February Cluster of Conferences

Late February features low-cost conferences that don't overlap but create tough travel choices:

Texas A&M Assessment Conference
http://assessment.tamu.edu/conference/
Pre-conference workshops: $35 each
Main conference: $175
February 22-24
College Station, TX

Day of Dialogue
http://conference.csuprojects.org/eportfolios
Open part of ePortfolios West Coast Summit
One-day conference: $125
February 25
San Francisco, CA

NMHEAR 2009
http://www.nmsu.edu/NMHEAR/
New Mexico Higher Education Assessment and Retention Conference
Workshops pre- and post: $65 each
Main conference: $85
February 26 -27
Albuquerque, NM

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Student ePortfolio: Career Focus

If ePortfolio is defined with a basic premise—a purposeful collection of works—then Florida State University guides students to the purpose of career preparation. The FSU Career Portfolio resource page leads with a clear explanation about the processes students follow. Click on "Career Portfolio Walk-through Presentations."

Among other things, the Walk-throughs explain a key advantage of the career portfolio: granting access to "referred users." Students can create access keys for use by potential employers (and anyone else) who can either log into an FSU web page or simply follow an embedded link straight to the portfolio. With the option of creating unique keys for each referred user, the student can then track the who and when of log-ins.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Demographer's Take on Higher Ed Enrollment

As numbers dominate the news today—in terms of the Recession with a capital R—some words from 6 months ago make good reading on the topic of higher education enrollment. Demographer Cheryl Russell's blog addressed enrollment in terms of a blink: by the middle class.

Russell referred to a "tipping point" that today's enrollment numbers back up. (My reference point is strictly anecdotal, relying on first-hand communications from a private university in the northeast and a public university in the south.) As families face lay-offs or simply fear of the future, college tuition has become part of the budget-slashing. Presumably, if enrollments were affected in winter, they will be even more affected in summer and fall.

Russell's analysis was based on mid-2008 statistics and pointed to the tuition increases of recent years as a key factor in enrollment shifts. She suggested that the middle class was already stepping away from the 4-year institution and turning to community colleges. As 2009 stats emerge, her predictions may well be confirmed.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Institutional Portfolio: Best Online Game

So, what institutional portfolio has the best online game? It's UTD, University of Texas at Dallas. And weren't they smart to create a game that is easy and addictive. And the iPod Shuffle give-away doesn't hurt.

The BeGemmed game has a purpose: introducing the campus to the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) of GEMS: Gateways to Excellence in Math and Science. Promoting student success and retention in STEM fields, the QEP will span the years following the institution's SACS reaffirmation.

The online game is not the only web enhancement in UTD's accreditation effort display. The portfolio also features a Project Blog, accessible from the portfolio home page. Besides providing an overview of the insitution's SACS Project, start to finish, it includes descriptive detail about the decision-making and planning of the web site itself. For short commentary on how the Project developers approached filenames, this link, http://sacs.utdallas.edu/blog/?p=15#more-15, gives a clue to their complex naming scheme.

(In casual language the Blog narrates more than 2 years' activity. The December 2008 entries have a celebratory tone.)

Obviously geared to its SACS reaffirmation, this UTD portfolio provides a full set of documentation on student learning as well as links to directory style information about faculty and staff. Using horizontal navigation across the top of the web site, visitors can quickly dip into big topics (Compliance Review, Assessment, Credentialing, the QEP) or smaller ones (Reaffirmation Teams, Timeline). Files are a mix of HTML, PDF, and Word.doc formats, so download/opening times differ across the site.

The UTD portfolio is an excellent example of planning and programming.

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Institutional Portfolio: A sample "Systems Portfolio"

Using the simplest of definitions, a portfolio is a purposeful collection of works. The key word, of course, is purposeful. It's easier to communicate that to students than to institutions.

When students pile all they've got into the portfolio space provided, they are advised to reflect and select. With that reminder or a little guidance, the student slows down and makes the good choices that support the purpose of the collection of works.

When institutions face exactly the same task, there is temptation to include every document, every policy, every assessment that any viewer could hope for. Sometimes calling it transparency, the portfolio grows fatter and fatter. It's awfully hard to slow that tendency.

Where institutional portfolios follow a template, the tendency to fatten is reduced. And the purpose of the portfolio is met.

