Learning In a Flat World

Day Two at the NMC Future of Education Retreat was just as amazing as the first night, if not more so.  Take one hundred colleagues from higher education, K12, museums, and corporate technology companies and have them think out loud for a day…that was the process at this retreat.  Just look at the sticky notes on the board to the left:

Lev Gonick started us off this morning with a description of work Case Western Reserve has done to extend into the Cleveland community.  The problem was framed with three numbers.  Kids in Cleveland who attain a degree – 8%.  Women in Cleveland with diabetes – 33%.  Families in suburban Cleveland in poverty – 57%.  His premise – if everyone in the community (not just inside four walls of institution) had unlimited bandwidth, what opportunities would now be possible?  Could an institution of higher education begin to impact health, poverty, social good, or the local issues any community has?   If bandwidth is infinite and everyone has a mobile device, would institutions of learning change their structure?  David again captured the discussion.

Rueben Puentadura then walked us through two hundred thousand years of human history, mapping out the need for socialization, mobility, visualization, storytelling, and finally gaming.  This was mapped to emerging technologies from the past eight or so Horizon Reports.  More discussion around the table, resulting in:

We then shifted gears to discuss transformations.  Over the course of the rest of the day, we worked in groups to visualize changes and emerging trends.  What surfaced was something David Sibbet termed VUCA – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.  The image below backs that up!

The social media was very busy.  Using Archivist, I captured 613 tweets from today, as well as this social graph of twitter users of the hashtag #NMChz:

Obviously, it will take days to process what happened over ten hours today…but this gives a feel.  The energy level in the room never dropped, and I felt very lucky to swim in this stream with these amazing colleagues!

Related articles

• What is the Future of Education? (bwatwood.edublogs.org)
• Our First Session at the NMC Horizon Retreat (bwatwood.edublogs.org)

I’ll reflect more tomorrow…but this evening was fascinating.  Malcolm Brown of Educause was our initial thought leader, and in 6 minutes, he suggested we look at the Horizon Report as a process of design thinking, working on “wicked problems.”.  David Sibbet then facilitated our initial session trying to capture some hindsights about the Horizon Project process.  We did small group discussions first, then as each group shared and built on the conversation of others, an amazing visual representation emerged. The first picture shows David in action, while the other two capture the drawings that emerged.

(…and we will continue doing this tomorrow through eight more thought leaders.)

An interesting start….

I have no real idea … just some notions, but I am lucky enough to be attending a neat retreat focused on just this question.

I am attending a retreat hosted by the New Media Consortium, which publishes the Horizon Report annually.  With well over one million downloads and 27 translations in the past ten years, the NMC Horizon Report series annually charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning, research, creative inquiry, and information management.  I was on the Board of Advisors for last year’s K-12 report, and found the experience rewarding and enriching.  Some forty of us from around the world examined a range of technologies and focused in on those we felt collectively would emerge in the next year, two to three years and five years down the road.

This year will be the tenth year for the Horizon Project, so Larry Johnson, CEO of the NMC, and Lev Gonick, VP and CIO at Case Western Reserve University and Board Chair Emeritus of the NMC, have invited one hundred of us from current and past boards of advisors to come together January 24-26, 2012 in Austin to reflect on what technology will mean to educational institutions in the next decade.  The are calling this retreat “The Future of Education.”

Their goal as stated at the above retreat website is to “…produce a 30-page-ish report that does two things:  One is to capture meta-learnings drawn from our research of ten years into the uptake of technology, which technologies seem to be “sticky” and persist, which are generative (in the sense of shaping perceptions that allow subsequent technologies to take traction) — and how to know one from the other. The second is to use those meta-learnings to frame a set of recommendations for strategic technology planning to inform the next decade of decision making across all sectors of education.”

One of those “sticky” persisitent uses of technology in education is the online education movement.  This past week, my colleagues and I at the VCU Center for Teaching Excellence launched our first totally online faculty development initiative for faculty who want to teach online.  Eighteen of our colleagues are in the first pilot of this online “course”…though course is not quite the right word.  We have crafted a learning environment and have 18 fellow faculty along for the ride.  They have done well this first week getting to know one another, researching the pedagogy behind online teaching, and in some cases, struggling with learning in an asynchronous environment.

