ePortfolio

Fusion 2014 – Day Two Recap

Posted on by Jon K.

So anyone who has gone to a conference before will recognize, it’s a bit more like a marathon than a sprint – you really have to try to pace yourself to get everything in and pay attention to the things you want to. I will say, that for the second year in a row, the food at the Fusion conferences were really good. Ended up talking with Paul Janzen of D2L about our impending PeopleSoft integration and the summer of integrations (Blackboard Collaborate, Pearson, maybe McGraw Hill, iClicker and Top Hat) we’re doing at McMaster. Ken Chapman also joined us at breakfast and asked a little bit about what we’d like to see out of e-mail. Frankly, I hadn’t thought about e-mail in years, because we’ve been mired in hell with IT and us trying to get the Google Mail integration working (not that it doesn’t functionally work, but IT has stalled us for admin level access since we asked a year and a half ago). I said that I’d personally prefer the system to not do e-mail at all, but that would be a difficult task considering we have people who segment their academic teaching e-mail on the LMS rather than their institutional e-mail. The problem for us is that we’re currently not configured to allow external e-mail.  It will be interesting to see if IMAP/POP3 support comes to Brightside sometime in the future – which makes a lot more sense.

Insights Focus Group

I wasn’t sure if I was going to be of any help in this but I  thought that seeing as we’ve run some reports with the Insights tool maybe I could glean better ways to deal with it. Basically, people had concerns with the large data not being able to run org-level reports (which is one of ours as well), the interface needs some improvement, and the time it takes to create ad hoc reports is too long. So those issues were at least noted. Let’s see how they get addressed going forward.

Blended Learning, Learning Portfolios and Portfolio Evaluation

Wendy Lawson and I co-presented this – however it was mostly a Wendy show. She lived it, so she should have the floor. Basically this presentation outlines what we collaborated on for Wendy in her Med Rad Sci 1F03 course – which is a professional development course for first semester, first year science students going into the Medical Radiation Sciences (X Ray, Sonography, etc).

We used the ePortfolio tool as a presentation mechanism – which I think worked well, I’m not sure if we had a good flow of what we were going to show on each page, but other than that, it was a risk that we felt was not big enough to impede our presentation.

We talked about how this redesigned course could use the Learning Portfolio to deliver the course in a blended manner (using ePortfolio/Learning Portfolio activities as the one-hour blended component) and how the students did with it. After working with Wendy on this presentation, the stuff her students did were miles above what we saw on average and I think next year, the weaknesses she acknowledged in the course will be addressed.

Vendor Sessions

I honestly skipped these because, well, I’m not interested in getting more spam in my work e-mail. Plus, my wife was having surgery (everything’s good!) at this time so I wanted to call and make sure we connected before surgery began.

Connecting Learning Tools to the Desire2Learn Platform: Models and Approaches

Attending this session was particularly self-serving – I wanted to say hi to the presenter, George Kroner, who I’ve followed on twitter for what seems like a million years, and the Valence stuff is stuff I feel I should know. I have a decent enough programming background – I can hack together things. So why am I not actually building this stuff?

George walked through UMUC’s process for integrating a new learning tool which can be broken down into three steps:

  1. Evaluate tool fit
  2. Determine level of effort to integrate
  3. Do it/Don’t do it

It seems so simple when I re-write out my notes, but it’s a really interesting set of steps – for instance, in the determine the level of effort to integrate – you also have to think of post-integration support, who supports what when you integrate? Is it the vendor? Or your support desk? What’s the protocol for resolving issues – do people put in a ticket with you, then you chase the vendor? Is the tool a one-time configuration and does it import/export nicely, or does it need to be configured every time it’s deployed in a course?

