For Scott's Learning Odyssey...

Please go to my satellite blog. Blogger doesn't do attachments, and I need that ability for my CECS 5210 class.

Thinking of Vyew

I would love to teach a lesson using Vyew. I would have to do some advance planning to become fully comfortable with the tool and determine which functions I wanted to use with my lesson. Vyew has a free-wheeling nature to it, so I'd like to pull some of that into the lesson, but also keep it structured. For instance, I might have a lecture with audio and video, but the chat function would allow students to ask questions. I might ask students to share their work by uploading a graphic or an attachment and having others provide live feedback.

As a system for collaboration, Vyew offers several affordances, such as drawing tools, the ability to share one's desktop, the ability to broadcast video and audio, and the ability to import files to share with others. These are the advantages of Vyew as a collaborative tool. It also has disadvantages. PowerPoint presentations are imported into multiple pages instead of a single file with navigation, so the structure of the presentation can be unclear. It would take a lot of practice, I think, to become completely familiar with Vyew. It also runs slowly at times, so there might be issues if a lot of people are in a session.

Analysis and Design - Part of the Flow

Analysis and design are extremely close as part of the instructional design process. Without an analysis, one really can't go confidently forward with the design. The analysis provides at least a portion of the roadmap so the designer knows where to go. I don't think an analysis has to be overly involved; in fact, there are times when an analysis is little more than asking what is needed and when it is needed. But even with such a short time for analysis, the designer can get a feel for the outcome of the learning and some clues on how to proceed with the design. I don't think that the analysis, once complete, is never revisited. Sometimes questions come up in the design process that require the designer to go back to the analysis portion again. Goals and objectives can be tweaked and revised as needed, since the content (to me) is like any creation -- it can evolve into something vastly different than what was originally intended, and revisiting the analysis can help make sure that the creation is still valid and desired.

The Information R/Evolution described in the video drives the way that most of us will obtain information that is used in the analysis, and it may guide the design, depending on the topic, the purpose and the audience. Most of us will use the Internet as a starting place for our research, and we'll come across websites, blogs, networking sites, wikis, and other online resources. If we know that our audience falls in what is known as a heavy Internet-using demographic, the instruction could be designed that way. It could be more exploratory in nature.

Analyze That!

Sorry, I just couldn't resist using the title of one of the Robert DeNiro/Billy Crystal films for the title of this post. :-)

The Analysis phase of this project helped me clarify what needs to be accomplished during the training session and set it all down on paper. It sounds so simple, but pre-planning is often skipped when designing training. I had to think about the learning objectives, the audience (the learners), the instructors, and all of the resources I had to work with. Of course, it isn't set in stone; the objectives may change as we start to develop the training. However, the analysis document gives me something concrete to use instead of some scribbled notes and my thoughts.

I haven't thought much about activities except for a possible scavenger hunt. The learners are grouped in pairs, and I would like them to search on specific sites to find the definitions for certain terms. We'll have about 12 learners in the class, so we can have six different groups. Once the terms are all defined, the learners can help piece everything together.

How Do We Learn?

I don't think there's a single catch-all theory of how we all learn. I think that we learn best by using a combination of approaches, and it depends on the subject matter being presented. For instance, I've had classes where we had to basically teach ourselves, and that works great as long as the instructor is there to provide feedback. Otherwise, you could be learning something incorrectly. There are also times where it is good to learn in groups; yet again, the instructor has to be present and available to provide mentoring and coaching to make sure that we are learning correct information. And when I'm learning something like mathematics or computer programming, I'd rather have someone explain it to me. I don't want to discover it myself, since I don't have a lot of personal experience or background and I would probably end up frustrating myself and not having a good learning experience at all.

So, my theory would probably be a combination of the objectivist theory, where the instructor dispenses knowledge and the students absorb it; the constructivist theory, where I teach myself the information based on what I discover; and the cooperative model, where I work with my fellow classmates to acquire new knowledge.

I'm honestly not sure how the cognitive information processing theory fits into my personal learning theory. I see how it fits as an adjunct to the constructivist theory. We all process information, rehearse it, and commit it to memory.