But while I do believe “online” is a part of the future of education at both K-12 and higher education levels, I am not as sure about other aspects, such as terms like:

• course
• degree
• discipline
• professor
• class
• semester
• …the list could go on

Bill Gates and Salman Khan certainly are interjecting some radical ideas about the future of education and the use of online learning…as are others.

So, while I am enjoying the launch of our online faculty development initiative – it follows established models of online course design.  I am looking forward to having my thinking pushed the next three days as we grapple with the future of education and the role technology might play in that future.

{Photo Credit: Mark Chapman, Steve Jervetson}

I have enjoyed two full days at the 2012 Educause Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference in Baltimore.  I previously posted materials from our presentation and my Twitter 2o2 session.  By the way, Skyping Jon Becker in for Twitter 202 went just fine, and Jon added some great observations on the personal, professional, and academic use of Twitter.  Thanks again, Jon, for being a part of this session!

Some overall impressions:

Before they disappear, check out the rich conversation that has  been going on backchannel using the hashtag #marc12.  As of this evening, 818 tweets have been sent.  Jeff Nugent clued us on to The Archivist during our Twitter 202 session this morning, and I just used it to capture these 818 tweets and run some analytics.  Looks like we added quite a few new “tweeps”.  I spotted that Derek Bruff was in the top dozen twitterers for MARC 2012…and he was not even here.  The power of a distributed learning network!

Randy Bass gave a great keynote on “Disrupting Ourselves: Cherished Assumptions, New Designs and Problem of Learning in Higher Ed.”  During his talk, I could not resist shooting a picture with my iPad that showed attendees shooting pictures of Bass’s slides.  As Bud Deihl noted, this was not your granddad’s conference!

Last year, Randy talked about the problem of learning in the post-course era.  His talk yesterday continued this notion of the change needed in higher education.  He talked about courses with low impact versus courses with high impact, and noted that in many cases, those courses with little impact are what we in education call “curriculum”.  The high impact courses are internships, capstone courses, student research and service learning opportunities.

One of the more interesting sessions was by Jim Jorstad, the Director of Educational Technologies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, entitled “Making Teaching and Learning Authentic- Engagement Through Social Media in Politically Charged Times.”  Jim showed how video he filmed of protests in Wisconsin and posted through YouTube and CNN iReports were picked up and widely distributed, which for me was simply another example of distributed networks at work.

Today, Terry Carter and her grad student Jonathon West discussed their student research project.  In “Going Digital: Conducting Student Research in Teams with Web 2.0“, her capstone students used a wiki to collaboratively gather data on a real world problem involving hospital readmissions and literacy, which was cool in and of itself.   What blew everyone away was the student generated digital story at the end to summarize their findings, but also give voice to the patients they interviewed (using actors and Flickr images so as to not violate HIPAA.)

John Shank of Penn State discussed “Learning the Net Generation Way: Reimagining Instruction with Digital Learning Materials.”  A good session for faculty wishing to locate and use digital material, but I thought it was light on “learning” and the so-called Net Generation.  I asked about students building their own digital learning material as a way of learning, and it really was not an area he wished to discuss.  Shucks!

The lunch roundtables were interesting.  I sat in on the Analytics table.  There was a mix of conversation about analytics for academic support, such as recruitment, retention, and logistics underlying academic institutions.  I was more interested in learning analytics at the classroom level.  Of note, an IT member of University of Maryland-Baltimore County noted that his institution would be doing some beta testing of Blackboard’s new analytic service.

That should give you a taste of two days worth of conference.  We wrap up tomorrow and catch the train back to Richmond.

Our entire tech team is here in Baltimore for the Educause Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference.  Bud Deihl, Joyce Kincannon and I are presenting today on our use of online courses to prepare faculty to teach online (with thanks to David McLeod, our CTE Grad Fellow, who helped with the analysis).  Without the words, the slides may not mean alot, but here they are:

Tomorrow, I will be leading an exploratory session on Twitter, while Jeff Nugent will lead a session on polling. Looking forward to the keynotes by Randy Bass and Kathy Humphrey.  Will post again later on my impressions.

