eLCC 2017 - Canvas at CU Denver

If you are ever worried about transitioning from one LMS to another, the good folk at CU Denver can put your mind at ease; as long as you're transferring to Canvas.

In addition to being the clearest, best structured session I attended, "Our Life with Canvas" provided me a good deal of insight into how to successfully change LMSs and to then take advantage of your new tools. Further, some of the key points for making a smooth LMS transfer apply to general training and use of LMS's by anyone.

Running down the list of good practices for a successful LMS transfer:

• Buy-in first, before an RFP. (Buy-in from faculty and Deans)
• Buy-in from leadership and a small selection committee that has procurement experience
• A dedicated transfer and implementation IT team
• Lightweight project management software to coordinate the transition
• Provide lots of training early on, and take advantage of official LMS provided support
• Have a decent budget for the initial transfer; share that money with profs, IT's, and the LMS

Do not make the transfer decision only in your IT department. Nobody likes having changes forced upon them; everyone likes a sense of agency, and there is a lot of talent around your university that should be involved in making (and then championing) a good decision.

Once you've made a university wide decision to start using a new LMS, launch it slowly, and in semester-long stages. 

• Stage 1: Tests. Implementation should take advantage of your early-adopters and highly tech-proficient educators. In this first stage, you can begin to work out (or at least find) bugs that may hassle the course transfer process. These initial successes will help set the stage for future course-transfers while also working out the bugs with profs that can handle some hassle.
• Stage 2: Opt-in. Implementation provides all profs the opportunity to start using the new LMS; whether as a sandbox or as a complete course replacement. This is a full semester long stage that lets professors know it is their decision for now and gives them time to play with the new LMS before they have to start using it all the time.
• Stage 3: Opt-out: implementation allows those profs who still don't want in to hang on to their old ways. Say for instance that a prof is teaching his final course at your university... why would he want to learn new software on his way out? This stage gives profs a final opportunity to use their old content and to feel like they are not being forced into anything.
• Stage 4: Mandatory. Now nearly 2 years into an LMS transfer, finally require that all profs use the new LMS. At this point, your IT team and the community will be well versed in the new LMS and can provide the best support to those educators who were most reluctant to switch.

A few additional tidbits shared by the presenter (Dave Thomas, Director of Academic Technology, CU Denver) act to really help in those transition moments to keep people happy and successful throughout.

• If you provide self-service course transfer to professors, pay them a little bit for their time; as little as $250 can acknowledge and justify their efforts.
• Focus on small goals; don't try to push all of the cool new features all at once, and don't try to do to much with the LMS's API right off the bat. Small goals means lots of rewards; keeping people motivated and happy without overwhelming them.
• Make sure that any training you do is done within the LMS that professors will need to use. This provides professors unique insight into their students' experiences because those professors are playing with the same tools the students would use. 
• Provide many different types of support, from professional development to documentation to paid help from the LMS provided.

In the end, after the final stage of transfer, 80% of the professors surveyed at CU Denver said that they were happy with the new LMS. This is quite a large percentage of people to have happy with any one piece of software and I am sure that the thoughtful transfer process weighed as heavily in their decisions as did the quality of the end product.

eLCC 2017 Conference

Carl Kinney

I really appreciate being given the opportunity to go to this conference. The administrative side of the conference is done so well.  Jeff mentioned in his post the talk given by Michael King from IBM and the Watson project.  I also really enjoyed this talk.  I think it is great that this type of research and data is being used so effectively.  It is wonderful that this type of technology is being used and integrated into Health Care and Education.  I also came away with a small amount of concern of making sure we as humans don't lose control.  I think it is great that we can basically teach robots to think, but what if a robot teaches itself how to think?  Okay, I'm not sure I want to go there, and I will say that what is being done is pretty amazing and great!

Another golden nugget from the conference was a session titled A Structured Approach to Using Technology to Improve Learning by Steve Green, United States Air Force Academy.
Nice that he mentioned Regis in his presentation several times and was very complimentary of Regis.
They have been doing all ground base and knew that needed to change how they conduct their classes.  Two things that stuck out to me:

1.  His awareness that every school/college is different, and you need to determine how you want to do your education.  I took a picture of his slide around this.
2. If you are doing blended learning it needs to be designed into the course, not just something that is added to the course.  

Again, I really appreciate having had the opportunity to go to this conference, and if you would like to discuss this or have any other questions, please let me know.  

2017 eLCC conference

Thanks to the eLCC conference planning team for another awesome eLCC conference experience. Perfect weather awaited attendees. 

This year's Thursday awards luncheon featured Michael King, representative with the IBM Watson project. Michael spoke on how big data can/will transform education. The IBM Watson project is the merger of big data and artificial intelligence to create a question answering supercomputer. King spoke of how technology has gradually risen over the years to become the most important factor within enterprises, particularly within higher education.

