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Communicating electronically with your class

One aspect of managing a class that has changed significantly — or, at least, has a great potential to change significantly with little effort — is communication with students outside of class. When I first started teaching, we didn’t have any real means of communicating with students outside of class. Eventually we could use email, and then we graduated to using the course Web site. Now we have both those choices plus several more.

My preferences are to use a tool that reaches a student’s cell phone with minimal effort. This makes it much easier to reach into the student’s world. Any time you require that the student get out of his/her comfort zone, then the odds drop of communicating with the student in a timely manner. This preference of mine definitely shapes my views on technology usage.

The problem here, as with so many things in higher ed, is that the expectations and desires of students aren’t inline with those of faculty. Let’s look at the arguments for and against some of the available approaches.

Email

My students use email very little. The only time they seem to use it outside of class-related usage is when they are looking for a job. There is something to be said for preparing a student for the workplace, but there’s also something to be said for reaching the student in a timely fashion. I try to use email as little as possible. Recently, I have used it to communicate grade information to the student because I had a program that made that option easy. Other than that, I have tended away from email usage.

Forums (discussion boards)

I was a big user of discussion boards in the late 1990s and very early 2000s; however, my students never were. If they had a question to send me, they sent it via email or came to office hours. If they saw questions from other students, they waited for me to answer them. Very very rarely did students participate on a discussion board if they didn’t have to. I have basically stopped using these for that reason. They are a good idea in theory, but in practice my students simply don’t use them.

Course management system

Here at the University of Michigan we use CTools, which is an implementation of Sakai. This is a perfectly capable, functional, and traditional course management system. As such it provides all sorts of tools for communicating with students:

Announcements: The professor posts information that can be read by all students
Forums: Discussed above
Assignments: Allows students to submit documents in fulfillment of a specific assignment
Chat Room: For live communication among class participants
Drop Box: Allows students and the professor to share documents privately
Messages: For sending a direct message to a site participant
Polls: For collecting information from the class as a whole on a given question

These are all perfectly reasonable and useful tools that have an underlying assumption that students go to the course Web site. If students don’t go to the Web site, then none of this is useful. So, the question is how to get them to the Web site? If I use the CMS, then I need to use it in combination with some other tool that will alert students to something they need to do or see.

Blog

Another approach that I continually come back to is the use of a blog as a course communication center. Students can subscribe to the blog RSS feed so that any post made on the blog appears in their RSS feed reader. Thus, a student would not have to be at the course blog in order to get information that I have posted. The only problem with this: students rarely use an RSS feed reader. While this approach fits with my way of reading (I’m a huge reader of blogs in my RSS feed reader) and writing (I’m writing this blog, aren’t I?), it just doesn’t work for most of my students.

This tool has a lot going for it. Students and professors can send private messages to each other. All class members can send messages that can be viewed by all other class members. Professors can announce information to the whole class. Students can ask the professor a question (privately or publicly) and the professor can provide an answer (again, privately or publicly). In addition, for many students this will become an important communication channel in their work lives; giving them some training and experience in using this tool before they start their job would be a good thing.

A couple of problems with this is that messages are limited to 140 characters, and messages can be missed in the general twitter deluge of information. If users go to the trouble of ensuring that messages from a certain user are forwarded to the user’s text messaging account, then that mitigates this concern somewhat; however, users still have to search for the class hashtag in order to find all information related to a specific class. If they don’t, then it’s possible that they will miss something. One possible solution to this problem would be to create a twitter list for all of the participants in the class. This would ensure that all of the tweets from all of the people on the list appear in one place.

Twitter is definitely in my planned communication arsenal. I will be using the #bit330 hashtag and the @bit330 account in the fall to communicate with my students. I expect that they will follow this account and I will follow their accounts. I used this three years ago when students weren’t really that into twitter usage. Now that it’s more integrated into many of their lives, I assume that it will go better than it did back then (not that it was bad or anything).

Text messages with Remind101

Another (currently free) text messaging-based solution is provided by Remind101. With this platform professors can text students but not vice versa, all without having to know each others’ phone numbers. You can see a demo video on this page and an extensive FAQ on this page.

This platform addresses is like the approach taken by twitter except that it is private to the class, students can’t send messages, and the messages are segregated to their own channel (i.e., not integrated with the whole twitter feed). It’s a really straight-forward solution. The professor gets a special code for the class, and then he/she shares this code with the students. Whenever the professor wants to make an announcement, then he/she sends a message to the Remind101 phone number that includes the class code. Everyone who has registered with that code then receives the message.

If you have routinely used email to send out announcements and found that students don’t get them in time, then consider this as a solution if you don’t want to adopt twitter.

Conclusion

For me, email is a fallback option; it is available but it isn’t anything that I want to use. I especially don’t rely on it any more for time-sensitive communications. I have basically stopped using forums, and will continue to ignore them, until I hear of some practices and accompanying technological changes that I can implement that somehow makes this tool more attractive to students.