At next week’s Educause Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference in Baltimore, I have been asked to lead an “Experience IT” session  on Twitter 202.  Per the program, “…the “Experience IT” format offers a hands-on, highly interactive introduction to newer tools and technologies so you can explore their potential impact in the workplace and classroom and on your professional development. Please bring your laptop or other session-specific technology (such as smartphone or tablet) to the session so you can engage with the presenter…This session will share best practices in using Twitter as a backchannel in conferences and will offer an opportunity to delve deeper into innovative uses of this online application. When you are through with this session we hope you will tweet your observations throughout the rest of the conference”

I have asked one of my Twitter heroes – Jon Becker  – to co-facilitate virtually and join us via Skype and Twitter.  That in itself should make this a fun session.  Per the conference program, the conference hashtag will be #MARC12.  We will also use #twitter202 as a session hashtag.

In getting ready, we have been guided by work done by Derek Bruff.  Four resources of note for using Twitter as a backchannel in a conference:

Derek Bruff, Encouraging a Conference Backchannel on Twitter –
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/encouraging-a-conference-backchannel-on-twitter/30612

Derek Bruff, Instructions to the Twitter Team -
http://derekbruff.com/site/classroom-response-systems/instructions-to-the-twitter-team/

Olivia Mitchell, How to Present While People are Twittering -
http://pistachioconsulting.com/twitter-presentations/

Ross, C. Terras, M. Warwick, C. and Welsh, A. (2011). “Enabled Backchannel: Conference Twitter Use by Digital Humanists. Journal of Documentation. Vol. 67 Iss: 2, pp.214 – 237.
http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/155116/1/Terras_EnabledBackchannel.pdf

Jon and I also want to highlight some possible uses of Twitter in the classrooms.  Some resources for these include:

Howard Glasser and Maggie Powers, Disrupting Traditional Student-Faculty Roles, 140 Characters at a Time – http://teachingandlearningtogether.blogs.brynmawr.edu/archived-issues/spring2011-issue/disrupting-traditional-roles

Three Research Studies on Potential Advantages of Using Twitter in Classroom -
http://clintlalonde.net/2011/02/03/3-research-studies-on-potential-advantages-of-using-twitter-in-the-classroom/

Derek Bruff, Gardner Campbell + Backchannel in the Classroom -
http://derekbruff.com/teachingwithcrs/?p=491

Jeffrey Young, Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class – Via Twitter -
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/professor-encourages-students-to-pass-notes-during-class-via-twitter/4619

The Twitter Experiment – Twitter in the Classroom, UT Dallas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WPVWDkF7U8

Finally, a useful website with lots of good Twitter-related links is Andrea Genevieve’s 28 Education and Technology Keywords or Hashtags to Follow on Twitter
http://www.andreagenevieve.com/technology-meets-education/28-education-and-technology-hashtags-to-follow-on-twitter/

Are we missing anything?  Are there other uses for Twitter that you would recommend highlighting in an “Experience IT” session?  Let us know, and join us via Twitter on Thursday morning, Jan 12 at 8:30am EST.

{Graphics/Photo Credits: Educause, Steve Garfield}

I have to admit – 2011 seemed like a long year, and I am glad to see it go.  2012 seems more promising, even with a presidential election looming.

I did not blog much in 2011, but I also did little teaching in 2011 (and none online), and so did not feel that I had much to share (beyond occasional tweets).  I see 2012 as different.  Next week, we launch our first fully 0nline faculty development course – “Preparing to Teach Online”.  PTTO has 18 faculty signed up for the inaugural pilot of this course.  I have been working with my colleagues here at the VCU Center for Teaching Excellence for the past five months to map out and build this course. I will also be co-teaching grad students in our Preparing Future Faculty course and hopefully will be teaching a summer course on Theory and Practice of eLearning. The combination should definitely give me some rich opportunity for reflection, which I hope to capture here.