We did a Valence exercise next, and I want to merely link two tools that when I circle back to doing some Valence work (soon, I swear!) I’ll need:

https://apitesttool.desire2learnvalence.com/ and http://www.jsoneditoronline.org/. The API test tool is a no brainer really, and I knew about it before but never knew where it was – incredibly helpful for debugging your calls and what you might get back. JSON editor online is new to me, and something that I really, really needed. I’m a JSON idiot – for some reason, Javascript never resonated with me. I’ve always preferred Python or PHP as web scripts, despite the power of Javascript. Guess I’ll have to put on my big boy pants and learn it all over again. Maybe Dr. Chuck will do a JSON course like he’s done with Python?

Social Event at the Country Music Hall of Fame

The evening social event was great – the Hatch Show print is actually something I might just hang in my office. There was some shop talk, some fun stuff, a drone… Oh yeah, this happened:

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Learning Portfolio Writing Prompts

Posted on by Jon K.

One of the problems of asking first year students to “reflect” is that, typically, they don’t know how to reflect. It’s not a skill that a lot of students come prepared to University with, nor have developed. Yet, it’s a critical skill to have – to think about what you’ve done, and identify what worked well, what needs improvement and what can change.

Reflection is really not a simple process, but it’s crucial to learning, and really important to deep learning. Think of all the life lessons you’ve learned, and I bet you’ve thought about them often, and sometimes deeply. They change you. Similarly, good educational experiences (whether that’s reading a book, attending a lecture, practicing a lab, or just trying something out) cause you to think about them, and again, sometimes deeply. It’s that deep learning that the Learning Portfolio wants to get at.

The activities we have unveiled in the first year of the Learning Portfolio were good – but mostly course based. Anecdotally, we didn’t see a lot of extracurricular activity, or if we did, it was part of the program. One potential reason was that we didn’t give any student a reason to actually use the tool. So one way to solve that will be to post writing prompts, to offer students something to reflect on and a reason to use the tool on their own. Each writing prompt will help students connect their academic work to their “outside” life, connecting academia to reality. I consider this sort of thing “translational” – an effort to break academia down to understandable language for the average person. In the process, hopefully students will engage with thinking about what they’re doing, set a goal for themselves and maybe get a little bit more out of their experience here.

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Learning Portfolio Showcase at McMaster University

Posted on by Jon K.

The day surrounding the culmination of a significant portion of my work around the learning portfolio at McMaster this year was the Learning Portfolio showcase.

In the morning, Randy Bass gave a talk about where learning might be going – I’ve embedded it here to provide some context for how our university is framing the discussion.

As usual, Randy gave a great talk, this is my second (maybe even my third) time listening to Randy speak and it’s well worth the investment of time. In the afternoon, there was more discussion around the use of the Learning Portfolio – from potential employers, from faculty, from staff and from students. Below is a short overview of some of the things we’ve learned.

One of the  big things I’ve learned this year is that the tool we’re using (D2L’s ePortfolio tool) really dictates how things get done. It would be nice to have a timed reflection option (currently we use Quizzes for this process – and that’s got problems in and of itself), it would be nice to allow students to act as teachers in certain contexts – dictated by the instructor of the course. I know that the tool is getting an upgrade, but the upgrades can’t come soon enough. Once we can use the ePortfolio app (and that’s not D2L’s fault, we can’t use it because of the method of single-sign on that we use) that will change some contexts, but maybe not all.

With all the statements about student-centred learning, faculty are asking for the ability to simplify access to ePortfolio content. I can see some benefit in the K-12 market as well for this behaviour (as much as I don’t particularly like it). If faculty are to guide students in good reflection, they should be able to randomly select someone (maybe blindly select from a group of people).

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ePortfolios So Far…

Posted on by Jon K.

So I’m the (self proclaimed) technical lead for the ePortfolio tool (which McMaster has rebranded Learning Portfolio). Actually I fell into the role when the person who was supposed to manage it ended up not being able to deliver the initial rollout presentation due to illness. The tool has worked admirably, scaled well, and frankly done its job. There are warts on the tool – maybe barnacles are a better imagery (to go a step further, barnacles can be removed  with a lot of hard work). The way one assembles a presentation (a sharable portfolio) is very mid 90’s – which makes the product a hard sell to student used to the ease of Tumblr or WordPress. Despite that major hurdle, we have seen over the first semester a moderate success, just over 21,700 items built in ePortfolio, with close to 3500 of those being reflections. We have over 3200 unique users, with just 17 courses using it. We’re now starting phase two of the first year, which will be periodic reminders to students, and we should see an uptick in usage – as well as an addition of two courses which will impact at least 1500 students. Now the real question is will students start to use it outside of classes?

