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.

Collaborative Learning

In class this week we are discussing collaborative learning and creating learning communities, with a specific focus to on-line learning.

When I was in high school, I hated group projects. It seemed like I always ended up doing most of the work. In hindsight, I realize that part of that was because I'm a bit of an overachiever and (especially in high school) tended to go overboard on projects. However, it often seemed like there was one person in the group who's plan was just to skim off the others and that pissed me off.

I did my undergraduate at the University of Chicago and I don't remember any group work what-so-ever. While part of that may be because I was a math major, the U of C requires nearly 2 years of core classes (i.e. general liberal arts curriculum). Many of those classes created fairly good learning communities. Classes were often discussion based, at least for the humanities, social science, and civilization (a.k.a history) requirements. Yet there was never any group work, just reading and writing papers. For some of the hum courses, we'd have an editing partner but that was the extent of it. I eventually became part of a learning community in mathematics, but that tended to take place outside the classroom. The "study groups" really did add a lot to the experience though.

As far as my doctorate is concerned, there was definitely a learning community formed in grad school. It was a good experience to be part of. There was no official group work, but we often worked collaboratively or help each other in the courses. My year studied together for our qualifying exams. We each took one semester of one of the classes and led a review session on it. I think it helped -- ours was the only year to have everyone completely pass their quals on the first try. I find it interesting how people worked together collaboratively and formed a community, yet none of the courses or teachers made it an objective for that to happen. The department encouraged group work and we all had a large office (holding cell) together, but never was any group work assigned.

Working towards my masters in education has been a very different experience. Teacher explicitly try to create learning communities. Collaborative work is often assigned. Yet at the same time, there's not really (to me) any sense of community. Part of this likely stems from on lin courses and being part-time students. I've worked with some really great groups, some groups that didn't feel like a group, and a group where one person contributed nothing (except excuses) and seem to think that was okay. All the attempts at fostering a learning community make it seem more forced and awkward to me.

Hmm... Until I wrote this, I hadn't realized just how great of a community I had when I did my ph.d....

Copyright

For my class, we've been discussing different issues in online education. On of them is copyright. My partner Lynee and I worked on this wiki about copyright. Lynee contributed a lot of the content having just gone to a conference on copyright and higher education.

Copyright can be an issue when you are developing courses. There is lots of great content out there, but sometimes if can be difficult to know what's okay to use do to copyright issues. This is somewhat frustrating to me as copyright was originally designed to further creative works. But now a lot of people need to "reinvent the wheel" instead of making use of existing works due to copyright. Some useful academic works that have fallen out of print are nearly impossible to get (and can't be copied) due to copyrights. In my opinion, current U.S. copyright law is designed to protect the profits of corporations. I think its current incarnation actual inhibits academic discourse and development. Plus some of the legal court cases regarding web linking to copyrighted material are just absurd.

You hear in academia about fair use -- the idea that if your copying it for educational purposes its okay. That's not quite what fair use is about. Fair use is a legal defense, not copy right permission. Here's a great video, A Fairy Tale, which explains fair use. To the best of my knowledge, this video is a great example of fair use.

The main copyright issue is the news is downloading music and other media off the internet. I'll try and stay off my soapbox on this issue and just summarize my point. Copying legally available media that is sold for money when you do not own it is wrong. However, the way the RIAA and others are trying to apply copyright law is really just bullying. I don't believe they can actually prove copyright violations took place (sharing files is not a copyright violation IMO, downloading them might be). Plus, given the current state of technology, they really need to adapt their distribution scheme instead of harassing their customers.

I'd love to see real copyright reform that is based on both author and public needs and not on the profits of corporations.

In the Beginning...

Greetings! I started this blog for INSDSG 619 Design and Instruction of Online Courses, a class I'm taking at UMass Boston towards my M.Ed. in Instructional Design. One of the reasons I'm taking that course is that my main educational focus is course design. As online courses become more prevalent throughout the educational community, I'd like to have some training before I need to design one myself.

On a personal note, three things everyone knows about me:

• I have my Ph.D. in Mathematics. I got my degree from Caltech. My thesis is in a fairly abstract area of mathematics called algebraic combinatorics.
• My main hobby is playing and designing boardgames. I play (and design) what are called "Eurogames". The Economist recently had an article about Eurogames. While I don't care for their nationalistic stereotyping, the article has a decent description of eurogames. To read (and buy) these kinds of games, Fun Again is a good internet resource. It's not necessarily the cheapest, but it's easy to use and has good reviews and resources. I occasionally do some work for Cambridge Games Factory, who are publishing two of my games, with the first one (tentatively) schedule to come out later this year.
  
• I love to read. As a child, I was a voracious reader, reading hundreds of books a year. While most of my currently reading is online, nothing compares to a good book. I used to read fantasy and sci-fi fairly heavily. Lately, however I've been reading more non-fiction. Recently I've read The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon (fiction) and Masquerade: the amazing decapitations of WWI, by Seymour Reit (non-fiction), both of which I greatly enjoyed.

I hope to flesh out this blog with links to various math and education related resources when I have time.