King pointed out studies that indicated the importance of maintaining and improving workforce skills, and yet there remains a mismatch in skills and talent coming into the workforce from recent college grads. A study from the Institute of Business Value found that over 50% of academic and business leaders felt that higher ed was not meeting the demands of students, industry, or of society.

King went on to say that projects such as Watson can provide insights into how best to bridge the student experience gap. One of his slides showed how Baby Boomers wanted speed with their educational experiences, Gen X wanted great service, and Millennials wanted convenience. And all generational learners wanted better outcomes. 

And congratulations to this year's award winners for eLearning Advocate (Kae Novak, FRCC), eLearning Educator (Anjali Vaidya, CCCOnline), and the Learning Technologies Team Award (Mursion, UNC).

See you at next year's conference!

Accessing Higher Ground - Highlights by Carl Kinney

I appreciate Regis giving me the opportunity to attend the 2016 Accessing Higher Ground conference held at the Westin in Westminster Colorado .  As with any conference there are highlights and areas for improvement.  I came away from this conference with a much greater appreciation for the need to ensure all of our electronic information and technology is accessible.  The topics and sessions were overall great, and areas for improvement were for me mainly around the administrative side of the conference.  I shared my input around the areas of improvement, on the overall conference evaluation survey.  You can see the schedule of all the events by going to: accessinghigherground.org 

I want to capture some of the highlights or major takeaways for me from the conference:

• With accessibility we need to ensure we are being both proactive and reactive (accommodating) as necessary.
• Standardization of all course navigation organization is critical.
• One size does not fit all.  Designing to the average really doesn’t fit anyone!
• Know thy users, for they are not you.
• If the user can’t find it, it doesn’t exist.
• The keynote speaker was Tommy Edison.  He was so inspirational.  He is a person who is blind and told his life story.  Notice the phrasing.  A person who is blind, not a blind person.  He mentioned that it makes a difference how you say it.  He wants to be seen first as a person.  He is very big on YouTube and worth checking out.

• Things for us to consider:

o   Investigate a better or establish a method for students, faculty and staff to report access barriers.

o   Bringing accessible design and development learning to higher ed – Teach Access.  This was actually a session given by Larry Goldberg, director of Accessible Media, Yahoo.  He shared that at Yahoo 1 in 9 new hires had heard of accessible technology.

o   Having a “fair” day for everyone to experience different aspects like using a screen reader.

o   Having a badge program for ADA compliance.

Hopefully the above helps spark some new ideas and thoughts for you, and we can all continue the journey to creating better learning for all.  I have a lot more in my notes, and would be happy to discuss more if anyone is  interested.  

All Leaders Conference in Washington D.C. last week

I attended the All Leaders Conference last week in D.C. since I am on the board with the local Association for Talent Development (ATD) - formerly ASTD, Rocky Mountain Chapter. I've attended now three years and I always learn so many things about leading a chapter as a board member. That really is the purpose of the conference is for chapter leaders to share with each other what works and what hasn't worked so well.

I presented last year and this year on the virtual study group I co-host with two other chapters on the east coast. The study group is for the Certified Professional in Learning and Performance (CPLP) which is a very rigorous two part exam. I earned my CPLP in 2014 and my study group is what was so instrumental in me passing the exams. That's why I want to give back to my community.

I realized that there is a real need all over the U.S. so we opened our study group to be national so we cover four time zones now. Additionally, for our current cohort, we have had an international participant from India and we worked out how she could join us, though not synchronously due to the time difference.

We continue to grow and now the participants who have completed both exams successfully are coming back to us and asking to help us and give back to the community. This has been the plan all along, that is, to create a sustainable study group. Often study groups fizzle after some time due to the amount of time and commitment required. Now with others joining us to help carry the load, I'm moving into more of a planning role and others are doing the execution by co-hosting the weekly study sessions.

This journey has been a very rewarding one in which I am able to give back to the Regis community. For example, I draw from what I learned daily in a much broader way now that I have the knowledge and skills learned through my CPLP journey. As an Instructional Designer, I have a deep knowledge for that aspect of the ATD Competency Model. However, now I have a broader knowledge base which covers all of the 10 competencies. For more information, please visit https://www.td.org/Certification/Competency-Model.

TLTS highlights by Nicole Marcisz

I attended the Teaching and Learning Symposium at Metro State on October 7, 2016, and I would like to share some highlights. https://www.msudenver.edu/tlts/

One session in particular really stood out for me as being quite thought provoking that I want to share highlights of for you.
User Experience (UX), Learner Experience (LX) and Usability in the Online Classroom
Presenters: Baye Herald and Jennifer Panko

Baye and Jennifer started out with a discussion to define both user experience and learner experience and then compared the two.

