I Didn't use iBooks Author to Create my Interactive Digital Textbook

After months of hard work, blood, sweat and tears (well, not all of those), I have finally submitted a new interactive digital textbook for publication. I didn't use the popular iBooks Author by Apple to create this digital textbook.

Right now you are thinking, "but wait, iBooks Author is made by Apple, and Apple is cool, right?" Apple is cool, but Apple is not multiplatform, and this makes all the difference in my world. My textbook is on educational technology, and when it is ready, I intend for it to be read by my own university students (and students at other universities) on any device. I want all of the interactive elements to function on a Windows laptop, Android-based mobile device, Apple computer, Linux desktop, and yes, an iPad. How many of these devices would work with a textbook developed using iBooks Author? Only the iPad (and no, not the Apple computer).

When I started out writing my textbook, I looked into many different platforms for publishing an interactive digital textbook. I looked into iBooks Author, but I realized that anything I created with iBooks Author would only work on the iPad. It was simply not going to work for me to ask all of my students to buy iPads when some had Android tablets, Windows computers, Apple computers, etc. already. Ethically, I couldn't justify requiring students to buy a certain type of device in order to succeed in class.

So I looked a bit deeper into the options for publishing interactive digital textbooks and found only a few alternatives that were truly multiplatform and interactive, one of which was Inkling Habitat. Habitat offers a multiplatform experience so that students on Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad, and whatever else can access and interact with my digital textbook. When my textbook comes out, it will be available on whatever device through Habitat.

Because Habitat has worked well for me, I am presenting a workshop at this year's AECT International convention on how to create your own interactive digital textbook and I already have a good number of people enrolled. I am looking forward to the experience! Check out Habitat at https://www.inkling.com/habitat/. And get ready for the first ever multiplatform interactive digital textbook on Educational Technology for Teachers, coming soon!

Task-centered Learning Differs from Problem-Based Learning

A recent publication by Joel Gardner and myself talks about how task-centered learning (TCL) differs from problem-based learning (PBL). When this article was submitted to Educational Technology, the editor asked if the distinction between TCL and PBL was just one of those simple academic discussions that has little effect on practice. I wrote him back that the contrary was true and shared a few experiences where people have discussed PBL, but what they were really discussing was TCL. This was the reason for the article. Some ideas and theories in instructional and educational technology really are the same thing, discussed in different ways from different people, but in academic discussions, I believe that we benefit from defining clearly what we'
re talking about.

One experience I had occurred at the AECT International convention. I attended a presentation on PBL in which the presenter had implemented a PBL experience for one semester which had all of the hallmarks of PBL, most significantly, the PBL experience provided minimal guidance and coaching for students. The result was a failed class, student scores did not improve significantly. "But," said the presenter, "we implemented some changes the next semester, and saw markedly improved student scores." The second semester was a great success. The presenter still called the second semester approach PBL, but I think it was mislabeled.

As I sat in this session I noticed that the changes that were made to improve the second semester scores were the same types of practices advocated in a TCL approach, not a PBL one. These included the instructional guidance and coaching that are so much a part of the TCL and First Principles of Instruction models for learning. So I guess that is the reason for the article. I believe that this distinction should be important for anyone in instructional or educational technology.

Web Design is About Communication

This spring, I created a new course on web design. As part of the process, I consulted with two experts who work regularly with web design. As a professor and course designer I highly recommend this practice. I sent a major assignment via email to both experts and got some very interesting feedback. First off, the experts suggested that I (and almost anyone who designs courses on web design) was going about things the wrong way.

The original assignment had well defined requirements in which students were required to create a website for a fictitious client according to specific requirements. But the experts suggested that there is rarely a time when a client knows what he or she wants and can explain that to you. A lot of the web design process involves communicating with the client to find out what he or she needs and negotiating with the client to determine what is wanted and what can reasonably be done within the project timeline.  The experts suggested that in addition to the technical skills of being able to create a web site, I should require students to learn communication skills to help them negotiate with clients.

Any web design class can teach about HTML and CSS, but a high-quality class helps students practice the skills they need to be able to communicate and negotiate with clients to provide a quality web design.

Learn more about E-Learning at Northern State University

Free Alternatives to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator

I hear a lot about Adobe products lately. As I look at the job market for my students at Northern State University, many job descriptions in the E-Learning field list familiarity with Adobe Products as requirements or qualifications for the position. However the individuals that write these descriptions are usually not familiar with free and open-source software (FOSS) alternatives to these programs that can do 80-90% of what the Adobe products do. In some cases, such as Adobe Flash and captivate, it is hard to find a good free/open-source alternative, but in the case of photoshop and illustrator, there are some great programs out there that are absolutely free and very functional that I have used with great success:

Adobe Photoshop alternatives

GIMP - http://www.gimp.org/
GIMP has been around for years, yet there seems to be relatively little knowledge of its existence among E-Learning professionals. GIMP is the ultimate photoshop alternative, offering fine-grained photo enhancement, retouching, cropping etc. features.

