Our Journey Through OMDE-610

What five adjectives do you feel best describe your participation in this course?

·        Enlightening – new concepts and perspectives

·        Thankful – facilitators and classmates

·        Fulfilling – personally and professionally

·        Relevant – authentic learning experiences

·        Reflective – learning using a range of Bloom’s taxonomy.

What strength(s) do you feel that you brought to this course?  How/when was that strength exhibited?

My greatest strengths I brought to this course were a genuine interest in the subject, a desire to apply what I learned into my professional workplace, and a willingness to share my professional work experience with others.  My classmates would have experienced these contributions most significantly during the conference discussions while the facilitators would have also seen this in all four assignments.

What area(s) of weakness, if any, did you discover in your own learning?

My writing style is sometimes not in alignment with academic expectations.  Changing this style after so many years of practice will continue to be a challenge.

Describe one thing that you learned about yourself as an online learner through your participation?

For this particular class perhaps the greatest thing I learned were new areas of interest I would like to further explore.  While recognizing that improving one’s writing skill is a continual process, I am also interested in exploring the historical context of operations research from a management science perspective and to also deepen my knowledge of descriptive statistics, particularly as it relates to program evaluation.

A Case Study: Online Learning at Hagerstown Community College

Hagerstown Community College is located in western Maryland and offers over 100 programs of study leading to an associate’s degree, specialized certifications, and much more.  Over 61 percent of its 4,714 students attend part-time, a clear indicator that many students must balance the demands of work with their continued education in an online environment. Starting in the fall of 2011 the community college began to transition its online learning platform to Moodlerooms.  This platform offers an end-to-end learning management system adaptable to a growing institution such as Hagerstown Community College.  This scalable solution also provides for ease of transfer of existing course content; an important feature for this community college since it currently has a robust suite of courses already online through the Blackboard system. 

After performing an initial review of the new Hagerstown LMS site, it is apparent that the program has been configured to meet the branding requirements of the institution and also offers the flexibility to address the unique needs of individual offices and divisions.  Extensive student and instructor guides and videos are provided to ease the transition to the new LMS.  The Joule feature provides for automated enrollments and portals for 360 degree views of student progress.  Risk mitigation is ensured through a disaster recovery component and a particularly impressive “zero boundaries” feature offering support for up to 78 different languages, an important feature for a community college with a significant number of military students.

The advantages of Moodlerooms for college instructors is significant.  Features include:  automated grading, online access 24/7, Q&A capabilities including polling and surveying, instant feedback, individual course design opportunities, and Web 2.0 options. 

Hagerstown Community College was the first college of its type established in the State of Maryland.  Its transition to a new learning management system portends its continued recognition as a leading institution of higher education in western Maryland.  For further information about Moodlerooms and its capabilities, check out this video:

http://www.youtube.com/user/MoodleroomsVideo#p/c/2/OMYzsAurxHY

Perry’s Top Ten



Inspired by Robert S. Donovan’s article, 21 Things that will be Obsolete by 2020, this author is going to create his own list of changes for the American classroom.  So here we go, the top ten items or practices that will disappear by the year 2020:

Routine Classroom Arrangements – gone will be the days of routinized columns of desks in the classroom.

Social Promotion – students will progress for their educational prowess based on competency attainment from pre-established proficiency levels.

Report Cards – good bye to the As, Bs, and Cs; instead graphical interfaces will identify proficiency levels for multiple content areas.

Endless Lectures – instead, students even at the elementary level will have greater and greater input to what is learned.

Structured School Day – far more creative, external learning opportunities will be provided to students.

Theory without Application – theory, models, and concepts will be taught, but immediately reinforced with practical applications.

Lack of Practitioners – the huge number of retired baby boomers will be actively engaged to support the public school student.

Restrictions on Mobile Devices – instead of being viewed as a threat, mobile devices will be used as a tool to engage students.

Hall Monitors – who needs them when students are empowered with greater governance.

Neuro-science – it is time to recognize the stages of development for all learners and engage them at the stage that they are at!

Leading Change, Leading Others, Leading the Way as Educators

Kotter's penguins on the move.

