It's hard to believe, but the summer is in the rearview mirror.  Next week the fall semester begins and as I look back over the summer  I see some things I learned (or observed) in these coronatimes:The FoMo is still strong!I thought I had beaten back FoMo (fear of missing out) but I guess not :-).  This summer many conferences made the switch to online this summer due to the ongoing

HyFlex (Hybrid Flexible) is a way of designing courses for (what I call) ultimate flexibility.  It takes both ends of the teaching spectrum, fully face-to-face, and fully online-asynchronous and it bridges the gap.  Back in the day, I learned about this model of course design by taking an OLC workshop with Brian himself, but you can learn more about the model in his free ebook.  I liked

Yet another post that started as a comment on something that Paul Prinsloo posted on facebook (I guess I should be blaming facebook and Paul for getting me to think of things other than my dissertation :p hahaha).Anyway,  Paul posted an IHE story about a research study which indicates that instructional designers (IDers) think that they would benefit from conducting research in their field (teaching

This semester is turning out to be one that is quite busy.  It was a good idea to not teach a graduate this semester so I can focus on my dissertation proposal, however (like that irresistible desert at the end of the meal) various collaborative projects have come in to fill the "void" left in my schedule from not teaching (the one that is supposed to be going into dissertation prep), and these

The summer semester is over!  Well, it's been over for several weeks now and the fall semester is in full swing, but I am not teaching this semester (focusing more on projects that have been on the back-burner for a while). Taking a break from teaching actually makes me think more about teaching in an odd way (I guess out of sight, but not out of mind).One of the courses that I teach is an intro

A number of threads converged last week for me, and all of the threads exist in a continuum.  The first thread was one that began in the class that I am teaching this summer, INSDSG 601: Foundations of Instructional Design & Learning Technology. One of the things that we circle back to as a class (every couple of weeks) are the notions of instructor and designer.  Where does one end and

While the DigPedChat on the topic is a month behind us, I am only now getting to it ;-)  So, after reading this post by Sean Micheal Morris on Digital Pedagogy I thought I would tackle some of the questions posed for discussion.  Feel free to leave a response, or link to your own blog post via comment :-)What does it mean to perform teaching? What does it mean to perform learning? These

A recent hangout I was on talking about online pedagogy with some really cool people :-)Note to self: Ouroboros as a pedagogical symbol...

A brief presentation that my colleagues and I did last Friday at our university's Teaching & Learning conference (I still remember when we called it the "EdTech Conference" :-)  This time around I listed by credentials as EdD (ABD).  I felt a bit awkward putting my standard (BA, MBA, MS, MEd, MA) - it also wouldn't fit - so since I am close to being ABD I just wrote that.  I think

The other day I got access to my summer course on Blackboard.  With just under 25 days left to go until the start of courses, it's time to look at my old syllabus (from last summer), see what sorts of innovations my colleague (Rebecca) has in her version of the course, and decide how to update my own course.  I had some ideas last summer, but since then the course has actually received an

The other day I was reading a blog posted by Rebecca on marking and getting a sense of that impostor syndrome creeping in. I love reading posts like these because I still consider myself new to the teaching, even though I've been doing it for a couple of years now.  Some of the things that she describes are things that I have thought or experienced, and some are not.In terms of an impostor

Among the many streams of things happening these days is keeping tabs on some interesting things happening in my various internet circles.  I've resolved to just dip into my RSS stream and look at things periodically over a couple of days and not be as 'vigilant' as I have been in the past.  Too many things to focus on, not enough time for news.  That said, I came across an interesting

The other day I came across a post on ProfHacker written by Maha B. where she talked a bit about her own teaching experiences and whether one assesses the process of learning or the product of learning.  I was thinking about this question in light of my own experiences as a learner, as a designer, and as an instructor who now has had experiences in introductory courses, capstone courses, and intermediate

Well, 2015 is done!  Grades are in, courses are complete, and things are in process for next year.  Next spring I am not teaching, so I am thinking about cool (and instructive) things I can implement for the course that I am scheduled to teach this summer (intro to instructional design).I won't work too hard on next summer's course just yet, too many other things to consider first.  That