(…and I like the banner designed by my good friend Bud Deihl…)

Co-designing the PTTO course with Bud Deihl, Joyce Kincannon and Jeff Nugent has been a blast.  For some of our thought process, check out out philosophy statement in the course syllabus, which reads as follows:

“We are living in an amazing time – where the vast storehouse of human knowledge is readily available and easily accessible – quite literally at our fingertips. Using devices from laptops to mobile phones, we can connect to the Internet from anywhere and in moments search for and find information that not only helps us answer questions, solve problems and complete tasks, but also entertains, inspires and confounds us.  In our work with faculty members interested in teaching online, we have experienced the common perspective that moving a course online is primarily about designing and sequencing course content. While quality course content is a significant factor, we also believe that recent changes on the web – toward a more social and interconnected space – have necessitated the rethinking of what it means to teach and learn online.

This availability of knowledge does not necessarily lead to learning online. Students already have access to high quality learning content. Teaching online therefore means more than serving up content. Your critical tasks are to be the drivers of quality course design, content mastery, and the skilled facilitation of learning.  By skilled facilitation of learning, we mean understanding how to interact with and engage students in this new learning landscape.

In this online course, you will do many of the things you routinely do to prepare to teach a class.  You already set goals for your courses, describe the specific learning objectives, define the tasks necessary to meet those objectives, and then create applicable assignments around these tasks. The fundamentals are the same.  The practice of facilitating learner interaction is quite different.  What is different in our view flows from our observation that the web has become social. Online courses require the social presence of the faculty in order for the course to be effective.  Students need to form a learning community as well, and active engaged learning activities are required for the course to be effective.

We designed this course with these philosophies in mind.  Through our work together in the coming weeks, we all – each of you and each of the course consultants – will be actively present in this course, will build our own learning community, and will collaboratively engage each other in the best ways to facilitate learning online.  We look forward to this!”

The textbook for PTTO is Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt’s (2007) Building Online Learning Communities: Effective Strategies for the Virtual Classroom.  We designed this course with the belief that community is a core component of a quality online learning experience. and we look forward to modelling this in our course.

Community has been on my mind for quite awhile, so I focused on something Stephen Downes said in yesterday’s oldaily about two posts that align nicely with this core focus of community.  Downes noted:

“Clarence Fisher writes a post titled ‘Learn it Yourself (LIY)‘ in which he argues “the Open Source revolution is rooted not in technology itself, but in learning. It’s the ease of observing how languages function and how programs are made – coupled with the ability to seek and openly share that information with others.” Meanwhile, Brian Lamb writes a post titled ‘DIO: Do It Ourselves‘ in which he argues “the slight shift to ‘DIO’ from ‘DIY’ is obvious enough, and if I think about all the fun and all I learned this past year through, say, DS106, it’s equally obvious I didn’t do any of it myself.” Which leads me to suggest the next logical step: LIO – Learn It Ourselves.”

Wow!

There was a lightbulb that came on for me that brought full circle all the reading this past year on the DIY U movement and networked learning.  We are launching PTTO precisely because it is NOT a DIY world where individuals can in isolation learn new practice.  Rather, it is a richly nuanced networked world where “we” learn together, and through PTTO, we hope to build in ourselves and others the skills in networked learning that can then be applied by our colleagues who participate in their own courses.  I would also suggest that this will spill over into my other courses.  I have always told my students up front that I will learn as much from them as they will from me…this just puts a new spin on that concept.  In the summer course in particular, I hope to experiment more with Facebook groups, Google+ Hangouts, and the like, co-opting my students into a two-way learning community.

I would be interested in tips from any of you on what works with adults in creating and sustaining engaging learning communities.  And look for more in the coming months as we “learn it ourselves” in my courses.

I have waited a couple of days to post about the “relaunching” of Delicious … primarily because I had such a visceral reaction to it… as the image to the left illustrates.

The old Delicious was my gateway drug into Web 2.0.  Through Delicious, I began in 2007 to connect with colleagues (dare I say “friends”) worldwide who shared similar interests to mine, such as Gabriela Grosseck in Romania, Eduardo Peirano in Uruguay, and Michele M. Martin up in Pennsyvania.  Our connections have evolved over time (as has Web 2.0), so that we continue to connect through our blogs, Twitter, Slideshare and Facebook, but Delicious is where I first made the network connections.

