Snowbound finals! Going online with exams...

After 2.5 snow days and many final exams delayed, instructors may wish to consider making exams available to students online. Here is a very brief video outlining the basic steps for adding a quiz or exam on Moodle, and the video may also be viewed on YouTube

Moving Forward with Innovation in Dev Ed at Lane!

Lane's Academic Learning Skills Department (ALS) has achieved some noteworthy success with students. For instance, of students in Lane's Achieving the Dream cohort who placed 1-3 levels below program level writing, 43% completed their program level writing whereas only 33% of students who placed directly into program level did indeed complete that program level writing within three years. Furthermore, 48% of students who placed 1-2 levels below completed program level writing -- 15% more than those who placed directly at program level. Students who placed into developmental writing were more likely to achieve success in program level writing, particularly if they needed only one or two dev writing classes!

Building on this current success with students, the department has developed a plan to redesign the developmental writing sequence, reducing coursework to a maximum of two quarters. On December 4, 2013, LCC's Curriculum Committee approved ALS' two new courses: WR087 and WR097 for this initiative. While Lane currently has a three term, 13-credit developmental writing sequence, the new sequence will allow students to accelerate through preparatory writing in two terms or less with 9 developmental writing credits and a co-requisite course providing 3 college transfer level credits. The new courses will integrate grammar, critical reading, writing, and basic information literacy skills to help prepare students for WR115 and beyond.

Faculty are moving forward with this exciting new project! Curriculum development is already underway with no less than sixteen faculty members collaboratively developing sample units and modules for the new courses. Undoubtedly, resources shared through the DIG Co-Lab faculty fellowship will prove invaluable to this innovation as well.

"Change,"  image by Wiertz Sebastién

Adaptive Learning... Some predictions for the future

Joshua Kim, Director of Learning and Technology for the Master of Health Care Science Program at Dartmouth, has some interesting "intuitions" about the future of adaptive learning in higher education. One that seems most intruiguing is the idea that adaptive platforms and LMS (learning management systems) well merge and become both seamless and ubiquitous. We see, for instance, some features of Moodle that can be used to create a quasi-adaptive experience for students in tools such as the personalized learning designer, but what Moodle offers is still far from a truly adaptive platform. While we may not be there yet, it's a propitious moment to consider the possibilities. What do you see in the crystal ball?  Read Kim's blog for more.

Photo by Isobel T

Sometimes the headline does say it all

Inside Higher Ed published, "Performance Funding Underperforms" identifiying some challenges and shortfalls to performance-based funding for community colleges. Even the CCRC has published a report providing a critical analysis of performance funding as it is currently conceived.

The question remains, what are the implications for developmental education? How do we promote student success without undermining the fundamental purpose and mission of the community college? I believe that the challenge lies in finding a "both/and" solution -- it is not an "either/or" choice between access and success that we must make...  but rather a solution that both preserves access for marginalized populations and promotes success that we must endeavor to find. Grassroots, faculty led initiatives, like DIG Co-Lab have the potential to help us do just that.

A sea change begins with a few drops of water.

photo by Matt Dinnery

SoftChalk Workshop today!

Just a reminder for the techie-minded -- there will be a SoftChalk workshop today (Friday, November 15) at 1:00 p.m. in CEN 232! Come and learn how to build interactive web-based lessons and activities for your students.

Image by Giulia Forsythe

Moodle updates coming!

Wow -- there are some really cool updates coming to Moodle at Lane in December! The ones I'm looking forward to include an option for displaying word counts in forums as well as integrated badges. In my classes I provide guidelines for forum posts, including minimum length, so having a word count displayed will be a useful, convenient tool for my students. Badges are a cool concept, and I think it will be great fun to experiment with them -- I anticipate that students will be highly motivated by the prospect of earning badges, and the fact that they can be displayed in a Moodle profile as well as in an individual students Mozilla "backpack" provides for a great deal of flexibility.

Learn about other Moodle updates coming to Lane here.  Thanks to Kevin Steeves for making this information available and the updates possible!

photo by Mark Drechsler

Procrastination... What if all students could overcome it?