I think  my interactions with Autumm in virtual connecting made me want to create  a little trailer with dramatized highlights from my doctoral studies thus far.  Alas, no budget for extras, scripts, sets, and green screens, so I guess I'll leave it to plain text for now ;-)This week marks the beginning of my second year at Athabasca's EdD program (survived year 1!), and I just began

Yesterday another faculty member took on the role and responsibilities of department chair.  This is quite exciting for a variety of reasons, but one of them that comes to mind is that I get to experience things anew.  "Training" a new department chair, even though my colleague and I report to them, provides an opportunity to explain to someone new what the operating rules of the university

Continuing on my quest for 'inbox zero' for Pocket, here is another interesting post that deals with the personality of the instructor in the teaching and learning endeavor. There are actually two interesting strands here, one that deals with the instructor themselves, and one that deals with material creation.  I'll tackle the material creation first as I find that this is what piqued my initial

This month I decided that it was high time I started preparing for the fall semester.  Sure, my third class  -EDDE803-(and third semester) of my EdD program is 2 months away, however since I have the books (thank you Athabasca for planning ahead! :-) ), why not start now that I am a little more relaxed?  The first book that I just finished is by Diana Laurillard Teaching as a Design

Dave is really HAL, who is emulating DaveBusy week!  Just finished grading my current class, and finished the syllabus for my summer class.  Now the next stage in the course development is to create some instructions of the assessments, supporting materials, videos... oh my! I guess this is making me a bit late to this week's Rhizo Party on #rhizo15.  I have not read responses of other

It seems like I am living in a time-warp this semester :)  I had saved an article to read, and respond to, titled "Motivating Faculty to Teach Online" that was published in Inside Higher Education. I could have sworn that I saved this back in the fall at some point, but looking at the date it was earlier this month. I am not sure if time flowing slowly is a good thing or a bad thing.  In

Well, here we are, part II of educational assumptions.  That last blog post was getting long, so here we are! These are still some ideas about things I jotted down in the margins, highlighted, or otherwise reacted to when reading a recent research article on Open Praxis by fellow MOOC researchers France and Jenny. Despite my issues and concerns with the article, it's still worth a read so that

On the web, not one knows you are a ____________ (fill in the blank).  Connecting with the previous elements of trust, I am continuing my opening exploration of this module's second topic: Network Fluency.  The introductory chat is available as a YouTube video, and the discussion is on the topic of Social Capital and Personal Learning Networks.This subject of Network Fluency (or Network Literacy

Back in September Maha Bali's post on Critical Pedagogy: Intentions and Realities hit the interwebs on the Hybrid Pedagogy site. It's something I've been thinking about writing an Online Edition from my own experiences teaching in an online environment.  It seems to be a bit slow on Connected Courses this week (at least as compared to last week, measured in blog posts), so this seems like a good

Wow, it's not even Wednesday noon (half-way through week 1 of module 1) in Connected Courses and the feed is buzzing with the title (and/or #whyiteach).  Quite interesting.  Lots of things saved to pocket.  I will most likely read through them this weekend ;-)  In any case, I joked on twitter earlier that I should write a post on why I don't teach (who knows, this post may evolve

I guess is teaching preparation time!  These past few weekends I've been going through my online course, updating due dates for assignments, and slowly starting to make the changed to the various modules that I had scribbled down as the course was in progress last spring.  It's still up in the air as to whether or not the class will run so I am thinking of applying for an assistantship for

I am back home, and with vacation behind me I guess it's time to get back to work.  I've got the day-job for which I've already created a list of tasks to undertake; the teaching of my newly renumbered course INSDSG 684 (formerly 619) and the updates I want to make to the course materials as well as gearing up for my #altcred experiment, version 2.0; and finally the Great Big MOOC Book which I

Well,  we are in Week 9 (or 13) in the course I am teaching this semester, and the badges experiment is continuing!  This weekend, as I was reading assignment submissions, I saw that some students, in their design documents, have started incorporating Web 2.0 tools (should we just call them "web tools" now?) that encourage the use, formation, or exploration of personal learning environments