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Happy New Year

Posted on by Jon K.

In the past I’ve looked at previous posts about what I think will happen, and reflect on those ideas. It’s not that I don’t think reflection is valuable, it’s just that I’m not that interested in navel gazing (hell, I can see my navel getting bigger by day).

This year, I’ll outline some of the projects I’m currently involved with and will try to write about this year.

Work Projects

So for work, I’m working on two large-ish projects. One is a Productivity and Innovation Grant funded project lead by the University of Guelph, around learning outcomes in D2L. What the project encapsulates is ensuring there’s alignment between course, program and ultimately University related outcomes – and the reporting that D2L will suggests where there are holes in the alignment. It seems like it will improve the Analytics/Insights tool greatly with global reporting options – which is something I’ve struggled with greatly.

The other, is around Learning Portfolios. The department that I’m embedded with has gotten some funding from the University to advance Learning Portfolios (the ePortfolio tool in D2L) on campus and it’s looking like we will be responsible for this area from here on out. I think that some improvements to the way the tool works by D2L will only help the adoption of the tool – however there’s still some major hurdles that have to be overcome before there’s widespread adoption. That’s not to say that adoption and use hasn’t grown greatly, it has – just the impact of the use so far has not produced enough of a ripple to spread campus-wide. That’s our job in year two. I’m putting in a Fusion 2014 proposal to co-present one of the really interesting stories from first semester that ties blended learning, learning portfolios and helping students reflect (in this case on career choices).

Personal Projects

Other than the banal things like redo the bathroom and visit more places, I’m putting out a record with my one band and releasing another record with my other band. Not very exciting unless you like hardcore punk.

While this is work-related, I want to put together a rubrics repository (like Rubistar, but much more focused on local courses, and local sharing) that has a series of rubrics saved covering higher education courses that the University teaches. This way, it gathers together some of the best work that faculty have done, recognizes them, allows them to set sharing permissions, and ultimately, choose to export as PDF or into D2L. This is a big project, and really not on anyone’s timeline, but I want it to happen. It’ll have to be open source, and to that end, maybe it doesn’t just spit into D2L but into Blackboard or other systems too. The first iteration will of course work with our system (D2L) and then maybe we can branch out.

I’d love to help update the Feed2JS codebase to get it WCAG 2.0 compliant.  I’d also love to blog more.

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More About the Learning Portfolio

Posted on by Jon K.

I’ve written a fair bit about my process for developing support materials – which is something I’ve become good at over the years. I haven’t really spent any time writing about some of the other, smaller initiatives around the Learning Portfolio. One of which is getting students to set their own learning goals.

It’s ironic that an institution (who have their goals for students) wants students to be self-directed, yet everywhere in their classes have very little choice in the way that they can determine their own goals and achieve them. This self determination is left to their own time, and is in every sense, not a part of school. However, the institution is certainly looking at ways that students can determine, set and track their own goals – and to that end, with a consultation with Desire2Learn, developed a widget that sits on the homepage that students can click on the link, enter their information on a form which creates an artifact in their ePortfolio/Learning  Portfolio. A small portion of the student population use the Learning Portfolio (about 5%-10% of our full time enrollment) but use is picking up. Use of the Learning Goals widget is also a large percent of that group – maybe making up 2% of our total population.

The idea with this widget is to get students thinking about their own goals and trying to tie those goals to their academic learning. I don’t know if there’s enough being done around this – and we’re only in the beginning, but some thinking needs to be done about this for sure. We aren’t tracking whether these goals are ever met, or even the content of these goals – in fact we only can make a guestimate based on how many times the title of the widget shows up in the Learning Portfolio object creation report.

