Category: New Educational Technologies

Accessibility tips I have learned on my Co-op term – Scott Hurley

A man stares at a bright computer screen.

The University of Waterloo is in the process of making our communications more accessible to everyone. Part of my job this term, as a Special Projects Assistant in the Centre for Teaching Excellence, has been to make our newsletter (Teaching Matters) more accessible.

I credit most of my knowledge to IST (Information Systems & Technology) and their SEW (Skills for the Electronic Workplace) courses and material, available to staff and faculty, which can be found on their Help & Training page.

Quick tips that helped me are:

Things that are not accessible and should not be used:
•    Text boxes
•    Drop caps
•    Hyperlinks like “click here” or “more”
•    Avoid adding  in pictures that add no value other than “looking nice”
•    Blank cells in a table

Things to do that increase accessibility:
•    Use Styles appropriately
•    Use descriptive hyperlinks: State the title of webpage (example: “Centre for Teaching Excellence”) “ instead of  “click here”
•    Provide alternate text for pictures, figures, and tables
•    Use the built in accessibility checker (in Word 2010)

Finally here are some of the tools that I have found helpful to check accessibility:
•    The PDF Accessibility Checker (PAC) (use this to check your PDF files)
•    The Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE) (use this to check if your website is accessible)
•    The built in Accessibility checkers in Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Word

I know it seems like a daunting task with a lot more work when you start to make your material accessible. Once we know what is/isn’t accessible, however, we can change our formatting habits and the process becomes very easy. It is also important to note that the real reason we are making our communications accessible is to make it easier to serve our audiences equally and not just because of new accessibility laws.

Writing Math: MathJax and Desire2Learn — Paul Kates, Oct 18, 2012

Please visit the MathJax and Desire2Learn page to read about writing mathematics using MathJax in the Desire2Learn course management system here at the University of Waterloo.

Paul Kates
Mathematics Faculty CTE Liaison
pkates@uwaterloo.ca, x37047

Update Your Lectures: Re-Thinking PowerPoint in the Classroom – Zara Rafferty

Black and white photo of a teacher in the classroom

Oh, how I loved PowerPoint as a student. When the lights at the front of the room clicked off and the PowerPoint projector clicked on, my peers and I took that as our cue to sit back, relax, and start surreptitiously texting under our desks. What was class time for, really, if not to catch up with the latest Facebook news?

Silly faculty, I thought, don’t they realize that, by posting the lecture slides, they are eliminating the need for me to listen in class? As for the few wily instructors who left blanks in the slides? Well, they eliminated the need to study for tests, as we could be fairly sure those blanks would comprise the bulk of our quiz questions.

It was only when I became an instructor that I realized how vital PowerPoint was for me. The slides helped keep me on-track, allowed me to share images or embedded videos, and ensured that I touched upon key discussion points.

But, as I gazed out at my students, not-so-covertly texting, nodding off, or staring at me with vacant eyes, I realized I was doing something wrong. I was using PowerPoint as a crutch and not as an effective communication tool. I turned to PowerPoint to organize my notes when I had not left myself enough time to plan a thoughtful, engaging lecture. I thought that by using a different font (hello, Rockwell!) and selecting a colourful PowerPoint template, I was somehow pioneering educational technology.

Wrong.

I had to face the sad fact that I didn’t know how to use PowerPoint effectively. I didn’t, and you probably don’t either. And that’s okay. We can fix it! Here are my top 5 resources for reinventing how you use PowerPoint in the classroom:

1. You Suck at PowerPoint: 5 Shocking Design Mistakes to Avoid
2. Re-Think Your Use of Visuals: Dance vs. PowerPoint, a Modest Proposal (from John Bohannon, who also created the Dance Your PhD project)
3. PowerPoint Inspiration: 28 Creative PowerPoint Designs
4. Active Learning with PowerPoint Tutorial
5. Try other PowerPoint-esque programs, like Prezi, Keynote, or SlideRocket

Of course, you could always get rid of PowerPoint altogether, but I suppose that’s a topic for a future post…

Happy designing!

(Image via)

 

MOOCs Usher in a New Era of Learning — Katheryn Rivas

The past year has witnessed a landslide of global participation in Massive Open Online Courses. These classes are commonly referred to as MOOCs and have attracted a diverse range of students from across the globe. In addition to massive enrollment figures (spilling over 100,000 in some cases), these courses are unique in that they are offered by some of the top universities in the United States and the world– for free.

Last month one million users registered with Coursera, making it the most popular MOOC site on the web. The site was founded only a few months ago, in April of 2012, by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University. A competing MOOC site, Udacity, was also launched by a former Stanford professor, Sebastian Thrun.

It would be remiss not to mention Sebastian Thrun and his role in the MOOC revolution. It was his Fall 2011 Artificial Intelligence class that ignited the spark of MOOC fever that swept the U.S. after enrollment numbers climbed to 137,000. Though only 23,000 completed the course – Thrun said he was hooked on the thrill of teaching massive classes, describing a particular fascination with the peer-based teaching that flourished among the course community.