Instructional Design and Work

For our first week of CECS 5210, I read the ADDIE handout and the first chapter of our text book, and I must say that I am heartened by what I have read. I have been doing instructional design, of a sort, for the last several years, and I didn't really have an official process for it. I just did it by instinct. While I didn't have any disasters, I certainly did have times when it didn't work as well as I had hoped it would. Now, it's nice to learn that instructional design is an interesting combination of art and science, and that it is a continuous process. When I tried following a strict instructional design model in the past, I kept getting tripped up because I was trying to follow a linear process, and it doesn't work that way. Not from my experiences, anyway.

As for the ADDIE handout, it confirmed many of my suspicions. I almost never hear the word ADDIE mentioned at work. We use an adapted form of it, but I was beginning to wonder if ADDIE was one of those buzzwords that people who really don't do a lot of instructional design throw around in conversations or in job interviews. I think ADDIE is a good guideline -- or a framework, as the article put it -- but the instructional design process doesn't seem all that different from the software design process.

As far as my future work goals are concerned, I would like to be a full-time instructional designer. I've been encouraged by what I've read so far and by my past experiences, so I would say that instructional design is extremely important in my future work goals. I had a job interview this summer and the interviewer asked me several pointed questions about my instructional design processes and I really couldn't explain them. Needless to say, I didn't get the job, but it was a learning experience.

Suffice it to say that I know I have a lot to learn, but at least I know I'm not on totally unfamiliar ground.

A Magical Weekend

This post doesn't tie directly to school, per se, but it does tie in with learning. I have the best time with people from whom I can learn something. I can do idle chit-chat, but to really capture my attention, the best thing to do is to tell me about something I know very little (or especially) nothing about. I had a dear friend come and spend the weekend with me. We hadn't seen each other in months, so we spent the greater majority of the day playing catch-up. She is a recently converted Catholic, so she asked if I could find a Catholic bookstore that might be nearby. I found one in Farmers Branch and we went there on Saturday afternoon. We had a delightful time. I had been in Christian bookstores many times over the years, but none of them affected me as much as this Catholic bookstore did. The store was completely modern, yet you could feel the history and tradition of the Catholic faith. My friend patiently explained what she was going there to get (a monthly book of daily prayers and scripture readings) and she explained more about the daily rituals of practicing the Catholic faith. She showed me how you use a rosary. I don't know that I had ever seen one. She also showed me these lovely miniature paintings of the 12 stations and told me what they symbolized. We walked around the store, which sold everything from priestly robes to incense to crucifixes (some lovely crucifixes - I saw a striking metal one), to all kinds of study bibles. They even had a rack of DVDs with popular movies that had Catholic themes, such as the Ingrid Bergman version of Joan of Arc and the popular comedy from the 1960s, The Trouble With Angels. Our next errand was the flagship Half-Price Books on Northwest Highway, so we discussed religion on our way to the next bookstore. I learned all kinds of information that I didn't know before.

We revisited the topic several times during her stay and she was always a fountain of helpful information. I rarely, if ever, discuss religion with anyone because I feel that it is extremely personal and really no one's business. Additionally, I resented the teachings of the church I grew up in that encouraged us to be witnesses and proselytize others, so I dug my heels in and decided that if I ever went back to church, it would be my business and no one else's.

She wrote me today to tell me what a wonderful time she had. She was able to relax and get away, even though she didn't travel all that far, and that helped her tremendously. I was glad to hear it, but I had a wonderful time too.

Falling into Fall!

School starts in just over a week, and we're getting ready for a new school year. I really don't think I can handle more than 6 graduate hours per semester and work full-time, so I'm taking two classes: New Technologies of Instruction and Instructional Systems Design. I'm excited about taking my first ID class. I do instructional design work, of a sort, but I've never really learned much about techniques or processes. I do it all by instinct, and while that seems to work a good deal of the time, I'm sure it's not the best way. It's like a story I read about Tallulah Bankhead, who stormed the American and British stages (along with radio and a few films, including Hitchock's Lifeboat) with her vibrant personality. She was starring in a (then) brand new play written by Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes. She had never really trained much as an actress and had gotten by mostly on instinct and personality, but her director really bore down hard on her during rehearsals and forced her to learn technique so she would be good not only on opening night, but every night. I look forward to large, steaming helpings of learning this semester. It's hard to believe that I will graduate in a year!