Check out this Chronicle article recounting one university math professor's experience flipping the classroom. Sure -- he learned a great deal about screencasting, but what Robert Talbert found most noteworthy was students' need to manage their time -- to learn about scheduling, calendaring and to somehow not succumb to procrastination. Thanks to Alice Warner for sending the article!

photo by @Doug88888

"Class-sourcing" Assignments

In his article, "Class-sourcing as a Teaching Strategy," Gleb Tsipursky provides examples of rich multimedia assignments produced collaboratively by teams of his students. Tsipursky's students produced Pinerest boards on topics as wide-ranging as an analysis of Super Bowl ads to Art and Ideologies of the 19th and 20th Centuries through his "class-sourced pinterest project."  This assignment could be adapted for use in developmental education. I believe that such project work provides students with a rich opportunity to develop information literacy as well as digital literacy skills while focusing on specific content -- students would engage in the critical process of identifying, evaluating, and citing sources as they work to choose and cite resources to pin.

Imagine developmental writing students, for instance, working collaboratively to create Pinterest boards on compound sentences or on specific thematic content such as climate change or social inequity in higher education, all the while practicing the writing process skills of editing or revision as they succinctly analyze and summarize their "pins" within Pinterest's constraints of 500 characters or less. This approach is consistent with the ideal of a liberal approach to education, building students' skills to engage in a critical debate and analysis of ideas before they synthesize them for a broader audience -- a set of skills that could even facilitate students future work in the emerging field of digital humanities.

Image by mkhmarketing

Sharing

In the spirit of the Digital Co-Lab Faculty Fellowship, I have shared a shell for my WR080 course in our Moodle collaboration space for DIG. It contains all sorts of resources including quizzes, readings, writing assignments, instructional materials focused on paragraph writing and grammar -- all thematically organized. Unit themes include nutrition, communication, literature and descriptive writing, and information literacy. I have also created and compiled a set of online grammar modules for student use. Students can find these on the Academic Learning Skills website. While they serve multifarious purposes, any student can try the practice activities to brush up their skills before or after taking the placement test, and teachers can use them as instructional resources.

photo by Manuel Burgos

What's the status of dev math reform?

A new report by Pamela Burdman and released by Learning Works, a coalition sponsored by the California Community College Foundation and others, outlines the current state of developmental math redesign and initiatives being implemented nationwide. Burdman outlines three broad categories of reforms: instructional reforms such as modularized or accelerated courses, placement reforms, and pathways reforms such as the development of alternate routes to college-level math for non STEM students.

Read Changing Equations: How Community Colleges are Re-thinking College Readiness in Math

While the article offers a reasonably thorough review of nationwide initiatives, it leaves some questions unanswered, noting that preliminary data suggest that alternate pathways focused on statistics may be a viable alternative to the traditional algebra sequence for non-STEM majors.

Inequity in Higher Ed: Questions about Performance-Based funding

Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl of Georgetown have published, "Separate and Unequal: How Higher Education Reinforces the Intergenerational Reproduction of White Racial Privilege," clearly outlining the increasingly stratified system of higher education in the U.S. It's an exceptionally good read.

Read "Separate and Unequal"

At present, increasing numbers of states are moving quickly toward adopting performance-based funding for community colleges while significant questions remain about the impact of such funding models. Is it possible that such funding models could adversely impact the neediest students? Is it conceivable that colleges may begin to change their focus, or their mission even,  in order to maintain funding levels? Could "open entry" institutions begin to limit access?

How much more separate and unequal could our system of higher education become?

This is a propitious moment for advocacy and leadership at both the state and national level. It is a chance to reaffirm and reclaim the quintessential role of the community college in promoting social equity and the fundamental purpose of the community college in a vibrant democracy.

New Directions in Developmental Education in Oregon

The most recent statewide conversation on dev ed in Oregon took place at Lane's downtown campus in May and was facilitated by Katie Hern and Myra Snell, two faculty members who coordinate the California Acceleration Project. Acceleration is one of the principles behind the Academic Learning Skills reading and writing program redesign project. Here's a video of the entire presentation:

Experimenting with MyOpenMath

MyOpenMath is a truly amazing OER (open educational resource). It is a platform that nearly functions as an LMS (learning management system) with links to electronic textbooks, interactive instructional materials such as videos, algorithmically generated math problems for student homework, grade book, forums, and the ability to adapt all or most of these features as an instructor. It essentially functions like MyMathLab or other commercial products, but it is free! What's especially cool is that it is possible to integrate it into Moodle via LTI (learning tools interoperability), which sounds complicated, but it's not impossible.

