Launching the Online Experience

In order for learner’s to have a positive learning experience, the instructor has to prepare a good amount before the course even begins. An instructor needs to know the layout of the course and course management system so that he or she is prepared to upload documents and pictures, set up groups and forums, grade assignments, and all of the other tasks necessary for running a course (Boettcher & Conrad, 2010). Also, there may be technology that the instructor has access to but is unaware if he or she doesn’t take the time to explore the course layout  and content, as well as some software that are freely available on the web. Wiki pages and other social media sites can help students communicate and collaborate with one another.

In addition, it’s important that the instructor be frequently present in the course in the first two weeks. This is a time to set clear expectations to students so they are aware of the standard of work that is required as well as what to do in the course. If these expectations are reinforced in the first couple weeks it makes the course go a lot more smoothly.

Finally, I think it’s important for an instructor to be a careful observer of the classroom. If a student drops off in participation or appears to be struggling, it’s often up to the instructor to find out why. Going the extra mile to show you care is important. Laureate Education, Inc., n.d. recommended showing ways you care and also opening up and showing your human side in the classroom. It helps to be personable and engaging in order to keep the students’ interest. Don’t simply post your CV when creating a bio, for example.

References:

Boettcher, J. V., & Conrad, R. (2010). The online teaching survival guide: Simple and practical pedagogical tips. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Conrad, R., & Donaldson, J. A. (2011). Engaging the online learner: Activities and resources for creative instruction (Updated ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

 

Laureate Education, Inc., n.d. Launching the online experience. Retrieved from: https://class.waldenu.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_6530133_1%26url%3D

Creating a Better Recipe for Online Training

This week I’m reflecting on a video by Laureate Education, Inc. (n.d.) featuring Pratt & Palloff as they discussed how to build an online learning community. If you are reading this and haven’t seen the video, don’t worry, as I’ll briefly summarize key points from the video throughout the post.

It would seem a good place to start by making the simple declarative statement that learning does not occur in a vacuum. Regardless of whether or not the learning is taking place in a classroom or in-person meeting, or online, certain key ingredients are needed to increase the odds of successful learning with the greatest number of students possible.

I think of traditional learning like a traditional recipe cookie, and online learning like a Gluten-Free cookie. In a traditional setting, the social interactions in a classroom is like the wheat flour, and is a key ingredient in the learning process. With a Gluten-Free cookie, the wheat flour is missing, and therefore, certain nutrients and textures and flavors might be missing, too. So what works great for a traditional cookie recipe (the classroom) won’t work for a GF cookie (online). For online training, a blend of other “GF flour” and key ingredients are needed to supplement what is missing from traditional training to keep students engaged and learning.

First, the people and purpose of online training could be virtually identical to that of traditional training, but the methods, process, and creation of social presence will be different. What follows are some good recipe tips for an online training course:

Methods. You cannot see your students in most cases, or at the very least you cannot address their issues immediately in an online setting. This means most needs should be anticipated. Considerations of “accessibility” should be accounted for—people with disabilities or technical issues should have more than one modality or method of introduction to the learning content at their disposal so they can navigate courses successfully. This might include closed captioning on videos and testing the accessibility of web links and forums. The layout of content on the Learning Management System (LMS) or web interface needs to be as easy to navigate as possible. This includes sound hierarchical design geared towards learners’ needs, sensible naming conventions, and an easy to find forum to have discussions with students and an easy way of contacting the instructor/facilitator. A discussion board is a good start, but other collaborative technologies should be considered, such as cell phones, email, web chats, video conferencing, wiki pages, blogs, etc. Ensure that all technology used is or can be well understood by participants as they progress through the course, and don’t use any technology unless it is helping to meet a specific learning objective.

Process. The learning process is everyone’s responsibility, from the facilitator to the students to the administration. The facilitator acts as an equal member in discussions and is also a learner and participant in addition to helping facilitate and guide discussions in a productive and supportive manner. A new student orientation and an icebreaker at the beginning of the course will help students figure out how to navigate the course and feel comfortable reaching out to their peers for help and learning. A key part of the online process, stemming from a social learning theory of learning, is to create collaborative interactions and projects where students engage with one another and co-construct meaning and value from the content together. This should be mixed with periods of reflection to reinforce the learning that taken place.

