And that's a wrap!

End of Spring quarter, end of our academic year. Wow. What a wild ride. We are certainly living in a time of great change and if you don't buckle in, you may be jostled a bit as new people, processes, tools, technologies, ideas...fly in and out, up and down, all around.

UW Tacoma will soon release a new strategic plan. The result of very hard work by many people over a year of consensus-building, it affirms our ACCESS mission as the center of a focus on diversity, innovation, community, and  excellence. This may seem apparent, but it took hard work to own, agree, convince ourselves that we are not a baby UW Seattle. We are Tacoma. With a vision:

The University of Washington Tacoma fosters thriving and equitable society by educating diverse learners and expanding knowledge through partnership and collaboration with all our communities.

 

Now why am I sharing this on the TLT all-things-learning & technology site? Because this campus vision affects each and all of us as we move forward with who we are and what we value. So, here in the Faculty Resource Center, Darcy and I wrap the year with excitement and commitment to provide what our diverse, busy, new traditional learners need - including the support of a faculty able to deliver flexible and innovative pedagogy.

iTech Fellows has 19 participants this summer, ready to take 20th Century teaching skills and adapt them to online and hybrid environments. Yeah! Why? UW Tacoma responding to the need for new literacies, reduced seat time, and more flexible paths to graduation from students. We're exploring change in teaching, engaging, and designing for anytime/all the time learning.

We've also seen the roll out of analytics on campus, provided by our collaboration with Civitas Learning: a first time ability to SEE real time student data from a lens of persistence. Taking a first look at what we know now: F2F degree program undergraduates who avail themselves of online courses are 7% more likely to persist to the next quarter than their peers taking only on-ground courses at UW Tacoma. SEVEN percent. 

And that's even though UW Tacoma has only put 3% of its catalog online. Even though 95% of the online courses each quarter are full within a day or two, sometimes within hours. Even though more than 10% of our students are rushing to find and take these time-flexible courses any given quarter. 

Our new strategic plan's focus on access is bound to change these numbers. If we truly focus on student success, we'll create more online and hybrid options. Create options for students to go to school, to work AND to take care of their families. Create more graduates. Here's the kind of data we now know, thanks to Civitas: 

• 10.24% of our students who took a mix of online and F2F courses do not  persist to graduation.
• 17.25%   of our students who do NOT avail themselves of online courses did not persist.

We can do better for them. Buckle your seat belts! UW Tacoma is learning to fly.

Exploring the Nudge

>NUDGE:
1. to push or poke (someone) gently, esp with the elbow, to get attention; jog, 2. to push slowly or lightly as I drove out, I just nudged the gatepost, 3. to give (someone) a gentle reminder or encouragement.
- The Free Dictionary

It's spring break at UW and Academic Technologies is busy planning, catching up, thinking ahead and even presenting to colleagues on how we're using technology in new ways to engage students and improve our retention efforts. 

Presenting: shout out to UW's TechConnect and to the Washington State CanvasCon. Local conferences create great community connections!

What are we speaking about?

Nudging. 

Following the work of Cass and Sunstein, documenting the way that subtle interventions can improve choices in a variety of situations, UW Tacoma has been exploring how we can improve student performance, engagement and behaviors in the educational setting. 

Carmean and Mizzi took this research and explored the idea of nudge interventions in higher education and where we might see improvements. 

The Mobile Nudge

Based on that work, UW Tacoma began working with Persistence Plus, a vendor that sends mobile text messages to students with information, encouragement and behavioral interventions. 

The collaboration began with online math classes,
expanded to math and stats and to the first year experience. 

We saw significant success in specific targets, but less evidence that mobile nudges can improve retention for the general population. We are now expanding to new behavioral interventions:  

• targeting students not registered for Autumn courses 3 weeks before school starts
•  and to near completers struggling with final courses and requirements. 

Every student is different, every student may need different supports - at different times, in different ways. Nudge initiatives meet the students where they are.

