Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Preview: Instructurecon in Denver

 This year's Instructurecon for Canvas in Denver and I'll be attending! Ohio University recently accepted Canvas as our new LMS and we are now working on transitioning from Blackboard. So far, it's been busy
with a lot of work, but that also makes it enjoyable. I believe that this conference will be a great way to dive into Canvas and speak with others about it so that we have more resources to help us. 


There appears to be a fair amount of support for conference attendees with several discussion postings for first timers, networking strategies, and session suggestions. It is a sold out conference, so I suspect it will be pretty crowded. 

Here are some of my general thoughts on attending this conference. Since I don't have a lot of experience with Canvas yet, my session choice has been a little different. They have a total of 146 sessions with a wide variety and I've tried to register for some sessions that deal more with setup and training so that I can focus on some of that as we move into integrating Canvas at our institution. Another area I've tried to focus on is course design which will help with assisting faculty as they move into their courses. You can see my 14 selections below. Interestingly enough, as I was going through the sessions you could add ones that you had an interest in and I ended up with another 50 on that list, so it looks like the conference needs to be about a week long for me😁 Keynote speakers. Often they are more general and try to be inspirational or at least thought provoking. Instructurecon doesn't seem to be an exception to this. I think the one I am most looking forward to is Arianna Huffington since I've heard her in programs on NPR. Usually I try to read, watch, or listen to material they've produced. For these keynotes, I've found more material available for Arianna and Deepak.

  1. Opening Keynote: Moments of Inspiration and Connection
  2. How to Become a Course Design Superhero
  3. Canvas Certified Programs: Learn Research-Based Best Practices for Online and Blended Learning
  4. Faculty Professional Development through the Advancing Excellence in Online Teaching Program
  5. Keynote: Moments of Learning, Innovation and Well-Being
  6. Creating Meaningful Engagement with Canvas
  7. Designing for Consistency: A Canvas Course Co-Design Project for Enhanced Student Experience
  8. Harnessing the Power of Interactive Training
  9. Turning a Flexible Assessment Approach into a Canvas Integration
  10. It’s to Your Advantage: A Guide to LTI Integrations
  11. Creating a Pathway for Accessible Course Design
  12. Best of ICON 23- HiED Edition
  13. Closing Keynote :Moments of Awareness
  14. UnConference
I am looking forward to everything that this conference has to offer and will be posting some thoughts for each day, so feel free to check back for those in the next few days. Attending the conference or just have some thoughts? Let me know in the comments πŸ˜€




Sunday, May 21, 2023

Ohio Higher Education Computing Council Conference 2023

 Impressions from OHECC 2023

During the second week of May, I attended the Ohio Higher Education Computing Council conference at Wright State University.  Last year, I was able to attend the one at Ohio University where I work and because of that experience, I was looking forward to the conference this year. 

I really enjoy this type of smaller regional or state conference. The major conferences, like ISTE are great for the sheer size and amount but I always feel I get overwhelmed with choices at those and don't feel I get as much as a connection with people than at a smaller conference. 

OHECC was a half day of presentations on Wednesday, a full day on Thursday, and then ended on Friday at lunch which gave us enough time to get home at a reasonable time.

Besides six presenters from OHIO, we had a nice contingent of participants that attend the conference. Besides meeting new people in the field from other places, it was nice to get to connect with people at my university since I don't often see them face to face anymore. 

On Wednesday afternoon after the keynote speaker, I attended a  session on Instructional Technology/End User Support where we talked about a few different topics. Later in the afternoon, Jeffrey Wolfe & Sally Smathers from Ohio University presentation titled, Connecting Front-line Employees to University Initiatives focused on Objects and Key Results (OKR). It was nice to hear another area's perspective on this and how they implemented it. They were able to set objectives using the framework and are continuing to move forward and expand what they are doing with it. 

In the evening on Wednesday, we had dinner at the National Museum of the United States Air Force which was a real treat! It is made up of four hangers with over 350 planes and thousands of other artifacts. We had a few hours to explore it with friends, but you could easily spend a full day there. I really enjoyed the rockets and some of the experimental planes.

Sign at National Air Force Museum Rockets at Air Force Museum


Thursday, I started off with a presentation Rob Perry from Veeam and David Belville from Ohio University titled, Ohio University Data Protection - Veeam Software Corporation. This is not something I normally deal with, but it was informative and allowed me to see how we work with a vendor at OHIO to protect our systems. I particularly liked the graphic that showed how our data is backed up and illustrated the 3-2-1 backup rule. The last morning session I attended was, Demystifying Assistive Technologies by Laura Fathauer (Miami) & Jill Bateman (Ohio University). This session was excellent at showing how assistive technology is really for everyone and what ways we can better argue for implementation using legal, moral, and business reasons. Video can be a powerful way to get your message across and to do that they showed several, but one that stuck with me was Sady, which shows that when we design technology for everyone, then anyone can use it. 

