Understanding Screen Colors and Accessibility

There are lots of accessibility myths out there, involving which color combinations are and aren't accessible: It's all about the level of contrast between the colors and the size of the text. WebAIM, a site which provides web accessibility solutions, has a Color Contrast checker available for anyone to use to check your text's accessibility.

http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

To use this tool, you need to understand a little about how colors can be named on a computer. Because of the way monitors show colors, colors are identified by the amount of Red, Blue, and Green in the color (RGB color). The value of each color varies from 0 (none) to 255 (as much as possible). Instead of writing out R: 255, B: 255 G: 255 (255,255,255) for white, some programs show this in something called hex code. Every color is coded in a 6 character combination with values from 0-9 and A-F - the first two characters are the Red, the next two are the Green, and the final two are the Blue. White is #FFFFFF and Black is #000000. Red would be #FF0000.

This would be simple enough (grab the RGB hex codes, you need and type them in the tool to compare) except that not all programs will give you the hex code - some will only give you the RGB values from 0 to 255, which is sometimes referred to as decimal code. If that happens to you (PowerPoint, for example, will give you decimal code under advanced color options but not the hex code) then you can use another tool to convert the colors to the code you need.

Here's an online tool that lets you put in RGB decimal values, or RGB hex values, or select a color by sight and gives you all the information about the color. Then you can take the hex codes to the WebAIM site to check color contrast for accessibility.

http://www.rapidtables.com/web/color/RGB_Color.htm

Free, Interactive Timelines with Chronozoom

I would like to introduce you to a free, online educational tool called Chronozoom. A product of the Microsoft Research team and the department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California, Berkeley, Chronozoom is designed to create dynamic, interactive timelines complete with images, videos, and other forms of media. Once you register with a free account, you can choose to view a large variety of featured pre-built timelines, or you can start your own. After choosing a start and end date, you can populate the timeline with any number of events (called Exhibits) and link to various existing media from around the web. When finished, you can even create a guided tour through your timeline. If you have a Microsoft OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) account, you can include documents or images saved in the cloud.

Create your own interactive timeline at http://www.chronozoom.com. Check out the videos below to learn more about the creation of Chronozoom.

Fast Internet or Slow Internet?

With online education becoming more and more prominent, it's important to remember the technological infrastructure that needs to be in place to make it a success. Today's Washington Post highlights this on one of their blogs, GovBeat, by showing an infographic of the fastest and slowest Internet speeds in the United States.

The really fascinating dissection of this map comes, however, from the site which posted it first (which may even have created the map): Gizmodo. That article talks more about the source of the data, and even gives the data a quick comparison against things like population density and income levels of the various areas.

The data used to create this map comes from OOkla's Net Index, which uses self-check speed sites like Speedtest.net to collect the speed information. You can download and play with the data yourself on the Net Index site: http://www.netindex.com/source-data/

The LMS, IE, and Quirks Mode

For the more advanced user of WebCT Vista, Blackboard Learn 9, Angel, etc., who uses web technologies to design rich, visually striking, interactive learning content, there is a perpetual thorn in the side: quirks mode. What is quirks mode? In short, any time the doctype code on an html page header is not done properly (and the first thing the browser sees), most web browsers go into quirks mode to try to compensate for a web page that seems broken. Usually the web browser renders the page as an older version of that browser.

The problem? Even if your html pages are spot-on perfect and standards compliant, WebCT, Blackboard, etc., add a bunch of html and JavaScript to the top of your pages when they serve them up. This makes the browser think the pages are broken, and it goes into quirks mode to try to compensate.

If you use html to create course content to upload into your online course, you’ve probably seen some of the problems caused by this, even if you didn’t know the cause. Most of the problems are caused in Internet Explorer, which renders as IE 5.5 or 6. So any html page you create to upload into an LMS system must be designed to work in IE5.5 or 6, or it will break for your students, even if they are on IE 8 or 10.

For more information on what breaks in different browsers I quirks mode, have a look at quirksmode.org’s excellent guide. It could lead you to the cause of the persistent, mysterious, illogical html problem you’ve been having in your online course:

http://www.quirksmode.org/css/quirksmode.html

Pulverizing Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a form of academic dishonesty that involves taking another person's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own. This type of cheating can represent a significant challenge for educators to mitigate. Listed below is a sampling of websites that will (for a fee) search the internet to determine if a person is misrepresenting someone else's work.

Catch It First 

Billed as "The most advanced online plagiarism detection service," Catch It First checks submitted documents against billions of web pages and generates what it calls an "originality report."

EVE2 

The Essay Verification Engine (EVE) Plagiarism Detection System generates reports that include the percentage of the paper that has been plagiarized along with an annotated copy that has all violations highlighted in red.

iThenticate 

iThenticate claims to be the "leading provider of professional plagiarism detection and prevention technology." It compares written documents against a database of over 32 billion web pages and 125 million content items. iThenticate is actually developed by Turn It In.

SafeAssign 

Hosted by Blackboard and offered to its clients is the plagiarism prevention service called SafeAssign. In addition to checking for instances of copying, this service has features designed to educate students about plagiarism and the significance of proper citation of any borrowed content.

Turn It In 

Using a proprietary algorithm, Turn It In compares documents submitted to several databases that consist of over 24 billion web pages, 250 million student papers, and leading library databases and publications. This service is very popular among educators and includes features such as OriginalityCheck, GradeMark, and PeerMark.

Simple Games

I'd like to introduce you to a product called Twine.

Twine is a product that lets you build an interactive story. As you're making the story, you can put in choices for the reader. As you get more advanced, you can even hide text from readers unless they made particular previous choices.

Twine is a free download, super simple to start using, but robust enough to grow into something more.

You can download Twine here.

You can watch a video on how to build a simple story with Twine below:

Creating A Simple Story from Chris Klimas on Vimeo.

And if you'd like to learn about some more advanced options (like tracking "whether the player's visited a certain place or how many stones of power she's collected") then you'll want to read "How to Make Games with Twine" at auntiepixelante.com

Can you think of ways to use Twine for your course?

4th Annual Quality Matters (QM) Conference on Quality Assurance in Online Learning Program

On October 3-6, I was lucky enough to have the chance to attend the 4th Annual Quality Matters (QM) