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A Brief Overview of Fair Use and Creative Commons Licensing

Producing and sharing digital media has never been easier. A simple Google search brings up thousands of images. Music is available digitally. There are programs and apps that make creating new digital products using existing media a snap. With this ease, it is important that in addition to simply being a good citizen, one must also be a good digital citizen. One characteristic of being a good digital citizen is not stealing or using another’s work in a way that is not approved. With this issue comes the topic of Fair Use and the Creative Commons license.

A book could easily be written on these two topics, what they are, how they were developed, and when something is or is not considered Fair Use. For the purposes of this blog, I wish to simply provide an overview of these two items and to provide some common ways that Fair Use may be infringed upon, often unintentionally, and how to avoid possible infringement of Fair Use within the classroom. I would like to thank Adam Fullterton for his information in my preparation for this post.

First, A basic understanding of Fair Use. Fair Use is actually a legal defense that is used if/when someone is sued for copyright infringement. It is not a law in and of itself. The guidelines set forth for Fair Use are those that are used by the courts to determine whether or not copyright has been infringed. These four guidelines are as follows:

What is the character of the use?
What is the nature of the work to be used?
How much of the work will be used?
What effect is there on the market?

These guidelines are taken into consideration as a whole when courts consider if Fair Use is an appropriate defense. For further details on each of these guidelines please see this link.

Creative Commons licenses is a form of copyright that allows creators to set the limitation on the use of their created content. Products with a creative commons license tend to be more straightforward about how the creator intends and allows his or her creation to be used by others. It is possible to find entire sites or advanced search engines that will filter by the type of licensed use. Here are a few examples of sites with CC licensed material:

There are also advanced search features in Google Images that allow users to select by license type as well.

Honestly the area of the use of digital media for educational purposes can be murky and extensive, but I’d like to share a few general guidelines to you to assist you in being a good digital citizen.

Simply having the material present on a password protected system does not make it ok to freely distribute (i.e. just putting it on Moodle doesn’t clear you for Fair Use).
- Examples:
  - Posting an electronic copy of a research article is generally considered not ok – but posting the link to the article from the school’s library database to access the article is ok
  - Scanning an article or section of a book and posting is is generally considered not ok – but making hard copies for your students to had out is ok (as long as the “how much of the work” principle is followed).
  - Embedding a video into Moodle for students to view in a traditional course (so they actually view it through Moodle) is generally not ok, but posting the external link to the video is usually ok (as long as the creator of the video allows).
  - Using popular music as a soundtrack for a digital project in its entirety is not ok, but using only 10% (or 3 min which ever is less) is generally ok.
  - In distance ed, showing films through the distance ed system is generally not ok.
  - The use of publisher course packs must ALWAYS be used with a purchased license.
When finding images, video, or other digital media for use in class or projects, use sites with dedicated Creative Commons licensed materials or use advanced search options to select by license.
Take a look at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s resource teachingcopyright.org to learn more about these copyright issues as they apply to teaching and learning.
Take the extra time to find the stated (if any) copyright usage statements on websites and digital media. Sometimes these are clear (can be found in the About, Legal, or Privacy section of a web page or bottom of screen in tiny print – if it is there). Other times these statements are not there and there may be a type of ‘implied usage consent.’

The use of existing digital media in the production of teaching and student projects is exciting, but we have a responsibility as instructors and students at Morningside to use these materials in an ethical manner. There are some tool kits out there (checklists) created by other institutions to assist faculty in determining whether their use of digital media would likley be considered fair use or not. Here is the tool created by the University of Minnesota.

I’m Baaaaaaack!

Well the holiday break is nearly over, students return to campus next week, and classes resume for the Spring semester next week Wednesday. What else is new? Your new Educational Technologist returns from her sabbatical, ready and eager to really get into her new job! In this blog post I want to communicate to you some of my plans for the Spring semester and what you might expect to come from the Ed Tech office this semester.