I am attending, and presenting, at NERCOMP 2014 today. As I was checking Blackboard over the past couple of days and "grading" feedback pieces submitted by my students, I noticed an interesting trend in the feedback (and some emails sent by students) that reminded me of #Rhizo14 (week 2?): encouraging independence.We are now in week 8 (of 13) in this course and students are put into groups of three

So, we've entered the half-way point of #rhizo14.  The original  topic title had something to do with Declaring your Learning. This of course brought on memories of jokes of airports and questions like "anything to declare?" and smart-alec responses to this question.  Declaring is also Stage 3 of a success in a MOOC, so I guess it made sense in a way that this was during week 3.  That

Cookie cutters: detriment to creativity, or fuel to the creative fire?Last week, while I was updating something on LinkedIn, I saw one of my colleagues post a link to a post by the eLearning Brothers called The Top 10 Best eLearning Game Templates. I am generally not a fan of such list-posts, but every now and again I come across something really interesting.  I usually don't teach courses on

The cone of silence ;-)In most cMOOCs I attempt to go back and respond to fellow participant's posts after something has provoked some thoughts.  If I am less busy, I tend to blog more, if I am more busy, I tend to leave more comments.  I guess this semester I am sort of in-between ;-)In any case, from week 1 of the #rhizo14 MOOC here are some things that have piqued my interest:From Jenny

"Design Gold" badgeHappy and Prosperous 2014 to anyone who is reading this :-)Since it's a new year, and the semester is starting in about a month's time, I've decided to spend the month-and-a-half between semesters thinking about the course that I teach: The Design and Instruction of Online Courses, a course for graduate level instructional design students.  I was first assigned the course

Take one blog, mix with others, add own thought and see what happensOver the past couple of days I've been reading what fellow participants have contributed to the blogosphere on #edcmooc.  I've watched the week 2 videos (more on that in post during the weekend), and I am slowly reading (or re-reading) some of the food-for-thought articles posted for week two.To keep things manageable, I decided

Seems like Week 1 of #edcmooc is now done, and I've read (or in some cases reviewed) the readings and videos that they had posted as resources for Week 1. During the Week 1 live session recap and discussion there was an indication that there were 20,000 registrants for the MOOC.  I'd be interested in seeing how many of those 20,000 follow through and "complete" the MOOC, whatever "completion"

Well, new semester, new experimentation with xMOOCs (I didn't see any cMOOCs on the docket this fall).  I decided to try out a few MOOCs on subjects that are interesting to me, as always, while I try to find my way toward a potential dissertation proposal.The first two MOOCs are on coursera and they are "Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative" from Vanderbilt and "Video Games and Learning"

Happy Labor Day everyone!The other day I was going through my two Learning Solutions Magazine articles to see if there were any comments (Part 1 and Part 2 here) that I might be able to address.  I think it's great when people engage with the reading material on the web in a constructive way, it helps everyone expand their knowledge a little. That said, the comments weren't that many, and they

This week on #ioe12 I tackled Open Assessment. Now, I am no newbie to badges. I can't say I've been there "since day 1," but it was pretty darned close!  Before going through these materials, which included a a video from the launch of the HASTAC and MacArthur Foundation DML competition, I thought of open assessment as something that dealt with badges for life long learning, and something that

Welcome to the Expansion Pack for the Open Teaching week of #ioe12 :-)  Here are some additional resources for open teaching.Peer Reviewed ArticlesKoutropoulos, A., Gallagher, M.S., Abajian, S.C., deWaard, I., Hogue, R., Keskin, N., Rodriguez, O. Emotive Vocabulary in MOOCs: Context & Participant Retention. EuroDL: The European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning. 2012/I.A little self-promotion

It's Open Teaching time on #ioe12!Having been involved with MOOCs for close to a couple of years now (in the fringes early on, and on the main stage since January 2011), I thought I knew quite a lot about open teaching, but Wiley video presentation surprised me and I learned something new!  I had run across Wiley's syllabi on Open Content a while back, (before this course) but I wasn't aware

