Things have been exceptionally busy around the ILC these days.  Of course, most of the commotion concerns Sakai, but many other things are happening as well.  In the last few weeks, we’ve had excellent Teaching Workshops and Seminars on Designing Effective Instruction (Bret Webb), Alternative Assessment (Christine Rinne), Assessing Integrative Learning (Cecelia Martin), an interdisciplinary panel discussion on Using Writing to Teach Critical Thinking (Chris Freed, Nicole Amare, and Don Mosley) and, most recently, Classroom Instructional Techniques (Jeanne Maes).

We have also had workshops on technologies such as Camtasia Studio, Camtasia Relay, and Developing Websites with WordPress.  It’s worth noting that this newsletter site, as well as the ILC main site, the ILC Events page, and the South Alabama Conference on Teaching and Learning site were all built using WordPress.

Speaking of CoTL.  The Second Annual South Alabama Conference on Teaching and Learning is coming up in less than six weeks. It will be on May 14-15 on the USA Campus. We will have excellent keynote speakers in Saundra McGuire and Mark Milliron, approximately 40 oral presentations, a networking lunch, and an “evening before” reception featuring posters (and free drink tickets). We want this year to be even more successful than last year, to the point that we’ll have to find a bigger venue.

And the best thing is that registration is free for USA faculty if you pre-register by April 30.  You can register here.

Speaking of Teaching & Learning.  It was recently announced that our QEP project for SACS will be “collaborative learning.”  One of the fundamental aspects of collaborative learning is that it requires the instructor to give up some control of the course.  This is, admittedly, one of the hardest aspects of it, and I would imagine I have heard at least a dozen faculty over the last couple of weeks talk about how they would like to do more innovative things in the classroom but they have so much material to cover that they just don’t have time.

My suggestion is that you think about the material that must be “covered” in your next class session and then consider how much of that is material your students can only learn directly from your mouth, from nowhere or no one else.  That amount will vary, of course, but in most cases there should be plenty of time left, both inside and outside of class, for more active and innovative, student-centered learning experiences.

It is important to keep in mind that your compulsion to “cover” everything stems from a perceived obligation about your teaching, when, in fact, the real obligation should be to your students’ learning.

Be mindful of the difference.

And now on to Sakai.  One of the coolest things about Sakai is that we are always getting new features and tools.  In the last few weeks, you may have noticed that when you create a new Assignment, you now have the option to use Turnitin.  All you have to do is check the box.  No more setting up classes or worrying about Class IDs or enrollment passwords.  When the student submits an assignment, it is run through the Turnitin service automatically.  You have direct access to the originality report without even having to set up a Turnitin account.

You may have also noticed a tool called Meetings in the list of available tools.  The Meetings tool allows you to hold synchronous web conferences inside your course using the open source BigBlueButton service.  With BigBlueButton, you can share your desktop, audio, and webcam video.

We are piloting an online test proctoring service called ProctorU, and the Respondus Lockdown Browser, which prevents students from leaving their browser window or even right-clicking during exams, will be available soon.  We are also reevaluating our clicker system, and one of the prerequisites of any new system we choose will be a seamless integration with Sakai.

Most importantly, however, especially given the new policy that all faculty must be certified in Sakai, is that Sakai 101 Certification is now available in multiple formats.  We offer at least one full on-campus Sakai 101 workshop a week during the semester, and we will continue that pace during the summer as well.  Sakai 101 is also available in the form of online training modules.  Finally, if you are the kind of person who likes to figure things out on your own, we also offer do-it-yourself certification.  And since there are four parts to Sakai 101, you are free to do some parts one way and other parts another.

I would like to stress, though, that Sakai 101 is based on a set of competencies.  That is, certification is achieved through the demonstration of those competencies, not simply through attendance.  Therefore, to receive certification, whether face-to-face, online, or on your own, you must be able to show that you can do all of things required.  The list of competencies is available here.

For more information on either of these options, click here.

Over 230 faculty and staff have already achieved Sakai 101 Certification, over 100 more have attended at least one on-campus workshop, and almost 100 have enrolled in Sakai 101 online.

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Sometimes life goes full circle, and in some ways that describes Gurupreet Khalsa’s path to her position as Lead Designer for the Innovation in Learning Center (ILC).  In this role, Gurupreet leads the team of graduate assistants who work in the ILC.  She coordinates schedules, assigns tasks, prepares reports, and participates in strategic planning sessions with other key members of the ILC leadership team.   She became Lead Designer in January of 2011—just in time for the Sakai transition initiative.