My first job this semester is to really figure out what all my position will entail. Educational Technology is a big job and I am but one person. I will need to begin to see where I will need to focus my energies as I begin to help the college move toward more effective use of technology. One thing that will be my guiding principle is that I will be much more focused on helping the college to be more innovative in the use of technology. As such I will need to take a higher level view of the use of technology. What I mean by this is that my position is not supposed to be tech support, but rather helping instructors more effectively and creatively use the technology available. For example, have a quiz that will simply not work for some reason, this is a call to eClass4Learning for tech support. Want to use the Moodle quizzing feature more creatively in your classroom to improve student learning, call me (x5253). Figuring out the scope of my position will also involve coordination with several different areas of campus including Tech Services, Library Services, FDC, and the new Teaching and Learning Coordinator.

Another area that I will be focusing my energies is the improvement of our online programs (Grad Ed and Grad Nursing). Currently we are testing out a system called Quality Matters to help us to improve the delivery of these online programs. We are also working on developing a handbook for online instructors. I will be giving more information about these in a future development session being planned in coordination with FDC.

In addition to the Quality Matters and Online Instructor Handbook development session(s) I plan to have 3-4 additional faculty development sessions. One that I hope to do relatively early is a session on the technology resources Morningside currently has but are underutilized. I will plan additional session based on information from the survey I gave late last year spring and in conversations with faculty.

Speaking of conversations with faculty, it is a goal of mine to have one-on-one meetings with as many faculty members as possible this spring to talk about issues in teaching and learning and to see areas where faculty might be interested in using more technology. I see these conversations as being very informal and talking about what we all love to talk about most, and that is how to best help our students learn. So expect me to contact you to set up a time for us to chat this semester.

Finally, I hope to have many consultations with instructors about ways to best improve teaching and learning using technology. I invite everyone to visit me in my new office (213 in HJF Learning Center). I plan to keep my eye out for innovative uses of technology and to purchase some tech toys that might be worth experimenting with in the classroom. As these things happen you can expect a blog post, Facebook/Twitter entry, or other means of communication. As always, if you have interest in a particular product I am all ears.

I hope the spring semester is enjoyable and exciting for you. Personally, I am happy to be back, though I admit I think the transition will be rough. Sabbatical is awesome and I got some great research done, but it is surely a different pace of life. I look forward to seeing everyone next week.

OpenStax: Free Online Textbooks

The world of Open Educational Resources (OERs) is quite vast and can be difficult to navigate. In the webinar I listened to a few weeks back, the folks at Inside Higher Education’s annual survey of faculty and administrator attitudes toward technology found that faculty tended to be interested in learning more about OERs, but appeared unsure of how and where to start. Certainly, there are many free resources available, but like any other resource found on the Internet, the quality can be questionable. Enter in OpenStax for college textbooks.

OpenStax is a site dedicated to the creation, sharing, and adapting of college level textbooks. Most of these books are for the lower-level introductory courses and have books for topics in physics, mathematics, psychology, sociology, economics, and biology to name just a few. OpenStax was created by a faculty member of Rice University and the content that is shared on this site are vetted and peer-reviewed and are under the creative commons license. It is supported by grants from several foundations

These books are customizeable for individual courses and instructors are allowed to customize the books using their online platform. When I attempted to play with the customization, I was not able to because of a registration error as of the time of this blog posting, but it may be worth one’s time if you wish to have a book tailored to your particular course’s needs.

When briefly reviewing the Intro to Pyschology book available, I’d say that the content is pretty comparable to most other books available commercially. The modules did include a few links to some hands-on activities and videos and there are a few review questions at the end. Unlike the books available by commercial publishers, the end of module questions are not scored and not exactly interactive (user simply clicks to reveal the answer, they do not select the answer they think in correct).

This difference is likley going to be the major difference between freely available textbooks like those in OpenStax and those developed by the commercial publishers. The creation of the interactive content and integration with scoring and course management systems requires more developers, programmers, and has a cost associated with it. In my opinion, this is likley what users are actually paying for now with commercial textbooks. With the availability of free textbooks online, the content is out there and some of it vetted likley as well as a commercially available textbook. But the inclusion of embedded activities, quizzes, and videos along with scoring and tracking systems is what currently sets the commercially available textbooks apart.