The trend of MOOCs is spreading not only in the U.S., but to other countries as well. Today, Coursera has a participating university in Canada, India, Scotland and Switzerland. International support for these classes is most evidenced in the international student participation rates. In Thrun’s original AI class, only 25% of the enrolling student body was located within the United States. Independent classes are cropping up across the world in Internet labs and open universities, providing education to those who may not have had access to such information otherwise.

Information is exactly what students of MOOCs are receiving. The classes do not offer degrees or course credits to students who are not enrolled in a parent university, which makes the very purpose of MOOCs different from a traditional institution of higher education. Currently, the most popular courses are in business and technology, suggesting that professors are seeking to answer a need for information within the professional field, making MOOCs relevant and impactful for members of the workforce rather than a student body. There are certificates of completion available for some classes, but the certificates do not carry the title of any university.

Currently, Coursera offers the widest selection of classes of the MOOC sites and has branched out of the STEM box (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) with humanities courses such as poetry and mythology.  Other sites such as edX seemed to be bound to the STEM courses for the simple reason that coursework can be assessed and graded by calculations – in other words, by a computer. Other sites are embracing the concept of a peer-educated community by requiring peers to review original work that cannot be graded by a computer. The quality of such peer-based education has yet to be determined.

Another unknown factor of the MOOC era is how these sites will develop sustainable business models. While the motives behind these startups have been primarily utopian – to make higher education globally accessible – the millions of dollars invested in these new companies demand a for-profit model.

The business model that Thrun has suggested would possibly transform MOOCs into a type of trade school in which qualifying students would agree to have their scores and information sold to recruiting companies. This relationship would support a definition of open courseware that provides education despite barriers of finance or distance; but it could also work to limit courses to relevant industry-related topics.

Katheryn Rivas is a prolific freelance writer and professional blogger who frequently contributes to www.onlineuniversities.com as well as other education and technology sites. If you have any comments or questions, drop Katheryn a line at katherynrivas87@gmail.com.

Visualizations for Assessment and Learning — Mark Morton

Web 3.0, they say, is going to be a “semantic web,” which I take to mean that it’s a web which will allow us to easily explore relationships among large amounts of discrete bits of data. One way of exploring relationships, of course, is visually: humans can literally “see” patterns of relationships more easily than they can otherwise apprehend them. Examples abound, but one that I recently came across is especially interesting from an “assessment” point of view. It’s a visual depiction of comments that a class of students made on one another’s blogs. In the visualization, each student is represented by a small circle (or node) and the the comments that he or she made are represented by arrows leading to the nodes of other students. So, if Matthew commented on Ephraim’s blog once, then the arrow starts from Matthew’s node and points to Ephaim’s node. At a glance, it’s easy to see who has been most active in making comments, who has received most comments, and who hasn’t been active at all — and that information can clearly help an instructor with both formative and summative assessment. You can the visualization, which was made with the platform Many Eyes, here.

Another visualization tool that I recently came across is called DebateGraph, which is intended to help people map out the various ideas, positions, and evidence that make up complex arguments. At first glance, a DebateGraph visualization looks like an ordinary concept map, but as you click the various nodes, you see that each one dynamically changes: it becomes the central node, and new nodes — ones that are connected to it — jump into place. The platform is collaborative, so if you want to contribute to the argument, you just need to log in, navigate to the appropriate node, and then add your point. You can see an example of a visualization in DebateGraph here.

I’m a bit sceptical of DebateGraph’s “practical” implications: in other words, if your family is having argument about where to go for your summer vacation, I don’t think that using DebateGraph would be worth the investment of time it would take to map out the argument. But as a learning tool — that is, as a way of helping students untangle the complexities of, say, a geopolitical conflict or an ethical issue — I think that the very “deliberate” methodology of DebateGraph could be very useful.

Talking to Yourself: Apps for Taking Audio Notes — Mark Morton

When’s the last time you sat down at your desk and said to yourself, “Okay, now I’m going to come up with a good idea.” Probably never. The thing about creativity, in my experience, is that trying to force it to happen simply ensures that it doesn’t. It’s a bit like a sixteenth-century woodcut I once saw that depicted a man gently cupping his hand so that it would hold a bit of water for him to drink: the message or moral of the woodcut was that if he tried to forcefully grab the water, by squeezing his hand tight, it would go squirting through his fingers onto the ground. Continue reading Talking to Yourself: Apps for Taking Audio Notes — Mark Morton

Remembering Versus Googling — Mark Morton

The story goes that a reporter asked Albert Einstein for his phone number (no, this didn’t take place in a bar), and Einstein had to look it up in a phone directory. When the reporter expressed surprise that the twentieth-century’s greatest physicist didn’t know his own phone number, Einstein replied, “Never memorize what you can look up in a book.”

If there was any validity to Einstein’s comment when he said it many decades ago, then it’s even more valid now: Google lets me look up information much more quickly and easily than even the most nimble-fingered research librarian can find it in a book.

But should we really follow Einstein’s advice about memorization? After all, the man couldn’t even comb his own hair, and he seems to have had trouble knowing what to do with his tongue. Continue reading Remembering Versus Googling — Mark Morton