As I write this conclusion, it is January and a new semester has begun. Optimism reigns and I arrived at my classroom yesterday confident that the network connectivity issues of Day 1 last fall would be a thing of the past. Of course if you’ve read any of this site, you know better, and as I was standing in front of 80 new students trying to explain this whole “connected learning” thing (and why it didn’t seem to work) our network guru was on the phone with our vendors, trying to figure out why all the campus access points seemed to be dead. Deep breath. Sigh. Oh well. We’ll try again tomorrow.

One of my goals in this whole adventure was to use connected learning tools in virtually every class session, and we managed to do that. Another goal was to identify when and where the tools work best; at this point my opinion is that these tools are okay at streamlining class administration (attendance, etc.) but their real potential lies in enabling new methods of teaching and interaction. These are the applications I hope to try in the current semester.

Someday soon we will reach a point where wireless access to the internet is ubiquitous and, just like electricity and running water, we can assume it is available just because it always is. For students accessing the net via 3G phone, that day (at least at somewhat reduced speeds) has already arrived. For others, we will continue to wrestle with connection issues from time to time, and this will, if nothing else, keep us nimble!

This is where the profound closing line is supposed to go, but I’ve got nothin’. Enjoy the journey, both the ups and the downs.

The Connected Prof

Like many folks, I am still angry at my high school history teachers for taking a potentially rich and interesting topic and reducing it to a meanningless exercise in memorizing dates. In the later years of my life I have come to enjoy history, so I am intent on making our short study of business history interesting and relevant. So, for the first time this semester, we used the iPhones for actual in-class research.

I put my students in teams, and each was assigned a major event from US business history. They had 15 minutes to research their event, including its specifics and its relevance. Finally, each group received two minutes to present their findings, including two relevant pictures (shown via the document camera), to the class. After each group finished I gave a 10 second summary while the next group prepared, and before you knew it we had finished our tour of business history.

How was this different from a typical class? For starters, nobody was a passive observer, since each group had to research a topic. Also, the pressure of presenting, regardless of how short the assignment, provided incentive to get the information right–the students knew that their ability to answer test questions over this material depended entirely on their ability to find relevant information. Finally, with a new speaker appearing every three minutes, it was difficult for listeners to nod off.

As straight-forward as this activity was, I believe this is the direction we should be heading. Today we used connected learning devices in the classroom the same way our students use them outside the classroom every day: to gather and refine information. The ability to move (even just virtually) outside the walls of our academic halls is among the most powerful forces we can bring to bear in the classroom. As students come to us more and more connected, we must take steps to connect our classes as well, otherwise we risk becoming obsolete. And take it from a business professor with a love of business history: the marketplace absolutely loves to replace obsolete providers  ; )

After the quiz, I did the unthinkable and told the students to stow their gizmos, after which we had an old-fashioned class day. In two ways this was great: it was a change of pace from what we usually do, and the kid on the front row didn’t spend the entire day playing an online combat game. As far as the rest of the class, my material was great and my delivery was energetic, but by the time it was over, I was fairly sure it had been a bit of a bust. To be quite honest, I’m afraid I’m becoming accustomed to the interaction I get when we use the iPhone in class. In just a few weeks I think I’ve trained the students to expect something more than just a lecture, and now they see that as somehow inferior. Of course I could be totally wrong, but if you teach you know that there are class days when you just know it didn’t work, and this was one of those days.

By the way, earlier in the week I did identify a new use for the online quizzes: signing up for events. We have done this twice now, and the sign up includes only one question: their name. After the students submit this, I get a standard spreadsheet with the list. Works great for almost anything they need to opt into, and it beats an illegibly scrawled sign-up sheet or a bunch of response e-mails.

Consider this email I received Monday after our quiz:

It is awkward for me to tell you this but I think it is necessary to let you know. This morning, when we were taking the quiz I did not  like the grade that I made and I wanted to figure out what I did wrong so, I  looked back at the questions but to be able to look at the entire quiz I had to answer the questions all over again. When I had answered everything, I was tempted again to see how I did for that second time so I clicked on submit. I just wanted to tell you the truth first before there is any confusion about it. I am really sorry about this confusion and I hope it is not going to have any bad consequences.

