My Big MOOC Adventure

MOOCs have been a hot topic for a little while now; I've read a lot about MOOCs and I have friends who have taken several MOOCs for personal enrichment and just loved them. As a person who would become a professional student if I could, I've been curious about the MOOC experience, so I decided to give one a try.

I started off by Googling "MOOC" and checking out the course offerings on various sites, like Coursera, edX, and Udacity. Fortunately for me, I'm particularly interested in STEM topics - MOOC offerings seem to be heavy on the math and science. I wanted to find a course that would be interesting and self-paced, as I wasn't sure that I'd be able to stick to a regular schedule of study. (Some MOOCs are more like traditional classes, in that they have set schedules and require submissions of work at certain times.) For this initial experiment, the ability to work independently was a higher priority than the possibility of interaction with other students.

I eventually ended up looking at courses on iTunes U, Apple's "store" for educational materials. I settled on a Calculus course [Calculus I (MA005)] offered by Saylor via iTunes U. I chose this mainly for ease - because of the Apple connection, I'd be able to easily download all of the materials onto my iPad, so I'd have them with me all the time. I've been interested in reviewing Calculus for a while now (since it's been years since I've studied or taught it), so that seemed like as good a subject as any to start with.

I was pretty excited to get started. I bought myself a new grid paper notebook, got out my favorite pencil, and set up a schedule for completing lessons. The materials provided for this course included textbook sections, practice exercises (with answer key), and a link to a graphing calculator app. This was a truly self-paced, self-study course, and I was ready to go...

Until I got incredibly bored. Several lessons in, I lost my enthusiasm entirely, and I knew exactly why. The text was pretty good, and the exercises were interesting enough, but there was no human element to the course. In addition to being self-study, this particular course did not even include any kind of video instruction or messages from the instructor. One thing that I know about myself is that I'm very much a visual learner, and I really missed watching an instructor explain concepts and draw out supporting charts and graphics. The text was not very visually engaging, either, so it was even difficult to do the reading.  I missed the interaction with other students and the opportunity to ask questions or listen to the questions asked by others. Wow, I thought - if I can't stay motivated to do this, how could students ever stay motivated through a course like this? I've heard people advocate MOOCs as an option for developmental students, and based on my experience, I'm just not sure I can see that working.

So, my intitial experiment with MOOCs was an utter failure in terms of reviewing Calculus, but I did learn some important lessons about virtual classrooms and independent study. I've since downloaded another Calculus course (also from iTunes U) from Ohio State, which is much more engaging - in addition to a text, dozens of videos are provided, and they're well-produced and fun to watch. The instructor, Jim Fowler is animated and has clearly thought about how to keep students engaged online. I'll post more on this course when I get further into it - stay tuned.

Digital Flashcards and Study Guides with StudyBlue

I've been using the StudyBlue flashcard app/website for a couple of terms now, mainly as one of the tools I encourage students to use to study vocabulary.  I've found that most of my students are not really sure how to study vocabulary for their classes - not surprising, really, considering that many of them lack college-level study skills. I've always included vocabulary study in my reading classes because I think it's an essential skill and because many of my students have limited vocabularies. I tried to help students develop a range of tools for working with vocabulary - I teach context clues and dictionary use and show them various methods they can use to study vocabulary (flashcards, partner quizzing, puzzles, etc.).

Now that I'm teaching only math, I'm still teaching vocabulary, but my approach has changed somewhat. I really focus on using the appropriate terminology for math concepts (saying "numerator" instead of "top number," for example) so that students can be prepared for more advanced college math classes. The study of math and science terminology is unique in some ways, though - it can require the study of both words and symbols, it's a little harder to use context clues, and much of the terminology is completely foreign to students. For these reasons, I've been spending a lot of time this term not only teaching vocabulary, but teaching students how to learn the vocabulary.

StudyBlue is a digital flashcard program that can be accessed through a website or an app. It's a pretty simple, straightforward program, though they are slowly adding more features. The program allows you to create decks of digital flashcards that you can then quiz yourself with by "flipping" the cards back and forth. Cards can be as simple as a term on one side and a definition on the other, or you can make them richer and more interactive by adding pictures, sound, or equations. When creating cards through the website, entering a term on a card brings up a list of cards that other users have created for that same term - you then have the option of continuing to supply your own information or inserting someone else's card into your deck. (This feature is not available on the app.)

Decks of cards get saved to your virtual "backpack," and can be used to study via simple flipping or to create study lists or true/false or multiple choice quizzes. When studying by flipping cards, you record whether you answered correctly or not; when you study that same deck again, you then have the option to see only or more often those cards you missed.

When teachers create a StudyBlue account, they have the option to create "classes" that they can invite their students to; when students sign up, they are prompted to join a class. Members of a class can then share study cards and chat with each other.