I used MyOpenMath for student homework in an online Math 10 class. Nearly all the types of problems that students must master in Math 10 are found in MyOpenMath; however, it required a great deal of modification to align the content with our course objectives. I also offered extra credit for students who moved on to practice Math 20 concepts, and a few did so.

When surveyed, 100% of respondents recommended using the same materials. In addition, 71% were very satisfied; 14% were somewhat satisfied, and 14% were neutral when asked about the MyOpenMath homework exercises. None reported dissatisfaction! (It should be noted that seven students completed the survey.)

Overall, I think it was a successful experiment.

And a big thank you goes out to David Lippman for developing and sharing this invaluable tool!

By the Numbers

Inventory of the First Four Months of Collaboration

1.5 terms
10 faculty members
3 departments
61 blog posts
107 learning objects, videos, quizzes and other digital resources shared
3 faculty member awards thus far

subtotal: innovation abounds!
total: an impressive group of Co-Laborateurs!

(inspired by "The First Four Months of My Journey," a poem by Guillermo Gomez-Peña from his Warrior for Gringostroika)

Digital Badges... coming soon to Moodle near you

Will digital badges be the next big thing? They are taking center stage at UC Davis as students in a new major in sustainable agriculture develop digital portfolios and earn badges while schools such as Harvard and Indiana University experiment with them. Purdue has even developed its own platform for badges, one that integrates with the Mozilla Open Badges project. Read about these and other schools dabbling in badges here.

The concept is a fairly simple one. Individuals earn digital badges by demonstrating skills just like a scout might earn a traditional badge for volunteering; however, with digital badges comes the ability to embed data including the issuer and criteria for earning the badge, making it more meaningful. In addition, digital badges are portable -- put them in your digital "backpack" and display them on any platform that supports them (e.g. Twitter, WordPress, a growing number of personal and professional social media sites, and even learning management systems).

Moodle 2.5, which should be coming to LCC in December 2013, will support digital badges and will be compatible with Mozilla Open Badges -- exciting news for those who are already experimenting with badges in teaching or who wish to start.

Will your students earn a badge for "summary writing," "fractions mastery," "creative writing," "online learning skills" or "information literacy?" The implications for pedagogy are multifarious!

Photo by looseends

Digital Co-Laboration Continues!

Barbi McLain taught two hybrid WR090 classes in Spring and provides insights on her pedagogical choices in her capstone video. Julie Pfaff  highlights digital badges and experiments with SoftChalk, sharing some innovative ideas for using its HotSpot activities while Jenn Kepka ponders a new approach to peer editing.

Image by Steve Johnson

New DIG Co-Lab Creations!

DIG Co-Lab participants are a vibrant and innovative group! Check out Vicky Kirkpatrick's video outlining her participation in this faculty fellowship and Julie Pfaff's review of her experience uploading curricular materials to the OER repository, Merlot.

Image by Barbara Dieu

Students decide if they are college ready...

According to a recent Inside Higher Education article, students in Florida will be able to decide if they need developmental classes or not. In addition, placement tests will not be required for recent high school graduates. This new state law is polemical, to say the least. As noted in the article, critics suggest that the policy will effectively limit student access to college by setting needy students up for failure. Further, the law is contrary to the ubiquitous student success adage, "Students don't do optional," which is supported by student success research such as studies outlined in this article from The Chronicle.

If the quintessential purpose of our community college system is access, and access is a fundamental cornerstone for equity and social justice, how do we ensure that access does indeed lead to success -- and that we continue to strive toward equity, which is inherent in the mission of community colleges?

Photo by Andres Musta

Making Popcorn!