In the end, the decision of whether to use an OER like OpenStax for your electronic textbook (if you choose the electronic book) or to use an online book from a commercial publisher will lie in how you and your students will choose to use the book. If the use of embedded activities and student tracking is important, the commercial book may be more appropriate. If you simply want the content and some activities from the reading available without the tracking then the lower cost (free) option may work.

Inside Higher Ed Attitudes toward Technology Survey

Yesterday afternoon I listened to a webinar from the folks at Inside Higher Ed on the results of their 2015 survey of faculty and administrator attitudes toward technology. The presenters focused on just a few of the items from this survey and I wanted to share a taste of what they found and some of the interpretations that were given from the presenters at IHE.

First when comparing faculty and administrators, there was a large difference in opinion about whether or not online learning could achieve the same outcomes as face-to-face courses (faculty 17%, administrators 62%). The presenters were careful to note that this asked about perceived achievement of outcomes. The presenters also elaborated and found that this opinion was more common with courses not taught by faculty. They found elsewhere in the survey that faculty believed their own online courses could meet outcomes pretty well (but not necessarily as well as face-to-face) but attitudes became more negative the more distant the course was (e.g. not taught at my school, not taught by me). The presenters also speculated that the faculty taking this survey may be making unfair comparisons. One presenter speculated that comparisons of online courses were being made to the traditional ‘liberal arts seminar’ class with few students and discussion based. However, I did not see any evidence for this speculation in the data.

Second, it appears that faculty are not aware of what are referred to as Open Educational Resources (OERs) available online. Or they may be aware of them, but not sure how to best find and select them. Some OERs do go through a vetting process to help ensure quality, others do not. I believe the shear volume of materials available out there become overwhelming for faculty as well. The presenters suggested that most faculty are very familiar and comfortable with the process of obtaining materials from publishers and thus tend to use those materials. But the process for OERs is less familiar. One of the things I’d like to try to do is to help develop some form of ‘clearinghouse’ for OERs that our faculty might be able to access. I’d likely be working in conjunction with the librarians and the new teaching and learning coordinator on this project.

Third, and interesting to me, was the finding the gulf between faculty and administrators on the issue of training. Administrators tended to believe that there were good training available whereas the faculty did not. This is another area I hope to address on our campus and will strive to make training opportunities available and to help faculty become aware of these opportunities. Additionally, the presenters focused on the issue of the perceived reward for effectively using technology. Many faculty did not perceive that the effective use of technology was particularly rewarded at their campuses. I wonder with some of our current reward systems at Morningside, if something can be done to specifically reward creative and effective use of instructional technology.

Finally the presenters shared that one of the things that faculty are most excited about is hybrid teaching (some online and some face to face elements). To some extent I think many people at Morningside do this already even though the course is not officially listed as Hybrid. The presenters also suggested that many faculty are doing hybrid courses without even really being aware of it.

In all the webinar provided a snapshot of the survey results and I think the presenters chose wisely as to which parts of the survey to share. I know that I came away with a few ideas for where to focus my efforts.

A summary of the webinar from the IHE website can be found here. There is a link to the full report also available on that site.

Importing Features of Moodle: Importing course materials and question banks

It may be a little early to be talking about getting ready for the next semester, but with registration day going on, it is certainly on the horizon. A while back I posted a blog on how to create a new Moodle Course. In this post I will describe how to import content from an old course into a new course.

The import feature is a great time saver especially for those who use Moodle heavily in their courses. It basically copies one of your old classes into a new class without bringing in the student data from previous courses.

Performing a course import

Create the new class
- From home page scroll down to see all courses. Then scroll down to add new class.
- See the page in the Moodle Knowledgebase: Autoenroll on how to do this.
- Be sure you use the EXACT title of the course from CampusWeb (including any punctuation – whether or not it makes sense)
Go to the new class page
- Will first see a screen to enroll (I think, unless that is special to my Moodle Admin role). You can probably ignore this (students will auto enroll) but be sure you are enrolled as a Teacher. Otherwise continue to add content.
Begin Course Import
- Administration –> Import
- Select the old course you want to copy from the list
- Select what you want to import over
  - May choose to not import things like calendar events (i.e. assignment and quiz dates) and groups – things specific to that old semester.
- Select the specific materials you want to copy over.
- Perform Import (takes a few seconds depending on how many materials you have)
Clean up the new class (this can be a little time consuming but better than doing everything over again)
- Change the due dates on all assignments and quizzes (edit resource then expand all to change dates)
- Change references to specific dates in any text (labels, assignment descriptions)
- Upload new documents (new syllabus, updated assignments, etc.)