Thank you for your understanding and I am sincerely sorry.

Now, without even getting into how much of this is true or false, or what this student’s motives might be, consider that any student in that class could have taken the quiz twice…or worse, just kept the quiz open while we discussed the material in class…or simply waited until after class ended to log on and complete it.

There are several solutions to each of these, but the simplest one involves information which the quiz software logs automatically: completion time. I open the quiz at 10:05 and give my students the password. In the results spreadsheet, I see a list, by time, of when each one logged on and when each one logged off. Typically they all wrap up by 10:12 or 10:15. If I see one who logs off at 10:45, I know he kept the quiz open throughout the class. If I see a student who took it twice (like the one in the email) I know to record the first score and mention to the student that one time per quiz is enough. And if I see a student who first opens the quiz at 1:30 that afternoon, I have a solid case for an academic integrity filing.

Beyond catching these types of events after they occur, there are ways to prevent them. I always use a quiz password, which I provide in class, so a student at home with the textbook can’t complete the quiz. Quizzes can be set to ‘lock out’ at a certain time, so if a student isn’t logged in by 10:10, he won’t be logging in at all. Randomized question order helps with wandering eyes in class, and of course an attentive teacher remains probably the strongest deterrent of all.

In the case of the student who e-mailed, I thanked him for his honesty, I explained that I would have known he took it twice, and I encouraged him to take quizzes only one time from here on out. I’m not sure if that was the right response or not; but in cases like that I am rarely sure I did the right thing. Maybe someday…

Why was he doing this? As an undergraduate physics major (I only lasted one semester) I might have thought he was saying, “Ha! You’ll never get this stuff.” But today, just let this picture sum up for you the realities of using technology, especially new technology, in the classroom.

Our tech people have been great in this whole initiative. Imagine the challenges involved in trying to set up one of our auditoriums so that 600 people can simultaneously hit the wi-fi access points, which makes my little class of 70 look pretty simple. Even though our room was already set up to handle around 100 connections, today we got an upgrade which takes the capacity up considerably.  I’m not sure why we got this, but I do know that in the days after the upgrade (I’m writing this in hindsight) our connectivity improved markedly.

Why? I have no idea.

The bottom line is that the specs on our original setup were more than adequate, yet the real-life performance wasn’t perfect. In my experience, technology likes to stick out its tongue at humans. One of my favorite tech videos features Bill Gates, on stage introducing Windows 98, only to have the system crash (click the photo to view it). I’ve always wondered if that poor guy on the right just walked off the stage and fell on his own sword, or if he waited around for the company to fire him.

As you watch that clip, pay attention to that guy, and you’ll know exactly how I have felt more than once this semester. When things don’t work, it’s embarrassing, it’s frustrating, and it interferes with doing what I’m there to do, which is teach. And the people who matter are staring at you, wondering what you’ll do next. So when it all falls apart, I try to just smile, say “Oh well,” and move on.

How do the students respond? Amazingly well. In fact, I think in some ways a professor who uses technology in the classroom is a little like a poodle that can stand up on its hind legs and dance. He may not do it all that well, and it may not always even work, but folks seem to appreciate the effort.

By the way, all you Mac aficionados who are smirking at Bill’s blue screen debacle can see Steve Jobs enjoying several of his own ugly moments in the glare of the spotlights by clicking the shot below. Tech snafus are not limited to one brand of hardware or software.

We took a quiz today using Survey Gizmo; I e-mailed the link to the class just before starting time, then provided the password in class. Note to self: send the link earlier in the day so they all have it already resident on their devices. This just saves the hassle of two or three having to find it during class time.

