Social Media and Online Teaching

Effective Social Media Practices and Good Online Teaching -- A recent blog post on InsideHigherEd comparing the habits required for effective social media use and the practices required for good online teaching (spoiler: the important qualities are presence and community). This struck me as interesting so I wanted to put it somewhere that I could find it again. :-)

humming merrily along

I found editing my Moodle course much less anxiety-inducing than recording myself in various ways. Play around with things and make them how I want them (or as close as the system seems to allow)? Now that I can handle!

While I did create my various multimedia objects with specific questions in mind, with the full intention of posting at least some on the library website, those don't necessarily come together into anything you'd call a cohesive "course"... but I'm pretty satisfied with what I've managed to pull together.

Except I gave up on Voki... no matter how I tried, the audio bit I recorded just would not upload/save/whatever, even though it didn't say anywhere that there were file size limitations or anything like that, and I shortened it several times in hopes that was the problem. So frustrating. I know there are other options for the audio, but by then I really didn't want to have to fuss around with it anymore, since I'd re-created the character part at least three times by the time I gave up (since it doesn't save without some sort of audio).

AND!

In trying to figure out what I could try to put on Moodle as group work I remembered that I work with students on a group project every summer: the Bridge Program students have to put together brief group presentations on one of three questions related to college (the benefits of higher education, adjusting to college life, and planning for after college). For the purpose of Moodle I pretended it's an annotated bibliography instead of a presentation, but putting that together made me realize I could totally use Moodle space for them to work in their groups.

In the past, I think most of them have just emailed everything to one another, and then they work in person to put it together, but it's definitely worth it to try having them use a collaborative document/forum to compile everything (a Moodle wiki could also work, but I'm wondering about the learning curve... we only have a few hours together and I like to make a good portion of that work time). So that was a much-appreciated flash of insight into how an online "course" could be awesome for something I already do.

I'd definitely say that this experience has been valuable, both in forcing me out of my comfort zone a bit and in being able to experiment with the Moodle system to figure out what it can do and how I might be able to use it. And also to get to know some of my teaching colleagues better. :-)

oh, the technology!

I had more trouble this week than I anticipated. Not with the technology itself--I've learned to be fairly good about being willing to experiment with new things--but with the issue of recording myself and the issue of what, exactly, is worth taking the time *to* record (and for what things recording could be the best approach). I have always been pretty self-conscious about how I look and sound in video/audio recordings. I have always been pretty self-conscious, period, but I'm much better about it than I used to be. And yet, evidently, some hang-ups remain. Skyping with friends is totally fine, but recording myself and putting the video up for people to see?? Eeek! And then there's the issue of how you always sound different in a recording than you do in your own head and it's so weird... So this week has forced me out of my comfort zone in major ways. Also, since I don't have a pre-existing class to work from, I've had to wrestle with the issue of what information is best to convey in audio or video and which bits may be beneficial to have available for the students to use since I'm very much hoping to use these screencasts and such on the library website going forward. I knew I was going to have to start working on that sort of thing (especially now that we're going to be starting fully online programs soon), so I might as well use this opportunity! Fortunately, I was asked a few questions by students recently that gave me ideas for everything but the avatar... and yes, agonizing over what to have an animated character say is just how I roll. Being forced encouraged to use audio and video tools also means I have to confront my usual dislike for information that's only conveyed in audio/video format. Give me text any day--it's more flexible for how I do things (e.g. the reference desk computer has no speakers and sound wouldn't work well in that setting anyway), I can refer back to specific sections much more easily, I read faster than people speak... I'm well aware that some people do better with audio and/or video, but my preferences definitely do not run that direction. If some audio or video online has a transcript, you'd better believe I'll be reading the transcript. (Transcripts aren't just useful for people with disabilities!) So that means that along with figuring out what to record, I'm thinking about how else I can present the information for people like me. Sometimes I wonder if it would just be better to do a page of step-by-step with screenshots (which is what we did at my tech support job in college) than bothering with a video in the first place. If nothing else, it's easier to update text and pictures than a whole video when things change, as they inevitably will. And, I have to say, I am surprised at how unintuitive Google Sites is! Google stuff is usually so straightforward, but I have spent way too much time going in circles trying to figure out where a particular setting is and how, exactly, do I modify this or that again? No wonder I've had students asking me questions as they're trying to work on their own sites! That said, I see potential for using this when I work with classes. I've been debating the best way to put together, say, specific recommendations for a particular assignment, and I think creating a page on Google may be a good way to go. It could also be used for in-class activities. I'll have to experiment and see how it goes.

presence (or absence) of the library and connecting students to it

(This is part two of my thoughts on issues brought to mind by the first module. Unlike the first part, this post is on just one subject: the library. Big surprise, right?)

Since we are starting the group project, I've been looking over the course quality rubric for the college and something stuck out to me... the provision within a course of "appropriate supporting resources" is relegated to the Enhancements section, and the explanation of what those are is: "Writing center, Academic support services, etc."

