PBS and Ken Burns are making much of the historical content from Ken Burns available through a new site – One Nation Many Stories. Together with Ken Burns in the Classroom the content and lesson ideas make a great resource for teachers. I was astounded to find that one can watch the entirety of some of the collections (e.g., Jazz) which I purchased when first released.
There is danger in evaluating anything from online comments, but for many issues those who find something acceptable seldom comment. Hence, I see many negative comments about their personal online experiences or the experiences of children reported by parents. Some college students want their tuition dollars refunded. I don’t know if they expect to then receive course credit in addition to their money back or just a refund and they will try again in a future semester. Districts report that despite their efforts to offer instruction many students simply don’t show at designated times or assigned work does not get submitted (NPR report, Twin City Schools).
Parents report their kids receive too much or too little work and they must attempt to teach what they don’t understand in terms of the content itself or the assigned activities. The comments that I admit irk me are those from educators and even educational tech folks who make such comments. “My kid loves school, but now cries when he/she has to do an assignment.”
It is difficult to evaluate these complaints. Clearly, students didn’t sign up to take courses from their kitchen tables using a laptop or an iPad. The homework issue has been in dispute lately, but this new online situation has increased the complaints. As far as expecting kids to work after school goes, teachers are in a tough spot. More is expected of them and the performance of the students they teach is used to evaluate the educators and their school, but somehow high standards are expected to be met with less time for students to learn. Now, some of the issues are the same – why this much time after school hours? Many complaints are different and more related to requirements placed on parents.
I don’t know what to make of the present situation. I have considerable experience teaching online, but my experience has been with adult graduate students who signed up for the experience purposefully because they could not attend a face to face class on campus. Our online class is face to face with the exception of those who have time conflicts and must use recordings to obtain the information covered. I wouldn’t want to have to watch the other students discuss the content for the week with the instructor either, but again this is the practical reality of our situation. For the most part, I think everyone accepts the approach and the adaptations to their situations.
I would have suggestions based on these experiences for others teaching adults. Aside from how to use Zoom, Blackboard, or tools available for writing and discussion, I consider my knowledge and experiences based in my direct role as an online educator of little value to K-12 educators. Tools and tactics I can teach you. I don’t know what to tell you regarding the students who don’t or can’t participate or how to structure a task should the assistance of a parent be required to deal with the technology or the learning assignment. I think we all are trying things based on practical sense in such situations.
When we work with preservice teachers and the type of practicing teacher I have just described, we focus strongly on the use of technology in face to face situations. I recently came across a study indicating that 3.5% of preservice teachers had any chance explore to online learning experiences as part of their field experiences. I don’t mean using online resources, I mean teaching/learning online. Even though the percentage of K12 students (mostly secondary students) is edging upward, educators aren’t prepared to teach in this way. This is a specialization few teachers expected to undertake so why take time to create the circumstances for teachers to acquire this type of experience?
I think my advice in the present situation is to be tolerant and try to appreciate the situation others find themselves in. This suggestion applies to those complaining and also to educators expecting collaboration from parents. Some are concerned that online instruction will become our new normal and education especially higher education will never be the same again. I hope this is not the case, but if for whatever reason this is true try to look at our present circumstances as the first real opportunity to explore ideas about distance learning on a grand scale.
You learn when you write. Writing across the curriculum develops writing skills, but also retention and understanding of the topic that is the subject of the writing activity. Writing across the curriculum continues to be proven effective (see reference for newest meta-analysis of studies investigating the efficacy of this activity in K12 provided below). Why is it then that students do so little writing?
One of the findings from the study that might be considered was that while theoretical arguments might suggest that certain writing activities would be more beneficial than others the unique relative advantages of specific writing tasks did not result in strong statistical differences. I am interested in the cognitive demands of specific tasks, e.g., argumentation and persuasive writing, but at present the best advice for practitioners would probably be “students benefit from writing about what they are learning” – you come up with the task. As a guiding concept I would suggest that writing tasks that require more thinking should be more effective than writing tasks that require less. Summarization should require more thinking that take notes. Summarization and provide examples from personal thinking that illustrate key ideas should require more thinking than summarization. etc.
Graham, S., Kiuhara, S. A., & MacKay, M. (2020). The Effects of Writing on Learning in Science, Social Studies, and Mathematics: A Meta-Analysis. Review of Educational Research, 90(2), 179–226. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654320914744
Educators now teaching online, whether experienced in this environment or not, may be tired of those they consider “outsiders” trying to offer advice and suggestions. At least, this is impression I get from following social media. I hope most of those considered outsiders are trying to help (and not profiteer) and these outsiders are making suggestions based on experience. Part of the issue is how to offer help when your experience even when extensive has involved a different type of student typically working online for reasons that are often different and because the online experience was perceived as advantageous by the students. Working with situations in which everyone was forced into this setting is different in important ways.
