The default for social media can usually be changed quite readily.  There are themes for blogs, changing its look to fit with the theme of the class or lay it out in a way that facilitates student work and learning.  Widgets that can incorporate Twitter feeds, video feeds or del.ici.ous links can be easily added.  There’s also the larger option of having a class site versus having each individual student set up their own site.  Either way, it’s easy to get student input and/or let students be responsible for what gets included and what tools will benefit them in their learning.  Links to wikis or other tools can easily be added to the site.  Learning needs to be flexible and the learning context needs to responsive to student needs.  It seems to me that social media offers that flexibility and responsiveness in a way that LMS’s just don’t.

One key reason people want to go to expensive schools, of course, are all the intangible benefits: the connections you make, the name recognition, etc. I agree that the cost seems way out of sync, but it also gets you some tangible benefits as well. At an exclusive SLAC, you won’t have a class larger than 40 or 50 people (and those are the lecture classes). Most classes will have 15 or so people. That means your opportunities for engaging in class discussion, for the teacher knowing you and keeping an eye on your progress are vastly increased. Your faculty will be from “better” schools (they cost more as a result, though their pay is still less than other professionals). The faculty will also be more available for one-on-one consultation and in theory, will also be more focused on teaching and learning rather than research (though this is debatable). Even at schools like Harvard and Yale, one could argue that having the opportunity to work with the great minds of our time is a privilege worth paying for.

There’s also a lot of learning that happens between classes, a point made back in the 70s by William Perry in his landmark study of Harvard students, Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years: A Scheme.  I have argued for using blogs, wikis, and other online tools to enhance and expand that learning even in face-to-face classes.  While I think that it’s possible to create the kind of community and environment in which this kind of informal learning and development can happen strictly online, I think that it takes a certain kind of student to do that, and it would take a lot of work on someone’s part to make that happen (the faculty member, usually).  Virtual worlds like Second Life show promise in helping to do this.  There’s just something about seeing a representation of people.  But we are a long way from virtual world learning being mainstream.

I do think there’s a market for a get in and get out kind of online course.  Heck, there are some courses I’d like to take like that rather than spending a whole semester online or offline trudging through material.  But I still there’s a value for being physically present on a campus at least for part of one’s college life.  Human connection is still important to learning and not all that connection is possible via the Internet.  As someone who’s shifted to working at home and having the Internet as my main way of connecting to people, I can tell you that I miss the face-to-face life of the office at times.  I do hope that the existence of online courses and social software more generally causes universities to think differently about how they teach and how they organize curriculum, but that doesn’t have to be strictly by putting courses online.  Collaboration, multimedia literacy, writing for an audience, finding research, critical thinking are all things that can be enhanced by considering what’s going on on the Internet, whether one chooses to use technological tools to explore these ideas or not.  I hope that universities will take up those and more topics.  I hope that universities change, not disappear.

What I hear over and over again in working with faculty who are putting part or all of their courses online is how much time it takes, especially in the up front development of courses.  Some schools offer summer programs with stipends and staff support to help faculty develop their courses.  Others offer small grants or course releases during the semester the new course is being taught.  Still others simply offer a top-notch support staff that does a lot of the time-consuming work of developing the course, with the faculty member serving in more of a consultant role.  Increasing pay for faculty or rewarding them monetarily for teaching online is good incentive if a tough sell during tough times.  But if online enrollments are increasing, the money brought in through these increased enrollments should more than make up for it.

My colleague Leslie Madsen-Brooks and I have often discussed her idea of teaching a blogging-based course where students would learn how to make money off of their blog or website.  They might sell an actual product or simply learn to use adwords effectively.  Students would learn writing and business skills as well as some technology skills, especially learning how search engines work.

These seem like great ways to help students see the real-world value of the skills they learn in school.  Those skills can land you a job, sure, but they might also launch a business.

Once upon a time, it was a novel idea to put a syllabus online.  Back during my first days of using the web for classes, I hand-constructed a web-based syllabus page.  A few years later, I contemplated, though never completely followed through on the idea of creating a truly multimedia syllabus.  My idea was that each assignment would not only consist of reading material, but would be illustrated by images or video that would also be part of the discussion.  So, for example, I was teaching Shakespeare and adadptations of Shakespeare and I wanted to include a snippet from Shakespeare in Love as well as a photo I had taken of the Globe Theatre in London to give students a clearer idea of what going to the theater was like in the 1600s.  But the task proved pretty onerous even as late as 2001 because taking clips of movies was hard, embedding them in a web site was harder, and I just didn’t have the time or patience to do that.  Having a rich syllabus is something worth striving for.  Although it certainly makes life convenient for students to have a downloadable (and printable) PDF, it seems like one should take advantage of the online medium at a higher level.

I haven’t quite achieved the multimedia syllabus yet, but since I’ve switched to using a blog platform as my course hub, I certainly have the ability to do so without the kind of effort I would have had to make in 2001.  What I have done, though, is to not put the whole syllabus online.  I usually break the course into thirds.  I may have a plan for the whole course, but I don’t reveal it to the students.  Having a syllabus online rather than as a pdf or other type of printable document allows me to change it on the fly and I do rather frequently.  I respond to the pace the students are going at and speed things up or slow things down.  Things happen, like I have to miss a class for illness or we decide to take a field trip somewhere that’s appropriate for the course, but which wasn’t originally planned.  I also try to be open about the fact that my syllabus, my structure for the course is simply my interpretation of how the course might be taught and so I leave room to change my mind, within the semester itself.   I have even, with great success, simply set aside a couple of weeks, give them a general theme and have had the students select appropriate materials or we’ve voted on them.  It means the students take on some responsibility for the course, deciding what it is they would like to know more about and through what medium.  Things like this could certainly be done with paper syllabi, but it seems online spaces allow so much more.  You could, at the extreme, have a wiki syllabus and let it be created throughout the semester.  That might be too unsettling for students and faculty alike, but imagine what might come out of it.  It could be a really intereting class.