I’d be interested in hearing about whether anyone’s doing major ePortfolio/Capstone project work – trying to encapsulate a student’s experience at University or College in that course/project – and ways that an ePortfolio might help that along. Sure, we know that portfolios are great for procedural/project based learning, especially when guided. I’m more interested in if this can be done institutionally. Really adding a great incentive to building this work.

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Learning Portfolios So Far

Posted on by Jon K.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long time, but I’ve only gotten my head above water about this in the last few days. Bear with me as semester start-itis hasn’t really cleared my system and I’m definitely fighting off a cold with flu like symptoms.

I’m very lucky to work at an institution with some pretty good vision from the top down. I’m not glad handing anyone here, I honestly mean it. Patrick Deane, McMaster’s President, has a vision, and put some institutional money behind enacting that vision. He’s identified the learning portfolio as something that students can use to document their learning journey. Watch the YouTube video for his take.

Admittedly, I have a vested interest in this idea working out, because I’m front and centre with this initiative around what we call Learning Portfolios, and what most of you call ePortfolios. I’ve ran over 20 workshops on the tool in the last year and a half, have become the defacto technical face of the thing, and well, I spent my summer working on it so that I can support the widespread use of it by faculty and students this year.

The summer has been a blur of activity – I’ve mostly had a chance to tweet about some of the things I’m doing, but here’s a quick rundown:

Figure out how to change the wording of ePortfolio in the D2L instance to Learning Portfolio

You’d think this was an easy thing – except that it’s buried in the Language options of the D2L admin settings.  To my dismay, it wasn’t as easy as changing one thing and it propagating to the hundreds of instances of the word throughout the system – it was hundreds of entries. Think it took 4 hours to manually go through and adjust this. After the upgrade to version 10.2 I needed to redo some of this work as the upgrade process either created new language entries or something got overwritten.

 Document how to use it

I’ve always believed in local documentation – I frankly hate using vendor documentation because it’s never specific enough to your particular install, nor does it illustrate why you would use it. I stayed away from the why, because that was for other people (students, namely) to decide. I did however create this repository of PDFs. 20 PDFs, articulating and well, showing students and faculty how to use the damn thing. There’s about 10 more that I want to do – these having to do with social media connections. While some of this stuff is documented in the vendor documentation, with us changing the name of the tool to something else, there is a high likelihood of confusion had we not done this. This whole thing took months of work, and isn’t close to being done. Also, I think we all recognize that students generally don’t use these systems because they aren’t as slick as Pinterest, or Facebook, or Tumblr. The ePortfolio tool is definitely not as slick as Tumblr, nor as easily customizable. So anything to get the technical details out of the way and into student hands is a desirable thing.

To that end I wrote scripts for twelve videos – eight of them are on YouTube. These were talked about in another post so I won’t go into much detail other than many people have really dug them. I think we’ll be doing more of these for not only the Learning Portfolio but also for the LMS.  With very little promotion, one video has 100 hits and the channel has 15 subscriptions, so it’s fair to say that people are interested in this type of support. More of these will have to be made.

Bend it to make it do what you want

One of the institutional goals is to help students take ownership of their learning and make explicit learning goals for themselves. With self-directed goals, many of them are not achievable in four years (or five, or fifteen even). We looked at some ways that might make sense for learners to create and self select their own goals. Ultimately, with some help from Desire2Learn, we settled on a form accessible via a widget that lives on the homepage of the LMS. That form allows the student to fill out a learning goal, making it explicit, do some thinking about it, and track it throughout your time at McMaster. So, we have a piece that does that in conjunction with the Learning Portfolio. I hope that Desire2Learn are thinking about adding this sort of functionality into the ePortfolio tool, because that gives users a giant reason why the ePortfolio tool is better than a blog, Tumblr or any other service in helping you make those connections.

