Category Archives: Virginia Group

Virginia Faculty Collaborative Group

Syndicated, Virginia Group

I’m Not Throwing Away My Shot

Last week I announced that I will leave a non-tenure track faculty position to build my own consulting business, Bandwidth Strategies. The transition from faculty to freelance suits who I am and how I work. It signifies one of several ways in which I am working to let go of “what people do” to be true to myself and the way I want to live my life. Just because it’s a good move – and I know in my heart it’s the right move – doesn’t mean that I’m not nervous.

My family and I traveled to New York this weekend to see Hamilton, the musical. My husband bought the tickets over a year ago, before I even knew I was going to have a faculty position that then I would be leaving.  Yesterday, my husband, my kids, and I were so excited to walk into the theater yesterday. Hamilton is brilliant art on so many levels, and as the lights dimmed, I suddenly realized that the timing of it all could not have been better. There are life and leadership lessons in Hamilton, and I needed to take some notes.

We know that I have a history of drawing inspiration from historical figures.  I’ve tweeted about my “Be like Abe” mantra. When Lincoln was angry he would write a hot letter and stuck it in a drawer. Invoking his name reminds me to wait before responding hastily in anger. Sometimes, it even works.

There are so many reviews and blog posts already written on Hamilton that there is no need to be comprehensive or even pedagogical in this space; it’s all been done. However, when I say “Be like Hamilton” I will be reminding myself to do the following:

“I’m past patiently waiting. I’m passionately smashing every expectation. Every action is an act of creation. I’m laughin’ in the face of casualties and sorrow–for the first time I’m thinkin’ about tomorrow.”

Hamilton, My Shot

Aaron Burr wasted so much time marveling at Hamilton’s success rather than focusing on his own. He was a brilliant lawyer – Hamilton even said so. Where Burr hedged his bets, Hamilton was transparent. When Burr was reserved, Hamilton wrote with passion. While Burr was bitter, Hamilton sparkled.  Hamilton sparkled – that is how he caught the eye of George Washington, whose mentorship was essential to Hamilton’s success. People are drawn to and influenced by honesty, passion, and joy.  I can be Hamilton. I can sparkle. You can too.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Leading through Visualization

Two weeks ago, Bonnie Stewart invited me to speak to #Ed6170: a faculty summer course in educational leadership sponsored by the University of Prince Edward Island. Bonnie focused her curriculum around leading under complex and changing conditions, because (1) it’s relevant and 2) it’s challenging.  In a move that I find particularly admirable, she created assignments that require her students engage with the content through multiple modalities.  Among other tasks, they will be making concept maps and infographics.

Bonnie and I went back and forth for several weeks on how I might contribute to the curriculum, and we finally settled on the idea of leading through visualization because it hit on strategies for leading teams through complex problems and contexts while also providing her students with some concrete tips on how to complete their visual assignments.

Creating this presentation required me to connect pedagogy, leadership, and information visualization, so I drew a direct line through constructionism (Papert) to learning communities  (Wenger) to reflective practice (Schon) to quantitative data visualization principles (Tufte).  It was fun to build the scaffolding for what is intuitive for some people, but not for others.  This presentation is about pointing out the obvious. I think simplicity is underestimated.  Sometimes, you just have to say things.

The following is a summary. Email me at lauragogia@bandwidthstrategies.com if you’d like the entire slidedeck. I’m always happy to share.

Leading through Visualization

Current trends in leadership

In the past, leadership development involved providing strategies for commanding, controlling, and wielding one’s authority.  Power was housed in one’s position at the top.  Information flowed in one direction.  However, the world is more complex than it used to be. There is more information to know. Conditions change rapidly and therefore what needs to be known in a given situation also changes rapidly. Complex problems require highly creative approaches to problem solving.

The constant influx of data from every direction and the dynamic conditions surrounding us has led to significant changes in the workplace.  The focus is no longer on the single person or product; rather it is on relationships: relationships between pieces of information, between people in terms of organizational teams and collaborative partnerships, and between workflows across those partnerships. The emphasis on relationships in the workplace and the world alters how leaders must behave. Influence replaces Authority. Collaboration replaces command and control.  Google “modern leaders” and you will not find descriptions of how to be authoritative or “top-down” officials; what you will find are a number of frameworks for transformative, collaborative, creative, inclusive, and design leadership.

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The approaches to effective leadership require similar skillsets: transparency and accountability, reflective practice, pattern-identification and connection-building, and flexibility in the face of change. The purpose of this presentation is to introduce information visualization as a strategy for practicing these skills. I will present you with three arguments on why the ability to present data visually is key to modern leadership. I’ll provide examples specific to higher ed teaching and administration and provide design tips so that you can integrate this into your current practice or if you are already doing some of these things, perhaps approach them with a little more intentionality.

