Leadership

Facilitator:  Steve Acker
Rapportuer:  Victoria Getis

Leadership Group

Goal: build a hierarchy that starts with specific user and his/her need for innovation proposed by individual learning community project, achieve “wireframe” stage, a representation of a final project that can serve as basis for discussion with both sponsors and constituencies.

Use cases are created by visualizing a specific individual and articulating their need for the product or innovation based on a careful description of the user within the context of the innovation. Our group began to build a use case for a graduate student and why s/he would benefit from ePortfolio:

•  based on needs assessment; work load is issue for graduate student; can think through new possibilities; how to get them done without spending extra time; for faculty member, time and reward structure (cost/benefit analysis) are also issues.
•  Marketing issue; Toledo has met to consider ideal student – stay-at-home mother, not employed, or anyone unemployed. Looking for displaced workers; place-bound people. Want to get it done ASAP.
•  How to meet different agendas?
•  Must convince multiple audiences, including administrators, student, faculty. Build multiple use cases?
•  Use technology for faculty improvement – allow self-reflection on teaching; technology must be non-intimidating.
•  Students not as intimidated by technology. Aware of power of technology – know they need it. Willing to learn.
•  Re-do physical portfolio -> hesitancy. What are benefits?

Persuasive points:

•  User needs to be aware of learning curve – learn this now, later learning will require less effort. Examples to make this point?
•  Accessibility. Others can see ePortfolio.
•  Product is richer.
•  Product is more flexible.
•  Selectively mutable – change your ePortfolio to show different views of yourself for different audiences. You CAN be all things to all people.
•  Adaptable to different student audiences – can change it depending on audience needs and strengths.
•  Logistics – integrate with other systems, can appear seamless. Need single sign-on/login. Must emphasize establishing professional identity, not busywork, must connect to “real world” and offer real benefits

User profile: busy, have different needs, student is tech-literate (sometimes), traditional and non-traditional, wants help, has different strengths to offer, different weaknesses to address.

 

Inhibiting factors to building a new innovation in ePortfolio:

•  Support, equipment
•  Lose sense of community
•  Speed of degree – lose commitment to institution (though this can be addressed through ePort)
•  Quality of services provided may not be top-notch

Solutions:

•  Lab space with equipment
•  Lab space with support structure and trained help
•  Create sense of community within departments

Wireframe: how will environment Learning Community build support our user as s/he meets her ePortfolio needs?

 

[here, we broke into two groups and began a functional requirement document to capture the needs of our end users:

 

Group 1:

Log-in: customize to user
Templates: Jumping off point and wizard
Overview : Getting people started building ePortfolios
Feedback:
Community: Share experiences and feedback
Search:
Evaluative Criteria: Major or professional evaluative criteria
Samples: others' ePortfolio
Requirements:
What if: If I change my major, how will this material map to new requirements?
FAQ:
Technology Tools:
Help:
Resources:
Organizational Filters: different ways to view material
Chronological
Media Type
Subject
Outcome
Revision
Reflection
Evaluative Criteria

 

Group 1's beginning of functional analysis:

 

 

 

Group 2:

 

Log-in : customize to user
Reflection: students' self-analysis and commentary
Template: guided scaffold to filling in/collecting the information
Promotion: communicating value of ePortfolio to student/build relations with community and public/showcase value of academic programs for students
Examples and Models: options for what is possible
Communication: from student perspective – telling/displaying your product to peers and faculty
Tools:
Support: achieving digital literacy
Controlled access: lock and key
Save: repository
Multiple levels of benefits for students, faculty, administration:
Students are able to collect artifacts of their experience
Students make connections to larger world
Students are part of community at hand
Privacy sharing permission: ?
Assessment: value of whole system

 

Group 2's beginning of functional analysis:

 

 

 

 

Conclusion: Designers use a process that represents needs analyses through concrete representations of different users. These use cases evolve into functional requirement documents, followed by a “wireframe” that steps an audience through a sequence of events needed to meet the user needs. Ultimately, a sketch is generated by a visual designer and then instantiated by a web designer. The model can support any attempt at innovations and work well to track progress through the stages.

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Culture

Facilitator:  Judy Maxson
Rapportuer:  Megan Troyer

Miami University —Not sure who spoke

Discussed a need to find a common ground, what all students need to come away with. How are they going to use ePortfolio ultimately? Is it feasible on Miami 's Campus?

