Identity Crisis Online?

Looks like vendors are quickly gearing up for the eventuality that there might be a big push to establishing the identities of online students. I blogged about this earlier. Here is one I received in the email (no, am not advocating for their product; all I am doing is bringing this to your attention). The whole thing reminds me, yet again, of the fantastic cartoon in the New Yorker a few years ago, which I provide here for your amusement, before you get to read the email from a vendor :-)

And now the email from the vendor ....

Increase academic integrity and reduce the costs of proctored exams by ensuring the right student is taking an assessment.

Join Campus Technology, National American University and Acxiom to learn how your institution can verify student identity without hardware from within your learning management system (LMS).

Register today to hear Dr. Jeffrey L. Bailie, Director of Online Faculty Development Distance Learning at National American University and Michael Jortberg of Acxiom describe how NAU reduces the need for proctored exams.

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

Don't miss this important and timely webinar. Click here to register now.

If you and your institution leaders would like a one-on-one demonstration to learn how to increase distance learning integrity with authentication, please visit www.Acxiom.com/StudentIdentity or give us a call. We've taken common practices from the financial industry and enabled them for distance learning programs, which we can integrate with your LMS. Our cost-effective identity verification process offers:

• Secure verification capabilities designed to reduce the cost associated with testing center registration, proctor validation and proctored exams.
• Predictable pricing and the flexibility to meet instructor and administrator needs.
• No servers, staff, web cam, broadband of fingerprints required.

Thank you,

Mike Jortberg
Acxiom Corporation
Michael.Jortberg@acxiom.com
1.630.944.0379

Learn more about ensuring academic integrity in distance education by reading Acxiom's white paper – "Methods to Verify Identity of Distance Learning Students." Click here for your free copy.

System Requirements for Webinar

• PC-based attendees: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista
• Macintosh®-based attendees: Mac OS® X 10.4 (Tiger®) or newer

An absolutely riveting online course

Here's an excellent article about designing online courses:

An absolutely riveting online course: Nine principles for excellence in web-based teaching

Source: Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology

Abstract: This article explores excellence in web-based teaching. Drawing on the views of experts in the field and the perspective of their own years of experience, the authors compiled a list of 9 principles to provide direction in the search for online excellence. The principles include: the online world is a medium unto itself; sense of community and social presence are essential to online excellence; in the online world, content is a verb; great online courses are defined by teaching, not technology. The list is not intended to be an exclusive set of principles or a comprehensive guide to online teaching. Rather it is a collection of important ideas and suggestions for teaching excellence in the online world.

This article could be a great resource for faculty on campus who are teaching online, and at the same time could provide a framework for our activities with the Online Learning Task Force.

2009 Horizon Report just out

The 2009 Horizon Report is out today and is worth a look. While it does not specifically address online learning, it does speak to the inevitability of increased use of technology in teaching and learning.

This quote is from the blog: Friends: Social Networking Sites for Engaged Library Services

Each year, the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years. “Campus leaders and practitioners alike use the report as a springboard for discussion around emerging technology,” noted Larry Johnson, chief executive officer of the NMC. “Over the six years that the report has been published, the impact on technology planning and discussions on campuses has been substantial. Now with six years of data to consider, we continue to look back at the overarching trends over time. What we see is that there are several long-term, conceptual themes that have affected, and continue to affect, the practice of teaching and learning in profound ways.” More than 75,000 copies of the 2008 Horizon Report were distributed in print and electronically last year.

The six areas of emerging technologies selected this year that will have significant impact on higher education:

1. Mobiles
2. Cloud Computing
3. Geo-everything
4. The Personal Web
5. Semantic-Aware Applications
6. Smart Objects

You can download the full report or watch a video of the presentation introducing the report to the world. It’s nearly 54 minutes long (the first 10 minutes are introductory) but I took a glance with no intention of watching the full thing and then couldn’t turn it off. Lots to think about here.

Axis of Evil? :-)

If all we learn is online, then .... writes Nicholas Carr:

Three things have happened, in a blink of history's eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia - and I admit there's much to adore - you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?

It's hard to imagine that Wikipedia articles are actually the very best source of information for all of the many thousands of topics on which they now appear as the top Google search result. What's much more likely is that the Web, through its links, and Google, through its search algorithms, have inadvertently set into motion a very strong feedback loop that amplifies popularity and, in the end, leads us all, lemminglike, down the same well-trod path - the path of least resistance. You might call this the triumph of the wisdom of the crowd. I would suggest that it would be more accurately described as the triumph of the wisdom of the mob. The former sounds benign; the latter, less so.

Well, you may want to re-read this posting on whether Google is making us stupid!

Are we sure it is the student who is doing the work?

Hey, after the conference I subscribed to a couple of listservs so that I can get updates on online learning issues.  (as if I don't have enough things to do; but, that is another story!)  Well, today I got an email, in which there are two things that we might want to look into.  First the excerpt from the email:

A Special Issue of the MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching is planned for June 2009 that will be focused on the topic of integrity in the online environment and authenticating the identity of students taking online classes. This is a timely topic in light of the provision of the Higher Education Opportunity Act (H.R. 4137) that requires that institutions that offer distance education “…have processes through which the institution establishes that the student who registers in a distance education or correspondence education course or program is the same student who participates in and completes the program and receives the academic credit”. As rule-making with respect to this legislation is in progress, articulating effective approaches to meeting this requirement is essential. Many in the distance education community have already sought to reframe the conversation to focus on pedagogical and curricular approaches, as opposed to costly and potentially invasive technological ones.

