Social Media Trends and Student Information Systems

What is NARCSSIS?

Michelangelo's Narcissus

Being an individual given to fleeting, broad fancies, it is rare that I am excited by something for quite so long.  I’m not just excited, I’m electrified!  For the first time in a long time, I feel that I can (and will) change the world!  What has made me such a braggadocio?  For months, I’ve had a vision of NARCSSIS, or the Narrated Customized Social Student Information System. I hope to research this idea and write my dissertation on related topics when I resume my Ph.D. I pronounce this like Narcissus, which I feel is fitting for a product geared toward “Generation Me” (Twenge, J.M., 2006).  Once you hear the description, I think you will agree that it is aptly named.

Inspiration from F8

Mark Zuckerberg at f8

I have to give partial credit to Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs for this idea.  It was while watching a recording of the F8 Facebook Developers Conference that the idea began to take shape.  Zuckerberg described the early Facebook profile as “the first 15 minutes of your conversation with a new person.”  You get their name, their occupation or field of study, find out what friends you have in common, and so on, but there’s no depth.  He characterized the second version of the Facebook profile that has existed into 2011 as the next couple of hours of your conversation.  You discuss your interests, what you’ve been up to lately, and connect on these things.  Then, he presented timeline – the total, visually-rich history of an individual from birth until present day.  It offers depth and context, and items are prioritized for easy digestion.  It punched me in the face that this was exactly what our Student Services staff were attempting to articulate.  Why wasn’t student information more visual, more social, designed in a way to allow you to quickly understand the story of the student?  Why didn’t systems offer an activity feed?  Why wasn’t messaging integrated?

A Title III Goal

I suppose I should tell you that our Internet Technologies Group (my team) is working under a Title III grant to develop a front end that integrates data from a variety of systems such as our SIS, our LMS, and our Advising system.  We called it SMART when the grant was written, picturing a data dashboard of quick visual indicators.  Since then, I have given a lot more thought to giving students a voice, promoting easy communication, and allowing personal customization of the interface.  You can see images, sites, features, and thoughts related to the idea that we’ve been saving on my SMART Inspiration Pinterest board.

Integrating Apps

iTunes App Store Icons

So, where does Steve Jobs fit in?  The lead programmer, Bob, pinned an image he called “Information Hub,” that was a cork board tacked with many pieces of important information.  For some reason, it made me think of the Dock on the bottom of the Mac desktop.  Then, I thought of one of the features that I appreciated about Mac software – the fact that the programs don’t launch immediately full-screen.  This allows me to launch things from the Dock and re-size and situate the windows of information as I see fit.  Why would we want to lock students, faculty, and staff into rigid views in this new system?  Why not allow the flexibility to customize the space in a manner most meaningful to the individual?  Then I thought of the App Store.  The apps, widgets, gizmos, whatever you want to call them that we develop should be available in a virtual marketplace for our audiences to add them to their spaces as they see fit.  We would develop them as we go, placing them in simple categories such as “Academic Records,” “Advising & Career Planning,” and so on.

People Don’t Know What They Want Until They See It

The Wheel

The thing that puzzled me the most as my thoughts feverishly whizzed by was, why doesn’t this system already exist?  Preliminary research on the web showed me that some companies were attempting to create a more social atmosphere, but none had approached the task with the gusto of NARCSSIS.  Working in technology, I guess I have a short memory for how “new” mainstream adoption for tools like the Mac and Facebook really are.  We still largely live in a PC world, where we access rigid software built by developers in the 90s.  Many of our users are growing up in a 2.0 world where they can readily share their thoughts and collaborate with peers.  Even the LMS hasn’t caught up to these desires just yet.  I think we’re ready for a paradigm shift in educational information systems.

No Money, No Learn-y, Pal!

Lately, there has been quite a buzz in my world about intellectual property, information security, and the ownership of digital content.  Though I’ve heard similar concerns from several faculty members and administrators over the past several years, it knocked me back a bit when a faculty member asked for web content to be private because, “We don’t want people to learn without paying.”  That’s right, “We don’t want people to learn without paying.”  Wow.  Just wow.  In efforts to explain my surprise, please allow me to share some basic facts and resulting questions:

Fact #1 – People don’t need your help to learn.

