continue to maintain the same level of commitment to support and service level agreements, and there will be no interruption in the service you receive today. As we build this new community, we will maintain and enhance each company’s current commitment to advisory boards as well as user groups and mailing lists.

We expect the merger of Blackboard and WebCT to be finalized later this year or early next year, subject to regulatory and other approvals. The combined company will be named Blackboard and will be led by Blackboard’s current President and CEO, Michael Chasen. We are pleased that several members of WebCT’s executive team will remain with the combined company and join Blackboard’s existing executive management team, including Chris Vento as Sr. VP of Technology and Product Development, Peter Segall as Sr. VP of Education Strategy, and Barbara Ross as Sr. VP of Integration Strategy. Karen Gage will be joining the Marketing group as a VP. Carol Vallone, WebCT’s CEO, will continue with the combined company as a consultant focused on client relations and strategy. Until the merger is complete, however, each company will continue to operate independently.

In closing, we would like to thank you for your institution’s business to date and request your input as we embark on this next phase of e-Learning. Please plan on joining us at EDUCAUSE 2005 in Orlando, Florida to learn more from our corporate presentations. The presentations will be held on Wednesday, October 19, 2005, 11:40 AM EST in Meeting Room W204A and on Thursday, October 20, 2005, 2:20 PM EST in Meeting Room W204A. Additional information will also be available at www.Blackboard.com/WebCT. In the mean time, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact your current account manager.

We look forward to our continued partnership, hearing your thoughts and answering any questions you might have.

Sincerely,
Carol Vallone
Chairman, President & CEO
WebCT

Michael L. Chasen
President & CEO
Blackboard Inc.

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Understanding Evolution

Understanding EvolutionOne of my all-time favorite evolution websites (right up there with talkorigins) has always been Understanding Evolution, from UC Berkeley. The site was designed mostly for teachers–heavy emphasis on K-12, too–but it was still pretty useful for just about anyone. Well, now I find that they’ve updated the site, making it even more useful for a general interested audience. It’s well-designed, well-organized, informative, and of course the teachers’ site is still there, too. Terrific!

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Some help for students hurt by Katrina

It looks like everything has been given the green light, and we at BMCC (with the rest of CUNY) will be able to take part in the Sloan Semester. It’s an effort to give students who have had their education interrupted by Katrina the chance to take online courses for free.

An accelerated semester will start in October, and students will be able to take a wide variety of courses, in a wide variety of disciplines and at a wide variety of levels, even if they have not been able to find permanent housing or employment yet. The courses will be offered by a range of institutions, with full course credit, with some funding provided by the Sloan Foundation, and the remainder by the host institutions.

It’s a great idea, and even though it’s a small drop in the bucket of help needed after Katrina, I’m glad to be able to participate in whatever small way I can.

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Edu-conferences or no?

Alan Levine of Maricopa and cogdogblog posts (as he has before) about the general woorthlessness of the big edu-cons, just right at the moment when I happen to be at one of them.

He has some valid points about visiting the exhibit hall just to grab the schwag (OK, I’m guilty of that, sometimes, I admit it), and sitting in the keynote and checking email or blogging (I’m guilty of that right now, although if the damn wifi in this conference center were working, I wouldn’t have to be writing this on the Treo with Vagablog!).

But I think he’s a little over-jaded (no pun on his url) and over-curmudgeonly…probably as a result of over-exposure. He’s a lot more of a longer-established and more experienced edtech hotshot than I am, and I think there’s a whole big world of faculty/admins/ID folks who are even less-experienced with even more to learn than me.

There’s a danger, when you spend a lot of time in the circle where innovation happens, of forgetting just how much of what is already old hat to people like Alan (and, increasingly, me) is still decidedly new hat to huge numbers of people who really do learn new things from these conferences.

And beyond that, even for hotshots and moderately warm shots like me, there are still opportunities to glean some little gems even from generally commonplace blahblah keynotes. For example, Tracy Futhey’s keynote about “Technology Initiatives to Move the Campus Forward” at Duke and Carnegie Mellon this morning, in addition to some general principles about risks, benefits, and challenges of tech innovation with which I’m very familiar (and others probably are, too), made a very intriguing side point. In talking about Duke’s famous (or infamous) Ipod project, she mentioned the later, almost incidental, addition of voice recorders to the Ipods.

This goes to a much larger and more important point about technology helping students to create and publish content, instead of (as is too often the case) merely passively consuming it. That’s not a point I really needed reminding of, but it is a point that is good (and provocative) to see new examples of. A conference like this can sometimes plant these little seeds which get mulled about, discussed over lunch or on the bus to UCLA, and then brought back home for more thought, new ideas, and to be used as handy pullquotes and name-dropping when talking to senior administrators (“at Duke they’re doing such and such”).

There’s also (as Alan acknowledges) the benefit of meeting and talking to people. This morning (and it’s not yet 11 AM) I’ve already had some good conversation with colleagues from Virginia Beach, Pomona, Newark, and Egypt.

But none of this really negates what I see as Alan’s major criticism (and I heard the same criticism from a guest-wish I remembered her name-on Chris Pirillo’s podcast). At all these conferences, no matter how we talk about educational innovations (especially enabled by technology), we really only hear about those innovations. At the conference itself, we don’t really do anything except sit and listen to a 50-minute-with-a-powerpoint, with maybe (at most) a few minutes for questions. Nothing active, nothing participatory, nothing innovative. We sit in air-conditioned rooms and hear about tools and techniques which are exactly the opposite of what we’re experiencing at the conference.

That’s an excellent point, and I would love to see a conference which does things differently.

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Eportfolios, Blogs, and Wikis–call them…?

At most every conference, symposium, journal article, whatever, we see eportfolios, blogs and wikis grouped together. They’re technologies which have evolved somewhat together, and even though all three have differences, there is a clear unifying generic theme. But what’s the clear generic title?
Accessible Online Content Creation and Collaboration Tools?
Student Collaborative Content Tools?
Online Content Creation?

I’m not going to get a good acronym, really, and that’s really not important, of course. But it is a bit frustrating.

Eportfolios–allow students to assemble, present, reflect on, and get feedback on artifacts which demonstrate their learning.

Blogs–allow students to present, reflect on, and get feedback on their thinking during the process of developing it.

Wikis–allow students to collaborate on and present information and thinking as they assemble it.

It seems that for all of them, the common theme is the public part–the presentation. Making student work (or any of our work) part of the larger public community of discourse is a very powerful tool. The other half–opening up the work to comment, give feedback, and collaborate, is also part of the equation, but it follows mainly from the first part. It’s the publishing, and the ways in which these digital tools make enable (or at least facilitate) that publishing.

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