Tag: Article Review

Original post.

For your writing post this week, develop a thorough description of the situational factors impacting your lesson plan. Exhibit 3.2 in the text provides a checklist of initial considerations. If you’re developing for K-12, speak to the developmental stage of your students. If you’re developing educational content for adults, estimate the level of prior experience and describe how that will affect your lesson plan. Highlight the situational characteristics that you believe will make course development most challenging.

Review the posts of your classmates and provide feedback on the situational factors they’ve listed for their target populations.

Colby College is an elite liberal arts residential college.  As such many of our students come from well to do families many from the Boston area.  Many have attended private high schools, preparatory schools.  Indeed, upon graduation many return to this home city.  However, not all students have this background.  Like all colleges, Colby attempts to create diversity in its student body.  Some international students are recruited through the International high school program.  Some international students are from China on a can pay basis – that is they require no financial aid.  Colby works closely with the POSSE foundation program and recruits ethnically diverse young people from inner cities, New York, Chicago ,for examples ,in this way.  A few of Colby’s students are recruited from Maine—though not as many as in the past.

The upshot is that few of our job applicants have prior work experience of any significant sort.  This along with generational differences between Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials and we have some significant hurdles to manage regarding work place expectations.  Very few of our students imagine themselves in an entry-level position.

The work at our Service desk has changed over time.  However, at a basic level it is transactional work, checking library materials in and out, keeping printer and photocopiers operational and filled with paper, providing directional services for both the building and the campus.  Over time our business model has shifted with part-time student employees increasingly important in supporting our front line service.  This has include extended hours in the evening and weekend.  It has also included providing basic research assistance.    In truth, there is a lot of content knowledge and a lot of process knowledge that our service desk employees need.  Historically, we created a “career path” for our student employees.  We defined three different levels of work: level one work was basic retrieval or shelving functions in handling library materials, we distinguished it as inward facing and having impact on internal library functions.  Our second level involved this level and additionally was outward facing in that it serviced customers or contacts external to the library: on campus, students and faculty, or off campus, other libraries or external vendors.  Our third level involved supervisory or research skills that affected library employees at various levels in the organization.  We promoted employees based on competence, fit, and possibly based on age/experience.  Therefore, many first year student employees worked as shelvers returning borrowed materials to the stacks and shelving them correctly.  Conversely, they worked for our interlibrary loan department retrieving materials from the stacks and packing them for shipping.  Our Service desks were second year students who had worked for a year in the previous capacity and had a sense of basic library skills and work.  We augmented their training with training in communication skills and problem solving and they provided first contact resolution services.  Most Colby students spend their junior year, a semester at least frequently the full year abroad.  Therefore, our third tier employees are often seniors; we draw our student supervisor and research assistant positions from this applicant pool.

Because we are an educational institution, we often imagine that performance issues are a matter of training.  If only we could get our training right then our performances would be perfected.  However, this is an incomplete truth and an error sometimes encountered in supervisors thinking about employee performance.  A performance deficiency might result from incomplete knowledge, a skill deficiency, or a managerial deficiency: motivational problem, organizational problem, equipment problem, or a policy problem (here I am drawing heavily from Robert Mager’s analysis of performance problems).

Turning my attention to another aspect of managing a service desk, that is key performance indicators.  This something we have not examined in the past, at least, with any consistency or thoroughness.   Jeff Rumburg and Eric Zbikowsky in their white paper “The Seven Most Important Performance Indicators for the Service Desk” identify: cost, quality, productivity, agent, service level and call handling as their priorities.

All of this boils down to a single element of quality, which is first contact resolution rate, as the single most important service desk metric to focus on for improvement.

The Colby College Libraries consists of three on campus facilities, Miller library the main library whose collection and services focuses on humanities and social sciences, Bixler Art and Music library whose collection and services focus on art, music and performing arts, our Science library whose collection and services focus on science, math and their related interdisciplinary studies.  Our final facility is an on campus storage facility that provides for more than forty years of collection growth.  Miller library has just under gone a two-year renovation, alas a highly controversial renovation.  Three years ago, we engaged a consultant and entered into a process of organizational re-design, two years prior to that, we engaged a consultant and underwent a strategic planning process both of these processes were successful (based on a variety of measures) and have moved the organization forward.  However, the controversy surrounding our physical renovation has seriously damaged our reputation with all college constituents, students, faculty, administration, and alumina.

As our student, employees working at our service desk are our primary source of first contact resolution, whether for customer service, building or campus directional assistance, technology assistance, or primary research assistance we are acutely aware of their performance and our need to for excellence in their performance.