Google Picasa - http://picasa.google.com/
Picasa is a great photo organizer/editor similar to iPhoto (but free and open source). It doesn't have all of the bells and whistles of GIMP but it does offer quick and easy photo enhancement, retouching and cropping and the most recent version offers new image filters for fun photo effects.

Adobe illustrator alternative

Inkscape - http://inkscape.org/
Inkscape is an excellent vector graphics editing software package. It is my go-to application to help me design and edit graphics for E-Learning projects.  I recently used inkscape to create some icons for a touch screen project and it worked very well:

These FOSS applications don't have all of the bells and whistles that the Adobe versions have, but in the end it doesn't matter what tools you used to create your e-learning project, as long as it is effective!

Learn more about E-Learning at Northern State University

Minimal Guidance is Relative

I recently read an interesting article entitled Why Minimal Guidance during Instruction Does Not Work that brought up a whole new world of thoughts about constructivism into my mind. The article uses three main arguments to explain how constructivist approaches to learning have not worked including Sweller's cognitive load theory, theories about long term and short term memory, and differences between experts and novices.

The first thought that I had with regard to this article is how do they define “work,” or whether a certain activity is working or not. It is made clear that this is when learned items are stored in long term memory. But aren't there many other ideas in the field of whether something works or not based on other criteria? For instance, instead of just storing something in long term memory, shouldn't we be able to perform in some greater capacity than we were able to before an activity. What if motivation to learn is a specific problem, then shouldn't this be used as a criteria for what works in an activity? And what of problem-solving ability, is this not very useful in our information age?

The authors also blanket all types of subjects and learners into one great whole when they say that guided instruction works better than minimal guidance. The only distinction that is made is between novices and experts. I see a more comprehensive continuum between novices and experts and at some point, I think we are better off giving minimal guidance as learners become more experienced.

Also, one of the main tenets of the article is the idea that so many constructivist activitys are done with too little guidance and that adding guidance is admitting that constructivism is inadequate. I don't think this is the case. Based on my experience working with some constructivists, the authors' view of constructivism is very different from what actually happens. In fact most would agree that giving no guidance is ineffective for promoting learning on either side of the spectrum. It seems to me that the difference is that constructivists want to give enough guidance to help the learner along, but not so much that they stifle the creativity and problem-solving ability of the learner.

Lastly, the authors mention that giving learners complete and correct information is the best method for learning to occur. A constructivist may say “whose information are they being given?” In other words, constructivism may challenge the notion that there is one correct version of the information irrespective of the situation or knower of the information.

Reference:

Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why Minimal Guidance during Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75.

Digital Games Based Learning?

A friend of mine once told me that we are not here to entertain students, we are here to teach them. In that situation I wholeheartedly agreed. I had just been trying to teach a Sunday school class to a group of digital natives with no attention span having limited success. But then I thought about the field of Instructional Technology and how many in the field try to entertain students, in fact a large part of formative evaluation involves asking students how they felt about the instruction in question and what they would do to improve it. Some of these answers (especially those coming from digital natives) may ask for more entertainment in teaching.

In my own opinion instructional designers should be required to make what they are teaching relevant and useful to their students now or in the future, but they should not have to entertain students beyond that. Maybe your opinion is different, but consider that in order for our instruction to compete with other things digital natives do, it would have to meet the highest quality standards of a video game production. This is doable, but only with a lot of time and money.

A common complaint among digital natives is that they are bored, but what this really means is that they are not stimulated as much as they could be when they are doing something more stimulating. Boredom is relative. Instructional Technology often tries to cater to digital natives' needs by creating instruction that is in video games, or other digital media that they are used to. While these efforts are commendable, I wonder if they are somewhat misguided because ultimately school must help get the next generation ready to work in meaningful jobs.

I am not saying that all jobs are boring, but I am saying that most jobs now require workers to stick to a task that digital natives would consider boring. Life is full of "boring" things that have to be done. While video games teach problem solving skills and critical thinking, the very problems that are being solved are more often than not very different than real life tasks that students will do in the future. Do these problem solving and critical thinking skills learned in a very exciting environment actually transfer to "boring" or real-life tasks that people do in their job? I don't know, but I think that this is what we should be asking in digital games based learning. Perhaps instructional design efforts should be made to help people become creative enough to take care of their own boredom problems. Or maybe "paying-attention" skills need to be the focus of some instruction to digital natives.