Our local faculty technology specialist and dear colleague, Ian Coronado, recently presented a webinar on Mozilla Popcorn Maker -- the same free app Barbi McLain used to develop a guided pre-writting activity for her Writing 090 students. Popcorn maker is fairly flexible and easy to use. It allows for the creative combination of video, images, text, pop-ups, Google maps, Wikipedia sourced information, and even Twitter feed in a time-based media project that can be shared via URL or embedded in Moodle.

Check out what Ian has to say in his demonstration!

How do we learn to fly?

A new study released by NCEE (National Center on Education and the Economy) finds that much of the math needed for college success is actually middle school math. In fact, the study reports there is "strong evidence" that understanding and mastery of middle school mathematics are essential not only for college success but also for career success, suggesting that mathematics instruction at the K-12 level must be realigned to students actual needs with a focus on mathematical modeling, statistics, probability, data analysis, and applied geometry in order to serve students better than the commonplace cursory treatment of these concepts while rushing to algebra at the middle school level.

What does this mean for community colleges, especially given that a large percentage of students have had the opportunity to follow only one pathway prior to coming to college? Is Statway or a similar pathway to college level statistics a reasonable alternative to the traditional algebra sequence?

The study reports similar, yet not parallel, findings for English, suggesting that high school students do not read or write at a level required for success in college. It also suggests that, with the exception of English composition courses, first-year community college courses do not require rigorous reading or writing of  their students. It claims, "Our community college students clearly need better instruction in constructing arguments and in laying out their thinking logically and persuasively." The report concludes that expectations at both the high school and college level are too low.

In closing, the report suggests "the nation may have to learn to walk before it runs, which means that it is important, first, to enable our high school students to meet the current very low standards before we ratchet those standards up."

Given the context of nationwide redesign of developmental education coupled with performance-based funding models and 40-40-20 goals at the state level, the question remains: How do we collectively learn to walk or run when the expectations, specifically in developmental education, require that we fly?

Alternate pathways

Developmental math redesign is leads us to question assumptions and think outside the box.  One colleague posed a simple, yet thought-provoking question, "Do students really need that much math?" Another asked, "If there were no constraints, and we could design the best possible program for developmental math students, what would it look like?" Are alternate pathways possible?

One option being piloted at many colleges in CA, TX, NM and elsewhere is the alternate pathway, "Statway," which obviates the need for the traditional algebra sequence. Statway has received a great deal of attention of late including a recent article in the Chronicle. Of course, such an alternative is not popular with everyone as evidenced by a recent op-ed piece in the Sacramento Bee.

Statway and other initiatives to accelerate developmental education through the California Acceleration Project will be highlighted this Friday, May 10 at Oregon's second statewide conversation on dev ed, which will be held at Lane's new downtown campus.

Clearly this is a hot topic -- registration is full! However, if you can't make it in person, you can catch streaming live video beginning at 9:00 a.m.

What alternatives are possible? And how will collaboration through projects such as DIG Co-Lab contribute to this evolving conversation?

SoftChalk Frenzy

Lately, I've been creating SoftChalk practices left and right. My students report that they love them, so that has fed my production frenzy. Since I simply adore SoftChalk as much as my students do, I decided to make a short tutorial about SoftChalk to share. I especially enjoy being able to create practices that students can complete without any risk -- they can do an optional SoftChalk lesson as many times as they wish for extra practice. In addition, if desired, it's possible to create a SCORM package with SoftChalk and then upload it to Moodle so that students may receive a grade for their practice. You will find an example of an interactive tutorial to help students prepare for an exam on fractions and mixed numerals here.

They want it all!

Each term I experiment with a new technology or tool in my classes and offer a new resource as an option for students, and I solicit feedback via questionnaires and surveys. What is remarkable is that I find the results are substantially the same every time. Students report that they love the new option, regardless of the format. It could be a social media / smart phone application for mobile studying such as "flashcards" on studyblue.com or an interactive online practice that I have developed. At the same time, students report that they also love the instructional resources that were already available for them in the course, which underscores the fact that providing resources in multiple formats enhances instruction and helps meet the needs of students with diverse learning styles.