Yeah, you’re probably pretty well-versed in the content, but the fact of the matter is that the Internet exists.  I can learn anything I want to learn online, as can anyone else.  We can even learn on our phones these days.  You can’t control the behavior of other people, the ones that come to you do so because they want the credits and/or degree and a motivational, well-facilitated, meaningful learning experience…but mostly the credits and/or degree.

Fact #2 – People don’t need to pay to learn.

See my response to Fact #1.  Yeah, you might say, “Well you have to pay for Internet access!”  Wrong.  Even those who don’t pay taxes are allowed to use the Internet at public institutions like libraries.  ‘Cause, ya know, libraries exist for the enrichment of our society as a people, kind of like an educational institution.

Fact #3 – Indeed, we DO want people to learn without paying.

Specifically, our mission statement says we exist “to provide educational and community leadership for the development of human ability.”  Sounds pretty broad, doesn’t it?  There are a lot of learning services and events we offer free of charge.  For example, anyone can come in and partake in educational goal setting with our advisors.  You don’t have to be a student, you don’t even have to be a community member.  We provide the service in good faith hoping that we’re helping the cause and that if we can assist you in meeting those goals you may enroll at our institution.  Likewise, anyone can attend many of our college events, such as academic presentations, discussions, and cultural events that take place outside of a structured course.

Answer These Questions.  I’m Confused.

Obviously, I’m not someone who worries that students, faculty, or others outside my classes will “sneak” or “steal” value away from my materials and presentations.  So what if they do?  I got into this business to help others learn and advance the cause of higher education.  Let them benefit, borrow, and steal.  These types of exchanges leave me wondering, Why wouldn’t you want someone to benefit from your passion and your knowledge?  Why wouldn’t you want to incite a fire for learning in others when you can?  Why wouldn’t you want to collaborate with the other educators and the institution?  Why wouldn’t you want the community to see what we have to offer?  Why are you in the business?  Really, ask yourself.

Open Source – It’s a Good Thing!

I heard somewhere that if we hoard our knowledge, afraid that others will take credit for it, we end up stagnant, recycling the same stale ideas that we’ve always had.  We’re not sharing, so others wish not to share with us.  We’re not collaborating, so others wish not to collaborate with us.  Some individuals are creative, but creativity often occurs when one is exposed to, and enriched by, the ideas of others.  This is called open sourcing and crowd sourcing, my friends.  If you share your ideas and clear your mind, you can collect new ideas with the available space.  What a wonderful thing!

A Word About Copyright

Lastly, please note that ideas are not protected by copyright.  Maybe the individual or artistic way that you displayed that idea is, but the idea exists on its own, free of legal ties.  You don’t own it.  You can’t keep it.  In fact, it probably wasn’t even yours in the first place, given that you are a culmination of your experiences and circumstances.

The De-Merit of Learning Styles?

“The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” according to an article in The New York Times.  Incredibly interesting.

E-classes should be embraced

My earlier post reminded me of a 2007 editorial that I wrote for the Central Michigan Life during a very heated campus debate concerning online learning.  I was a full-time specialist clerk for the university’s online graduate programs and an adjunct faculty member that dreamed of one day becoming an instructional designer.  My supervisor urged me not to write the article as a representative of the online division, given the topic’s controversial nature.

Just four and a half years later, I have been an instructional designer and am now the director of the Internet Technologies Group and Distance Education Department at the community college across town.  Just over four years.  Trippy.

Here is the link.  I think my perspective still applies…
E-classes should be embraced.

Separating Design From Delivery

Until now, I’ve been a designer, an instructional designer. Now, I am a director. Now I know I will have to address accusations of poor quality and sub-par experiences.

“Individual attention doesn’t exist in online classes.“
“I can’t get to know my students online.“
“Online courses are isolating experiences.”
“You can’t replicate what I do in the classroom online.”