Both course management systems and blogs are okay, for what they do, but they don’t reach students where they live. For me, the drawback of Remind101 is that it doesn’t provide a channel for students to communicate with each other or for them to see communications from other students; there can be much value in this kind of shared group communication channel. I plan on using twitter for announcements and to point students to a specific URL (many times within the CMS) that contains more information. This way I can take advantage of the technologies within the CMS and use twitter to draw students to the CMS in a way that is convenient for them.

I’m sure that I have missed some other tools currently available, and I’m equally sure that new approaches will be available within a year. But, for now, I hope the above analysis provides you some food for thought when planning your classes in the upcoming year.

Introducing “Living & Learning Digitally”

In the fall 2012 semester at Michigan’s Ross School of Business I will be teaching “BIT330 Web-based information resources” (its official name) or, more accurately, “Living & learning digitally.” A current, evolving draft of the course Web site is now available, but understand that it may change significantly in some aspects in the next couple months.

Overview

This 3-credit course will be taught MW4-5:30pm. What is usually thought of as the course content will be delivered mostly online via pre-recorded video. Students will only infrequently need to actually attend class at the “official” time. I will have frequent online office hours via Google Hangouts. There will be lots of twitter usage, and participation will be related to the timely completion of online activities. This course has no prerequisites and is available for sophomores, juniors, & seniors.

For a previous incarnation of this course, I made this video. I will update this soon, but you should get the general idea of the class from it.

Purpose of the course

The course goal is to prepare the student for living and learning digitally. This preparation will be accomplished through academic study as well as through usage of current technologies, both well-known and under-appreciated. The following are the four basic threads running through the course:

Communicating digitally (via text)

One-on-one: Perhaps not shockingly, at times we will use email to communicate among ourselves. I will also use twitter to reach you, and I expect you will do the same (if you don’t already).
One-to-many broadcast: I will use the course twitter account to send out announcements to the class. I expect that everyone will follow this account during the semester and will (probably) have the messages forwarded to their phones.
Publishing: We will experience three different modes of publishing in this course:
- Blog: As part of your weekly learning tasks, you will write short blog entries to the public course blog site. The audience for this blog is an informed college student who is not taking this course.
- Wiki: Each student in the class will create an analyst’s report on some business & industry. The information will be gathered through the application of all the tools (see below) that we will learn about during the semester. Students will get to choose their own topic (with some guidance provided by the instructor). The creation of this report is something that student’s in previous years have enjoyed immensely.
- Digital book: An addition to the course this year will be the production of a digital book by all the students in the class. While this has been done in other UM classes (most effectively and famously by Brian Coppola in the introductory chemistry class), I do not believe that it has been done at Ross (or in other business schools, though I may be mistaken about that). Each student will contribute a chapter (with guidance from the professor and others in the class) to a book that the public at large can use as a reference to the most powerful tools and interesting applications that we learn about in the class. We will publish the book at the end of the semester, with each contributing student getting appropriate credit. The goal will be that future classes will add to & revise this book as appropriate.

Communicating digitally (via video)

Part of the purpose of this class is to get students comfortable with communicating via video in a relatively structured setting. I believe that current UM students will be asked to go through lots of similar learning activities in the future either in their jobs or in more advanced studies. I also believe that getting a head-start on learning how to succeed in such an experience will be valuable for these students.

One-on-one: We will use Google Hangouts for one-on-one tutoring and Q&A when it is needed.
One-to-many: I will create short videos that introduce the topics and tools that we will discuss in the class; these will be lectures in front of a board, lectures with PowerPoint slides, basic talking head, or me demonstrating a Web-based (or iPad-based) tool. These videos will be available on YouTube.
Within small groups: For office hours I plan on being available on Google Hangout a couple of times during the week. Right now, up to 10 people can hangout together; until we find out differently, I assume that this will be sufficient.

Finding information

Almost all of the above describes the process of the class. The topic of study for the class will be how to find information on the Web that is relevant and appropriate to the question at hand (specifically, business, industry, or career related). Of course, learning to be a competent user of Google’s search tools will be a starting point for the class; however, dozens (if not hundreds) of other tools are available that a well-informed student should be aware of and know how to use. (See the list below for the types of tools that we will be investigating.)

Managing information

The big problem in search used to be finding informational resources that were relevant to a particular query. That is no longer the case. Now the problem is finding too many such resources. Today’s student (and manager) must learn how to narrow down his/her search for more appropriate information and, then, know how to manage the seemingly never-ending flow of information to his/her desktop. During the course of the semester, students will be introduced to several different tools that should help the student stay on top of his/her information inventory.

Much of the course will focus on Web-based tools, but I plan on also introducing mobile tools when appropriate.