Keep the following connection to pedagogical theory in mind: A good visualization makes the abstract concrete. From a constructionist standpoint, making the abstract concrete facilitates deeper learning, because learners are externalizing their thoughts for the purpose of sharing them.  Once the thoughts are made explicit, they can be studied, refined, and made sharper through the process.

Power of visualizations: Meeting posts, big pictures, and pathfinders

Meeting posts. Visualizations create a concrete meeting post for collaboration and sharing as well as opportunities for transparency and accountability.  I was tasked with creating a comprehensive recruitment plan for my previous workplace, which supports four programs and an annual conference, each with overlapping but distinct audiences.  Additionally, the audiences in question transcend organizational boundaries and professional sectors. I needed to develop an outreach plan that was efficient, sustainable, and offered obvious paths for expansion.

Furthermore, I needed to think about the structure and location of the data; what contact info would go in our listserves? Mailchimp? Were would content go so that it would be accessible? How would the data be structured so that we could access lists that lived in different locations without creating duplicate communications? Finally, I needed to find a way to effectively include the rest of the team in the planning, since they are actually more knowledgeable than I on the day-to-day operations and historical knowledge of the institute. I also needed to find some pathway for negotiated accountability for the student workers who would be doing much of the work.

recruitment plan

The key to success was the whiteboard hanging behind my desk.  This is a simplified version of the visualization I used to create our communication plan. On the left we have the communication platforms – social media, emails, mailings, & media postings by potentially interested parties.  In the middle are the programs listed and then on the right side of the board are listed the physical location of the lists and the person responsible for the job.

Tables on whiteboards are so common that we take them for granted.  However, they are an extremely powerful collaborative leadership tool.  Here’s how a visual meeting post works to promote collaborative leadership.

  1. When speaking with my director, I focused us on the left side; She shared a significant amount of historical knowledge and cultural nuance as we moved through the concrete list.
  2. When speaking with my content developers – my social media coordinator and copywriter, we focused on the patterns made by the X’s under the programs.  When was it possible to group messages about certain program for certain markets.  In developing our social media plan, there needs to be a very different feel, a different photograph for a Facebook post that includes information about Program 2 and the Conference, as compared to a Facebook post that combines Program 3 and the conference. Same with email and mailing content.  Having a concrete pattern of X’s helped us brainstorm about the possibilities.
  3. When speaking with my communications manager, we started with the data location and then moved left. Together, we needed to design the actual databases – how would we prevent duplicate communications when we had people who crossed lists and lists in different database systems?  The whiteboard visualization gave us a concrete model to test; we walked through mailing scenarios until we understood what filters would have to exist, what rows would be needed in the excel spreadsheet, in order to prevent duplication.
  4. When speaking with my student workers, we focused on the last columns, their assignments; we set expectations and deadlines and we could take the opportunity to negotiate, since they know their summer schedules better than I do – I merely presented the work that needed to get done and the team really helped me distribute it in the way in which they were most likely to succeed.

Transferable concepts from this example:

  1. The whiteboard is too obvious to hide. This was hanging in a physical shared location that everyone accessed everyday.  They couldn’t help but see it.  You can have these in online spaces too, like a homepage that you have to click through to get to anything else.  However, the point is that successful meeting points are never hard to find.
  2. The whiteboard is easy to erase and change. Our communication plan went through multiple iterations prior to its final iteration – imagine how tiresome and potentially confusing that would have been if we had been moving through multiple document versions and saves. If you have a version that you think you should save, take a picture.
  3. The whiteboard is accessible. Anyone can write on the whiteboard. There are no administrative privileges or tech skills necessary.
  4. Whiteboards support multivariate approaches. There are a variety of ways you can convey additional layers of information if necessary: hashed lines, sticky notes, color coding…In our case, each program has a “signature color” so it makes sense to color code anything and everything to the signature color to help people recognize it instantly.

Slide14

Big Pictures. For the amount of work that gets done in my previous workplace, it is very efficiently staffed with a director, an associate director, two program coordinators, and six rotating student workers. There were a lot of moving parts involved. I noticed that a significant number of deadlines were being missed or forgotten because of miscommunication or a failure understand expectations.

I had experienced this phenomenon before, as a physician. When you work in environments where conditions change quickly, tasks are complex, and staff come and go, it is easy to lose track of the big picture. This is why the most dangerous time for a patient in the hospital is immediately after a shift change: because it is difficult to transfer information from one shift to the next. Obviously healthcare technologists are working on this problem, but one of the most basic and universal components to the solution is what’s typically called “the board.”