Social Presence. Social presence is key to avoiding high attrition rates in an online setting. Pratt (Laureate Education, Inc., n.d.) recommended watching students closely in the first two weeks and reaching out to them if they “fall away.” If you “hook them” early and get them engaged, they are very unlikely to fall away later in the course. Palloff (Laureate Education, Inc., n.d.) adds to check into the course multiple times a day especially in that critical first two weeks of class. The facilitator’s role is to create a warm and inviting atmosphere to help overcome the often seeming impersonal nature of online/technology mediated communication. Be creative and use the technology to your advantage in order to create social presence. If you have a younger audience that loves to use mobile technology, consider the use of texting or a mobile app in your course presentation to help keep students feeling connected and ensure that they have valuable information at their fingertips right when they need it most.

If you follow many of these general principles, the online course and training will improve exponentially, including the rates of success. The main takeaway is that an online course is not just about putting the content “out there,” but carefully considering how the content is presented, and making an effort to connect personally and professionally with participants to get them engaged in the learning.

Thanks for reading and comments are appreciated!

Welcome Walden U. Class, EIDT-6510!

Hello class,

I guess I'm posting this late because I forgot the blog assignments usually require posting earlier in the week. This is the same blog I've had since the Bachelor of Science in Instructional Design & Technology, so there are some older posts that are also relevant to instructional design and online training. Feel free to look around. I also look forward to reading your posts as well. See you around!

~Nathaniel

Everyday Scope Creep

For this week's assignment, we had to identify a project in which scope creep took place. I have to admit that I'm a little late in posting this because I couldn't think of a situation in which scope creep actually happened to me personally, or a team that I was on. So, I will talk about a kind of "scope creep" that I have witnessed. By the way, for those reading this that aren't in my Walden classes, "scope creep" is what happens when you are working on a project and the scope is either ill-defined or not strictly followed, and the amount of work or nature of work starts to increase and/or change in unexpected ways as a result.

The first example I can think of is a project where the scope is well-articulated but ill-conceived. I was able to come up with this example after reading my friend David Smith's blog post on his home project adventures. I remember an example from when I was young where my grandparents wanted to flatten a side of a hilly patch on their one acre back yard with my mom and I. The hilly patch was about seven to ten feet high, about seven feet wide, and thirty feet long. The plan was to rent a rototiller and manually churn the hill, then shove the mud into wheelbarrows and dump them on some exposed tree roots in the back of the yard. So we had a plan and knew what everyone would be doing. However, the work was backbreaking and grueling. The mud was hard clay and packed in earth, and it wasn't long before the earth was very rocky, and the rototiller was having a tough time getting through the earth. After a very long day-and-a-half of work. At one point, my mom said that she thought this had gone too far, and that she thought the job would be better done with an earth mover, such as a Caterpillar. Grandma disagreed with that idea, perhaps because she already felt committed to making the original plan work. Eventually, she relented and a professional earth mover came out to look at the job. He said it would only take him an hour to finish it, and by the way, the clay we were throwing on the tree roots were going to kill the tree. So it was a good thing we called him. Sometimes the scope can seem just right when in fact the scope was poorly designed to begin with. A little more analysis on the front-end might have made us all realize that the job was too big for us and what we had planned.

My second example is what I'll call "association/affiliation/partnership scope creep. This is when a company is partnered with another company, often a customer/client of some kind, in which the nature of benefits and perks of being a "number one customer" or highly valued customer, are not clearly defined, and the customer keeps nibbling and slowly creeping and ratcheting up the demands on the service-providing company. I've seen the companies in the "number one" spot dictate all kinds of terms to the service providing companies I've worked for, to the point that the service-providing company is making special exceptions to company policy, forcing employees to undergo several extra-invasive security protocols to make the client comfortable, bumping the client to the first in queue for service over several other customers, and pretty much whatever else the customer demands. This seems like the company-equivalent of codependency or unhealthy boundaries, and it can have devastating consequences for both companies: One company ends up bending over backwards and compromising it's standards and corporate identity to appease the customer, and the client develops unrealistic expectations and gets frustrated with the service provider when these expectations are not met. If the associate were looked at like a special type of project, you could create a statement of work for the special customer, and spell out all of the specific benefits the special status or partnership affords them, and also what the limits are--the deal-breaking things the service-providing company cannot or will not do, so don't ask. Agree to certain perks and then stick to them! If the client company wants (or demands) more, then that would require a new contract or statement of work, and both parties would have to agree to the new written terms. The service providing company retains it's identity and stabilizes its work load, and the client is happy because they know what to expect and they're getting it, and they still have a "special status" with the service company.

So those are my examples of "scope creep." They may not be dead on the money, but it at least hits on some scope creep elements...

Thanks for reading!