I came across a resource I thought was useful. These recommendations come from a K12-oriented group from Illinois. This group put together a report offering a variety of suggestions. I found this report within a LifeHacker post that was focused on one specific topic from the report. The LifeHacker post presented the recommendations of the Illinois group on time expectations broken out by grade level. Because we have grandchildren of multi-ages now learning from home, it is obvious the expectations of teaches are all over the place. As a researcher, I know of nothing that would address the very practical question of how much time works best under presentation circumstances and how should this expectation be split across online time vs. assigned activities. A group recommendation on an important variable should at least serve as a starting point.
Like so many issues with online instruction/learning, the first inclination is to duplicate common approaches from the classroom. Maybe this is an acceptable starting point, but because there are so many variables that are simply different, an effort must be made to be flexible, to consider recommendations, and to make adjustments.
I have been spending time on significant maintenance projects since the beginning of February. If you decide you want to offer resources to the public, you find your self making many decisions. Do you want to offer periodic blog posts that offer ideas in small, independent units that appear for a few days and then roll of the screen? Do, you want to create content that is less time-based in how you imagine your readers will interact with this content?
There are variants of both approaches that are workarounds in allowing you as content creator and those who rely on your content to deal with the time issues. Bloggers can offer a search tool (search or tags) readers can use to see what you might have said about a topic years ago. You see a search box on this page if you are viewing the page display on a computer. The search box is also available for those who rely on mobile devices, but I am guessing few ever think to find this tool for accessing content. Bloggers can also repost content based on analytics that indicate which posts had been viewed frequently or intuitions about what might be useful at a given time or when bloggers find themselves with nothing new to say.
I do blog (you are reading one), but I also present what might be described as organized collections of resources. In one case, I developed and maintained a resource I imagined as an open educational resource (OER) textbook. I had written and continue to write what I consider a commercial book and I wanted to explore other issues you do not learn about by selling a product. My second collection project involved content I could provide as an extension of the textbook I write with my wife. Again, this was an experiment of a sort. I was and remain interested in topics such as keeping textbook content current, keeping the cost of a commercial product low, and offering educators who assign a textbook ways to make what they assign to students more flexible (I call this my interactive syllabus project).
Time is also an issue with such collections. The content ages and this means some links no longer work, some tools described are no longer available, new laws require educators do things in a way that was not previously required, new topics catch the fancy of practitioners and they expect to see these topics addressed in what they study, etc. All published instructional content faces these challenges, but offering content online was intended to meet these challenges. Online content is modified at the source and the updates are available to all. Goals like this are well intended and reflect real problems. Addressing these goals requires far more time than most consumers assume. My two projects consist of several hundred individual pages of content and several thousand web links. Maintenance does not result in compensation, but neither did the original investment in these projects.
As I claim at the beginning of this post, I have been working on my maintenance initiative now for several months. I have completed the first phase which has little to do with the reasons I have just listed here for doing maintenance. I decided it was most efficient for me to address the technical challenges I was facing first and then deal with the challenges that were more inherent in the content. My OER project (Meaningful learning and the participatory web) had gone through previous upgrades first changing the delivery system from a wiki, to individual web pages, and then to a page-based approach using WordPress. Most are probably familiar with WordPress as a blogging platform, but it also works well as a way to create a large collection of pages that can be interlinked. The tools internal to WordPress I was using to create what could be experienced as web pages were primitive and it was time to retool everything to take advantage of more recently developed capabilities. The idea is that the maintenance would allow more efficient content creation with more power. Worth the investment as long as I continue to create content.
The content generated as the free extension of our book was authored using a sophisticated program called Dreamweaver. This authoring environment allowed me to use Javascript and CSS to add efficiency and power to my content. Adobe, the company responsible for Dreamweaver, continues to upgrade its products. It can be argued that this is necessary as the hardware on which these products are used changes. There is also that upgrade fee that is nice to receive from users. At a point some years ago, Adobe went to a lease rather than purchase model for its products. My son who is a professional media producer claims this is great. My opinion as a hobbyist (making no money) user was different. I was comfortable with the software I owned. I was comfortable until my old computer crashed. I did recover my files, but this was at the cost of a new motherboard. It was time to guard against an inevitable problem of not owning a working content creation environment. I decided I needed to take a different approach and am moving my content to an online web authoring system called Concrete5. To my knowledge, there was no automated way to make this transition, so I have been moving the content page by page and image by image. The move is complete, but I have identified one remaining maintenance task. For some reason, the theme I am using in Concrete5 does not color code links. The links are there and function, but linked text is not visibly differentiated from the normal text. I am now going to have to manually change the color of the text that is a link.
Why tell you this? First, I wanted to announce the availability of the updated systems. My OER project (Meaningful learning and the participatory web) and our resources for extending our textbook (Integrated Technology for meaningful learning) sites work. Second, I wanted readers to understand what is required behind the scenes to provide the free online content you consume. I make this effort especially as it relates to OER resources and those who complain about commercial textbooks and offer OER content as an alternative. Simply put, there are practical limits to assumptions that OER education resources will be available. There are not enough hobbyists who find this process enjoyable.
This example was created with Book Creator for Chrome. Click the image that follows to access the online book.
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