Specific topics discussed

Again, with the understanding that this list is provisional, here are the topics and types of technologies that I currently plan on discussing and introducing:

Wikis
Blogs
Web search techniques (4 days)
Resource quality evaluation
RSS (2 days)
Blog search

News search
Twitter (2 days)
Automation tools (ifttt & Yahoo Pipes)
Image search
Pinterest
Page monitoring

Research tools
Change notification
Video search
Social search (digg, reddit)
Metasearch
Custom search engine

Conclusion

Well, that’s it for now. If you’re a UM student, you should be able to sign up for this class in the usual ways. Even if you’re not a UM student, you should be able to use much of the information on the site (and interact with me to some extent). Here are some other thoughts:

If you are interested in getting some insight into the development of this course, follow me on twitter at drsamoore or read my blog.
If you’re excited about the course:
- If you’re a UM student, tell your friends about the course and get them to sign up.
- Send me a public tweet (include @drsamoore anywhere in the tweet except as the first characters) describing why — and use the hashtag #bit330 when referring to the course.
- Follow bit330 on twitter. This is the account I will use during the semester for all course-related information. Until that time I will periodically post more targeted status reports and other informational items on this account.
If you have questions about this course, send me an email at samoore@umich.edu. If you send me an email, put BIT330 in the subject line. (Or, of course, send me a tweet, either public or private.)
If you think I’m missing something that would make the course better, again, send me a public tweet describing what that “something” is.
Soon I will post a video that should give you some more insight into the course. Be on the lookout for an announcement within the next couple of weeks.

I hope this provides enough information to get you unnaturally excited about taking a class. I hope to hear from you soon!

Question related to twitter usage for a class

I have a question for which I need some help.

I have a twitter account drsamoore. I am planning to use twitter for a lot of the communication for my class. Let’s call this class BA001. I see at least a couple of options for handling these messages in twitter.

I could have students follow my account, and follow my student accounts. For all messages sent out by me or students related to the class, we could add the #ba001 hash tag. This would keep all of my communications in one place (so as to not create some type of multiple personality disorder) but I am also aware that I have a variety of different people who follow me (many of whom are not students). These people would probably not appreciate getting all of the communications that I send out related to the class.
I could create an account in twitter ba001. I could then have students follow this account, and this account could follow the student accounts. They could append @ba001 to any public message about the class or they could begin any private with @ba011. If I thought the answer to the private message was of interest to all the students, I could simply send out a message from the @ba001 account. This approach would usefully segregate my messages (from the point of view of many of my followers, I’m guessing) but it would cause me to have to think about which part of me was sending the message.

I really don’t know what to think. Is this a common dilemma that I am facing? If so, how do people handle this? I would love to hear your thoughts about this.

Using Twitter in a face-to-face class

I have previously used Twitter in my class with good results, but I found it more difficult to capture information from the class than I would have liked. I recently found another tool that actually makes my previously problems go away. In this post I describe what I did in my previous class, the problem I had, and the tool that is making my problem go away.

I taught a class on finding information on the Web (known as “BIT330”). Almost every day we had in-class lab exercises. Once every week or two I would ask the students to tweet their answers to certain questions or to tweet observations on specific tools (that I was particularly interested in, for instance). Part of the instructions in the class exercise write-up that I provided was to include #bit330 and some question identifier hashtag in the tweet.

The reason for tweeting with the hashtags was three-fold:

I used Twitterfall on a screen at the front of the classroom. I couldn’t recommend this tool more highly. It essentially is a live search; I would set up a search for #bit330 and then the tweets would slowly scroll down the screen (like a waterfall — get it?!) so that everyone in the class (including me, of course) could see the progression of students, the answers they were giving, the observations they were making, and the questions they had. This is a really cool addition to a class.
The second reason was that I could then capture the tweets and use them as part of my basis for establishing participation in the class. One time a student was logged on from home (or someplace other than class) and completed the exercises and sent the tweets.
The third reason was that I could capture the tweets and use them as a basis for learning about what exercises worked well, which needed fixing, and which needed replacing.

The trouble was that it was labor-intensive to get the information as the basis for points 2 and 3 above. I would run a search in twitter, and then I would repeatedly copy pages of tweets to a text file, and then I would use a short python program to turn the text file into a CSV file which is a better format as a basis for future computations (e.g., importing into a database file, as the basis for a word cloud, or whatever). This was all less than satisfactory.

The answer to all this is found in SearchHash (brought to my attention by the always-awesome Patricia Anderson). This tool will perform whatever search you want on recent tweets and will create a CSV file of the results. Problem solved!

It really is as simple as that. I can definitely see myself using this approach much more often in the future now that I know it’ll be so much easier to access the data.

What about you? Do you have any twitter-related tools that you use to support a face-to-face class? Or have you used these tools (successfully or not)? Share your stories!