Resources for PM Budgeting, Scheduling, and More

            Being a project manager can often feel like a daunting task if you focus too much on the entirety of the project. Fortunately, there are an amazing wealth of resources aimed at helping new project managers or experienced project managers looking to update their practices. This week, I did a little hunting around and found a few such resources for your consideration.

            The first is a site called www.brighthubpm.com. Specifically, I took a look at their templates and forms page, found here: http://www.brighthubpm.com/templates-forms/124740-collection-of-free-project-management-templates-and-forms/. I find that forms and templates help me to stay organized and break down large projects into manageable chunks of information, and this site has forms for every step of the project management process. Specifically, it has a link on how to create a RACI or RASCI chart, which Stolovitch mentions in this week’s reference materials. The RASCI (Responsible, Accountable, Support, Consulted, Informed) is a matrix chart that delineates all of the work tasks to be completed on a project, and who is supposed to complete the work and so forth. Each task is assigned to a person or people, and given an estimation as to the duration of hours it will take to compete the task. This can also be used to generate budget considerations, too. Simply generate a cost per hour estimate given the specific people assigned to the tasks, and any and all tools and resources they will need. A word of caution is to remember that what is “needed” should be measured against the approved budget and modified accordingly if necessary. www.brighthubpm.com has a lot of other great templates too, such as when it comes to scheduling and other planning phases…

            One site said that the hardest budget you will ever have to put together is your first one. Budgeting for beginners is difficult because, again there is a lot to consider and some “hidden” or indirect costs can be missed in the budgeting process. This blog post along with this week’s resources, helped me to think of budget as a matter of time as well as money. http://www.techrepublic.com/article/creating-your-project-budget-where-to-begin/ The site’s page also covers common mistakes to avoid in creating the budget. This is helpful because more than half the battle of creating plans, schedules, and budgets are thinking about them in a productive and thorough way. Any resource that helps orient you to a better understanding of the budget is helpful.

            A final resource worth sharing is Cathy Moore’s site. In this blog post, as well as others she talks about how to create value in E-Learning that is also budget-friendly. http://blog.cathy-moore.com/2010/05/how-to-design-elearning-thats-memorable-and-budget-friendly/ Cathy Moore’s blog emphasis on value reminds me that every budgetary consideration should start with the question of value, and how it will increase training effectiveness. By focusing on this emphasis, you begin to realize that you don’t need to develop something you originally thought was essential in the project, or reevaluate the budget plan after assessing the project as a whole. This “meta-budgetary” question can lead to weeding out a great deal of cost-suckers that aren’t really adding value to the training project, and keep the project on-budget.

            What do you find difficult about creating a PM budget? Let me know if you find any of these resources useful in the comments below!

Layers of Communication

 It's a fairly widely known statistic that only about 7-10% of what is communicated in a face-to-face conversation is conveyed by the verbal content and the language itself. An additional 40% of the entire message is communicated in tone of voice, and about another 50% is communicated through body language. Though many of us have heard this, we are not always conscious of this when we are communicating to others at a distance via technology. It is better to show than tell, however, so below is an exercise in which the exact same message is communicated in three different ways: Through email, voice mail, and face-to-face:

http://mym.cdn.laureate-media.com/2dett4d/Walden/EDUC/6145/03/mm/aoc/index.html

Just reading the email alone, it reads as a genuine but urgent request for an ETA on a project that may affect the deadline of a colleague. There is reassurance in the email, in phrases such as "I know you're busy.." but it is hard to tell if this is "true" reassurance and understanding, or merely "couching language," or language used to pad or prep the reader for the upcoming discomfort. What comes across most in this first exchange, to me, was "worry." She really needs this ETA or she'll miss her deadline. She's likely using couching language to mask her desperation...

Then, I listened to the phone message. In the phone message, the reassurance comes across more strongly, and I got less of an impression of worry or urgency, though it is still there. Hearing the actual voice allows certain words to be emphasized. The "I really appreciate your help" comes across strongly. Most of the voice mail sounds as though she's reading from a cue card, which reduces the sense of urgency in the message.

Finally, the face-to-face message was least alarming. The tone of voice sounds even more calm than the voice recording (unfortunately this may be due to the fact that they are different actresses/voices for the voice mail and face-to-face, which is an unfortunate variable in the experiment). In the face-to-face communication, she begins with a polite smile and has a relaxed body pressure. The feeling of worry that I got from the first message does not come across here. Her level of deference makes me want to fulfill her request sooner, rather than feeling obligated to as the email made me feel.