Push out a template for students to use

Seeing as the institution wants to help students – what is the best way to help? There’s no one best way I’m sure, but one idea is that we push out a template to any student who registered in a course between Fall 2012 and Fall 2013. Our System Administrator looked at using the API to accomplish a push, however, there wasn’t enough time to test the script properly, so we are manually doing this. I have a CSV extract of all 30,000+ students who had the student role in at least a course over the last calendar year. I chop that down to 1000 student segments, enroll those students in a course, then push the template from my account into those student’s Learning Portfolio. Unenroll the students, after making course active due to a bug in D2L’s system (you can’t unenroll a person from a course while the course is inactive), and repeat the process.

I ramped up the numbers to 1000 (I started at 200, moved to 600, then 800, then a 1000), and that seems to be the best number to hold at. When I approached some of the ePortfolio team over the summer about our plans, they were concerned about a push to 20,000. I hope they work on the scalability of the tool going forward. Once I got into a rhythm, and used the 1000 enrollment levels, I knocked off 10,000 fairly quickly.

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ePortfolio Implementation: Inhibiting Creativity?

Posted on by Jon K.

I know, I know. Job complaints are rarely the sort of thing you want to read, nor that I want to write. I really don’t! I love my job, the things I do which are varied and interesting. I’m at a bit of a crossroads though, I’ve been doing this job long enough that I worry about the documentation of how to use tools influences the way the tool is used. Quite often the most creative, interesting ways tools get used are in that first few hours of learning how to use a tool – one of the reasons I believe that blogs end up used for a short time, and people abandon them as time wears on – they’ve learned all that they need to know and with curiosity satisfied, there seems to be little value to them going forward.

So I’ve been writing lately documentation for Desire2Learn’s ePortfolio tool specifically for our instance of the platform. I’ve put together a diagram that shows the different parts of the layout with pixel dimensions, a guide to setting up the Chrome plug-in, and now a guide to using the Chrome plug-in. In my initial draft, I had examples of how one might use the plug-in, because it seems to me, you have to know why you might add a file, or take a screenshot of a webpage, before you actually do it. Maybe these examples will be held up as some sort of  “best practice” or worse still “the way to do something’? I have always strived to write neutral documentation, where it just told you how to do something, with pictures illustrating the concepts. With ePortfolio though, you can do many tasks in different ways, none of the wrong or lesser than another. You can add an Artifact through the plug-in, through the Learning Environment, and there are valid reasons to add that Artifact both ways. You can tag things, you can choose to use collections if you want. You can have a big mess of things in your ePortfolio.

Who am I to tell someone that the way they’re doing it is wrong?

Apparently, I’m the one to tell people how to do it. The problem is that I instinctively want to find the most efficient way to use a tool – that’s part of my job. With ePortfolio, each path is equally complex (if you let it) or simple. There is no best path, there is no way to do it “right”, which again, will frustrate many, annoy others, and please a small few. The design of the tool pleases me ultimately, because I’m fascinated with how people deal with obstacles in learning. Unfortunately, there’s a part of me that wants the technology to not get in the way. Maybe that’s what my problem is ultimately.

When people are faced with problems they tend to either get collaborative and/or creative. Both of these conditions I love, because frankly the world can use more of both qualities at the moment. Does providing a path for those to follow stunt people’s instinctive creativeness? Is there a way with documentation to make it useful without making many decisions on what goes in, and that editing process then leaves alternative paths to grow over and be forgotten? Or is this another way to see who is really creative and thinking differently, because it allows everyone access to the tool, and then those who are energized by it, can take it places I’ve never thought about?

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PBL – Portfolio Based Learning? And the Eternal Funding Question

Posted on by Jon K.

We’re ready to unveil ePortfolios at the institution I work at and I’ve had a hand in developing the training materials. I love the tool, and I hope that the faculty love the tool as well. I do hope that the students love it as well, however I have some reservations.