John P. Kotter in his seminal work, Leading Change, postulates that change management is a key to organizational success in the 21^st century.  Recognizing the implications of globalization in the new century, he sees change as a tool that can be harnessed and used to any organization’s advantage, including that of educational institutions.  Kotter describes this management of change as consisting of eight steps:

·        Establishing a Sense of Urgency

·        Creating the Guiding Coalition

·        Developing a Vision and Strategy

·        Communicating the Change Vision

·        Empowering Broad-Based Action

·        Generating Short-term Wins

·        Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change

·        Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture

Kotter argues that the lynchpin for successful change management is leadership.  He goes so far as to say that 70-90 percent of any true transformation is dependent on leadership as compared to management.  So what are the keys to leadership?  According to Kotter, they are establishing direction, aligning people, and motivating and inspiring. 

So you may ask, how does Kotter’s work relate to the role of a teacher in an academic setting?  I would start by considering the definition of a leader.  Aren’t all teachers involved in establishing direction for their students, aligning student work to the curriculum’s learning goals and objectives, and motivating and inspiring students to be the best that they can be?  Yes, teachers are leaders.  And also, aren’t teachers involved in change management on a daily basis?  They work with students to create an environment to instill a desire to learn new concepts, new perspectives and ultimately new knowledge.  Yes, teachers are also change managers.

In recognition of the valuable role teachers perform for all of us, enjoy this short video clip on change management and allow it to instill in you a greater appreciation for all teachers.

Critical Thinking and the American Political System

So when is the last time you associated the term critical thinking with an American politician?  Critical thinking is one of the most important callings for higher education, right?  And if we were to consider the educational background of our politicians, as a group they are certainly highly educated as compared to the rest of the population.  So might one surmise that since there are a large number of highly educated politicians that this would translate into a lot of critical thinking?

Hmmm, . . . I suspect you would agree that politicians are most certainly the recipients of a great deal of critical exposition!  Yes, Congress has the lowest favorability ratings since the Stone Age (or more accurately, the 1960s).  So what gives, why are politicians held in such low esteem if indeed they are highly trained critical thinkers?

Perhaps an example comes into play.  Consider the use of the active versus passive voices in our written documents.  Academia advocates, with rare exception, that the active voice is the way to go.  It is more to the point, more concise, more clear.  But think about it, when was the last time you heard a politician use the active voice?  Let’s bring this into focus with an example; we’ll use a quiz question to press the point.

Select one of the following two statements that you believe would most likely be made by a politician: 

a)      I believe our debt crisis must be resolved through a combination of tax increases and service cuts, or

b)      Tax increases and service cuts must be used to reduce the debt crises.

Yes, the politician would more than likely choose option “b.”  Using the passive voice is so great when you want to muddy the water, avoid blame, and offer a long-winded pronouncement that keeps things nice and vague. 

So what is the learning point from this conversation?  Perhaps it is that our environments can impact how some of the tools gained from our college educations are actually used in the workplace.  It is not only the politician who has mastered the use of the passive voice, but it is the federal bureaucrat as well.  Avoiding the use of the active voice has been used as a shield for many years by a remarkable number of federal employees.  Perhaps partly in response to this disparity between the public’s expectation for clear language and their reality when engaging the bureaucracy, President Obama signed the Plain Writing Act of 2010.  This law requires that federal agencies use "clear Government communication that the public can understand and use."  So will the American political system successfully navigate the rocky shoals of intransigence that resides in many federal agencies?  We will see, but perhaps most telling will be the role the trainers of this new federal law take in facilitating not only the skill but also the human and organizational infrastructure to support this change effort.  The purpose of education and training should therefore be more than the acquisition of learning, it should also focus on learning outcomes as a part of meeting the strategic goals of public policy.

A Blended Learning Toolkit

The MDE-Lounge can come in handy.  Not only does it foster a sense of community; or should I say “social presence” in CoL parlance, but it is also a great way to discover new and handy resources.  One of the more recent posts in the lounge mentioned a blended learning toolkit.  I was prompted to check it out because last week while I was listening to the CBS Evening News there was the mention of blended learning.  This particular news segment focused on how the current downturn in the economy is negatively impacting school districts, but what especially sparked my interest was the interview with a principal from central Pennsylvania.  During this interview the principal mentioned that blended learning might be at least one creative way to address student learning needs in an environment where he didn’t expect any increase in funds for the foreseeable future.  Wow, blended learning to the rescue?!  While I am certainly not convinced that blended learning is “the” solution for all our ills in public education (nor am I implying that the principal thought this either), it certainly begs the question, What easy tools are available to implement blended learning? Well, the MDE-Lounge came to the rescue.