1. We employ a market based vocabulary – how do we discuss our initiative to those who do not like that language? Looking for an intersection between business and the academy.
   1. Palinurus.org – the relationship between business and the humanities
   2. The University in Ruins , book by Bill Readings
   3. Rubrics by disciplines are available from organizations in the discipline
2. We'd like a rubric to help us decide how to evaluate these ePortfolios
   1. You have to build your own; how could anyone else know what you value
   2. LiveText (3 rd party ePortfolio, hosted on their servers) said it will import rubrics from accrediting agencies
3. Does anyone have feedback about ePortfolios available, such as Blackboard
   1. Ask about metadata
   2. Ask about migration – getting material in and out, so it is not localized to your institution.
      1. Possibly in the next versions there will be a way to do this (possibly within a year)
      2. WebCT has a different approach (Steve)

BGSU

Kris Blair - The Digital Literacy and Communication Studio will create both face-to-face and virtual design, development, and assessment environments for several new and existing e-learning initiatives in BGSU's Department of English, including the development of online courses across the department where technologically literate graduate students have been paired with faculty to team-design online courses. Extending this and other initiatives will not only solidify our department's commitment to the Academic Plan but also create a recruitment tool for graduate education among traditional and non-traditional populations.

 

Looking at needs assessment, what does it mean to be literate in an information age?

How do we address sustainability? How do we create a departmental culture that values this? To date, workshops with faculty, grad students have developed resource shells; faculty in science & tech communication have developed a program. We are using technology to broaden what it means to be a student in the discipline. Started “Evenings at the Studio” and have a program on “House Calls” peer tutoring with students and faculty assistance.

We have been able redraw the boundaries between rhetoric & writing and technical writing.

 

Questions:

1. Sustainability: Can you have an identity if you do not have established space?
   1. There are models at other institutions that offer “Centers of Excellence” for help in core missions.
   2. OSU – Goldberg Center , World Media Center
   3. Yes, you can have a virtual identity in national organizations, but locally it helps for people to have a place to drop in.
   4. We have classroom space for studio work, with competing interests.
   5. How could something like this be turned into a “Moveable Feast” tied together with a theme?
2. More funding will be needed; can we identify other sources of funding?
   1. Keep thinking!
3. Depts of English do not get lots of credit for innovating technology. We are looking for advice to get more institutional buy-in for what we are doing. Issues of portfolio and technology literacy are core to our discipline.
   1. Move to collaborative relationships, and reassess assumptions of how you are viewed.
   2. Work closely with other departments.

 

Alan Kalish – Ohio State

This community will work together to design an effective and efficient, web-based tool to allow faculty members to document the artifacts of their teaching and to review those of their peers. We will review the literature on peer review of teaching and course portfolios, and devise a range of questions that will enable faculty in multiple disciples to easily create course portfolios, as well as create rubrics for reviewing these portfolios. We will build and test a web tool to enable faculty to publish course portfolios and respond to them. We will offer this tool to our own and other academic units to adapt and adopt as part of their unit peer review of teaching procedures.

 

This group started with looking at the use of portfolios in general. Project is tied to the need for peer review of teaching, understanding that good teaching is different discipline to discipline. Portfolios seem a good match for this. Objections to peer review: no training in it, no time to do it, no peers in the thing that I teach. ePortfolios addresses these objections: rubric teaches how to look at course, provides a way to give feedback, addresses efficiencies in repurposing material, opens the ideas to others outside the smaller community of local scholars. ePortfolios ask us to be reflective about our teaching, allow us to share our teaching and leave a legacy; valuable for promotion and tenure and teaching awards. Higher administration will know what they are looking for and at.

 

Goal is to create a template for faculty to build ePortfolios across disciplines.

1. How do we make this easy enough for faculty who are not part of our project designing it to be willing to use.
   1. Steve Acker will share a template for others to comment on.
2. How do we make the benefits clear enough?
3. How do we convince colleagues, departments, deans to accept this process and accept it as part of their process?
   1. Make if familiar to users (Word? TurboTax? That much easier than doing it yourself to have benefit.)
   2. Extensive help dictionary
   3. Faculty need to realize that assessment is coming, and we need to start documenting what we do. This is a type of assessment material over which we as faculty have control. It is more than an aggregate of SETs. It is presented as interpreted data.
   4. Rollout with an accepting department and have them showcase it. (One of the community member's departments may volunteer?)
   5. Piloting for trialability (see our pal, Everett Rogers)
      1. Self-identified pilots
      2. Judy Maxson offered this approach to Hocking; people stepped up to the call for pilot projects.
      3. Scott Siddall offered that Modern Languages at Denison were open to the idea because of their assessment culture.

 

Laura Mandell – Miami University

We will transform materials that could in fact, if printed out, constitute a simple textbook, into interactive assignments making use of visual rhetoric -- including games that allow students to achieve mastery of key concepts before they move on to the next "level." We will meet as a group to read materials about the effects of images on teaching, visual literacy, and game theory in relation to pedagogy. We will invite Joel Foreman from George Mason University to consult with us. He is in the forefront of using gaming in teaching and learning. We will ask our technology team to redesign the content now available on our site, crafting it into new learning objects. We will use these materials in the classes offered this Fall and Spring, along with print versions of the same content, in order to measure the effects of visual rhetoric and interactivity on student learning outcomes.