The first reservation is that the tool looks old. While there are workarounds, and ways to make it look better – the templates provided look like junk. Especially now that Desire2Learn’s LMS looks beautiful, sleek and modern. At the organization level, we’ve done our best to address the clunkiness of the ePortfolio templates – replacing ones that are better suited to a K-12 environment with a more adult, er, professional look. I’m sure that the templating system will change in forthcoming revisions to the tool – it’s something I know I’ve complained about, a couple of times, directly to D2L – they now have shown they can create an elegant, modular product, so I expect those changes that have been made to the LE be moved into other tools throughout the suite.

The looks aren’t the only thing. Faculty are going to have to get a handle on changing how they teach – which is problematic from an institution viewpoint. People change slowly, but the institution demands change – probably because the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities are breathing down their neck too. Of course, it doesn’t help when austerity measures in the province of Ontario are hitting all the public sector workers – we are offered 0% wage increases over the next two years. I can stomach that – I have a comfortable job that affords me a world of luxury that I didn’t have previously. I recognize that. I also recognize when MTCU and the Ministry of Finance are at odds over funding of development in the education sector. It’s funny how on one hand they want people to do more (with more students) and the best practices point to more student-centered approaches, when there clearly is no way that those approaches are able to be met. Portfolios are a great example – here’s an alternative way to run a class, but no one’s thinking about the nitty-gritty part of it – how to manage all the information that portfolios generate. That costs money.

Combine new rules at the Federal level (Bill C-11 comes to mind, with new restrictions on fair use in education) – and ultimately it’s the support people who end up doing the grunt work on supporting the initiatives (and might end up Federal watch, er, lapdogs as well).

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Speculation on Version 10 of Desire2Learn’s Learning Environment

Posted on by Jon K.

As one of the three administrators at my institution of the LMS, we got an invitation to the unveiling of version 10 of Desire2Learn’s LE. We were also asked what we thought the new system would be like, what the big change will be. I started mulling over what it could be, thinking about all the permutations. I had spoken with someone I knew who had seen the new version and when I said no, their only response was “it’s different”. So while I may be right in the speculation, it’s not because I have insider information. Here’s some things that I think might be a part of the new Learning Environment:

1. Further integrated with Social Media. During the 9.4.1 upgrade D2L added some minor touches, being able to add Likes and Tweets to items in the LE, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the User Profiles replaced with Facebook or Google profiles.

2. No more Homepages with widgets. While I like the widgets approach to homepages, I think it’s probably run it’s course. What would replace it? Perhaps a dashboard type interface, like the one in ePortfolio, where when one logs in, they are presented with an activity page, which lists all their courses, and the activity within them.

3. No more Content. I’ve grown to hate how faculty use Content as a repository for PowerPoint and PDFs. I wish that there was more inventive use of the Content tool, and if it’s going to be a big change, getting rid of Content would be a big change. Is it the sort of change everyone would want? No. I think it would freak a lot of people out, but D2L is well aware of disruptive change, and maybe it’s something that as a company, they would be daring enough to go to. The things that were in Content would now be tied to Competencies, or Outcomes, or some other activity. In essence, it forces faculty to rethink the use of this learning object. Alternatively, the Content tool could be re-worked so it allows students to create content as well (based on Instructor level permissions). I’ve seen this in other collaborative software like FirstClass – where instructors can grant students permission to do different tasks.

4. Badges. D2L could easily craft some badges to award a user for passing a course (eg. PSYCH 1A00 badge complete!), completing all the assignments, based on their Intelligent Agents tool. While I personally think badges are silly, almost as silly as the paper diplomas are printed on, there seems to be a shift towards using badges as a motivator for completing a course. I can certainly see that being useful, and it would be a big difference over the competition for D2L.

5. Blogs tool be deleted to be replaced by simplified WordPress installs. OK, this is my personal wish, but how great would it be to have a one-button opt-in wordpress install (a simplified one – perhaps with no add-ins or only a selection of themes) for students. It would be even better then, if courses could have a blog tool where collaborative writing could occur.

By the way, Happy April Fool’s Day, even though this is not an April Fool’s post.

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