I found Delicious personally very useful.  I could get to my web bookmarks on any computer.  I could in effect organize the web, bundling bookmarks around themes.  I could add colleagues (and students) to my network and follow what they were bookmarking.  I could use it as a vetted search engine to find resources that others worldwide had located.  Through class tags, I could share web resources with my students.  At Gabriela’s urging, I experimented with the use of Delicious in my online class, and presented my results at eLearning 2008 and in the online journal edited by Gabriela – “Instructional Uses of Social Bookmarking: Reflections and Questions.” (REVISTA de INFORMATICA SOCIALA, pages 28 – 39).

One of the more useful features of the old Delicious was the ability to set up RSS subscriptions around networks or tags.  I like to know each day what individuals whose tagging practices I value were curating off the web.  By adding people like Jeff Nugent, Jon Becker, Alexandra Pickett, and Gardner Campbell to my network and then subscribing to the My Network feed, I automatically built an amazing intelligence and environmental scanning process.  It piqued my interest to know what they found interesting.  When the term “edupunk” first surfaced, a subscription to the Delicious tag “edupunk” siphoned from the web a very interesting collection of sites.  Every morning, email is the first thing I check…but Google Reader is the second, and Delicious was an important component of my Google Reader aggregation.

Delicious was originally launched in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.  I joined in 2007, and by the end of 2008 according to Wikipedia, I and my public links were part of a global network of more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs.  The site was sold to AVOS Systems on April 27, 2011 – which was exciting in that Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube fame were involved.  This week, Delicious was relaunched in a “back to beta” state.

Delicious was one of the first sites explained by Lee Lefever of Common Craft - a great explanation “in plain English” of social bookmarking.  The relaunched Delicious has invalidated much that Lee explains.  With the flip of a switch, Delicious went from a must-have tool in my digital toolbelt to just another web site.

My 5,547 links are still there.  I think ….but am not sure … that my tags are all still there.  My bundles are gone.  My networks have now become friends but what they are doing collectively has disappeared.  RSS functionality is gone, replaced with a Facebook like sharing function.

In other words, the ways in which I have been using Delicious for four years have disappeared.

Granted, you get what you pay for … and Delicious has always been free (though I would gladly pay for the old service).  The new owners warned that they were updating Delicious…I just did not expect basic functionality to disappear.  I am not the only one upset.  Just look at:

• New Delicious is a Bitter Disappointment
• Delicious Relaunches. So, What Now for Educational Social Bookmarking? (Or, Rather: So What?)
•  Not so tasty now

One of my favorite recent movies is “Up” … probably because I can identify with the old curmudgeon Carl Fredericksen.  Towards the end of the movie, he is pushing his way through a crowd and he says words to the effect of “Sorry, old man coming through”.  Maybe RSS is dying and friending / sharing are the new norms.  It seems paradigms are shifting once again.  The new owners are probably less interested in the old guys like me that stuck with the old product as they are in launching something hip that connects with the masses.  So be it.  But this old curmudgeon misses his old Delicious and so far has not found the energy to go back and stack what I used to have.

Pile on and let me know what you think.  Am I wrong?

{Up graphic from filmgabber}

I have not blogged in three months…partly from not having the muse to do so, and partly because I have been so darn busy. But given the interesting things I have been involved in lately, I have been meaning to do some reflection … and now is as good a time as any…and of course, I have questions that I hope you can help answer. 

During the last three months, I and my colleagues in the CTE have been focused on exploring how to take our year-long 20-faculty cohort model for developing online teachers, that we have done for the past two years, and scale it to a process that can be delivered to more faculty online in a more frequent manner.  While not a committee in the strict sense, developing a product within a team can resemble the old English proverb:

“A camel is a horse developed by a committee.”

Well, this team is putting together a pretty good looking camel!  And for context, we need to go back a few years.

Two years ago with my colleagues at the VCU Center for Teaching Excellence, we published a white paper entitled Building from Content to Community: [Re]Thinking the Transition to Online Teaching and Learning.