Gurupreet graduated from Davidson High School in Mobile where her family has lived since she was in the ninth grade.  She then completed her bachelor’s degree in English and History at the University of Montevallo.  Gurupreet and her husband, a career science teacher, lived in Seattle, India, and Los Angeles while raising their two daughters.  During those years, she taught English, primarily in middle school.  During her career as a teacher, Gurupreet earned her National Board Certification in English, became a Fellow of the National Writing Project, and was an adjunct faculty member in the Charter College of Education at Cal State.  She is an active member of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and has been a frequent presenter at the NCTE annual conventions.

When the need arose to help care for her father here in Mobile, Gurupreet moved “back home” where she was accepted into the doctoral foundations track in Instructional Design and Development (IDD) here at USA.  After beginning her program of study in IDD in 2009, Gurupreet became a member of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) and presented at a roundtable at the AECT conference in Jacksonville last year.  She and other IDD team members have had a presentation on learning management system transition strategies accepted for this summer’s Ed Media conference in Denver.

As you might expect, Gurupreet is an avid reader.  While she reads across a wide range of genres and authors, her current favorite author is Neal Stephenson.  She is looking forward to some enjoyable reading time on the waterfront deck of her new home which has just been completed in the Lloyd Station area.

Upon earning her Ph.D. (anticipated Spring of 2014), Gurupreet plans to seek a position as a professor in teacher education.  Thus, the circle will be complete.  Having begun her own education to become a teacher here in Alabama, she will have earned her credentials to educate others in the science of teaching here as well.

by Dr. Doug Marshall (Sociology)

Let me clarify right up front that my Luddism is but relative. I write not to argue that technology has no place in higher education, nor that a live lecture course is always and everywhere superior to its electronic alternatives. Neither do I write to defend that bastardization of the lecture, the mere recitation of aged notes into ever-newer generations of student notebooks. What I do contend – as both an experienced college teacher and as a social scientist – is that the venerable lecture course must retain a central place in higher education, including here at South. For all of its wonders, educational technology is most significant as a means of augmenting, not replacing, the live classroom experience.

The crux of my argument is that the purpose of college education isn’t only, or even primarily, about the mere transfer of practical information or skills – though these are among its more tangible fruits. What universities have historically been uniquely able, and
necessary, to provide is something more fundamental: The socialization of students into an intellectual culture, cultivating in them both the appetite for knowledge and the critical habits of mind with which to analyze, evaluate, and use it. The goal is to equip the student to partake fully of human culture, to participate fully in human society, and by doing so, to perpetuate human civilization.

Though it certainly includes the transmission of information (and, perhaps more than many, I would maintain the importance of such dissemination), socialization is a much larger process that relies upon older and more fundamental mechanisms. Having evolved in our decidedly non-virtual ancestral milieu, such mechanisms capitalize on the states evoked in us by the unmediated copresence of other human beings. Anyone who has decided to attend a live play instead of staying home to watch TV, who goes to church instead of listening to the service on the radio, or who partakes of a live concert rather than plugging in their ipod understands well the subjective experiential chasm between actual copresence with the performers (and, just as importantly, other audience members) and the mediated and asynchronous facsimile that technology makes possible. This subjective contrast reflects, and is a direct function of, the two experiences’ differential potentials as occasions for socialization.

Because it borders upon my own work on ritual processes, I am tempted to dissect the live experience into the multiple mechanisms (e.g. autonomic arousal, emotional contagion, deindividuation, etc.) by which it facilitates socialization.  But since this would quickly exceed the bounds of this newsletter (and most readers’ interest), allow me to oversimplify their cumulative effect with my own gloss on what is unique about the live lecture experience. What a good lecture has in common with the theatre, religious rituals, and concerts, and what gives all of these experiences their distinctive power to change the way people see their world, is the sense that something special and utterly unique is being created here and now.

Despite the script, bulletin, sheet music, or outline that roughly sets the course of events, what actually transpires is a joint function of these guidelines, the instructor’s mood and interests, the audience’s attitudes and knowledge, and, most importantly, a particular moment in social and cultural history. The analogy I’ve made many times is to improvisational jazz, in which the lead sheet can be almost incidental to the music being made. The exciting sense that something brand new is being created ricochets and intensifies among all present, creating an immediacy and lasting impression that is hard to obtain in any other way.

