Accessibility Issues are No Laughing Matter

Except this one really made me laugh quite loudly.  I was trying to create a new Google account so there would be a webmaster email address for the BYU PSST research group's website.  As I went about happily filling out information for this new account, I suddenly hit a wall when Google wanted me to type in some letters that looked all swirly and mashed together like a trick one's eyes might be playing when one has been smoking peyote.  (I would, at this point, like to disclose that I have never actually smoked peyote and don't know if the preceding comparison is a good one or not.  I would also like to discourage anyone from smoking peyote to find out.  Moving on.)

History and Status of OER at BYU (DRAFT)

While the social climate for a policy of openness at BYU is currently in its nascent and humble stages, it is quickly gaining momentum.  Despite the lack of an official university-wide “open” policy at BYU, a number of open activities are already well under way.  To date, a growing number of OERs and OER-like resources are already offered through various channels on campus.

BYU Independent Study is one example of an organizational effort to contribute to the OER community.  IS already offers free access to a selection of their courses for personal development.  Additionally, IS will soon launch a pilot program to offer several of their most popular courses to all BYU students and the general open education community in a manner similar to OER initiatives currently underway at other universities.

One more such organizational effort is based in the McKay School of Education, which recently launched a pilot program to openly publish (with voluntary instructor participation) several School of Education courses.

In addition to these organizational efforts, many BYU faculty have, as individuals, posted personally developed course content in various ways to make these resources available to the general public.  Some faculty post course syllabi, reading lists, and other course content on personal websites, while other faculty have even recorded their lectures and published them on well known online media repositories such as iTunes and YouTube.

While each of these efforts is a step in the direction of openness, the efforts are typically isolated from each other.  The real power behind these efforts will be found in strength of numbers and unity of purpose.  Because many departments and individuals at BYU are already beginning to contribute to the OER movement, there is a clear need for a central repository of BYU-produced OERs.  The Center for Teaching and Learning is clearly the organization with the resources and momentum toachieve such an undertaking.

(Distance Ed) Week 6 - Findings

Article	Findings
Dalsgaard, C., & Mathiasen, H. (2008). Self-organized learning environments and university students' use of social software: A systems theoretical perspective. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 5(2). Retrieved January 12, 2009, from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Feb_08/article01.htm.	Finding: "The study of the two project groups suggests that a conference system offering asynchronous discussion forums and file sharing has the potential to support students' self-organized learning environment." My thoughts: The results of this study were not earth shattering.  Nor were they particularly bold.  I felt that they were timid, hedging their conclusions.  They concluded that social software in general can help support a self-organized learning environment.  I wouldn't have thought to argue with that in the first place, but it's good that they're not assuming anything, right? Finding: "Given that students are allowed to work independently and are provided with a range of tools, they are excellent in choosing the right media in a given context." My thoughts: I'm not sure that this study (with a sample size of 4) really justifies the generalization that "students are excellent in choosing the right media in a given context."
Ganjooei, B. A., & Rahimi, A. (2008). Language learning strategy use for EFL E-learners and traditional learners: A comparative study. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 5(12). Retrieved January 12, 2009, from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Dec_08/article01.htm.	Finding: "the education system has little influence on the way learners usually go about applying language learning strategies." Finding: "No significant differences were observed in regard to the frequency of occurrence of learners' use of strategies." My thoughts: I thought this was a valid research question, and I think it is interesting to see that there is no difference between online and F2F students regarding usage of learning strategies. Finding: "Learners with high language proficiency level showed more effective use of strategies whereas the learners with low level of proficiency usually failed to choose the appropriate learning strategies in their process of language learning." Finding: "There is a positive correlation between language proficiency level and application of subcategories of language learning strategies." Finding: "Analyzing the results from one-way Analysis Of Variance (ANOVA), one could claim that there were differences regarding language learning strategy use in each proficiency level, but contrasting each proficiency level two by two, no significant differences were observed." Finding: "Both language learning strategy use and language proficiency level can be predicted by each other." My thoughts: The study was well thought out, planned, and seems (in my limited knowledge of what good research is all about) to be rigorous in its methodology.
Gouge, C. (2008). Redesigning online instruction: theory and application. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 5(2). Retrieved January 12, 2009, from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Feb_08/article04.htm.	Finding: "Evaluations showed that what students valued most about the structure of the course was not any one individual demonstration or other aspect of the course (no matter how sophisticated the technology used to support it);" Finding: "students reported that they appreciated the variety of interactivity and opportunities to communicate with me and their classmates encouraged and made possible by the course structure." Finding: "90% of students cited the message board interaction with me and their peers as the most useful to their learning in the course." My Thoughts: This was a nice case study, Interesting to hear her personal results from this particular course redesign
Holbein, M. F. (2008). From traditional delivery to distance learning: Developing the model. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 5(8). Retrieved January 12, 2009, from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Aug_08/article05.htm.	Finding: "Sitting in a classroom and listening to a lecture or small group discussion can actually be quite passive. Online learning is active and alive. Beyond the technology and instructional design lies the human element. Students want and need to be connected. The challenge for instructors is to help them build a sense of community so that while they may not see one another face-to-face, they know one another and share their ideas thereby contributing to learning for all." My thoughts: This one was more theory-based and focused on the importance of building community and interaction for an online setting to be instructionally effective.
Kiriakidis, P., & Parker, A. (2008). Faculty and learner interaction in online courses. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 5(11). Retrieved January 12, 2009, from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Nov_08/article03.htm.	Finding: The relationship between the extent of faculty interaction and the extent of learner interaction in online courses was found to be of statistical significance (r = .763, p < .01). " Finding: "The findings of this study suggest that there is a direct relationship between faculty and learner interaction in online courses." My thoughts: No argument here.  Teachers interact with students more = students interact with teachers more.
Kok, A. (2007). Metamorphosis of the mind of online communities via E-Learning. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 5(10). Retrieved January 12, 2009, from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Oct_08/article03.htm.	Finding: "Recognizing the learners' input, providing opportunities to develop a sense of group cohesiveness, maintaining the group as a unit and helping learners to work collaboratively may increase the effectiveness of online communities." My thoughts: Mostly theory based; conclusions seem valid.
Kupczynski, L., Davis, R., Ice, P., & Callejo, D. (2008). Assessing the impact of instructional design and organization on student achievement in online courses. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 5(1). Retrieved January 12, 2009, from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jan_08/article01.htm.	Finding: "The original intent of this study was to determine if a relationship existed between instructional design / organization and student performance in online courses. None of the three methods revealed a relationship between the predictor and criterion variables."
Royal, P., & Bell, P. (2008). The relationship between performance levels and test delivery methods. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 5(7). Retrieved January 12, 2009, from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jul_08/article05.htm.	Finding: "There was a difference between student performance and test delivery method. However, the overall difference was not significant." My thoughts: Surprising.  I would've thought that there would be a much higher achievement rate on exams that were non-proctored.
Shi, S., Bonk, C., Tan, S., & Mishra, P. (2008). Getting in sync with synchronous: The dynamics of synchronous facilitation in online discussions. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 5(5). Retrieved January 12, 2009, from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/May_08/article01.htm.	Finding: Moderators effectively moderate an online  group discussion by posting messages with "hooks on both ends" Finding: "When a moderator was demonstrating and modeling, hopefully within the zones of proximal development of most or all of the participants and coupled with deep engagement with real issues related to the topic, participants were drawn into the discourse. Finding: "when individuals operate on each other's reasoning, they become aware of contradictions between their logic and that of their partners. The struggle to resolve these contradictions might very well propel them to new and higher levels of understanding." Finding: Moderators can effectively moderate an online group discussion by establishing group norms. Finding: Moderators can effectively moderate an online group discussion by trying to accommodate for students' social-emotional needs. My thoughts: A "best practices" type of article.  From their experience, they collected a number of things moderators can do to provide high quality online group discussions for distance education situations.
Young, B., Hausler, J., & Sanders, J. W. (2008). Do online students exhibit different learning styles than onsite students? International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 5(4). Retrieved January 12, 2009, from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Apr_08/article02.htm.	Finding: "While we found students who preferred visual learning were slightly less inclined to prefer online classes, we found no one discernable learning style to be prevalent in most of our online classes.  Preferences were more likely dictated by other considerations than learning styles." My thoughts: This finding was surprising to me, and I think it made for a good study.  I would have thought that online courses would appeal to a specifically different type of learner.