Using this process the most time consuming element is cleaning up the new course to reflect the new dates. There is not a feature that will automatically adjust the dates for you, unfortunately, but this is still much quicker than re-creating the entire course.

Another importing feature that Moodle has is a question bank import. Using this feature you can import existing question banks (from publishers or self created) into your course and makes for quick work at getting existing questions into Moodle for quizzes and tests.

Performing a Question Bank Import

Go to the course you want to import the question bank to
Go to Administration –> Question Bank –> Import
Select the type of question bank to import and proceed through the steps.
- Moodle question banks support most major question bank file types (including Blackboard, WebCT, and of course Moodle)
If you want to create your own multiple questions you can create your own question bank using Aiken format.
- Uses a plain text file type (.txt)
  1. Use Notepad on Windows Machine
  2. Use TextEdit on Macs
  3. If go through Word save as a .txt file to start and choose UTF-8 formatting. If auto-formatting begins, turn this off to ensure correct formatting for the importing function.
  4. Use this format when writing the questions
- This process allows for quicker writing of MC questions. All questions can be written on a single document rather than doing all the scrolling and clicking necessary to create the same questions within Moodle itself.
- It is probably still best to create short answer, essay, and matching questions within the Moodle Quiz activity.

You can also export question banks created in Moodle using the Administration –>Question Banks –> Export function. This allows you to share your question bank with others or to save it locally onto your computer.

The Urban Legends of Education

We all want to do our best to educate our students and many of us attempt to address the unique characteristics of our learners when we are developing our own lectures, assignments, and projects. It is true that each person (learner) is unique and that some approaches will work well for one student and not for another. Many of us also look at our students today and think to ourselves “they seem much different than I was when I was their age.” People are unique yes, and the generations do differ from one another. These two facts are the basis for some of the most pervasive misunderstandings, and frankly myths, about learning in education today.

I’ve take a couple of weeks hiatus from blog posting because I’ve been focusing on one of my sabbatical projects which is a “Call to Action” paper regarding the continued belief about how learning styles are a vital component to understanding our learners and in developing our lessons. My particular position is that the idea of ‘learning styles’ does not significantly influence how well one learns. This position is based on growing evidence from psychological and educational research demonstrating that indeed there is not a large effect (and in most cases no effect) of matching ones teaching to a student’s learning style. My call to action will be to better inform our future teachers about the research in cognitive psychology and to use this as a primary mode of communicating how our learners do and do not learn.

In my preparations for writing this paper I ran across an article titled “Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education” by Kirschner and Van Merrienboer (2013). This paper reviews the research debunking three pervasive beliefs in education: 1) That students today are digital natives, 2) that it is best to match teaching to a student’s learning style, and 3) that learners can be effective self-educators using the Internet. I was drawn initially to the section on learning styles for the purposes of my own writing, but interwoven within all three of these myths is the role of technology in education.

To give a brief summary, the notion of digital natives is based on the idea that college students today have been born into a world of constant access and use of technology and connectivity. Marc Prensky (2001) was the first to write on this supposed phenomenon. He argued that these digital natives were different than those not born into this technological world (whom he termed digital immigrants). They were different in that these people were able to multitask effortlessly, intuitively knew how to use technology effectively, and likely had developed brains that were ‘wired’ differently due to this use of technology. Kirschner and Van Merrienboer demonstrate that none of these claims are true, and in reality, a careful read of Prensky’s original work shows that most of his claims are based on casual observations.