Nudging with Canvas & Analytics

Returning to Carmean and Mizzi's research hypothesis that nudge initiatives can best be directed at persistent and retention challenges for the 21st century university, UW Tacoma is looking into more effective ways to build a Nudge Culture into the curriculum. The LMS is our focus point, as it has increasingly added analytic features that allow better, quicker, personalization of learning. They simply need to be implemented into practice. One underutilized (some would claim well-hidden) feature for nudging to performance is the Gradebook's "Message students who..."


In the past, it has been time-consuming for faculty to give feedback to students that perform in patterns that would benefit from feedback, resources, encouragement. Now, students are sent a personal message based on behavior seen in the LMS. In moments, instructors can select a message category and send personal notes to all students meeting that criteria. The challenge, since this has not been a practice in the past, is to tap into a collective understanding of effective nudges. UW Tacoma has been doing workshops to create shared, tested, effective triggers and phrases.  

And that's just the beginning. We're learning so much from colleagues regarding use of Syllabus Quiz, multiple attempt quizzing, Discussion Board reveals, prerequisite modeling, gamification of content, and more. Keep nudging, the we smarter than me!
Collaborative response from Washington State CanvasCon workshop on using Canvas as Nudge environment.

AND...New Possibilities in Nudge Analytics at UWT

Eyes on the horizon, the University of Washington has partnered with Civitas Learning to bring all our data about students together in one interface. We will be able to data mine for trigger points of poor persistence, and if we rise to the challenge of moving analytics into action, we will create new nudges, supports, and resources to target interventions. 

Each student is different, learns differently, faces different challenges. The 21st century campus has the opportunity to meet them where they are and provide the support, resources, and interventions that student needs. 

State of Online Learning

Pearson's 13th annual report on the #StateOfOnline Learning is out. Good news for advocates of innovation and leveraging technology. Lovely use of infographics to tell the story. A worthy read. Some food for thought from the report:

• 28.4% of higher education students are enrolled in at least one online course
• Last year, the US saw 147,000 new online enrollments
• Nearly 2/3 of academic leaders call online education “critical to the long-term strategy of my institution”
• Larger growth is being seen in hybrid courses, with 35.6% of academic leaders now calling blended/hybrid outcomes “superior” & somewhat superior to classroom instruction alone.

Read more here: Online Report Card: Tracking Online Education in the United States

Meanwhile from the trenches of University of Washington:

• The Seattle faculty just voted that 99% online is not an online course. IF you meet with your students one time, THEN they can scurry around the military and international student blocks on online courses. It also gets around the bizarre UW "residency" rule for Senior year study demanding butt in seat with no more than 15/60 finishing credits done online. (Outcomes are NOT enough. You must listen in your Senior credits).
• Tacoma faculty are poised to follow suit on the 99% policy. Soon, the count of online courses at UW will most likely drop to zero, unless enrolled in an online degree.

It gets worse:

• Currently, pre-passage, only ~2% of UW Tacoma's courses are online. 
• In any quarter, less than 10% of our students are taking an online course. They WANT online courses, NEED online courses, FILL all the enrollment seats within hours of registration, 

Your friendly bloggers at TLT Corner would love to hear from you if you faced fear of change and contribute to the digital possibilities that allow 28.4% of higher education enrollments in online courses. 

Horizon Report 2016

Some of us wait eagerly for the annual Horizon Report to be released. It's like higher education's geeky birthday, anniversary, and Valentine present rolled into one. What did venerated colleagues from all over the world decide (over many months of nominating, caucusing, voting) were the trending academic technologies for the next 1, 3, 5 years? 

I don't always agree, finding consensus often leans to pie in the sky, Ivy league, virtual yada yada enthusiasms instead of the tools and practices that engage the post-traditional students now found in most classrooms: classrooms on the ground, online and hybrid. 