For me, one of the huge drawbacks of large class sections is the difficulty in gauging how the students are doing. In particular, my first-semester freshmen are at some risk of getting lost in the crowd, falling behind, and giving up. So after the quiz, I gave them a simple one-question poll: “How you doin?” The question was about their general college experience, and the response choices were:

1. Great! Flying along!
2. Pretty good. A few bumps
3. Fair. Not sure what I’m doing
4. Not so hot. Looking like a rough landing
5. Epic Fail. Not at all what I planned

As I expected, the responses ran the gamut (note: what is a gamut, anyway?), with “2″ being the most popular choice. This exercise didn’t tell me anything about any particular student (actually, a close look at a few faces probably would have let me pick out the ones who chose “4″ or “5″), but it let us, as a group, talk about success and failure, frustration, caring for one another, and other topics. It also let me look them in the eye and tell them to hang in there (and invite them to come see me if I could help them).

Is this as good as sitting around the table with five students and knowing all of them personally and well? Not even close. But large classes are a reality, and anything that helps me help them (and bridge the teacher-student gap) is welcome.

So how you doin?

However, my students in the connected learning class did not suffer too terribly from my absence (I’d like to think that they missed my stunning good looks and my rapier wit, but these are both doubtful as well).

This podcast class was a step or two up from my previous effort. I used very basic tools: Powerpoint will let you record narration (annotation) and custom timings; you basically play through your slides and say what you would say in class, making minor adjustments since you are not able to get feedback and answer questions. Once you have the annotation recorded, you save the file as a presentation and upload it someplace the students can find it. This one took me about an hour to prep, format, and record. A Powerpoint file saved as a presentation will play on almost any platform, so it’s a fairly universal format.

To close the circle and give them something to actually do (as opposed to just watching TV) I created an exercise over the chapter using Google forms. The students downloaded a file and submitted their answers automatically. Once again I had unusual problems with Google docs; about 27 students submitted successfully, 7 tried and failed, and 1 turned it in late (since it’s time stamped, there is not arguing there). Later I learned of others who could not submit successfully. My latest theory is that Safari doesn’t play nicely with Google docs, but I haven’t dug into this enough to know the truth yet.

For a class where I was nowhere around, I felt good about the material we covered. The students who attempted it were able to learn the concepts, then actually use them. This is a solid step up from a straight lecture, and two steps up from a day off. But as soon as the students start saying, “Can we just do the rest of the semester by podcast?” I’ll know I’m in trouble.

To avoid being one of those folks who starts by saying, “Well, I don’t really have anything much to tell you,” and proceeds to prove it for the next 40 minutes, let me just hit the high points. We tried the word cloud again, and this time it still didn’t work; that’s two strikes, and in my league that is probably enough. We took a quiz the old-fashioned way, I showed a couple of video clips in my lesson, and I sent them on their way.

Today was one of those classes that reminds you of the sad truth: no matter how hard you work to be  a dynamic, powerful Superman in the classroom, you will still have days where you are simply a somewhat uninteresting Clark Kent.  As you adopt connected learning tools, you will still have one foot in the old way of doing things. That straddling of two worlds can be both a liability and an asset. Oddly enough, I have found that an occasional day of old-style teaching actually adds variety to what I’m doing. And that’s a good thing, because all this new-fangled stuff is taking a lot of time to put together!

If you’re thinking about trying this whole connected learning thing, you are going to need one key thing, and it’s NOT technical expertise. In fact it’s not really any kind of knowledge at all. If you want to give this a shot, you must, MUST come to the experience with a willingness to fail, not on a small scale, but on the scale of a natural disaster. And you must know that the day will surely arrive when nothing you have planned will work, and you have to be ready to move forward and improvise in spite of it. In short: be brave, or it will never work.

OK, if you’re still reading, here is how Day 26 went. Now that we had figured out the formula for giving quizzes on the iPhone I was ready to just roll right on. Before class started I emailed all my students a link to the quiz (as I always do) and I told them to visit the link and launch the quiz (as I always do). They took out their phones, and after about 30 seconds, one of them said, “I can’t get to email.” He was only the first, and soon it was evident that more than half the class could not get to the link. What to do, what to do….I took this opportunity to share with them the gospel of periodic rebooting, and had them all restart their phones. No help, no change. Hmmm. At this point there weren’t too many options; we threw out this quiz and jumped into the class. Then, it got even better. My phone would not connect to Responseware. I tried it twice with no luck. Others were having similar problems (and it’s bad form to blame the students when you can’t even do what you are telling them to do).