The notion of learning styles is so pervasive that it continues to hold importance in most teacher education. Most textbooks in teacher education discuss learning styles and teachers are taught how to best match instruction to the different learning styles of their students. Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork (2009) reviewed the literature and found basically no evidence for this ‘matching theory.’ However this belief persists to this day. There is an entire industry dedicated to the assessment of individual learning styles (thus this belief helps others make quite a bit of money). Others, however, are advocating circumventing these self-report inventories and identifying a person’s learning style using computer automation given the criticism that existing learning style inventories are often unreliable (Feldman, Monteserin, & Amandi, 2015). So now there is a call for automating this unsubstantiated approach to instruction!

Finally, the belief that with the fact that all (or nearly all) knowledge is available on the Internet, learners simply can become self-educators (i.e. not needing formal instruction) is losing steam. It may be true that there is a wealth of information more freely available now that there ever has been. However, there is also a lot of CRAP on the Internet as well and what research finds is that novice learners (i.e. the types of learners most of us are dealing with) do not sift the good from the bad very well. Kirschner and Van Merrienboer (2013) argue that novice learners are still in need of formal instructors to help provide them with the essential knowledge needed to learn. I’ve been known to say “you need to know stuff to do stuff,” here is yet another example of the importance of knowledge. There is a place for experts to inform and guide students in education and it is an important role that these experts play. Do we hope one day that our students can become these types of self-educators? Of course (I get a nickel for everyone who thought the term ‘lifelong learner’), but it does take having a certain amount of basic background information in an area to be able to do this well.

All three myths have the thread of technology in them. The digital natives and learners as self-educators are self-evident. But the impact of technology is also found in the learning styles myth. It’s not uncommon for papers on e-learning to note the possibility for allowing for almost perfect learning styles matching to occur in a way that is not as possible in a face-to-face class (e.g. Markovic & Jovonovic, 2012). In e-learning, the learner can simply do the activities created in the mode best suited for their own learning style (Markovic & Jovonovic, 2012). However, what we have learned again from research is that this matching hypothesis simply has not held true. What does have more empirical support are the strategies and techniques learned from cognitive psychology on how human memory works and these are the methods that should take precedent when developing lesson plans and other learning opportunities.

I encourage you to read the entire article from Kirschner and Van Merrienboer. It is available full text to those with access to the Morningside College Databases. This article (besides feeding into my small curmudgeonly side on these issues) once again illustrates the importance of knowing the research and knowing what is the good research out there. The continued belief in these ideas can have a negative impact (assuming people know how to use technology because of their age, cutting out a valid and effective mode of instruction, setting a student out into the big wide Internet without a net) and in my opinion more needs to be done to correct these beliefs.

References:

Feldman, F., Monteserin, A., & Amandi, A. (2015). Automatic detection of learning styles: State of the art. Artificial Intelligence Review, 44(2), 157-186.

Kirschner, P.A. and Van Merrienboer, J.J.G. (2013). Do learners really know best: Urban Legends in Education. Educational Psychologist 48(3), 169-183.

Markovic, S. & Jovonovic, N. (2012). Learning styles as a factor which affects the quality of e-learning. Artificial Intelligence Review, 38, 303-312.

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., and Bjork, R. (2009). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105-119.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1-6.

Kaizena: Integrating Effective Writing Instruction Strategies

Developing effective written communication is an essential skill that we hone at Morningside College. Doing this requires work on both the part of the student and the instructor. Writing is a process that requires several steps even to just begin writing, and then when the writing is happening, several drafts are required. The importance of feedback is essential and there are good and bad ways of giving and managing feedback to students. In this post, I want to describe a free product – Kaizena – that integrates several best practices of writing development. Tone of feedback, access to relevant instruction, evaluation of progress, and identification of necessary skills are all vital to helping students develop their writing.

Some ways that we as instructors can help facilitate are by utilizing voice comments over written comments. This allows us to communicate tone of voice with comments that is often lost with written feedback. We also try to link specific instances of student writing errors to lessons. Finally, it is often helpful for students to receive a sense of their progress on specific skills as they go through the drafting process. Many of us try to do all of this, but it can be extremely time consuming to do so. Kaizena is a program developed to integrate all of these features of writing instruction into one easy system.