Picture1

Anyone who has spent anytime in a hospital or watching medical dramas on television should be familiar with this sort of board.  It’s a meeting post where all the rooms and patients are listed, along with their essential information and the people who are assigned to taking care of them. At every shift change – or anytime the team needs to get refocused – a staff member will ”run the board” to make sure everyone is on the same page about priorities and personal responsibility.

So, given that the team did not seem to be on the same page, I adapted the concept of the OR board for our office.

IMG_0903

One Friday afternoon, I gathered the students and program coordinators.  I asked each one to tell me the story of their program from the beginning to the end of the program cycle.  I used sticky notes to mark all the deadlines and tape to mark the end of the fiscal year and winter break, as these are very real, hard deadlines for a lot of things.  It took a couple of days to get everyone’s input and as we did, questions were raised and either tabled for our strategic planning retreat or answered.  Several students had light bulb moments in which they literally exclaimed “OH! THAT’S WHY I’M DOING THAT!”  One program coordinator finally understood why she hates January a lot more than July.

Then, once the staff was on the same page, I grabbed our director – she made some corrections and then I asked her to change it to her dream scenario and she changed some things around.

Design points illustrated in this story:

  1. The sticky notes are qualitatively different than the whiteboard in the previous example; sticky notes can be made and then saved to the side if you don’t know where they belong yet.  There were several instances in which a student knew there was an event that needed to occur but couldn’t tell me exactly when – I had to wait for the program coordinator to contribute to get it right.  There are times when not having to erase things can be helpful.
  2. By having a concrete visualization, you can have an asynchronous conversation, deciding where and when you bring people to the meeting post.  By having the students contribute, then the coordinators, then the director, we were able to unveil and correct some misconceptions; everyone was able to pick up on any logistical problems, and the director was able to set new goals in a public and documented fashion.

Slide17

Pathfinding. Finally, visualization support reflective practice.  I’m not going to go too far into defining reflective practice, because I think you already know what it is. But here’s a visualization if you need one.

Reflective practice is an intentional process in which you look back at events, ask questions about what could have gone better, evaluate your performance, and then make changes so that you can continue to improve. However, sometimes we need help identifying what needs to be fixed. One approach is critical incident analysis, which is also something I learned in medical practice although you’ll find it across disciplines. Briefly, a critical incident analysis is an approach to dealing with challenges in everyday practice. Reflective practitioners pose problems about their practice, refusing to accept ‘what is’.  So they explore incidents which occur in day-to-day work in order to understand them better and find alternative ways of reacting and responding to them.

reflective Practice

A fishbone diagram, also called a cause and effect diagram is a visualization tool for categorizing the potential causes of a problem in order to identify causes. The basic idea is to have your team identify and create a problem statement and then brainstorm on the major categories of things that could have contributed to the problem. Once you have your categories identified, you can focus on specific possibilities related to each category.

Leading through Visualization (1)

And finally, almost like a juicy postscript:

Slide26

1. Content first

A visual is only as good as the content you present. Your impact is only as good as your documentation.  Identify yourself. Cite your sources. Credit your artwork. Make it easy to check your work.

2. Tell a story with your designs

Write the story first, as you would for any article.  Lay out your narrative or argument in a logical, compelling order.  This infographic, for example, has the same components you would find in a newspaper or journal article.

Untitled design (1).png

3. Write in data paragraphs

Edward Tufte defines data paragraphs as a cohesive set of numbers, words, and graphics. Consider what each element is bringing to the understanding of the information. Graphics, just like words or numbers should never be randomly placed on a page.

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4.  Simplicity is discipline

In matters of design, more is rarely better. Directly label your information when possible (instead of using a key). Limit your color palettes to three to five colors.  Limit your fonts to one or two fonts.  Limit unnecessary punctuation.

5. Make a color palette & pre-select your fonts. It will save you time.

 

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Featured Image:  Isaac Benhesed on Unsplash

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Composing a Life

When I first came to JMU, I entered a new phase of life: new job as a dual professor-administrator, mother to a new baby (my second), and a new decade (I turned forty soon after I arrived). A few months in, a colleague gave me a copy of Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life. I think she knew how much I would appreciate Bateson’s topic:

“This book is about life as an improvisatory art, about the ways we combine familiar and unfamiliar components in response to new situations, following an underlying grammar and an evolving aesthetic.” 

In the decade since, I have changed administrative roles twice, completed a variety of big-multi-year projects, and turned fifty. I picked Bateson’s book up again this spring. It was high time to revisit it, to take my time with it, and mine it for wisdom.