Wiki, Schmiki!

My post title notwithstanding, we recently launched a corporate wiki and it's a good thing that we're embracing Web 2.0 tools. It has been online for not quite a month and we've been getting some good participation from our customers. However, since this is a corporate wiki being used by corporate employees, there is a great deal of concern in HR and Legal about possible inappropriate wiki postings. Ideally, a wiki is supposed to monitor itself and users would resolve inappropriate postings without having to get a moderator involved. I hope that we can get to that point, but for right now, we check the wiki several times a day to see if anything obscene or obviously against company policy has been posted. I think that once the wiki is more self-monitoring, we will see some more effective participation and get better results out of it.

We've also learned that we have to market the wiki so that people don't forget about it!

Articulate!

I've become fond of tools that can convert PowerPoint presentations to Flash files for distribution over the web. They have come in handy when a last-minute request for an online training course comes down the line. In the past, our department has used Breeze (which is now Adobe Presenter), but when it came time to renew our licenses, we took a look at Articulate and liked what we found. For what we were going to spend on a basic Breeze license, we got the Articulate studio, which comes with the presenter program (for converting the PowerPoint file), plus Articulate Engage and Articulate Quizmaker. We're diving in now to learn the new program and so far, the response has been positive.

Personally, I like the interactions that can be added to the presentations to make them look more like true online courses and less like a "page-turner" online presentation. The quizzes are sharp and easy to build.

I really didn't mean to make this post seem like a commercial, but I've just been given my first assignment with the new program and I can't wait to start.

I have a problem...

Not really, but I try to tie the title to the lesson. :-)

In this week's class, we discussed how to use e-Learning to promote problem solving skills. As always, I compare what our department produces with what I'm studying about in class, and we seem to do a good job of this. We include scenarios in our e-Learning courses and the scenarios are tied to the job. We don't follow some of the principles mentioned in this chapter, such as using job experts and seeing how they would solve a particular problem, or promoting learner awareness of problem solving actions and skills. The latter is done with some of our other training in which they are provided with flow charts to help document a process or procedure, but it doesn't exist in our e-Learning. I know that our audience typically doesn't have good metacognitive skills, but I think part of the reason is the rushed timeframe for our training. Sometimes, our team members are placed before a computer and told to complete x hours of training in a day. By flying through the course and skimming over the examples, learning isn't really taking place. I wonder if metacognitive skills on the job are influenced by the work culture. We can each have our own standards, but if they are met with apathy by coworkers and supervisors, do we still pursue them as strongly?

Collaborate... Moderate... Try Not to Hate

Remember the INXS song "Mediate" from their 1987 Kick album? That's one of the few remotely popular music references I can include, since my musical tastes are quite out of step with most music today. But that's a different story. As Sophia Petrillo always used to say when sharing a story about her past on The Golden Girls, "But, I digress."

This week, we discussed collaboration in e-Learning and how it improves the learning experience. I can attest to collaboration improving the distance learning experience, certainly. I'm in my second year of graduate school and most of my classes have been online. In most of those classes, we had to asynchronously collaborate with each other. We had to post responses to discussion questions to the class message board and we had to post responses to at least two other posts before we could consider our participation complete for that class week. Sometimes, I gritted my teeth when I did it, but ultimately I benefited from expanded viewpoints.

I am curious about collaboration in corporate e-Learning environments. I work in a retail training department and we have a very low degree of concurrency (except for when a new course launches) plus we have very low resources for monitoring such collaborative tools as message boards or forums. We tried to do a wiki and it sounded like the answer we had been seeking, but the project ultimately got canceled because there weren't enough resources for monitoring it to make sure that off-topic discussions didn't get started (which is a huge concern for management). Additionally, much of our audience consists of retail store employees who do not have a great deal of time for training. The vast majority of their time is spent selling or completing other tasks; they fit in learning when they get a chance. I'd love to try using collaborative tools, but I think we have to use it with certain segments of our learners and not use it across the board. I wonder if we could do a hosted blog or a wiki with just a select group and see how it goes. We're revamping some of our training efforts in 2008, so we'll see.