I like StudyBlue for two reasons - first, it's a clean, simple app that students can quickly learn to use. Additionally, it's convenient - students can install the app on their phone and use it to study whenever they have a few free minutes. They might not carry actual study cards around with them, but they've always got their phones, so they can study while they're waiting for the bus, etc. I've found that international students, in particular, really like and use the app.

I've been sharing StudyBlue with students and other instructors - stay tuned for a post in which I describe more about these experiences.

Screencasting with Explain Everything

For my classroom flip, I recorded a short video on solving and graphing inequalities in one variable, using the iPad app Explain Everything. [See the "screencasts" section of my blog for a more detailed post on Explain Everything.] I chose to make my own video for this lesson because I wanted to use some real life situations as examples of inequalities, and I couldn't find exactly what I wanted on Khan Academy or other similar sites.

I started by creating slides in Google Drive Presentation with my title, headings, and examples. Explain Everything can import Powerpoint slides, but not Google Drive Presentations, so I had to save the Presentation slides as photos, then import the photos into the app. This was a little cumbersome, but I'm trying to work with the Google Universe and wanted to test out this workflow.

The app worked well for this video, especially now that I'm getting more comfortable working with the options while recording. The one thing that I don't like about this app is that the microphone on the iPad picks up quite a bit of ambient noise - at a couple of points you can hear my computer chiming in the background. This will happen to some extent with any microphone, but I notice less ambient noise when I record with my Logitech headset.

Uploading the video takes a bit of time, but works smoothly. You can find the video here on my YouTube page.

Creating Tutorial Videos with Explain Everything

I've used a number of different math tutorial videos with my students over the years - mainly from Khan Academy, but from a few other sources as well, but though I've been meaning to create some of my own, I just hadn't got around to it until recently. Several factors inspired the set of videos I just created. First, while teaching graphing Spring term, there were some consistent issues that I thought videos could help address if students could access them while working on homework outside of class. Second, I've been interested in iPad screencasting and wanted to try out the Explain Everything app. Finally, while I find videos made by others to be helpful, I think that my students would really benefit most from being able to watch / listen to me explain concepts the same way I explained them in class. With those things in mind, I set to creating a series of videos on graphing equations in slope-intercept form.

Explain Everything is available through the Apple App Store for $2.99. There are some things that I really like about this app. The interface is generally pretty intuitive, though there were a couple of menu buttons that I had to play with a bit before really figuring out what they could do. You can create files with multiple pages so that when you do your screencast, you can record each page separately (and go back to edit single pages) but create one seamless video in a single step. Photos and videos can be imported onto slides; you can add text and drawings to slides; and you can minimize/expand and move around elements on a slide. In addition, you can open a video recording screen on a slide and record video right into the app. Finally, you can open a live web page on a slide. Recording quality is good and I found the audio to be satisfactory, even when using only the iPad's built in microphone. Uploading to YouTube was a little slow but not at all difficult.

There are a few things that I don't like about the app. Editing videos seemed a little glitchy - when I would pause and try to re-record a section of video, the active tools would switch on me, and a couple of times changes that I made to elements on the screen didn't "stick" as I started recording again. I believe that you're supposed to be able to edit video and audio separately, but I had a little trouble with this. When you open a live web page, the page loads quickly and page elements are functional, but web page text and graphics (and especially video) are lower resolution than in a browser. Finally, while there is a tool for inserting elements like arrows and lines on slides, it's really limited in the shapes it can create; I'd like a more robust shape tool.

I plan to play around with this app a bit more, but based on my initial impressions, I would recommend this app to anyone who really wanted to screencast from an iPad, with the caveat that this is not the best screencasting tool out there. For my next video project, I intend to use a web based tool (like Screencastomatic) on my PC. 

As for the videos themselves, I don't think they're too bad for a first try. I did realize after completing my fourth video that I did not use a single example with a negative y-intercept, so I might go back and either change one of the videos or add another to the set. I had been told by a number of people to write a script before recording, and that was good advice. I did find that I needed to revise and adjust my scripts as I went along, but they were good guidelines. The biggest challenge I had was making sure that there was nearly always something going on onscreen - I tried to avoid having too many segments with more voiceover than visual. 

Thinking ahead to making future videos, I'm toying with the idea of recording myself at a whiteboard or chalkboard, rather than screencasting. I did start each video with a little clip of myself - another great piece of advice I'd been given was that students like to see a picture of the person behind the voice on the video. I think for a lot of students there is something to watching a teacher explain something - the gestures, body language, and other visual cues add something important to the instruction, and I always feel like that's missing from screencasts. So stay tuned for future videos - maybe you'll see more of me in front of the camera!

The set of five videos on graphing slope-intercept equations is available on my YouTube page: http://m.youtube.com/channel/UCjU1lK3l5Vi0uz7dnvMypeQ?feature=guide.