The cover employs Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance (ca1662-5) to suggest one of the book’s central themes: how women seek to balance their myriad conflicting roles.

Here is a traditional review; there are many others. Suffice it to say she examines the lives of five remarkable women that illustrate improvisation and its lessons. They are: Joan Erikson, (dancer and jewelry designer), Johnetta Cole (anthropologist and president of Spelman College), Alice d’Entremont (electrical engineer and corporate leader), Ellen Bassuk (psychiatrist and researcher and advocate on homelessness), and Bateson herself (professor and college administrator). The prose is elegant, the stories moving and relevant–especially if you are a woman in higher ed.

The funny thing is that, as I reread it, I realized how much Bateson’s findings and advice resemble what I tell students. Society puts so much pressure on undergraduates. They are expected to choose a major quickly but wisely, as if it will define them forever. (And what do YOU do,  dear?) But we also say “find your passion,” understanding that a job might not be a person’s calling.

Every campus is a place of traditions and continuities yet each is also a place of new beginnings, transitions, and transformations. When I came to JMU, I reinvented myself in important ways—as an employee at a public institution instead of a private college, as a scholar of race and memory instead of class and ethnicity, as mother to a daughter as well as a son, as mentor to faculty much my junior. (Boy, was it a surprise to realize I was no longer “junior.”) Bateson reminds us that life doesn’t follow a clear trajectory, not for most people, not anymore. Nevertheless, American culture (the white, middle-class, urban part anyway) imagines life as a quest. We urge young people to set their goals in childhood. We have them play dress ups as doctors or nurses, princesses and princes, but it isn’t just a game. By middle school they must choose a sport (gymnastics, soccer, basketball, whatever), a particular academic strength (science or math, Lego robotics, preferably something STEMmy), and something creative (violin or piano, art or drama) for well-roundedness. In high school they get pushed into pre-collegiate classes early in hopes that one of them will determine the major to come. And in college they are under similar pressure to get the most of their “college experience,” to join clubs, find internships, and forge new relationships, all while graduating “on time” and with honors.

Bateson gently undermines the whole project. Americans, she observes, view achievement as purposeful, “monolithic,” a relentlessly single-minded pursuit. Popular biographies of exceptionally ambitious people, that is, the successful ones, reinforce the myth. Our cultural aesthetic privileges the struggle to win, to overcome any obstacle, and denigrates those who meander, change course, falter, or lose their way. (p4) I nodded along as I read her words. Most people are not single-minded, not in my experience, not in the past nor in the present. When Bateson’s book came out in 1989, I had just started grad school. Like many of my classmates, I wanted a Ph.D., but I didn’t know if I wanted to teach. And I surely didn’t know if I would find a job. The year I graduated, 1996, turned out to be particular bad, in fact. Every US History position for which I applied had hundreds of applicants! I landed a one-year, visiting position and was damn glad of it. Fortunately, I had worked in the park service before; I had a Plan B and a Plan C, if things didn’t turn out well. And though I soon landed a tenure-track position, I eventually wandered off in a different direction. I am still exploring, in fact.

Improvisation is the metaphor Bateson uses, and I like it. She draws on the musical concept of composition, as well, yet she broadens the term to encompass other arts, such as sculpture, painting, writing, quilting, cooking, dancing, and building. In all these endeavors, the maker chooses from among the various materials and techniques available to her and combines them in a way that makes a unique, coherent, and meaningful whole. The materials and techniques that men and women use to compose lives today deviate sharply from those used by our parents and grandparents. We can’t follow previous generations’ examples. We must make our own music, over and over again.

How the college experience has changed: Remember standing in lines and filling out forms to register? Now students do everything online . Photo courtesy JMU Special Collections.

So, too, college students can’t sing a tune written by others. Much has changed since Bateson’s book appeared in 1989. When I speak to students I cite a startling contemporary statistic: by the age of forty, the average American with a bachelor’s degree will have between ten and fourteen different jobs. Following Bateson, I should perhaps add contemporary statistics on divorce and debt and geographic mobility. “Fluidity and discontinuity are central to reality,” (p13) now more now than ever before. Like Bateson, I celebrate “the creative potential of interrupted and conflicted lives,” and I want young people to have a better sense of what actually awaits them. It’s ok to be undeclared I say. It’s ok to change your major or pick up a second one (or a minor) that speaks to your soul. It’s ok to take electives, and it’s definitely ok to acquire a liberal education along with whatever vocational training one gets. As Bateson concludes, “The compositions we create in these times of change are filled with interlocking messages of our commitments and decisions. Each one is a message of possibility.”