Nowhere is the library mentioned in the three pages of rubric. Is that because the presence of the library is assumed? (It is, after all, one of the "Important Links" on every course home page... unless the instructor opts to move/remove it.) Or is the library never thought of specifically? (How much is the library thought of during the preparation for any course, really? I honestly don't know. I only know which instructors have me work with their classes in one form or another.)

How can I as a librarian help instructors make the connection between students in their online classes and the library resources?

For face-to-face and hybrid classes, making the connection is easier: I bother barrage remind instructors via email (and in person, where possible) of the services the library offers. Sometimes that means materials are placed on reserve--which gets students into the library. Sometimes that means the instructor brings the class to the library (or I go to the classroom) to talk about what's available for their assignment--which gets students into the library and/or onto the library website. Sometimes students come to the library with questions about assignments either because the assignment mentions the library or because they know they can get help here--which gets students into the library and onto the library website.

These things rely on physical presence. The question of how to transfer these things to the online context is something I have been thinking about/grappling with/trying to read up on for as long as we've been talking about fully online programs for the college, which amounts to basically all two years I've been here. And I don't feel like I have good answers yet, despite seeking out and reading a large number of things on that very topic (to be fair, I'm not done reading all the stuff I've found, and I keep finding more...). The trouble is, much of the literature I've read about librarians in online classes assumes more time/resources than we have available, which I see as related to the fact that the librarians writing the articles/books have way more librarians on staff than we do.

I wholeheartedly resist the notion that online students should have less access to library services simply because they're online rather than on campus. There are possibilities that might work for us, but I'd need to experiment with various classes to find out what works while being a reasonable time investment. Have a library-specific discussion forum when the students are working on an assignment where library use is expected/encouraged? Perhaps. Post more basic how-to information on the library website so students can get answers to typical questions on their own? Definitely on my to-do list, but I'm still figuring out things like format (a list of steps? a short video tutorial?), what to cover, how to post them, where to link them... and that still relies on the students finding the library site in the first place. And so on and so forth.

It's a complicated issue. All I know for certain at this point is that my personal guiding goal remains the same: to make information-finding easier for the campus community. I hope to make that true for any member of our community no matter where they are physically located, but right now I have to admit we're not there yet.

Colleagues, I welcome your feedback and insight on this and any other library-related matter!

some initial ponderings

There are a few things stewing in my mind as a result of this first module, enough that I'm going to split it into two posts because it's going to get too long and scattered otherwise. So this is part one, with general thoughts and reactions to the class material so far.

Online Courses Generally: The idea of online courses is in no way unfamiliar, thanks to my experiences in college. I had some solely online classes (which I remember as having been well-done, but at this point I'm not sure which particular aspects communicated that impression, and that's really bothering me!) in addition to the use of the LMS as the place for documents and such for face-to-face classes. I also worked for campus IT Help Desk and was one of the student specialists for troubleshooting our LMS (we started in Blackboard, but used Desire2Learn for most of my college career). I'm going to have to go back through my school files and see what I have from my online graduate courses; recalling how my instructor(s) did it might help me get a better sense of what some of the suggested principles look like in practice.

Topics in the Readings: I was pleased that some of the topics in this first week of readings--namely, copyright/privacy and accessibility--were things that I'm also already reasonably familiar with. Librarians are often pretty conversant about copyright issues because of the questions we are asked, and I had the opportunity at my last job to work with the screen reader JAWS to evaluate the accessibility of an interface I helped design. Believe me, using a screen reader is a vastly illuminating (and often frustrating) experience! If you ever have a chance to try something like that, DO IT. It will change how you look at the internet.

On a related note, I'd like to reiterate a comment from the Know Your Copy Rights - Uses in Online Courses reading: it is *always* better from a legal standpoint to link to a document rather than post the document itself to your Moodle course, whether the course is fully online or not (for example, notice that all of the Module 1 Resources are links to websites, not links to PDFs that have been uploaded to Moodle). This is especially true for articles; book chapters are trickier. Lest you think this isn't a big deal, be aware that there is an ongoing lawsuit on the issue of posting copyrighted works online for students to read ("Georgia (State University) On My Mind" gives a good overview of the issues involved.)

If you need help figuring out how to link to an article in one of our databases (or help finding whether we have access to an article/journal/etc. at all), ask me or Tippi or Marci. Copyright questions are generally handled by Tippi or Marci; I can answer some, but they've had more experience in that area. This stuff is one of the many things we're here for!

Faculty Self-Assessment: I am somewhat bothered by the fact that this assessment had no answer for 'I am familiar with the idea but not had opportunity to try it'. I know they're trying to keep their evaluation simple, but some of the questions really can't be answered by any of the "I have done this..." responses until you either 1) teach a class in any format, or 2) teach an online class (e.g. "Establishing your presence in the course on a regular basis" requires a regular-length course in which to be present). I guess they're assuming that only people who are experienced instructors are going to be making the leap into online teaching? (Some of us non-instructors don't have a choice, not if we want to serve the students as best we can! But anyway...)