Just some Maine fall colors, since we are sharing.

Original post.

Andrew See & Travis Stephen Teetor (2014) Effective e-Training: Using a Course Management System and e-Learning Tools to Train Library Employees, Journal of Access Services, 11:2, 66-90, DOI: 10.1080/15367967.2014.896217, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15367967.2014.896217

Therefore, it seems I have found the perfect article for my purposes.

Online instruction and e-Learning tools are increasingly being used in the academic setting for faculty to deliver course content; however, most libraries have yet to apply the advantages offered by these tools to employee training. This case study from the University of Arizona Libraries (UAL) presents the challenges of sustaining traditional training approaches and the steps to develop an online training program, including identifying specific competencies needed to create effective online training, an approach to prioritizing where to start your program, and requirements for training platform selection. (See and Teetor 2014)

I suspect that most academic libraries struggle with similar versions of this problem, limited permanent staff, multiple locations, extensive hours of operation, and many part-time student employees with frequent turnover, and schedules that do not overlap with supervisors.  The work consists of customer service, technology support, providing directions, basic research assistance, and building security.

Perhaps many instances of independent invention have occurred in academic libraries to address these issues.   Our solutions at Colby College Libraries include a variety of tactics.  We meet face-to-face at the start of each semester at each location as a staff.  New employees receive focused instruction from a permanent staff supervisor during their first shift.  Librarians likewise meet with as many student employees as possible and provide an hour of instruction on answering research questions — followed up by individual make up sessions to catch the rest.  We have a selective interview process for student supervisors and train them more extensively.  They assist with both training and administrative tasks in managing their respective staffs.  We created a peer mentor program where new employees are partnered with returning employees and so gain the benefit of their experience.  We also created a website to supplant our old training manual. We have enriched that sight with instructional videos created by student employees. We refer to that site when we answer employee questions to impress upon them that many answers are available to them through that resource.  Finally, we meet for lunch once a semester all service desk employees from all locations and while the focus is fun, we sneak some training or review into these sessions as well.  We like the authors of the article also systematically evaluate the employees’ job knowledge and retrain as necessary.  This yields good, but not great results and I am feeling increasing pressure to achieve great outcomes.

The authors first described a new position, a specific employee to create their online instruction.  They then describe the selection process for LMS.  They then describe the content areas of the LMS they use: “Checklist, Content, Quizzes, Dropbox, Grades, Classlist, Discussions, and Syllabus.”  Because these categories are facets of the particular LMS, I will not spend a lot of time summarizing the details of their curriculum.  However, their discussion of creating online content does bear some study.  They used the Desire2Learn LMS system, but for content creation, they describe three tools: Adobe Presenter, Articulate Storyline, and Panopto.

They evaluated the results of the new training on cost savings, test results, and observation of task performance.

• “In terms of cost savings, online training will likely result in cutting F2F time in half instead of eliminating it completely.”

• “Similarly, UAL employees who have used the online training have been just as successful in passing tests as their counterparts who received predominantly F2F instruction.”

• “While there has not been an in-depth comparison of performance when trained F2F versus online, employees have proven just as capable and have completed this stage of training just as quickly, regardless of how they were trained.”

Again, these conclusions are conservative as with most academic writing.  However, to my mind as an Assistant Director whose business is the same business.  I think there is plenty to go on here.  I have shared this article with my permanent staff and my student supervisors.  We will be discussing it 10/10/2014 at our supervisors meeting.

The authors’ finally end with this conclusion: “While we have received feedback from trainees about their desire to have a greater degree of F2F interaction, overall the online program has proven to save time while achieving the same degree of effectiveness in preparing employees to work at service sites. We plan to address this need by adopting a flipped classroom approach to supplement online learning with F2F activities and workshops.”

Over the last 5-6 years, we, at my work, have approached and shied away from using the LMS system for these purposes.  I decided on my way into work this morning that I was done with the indecision.  I meet with our Instructional Designer today to review the objections that have been raised in the past.  To see if these objections still had any bearing on the matter – she convinced me that none are meaningful any longer.  In the morning, I will schedule a training meeting, next week, for my staff with this person.  Moreover, we will move aggressively into online learning in support of improved employee performance.  Another important conversation was had today with a new colleague an Assistant Director in an adjacent department.  We agreed to revisit a past initiative to create a career path for student employees in our library.  Several years ago, we did this hard work and had good success with it.  Alas, we lost track of it in our reorganization.  I think these two projects go hand in hand.

There that was the easy part.

Original post.