At this point I was 0 for 2 and not feeling too confident. We plunged into the class anyway and I did my best to wow them with my good looks, astounding intelligence, and razor wit. You already know how that went over….Class was dull, even to me, and that’s a very bad sign. Maybe it was the time of the year; maybe it was the teacher’s unease after his first two tries fell flat. Maybe it was just dumb luck, but I came back to my office feeling like I needed to quit teaching and go back to school. If you teach, you probably know the sort of day I’m talking about. I eventually attributed at least part of the problem to the fact that Fall Break was just one day away and most of the students had already shipped their minds back home for the weekend. But I also put a big chunk of it on my own doorstep.

My experiment this semester has been designed to ask both “What can we do with these tools” and “What should we do with these tools.” At the midway point, I’m starting to think that the connected learning tools are not at their best as “efficiency improvers.” I say this simply because we have had so many technical issues related to attendance checking and quiz administration that I think becoming more efficient in these ways may be a mixed bag (at least with current technological limitations). Perhaps these tools are, as someone once described a golf club, “singularly ill-suited to the task” of making class administration more efficient.

On the other hand, I am coming to think that these tools hold almost limitless potential for expanding our interaction with our students. Without sounding too much like a “fan boy” I can say that I find it  hard to imagine that these tools will not be widely used in higher education within five years. Why? Because the ability to call up virtually any fact, or contact virtually any person from virtually any place on the planet renders the distinction between the classroom and the “real” world largely meaningless. The expectation that students memorize lengthy lists of dates and locations becomes harder to justify when that information is instantly available (for free) at any time. Note that I’m not saying the students shouldn’t learn these things; I am merely stating that our concept of ‘learning’ a subject is going to have to change as our access to information changes.

Sorry, we’ve veered off into the land of philosophizing. I give myself a big fat ‘D’ for this assignment, though in the words of one of my students, “I put in ‘C’ effort.” See you after Fall Break.

Ironically, if we take that model and extend it to its ultimate possible degree, we reach a point where a team of professors could spend two or three years moving an entire degree plan online, at which point they could all retire (if they are old enough) or just file for unemployment (if they are not), while the course was taught by adjuncts, grad students, or someone else for the next ten or twenty years. This is the outcome which troubles professors across the nation right now, and it remains to be seen how it will play out. Of course that topic is far too large for us to consider here, so let’s leave that depressing thought and move to something more immediate.

It seems fairly obvious that many elements of a course can be delivered without the physical presence of a professor, and one of the simplest ways to do this is with a podcast. Since I had to be across campus during class on Day 25, I simply created a podcast of the day’s material. It was not fancy or technically sophisticated, but it got the job done. The students watched a short clip of info on our topic, then completed an exercise I placed online for them. I also used Google forms to let them sign up for a meal at our house, and tried to use Google maps to give them directions, though this seemed to have some issues related to viewing the maps on the iPhone.

There are countless ways to create a podcast; for this first attempt I simply used screen capture software to grab my class slides while I provided voice-over. The result was a fairly small video file which the students could download and watch at their convenience. The biggest downside of this approach is the lack of interactivity, while the biggest strength is mobility and scheduling flexibility.

I don’t have any desire to move to podcasting all my classes at this point; my sense is that the students who choose a 4-year residential university (and who pay private tuition) have already chosen face-to-face learning as their default mode. Having said that, I love the ability to still deliver content on those 3-4 class days each term when other job responsibilities take me out of the classroom. I can also see  opportunities to recognize that other events in our university calendar are part of that residential experience, and to offer alternatives to class attendance on days when many of my students are otherwise distracted.

If you want to listen to some high quality audio podcasts, you can visit my good friend’s site (Google “stewllenium radio”). This guy teaches financial management and has recorded an entire library of supplemental material which helps his students get some of the tougher concepts he covers. He also has a great 3-part podcast on buying a car, which is practical for anyone. His students are fortunate, since they get him both in class and also outside if they need it.

My plan for next semester is to create integrated class experiences for all the days I am gone, including a podcast , an activity, and a deliverable to be completed on their own time. Hopefully I’ll still be writing and can share with you what works (and what doesn’t).