At that time, the strategic plan for Virginia Commonwealth University – VCU 2020 – did not even contain the word “online.” My colleagues and I understood that the academic world was increasingly being impacted by the internet, and we wished to draw a line in the sand and go on record stating that online teaching was much more than simply positioning content online. Rather, we strongly believed that online teaching required a shift in teaching practice. We have been influenced by Terry Anderson’s 2004 work The Theory and Practice of Online Learning. In fact, the word cloud here was built using the words from his Chapter 11, Teaching in an Online Learning Context.  I love how serendipitously “online learning’ and “teachers presence” lined up in this Wordle, and that equal emphasis is given to students, teaching, and content, mirroring our use of Garrison, Anderson, and Archer’s Community of Inquiry model.

Much has changed in the past two years, including a new president and a new provost with a vision for positioning VCU as the nation’s top public urban research university. The new strategic plan – Quest for Distinction – includes a new emphasis in online teaching and learning. Online@VCU has been launched as a move to coordinate, support, and grow online learning initiatives at all academic levels. In the past two years, we at the CTE have facilitated two online initiatives, helping 39 faculty make that transition online. We used a very intensive process involving a full week face-to-face institute, followed by an online course experience from the student’s perspective, and then consultation and peer review as their online courses were built and taught. With the increased emphasis and resultant interest campus-wide, we are moving to the next phase of developing online courses to help more of our faculty colleagues prepare to teach online.

I am blessed to be working with a great tech team.  Jeff Nugent continues to provide both leadership and vision to our process.  Bud Deihl brings a strong sense of storytelling to our team.  And during the last three months, we hired a new online instructional designer in the person of Joyce Kincannon.

We have collectively spent some productive hours mapping out strategies on whiteboards before moving into production inside Blackboard.  What we wish to do is develop a process that will prepare faculty members to teach online, and that involves pedagogy, course design, and experiences within an online community.  Faculty members by nature come to this virtual table with content knowledge and knowledge about teaching face-to-face in their discipline, but in many cases, they find the online environment unfamiliar.  They are walking into their online room and not recognizing the layout.  Where are the chairs?  Where is the podium?  How do they circle the chairs if that is their desire?

We hope through our “Preparing to Teach Online” course to make the layout and the processes more familiar.  We hope to raise faculty awareness of processes, best practices, and tools that have worked for others without inundating them with so many choices that option paralysis occurs.  Finally, we hope to support faculty as they both gain experience working in an online environment and construct their own course.  All of us have design models that we have used in the past, but this is the first time we have collectively worked to build a single course together.

There are good models out there already, such as SLOAN-C’s certification process and the development courses run by Penn State University‘s World Campus and University of Central Florida.  We just do not believe it is cost effective to outsource the training for  all of our online teaching faculty.  Developing it in-house remains an engaging process where our assumptions are continually pushed by each other…resulting I believe in an improved product…a good looking camel … that we know will be even more improved after our first class is piloted.  We do not see this as a drop-in, drop-out model.  We still believe that the best approach involves developing learning communities that can work together through the process.

We still have a ton of work to do to fully flesh out the course, but our initial thoughts for the flow are:

• A pre-assessment of both motivation and technology skills
• A face-to-face orientation
• Online modules
• Introduction to the Online Environment
• Development of Learning Goals and Outcomes
• Selection / Development of Course Content
• Online Collaboration, Interaction, and Engagement
• Assessment of Learning and Evaluation of the Course
• Interspersed consultations with the instructional designers
• Peer Review of developed courses

For those of you moving in the same direction, any thoughts?  I would be particularly interested in the following

1.  Your ideas about pre-assessment instruments that have worked for you.

2. Time commitment expectations for full time faculty moving through a process like this.

3.  Cohort size.  What is too big?  What is too small?

4.  Compensation or enticements used at your institutions.

We are in the early stages, so your assistance as always would be most appreciated!

During the past spring in the course I co-taught with Jeffrey Nugent, we asked our graduate students in the Preparing Future Faculty program to create a personal teaching project.  Many chose to develop a teaching philosophy.  Several good ones are here and here and here.

It occurred to me that I have not updated my teaching philosophy in quite a few years.  Motivated by the good work of my students, I decided to dust mine off and distribute it here for comments.  How would you “grade” it?  Does it resonate with you?  Does it miss an important element?  Let me know!

