All Finished

I finished implementing my lessons on Moodle. The course is called "Understanding Statistics in the News". Three lessons are completed. I'd like to teach the course if I ever got a chance, though I think I'd expand it beyond 6 lessons. Right now it feels great to be done, though. Only thing left for this class is the peer reviews of my group members' courses. That won't happen until after Thanksgiving, however.

Final Project

I'm getting close to finished with my moodle implementation. I like how it is turning out. I have to wonder if I'm spending too much time on it. It's probably taking me about 8-10 hours to implement each lesson. I guess if I was actually teaching the course I would view this time differently. I'm hoping that some day I'll be able to make use of this work. For now, I plan encorporating it into my so-called teaching portfolio. I hope to get things finished this weekend. I also need to go back and revise my outline with the feedback provided.

Moodling away

I've been implementing my final project -- Statistics in the News -- in moodle. I have two of the three lessons done so far. It's a lot more work than I would like, but part of that is me writing and creating so much stuff instead of just linking to articles already written. I just prefer to put things in my own words, I guess. It takes a lot more time. And when you accidentally close a tab (when switch between tabs to copy a link) and lose a half an hours work, it gets frustrating. I've been writing in word and copying over since then. While moodle has a convert from word button, it seems to omit some spaces between words. I'm going to have to go back and edit everything, but at least its all there.

I'm really liking how everything is shaping up. While this is designed as an online class, I think if I actually gave it, I would prefer to do it as a blended class. I feel that a live lecture would work a bit better for stuff than the written notes. Though I could tape a lecture and put that up with a live chat session as a possible option.

Virtual Classrooms

For those wondering about my ROI post, it was for my Assessing Educational Technologies class. Once again, I confused which class this blog was focusing on. Hope people found it interesting anyway.

This week we're looking at virtual classrooms. I'm very interested in the readings and discussions. My only virtual classroom experiences have been in WIMBA.Overall, I haven't cared for the experience. It was technically cumbersome and many of the classes were a waste of time. When we did our focus group, WIMBA was not highly thought of in our group. I'm hoping to learn more about positive implementations of virtual classrooms in this week's lesson.

Gradschool ROI

One of our assignments is to do a cost-benefit analysis of grad school and to calculate an ROI. The thing is, the ROI depends on what you study and if you get your degree. So for my analysis, I will assume the degree is completed. I've tried to assign weights based on the following criteria: magnitude, importance, frequency of occurrence, strength of connection to grad school.

Since I expect most students in the class will analyze the M.Ed program, I decided to do mine on a Ph.D. (in mathematics) instead, so that there's a bit more variety in our results. I'll try to list cost and benefits related to a mathematics Ph.D. in general, not necessarily my personal costs and benefits.The rating is indicated by *'s. The use of 'grad school' below will always refer to getting a doctorate mathematics.

Costs

1. Financial (*): They pay you a stipend for teaching and wave tuition. Sometimes there's university supported housing as well. It's not a lot, but it's definitely enough to live on and you don't take on debt.
2. Time (****): Graduate school is at least a 4 (usually 5) year fulltime commitment. We were expected to do at least 56 hours a week. During your first year and during qualifying exams it could often be more. However, it was fairly flexible as to when and where that time was spent.
3. Opportunity Costs (**): While you're in grad school, you're not working at a job getting money and rank. You've also limited your other options (travel, major hobbies, etc.)
4. Commitment (**): Once you get over a year in, you really have to see it through in order to see much return. It's a major commitment and needs to supersede a lot of other commitments. (This partly overlaps with time and opportunity costs.)
   
5. Mindshare(*): You spend a lot of time thinking about your work and it takes up a lot of mindspace.
6. Miscellaneous (*): Being consider overqualified for some jobs, hyperspecilization, spam from the university, stress, etc.
   

Total Costs: 11

Benefits

1. Employment Opportunities (****): There are many jobs that are only open to you if you have a Ph.D.
2. Salary Increase (***): Having a Ph.D. tends to start you off with a higher salary and the available jobs often pay more as well.
3. Status (**): Having "Dr." in front of your name does mean something to some people.
   
4. New Skills and Information (***): You've learned a lot, particularly with regards to research (and perhaps teaching).
5. Confidence (*): Having completed a doctoral thesis can be a confidence builder.
6. Networking (*): You meet a lot of people in your field and have many networking opportunities.
7. Resources, Publications & Seminars (*): You acquire a lot of texts and notes that are good resources for your field. You have the opportunity (and expectation) to publish your work and give talks on it. This provides long term benefits in your field.
8. Miscellaneous (*): You don't have to decided what you want to do with your life, you avoid the real world, etc.
   

Total Benefits: 16

ROI =16/11=45%

Personally, I feel this ROI calculation is a little silly, because it is so volatile and subjective. At first I didn't have a miscellaneous costs category and had the skills benefit at 4. This gave me a 17/10=70% ROI. Very slight changes totally skew this number. It might be okay for a personal assessment on if gradschool might be personally worth it to me (and giving very personal ratings to everything), but for anything else I think you can get the number to be nearly anything you want.

Touching Base

I've been fairly busy lately and often don't have a lot to blog about. In addition to this course, I'm also taking assessing educational technologies. There's a fair amount of overlap between a classes on designing online courses and assessing online courses (which are a form of educational technology). Unfortunately that means I keep getting which topics and assignments go with which class.

The most obvious overlap was when both classes discussed usability issues at nearly the same time. Currently things are going in slightly different directions -- Return on Investment assessments versus course content development and assessment, but both are still looking at assessments.

However, both classes have a final project that's requiring attention. I'm hoping that after the election I'll have some time to buckle down and focus on my projects. I'm really excited about the course I'm designing for the class, I just wish I had more time to spend on it. I have a lot of ideas that inspire me, but I don't know how long they will take to implement. I'm trying not to let myself get to carried away with all the neat ideas I want to try out.

Groupthink

This week we are studying different lesson styles for engaging students in interactive activities -- for instance Role Playing, Case Studies, Small group projects, etc. My group is supposed to brainstorm which interactive activities would work well to teach the concept of Groupthink.

I find groupthink to be a fascinating concept - in short that closed groups can be self-reinforcing in their beliefs. The article we read on it discuss the attributes of group think and how in hindsight people tend to claim something was groupthink when its really hard to determine that. When a descision goes bad and it looks like the decision making body ignored some evidence group think might be blamed. I think it's very interesting that only bad decisions ever get analyzed for group think. I think group think can occur even if the group ends up making the "right" choice. Since rarely do goup choices have huge impacts (like the challenger explosion), I think group think can occur fairly often and just goes unnoticed because the group's decisions don't really matter.