Deconstructing the Quality Matters Rubric

I recently completed a wonderful two-part peer teaching observation with Dr Sara Lawrence. But, unlike the teaching observations I have done in the past, this one was for an online class. I had never done a teaching observation for an online class before. We had a standard checklist for peer review, but the questions in …

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Supporting healthy failure in online education

Teachers are told to make learning fun. Yeah! However, there is a fair percentage of learning that includes rejection and supporting that online is hard. Educational psychologists manage to gloss over the emotional side of things and come up with statements in research jargon that a learner is adjusting mental schema according to new information. …

Projects for transformational learning

CATPALS this year focuses on Environmental Issues and all TAMUT registered students can pick up their free copy of Allen's The Good Food Revolution at the Student Success Center-UC330. Go get it and get involved! Universities, colleges and other types of learning institutions often pursue projects that initially start as non-credit bearing activities until they …

Information for Visiting Scholars

I am flattered by the communications I have received over the past couple of years asking for invitation letters to be a visiting scholar under my sponsorship. To expedite the process, please read the following prior to contacting me. This blog post will let you know how i handle the process of a request to …

Design Tensions

I am writing this blog post after a failed online search for a clear, concise, yet sufficient explanation of design tensions in instructional design. Deborah Tater's 2007 definition is here, but it's a fair bit longer than mine. Of course, her's is also said more elegantly. Design tensions are relationships between design components or features …

Campus Pack (CP) addition for Blackboard: A usability review

I was asked to review Campus Pack (CP), a Blackboard overlay that attempts to improve on Blackboard functionality. Here are the issues I found. 1. Campus Pack lacks scent trails, or an intuitive design Intuitive design is the feeling that a device makes sense from the user perspective. Campus Pack seems to challenge the user, …

Wikipedia in graduate school

Wait what? I don't want to ever revisit this topic. Here goes. Each faculty member chooses to allow or disallow the citation of Wikipedia for different reasons. Here are my reasons with, of course, my rationale. Wikipedia is a collective understanding of a topic. If a student cites such an understanding, then the citation is …

Using and abusing the GRE in graduate admissions

I preface this statement with an acknowledgement that my views here are intended to stimulate discussion at Texas A&M--Texarakana and do not apply to my feelings about the use of the GRE at other institutions. I have been asked to revisit the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) requirement for admission into the ITED program at TAMUT. …

Forbidden words in Instructional Technology

Expanded title might read, Why I forbid students to use certain words when they describe a design, and the list itself This week a student asked me to explain the differences among discussion boards, discussion forums, and blogs. I paused because I knew my answer was actually a blog post, and not really what a …

Publishing as a graduate student & tips for submitting a manuscript for submission

I have been asked about publishing as a graduate student, and have decided to share that opinion here with some pointers. I chose the blog as opposed to elsewhere because the blog is the venue for these perspectives—not a university website, not in-class materials. These views are not the views of Texas A&M University, nor …