Kaizena works with Google Drive and allows instructors to give four different types of feedback to student work: voice feedback, written feedback, lessons, and skills. Voice and written feedback are pretty self explanatory and Kaizena makes creating both of these very easy. Lessons allow the instructor to link either written, voice, or linked lessons (like instructional videos) to specific areas of the student writing. Skills provide a rating system to specific skills demonstrated in the student writing.

Of course none of these approaches to writing instruction are new, but what Kaizena does is seamlessly integrate all of these important pedagogies into one easy to use system for both instructor and student. Feedback given by the instructor is given in real time to the student electronically so Kaizena can even be used during face-to-face or virtual writing conferences as a way to record the feedback given.

The other feature that Kaizena provides is a running ‘conversation’ between the student and instructor for the entire term. All feedback elements, student replies to all assignments are presented in a linear fashion allowing the student and instructor to see the progress made in the development of writing skill.

The link to the Kaizena Website is here: https://kaizena.com/

Here is a nice overview video of how Kaizena works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=38&v=ICtVnCtBwR4

New Moodle Look Coming

With the recent upgrades to Moodle will be coming a new look as well. Previously, Morningside used a default theme called “Formal White.” We have learned that this theme does not play well with the new upgrade to Moodle. Because of this we will be changing the default theme to “More.” This will result in your Moodle pages looking a bit different and possibly some of your blocks shifting position. We have decided to do this because there are a few important benefits that come with this change.

One benefit is in the grade book. With “More” the student names on the grade book do not scroll off the screen when scrolling right to left, similar to locking a column in excel or google sheet. Additionally, there have been issues with students not able to post to forums with the old Formal White theme. This is resolved by changing the theme to “More.”

Sometime today (Monday, Sept 14) this change will happen so please be aware of this. If you do not use the default theme, your page should stay as is. This should only affect those that keep their Moodle pages on the default theme.

If you would like to try to play around and change your page theme, you can do so by going into the “edit settings” for the main page of your class and scrolling down to “appearance.” Here you can select a theme in the “Force Theme” menu. Obviously from the content of this post, some theme are better than others. The folks at eclass4learning suggest either “More” (our new default theme) or “Clean.”

Here is a link to a PDF put together by Sherry Swan describing how theses themes compare on the computer and on a mobile device. Moodle Theme Comparison 20150910

Sherry describes the differences like this:

I have attached some screenshots of my Moodle sandbox course showing the Formal White (FW) theme, which is our current default, the Clean (C) theme, and the More (M) theme.

Page 1 shows PC screenshots of the three themes: FW, C, & M
Page 2 shows M with blocks either docked or moved to left side

Page 3 shows Android phone screenshots of FW and M

From the user’s perspective, when viewed on a PC, the differences are:

FW has darker shading around header and blocks, C and M have light shading that may not even be visible, depending on the clarity of one’s screen (you will notice that the shading is so light that my screenshots did not pick it up)
Color scheme differences in block text and descriptive labels, FW all block and descriptive text in black, C black and blue text, M black and orange text
Left and/or right blocks take up more space horizontally in C and M, so it is suggested that blocks be docked or placed all on one side or the other to leave more room for the main content area

From the user’s perspective, when viewed on an Android phone:

FW appears much the same as on PC, but much smaller
Color scheme differences as noted above
C and M show the main content area (the middle portion of FW view) first and then non-docked blocks appear at the bottom

My thanks to both Sherry Swan and Shaun Meyer for helping with this transition and providing the information included in this blog post.

Educational Technology Returns: About me and my vision for Morningside Ed Tech.

Hello to the educational technology blog at Morningside College! This is just one of the several ways in which I intend to communicate with the faculty and instructors at Morningside about all things educational technology and teaching & learning. This first post will serve as an introduction to me and how I envision my position as educational technologist at Morningside College.