Feedback on Feedback

A consistent refrain in creating practice opportunities and assessments is the idea of feedback. Learners should have specific information about how well they did with the practice opportunities provide to them. Otherwise, they will not know whether or not they have enough of a grasp of the material to successfully retrieve it and use it at a later time. We have just studied a chapter on providing practice opportunities in e-Learning situations and the authors suggested that the feedback needs to tell the learner not only whether or not the practice was completed successfully (whether the answer was right or wrong, if appropriate) and why.

I agree completely that feedback is extremely important in both practice and assessment situations. I'm a bit perplexed on how much feedback to provide in an assessment situation. At that point, do you tell the user whether the question was answered incorrectly -- and do you provide the correct answer? Or do you direct the learner back to the instruction to find the correct answer? I've heard arguments for both sides. I am guessing that it depends on the audience and the purpose for the assessment.

Redundancy vs. Learning Styles: Mutually Exclusive or Possibly Compatible?

This week, we discussed the importance of avoiding redundancy in providing material to learners. Specifically, we discussed how providing the same material through a visual format (graphics), audio narration, and printed text can overwhelm learners and detract from learning. Presenting printed text and explanatory graphics can overload the learner's limited visual processing channel. The Redundancy Principle suggests that in most cases, it's better to show and tell, not to show, show, and tell. On-screen text or explanatory graphics can be paired with audio narration to appeal to both the visual and auditory channels.

This contrasts with the learning styles approach, which recommends that e-Learning designers include seemingly redundant methods of presenting materials to appeal to different learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic). I'm sure this has been a lively debate for many years, because it does seem true that we have different preferences for processing new information. My partner is like a human tape recorder; he can hear a conversation and repeat it almost verbatim later. He is a strong auditory learner. I have to use a combination of preferences. I do need to hear it, but I also need to process it visually and kinesthetically if possible. Most of us do use a combination of styles.

So, where do the approaches meet? I think they both have a place in e-Learning design and they are not mutually exclusive. Is this where truly blended learning plays more of a role? We can have audio and visual information, but perhaps we can provide a worksheet at the end for learners to download that sums up the main points of the lesson. Maybe the worksheet could contain a practice exercise or two. Yes, there would be some redundancy, but the learner would have the choice of whether or not to use the additional (possibly redundant) information.

Let's Get Conversational

This week's chapter and discussions focused around making online training more personal and less formal. In a word, more conversational. I think this is a great idea, but it's something I have found difficult to put into practice. I was an English major as an undergraduate student and I have a tendency to lapse into formal writing whenever I am doing any kind of professional writing. To me, formal writing is designed to impress others -- whether it's a supervisor or an instructor -- and I guess I like to show off as much as anyone else. But as far as e-Learning is concerned, formal writing does not always apply, and I will endeavor (no... I will try) to incorporate more of an informal style when it's appropriate.

Another aspect of this chapter that I found interesting was the virtues of virtual coaches. To me, a virtual coach can be effective if credibility is maintained. We don't want learners to say, "That's really dumb" or "How silly" when the virtual coach appears; otherwise, we have lost the learner. I discussed this with my supervisor and she agreed with me that there's a fine line to be walked when implementing virtual coaches so that there's enough of a positive return (in terms of learning and transfer) on the investment of creating the virtual coaches in the first place.

Speaking about Audio

In this week's class, we discussed the effectiveness of using audio narration with images rather than using images and printed text. This is supposed to help prevent cognitive overload where too much information is being processed through the visual/pictoral channel. We did not go in great depth about it, but I wonder if this suggested rule applies more to e-Learning courses that do not often change. I work in a retail environment and our content is constantly being updated. Sometimes we've gotten audio recorded and the project is ready to roll out the door, and the entire concept changes mid-stream. This involves re-recording and re-coding, since typically you should include a close-captioning option. The majority of our online courses do not have audio, but some of our courses that are created in Adobe Presenter do have audio attached because it's so easy to include it.

Is there a happy medium? Or is it something that designers and clients determine on a case-by-case basis?

I Said It!

I was having a conversation with our director today and I casually used the phrase "cognitive overload" in a sentence. It just flew out of my mouth, and my hand flew to my stunned face as though I had just uttered an expletive. She was pleased to discover that school is paying off. She insisted that I share the news in my blog.