There's brief video with Don Norman that explains the definition of User Experience (UX) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BdtGjoIN4E
Basically, it is the person's experience with a "product," not only focused on start to finish and everything in between, but the experience before and after as well.

When we talk about learner experience (LX) this could be focused on our learners and their experience with a single course. And as mentioned above, this would include the learners experience before the course, starting the course, during the course and then after the course is over. Learner experience is different from user experience in that there are more pieces to the equation that just the person and the "product".  For example, with user experience, you are one person, that say, buys a new iPhone. You might be really excited and willing to wait in line to be one of the first customers to get the latest and greatest. Even the experience of opening the package and the ease of setting the phone up is essential. You go on for next weeks, months and years, having the user experience with that phone. With learner experience, let's use a Regis student who enrolls in an online course as an example. This student makes a choice about taking the course, but it could be a required course that they are not looking forward to taking for whatever reason. They have stress coming in. They begin to log on and explore the course. Is it friendly and inviting? Do they know where to go first? Is it well organized? Are they feeling welcomed by the instructor? etc. In the learner experience there are other players involved that will affect their experience; ie. the instructor, and other students. Was the course designed for successful engagement and interaction with instructor, content and other students? Another factor is that the students have invested quite a bit of money in their education so this can impact commitment to making it work and general motivation to do well.

The presenters invited us to consider on a course level the learner experience. They did some research on learner experience by having some students do narrated "think-a-louds." For example, the student will narrate a screen recording of the first exposure of the course in the LMS and talk about what they are seeing, where and why will they click on things, do they know where to begin, what makes sense, where might there be some confusion. They gathered this data to make changes and inform the overall design of the course.

Some simple tips that the students in their research indicated that were very helpful in making the learner experience great include the following:

• Instructor to send out early communication (before course start)
• Include welcome letter/message as student enter course (perhaps on course home page with announcement tool)
• Create a positive tone and line of support
• Provide communication avenues and choices to contact instructor 
• Create a getting started video
• Include avenues for students to provide learner experience feedback- by way of simple surveys (after first week and midway) 

And lastly, during the presentation we considered one more experience to add to the mix, "Learning" experience. So with learner experience, the focus is on the student (the learner) and how they experience the design of the course and the people they interact with during the course. Learning experience might focus more on the content, outcomes and learning journey. How does the learner engage with the content to learn new skills, change behavior and successfully meet outcomes?
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/learning-experience-design-the-most-valuable-lessons

Something to think about and be conscious of as we design and teach courses.

(Reminder: I would encourage you to make an appointment for consultation with your friendly instructional designer to discuss your learners and learning experiences.

Nicole

 

5th Annual TLTS2016 - Highlights by Carl Kinney

I am glad I had the opportunity to attend this conference, and the fact that it is a free conference continues to impress me.  The fact that it is a one day conference also helps with you not feeling like you are overloaded with new information, yet you come away with some golden nuggets.

One of the sessions was on Engaging Students Through Interactive Learning, presented by, Kevin Zeller, Amy Dore, and Jeff Helton from Metro State.  In this presentation they shared that 1 in 4 students in higher education are taking at least one online course, but over the last two years the number of online courses is starting to trend downwards.  There are many variables and factors that influence this, but "Interaction" is key to engaging students.   If your online courses are asynchronous, having this interaction is still critical.  So, this is where advancements in technology can really help.  Creating short review videos can create that interaction even though they are accessed asynchronously, or recording non-mandatory synchronous sessions and making available for students to access at a time that works best for them.  As with most things, there are challenges to keep in mind.  They shared, some things to consider are: changing technology, budgetary concerns, development time, diverse student needs, and policy changes.

Another session that was a nugget for me was User Experience (UX), Learner Experience (LX) and Usability in the Online Classroom, presented by Baye Herald and Jennifer Panko from the University of Colorado - Colorado Springs.  Some of the golden nuggets from this session are:

• Learner's perception is just as important as content and learning objectives.
• The learner's perception involves, before class, the class, and after class experiences.
• The "user" experience is more around a specific product or service.
• The "learner" experience is more around using available resources to study and show that learning has taken place.
• Also touched on Learning Experience, and shared that a company has trademarked the term Learning Experience Design. www.sixredmarbles.com
• Early communication with the student is critical.
• Should ask students after a couple of weeks about their experience.
• Observation can give you a different result from what you might get in a survey. 

I think UX, LX, and Usability are all areas we should examine more and identify how we can improve in all of these areas.

I'm happy to discuss any of the above in more detail, or share some of the highlights with some of the other sessions.  Let me know if you are interested.