Month: July 2017

InstructureCon 2017 Presentation and Reflection

I’ve known since the middle of March that I would be presenting at InstCon and it was a mix of excitement and nervousness ever since. I’m done with my presentation now and feel relieved!

I had some great questions after my presentation and eight or so people hung around to talk. There even might be some very strong opportunities to collaborate with folks from Dartmouth and elsewhere! So, it was a success for that alone.

The presentation was rough at times because I haven’t presented before at this conference. I generally like to go to a conference first to get to know the culture and audience before preparing to present, but that wasn’t the case this year. At other times, I felt very comfortable and right-at-home with the audience of about 60 people.

While the recording for the conference will not be available for a few more weeks, I do have a link to the presentation that basically contains a transcript of the presentation. It turns out that not many presentations I saw included the “Spy Theme” that the conference was based on. Mine was heavily based on Mission: Impossible, but I think it worked since it fit the content of my presentation so closely.

Overall, I would say that I very much enjoyed this conference. The sessions were very good and I hope to watch some of the ones I missed once they post the videos. There was one in particular on Canvas Blueprints that I wanted to see, but I know those materials will be available later.

I was interested to hear about two things. The first is that Canvas is designed to be good around a number of core functionality features, but leaves openings for others to integrate LTIs (and APIs?). The second is that Canvas relies on a group of the forty most active Canvas Community members to decide where a significant portion – 16,000 hours, of their development resources are spent over the course of a year.

Regarding the first insight, this might explain the “85% feeling” I’ve had since I started working with Canvas. I’ve kept thinking, “they really have this down 85% of the way there, but it would be nice if they also had…” I’m not sure this is an accurate representation, but I’m not sure I agree that they expect people to develop LTIs to take Canvas “the last mile.”

I have a bigger potential issue with the “40” decision-making model. I admit that I have no idea how they chose the 40, but I sure do have a lot of questions. Are these people chosen because they have the most posts in the Community? What skill sets do they have to drive the future of the development of Canvas? Does Penn State and other Unizen partners have any say in this process? I have not hear of other software companies using this approach, but I do not know anything about the software industry. I just though it was odd.

In the end, I still very much support Canvas and think they are doing very good things for our community of students, faculty, staff and admins. I’m looking forward to going again and being more relaxed either as a participant or a presenter.

Canvas Course Restore Testing

BLUF

Everything looks as I would expect it except for the communications-aspect of the 3/12/16 version of the course (see below). Otherwise, the process to restore a course seems accurate from the instructor’s perspective.

Overall, I think this would be a very useful option in a limited number of use cases. It seems like a course restore would be a considerable effort that would require a significant situation to warrant such effort. I’m not sure I can imagine what a situation would be at this time. I would hope that good instructor practices and general practices around data security would severely limit the number of situations this would ever be needed, but I have seen some extraordinary cases in my relatively short time here at Penn State.

Background

On 6/30/17, I received a message from Brian Young that my SP16 section of IST 111S was restored to the previous date of 3/12/16.

This is an account of what differences I am seeing on my end, if any. I have broken my observations into three categories: content, assessment, and communication. Each category may have subcategories as well.

Logging in

I have to do the following to log in. The process does not work in Chrome for some reason. I get a “Page Error” warning in Chrome.

  1. Launch Firefox
  2. Use the following URL – https://psu-restore-tc.instructure.com/login/canvas
  3. Use the following username – kkm11@psu.edu
  4. Use the password that Brian Young sent me 7/3/17 @ 16:40

Communication – partial fail?

Announcements – success?

The announcement I have checked all look good in the 3/12/16 version of the course, just as I would expect it. The comments, links, and media all seem to be fine.

Older announcements did not load, but that’s probably because it’s on a different instance of Canvas. I just keep seeing the “Loading more results” message. The last announcement I could see was from 2/1/16.

UPDATE 8/4/17 15:00 – I was able to access earlier announcements today. I only had to wait a second or so before the list refreshed.

Conversations – unconfirmed, problematic

Nothing showed up when I went into the Inbox when I selected the class from the list of options. I checked each folder, but nothing was restored.

There is a bug in Canvas that exists in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari that disallows me from viewing a large number of courses or searching for specific courses from the Inbox. I was not able to confirm or view emails from my current, final version of the course compared to what I should be seeing in the 3/12/16 version of the course.

Discussions – success

The discussions looked as I would expect them to at the time of the restore. While this is not my favorite tool in Canvas, all of the content looks like it should.

Content – success

Referring back to the course changelog, I found the three entries that I needed to check in the restored version of the course. I would expect that none of these comments and subsequent changes, if any, would appear in the restored version of the course given that they were made after the restore date cut-off of 3/12/16.

The changelog itself is not surprisingly exactly as I would expect it would be if I were looking at it 3/12/16.

Interestingly, all of the icons and other styling are “older” – thought I cannot tell if they are accurate and representative of the restore date or just the CSS used on this special instance of Canvas spun up to hold the restored version of the course.

Assessment – success

Assignments

I’ve checked the assignments and they look as I would expect them – unchanged between both versions of the course.