The toolkit I am referring to is titled The Blended Learning Toolkit and is a product of the University of Central Florida and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.  This web-based product is open source and is funded by the Next Generation Learning Challenges organization under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.  Sound familiar?  Yes, many of our readings in OMDE-610 have been provided from The Theory and Practice of Online Learning, an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons License.

The Toolkit offers a blog for user postings, a process section to help build your own blended course, effective practices, evaluation methodologies, faculty development, further research, and most valuable to me, a good number of model courses so you can actually experience some of these great products.  Go ahead, check out the site here:  http://blended.online.ucf.edu/. Although not all the courses are available to American users because of copyright restrictions from other countries, there are still many options to choose, particularly from the University of Central Florida.  One of my favorite sample courses is provided with a short introductory video by the instructor, Dr. M.C. Santana, who teaches a class on visual communication theory.  Check it out here:  http://engage.ucf.edu/v/p/pb6fvtW

Just listening to this short introductory clip makes you want to take her course, doesn’t it!  Feel free to “tool around” other classes and see what you think; another great one is provided by a philosophy professor from Yale, I’ll let you dig for this one on your own.

So is blended learning “the” solution for public schools at a time of diminishing financial support?  I am hardly prepared to make the leap and say it is, but certainly public educators should explore its capabilities in recognition that many of our students are super cyber-savvy customers. 

Connectivism, Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Semantic Web

Kop and Hill (2008) discuss the potential of connectivism as a learning theory. Built on the behaviorist, cognitivist and constructivist theories, Kop and Hill state that there is an alignment among these three validated theories and connectivism. Despite this, I continue to contend that connectivism is a valuable pedagogical tool and yet not sufficiently supported to be a learning theory.

As I was posting on our week #5 conference earlier today I started to consider the use of Bloom’s Taxonomy and how it may apply to Kerr’s (2007) contention that “knowledge is not learning or education” (p. 7). I conferenced with one of my classmates on how the levels of intellectual behavior in the Bloom Taxonomy could be applied to Kerr’s aforementioned quote. I argued that while repetition is a valuable learning tool as contended by the classmate, this learning approach would likely only address the most basic learning behaviors in the Bloom Taxonomy. I felt this was a rather easy argument to make, but because of my lack of prior academic background in education, I decided to explore the Bloom Taxonomy further. As a part of this research I discovered the work of Andrew Churches. Churches (2011) recognizes the original work of Benjamin Bloom in 1956 as well as the subsequent work by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl in 2001 which updated the taxonomy and the concommitant defining verbs for each level.

I then discovered a still newer taxonomy for Bloom’s work, that of Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. This was a bit of a revelation to me, not so much because of the taxonomy itself, but because of its application to connectivism and the Semantic Web. While not changing any of the levels from the 2001 version, this updated taxonomy alters the associated defining terms so they are more applicable to the web environment. As an example, the 2001 verbs include define, duplicate, list, memorize, recall, repeat, reproduce while the digital terms are social networking, social bookmarking, googling, searching, and bullet pointing.

While the uses of the different definitions are obvious, what I found most interesting is the similar way in which the Bloom Taxonomy and constructivist learning proposed theory provide the same pedagogical approach for the web environment. In both cases the approaches represent the dynamic nature of educational resources and the provision of valuable new tools for both the learner and educator. I found it powerful to recognize that a variety of educational tools can function to address the same purpose, i.e., improved pedagogical outcomes.

References:

Educational Origami. (2011). Blooms Digital Taxonomy. Retrieved from http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+Digital+Taxonomy

Kerr, B. (2007). Msg. 1, The invisibility problem. Online Connectivism Conference: University of Monitoba. Retrieved from: http://Itc.umanitoba.ca/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=12

Kop, R. & Hill, A. (2008). Connectivism: Learning theory of the future or vestige of the past? In The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 9(3), 1-13.