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.