Syndicated, Virginia Group

When you are a muse

Being a muse isn’t easy. It seems like it should be, as you aren’t the one actually doing the creative work, but it takes a certain amount of courage to be willing to relinquish control and accept what other people do with you.

I have a friend. He’s a very dear friend. He has my best interest at heart, always.

Tod paints, or at least he used to and he does now.  He painted, then he played golf, then he painted. All of this is documented on his blog. But when Tod started painting this last time, he collected selfies of the people he loves and he used those as inspiration. He’s painting a lot of people, but he painted me almost first.

I take a lot of selfies. Most of the time I take them to mark changes in my life. Educational degrees. Jobs. Seasons.  There was a time I was taking one every week because the changes just kept coming.  I happened to be working for Tod at the time.  He has since remarked that he never knew what he was going to see when I walked into the office, and there was some truth to that;  I looked like an entirely different woman every day.  I think it threw him for a loop in real life, but in retrospect I think he sees it as an opportunity: the documentation of a woman in transition. He chose one of his favorite selfies that I took (in our shared workplace at the height of my midlife crisis) and he painted that.

Selfies are self portraits.  I’m good at them. I know how to use composition, shadow, light, and most noticeably my HAIR to hide what I don’t like and to emphasize what I want. I intentionally use my hair to hide the intensity around my eyes – I’ve never liked the way it looks. It looks too hard or hungry or masculine to me. I don’t like it but I can’t shake it and the only time I can erase it is when I’m have a beer and take the selfie laying down.

When Tod painted me, he took my hair out of the equation.  He literally took my hair completely off my face. All that intensity is staring back at me and there is nothing I could do about it. I can’t reframe or retake. I can’t vignette or tilt shift.  I can’t tilt my head to let my hair fall forward from behind my ears.  But I can’t deny it either. I can’t tell him Tod got it wrong, because in reality he got it very very right. Fuck it all, there is no way for me to hide. I’ve never felt more publicly naked in my entire life, but I’ve also never felt so accepted or valued either.  It’s a unique sort of tension to it all.

 

Syndicated, Virginia Group

MOOCs, Motivation and Me

I am intrigued and inspired by Steve Greenlaw’s observations (in two parts) on motivation in the OpenLearning17 cMOOC and on motivation and MOOCs more generally. For OpenLearning17 specifically, I have an additional theory. Like Steve’s observations, mine are based on my own experience. I don’t have the data in hand, so I’m relying on Steve’s interpretation of it and simply adding to his insightful comments.

I am particularly intrigued with the notion that some participants who did not continue through the whole course may have gotten as much as they wanted from it. MOOCs are not the same as credit-bearing courses. No one is paying to be in the MOOC and no one will receive a degree based on their completion. MOOCs do require a different kind of motivation, a more intrinsic one. We have to want to complete it to do so and in order for that to happen, the MOOC needs to have priority over other things. Steve addresses this issue in Part 2 of his reflections.

The reality is that for many, the MOOC cannot be the priority. Life gets in the way. Work gets in the way.  OpenLearning17 was an opportunity for professional development, primarily for those of us working in higher education. As Steve suggests, maybe the motivation isn’t there because we’re not held accountable for our own development in the same we are for other parts of our professional lives. Professional development is about self-development and therefore focuses on the self, not on others. Here’s my theory, it seems to me that self-development often ends up towards the end of our list of priorities because we put the needs of others first. We do this even when we know that our improvement will positively impact others (e.g. teacher development improves teaching, thereby improving the learning experience for students). Most of the participants in OpenLearning17 were educators, or involved in higher education in some way. We are “givers” as a breed and therefore, we tend to put the needs of others before our own. We start out with good intentions about improving ourselves, expanding our knowledge, and then the needs of others creep into the space we had carved out to focus on our own development. I know that for myself, during the weeks I couldn’t participate at all, it was the needs of others that took priority: the needs of my team, my institution, my family. I just didn’t have time for me, which meant I didn’t have time for the MOOC.

There are comments that suggest that participants who had to drop out due to competing priorities would try again. To help give participants and organizers a sense of completion, we could try offering a different approach to the content. If 14 weeks is not sustainable for focusing on one’s own development, perhaps a shorter time frame might be more manageable. Perhaps the same course content could be reorganized into smaller parts that could be offered sequentially with each part requiring a smaller commitment of time. The parts could be offered back to back for those who want a more immersive experience, but each part would need to be able to stand on its own so that those participants who can only commit to that part can begin without prior knowledge needed.