To those who argue that because students today spend their lives doing everything else in an on-line environment, education must do the same or be left behind, I must take exception. It is the very fact that everything else comes to them through the same electronic portal that makes it so important that education not. The live experience makes it clear that what we’re providing is not just another channel of “content” always available for “consumption.”  More cynically, we must recognize the reality that in an on-line environment, we as teachers are competing head-to-head with every single member of our student’s social networks, with entire industries of determined commercial interests, and even flocks of angry birds for our student’s limited (and arguably shrinking) attention. I’m sorry to say it, but we as a whole are not going to win that contest.

To be sure, most students will eventually watch or read their way through the class materials, contribute the requisite posts to the discussion board, and pass their exams. But research suggests that they will do so using tiny chunks of attention wrested from other, more compelling on-line attractions (some research suggests that when they can, students check their email or facebook wall 30-40 times an hour). There is a real possibility that the resulting lack of experience with the discipline of sustaining one’s attention for the purpose of understanding a concept, solving a problem, or completing an assignment exacts serious if hard-to-measure cognitive costs over the long run. For our purposes, it is safe to say that thus reduced to just another asynchronous mediated experience among many others, the on-line classroom has a reduced chance of producing a lasting impact on students.

Let me leave you with one last thought. As its critics have often pointed out, the University model has changed relatively little over the last few centuries. For all of its well-known foibles, shortcomings, and absurdities, it has undeniably fostered staggering progress in human knowledge, technology, culture, lifespan, and social values (Yes, I know, it’s awfully easy to identify all the new horrors it has also spawned, and I’m hardly modernity’s cheerleader. But ask yourself, honestly, would you really rather have lived a thousand years ago? Five hundred? Two hundred?). In short, it is a model of higher education that has demonstrated its efficacy over the long haul. We must understand that to the extent that we abandon it for an untried alternative, we do so at ours and our culture’s peril.

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Davidson has over twenty-five years of experience in computer programming.  He spent eleven of those years at the USA Academic Computing Center and another four years as manager of IT for the Mitchel Cancer Institute. When asked how he has handled the everyday responsibilities of ironing out the wrinkles in the Sakai environment, Davidson’s advice is “start early and keep up because the work only compounds if you do otherwise.”

When looking to the future, Davidson’s goal is to provide the best possible support for the use of Sakai by faculty and students.  He hopes to maintain quick response time for any individual issues that arise with using the new system.  Even though his job keeps him behind the scenes, Davidson enjoys interacting with students and faculty to help them become more comfortable with the format of the new system.  He hopes users will have an overall positive experience with using Sakai and implementing new technologies in online courses.

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For the next couple of years, one of our primary tasks here at the ILC will be the introduction of the Sakai CLE into the USA environment, and a great deal of our efforts will be focused on training the University community on how to use the system as a teaching and learning tool.  We’ll also be emphasizing Sakai’s value in supporting other collaborative activities.

Our basic Sakai training certification workshop series, Sakai 101, will be the cornerstone of our Sakai training efforts.  It is a four-part series, with each two-hour part covering a set of basic competencies that are vital for teaching in Sakai.

Part 1: Getting Started in Sakai provides a basic conceptual overview of Sakai and includes information on how to login, an overview of the system, an introduction to basic tasks such as how to add a syllabus and use the Resources tool.  It covers all of the things you need to know before tackling the more advanced competencies in the later parts.  Therefore, we ask that you attend Part 1 before attending any of the other parts.

Part 2: Creating and Delivering Content covers how to use the Lessons and Assignments tools for organizing and delivering course content.

Part 3: Assessment and Grading Mechanics covers the use of the Tests & Quizzes tool and the Gradebook.

Part 4: Working with Communication Tools covers tools such as Announcements, Calendar, Messages, Email Archive, and Forums, as well as Group management.

These two-hour workshops are offered individually, in paired four-hour blocks (i.e., Parts 1 & 2 on a Monday afternoon and Parts 3 & 4 on the following Wednesday afternoon), or in an all-day format.  An online version will also be made available soon.

Also, since Sakai 101 is competency-based, if you are unable or don’t wish to attend workshops and prefer to learn on your own, you can still get credit for all of the Sakai 101 competencies:  you just need to perform them in a course or project site and show us.  The competencies for each part can be seen here.

As of this writing, seventy-five faculty and staff have successfully completed the Sakai 101 training course, and over 170 have completed at least one of the four parts.

Our efforts are not solely limited to Sakai 101, however.  We also offer workshops on technologies that are related to Sakai (e.g., Respondus exam management, Kaltura media management, BigBlueButton web conferencing, and WebDAV file management).  In addition, we are offering a number of one-hour teaching seminars where we and other faculty members share teaching strategies and experiences with various tools in Sakai.