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Philosophy of Teaching in a Distributed Online Environment

I was recently asked what I looked for in students, and my response was “I want students to be as excited about learning as I am.”  I have been teaching online for nearly two decades, and one of the exciting aspects of teaching online is that the possibilities continue to grow, and with these possibilities come endless opportunities for learning.

I have taught undergraduate and graduate courses, in education leadership and in business leadership.  My approach is similar in both disciplines.  Students are expected to do more than regurgitate “facts” – they are expected to analyze and critically process existing and emerging information to draw fresh conclusions and applications in an ever changing world.  As such, I am a co-learner with my students as we examine existing paradigms and explore new ones.  The world is not a multiple-choice test but rather one that requires higher order thinking skills.  My teaching approach engages students to think in new ways.

I also have in recent years relied increasingly on a network of learners (Twitter, Delicious, and blogs) for my own personal learning, and through this network have seen the power of social processes for learning.  The reflective nature of blogging for instance requires students to think about thinking, which leads to metacognition and the higher order thinking that I seek.  Each student brings unique perspectives to bear, and when this reflection occurs on the open web, it invites other perspectives from outside the course to push, prod, and provoke new reflections.

I believe that good teaching is good teaching, whether one is online or face-to-face.  My teaching has been informed by Chickering and Gamson’s Seven Principles of Good Practice in Teaching, which I believe hold equally true online or on campus (Chickering and Gamson, 1987):

“Good practice in undergraduate education:

1. encourages contact between students and faculty,
2. develops reciprocity and cooperation among students,
3. encourages active learning,
4. gives prompt feedback,
5. emphasizes time on task,
6. communicates high expectations, and
7. respects diverse talents and ways of learning.”

An online course is so much more than a correspondence course.  I concur with Palloff and Pratt (2007) that the formation of a learning community is essential in online courses.  If students see me as a real individual, with social, cognitive and teaching presences evident in the online environment…and equally important, they see each other as well, then a community of learners can develop.

My philosophy of teaching evolved from years of teaching both face-to-face and online in military, university, and two-year settings.  As I reflect on my beliefs regarding teaching and learning, I find that my view is threefold:

• to promote positive learning, modeling what I teach and learn;
• to spark learner enthusiasm for learning and peer-teaching;
• and to provide a strong foundation for lifelong reflective practice.

To accomplish this, I apply a variety of strategies based on essential educational principles encompassing learning theory, collaboration, technology application, strategic instructional planning and assessment, constructivism, and reflective practice.  I believe that learning is always evolving, and that I learn as much from my students as they do from me.  I also believe that learning is best when students see the relevance of the learning.  I intend for my ‘passion’ for teaching and learning to always be evident, building a learning community through enthusiasm and empathetic connections with learners.  As a result, my teaching will positively impact the learners, ultimately connecting them to their ‘passion’ and lifelong learning.

While good teaching is good teaching, I strongly believe that the practices one uses for teaching are quite different online.  An expanded version of this philosophy can be found in the White Paper I co-authored with Jeff Nugent and Bud Deihl, Building from Content to Community: [Re]Thinking the Transition to Online Teaching and Learning (May 2009).  With a community of learners, it makes sense to use a number of learning activities and assessment processes, including formative assessment and peer assessment.  This online community is made up of unique individuals, with differing learning styles, background knowledge, and biases.  These diverse perspectives can enrich the learning environment.  My role is to create a safe environment in which this sharing of learning can occur.

The web has evolved in the past six years to be one that is participatory (just look at Facebook).  It therefore makes sense to create active learning opportunities that take advantage of the affordances the new web allows, such as wikis for collaborative authoring, blogs for reflection, and new video tools that allow anyone to publish multimedia.

We teach in a distributed online environment.  This environment allows for multiple means for communication and collaboration.  My role is to be cognizant of my role to model effective learning practices while I actively engage my students.  Together we can learn more than any of us could learn by ourselves.

.

Chickering, Arthur W. and Gamson, Zelda F. (1987) “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education,” American Association of Higher Education Bulletin, March 1987, pp 3-7.

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