Rubrics

On 4/4/16, I had a an entry in the changelog about an edit I had to make to the rubric for L06: Implications of Technology. Indeed the 3/12/16 version of the course does not have the updated rubric – an excellent indicator of a change that was made after the recovery date that should not appear in the recovered version.

Quizzes

This course does not contain quizzes in the traditional sense. There are two quizzes: an academic integrity quiz and an unpublished student questionnaire (formatted as a quiz). There are also a couple of surveys.

All of them were due before 3/12/16 and do look the same in both versions of the course as expected.

Minor note, SpeedGrader between both versions have different defaults, so I was presented with different initial information, but when I changed the settings, the 3/12/16 version of the course displayed all the information as expected.

The newer course showed a grayed-out name in the SpeedGrader that didn’t appear in the 3/12/16 version of the course. It is not a name I recognize. I assume it was a student that dropped the course early on.

Grades

One minor difference I noticed is that some students do not have an image/avatar next to their name in the 3/12/16 version of the course when there is one in the final version of the course. I cannot tell if the students added their pictures after the restore date however.

Spot checking the grades, all of the numbers look as I would expect it to in the 3/12/16 version of the course.

Closing

Having done some comparison between the 3/12/16 version of the course and the final state, I have some questions about this process. In no particular order:

  • Is this going to be an option for all faculty moving ahead?
  • What constraints will there be if this is offered as an option? How will faculty make requests? How long will a request take? Will there be a limit to these requests?
  • What is the impact of seeing an older version of the course that features “outdated” CSS or other functionality differences between a previous state of Canvas and a current one given the number of updates that Canvas applies in a given year?
  • What roles and considerations does the College Administration have in the procedure of making a restore request? Department heads? Designers? Other support staff?
  • Would a restored version of the course exist separately or could it replace an existing version of the course? What impact would a “forking” of a course have? Are students seeing both versions of the course? Probably not since I needed a separate log-in.
  • It wasn’t clear, but it looked like all of the assets are cloned, is that true? If so, are there storage limitations?
  • Can content be exported from one version to another?

InstructureCon 2017 Day 2 Keynote

The second day of the conference started off with a keynote from Sheena Iyengar who spoke about her research on choice. Choice is foundation of inventing. She mentioned that it is essential to limit our choices to make quality decisions.

She stressed the importance of getting quality ideas since they are essential for identifying our choices. She mentioned that while it is important to ask the people that we work with, they are very good at emotional support and some idea generating, but it is even more important to ask those in our network that we haven’t been in contact for three years. These individuals will give us our best ideas. I thought that was awesome and inspiring to contact some of the folks I’ve worked with in the past, but haven’t spoken with in a while.

We only have so much time each day, so it is essential that we spend time on the decisions that are the most important for us. For example, she shared how successful CEOs spent 50% of their time on decisions that took 9 min or less and 12% of their time on decisions that took over 1 hour. She talked about how this 12% is our value-add and we need to be strategic about what decisions those would be.

I wonder if our office has an opportunity to improve by limiting the decisions that we make as a group. I think we could do even better by identifying individuals to take the lead on decision making in certain areas. This would allow others to build leadership skills and reduce the painful-at-times and less-efficient process of getting buy-in.

InstructureCon 2017 Day 1

Today was spent on registering for the conference and meeting up with people. I tried to join the Developing LTI Tools pre-conference session, but I did not realize that I needed a ticket to enter. They wanted more money.

The keynote was entertaining. Josh Coates seems like a character. He did a great job and talked about the choices we make in life and how it creates a path that can be intentional. As a surprise, he invited Jewel up to the stage for an interview. She was thoughtful, funny, and down-to-earth.

It was raining that evening and it made it kind of a bummer to try and have a dry meal for most of us. A lucky few hundred folks were able to eat in the middle of the tent where it was relatively more sheltered. A lot of folks had to take shelter elsewhere and get wet in the process. Well everyone got wet.

Regardless, I finished up the night excited for the conference. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen having only been to educational conferences before.

Learning Design Summer Camp Breakout Session: VR and 360 Video

Great presentation from Bill, Linas, Alicia (and Joe, in absentia). Awesome examples of 360 vid in SPLED and the Home Healthcare courses. Lots of questions for me. I am curious about their goal to progress from one level to another. I assume they are talking about expanding their capabilities as opposed to just a linear progression. There will always be a place for “plain, 2d video.” Bill mentioned that when the nursing team he was talking with had some ideas that while were inspired through a demonstration of 360 vid, didn’t seem like a clear pedagogical fit for that technology when they started looking at the request in more detail.

One of my goals this upcoming year would be to find a sound pedagogical fit for at least one 360 vid in at least one course that I support.

  • Can we do a Spark Team? Folks sharing quick exploration of various new topics.
  • Different levels: Traditional Video, 360 Video, VR, AR – when do you make the progression?
  • How could we use 360 Video in IST?

Learning Design Summer Camp Breakout Session: Project Management Methods in Course Design

Some interesting ideas around PM. Most useful were some new concepts related to ranking stakeholders – not something that was particularly useful to me in the past, but there was interesting questions around how the ranking of stakeholders would impact the project plan. Thankfully, our office has many of these practices in place, but of course we can always refine and improve. I think one initial area would be improving standardization around scope documents.