The course content is still available, so of course past and new participants can access the information, but we know that the synchronous (Twitter chats and Google Hangouts) and time-bound asynchronous pieces (Hypothes.is annotations) had significant value for participants. The activity of the course is what brings connection and community to it and the course (or perhaps some other event?) must be active in order for that element to occur.

I hope that in the next iteration we can intentionally design the experience for participants who have a limited amount of time to devote to the cMOOC and I look forward to helping figure out a way to do that. For those of you hoping to participate in future iterations, what would you like to see?

 

Image courtesy of Addison Berry “Changed Priorities Ahead” via Flickr.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

MOOCs, Motivation and Me

I am intrigued and inspired by Steve Greenlaw’s observations (in two parts) on motivation in the OpenLearning17 cMOOC and on motivation and MOOCs more generally. For OpenLearning17 specifically, I have an additional theory. Like Steve’s observations, mine are based on my own experience. I don’t have the data in hand, so I’m relying on Steve’s interpretation of it and simply adding to his insightful comments.

I am particularly intrigued with the notion that some participants who did not continue through the whole course may have gotten as much as they wanted from it. MOOCs are not the same as credit-bearing courses. No one is paying to be in the MOOC and no one will receive a degree based on their completion. MOOCs do require a different kind of motivation, a more intrinsic one. We have to want to complete it to do so and in order for that to happen, the MOOC needs to have priority over other things. Steve addresses this issue in Part 2 of his reflections.

The reality is that for many, the MOOC cannot be the priority. Life gets in the way. Work gets in the way.  OpenLearning17 was an opportunity for professional development, primarily for those of us working in higher education. As Steve suggests, maybe the motivation isn’t there because we’re not held accountable for our own development in the same we are for other parts of our professional lives. Professional development is about self-development and therefore focuses on the self, not on others. Here’s my theory, it seems to me that self-development often ends up towards the end of our list of priorities because we put the needs of others first. We do this even when we know that our improvement will positively impact others (e.g. teacher development improves teaching, thereby improving the learning experience for students). Most of the participants in OpenLearning17 were educators, or involved in higher education in some way. We are “givers” as a breed and therefore, we tend to put the needs of others before our own. We start out with good intentions about improving ourselves, expanding our knowledge, and then the needs of others creep into the space we had carved out to focus on our own development. I know that for myself, during the weeks I couldn’t participate at all, it was the needs of others that took priority: the needs of my team, my institution, my family. I just didn’t have time for me, which meant I didn’t have time for the MOOC.

There are comments that suggest that participants who had to drop out due to competing priorities would try again. To help give participants and organizers a sense of completion, we could try offering a different approach to the content. If 14 weeks is not sustainable for focusing on one’s own development, perhaps a shorter time frame might be more manageable. Perhaps the same course content could be reorganized into smaller parts that could be offered sequentially with each part requiring a smaller commitment of time. The parts could be offered back to back for those who want a more immersive experience, but each part would need to be able to stand on its own so that those participants who can only commit to that part can begin without prior knowledge needed.

The course content is still available, so of course past and new participants can access the information, but we know that the synchronous (Twitter chats and Google Hangouts) and time-bound asynchronous pieces (Hypothes.is annotations) had significant value for participants. The activity of the course is what brings connection and community to it and the course (or perhaps some other event?) must be active in order for that element to occur.

I hope that in the next iteration we can intentionally design the experience for participants who have a limited amount of time to devote to the cMOOC and I look forward to helping figure out a way to do that. For those of you hoping to participate in future iterations, what would you like to see?

 

Image courtesy of Addison Berry “Changed Priorities Ahead” via Flickr.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Liberty and Learning at JMU

Here is a guest post I wrote for the American Democracy Project at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, July 2017

The James Madison statue on East Campus (“Big Jimmy”) is a popular spot for photographs, especially on Constitution Day. Photo courtesy JMU Marketing and Communications.

We take civic engagement very seriously at James Madison University. Originally founded as the State Normal and Industrial School for Women in 1908, this institution has been renamed and rebranded multiple times. President Samuel Page Duke proposed the name Madison College in 1938 in part to commemorate the legacy of the nation’s so-called “Forgotten Founder,” and President Ronald Carrier led the transformation of that institution into James Madison University in 1977. Since then, the link to our nation’s fourth president, the Father of the Constitution, has become more intentional with every passing decade. And that is very fitting since Mr. Madison was one of the young republic’s most ardent advocates for higher education. “Learned institutions,” he wrote in an 1822 letter, “throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty. . . . What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable than that of liberty and learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?”