The Systems Portfolio from Northwest Technical College (Minnesota) meets a purpose familiar to North Central's HLC institutions. The Systems Portfolio documents a school's progress in AQIP—the Academic Quality Improvement Program. The nine categories of AQIP show up in the portfolio menu, followed by items such as a Document Repository. (Using a template to build an AQIP documentation site follows HLC training.)

For many good examples of portfolios and purposes, visit Minnesota's Institutional Electronic Portfolio Resource Center.

(More institutional portfolios will be featured over the next month.)

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Transformative Assessment

If you are open to transformative assessment, there's a rubric waiting for you.

The concept is a few years old (2003), since EDUCAUSE joined with TLT Group, Washington State University, and the Coalition for Networked Information in a project. The purpose was to create a tool to assess how data could be put to use in improving practice.

The Transformative Assesssment instrument is based on a continuum with numerical range of 1 to 6 for identifying an assessment as Administrative (1-2), Progressive (3-4), or Transformative (5-6). Four dimensions are outlined on page 1 of the instrument:

Assessment Purpose
Data Acquisition & Analysis
Application of Findings
Dissemination

Pages 2-4 break down the dimensions with a descriptive rubric. (The last page provides a scoring form.)

The rubric provides concepts to stimulate discussion among staff and faculty. The continuum may appeal to stakeholders who need a broad picture of the potential for assessment efforts.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Tech Note: Innovate-Live Webcasts

Innovate ("journal of online education") is published by Nova Southeastern U with partial support by Microsoft. Innovate-Live is the companion web conference space (that includes archives). Supported by ULiveandLearn, the companion space brings the Innovate authors "live" to extend the reach of their articles through conversation with readers.

The Q&A between live speaker and audience members is especially valuable for the archival aspects of the web site. Even a small audience (or perhaps ideally a small audience) provides contrasting voices that prevent the author event from being merely a canned presentation. A good example is the June/July 2008 webcast called The Interactive Syllabus: Modifications and New Insights. Just a few attendees of that web conference contributed to the 23-minute event, posing questions and stimulating new ideas. Webcasts using AdobeConnect, or breeze, make presentations user-friendly and well suited to the archiving task.

The third leg of the Innovate empire is Innovate-Ideagora, a social network operating on ning. Relatively small at 324 members, Innovate-Ideagora nevertheless contains passionate discussions about technology in education. Reach the space through the more traditional web sites (the above links) of Innovate.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Measuring Online Instructor Activity

With expectations for growth in online education (due to the recession), there is renewed interest in attracting faculty members to online teaching assignments. There is a growing community of adjunct online instructors but institutions seek to increase the number of regular faculty online.

U of Maryland - Baltimore County (UMBC) is highlighting their "most active" online instructors through a Blackboard Reports web site. Activity is not in number of courses taught, but in number of "page hits" by the instructors in their Blackboard course shells.

The Chronicle story that described UMBC's reporting of usage stats included the context of how such reporting can be of value. Readers' comments on The Wired Campus include UMBC's John Fritz's explanation of their system and some of their rationale for collecting (and publishing) stats. The range of comments on Wired Campus is tremendous and reflects just about any reaction you can imagine to the publishing of such data. From "invasion of privacy" to "reasonable protection," the concerns are posted from all perspectives: student, professor, and administrator.

The question of usage stats is not likely to become more acceptable to critics just by calling the stats an "indicator" rather than a measure, but that does describe how many online instructors utilize stats in reviewing students' activity. "Hits" as well as number and frequency of log-ins provide an indication of whether a student needs prompting. Of course, a check on quality further informs the decision to prompt.

My personal experience with Blackboard included a crude test of the accuracy of the usage stats that Blackboard calls Course Statistics. Several graduate students spent timed sessions in a Blackboard shell and intentionally accessed files in certain patterns. We confirmed what we already suspected, that the reported hits did not correlate well with time-on-task or even number of files accessed. Even with that lesson, we proceeded to use Course Statistics to identify MIAs (students "missing in action"), establish the date "drops" stopped attending class, and track performance as one indicator of student engagement. My informal conclusion after teaching online for almost 10 years is that page hits don't necessarily correlate with students performing at middle and high levels. But they do correlate with students on the low end and sometimes serve as an early warning signal to identify those students.

(John Fritz has shared his paper with the higher ed community; more on that in another post.)

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Free Anti-Plagiarism Checkers

Some instructors love anti-plagiarism software adopted by their institutions and other instructors intentionally avoid it. The most frequently cited objection is the method used to fuel the checking engine: collecting and storing student-written content.