I was also able to take an IT campus tour at Wright State during the afternoon which was insightful. We got to see several of the classrooms including a large interactive one. Tom Hanks is associated with them and they have a building there named after him which houses a Mac computer editing lab and a theater among other things. We also go to see their server room, which I found fascinating. Lots of noise!
Large Active Learning Classroom at Wright State
active learning classroom

Large Classroom Auditorium at Wright State
large lecture auditorium
A film reel of "The Trouble with Tribbles"
film reel
Replica of the Wright Flyer at the library
Wright Flyer replica in library
Floor suction lifters at Wright State
suction cup to lift floor panel
Backup Servers at Wright State
servers

Thursday afternoon wrapped up with time for a vendor showcase. They had about 40 vendors there and I did take the time to talk to almost all of them. Unfortunately, most of them dealt with backend related services and I only saw about four that were relevant to me. Samsung had an interesting interactive display that could be useful in some cases. It's not as feature rich as the Surface Hub, but it is significantly less, which makes it attractive.  

Friday was my presentation day! My colleagues Michelle and Lindsey had a presentation scheduled the same time as mine so I was a little bummed that I wasn't able to attend theirs. I was also a little worried since it was the last day and an early time after a late night of trivia that it might be a little sparsely attended. However my fears were unfounded and it was well attended with lots of engagement! Maybe it was the fire alarm that went off earlier at the hotel ;-). My presentation was titled, Engaging Instruction with Microsoft Surface Hubs in the Classroomand was about what we found during our pilot of Surface Hub. I found a few interesting things out during the discussion we had. The first is that there are at least two other schools in Ohio using them, with one that has over 50! The second is that when I asked the question, "Who is interested in deploying these at your school or thinking about it?", no one raised their hand. I was a little taken aback, but some went on to explain that they had already chosen a system at a significant cost and were into a multi-year contract with support for these systems. The Surface Hub is expensive and won't serve every classroom that is on campus, so I can see where there would be hesitation. Hopefully the price for these will continue to drop they develop it. 

Mike Dombroski Presenting

The sessions on Friday ended with a session for Instructional Technology/End User Support. This was a great way to end the sessions by coming together and discussing some topics that were relevant. This included student laptop programs, video meeting software, physical spaces on campus, funding big initiatives, MFA, and making stakeholders aware of changes to software.

Youngstown State currently has a program where they loan out up to 1400 laptops and other devices, such as mobile hotspots for $50 per semester. This type of program can be beneficial to both a university and students because it can reduce the need for a university to maintain computer labs and helps students in need have access to a computer without having to fully purchase one. This discussion also focused on the need for staff and faculty computers as well as they types of computers needed. Most schools have some parameters in place to determine what computer model would be needed for a user. The issue of providing stakeholders at a university accessible devices for use will continue to be an issue. 

The topic of which and how many types of video conferencing software we support at our universities. The majority supported one or maybe two, but there were one or two who supported more than that. Supporting multiple systems that do close to the same thing can be a real drain on resources and I believe make the student experience more difficult. One of the issues is that none of these systems are perfect and people get used to one and that becomes their favorite and it's hard to make that switch. The universities that support only one argue that having a fragmented choice make it really difficult to keep up with everything and one system keeps it simple for everyone. 

At universities and other places, enterprise software updates are great because you no longer need to go from computer to computer, but it has brought other challenges such as update fatigue and training issues. I try to keep up with roadmaps and version change announcements, but sometimes things will fall through the cracks. The most recent example is that when I went to go into a new Microsoft Whiteboard instance, I found that they had added a timer to use. It wasn't that big of a deal because it didn't affect usability but I have gone to a training, where suddenly a feature is removed or changed and that can be an issue. Imagine going into a classroom expecting something to work the way it always has and it has suddenly changed or gone. This can throw off a lesson or a the very least affect your timing. We didn't seem to be able to come up with anything beyond communication and regular review, but we will continue to work on this.