Three major goals of this community are: 1) learning how the web can be used to create active learners; 2) developing interactive materials for this first- year seminar/ core course; 3) improving student learning outcomes by combining visuals with text.

Tensions between usability and pedagogy – optimal usability, or slow down and think?

Theory and Practice modes – what should we be doing??! We are thinking!

People need to be unified around implementing goals. There is contention between pedagogy and theory—slow down and think. We make things that bring theory and practice together as we enter the practical part of putting the project together. Teaching through games, capitalizing on the interactive environment, students learn on the sly.

1. How can we make these materials available to those who might really use them? At Miami and in the state? The course is on the eAnthenum (OLN). A bibliography on visual literacy is there, how do we get this to the people who want to use it, who need it?
1. OLN Prof Development Board has identified this question as well. There is a need to spend time to carefully consider the material available. The eLearning Anthenum is set up to do that, but that takes resources. One of the primary tasks of the OLN Professional Development Board in the coming year will be to address this.
2. Open source tools builds some outreach
3. Submit this material to journals – the pieces are publishable as journal articles. Online journals welcome these as well. The articles demonstrate the usefulness of the material.
4. Local symposiums
5. eMail lists for target communities
6. Multiple links to the page
7. Work with your graduate students so they get in the practice of looking for things in repositories and online. Train the future generation of faculty.
8. Remember the responsibility for maintaining the material.

 

Elene Kent - Capital University

This project will establish a learning community to investigate a web-based, on-line assessment and academic instruction program to prepare in-coming freshmen students for the rigorous academic expectations of Capital University . At present students come to Capital University with varying abilities in fundamental areas such as reading, writing, and mathematics. Historically, academic abilities are assessed during summer residential experiences but today's students, and often those who are not as academically prepared, must work in the summer to offset the financial obligations of college. Work schedules do not permit these students to attend summer residential experiences and they remain at an academic disadvantage. Therefore, a web-based, on-line assessment and academic instruction program enables students to gauge where they stand academically and prepare for the academic challenge of Capital University . Technology provides an empowering tool that resolves an inability to travel to campus in the summer while providing academic preparation through e learning.

Progress to date: identified packages to address needs; we have also started other LC's

Still need: We are small and need to use 3 rd party resources, no resources for open source dedicated to project.

We need to tie this “toolbox” to advising, online orientation, and other learning efforts, helpful in retention.

1. How do we sustain this project –once the year ends, then what?
   1. Sustainability is making the case for the innovation from the perspective of faculty, student and staff. Attach it to the institutional mission.
   2. Distribute the responsibility for sustaining it to different, multiple areas of the institution
2. how to assess critical thinking skills with third-party tools?
3. How to assess library skills? Any tools available for information literacy?
   1. 5-colleges of Ohio information literacy tutorials (may have reinvented the wheel, not had the impact wanted)
   2. University of Texas
   3. Kent SAILS
   4. OSU has NetTutor for basic information literacy (used as homework assignment in a variety of classes, also available for 1 hour credit)
   5. Other projects Sheryl Hansen will post.

 

Karen Rhoda – University of Toledo

Business Management Technology FastTrack Ohio

This community will provide a collaboration of business, educational, and student perspectives in order to: 1) develop Business Management Technology and Arts & Sciences courses that will result in the offering of an accelerated associate degree in Business Management Technology; 2) ensure that the courses offered address educational, community and industry needs; and 3) expand the enrollment and persistence rates of students in this program. Attainment of project goals will address University goals of providing affordable, accessible, and quality education that engages the student in higher order thinking. It also addresses industry's priority to maintain a well-trained workforce and the UT Division of Distance Learning's priority to reach place-bound students who might not able to attend a traditionally delivered course.

Faculty and instructional designers work together. Pilot courses being offered. ePortfolios developed. We have 5 “change champions” on the campus, and they have reached out to their students. The learning community has business and employers in the community. Defining “professionalism” is next step.

1. How do we assure ePortfolios are utilized by the students?
   1. LC's are part of courses, and content is part of orientation
   2. Faculty include the use of ePortfolios in their syllabus
   3. Build it into the evaluation portion of the course, value it in the course, especially early so they know it is valuable.
2. How do we assure that other departments buy in to the accelerated program?
   1. The content of student portfolios can be used to demonstrate the outcome of the program, but be very careful of student-ownership of material (especially when they are students, may be construed as coercive).
3. What 3 rd Party tools are available and what questions do we ask? You only truly know your subject if you know what questions to ask. There are tensions between pedagogy and theory.

Also, there is no sense in doing what is being done if it isn't going to carry on—sustainability.

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