First, my name is Kim Christopherson. Many people at Morningside already know me from the 8 years that I spent in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Morningside. During my time in the psychology department I have spent time conducting some research on the use of clickers in the classroom and I have also spent several years in the curriculum review and revision process. My own background is as an educational psychologist with a cognitive focus. What this means is that I research how the human cognitive system works (and doesn’t work) as it applies to the educational environment. My focus in graduate school was researching what role technology might play in improving the performance and efficiency of student learning.

My Master’s Thesis and Doctoral Dissertation focused primarily on the use of an online study tool (series of multiple choice study questions delivered electronically) on student motivation and engagement as well as students’ ability to predict how well they would perform on an exam. I continued my research in this area when I first started at Morningside by examining the effect of the use of student response systems (i.e. clickers) in the classroom.

I very much look forward to being able to refocus my research energies back into the area of educational technology in this new position and I plan to have a research project of some kind attached to almost every course I teach. I am a willing collaborator in research, so if anyone has ideas or wants to collaborate with me please contact me.

My vision for my position as Educational Technologist at Morningside is of course guided by the job description, but I also have my own particular ideas that I would like to share in terms of how I see my role on the campus. First, one of my major duties will be to assist in the development of the online courses in Morningside’s online only programs (Graduate Education and Graduate Nursing). In this role I will use the research and best practices of online delivery to help improve and develop courses delivered via our course management system (currently Moodle).

Second, within both the graduate and undergraduate programs I will serve primarily as a consultant for faculty in the development and improvement of their online courses, but also as a consultant for the use of technology in more traditional classrooms. Part of this role of consultant will be to deliver several professional development opportunities throughout the year.

Third, I’d like to offer faculty the opportunity to travel to technology related conferences by helping to offset some of the registration and/or travel costs to faculty. I have yet to decide upon a process for requesting these funds, but I do believe that conferences like these can be extremely valuable for faculty other than myself to attend and then share with the campus community. I’d also like to offer some opportunities for summer workshops for which faculty might be compensated.

Finally, I do plan on being the point person for the most up-to-date trends, gadgets, and research in educational technology. This will frankly be a steep learning curve for myself because I’ve been out of this loop for several years now, but rest assured, once I get up-to-date I will be sharing this information with the faculty in a variety of ways including blog posts, social media posts, show-and-tell sessions, and the opportunity for faculty to test out new gadgets in their classrooms. Stay tuned for these updates!

There is one area that I will be playing a small role in and that is the role of tech support. Though I do intend to assist faculty with some support of the technology that they choose to use in their classroom, I cannot be the sole point person for all tech support. My role as Educational Technologist is more ‘big picture’ and focused on assisting faculty in implementing and deciding on what technology (if any) might be most helpful to their students. However, with that said, I do intend to work with IT and others to help better develop the support resources for technologies like Moodle and Taskstream so that faculty can easily find the help they need when a specific tech issue arises.

I’d like to end this entry with a description of how I tend to view technology in the classroom. Many faculty know me for my integration of technology in my classrooms. I’ve been using clickers since I first started at Morningside and continue to use them today. I’ve also been in the process of flipping a few of my classrooms by using videos and online testing. I’m not shy about incorporating technology. However, I do tend to do so only if I believe that there is a true benefit and this decision is typically based on some type of empirical evidence. I am a cheerleader for technology, but only if it is purposeful. Technology for technology’s sake can actually reduce learning because if done poorly, it can confuse students, overwhelm student’s cognitive abilities, and overwhelm the instructor. Thus, when I am in a consultant role you will most likely hear questions like: “what learning goals do you want to improve?,” “What do you want your students to do?,” and “What are your students struggling to do or understand?” Knowing your particular learning goal for your student can help me to consider what possible technology solutions might be available. But odds might be that I also propose low tech options as well.

If you have a particular technology you’d like to incorporate more (for example using Moodle more in your class or using Taskstream), I’ll again default back to what your course goals are first and then think about possible features to include. Research in educational and cognitive psychology tells us that it is not the delivery method of the material that matters as much as instructional design in student learning. And all instructional design needs to start with the goals/outcomes of your course. Technology can simply make some things more possible/easy to incorporate such as customized learning, incorporating multimedia, and providing more opportunities for practice (Clark & Mayer, 2011).