Well, the New Media Consortium must have been channeling and adapting to my yearly (grateful, but...) whinings, as their chosen trends are still important/visionary/informative/fascinating, but they've added sections on Key Trends and Challenges that address the realities facing higher education daily. A thoughtful look on how tools, trends and challenges create a stew of possibility for the role of technology in our practice. 

One loud hurrah from UW Tacoma. Here's a link to the report. Our collective tech present and future: read all about it.  

Horizon Report 2016

Canvas Rocks the Voter Polls

Happy 2016! Let's make it better, fearless, learner-friendly.

One of the things you can depend on in the beginning (and end) of the year is polls. We're not talking about the upcoming presidential noise, but higher education and it's surveys of what's working, making a difference, making our jobs easier.

The journal University Business covers this all year, across the spectrum: admin, finance, data storage. You name it. If higher education is using software to meet its needs, UB is studying and reporting on it.

So, of all the tools presented and polled, across all the services and demands of a campus, only one in the category of learning and teaching made the list. What software you ask? (You probably didn't, as you've already guessed or responded in the poll...).

Canvas. We chose right when imagining the tool that would take teaching and learning into the digital age. Now here's the tricky part: any LMS will allow you to do the things they were designed to do: replicate the classroom functions (Announcements, Discussions, Assignments, Grades...) but that's not why Canvas made the list.

It made the list because it's doing well what others don't even attempt: a move toward analytics across the digital experience (see my post on 'Nudging Students to the Finish Line' regarding Canvas and the 'message students who...' option). Darcy and I do a workshop on using DATA, gathered by Canvas, to better know, track, nudge and inform students on progress. The workshop wouldn't be possible without the Canvas approach to visualizing data.

And that doesn't even address their new speed grading functions; more intuitive rubrics, and synchronous chat and collaboration tools.

Check out some of the deep-under-the-hood features of our UW-supported LMS that's winning national awards. Canvas: it's not your mother's LMS.

Here's the UB 2016 Reader's Poll Results. 

New Tools in New Ways

Congratulations to one of our favorite iTech Fellows, Kim Davenport, who was recently awarded the CMS Instructional Technology Initiative Award by the prestigious College Music Society. 

CMS is a consortium of college, conservatory, university, and independent musicians and scholars of music. This annual award is given in recognition of exceptional contributions in  the effective use of technology to improve college music instruction. 

Kim’s work will be recognized at the Society’s National Conference and presented in a Showcase event there.

Take a look at Kim's rich story-telling of how she teaches her "TARTS 2220: Exploring Classical Music in Our Community" to engage students and help them fearlessly learn more about music. It helped us better understand why students love her online course.

Kim's story of TARTS220 is told via use of the open, free web tool ReadFold. Check that out too as a way to easily engage students in telling their own stories with rich media links and resources.

Gorgeous. Inspiring. And fun!

Start the new year right: REFWORKS! 2.0!

It's been confusing and disappointing in the past that UW would spend so much to join the wave of universities purchasing and offering RefWorks FOR FREE to their students, and then not promote the tool. Mention RefWorks to most students and you get a blank look. Add the challenge that it takes a bit of time to learn to use it on your own, without support or promotion, and even those that heard about it found it challenging to start up. But those that do? So much time and effort saved, excellence and error-free citations gained.

Now, a new year, a new plea from Academic Technologies: hop in, the water's lovely and the UW Libraries have stepped to the plate with a new RefWorks support site! Check it out. Still a bit complicated, and we strongly recommend you stop in the Library, if possible, and ask a Librarian to get you started. If you do, you'll soon be spinning with joy seeing how easy it is to build your own personal library of citations.

Even if they don't offer to show you, DEMAND they teach you how to add Google Scholar citations straight to your library. We strongly recommend you also use the free paper writing tool Write-N-Cite, Learn that in Phase II, once you're a RefWorks addict.

Here's the new UW RefWorks site. 

You're welcome.