Brett Shelton discusses using a commercial game for education in his book, The Design and Use of Simulation Computer Games in Education. He mentions that something called unintentional learning happens in these types of games, which is not useful from a design standpoint (2007, p. 108). I have not read any studies that prove that general skills learned from video games (like problem-solving and critical thinking) transfer to any real-world situation (perhaps you have). But I think the best efforts of digital game based learning teach specific skills that are relevant to real-life.

In an excellent article entitled Game-Based Learning: A Different Perspective, Karl Royle explains that games and education have been and are still largely mutually exclusive (2008). But Royle proposes a model of instruction that comes from the field of instructional technology that will allow for the blending of these, problem-based learning. Royle explains that problem-based learning in a video game would require the learner to complete a complex, real-world and authentic task by applying rote information found in the game (2008). In other words, learners would be able to learn and apply useful information to a unique real-world and relevant task.

This is the type of approach that I see being useful from an instructional design standpoint. It instructs and makes use of only relevant media. It has been proven that media does not influence learning through thousands of no significant difference studies. Therefore any irrelevant media added to instruction will not make any difference in real learning and can often be distracting. Many video games do this. In contrast, there have been many great efforts to create instructional games using relevant, real-world tasks and I think these are the only useful ones for education. After all, we are not here to entertain students.

References:

Royle, K. (2008). Game-Based Learning: A Different Perspective. Innovate, 4(4).

Shelton (2007). Designing Educational Games for Activity-Goal Alignment. In Shelton, B. E., & Wiley, D. A. (2007). The Design and Use of Simulation Computer Games in Education (p. 316). Sense Publishers.

Instructional Technology Blames Teachers

Instructional Technologists always give teachers a hard time. It seems like all the talk that I have heard lately about teaching practices has been negative toward the teacher who does the bad teaching practice. But bad teachers are too often an easy target and I think that they are only a small part of the reason for less-effective instruction in college campuses today.

In the many discussions that I had while completing my Master's degree in Instructional Technology, all bad teaching practices were attributed to the teacher who was doing them. It is really easy to blame the teacher, after all, they are the person who does the act, and as Master's students just getting into Instructional Technology, my classmates and I would look upon our limited past experience with college including our undergraduate classes. The most visible instructional component of these classes was our teachers.

But what if there were deeper roots to bad instruction than just the teachers themselves? After having taught and worked to create courses for higher education, I can say there are. I have never met a single teacher that would not like his/her students to learn something. This is no longer a question in teacher's minds. The real question is how to do this when teachers are put under the constraints that higher education imposes upon them.















"congratulations graduates, this diploma signifies that you have sat in your classroom seat for a certain amount of hours and have received arbitrarily fabricated grades from overworked and underpaid instructors. You are now ready to do something totally different than you learned in college ;)" (photo provided by Josh Thompson)

Instructional Technology has come up with some great ways to help students learn better, quicker, and in more depth, but few of these methods even consider the constraints that teachers in higher education are put under, fewer still help alleviate them. Many theories claim that they do when they really don't. I think that some of the most valuable work being done in Instructional Technology involves systemic change in public education.

A professor that I work with currently teaches several freshman classes full of ninety students each semester, is required to do research that requires extensive travel and time to write and submit manuscripts, and must serve on several committees for the university. He wakes up at about 4am each morning to get to work and usually stays there until 6pm. He then goes home to have dinner and then does reading and research for the rest of the night each day. This is typical here. I know of at least 3 other people whose schedules are similar. They do this work because they are required to by the university. This is a regular university workload.

The field of Instructional Technology generally defines behaviorist practice such as lecture and multiple choice tests as bad teaching and assessment practices. But these are the very same practices that help teachers be more efficient in their teaching. For instance, lectures can be the same every time allowing teachers to create it only once and then deliver it many times. Multiple choice tests in testing centers allow assessment of student's knowledge without having to involve the teacher.

Some Instructional Technologists sit there an wonder why more teachers are not doing more good instructional practices like peer interaction, group projects, authentic tasks, task-centered instruction and so on. Some become angry at teachers for their bad practices, but the reason is that they don't have time! All of those practices will ultimately take more of a busy teacher's time, and taking more time on teaching and less on research could put a college teacher's job in jeopardy. Imagine approaching the professor that I work with and telling him that he does not teach well, and he needs to change his curriculum to be more task-centered. You explain that this will take more time to do, but in the end students will learn more and enjoy the class better. Most professors would respond that they just don't have the time, and this answer is perfectly honest and acceptable. The time in one day cannot be increased even by a minute.

There is a lot that needs to change in colleges today, but I think that it needs to start not with teaching practices, but with the structures that are in place that do not allow teachers to engage in good teaching practices.