Macdonald, J., & Poniatowska, B. (2011). Designing the professional development of staff for teaching online: an OU (UK) case study. Distance Education, 32(1), 119-134. doi:10.1080/01587919.2011.565481

This article caught my attention because it is at the crossroads of several personal interests in thinking about online pedagogy: the workplace, blended learning, near synchronous feedback, and cool and geeky new tools.  The authors review a module taught through the UK’s Online University.  This module is aimed at online teachers, but teachers in the workplace though in this case the workplace was the OU.

Drawing on this experience, we therefore set out to design a new online professional development module at the OU (UK), which would act as a guide and introduction to new ways of working with online tools for all staff throughout the university. It was important that this module should be designed in a way that it could be easily updated with changing technologies. We were aware of the need to sustain engagement by using measures such as an activity checklist and certification system, and to consider ways of encouraging peer learning through an online community. Finally, we wished to design this module using a practice-based approach, starting with the job. (Macdonald and Poniatowska 2011)

The authors spend several pages on developing a theoretical structure that informed their case study which we will happily gloss over. Instead, their approach was to focus on the common intentions of teaching and supporting learners.  Their focus shifted then to strategies and finally to tools; an eminently practical approach, I think.  This approach allowed them to minimize the need to regular revision of the course – instead new tools could be classed by strategies and accommodated.

Learners selected either a self-study route or a cohort program.  It sounds like the latter was easier to manage since interactive projects were precluded in the self-study route.

Use of the Elluminate tool was experimental and new so the authors recruited tutors competent with the tool to enrich that experience.  Their experiences with this approach have encouraged them to explore online tutoring.  The authors review briefly some of the quantitative and qualitative data they collected on participants experience with the curriculum.  They discuss the outcomes of the course broadly and each of the tracks, cohort and self-study, their conclusions, as with most scholarly projects, are constrained and suggest additional directions for subsequent research.

I particularly like their final observation: “In other words, what the learner actually learns cannot be predicted in advance.”  I think this is brilliant.  It shows the aleatory quality of learning.  We throw a variety of learners and supporting props together and then watch intently to see what is learned.  There is no accounting for motivation, curiosity and discovery.  A gifted learner can skew a set of course outcomes significantly from those imagined by the teacher.  Combine that with a cohort and the outcomes can be profoundly variable.

I liked this inquiry very much.  It was not exactly what I was looking for in my thinking about teaching young adults about work at a service desk, but it is closer than many of the articles we have reviewed thus far.  I find it rewarding that this article is about teaching teachers.  A number of interesting facets to that, one seeing that full-time teachers self-selected for cohort study whereas part-time preferred individual study.  Intriguing also to see teachers receive tutoring.  In addition, to see them working to discover an on-line voice, on-line techniques for tutors, is rewarding.  I suspect like teaching labs, tutoring on-line has its challenges.  I also suspect that the learners themselves provide many clues on how to do it well.  I found it valuable that this course showed the collaboration between instructors and instructional designers.  I liked as well that it introduced the collaboration between tutors and the aforementioned.  I like that it is an iterative process to develop the course.   I also like and simultaneously struggle with it not being a graded course. “Finally, to support engagement, participants are encouraged to complete a choice of activities using an activity checklist that once completed generates an automated completion certificate.”  This is something I am struggling with as I consider the final assignment for the course.  I am obviously suspicious of “schooling” and of “grades” and so writing rubrics is a conflicted task for me.  I understand their value in assessment and in connecting outcomes and course work.  However, there is part of me that wants to honor the discovery that is unpredictable in throwing learners and tools together in an aleatory space.  There is the part of me that is a boss.   I am driven by finite resources and expected to show return on investment.   I am appreciative of focused and measurable outcomes as evidence of learning.  I also understand that excellence in service that creates customer enthusiasm is a result of motivation, curiosity and discovery.  I suspect that I will need both/and in my assessment of learners in order to accomplish rote skills and interpretive skills.

Original post.