So how do you create syllabi online?  What affordances does the online space offer you?

My friend and colleague, Barbara Sawhill, has written a great post about the problems of presentations, both live and streaming, in terms of audience participation.  The irony of these presentations is that they are often about creating an interactive classroom environment, offline or online, and yet, they don’t create an interactive environment themselves.  As Barbara points out, we do that in all our sessions.  It’s often a bit unnerving for the audience at first, but then, it seems, they take off and we all learn a lot, which to me is the whole point.  A while back on his blog, George Siemens talked about trying to facilitate a conversation rather than give a presentation and his audience got mad at him.  They wanted slides, dammit!  When you think about it, this is often what happens to students who find themselves suddenly required to participate actively in their own learning.  What do you mean I have to contribute to a blog and say what I think?  What do you mean we’re going to collaboratively write a paper?  Just as we push our audiences past their expectations, we have to do the same with our students.  Too often, we become complacent and just spoon feed them or have a “sink or swim” philosophy.  Coming up with ways to create interactivity looks easy on the surface, but it’s actually harder than preparing lecture notes or slides.  And once you’re in the room, your audience may go off script.  So you have to be able to think on your feet in a way that you don’t when giving a standard presentation or standard lecture.

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The credentialing game is even worse when it comes to teachers, because bureaucrats, obsessed with rules and numbers, would rather hire a mediocre but “fully certified” prospect than the brightest, most promising applicant who lacked the “education” courses.

He goes on to offer two stories of teachers who lacked the official credentials, one with a mere technicality who was fired, and the other who quit rather than take a freshman level course that he had tested out of.

While I agree that a certified teacher does not necessarily mean a qualified teacher, I do think a certain amount of learning how to teach through a few classes is a good idea.  I can’t help but think about all those college teachers, 99% of which have never had a course in how to teach.  And yet, many of them do become good teachers.  Mostly, I’m sure, through following the lead of the teachers they had that they considered good and through their own self-evaluation and continual self-improvement.  And then there are those who aren’t good and never become so.  And unlike public school teachers, students are paying a fortune to sit in their classes.

The credentialing process for public school teachers would never work for college professors, but perhaps the solution offered by  Linda Mikels would work not just for K-12 teachers but for college professors as well:

The art and skill of effective pedagogy is arguably equally critical to effective classroom instruction. While most aspiring teachers hope to develop these skills through university coursework, in reality the most effective training is acquired through an apprenticeship at a high-performing school with a highly effective classroom teacher. As with most trades, the craft of effective pedagogy is one that is best developed in the context of the “workplace.”

Some classes will be useful, but more useful will be learning within the classroom with a good mentor over a year or two.  I am one of the few Ph.D. holding people who has had several classes on pedagogy.  I took my first class concurrently with teaching my first class.  We brought back real-live scenarios from our own classrooms and discussed them, coming up with solutions.  We were also encouraged to use the strategies we were learning about and report back on their effectiveness.  We turned theory into practice right then and there, rather than learning the theory and then waiting years before we used it.   Imagine doing this in every grad school or into the first year in a tenure track job.  Some places do offer these kinds of teaching support, but most don’t.

Interestingly, of course, I’m not qualified to teach in a public high school.  The magic words that have been on many a job ad –”or equivalent experience”–never appear on ads for public school teacher positions.  Imagine what public schools would be like if the many Ph.D.’s out there who don’t work in higher ed could apply for public teaching jobs without having to go through more schooling.  The credentialing process for both professions seems arcane and not effective for the learners we have today.  I think it’s time to think outside the box.

One thing Julie didn’t mention was the issue of making the blog public vs. private.  I have always made the blog public.  In fact, the first time I taught the course, the goal was to gain a readership for the blog.  The students got very creative about this and put posters around campus with the link, included the link in their IM away messages and email signatures.  We also encouraged them to read and link to other blogs and even to comment on them.  In other words, we wanted them to appreciate how the blogosphere really worked.  I think it’s important for students to feel like they’re writing for an audience besides the professor or even their fellow students.  They are often more careful in their writing and try to make better, more evidence-based arguments.  I can imagine, however, some situations where you’d want a private blog.  Now that the blogosphere is so huge, though, unless your students are doing the kind of legwork mine did, the likelihood of your blog attracting much attention.

Blogging with my classes has really made them quite memorable for me and I hope for my students, and it was interesting enough to me that I wrote my dissertation on it.  My first blog class is archived here.  The only other class that remains online is this past spring’s Gender and Technology course, which was a great course to teach.  I’d definitely say to anyone that bloggins is something worth trying with your class.

I usually recommend trying one tool at a time.  And if you can’t figure out the basics in less than 1/2 hour, move on to something else.  Like Weir said,  technology should make your teaching easier or better, and a tool that takes forever to master usually isn’t doing either.  If school starts for you in a month, now is a good time to start playing around with some tools.  Other advice I’ve often given faculty is to use the tools for a while before you ask your students to.  If you want to try a blog for a course, you’d better at least do some blog reading and commenting, better yet, blog yourself.  It’s also a good idea to let your students know when something is an experiment.  Explain why you’re using what you’re using and get some feedback as you go along.  They’re much more forgiving when something doesn’t go quite right if you’ve let them know it’s new to you.

Using technology in the classroom can really add something to your teaching and to your students’ learning when done well, and it takes some trial and error to figure out exactly how to use it well, so don’t be afraid to give something a shot this year, get some good feedback and tweak it for next semester.  Sometimes you do get lucky, and things turn out great the first time around.