From the moment they first step on campus, students are exposed to Madison’s political legacy. We aren’t subtle! Madison statues, Madison quotes in public spaces, and Madison logos in university publications complement the classical architecture that defines our historic Quad, the symbolic heart of the institution. As part of Orientation in August, all 4,500+ freshmen participate in a program called “1787,” which includes a 75-minute academic exploration of our ethical reasoning framework, the Madison Collaborative. We annually mark Constitution Day, September 17, with cake, pocket Constitutions from our friends at the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution, and a free trip to Montpelier, Madison’s home and estate in nearby Orange County.

More than 300 JMU students turned out for a Presidential Election Returns Watch Party on Nov. 8, 2016. Photo courtesy JMU Marketing and Communications.

Two years ago, in tandem with a successful, student-led effort to establish an on-campus precinct, we launched Dukes Vote, a fall voter registration initiative that combines social media posts and mass emails with links to TurboVote, coordinated tabling at locations across campus, and visits to residence halls and general education classes. Students are also encouraged to explore civic tools like icitizen and BallotReady that provide information about issues of special concern and perspectives on candidates running for different offices.

But civic engagement also runs through the curriculum, especially the General Education Program, The Human Community, which is divided into five areas of learning outcomes called clusters. The American Experience area of Cluster Four: Social and Cultural Processes, for example, especially reflects JMU’s long-standing commitment to prepare undergraduates for citizenship. The area came about in 1998 after the Virginia House passed a joint resolution directing the boards of visitors of the sixteen public colleges and universities to review their general education programs to implement a US History requirement. Today, our nearly 19,000 undergraduates choose among three unique, 4-credit courses, either HIST225: US History, POSC225: US Government, or JUST225: Justice Studies. The common outcomes, designed by our own faculty, state that students will be able to identify, conceptualize and evaluate:

  • Social and political processes and structures using quantitative and qualitative data
    • Key primary sources relating to American history, political institutions and society
    •             The nature and development of the intellectual concepts that structure American political activity
    •             The history and operation of American democratic institutions
    •             The history and development of American society and culture
    •             The history and development of American involvement in world affairs.

Deliberative dialogue techniques are used in curricular and co-curricular spaces to foster civic competence. Feb. 8, 2017 D.E.E.P Impact event.

To measure performance on these outcomes, we use a 40-item instrument delivered during 1787 (Freshman pre-test) and again on our annual Assessment Day (sophomore post-test) to thousands of students each year. We are proud to have decades of data showing the value-added by a JMU course to our students’ acquisition of essential civic knowledge. Further, JMU is one of only three Virginia campuses that require a course focused on America’s democratic political heritage. Other areas of the general education program support civic learning with outcomes related to ethical reasoning, critical thinking, scientific literacy, and diversity. In fall 2017, we are launching an innovative version of our required general education human communication course for 200 Honors College students. Designed to incorporate constructive advocacy and deliberative dialogue, this course builds on faculty work with the Kettering Foundation and serves as a pilot for revisions that may soon impact all undergraduates.

This summer will see the launch of the James Madison Center for Civic Engagement, which is charged with coordinating and promoting civic engagement university-wide. The new center is part of a bold strategic plan that calls us to be the national model of the engaged university. At JMU, we have purposefully divided engagement into three distinct, yet complementary components that reflect our long-standing institutional culture and values:

  • Engaged Learning: Developing deep, purposeful and reflective learning, while uniting campus and community in the pursuit, creation, application and dissemination of knowledge;
  • Community Engagement: Fostering mutually beneficial and reciprocal partnerships, ranging from local to global, that connect learning to practice, address critical societal problems and improve quality of life;
  • and Civic Engagement: Advancing the legacy of James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, by preparing individuals to be active and responsible participants in a representative democracy dedicated to the common good.

While we believe that Madison remains an important role model, we don’t want to see him enshrined on a pedestal. Instead, in partnership with colleagues at Montpelier, we designed a civic framework called “I am Madison’s Legacy” that connects contemporary competencies and dispositions to things the historic Madison actually said or did. In the future, we hope this set of six affirmative statements will help faculty and units and organizations across campus recognize what they are already doing to “throw light on the public mind” and protect “the public liberty.” Like Montpelier, where an exhibit on slavery and racism, “The Mere Distinction of Colour,” opened to acclaim earlier this summer, we want students to have an accurate understanding of who Madison was and what did. Only in this way will they know who they are and what they must do.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

MOOCs and Motivation: Part 2

This post is a continuation of the previous one, but digs deeper into the question of why participants fail to complete MOOCs  It is speculative and personal. It’s possibly based too much on my own experience, so take it for what it’s worth.