Reeder, Kenneth; Macfadyen, Leah P.; Chase, Mackie; Roche, Jörg, (2004 June) Falling Through the Cultural Gaps? Intercultural communication challenges in cyberspace. Proceedings, Cultural Attitudes to technology and Communication, Karlstad, Sweden. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/1329

Working backwards from their conclusions we first learn about a concern for cultural sensitivity from all participants.  Something as simple as how participants introduce themselves (genealogy vs. resume) can indicate cultural difference.  The authors point out that other gaps in communication can be highlighted by studies in second language acquisition, their point being that communication standards should be made explicit.  “Rather, these participants may have experienced confusion or doubts as to whether basic interpersonal communication, academic language, or perhaps something in between (another site of negotiation?) was expected in the online situation” (Reeder 2004).  They finally theorized about a hybrid form of communication that seems to be developing online: “For instance, Dudfield (1999) agrees that students are increasingly engaging in what she calls ‘hybrid forms of literate behaviour.’ Gibbs (2000) has extended this to suggest that new forms of communication are actually constructing ‘new forms of thinking, perceiving and recording.’…  We might speculate however that our corpus and others like it represent a new genre, neither spoken nor written, yet drawing upon conventions of both. In any case, distance educators need to be cognizant of the relative “fit” between their participants’ origins in oral or literate cultures and the distinct genre requirements of online communication in e-learning”(Reeder 2004).

To my mind these are fairly constrained conclusions.  The idea that course participants should be culturally sensitive and that instructors do better to make expectations explicit hardly seems to move us along – sure they bare repeating but they do not constitute something unique to online instruction.  However, their final observation regarding a distinctive tone or voice in online communication is interesting – “hybrid forms of literate behavior.”  I think there are many fruitful questions that burble around that conclusion.  So, based on the conclusions this conference paper seems at least understated.

Looking elsewhere for highlights, we find a section header “3.1. THE INTERNET HAS A CULTURE” and here the authors do some interesting work:

Like all technologies, the Internet was and is socially produced – and all social productions are informed by the cultural values of their producers (Castells, 2001). The creators of the Internet were predominantly Anglo-American engineers and scientists “seeking quick and open access to others like themselves” (Anderson, 1995. p. 13). Their ethnic and professional cultures value aggressive/competitive individualistic behaviours. In addition, these cultures value communications characterized by speed, reach, openness, quick response, questions/debate and informality. Schein (1992) attributes similar values to the information technology community in general.

We observed that these communicative cultural values are embedded in the design of WebCT and similar Internet-based communications platforms. Layered over this foundational but ‘invisible’ culture of the Internet, the culture of the online modular courses under study here is similarly the product of its creators: predominantly university-educated Canadians, who are Western, English-speaking and female.  (Reeder 2004)

Here is something we can get our teeth into and chew on.  Thinking back to Owen’s first assignment we watched a thought leader speculating on “learning networks” as a new and important phenomenon.  My take away was an insight that we do not need to limit ourselves, even in formal education, to LMS.  So are there other social media sites that resonate with different cultural values?  One way to answer this is to put on our cultural diversity glasses and look for these ourselves another approach is to ask members of populations we would like to reach — where they congregate online?  This helps us identify new or new to us tools for online communication.  Another is to imagine our course design in a different way.  What if we ask participants to introduce themselves genealogically first; here I am thinking about connections to people and places (notice the discomfort we feel) and this is part of the value of this.  My friend John Schumacher called it “the insanity of place” his example was to imagine approaching a stranger’s cart in the grocery store and, without explanation, taking an item out and looking at it.  Yet even just 100 years ago we (members of the dominate culture) would have been comfortable with a genealogical introduction.  Here I am remembering a highlight from the recent nonfiction book Quiet the author traces the change from persons of character to persons of personality (pg35).   Reaching back to the authors conclusions and their curiosity in a “new genre, neither written nor spoken” I wonder if social media is likewise blurring the distinctions between genealogical introductions and resume introductions.  I can learn about others in this course by Googling them and finding their LinkedIn profiles, their Facebook pages, (Twitter, Pinterest and so on) their online brand as it were.  Their identity for me is likewise hybridized both personal and professional.  That said, a lot of online communication has happened in the time since this paper was read – plenty of time to develop and refine some new genre.  Alas, I am unsure this new voice is emerging.  Blogs seem to follow conventions of essays or journals with long expository writing.  Tweets seem to be somewhere between bumper sticker wisdom and aphorisms… though it does show a stylized kind of communication.  Forums show a wide variety of writing ability and style sometimes with posts clearly translated by Google or that ilk.  Criticism for poor writing, reasoning and argumentation are frequent and harsh.  Forums seem to be a place where cultural diversity interacts and often with little sensitivity or with reference to “online norms.”  I wonder more about silent participation.  People who read and reflect on what they encounter but do not themselves add to the “conversation.”  On one hand, I have shifted from LMS to the whole of the internet.  Therefore, my sample is larger, but not systematic as I am reflecting on my observations of online communication — not conclusive but sufficient for me to be suspicious.

In the end this paper disappoints a little; the authors seem most concerned with grinding their axe with Canadian dominant culture.

Cain, Susan. (2012) Quiet :the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking New York : Broadway Books

Original post site.