  • Common tools
    • Stakeholder management
    • MOU; use a change order if one of the stakeholders changes the scope of  work
    • Project Plan (Gantt Chart)
  • Getting Organized and Staying on Track
    • Chart with Major/minor tasks, dates, assignees
    • Keep it as simple as possible
  • Top 5 Stakeholders
    • A = allies, B = non-allies
    • R = resistant, in-between A and B
    • up-down axis = I(nterest) vs. P(ower)
  • Engage
    • Purpose is to develop an online version of 402 HIT

Learning Design Summer Camp Breakout Session: Nearpod

An interesting take on interactive presentations that appear to be best suited for resident use. There are affordances for online delivery and faculty-learning design office support models. Unfortunately, the feature set really depends upon a paid license.

  • Website or app available
  • Allows for sharing presentations, even if the instructor doesn’t want to control the presentation
  • Lessons can be packaged and self-paced for online use
  • You can give students a code to enter the lesson, it is a way to track participation
  • You can use PowerPoint to build your presentations
  • Keeps metrics on if people drop out
  • Features Polleverywhere-like polling
  • Is there a way to keep notes within Nearpod?
  • There is a free and paid version available – actually there are four levels; Gold is limited to 50 students, Institutional levels allow for large 100+ students
  • There is a collaboration board feature as well – other features: quiz, draw it, FITB, memory test
  • How would we support Nearpods in our WC Online Delivery Course format; Cheryl doesn’t know, it’s not clear if a designer can create a Nearpod and share it with an instructor for use in their live course section

Learning Design Summer Camp Breakout Session: Piazza

Glenn Johnson, Tracey, Bruce

Will require some initial testing to see if we can access it outside of a live section. It seems like it will be possible. While links from within the Modules view are possible, those links point to the Piazza “home” page view and not a particular thread. It looks easy enough, but are our faculty ready and interested? Only time will tell. The tool does look promising.

  • Integrated into Canvas
  • Very easy setup
  • Piazza is half-way between a discussion forum and a ticket
  • There are different status indicators that help instructors to identify where they need to put their attention
  • Canvas discussions mark posts/comments as read even though you may not have read through a post, people like to scan through posts before reading through them
  • Piazza provides a timeline to show the history of a conversation
  • Demo of LaTeX: allows for coding equations into the WISYWIG, there is also a button-based interface if people do not know how to code in LaTeX
  • Students can also cut-and-paste code into the text editor to share their work in Piazza
  • Images are also easy to add
  • Piazza is very easy-to-use and doesn’t require training, it just works
  • This can be setup as a wiki where one student can post something, but others can edit, and instructors can also make edits
  • There is an announcement in Canvas that Piazza is now working:Piazza now working properly in Canvas courses
    Users were encountering an error when they tried to access Piazza anywhere in their courses other than through the main course navigation. This issue has been corrected. Piazza can now be accessed in all areas of Canvas.Links that are not working should be deleted and recreated.
  • There generally are not any issues with students editing each other’s work since you can use the revision history bar to view previous versions of the post
  • You do have access to metrics like how quickly does someone respond in addition to some other overall things like how many posts, etc. They are useful from a high-level, but you’re not going to get accurate data all the time; you can find out when students are most active during the day
  • Does the app integrate with the student’s courses in Canvas?
  • May not be not available to other than live courses; may be available to Master Courses
  • Not connected to the gradebook

Wrong Description for my InstructureCon 2017 Presentation!

I’ve sent one of the organizers an urgent message to fix the inaccurate information and to change it to…

Kent Matsueda, Assistant Director of Design, College of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State University

This after-action report will provide a briefing of a declassified mission and how it succeeded through the use of a clever peer evaluation tool developed at Penn State University. This LTI tool provides covert team leaders with valuable feedback that can be used to improve the effectiveness of field agents on future missions. There will also be a call to other designers and developers to join our R&D Lab to build a better tool for future use in our agencies and institutions.

Having said that… Vice President is a nice promotion. I wonder when my Dean will get that update 🙂

How to Say Anything to Anyone – Shari Harley

Image result for shari harley

The College of IST was joined by a couple of other units around the University to hear Shari talk about her ideas on using candor more in the office.

I did not know what to think going into the event, but I was nicely surprised by the quality of her delivery and content of her presentation.

Initially, I thought we’d be given a lot of information on why and how we have to change who we are to be more effective in the office. It more about providing us with tools and a mindset to improve how we communicate with one another. It wasn’t just about how managers should talk with their reports. This was applicable for everyone.

I actually left with a plan to buy some of her materials so that I could use them here in the office and was very pleasantly surprised when Amy brought back a book and a couple boxes of questions from her afternoon, Directors/Managers-only session with Shari. The questions can be used to learn more and assume less about those we work with.

I hope to start using some of these techniques immediately. I am already meet with all of my direct reports monthly and we talk about many of these things, so I’m happy I have that precedent and know that I am on the right track. What I learned is that there is a lot more I can do to be a more effective supervisor and team member.