Quest 1 - Reusability in the Land of OERs

Aaron's Rogue Quest 1

"Carefully review the following sites that publish open educational resources, noting the types of media predominantly used by each site and any site characteristics that seem unique. Pay close attention to the quality of reusability exhibited by the media from each site.  Be certain to review a sufficient sample of courses per site to gain accurate insight into their practice. Write a substantive post with references on the variety of media, touching on the reusability aspect of each medium type you encountered."

In this post, I have sampled a number of courses from each of the following websites that offer open educational resources.

MIT OCW
Berkeley
Yale
Stanford
Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative
Connexions
Open University of the UK

Throughout the rest of this post, I intend to discuss each of the different media types of OERs that I found on these sites, discussing their strengths and weaknesses with particular regard to the 4 Rs of Reusability and the SLAM (or, less violently, the ALMS) analysis (from our in-class discussion on 15 Jan. 2009).

(Distance Ed) Week 5 - Theoretical Foundations

So, here is a brief synthesis of the theoretical foundations from the 10 articles I chose.

Constructivist

Also, Garrison was quoted a number of times in the context of "communities of inquiry." Several of the papers didn't really boast of anything that could be considered a theoretical foundation. Or if they did, they sure didn't make it explicit. How annoying.

In response to Charles' thoughts on Learner Autonomy

This post originally started out as a comment reply to a comment from Charles in reply to this post. (Sorry, couldn't think of a better way to write that.) It eventually became long enough to become a post of its own, and thus worth more points for my Distance Ed class. (YEAH!)

"In my view learner autonomy can be a good thing and a bad thing."

You know, you are absolutely right. At first I disagreed with your statement, thinking that we had just been using a different definition of "learner autonomy." I was using the phrase to designate only the quality and extent of the autonomy characteristic exhibited by the learner, and I thought you were using it to describe the degree of autonomy encouraged or allowed by the instructor.

However, despite the possibility of our using different definitions of the phrase, I am nonetheless forced to agree with you after more careful consideration of the matter. Imagine a classroom full of learners who are fully autonomous, needing no help at all from the teacher, and can come to all of the correct answers on their own, solely through interaction with the textbook. (Please ignore for a moment, if you will, the fact that the situation just described is, arguably, a contradiction.) Now, imagine a classroom full of students who, in order to truly learn the content, desperately need the instructor to hold their hands and spoon-feed them all course content. The first scenario I described sounds much less easier to me as an instructor, and thus much more appealing. So learner autonomy is obviously a good thing, right?