1. You/we have an opportunity to contribute articles.

2. More importantly, it is news to me (maybe not to you) that there is rulemaking in progress to require institutions offering distance ed to ensure that the registered student is the same as the one doing the work.  I mean, I welcome the discussion on this topic because it is an extremely important aspect of credentialing.  (I know of lots of horror stories in India, where correspondence courses through some universities were notorious for being diploma mills.  And, no, I did not get my degree that way!)  But, it is interesting that this is being worked into the Hr. Ed. act itself.

Maybe if I require students to turn in their assignments through video-clips I can verify the authenticity, eh :-)  But then what if they had outsourced the work to somebody in India (hopefully not graduates of those correspondence courses) and then all they do is present the work in an YouTube clip as if it is their work?  I tell you, students will always sniff out the path of least resistance :-)

Where exactly are the cart and the horse?

Hey, I am guilty of not contributing through the Wiki that Robert set up for us. (It was Robert who did that, right?) Maybe because I am just too damn comfy in my blog mode :-)

But, am amazed at how rapidly things like Wikis are diffusing through society, and with the different examples. The example below has political shades and, therefore, am a tad hesitant. So, first a disclaimer: I do not belong to the groups listed on the website that I am going to refer to, nor am I registered with any political party for that matter. I am just a nutcase who reads anything--even the info on the cereal box!

Ok, now the example .... I am kind of following the evolution of the stimulus plan because of my interests in policies. One blogger notes:

hop to Read the Stimulus and insert comments directly into the bill's text. Their motto "$850 Billion, 334 pages, and counting... somebody needs to read it!" But, of course, the best part about these sites is that no one person has to read the whole thing.

It is fascinating. Even a couple of years ago, it would have been impossible for real-time commenting from citizens. And now, real time discussions with distributed intelligence.

From a pedagogical perspective, I wish I could do such things in an online class. However, even if I am all set to do it, well, I will have to teach students on how to engage in such discussions and analysis before we can get to the real discussions and analysis. So, it frustrates me as a teacher that there are such fantastic tools like Wiki out there but that I am not able to put them to use. I am now all the more jealous of the history project demonstration that we watched at the conference.

Even the blogging I tried out last term was only partially successful. Granted they were freshmen and sophomores, but .... the best that some could do was inserting a hyperlink into their posts. I could not achieve what we hope for in these contexts: discussions, referencing through hyperlinking, commenting on other posts, ..... I am like many faculty who think that this ought to happen quite naturally, but it does not. And a ten-week term is too short a time for me to spend teaching students these skills, at the risk of not having time for content matter ....

Which is when I sometimes wonder whether the cart is way before the horse!

So, what business are we in?

In the New Yorker, James Surowiecki comments on the rapidly shrinking newspaper readership.  (Yes, the market for my newspaper op-eds is in grave danger, and I am not sure whether anyone cares for my blogs!)  Anyway, in that column, Surowiecki notes that:

Newspaper readership has been slowly dropping for decades—as a percentage of the population, newspapers have about half as many subscribers as they did four decades ago—but the Internet helped turn that slow puncture into a blowout. Papers now seem to be the equivalent of the railroads at the start of the twentieth century—a once-great business eclipsed by a new technology. In a famous 1960 article called “Marketing Myopia,” Theodore Levitt held up the railroads as a quintessential example of companies’ inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Levitt argued that a focus on products rather than on customers led the companies to misunderstand their core business. Had the bosses realized that they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate. By extension, many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net.

Which got me thinking: what is our "business"? I am not referring to the horrible distortion of academe into some kind of a customer- and industry-friendly corporate model.  That is a different discussion for another day.

But, if, suppose, "liberal education, and developing life-long learning skills" are the business that we are in, then shouldn't we learn from the newspapers and make sure that we too don't become irrelevant in a way?  

Look at the parallel: there is a great deal of interest in news reports and analysis and, interestingly enough, there is way more than what we need that can be freely accessed.  Journalists are beginning to complain that while their work, skills, and knowledge are recognized as important, there is no money in them in the web-based model.  In fact, the NY Times itself is so deep in debt that by May it has to raise 400 million dollars.  Of course, the parent company of the LA Times went bankrupt! 

The other day the recently retired managing editor of WaPo (whatever his name is!) was a guest on Terry Gross' Fresh Air.  He said that going by the number of visits to the WaPo site, it is clear that the paper has never had such a readership ever in its history.  The challenge, he said, for WaPo and every paper was to figure out how to translate that phenomenal readership into money.

On a similar note, knowledge, which used to be available in restricted brick and mortar campus environments, is now freely available for anyone who wants to learn.  Want to make cocaine? Want to read the complete works of Shakespeare? You have questions?  The Web has answers! At the rate at which Google is everywhere, it won't surprise me if the company comes up with a neat way to offer a formal education through Google itself!  

Aren't we looking at the same fate that the newspaper industry is facing?

Online teaching and learning is, therefore, an extremely important strategy to avoid the redundancy that we otherwise face.  We might have a few more years left in terms of the system delivering "captive audiences" who will fill the classroom space.  But, that time will end soon.  It is not if, but is a question of when that end will come.