---

Let me remind you that there is a difference between design and delivery.  The problem, I think, is two-fold:

1. If those who assess online delivery don’t know what online delivery should look like, they can’t assess it, so they don’t.
2. If those who assess design have no say in the assessment of delivery, and those who assess delivery have no say in the assessment of design, there is a disconnect.

It doesn’t matter how much support we provide – technology, graphic design, educational pedagogy – or what tools we use to assess – quality rubrics, surveys, pilots – we can not control the delivery of the experience.  “Phoning it in” and treating it like a correspondence course are delivery issues.  If you don’t make the effort to get to know your students, you won’t.  If you don’t make the effort to provide individual attention, they won’t receive it.  If you don’t inject your personality and philosophy in your materials, they won’t reflect you.

---

The next time you question the quality of an online program or course, ask yourself, “Is that a design issue or a delivery issue?”

If it’s a design issue, by all means, let us know and we’ll fix it.  If it’s a delivery issue, there’s not much we can do about that.  People have autonomy.  We can’t make someone want to engage by the way we structure the course.  We can design opportunities for interaction.  They can ignore them or give minimum effort.  What I will do for you is make a promise:

I promise to continue leading horses to water.

Creating Complete Online Lessons

Do Online Courses Make People More Likely to Cheat?

A recent, heated debate with faculty on academic dishonesty in online courses brought up some interesting ideas that I believe are misconceptions.

Allow me to expand on these below:

---

Myth #1: In a face-to-face course, I can ensure that my students are doing their own work.

Not likely.  Education has been face-to-face for centuries and that’s where cheating originated.  Whether it’s hiring someone else to write your paper, using a crib sheet during the exam, or pulling the answer to the question off of Google, face-to-face courses don’t allow you to control the behavior of others.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that you probably can’t even confirm that it’s actually your student that’s attending.  I’m serious.  Unless you check their IDs.  I worked at a college when someone was busted mid-way through the semester posing as the student that was actually registered for the course.

Myth #2: Proctored tests ensure security and accurate assessment of learning.

Again, doubtful.  The bulk of proctored tests are multiple choice, which doesn’t really assess much other than memorization.  Having worked at several online learning centers, I know that when I had to mail materials out to proctors across the U.S., I had no way of verifying the integrity of those individuals.  Sure, you can make sure someone works at a school or a library, but that doesn’t ensure that the person isn’t the student’s mom, uncle, friend, or boss.  In fact, a couple of the educational testing centers I’ve had experience with don’t regularly check IDs and don’t monitor their testers.  What does the lab attendant making $8.28 care if this guy taking the test cheats?  In fact, maybe they’re both students and friends!

Myth #3: You don’t really get to know your students or their quality of work in an online course.

This one is especially irritating to me.  If you’re not getting to know your students or their quality of work, you’re not teaching.  There is still an epidemic of misunderstanding of the instructor’s role in online courses.  Many instructors will design academically-sound, even impressive online courses, then step back and let the students muddle through as if it’s a correspondence course from the old days.  You should be corresponding with your online students regularly, becoming familiar with their personalities, their goals, their styles of writing, and providing feedback for improvement.  No, it’s never going to be 100% – those that wish to cheat are going to cheat – but the more you “check out,” the less they care to put in the effort.

Myth #4: Students cheat more in online courses because they can.

I haven’t looked up statistics on this, but I’m going to go ahead and disagree.  If I’m a person with integrity, putting me in a more autonomous environment does not make me less likely to display integrity.  Taking classes online doesn’t make me more likely to plagiarize, legalizing marijuana doesn’t make me more likely to smoke pot, and having a blunt object within my reach doesn’t make me more likely to bludgeon you.

What may be true is that the online environment makes it easier for you to notice the cheating that does occur.  You’ve got records of what was submitted, file information with author and date information and time stamps, and tools like Google and Turnitin that make it easy to catch those “bad seeds” in the act.