Consider it done!

Speaking of Madeline Hunter

We weren't speaking of Dr. Hunter, but I thought I'd use this title as a hook to lead you into this week's blog posting. In class last week, we discussed the importance of placing corresponding text and graphics near each other. This helps the mind create connections between words and pictures and increases the transfer of knowledge. I'm oversimplifying the point a bit, but I'm using it as a set-up to get back to Madeline Hunter.

When I read this chapter, my mind reeled back in time to the early 1990s when I was a young English major who planned to teach at the secondary level. One of my undergraduate classes focused on Madeline Hunter's 1982 book Mastery Teaching, and I remembered a discussion of how a teacher can create relationships by the way words are written on the chalkboard. I dug out my copy of Mastery Teaching and found a chapter called "Teaching to Both Halves of the Brain." In this chapter, Dr. Hunter discusses how teachers can use chalkboards to indicate relationships based on their position on the chalkboard. If a teacher writes the word NIXON above the word FORD, the student can infer that NIXON comes before FORD. But if the teacher wrote NIXON next to the word FORD, the student might infer that the teacher is drawing some kind of parallel between the two. Dr. Hunter closes this section of the chapter by saying,

"When we are aware of the power of position in space to suggest relationships, we avoid placing items on the chalkboard in a haphazard fashion or where there happens to be space. We place each item deliberately so its position indicates its relationship to other material on the chalkboard (causal, oppositional, numerical, comparative, categorical, etc.)" (p. 41).

I saw immediate parallels between a chalkboard and an e-Learning screen. The way we position items on a screen indicates a relationship, whether it's one or more textual concepts, corresponding text and graphics, or instructions and a practice exercise.

I love it when I can tie new learning back to previous learning!

Book reference:

Hunter, Madeline. (1982). Mastery teaching. El Segundo,
   California: TIP Publications.

Animation Time, Come On!

For this week's class, I had the opportunity to create my first animated GIF. The instructions suggested we use a tool called GIMP, but I didn't feel that I had sufficient time to become familiar with a different software package. I toyed with the idea of using Photoshop or Fireworks, and ultimately decided on Fireworks. I found a great tutorial to help me get started.

I used a sprite sheet found on the ShyGuy Kingdom site. Once I found a sprite sheet that had a good sequence of events, creating the animated GIF took very little time at all in Fireworks. I selected the graphics I needed from the sprite sheet using a rectangular selection tool, copied them into frames in Fireworks, and optimized the file as an animated GIF.

I'm quite proud of the little thing, but I can't post it to show you. Apparently, Blogger.com is having problems uploading images right now.

Getting Around

Our most recent class topic was Learner Control; specifically, how navigation schemes can help or hinder learning. Not only do poor metacognitive skills cause learners to make poor choices, but poor navigation can achieve the same result. If the learner doesn't know where to go next, he or she might just close out of the course and never come back if the experience was frustrating enough. One of the key reasons that some learners do not complete online learning is because of technological issues. This could be due to a variety of reasons: the course froze up; the data didn't transmit properly; or the navigation wasn't clear enough. An easy way to ensure clear navigation in an e-Learning course is to use a program such as FlashForm to help you build a template. It includes many of these things.

On a side note, I did a post for our wiki on Mystery Meat Navigation. This is a subject close to my heart because our department made an ill-advised move a few years ago and designed our website with a classic example of mystery meat navigation. Users had to click on unlabeled images to find out how to navigate through our site. It was a resounding flop and created a good deal of ill will that it took us over a year to resolve. We went back to a more standard navigational format within a year, but I've kept a screen print of the problematic navigation on my cubicle wall ever since as a reminder to keep our users in mind. It's not hard to see the allure of navigational styles where the user navigates through a series of images and mouseover menus. It is cool at a conceptual, "gee whiz" kind of level, but if it doesn't help users navigate, it's a lot of work for nothing. My favorite example of MMN (I think it deserves its own acronym) is the web site of a certain restaurant famous for its delicious burritos. It's better than it used to be, but when you load the site, you get a lone image in the upper left-hand corner. Hint: You click on that image to display the navigation. :-)