The alternative method for checking on plagiarism relies on comparing student work to published texts via the Internet. (Obviously, such a check does not provide protection against student papers being sold or shared.) These free resources do not require downloading software, which makes them attractive to instructors adopting their own strategies:

Google as checker:
http://www.google.com
Place quotation marks around a phrase and enter that into the search window. For best results, use key phrases rather than complete sentences.

The Plagiarism Checker:
http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker/
Straightforward application that utilizes Google API for the same results as searching through Google, but with an interface far less cluttered than a search page. Instructions are written with the teacher in mind.

Plagiarism Detect:
http://www.plagiarismdetect.com/
Instructions are written with the student in mind. The check can be made on text copy/pasted into a search box or on an uploaded file (.txt or .doc). Options for search areas are the web, PDFs, blogs, and books. Finally, the site offers "deep analysis" or "light analysis." The results include a percentage score (66.7% on my sample, which was a real case of student plagiarism) and a list of the sources found by the checker. By check-marking the sources, you can further identify the percentage by location. This site requires registration and log-in.

Copyscape addressing plagiarism from the other direction:
http://www.copyscape.com
Enter a URL and the checker will pull up other web pages that have the same text. Presumably, you would run the check if you think your own copyrighted material on the web is being plagiarized.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Tech Note: Testing Internet Connection Speed

Campus Internet access is famously fast although some home connections finally rival the big pipes of colleges. Even on campuses, slow-downs may occur. On a former campus of mine, access dropped to a crawl daily, 11am to 1pm. Yep, lunch hour.

You can test the speed of your Internet connection by logging into an MSN web site and entering just two pieces of information.

Enter your Area Code.
Select the type of connection (dial-up, LAN/WAN, DSL/Cable).
Then just click on the Test It button.

My results were consistent across several trials. The measurement is made against CNET servers. CNET is my favorite "tech help" resource, as noted in a previous blog.

Other sources for speed info:

McAfee Internet Connection Speedometer includes basic information about connection speed.

Speakeasy Speed Test is the most entertaining of the sites. Click a city name and a test with that server will ensue, complete with animation for both download and upload speeds.

AT&T High Speed Internet Throughput Test also gives you choice of server location with a pull-down menu. The site also offers reasons for the difference between the test result (potential throughput speed) and the download time you experience at other web sites you visit.

Visualware's Test My Connection Speed web page offers just what the company name implies: visuals. The site casts the results in terms of quality and, specifically, what you can expect of VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) calls.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Top Military-Friendly Colleges & Universities

High response made Military Advanced Education and its parent company KMI Media Group double its list of "Top Military-Friendly Colleges & Universities" for 2008. (The list is now doubled, from 30 to 60 institutions.) Selections were made by an independent panel.

The magazine's "Top 20" also had to expand, to 22:

1. American Military University
2. American Sentinel University
3. Capella University
4. Central Texas College
5. Coastline Community College
6. Columbia College
7. Columbia Southern University
8. ECPI College of Technology
9. Excelsior College
10. Grantham University
11. Kaplan University
12. Park University College for Distance Learning
13. San Diego City College
14. Southern Illinois University Carbondale
15. State University of New York Maritime College
16. Strayer University
17. Thomas Edison State College
18. TUI University
19. University of Maryland University College
20. University of Oklahoma
21. University of Phoenix
22. Western Governors University

All 60 of the institutions recognized by Military Advanced Education are listed alphabetically in a special report.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

TLT Group's Flashlight Online: Matrix Surveys

Flashlight Online is the Web 2.0 tool for evaluation offered by The TLT Group. The non-profit corporation's name stands for Teaching, Learning, and Technology and is recognized in the distance learning community as a source for free and low-cost training and resources.

The Flashlight Online products are available to institutional subscribers and access is open to multiple individuals within the institution. Flashlight has advanced from version 1.0 to 2.0 and now focuses on the concept of matrix surveys. Course evaluation is a major use of the tool.

The TLT web site is complex; a quick way to orient to the organization is through the free Friday afternoon webinars and the web page (called FridayLive!) that describes them. Scroll to the bottom of the page for a link to the archive of Friday sessions—it holds an impressive 4 years' worth. (Also a good opportunity to view TLT's webinar tool: Adobe Connect.)

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.