One recent resource that I developed and shared with students was an attempt to integrate study strategies, "college knowledge" to promote student success via early and sustained math progress, and application of basic math skills to prepare for an exam. I'm not confident that the resulting online activity truly integrates all these well, but students seem to love it. (Yet they still love the traditional paper/ pencil exam practice as well!)

Essentially, they want it all!

Through DIG Co-Lab and other collaborative efforts such as Jared Westover's wiki, we can provide a nimble space for sharing a wide variety of rich instructional resources.

Not a "graveyard"

The buzz about developmental education comprises multifarious perspectives. Developmental education has been referred to as the "graveyard" of higher education and higher ed's "bridge to nowhere" by groups such as Complete College America. Some, and the AACC no less, have even suggested that community colleges may need to rethink their mission, going "beyond the open door" to consider tough questions like, "Whom do we serve?" Policy recommendations include reducing or eliminating developmental education as seen in proposed legislation in Connecticut to cut it. In response, groups such as the Center for the Future of Higher Education have formed and dissolved as quickly as they were established in order to address this rapid narrowing of the community college mission. Analyses include a report on the impact of the completion agenda on access while others focus on research. Articles, reports, studies, blog posts, and sundry media, which put dev ed in the limelight, abound.

At the same time, questions arise surrounding the foundations that support the work of Complete College America and similar initiatives. What is the underlying impetus for this ubiquitous, laser focus on completion? Could it stem from the history of investment in the student loan industry by contributing foundations such as Lumina?

Furthermore, there is a great deal of discourse on best practices in developmental education and the calls for dramatic change in order to promote student degree and certificate completion; however, as noted in MDRC's report "Unlocking the Gate," "While research on best practices in developmental education abounds, little rigorous research exists to demonstrate the effects of these reforms on students' achievement."

Clearly, this is a complex, multi-layered issue embedded within an equally complex landscape that cannot be understood at a cursory level. The question of developmental education is as much about access and equity -- the very premises upon which our community college system was built -- as it is about success and completion.

Amid the din and clamor of this nationwide discourse about developmental education and student completion, we have a glimmer of hope -- a kernel of energy.

In the context of a community college,

• in which 65% of its students are first-generation college students,
• in a county in which 17.4% of the population lives below the Federal poverty level, and
• in a state with a 68% high school graduation rate,

our Lane Community College developmental writing students have achieved success in program-level writing courses at a rate that is 10% higher than students placing directly into program-level writing. (This is based on Lane's Achieving the Dream cohort data of degree-seeking students entering in Fall 2006 through Fall 2008, following those students for three years.)

Developmental education strikes at the very heart of the purpose of the community college in a vibrant democracy.

It is not a "graveyard."

Developmental education is, in fact, a bedrock.

It is a foundation that we believe will grow stronger and more prominent through innovative work such as this Digital Collaboration project and our commitment to access, equity, and success for our students.

Animoto videos

Some of my students like to make Animoto videos to use with presentations -- they're simple, free, and fun! I just produced one about the concept of equivalent fractions. Animoto offers free accounts to everyone, but I especially like that educators can obtain an upgraded Plus account, which allows the creation of an unlimited number of longer videos with more options. As instructors, we also receive an access code to share with students so that they can also create longer videos with a Plus account.

Let the collaboration begin!

We're just beginning the DIG Co-Lab fellowship, and Barbi has already posted a really cool brainstorming activity for writing that she developed using Mozilla Popcorn Maker .

I think this is a wonderful example of how guided practice can be achieved online and especially like how Popcorn Maker allows adding forced pauses to videos, giving students time to stop and think, write, reflect and more!

I loved Barbi's activity so much, I decided to try "making popcorn" myself. I have to admit that it took me a little while to get the hang of it, but I think this format has great potential even if my first experiment with it does not have the best flow! Here's an introduction to adding fractions with different denominators to help build students' conceptual understanding:

Do you DIG Co-lab?

As faculty members, we have the opportunity to effect change in order to promote student success!

Through DIG Co-Lab, we collaborate, sharing instructional materials, files, learning objects (and more!) digitally in order to innovate. With a focus on developmental education, we lead this effort acknowledging the primacy of equity and access and the fundamental role of the community college in a healthy, vibrant democracy.