Multi-factor authentication is another topic we discussed, mainly who is using it and how. On June 9, 2023 there is an update to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that will go into effect and deals with universities having MFA for their stakeholders. Authentication fatigue also happens and many of us are working to reduce some of that and  we struggle with the software not always working as it is advertised to work. Working with vendors on this is a struggle. This is where training and support are also important and many of us have systems in place to support users as they try to set up the systems. Finally, looking to the future we talked about how big initiatives were paid with COVID-19 funds and we need to have better planning in place to that we can update these systems when needed. Several people mentioned that they are already working to come up with funding to purchase updated equipment in a more cyclical manner so that they can replace a little every year. We also talked about strategies such as replacing Macs every five years compared to PCs which are replaced every four years to help with offsetting costs for more expensive equipment. 

Another topic was our physical campuses and the infrastructure used to support that. Many of us are currently looking at 40-60 percent of spaces on campus as being under utilized. At this point, this issue is better suited to a university wide discussion, but we talked about how we can support that with data and communication of what resources are being used.

I found the conference to be well worth my time and enjoyed talking to people from other universities as well as my own. Getting a chance to talk about issues and learn new things in formal sessions and informal get-togethers was valuable. One of my biggest take-aways in general is that we all are facing many of the same issues and conferences help us to come together and talk about them, which makes them valuable. 

Below is a new feature to my posts that I am adding to help me better share and reflect on what I am reading. I don't have anything in the "read" section but hopefully that will grow shortly. 

What I'm Reading 

This is a current book list of what I am reading related to Academics and Technology. As I finish a book, I'll put a little posting in that week's blog post and move the book to what I've read and include a link to the post where I wrote about the book. 

What I've Read

This is a book list of what I read related to Academics and Technology. If you click on the title it will take you to the post where I wrote about the book. 





















Friday, March 24, 2023

Week in Review March 24

 Welcome to this week's review of technology related articles that I found relevant to the work I do in education. Please share any insights you have or any articles in the comments section. Happy Reading!

AI generated painting of a crow on a sycamore tree

Teaching In The AI-Powered Future by Justin Louder - This is part of a three blog series put on by Anthology  that will culminate with a live webinar on Tuesday, March 28. The author writes that PWC conducted  a survey in 2017 and reported that 72% of respondents believed AI would be the most significant business advantage in the future. Six years later I believe we are starting to see beginning aware of this among the general population, including educators. As educators, we are still in the exploration stage of the process, but it's reaching the point where we can easily use it in the classroom. AI has been here awhile, but this year has seen use turn the corner in ease of use and awareness that I think will only have it grow more quickly. The post goes on to talk about personalization, intelligent tutoring systems (ITS),  and VR/AR. He also discusses some challenges such as bias and privacy issues.

How does something like ChatGPT work? I am glad you asked! Many don't consider something like ChatGPT true AI and I tend to agree with them. It is what is known as a large language model (LLM) that will basically take a word and based on the frequency of what it has in its dataset place a word after it (this is an extremely simplified explanation and a lot more goes into it, but that is how I think of it). This allows it to come up with writing that seems to make sense and is plausible. For the most part I think it works well is useful, but I don't think you can trust it yet. There are many articles about the moral implications (OHIO access), the accuracy, and that they will often just make something up to fit the output that is requested. However, I do believe that we have seen some real potential from AI and it will get better. Maybe not perfect, but better! Anyway, if you want a better understanding of how ChatGPT works, I recommend reading What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? (very long but fascinating!) by Stephen Wolfram and The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it by Will Douglas Heaven. If you aren't familiar with Stephen Wolfram's but I would encourage you to take a look at his other posts, since he has some great insights.

This article What Students Want (and Don’t) From Their Professors by Colleen Flaherty touches on a lot about how I feel about instruction in higher education. "Outside of the education program at USC Aiken, nearly all of Walsh’s professors lecture nearly all the time, he says. With one exception—a professor of biology who facilitated lively lab discussions prompted by images—Walsh, a senior, can’t name a single professor who’s used 'different teaching styles to engage us as learners.'" I think this statement is significant in that as educators we need to constantly evaluate the instructional methods that are used. I am no longer teaching full-time, but using different methods for teaching is important. Recently I've been exploring the use of gaming in the classroom, and I think that it might provide some help in solving two of the barriers to success that students feel hinder them: teaching style and mental health. If you are unfamiliar with Jane McGonigal's video on making a better world this is a good place to start exploring gaming in education. 

How Online Teaching Can Promote Empathy by Lisa J. Anderson discusses that online teaching can..."help lay the groundwork for a new emphasis on empathy as a driver of academic success, including how best to incorporate student voices into courses."

Here is an article that is a good reminder of Instructional Design Best Practices Archives by Matthew Lynch 

Here is a fun video to get your weekend started!