The most frequently expressed reason for dropping out of #OpenLearning17 was lack of time. While I accept that at one level, I also wonder if there are deeper reasons. Let’s start with some thoughts specifically on MOOCs; then we can explore deeper issues of motivation, comparing the experience of students with the experience of instructors and professionals.

I’m assuming that participants joined #OpenLearning17 because they have an interest in and want to learn the subject. There was little or no extrinsic reward for doing so. This has been the case for all the MOOCs I’ve participated in.

MOOCs often include a great deal of work in a given week. Some weeks #OpenLearning17 certainly did. The idea is that those who have a particular interest in the subject can dig more deeply than those who don’t. I found that when I had worked through a certain amount of the work, I felt like I knew enough to participate. I didn’t have to do all of the work to reach that point. During some weeks, I wasn’t able to do enough work to reach that point. This made me less able or less willing to participate publicly.  As one participant indicated in a survey response,

“Yes, as the semester went on my schedule got much busier and I couldn’t fit the OpenLearning activities in. Some weeks required a lot more than others and then I felt like I couldn’t really do the week justice.“

MOOCs tend to be based on a cohort model—they are not self-paced. If one finds one can’t keep up with the ostensive pace of the course—if, for several weeks in a row, one finds they don’t do enough of the work to reach that level of understanding of the subject mentioned above, I think there’s a tendency for participants to feel like it’s not worth coming back, even if the course is not vertically building.   If this process spirals out of control, the MOOC participant may drop out.

Could it be that the (arbitrary) pace of the online course doesn’t match the time availability of most of the students? What then? (And what does this say about the learning experiences of the students in the courses we teach?)

Is the problem of failure to complete a MOOC due to the lack of accountability?  Students more often than not stay with a course because of the grade and credits that will be earned.  Is that a bug or a feature? One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that relatively few students plan well for the end of the semester. Final papers and exams are often worse than I would expect from students, given the quality of their earlier work. This seems due in part to the fact that students are stressed beyond the level that makes them productive, and some students seem to give up, just to be done with it.

When I engage in a scholarly project, I work at it until it’s done to my satisfaction. Often the only deadline is my own. When I have an externally-imposed deadline, I tend to adjust the pace of my work to meet that deadline. I can do this because I have a lot of experience and a strong sense of how much time a given task or set of tasks will take.  [ For a related discussion, see John Warner recent piece.]

When I’m teaching, the schedule is external—I have to turn grades in by a certain date, and I make that deadline. Sometimes that results in a difficult couple of days and I may end up wishing I had a bit more time. In the case of determining final grades, again experience has taught me about how long something will take, though ultimately the need to meet the deadline may make me less sensitive to how good a job I’ve done. It’s probably true that final exams and final grades are, to a certain extent, like sausage making.

How is a student’s experience taking a class different from an instructor or professional completing their work? Many students don’t know how much effort it takes to complete their assignments and/or what a good result is or how much time it takes. In other words, students lack self-efficacy and the ability to self-regulate their learning.  I see this particularly with first year students, but also with some upper level students.

When I do something professionally I typically want to meet a standard of what I consider good work. When I was an undergraduate, while I wanted to do good work, I wasn’t always sure what that would be. When push came to shove, I turned in what I had, for better or for worse. While I had a grade at stake, the lack of experience and understanding of my learning process meant that I didn’t always achieve my goals.

When I do something professionally I have a good understanding of process I’m about to engage in. As a student, I had an imperfect understanding of that process and, at times,that   led me to undershoot.  Why didn’t the uncertainty lead me to overshoot? Because there’s nothing higher than a A? Because I wasn’t as motivated as a student as I am as a professional?  I’m not sure. As a student, I had a lot of what I thought were important things competing for my time. As a professional I do also, but I also have a better sense of what’s important, and how long things will take.

What about when I take a course or a MOOC? My participation in #OpenLearning17 asked me to do some things that I wasn’t all that familiar or comfortable with.  These including annotating documents with Hypothes.is, Creating Storify(s), and participating in real time twitter discussions when I hadn’t done enough of the assignments to be able to contribute much. I felt self-conscious about embarrassing myself publicly.  As Sarah Rose Cavanaugh said in a recent Chronicle piece, “To participate is to risk a lowering of one’s status.”  In short, during #OpenLearning17, at times I behaved like a student.

Is there a tendency as a student to give up agency to the instructor, falling back on our learned behavior of school? I just know that when I take a course, I don’t feel as responsible as when I teach one, or as when I do some other professional task. I wonder if I’m the only faculty member who feels that way.  More importantly, how can we encourage our students to get beyond this artificial barrier to learning?

 

Image courtesy of tamahaji “The Motivation” via flickr.com