This exercise is an important reminder to choose your method of communication wisely. If you are working in a group, discussing sensitive subjects with more emotional gravitas should probably be left for face-to-face or a Skype call (or Adobe connect, etc.). However, email is expedient and is great for task-oriented messages, so long as the sender remembers that a lot of the intended tone could or will be lost in translation.

For your consideration: Here is another similar experiment that I think has better controls. It concerns "the halo effect" as it relates to attraction. A male actor reads the exact same words that are a sample dating profile to be filmed on a webcam for potential dates to view. In one version, he reads the words with a negative tone of voice (and facial expression to match). In the second version, he reads the words with an upbeat tone. One group of girls watches the first video. A second group of girls watches the second video. The experiment and there reactions can be found here: 

How to Paint a Project into a Corner

Some projects, when you are finished with them, you can take a look back and feel a sense of satisfaction that you accomplished something, and that all of your efforts will pay off in making a situation better for yourself and those around you. And then there are some projects that are marked by a certain, “If only I knew then what I knew now” feeling. These are the projects that are less than enjoyable to take a look back on, but they are often the most instructional if we do take the time to examine them.

For my bachelor’s program, I had to come up with a training module that would resolve a real-world problem that myself or someone I knew was facing, and create the training module. I often have difficulty coming up with these sorts of projects because I am not in a position where a lot of these issues are easy to find. I was not even a graduate assistant at the time—I was and am working at a hotel as a painter. The paint room was incredibly disorganized with over a hundred different paints and stains in the paint room and only a loose organization as to what went where. The paint chart that explained what paints went where was a series of chicken-scratched papers on a clipboard, and it was very difficult to tell what information was most current. Further, I was told that there was an issue with engineers painting the wrong color on the walls—that engineers would just grab a color that looks right and paint a surface with it only to find out that it was the wrong color in the morning. To meet the requirements of my course project, I had to include certain multimedia elements into the project, and this pushed to me to do more than what I felt the issue at hand merited. Perhaps a lot more…

The former painter seemed to believe the problem was simply one of motivation—that people did not keep the area organized by putting things back where they belonged. To help with this, and to clear up the confusion about which paint corresponded with which surface, I created a paint chart catalog with pictures and number callouts that showed the paint that belonged on each surface in the hotel. It was basically a job aid on steroids as well as a way to organize the paint room. I also created a system of labeling the shelves with “warehouse locations,” and the binder with the paint chart showed where each paint was located on the shelf. It’s an alphanumeric coding system that’s used by the military warehouses as well as other warehouses the world over. Throughout most of this project I didn’t really consult with anyone on the details. I mostly saw this project as my prerogative to fix the paint situation.

As a result, it has more or less remained my project. I didn’t really get buy-in from anyone, and now that the project is finished, most of the engineers complain that the location system and the binder is “too complicated.” I tried to make the project scalable in case the organization caught on, so I added more letters and numbers than what was needed for the shelves in the paint room, and most people never bother to take the time to figure out what the location breakdown means. Now that I have been doing the painting detail for a while, I’ve also begun to realize that engineers rarely paint the walls the wrong color. What this turned out to be was one of two things: 1. Someone ordered the wrong sheen of paint or type of paint. For example, the paint was supposed to be Eg-Shel, and someone ordered flat instead, or it was supposed to be the “Mack Creek” color from the “Harmony” Sherwin Williams product line of paint, but they got the “Direct to Metal” Sherwin Williams paint instead, etc. Both of these have an effect on how the paint looks on the walls and makes it look like the “wrong color.” And 2. It is very difficult to mix a gallon of paint to be exactly the same color batch after batch from one gallon to the next. For more reasons than I can name, Sherwin Williams will often give us a paint that is “slightly off,” because they change the formula of their colors or have minor variations in the paint, etc. Also, if the walls haven’t been painted in a long time, the wall’s color can fade, and when applying the new paint it can leave an undesired contrast where the touching up occurred. In both cases, the only real way to fix this is to repaint the entire surface, and make sure that the paint is the right sheen and type to begin with.

In reviewing the questions regarding projects “post-mortem” by Greer (2010), I think there are some beneficial pieces of my project deliverable—the paint chart catalog. However, not getting buy-in from others in advance means that redoing the catalog ordering system is likely in order to make things appear less complex to others who might use the paints, rather than just asking me where something is. There were warning signs of this, and rather than halting the project I moved forward because I was also completing the project for the course grade. Perhaps that was the first  mistake.

References

Greer, M. (2010). The project management minimalist: Just enough PM to rock your projects! Laureate

Education, Inc.: Minneapolis, MN.