Abrahmov, S. L., & Ronen, M. (2008). Double blending: online theory with on-campus practice in photography instruction. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 45(1), 3-14. doi: 10.1080/14703290701757385

The authors through using the online presentation to augment their classroom performance were able to add learning objectives that previously were too much for the classroom (Abrahmov & Ronen, 2008). These additions were aimed at the goal teaching basic photography and visual literacy: “Our major challenge was to promote the awareness of the connotative level of meaning, and its relation to the factual aspects, in order to foster the understanding and creation of photographs that express additional levels of meanings” (Abrahmov & Ronen, 2008). The authors describe six online exercises that they created to facilitate students learning visual literacy. This section of the paper is extensive and detailed. The authors also describe their evaluation of the augmented class.

This evaluation study was based on the analysis of the data extracted from the following sources:

• Students’ online activity and their performance in the theoretical tasks (content analysis).
• Students’ performance in the practical final project.
• The peer evaluation records of the final project (content analysis).
• Students’ reflections as expressed in a questionnaire administered at the end of the course.
• Interviews with a sample of students from each class.(Abrahmov & Ronen, 2008)

The content analysis focused on the student’s use of six professional terms. The analysis showed the adoption and use of these terms over the course. The peer evaluation was likewise subject to content analysis. Here the authors were looking for students to seek and identify the second level of connotative meaning in the images submitted for peer review. Sixty percent of the students did this. “All students reported that the study of theoretical aspects of ‘reading photographs’ had contributed to the development of their practical skills, while most (70%) stated that it had a significant impact on the photographs they have produced”(Abrahmov & Ronen, 2008). The authors seem pleased with their results and even recommend that this model may have relevance for other “similar instructional challenges.”

I selected this article for review precisely because it combined the technical skills of making something and the intellectual skills of interpretation and appreciation of the object. I suppose this course has elements of a flipped class. However, even that is stood on its head because the online instruction is about peer interaction and about keeping the conversation going outside of the classroom extending the learning outward into real life. I likewise chose the article because it was about more learning; more content added to the course, rather than more courses added to the curriculum or worse how a course could be dumbed-down because “Young people these days…”. I selected it as well because of the higher-level learning accomplished in the tension between the how and why of the inquiry.

I will now examine more closely two of the six assignments as the authors identified them as particularly effective. The second assignment was conceptually central and pivotal, and students themselves acknowledged this. In the first, the notion of “focal point” was developed and explored in this way:

• Implementation format: open submission as a file attached to a message in a designated discussion group board.
• Scaffolding: explanation and examples of the concept of ‘focal points’ was hyperlinked to the task page, as well as the opportunity to view peer examples.

This implementation is deceptively simple, and unfortunately, that is real all the authors give us. We are left to speculate on the conversations that ensued between instructors and students and between students. We have to imagine that the instructors have a particular knack for explaining the concepts, but they do not give away their trade secrets here. The students identified this concept as the most revelatory and the most transferable piece of theoretical knowledge learned in the course. I wish the authors had spent more time exploring and explaining this success.

The final project was the submission of a series of four to six printed photographs – thematically related. The subject was left open to the students but the goal of the project “to create pictures with a developed second level of meaning” was assigned. Each student was expected to submit two written evaluation on peers’ work. This text, as already mentioned, underwent content analysis by the authors focused on the use of terms and ability to identify and relate the two levels of meaning.

The article itself is not overwrought with theorizing or professional jargon dumping, and I like that. The authors use “writing” and “reading” as tropes, as general categories for the two sets of tasks they assign students. Writing speaks to the physical, technical skills of making pictures with cameras. Reading speaks to the interpretive and aesthetic notions that the instructors add to the class, that speak to achieving a “second level of meaning.” This is a simple provisional theory to get the practice up on its feet and see if it grew legs.

I struggled a bit with the course evaluation because it smacked of academic rigor rather than sustainable self-reflection. Content analysis is a labor-intensive research technique, certainly to write an article and for scholarly rigor it was necessary for getting published. However, I suspect the authors returned to simpler and more sustainable course evaluation tools for following classes. In truth, I would have preferred to read about those techniques – alas, their article probably would not have been successfully peer reviewed in that case.

I do recommend this article to my classmates particularly if they are dealing with presenting technical skill. However, I wonder if there is a way to make an abstract and theoretical subject more tangible by pairing it with a practical one. I recall once buying a book on framing roofs. The author did an admirable job of connecting geometry and trigonometry to the actual problem of building roofs. I would have learned the concepts in high school if the math had been taught in an application rather than just rote.