---

Though I could continue to address various misconceptions about online education, I’ll stop there.  I think you get my point.  Am I biased?  Sure.  But so are you.  There are affordances and constraints associated with every educational environment and educational tool, but no environment or tool provides you the ability to completely control the behavior of others.

“Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.” –George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Qualities of Successful Online Instruction

Technology Literacy: What’s the Goal?

A friend of mine offered an intriguing perspective on instruction geared toward technology literacy at lunch today.  He asked, “Why are we teaching Word, Excel, and PowerPoint when we could be teaching word processing, creating spreadsheets, and authoring presentations?”  Many students become obsessed with which buttons to click or step-by-step directions when what we really want is for them to understand its use and purpose in their daily lives.

---

Do we want to teach tools or do we want to teach ideas?

---

I wondered why we have let these specific tools saturate our marketplace and our educational marketplace.  I believe the reason is simply exposure.  Microsoft’s business model has pushed these tools in our faces when we purchase computers for personal, business, or educational use, so we assume we want students to know how to use these specific tools for success.  But, is that what we really want?

My friend posed that, if your assignment requires students to use a specific software, you’re teaching the wrong thing.  Why shouldn’t students be able to use GoogleDocs or Open Office to write papers, or Numbers or Keynote for spreadsheets and presentations?  As an Instructional Designer, I tend to agree.  For instance, if I design a journal assignment, students have their choice of whether they want to prepare that journal in written, verbal, or other form and what software they want to use.  I don’t care if they track their thoughts with blogs, YouTube and a Flip cam, or scanned pen on paper.  Of course, this takes more time to score than zipping through twenty Word docs, but my objective is that they practice reflection, not that they reflect with a certain tool.  So, why then, are introductory technology courses based on specific applications?  Why not offer exposure to several options so that students can apply these skills in different environments?  Isn’t that more realistic, given that technology is always changing?  I know a lot of people that freaked when Office 2010 came out.  If they’d been exposed to multiple work environments before that point, the change may not have been so jarring.

Redesigning Evaluations

This is the time of year that some of us educators start to stress about evaluations.

No, I don’t mean the evaluations our administrators do of us or the evaluations we do of our students.  The end of the semester is traditionally our students’ opportunity to evaluate us.  I understand they can be brutal.  I understand they are often motivated to be more expressive when they don’t agree with our evaluations of their work.  However, I also understand that, when the right questions are asked, they can offer honest, insightful feedback and many suggestions that can assist us.

Why are you afraid of student evaluations?

I think, on the whole, we know if the experience has been positive or negative.  Why, then, do some of us fear the evaluation?  I guess it’s fair that if you suspect you stink at your job, you don’t want to hear that you stink at your job 9 times from 9 different people.  What you likely want to hear is what you do well and, more importantly, how you can improve.

I believe that evaluations are typically worthless and they must be redesigned.

Our institutions often distribute Likert-type surveys to our students to gather data on our courses and teaching styles.  This numerical data may be decent for examining overall trends (the administration’s goal) but it doesn’t do much for gathering suggestions (our goal).  When is the last time you filled out the survey on your table at a restaurant?  If you can recall, did you offer any suggestions for improvement?  Probably not.  They weren’t interested in improvement.  They were interested in establishing a benchmark of service so that they could track change over time.  We need to be asking things such as, “What is the most important thing we did in this course and why?” “If you took another course with this instructor, how could s/he better assist your learning?” or “When you read the list of course objectives, which of these do you think we met?”  But, of course, that data is tough to run through a Scantron.

Seek evaluation.  You won’t regret it.

Instead, I encourage you to deal with the survey tool that your institution distributes, but to supplement it with your own.  Write the questions you really want feedback on and build your survey into the course.  In fact, why even wait until the end of the year?  Why not offer a slightly different version of your evaluation, two or even three times a semester, so that you can actually use the data to improve the experience as it progresses?  Education isn’t about following a script.  It’s about being flexible and meeting the needs of your audience while still meeting the overall objectives for the experience.