For my inaugural "assignment" post for #fslt12 I thought I would use one of the reflection templates, specifically the "areas of expertise" one. It's interesting to think about my teaching experience thus far. Initially I was tempted to say that my teaching experience extends back to February of this year; this is when I started teaching a college level course (graduate level) in research methods for

This morning, before I left for work, an article caught my eye in my RSS reader from Inside Higher Education (amazingly, they gave me enough of a blurb to want to read the article - usually they don't!).  The article is about an Italian University that is going English-Only for their instruction. This article is an interesting read (I can't wait until the comments start coming in).My initial

I was reading Lisa's response to #bonkopen the other day. Both the post and the comments were quite interesting. One of the issues is blackboard as a platform. OK, sure, LMS in general stink - regardless of whether it's Moodle, Bb Learn, Bb Vista (formerly WebCT, ANGEL and so on.  Lisa does prefer the distributed mode of communication which is typical in MOOCs like Change and CCK, but despite

Well, actually, it's the start of two new MOOCs!I know that Change11 and DS106 are still going, but change11 seems to be on life support. It seems to me anyway that the same 4-5 people are posting, and even though there are interesting people in these final weeks, most people have moved on, which is too bad. I still read the daily digest, and those 4-5 people post some thought provoking stuff, but

I posted a link to the notes that I took during the NERCOMP unconference session that I proposed and lead in my previous blog post.  Granted, the notes are a bit disconnected because I was jotting down ideas, notes, and thoughts as they were being mentioned by participants so you may not get a coherent view of everything.My initial thought on a course on Learning Management Systems was that students

A few years ago, when I was still a student in Instructional Design, the then program director of the instructional design program had an idea for a new course for our program: a course on learning management systems. Her conception for the course was that students in the course would get hands on with many different learning management systems, so that when they graduated they would be conversant

My video introduction to the research methods course (for instructional designers) that I am teaching this semester came in.  Yay!  Even though I think I could have benefited from some make-up, the video came out pretty good.  (if the embedded player isn't working, here is the direct link to the video introduction) brightcove.createExperiences();

'Tis the season to be thinking about which courses you will be registering for spring courses; unless you're graduating this December, in which case let me be the first to congratulate you! :-)  The spring course list is now out, check it out on our discussion board.  When I was a student I always liked to have a syllabus for the courses I was thinking about registering for so that I could

I've posted a new blog post over at the UMassOnline blog with some thoughts about the net gen and teachers knowing their learners. Check it out: click here

Before the new year came in, one of my linguistics professors sent me (and other classmates) an email looking for some feedback.  The question was:  How would you react as a teacher if your students texted, surfed the internet, or did other stuff on their computers during your class?Given that my classmates all come from diverse backgrounds (some in Higher Education, some in K-12, others

While I was exploring the options for conversation simulation software (I am not that skilled with Flash so that would take WAY too long to accomplish), I came across KDSimStudio (via eLearning Learning).I was really excited to try it out since it seemed straight forward and easy to use, and there was a demo version that I could try. The software looks nice, but I found out that it only supports roman

I was reading this opinion piece on the Chronicle of Higher Education on Careers. The author reports back on a forum discussion where people talk about your first job influencing your career. Essentially should you go get a teaching job right after you get your PhD, or should you publish your heart out and try to get to that R1 institution where fame and fortune lies (or so they say).I quite honestly

I was reading this article on insidehighered.com the other day.All I have to say is BRILLIANT! (OK, maybe I am getting a bit carried away here)While the article doesn't point out much new information (for me anyways - sorry, I don't mean to sound like a snob), it manages to point out that a lecture is not an inherent ability that you are either born with or you are not. It's is a skill, an art dare

I came across this article on the Chronicle of Higher Ed recently. It was an interesting read. I can't really speak to the financial information they give because I am not involved in that area of university management. I did however have a couple of comments on other topics...Millions of workers have lost their jobs in recent months. But tenured professors are hard to fire. And some powerful faculty