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Indeed, some of you are probably starting to wonder if a strange Sakai fetishism has taken over the ILC.  Our official position is that it only seems that way.  We still do the same kinds of things that PETAL and the OLL have always done:  We’re just doing more of it all around.

We are offering a significant number of non-Sakai Technology Workshops on things like Camtasia Studio and Relay, Blogs, Audio/Video Chat, Interactive Whiteboards, and Clickers.  We are also offering at least two Teaching Seminars per week on too many topics to list here. And many of these have nothing to do with technology.  Just recently we had an excellent session led by Doug Marshall (Sociology) that made a compelling case for the preservation of face-to-face instruction, and we hope to have an article on just that in an upcoming issue of the ILC eNewsletter.

We have also added a series of two-hour Teaching Workshops on topics like Collaborative Learning, Alternative Assessment, Instructional Strategies, and Critical Thinking.  These, like our Teaching Seminars, will be led by experienced faculty.

To view our entire Fall Schedule and register for events, please visit http://usailc.org/events/

We are starting to plan our Spring Schedule and the 2nd Annual South Alabama Conference on Teaching and Learning, so if you have any suggestions for topics, please let us know.”

Finally, our Fall schedule got off to a great start with that day-long series of teaching seminars  that we, for lack of a better name, playfully called the “Event Formerly Known as PowerPETAL.”  It was, once again, a tremendous success.  There were 64 attendees over the course of the day, with each attendee averaging about 4 events each.  We are already starting to look ahead to January when we’ll do it again, but we have to come up with a new name.  We’d love to hear what you think we should call it.

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While in many ways it is simply a plug for his keynote address at the Campus Technology 2011 Conference, a snapshot of his perspective on technology and the classroom can be seen in this month’s Campus Technology magazine.

To see his interview with Mary Grush, click here.

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The ILC will provide the same kinds of programs and services that each of the former units have performed, with a more coherent and unified sense of direction.  For instance, what used to be PETAL Teaching Seminars will now be ILC Seminars, and what used to be Weekly OLL Workshops (or “WOWs”) will now be ILC Workshops.

For the time being, these activities will be held in the same places they have been:  ILC Seminars will take place in the old PETAL space in Room 312 of the University Library, while ILC Workshops will be in the graduate computer lab 3302 in the College of Education.  After the completion of Shelby Hall next year, it is expected that the ILC will move somewhere on the main campus.

Dr. David Johnson, Senior Vice-President for Academic Affairs, announced the creation of the ILC in early March, stating that “Combining faculty development, e-learning, and learning management system administration will limit duplication of resources, create greater staff efficiencies, and provide targeted support to faculty  and staff in what is becoming an increasingly complex instructional system.”

This combination of services will become increasingly important as the University begins its transition to the new Sakai online learning management system and implements new initiatives in preparation for the upcoming SACS visit.

As part of the Sakai transition, the ILC will implement a multi-tiered training program, a dedicated blog, an advisory group, and an early adopters group.  Other initiatives will include policies and training related to course redesign, multimedia development, accessibility issues, copyright & fair use, and New Faculty development programs.

The ILC is directed by Dr. Jack Dempsey and will oversee the University’s initiatives to focus on ways that technology can positively impact student outcomes.  As USA moves forward with innovative approaches to teaching and learning we are enthusiastic about the potential for positioning the university as an educational technology leader.

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The conference will feature oral and poster presentations from faculty at USA and other area institutions.  These peer-reviewed presentations cover topics such as Redesigning Courses, Different Approaches in the Classroom, Creating Effective Course Assignments, and Teaching Writing.

The conference will also feature two distinguished keynote speakers:  Maryellen Weimer and Sarah “Intellagirl” Robbins.

Dr. Weimer, professor emeritus of teaching and learning at Penn State University and 2005 winner of Penn State’s Milton S. Eisenhower award for distinguished teaching, will speak on “Keeping Teaching Fresh and Invigorated.”  Dr. Robbins, director of emerging technologies at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and an expert in virtual worlds and Web 2.0 technologies, will address “Successful Learning Tech Integration: A Guaranteed Way to Make it Work Right Every Time!”

The conference will also feature a panel discussion with both keynote speakers and award-winning teachers from the USA faculty.

The conference  is free to all USA faculty and graduate students and presenters who registered by May 6. After May 6, the registration fee is $25 for USA faculty and graduate students and $40 for the general public.  Lunch is provided for all who register.

For more information and to register for the conference, visit www.usapetal.net/cotl/


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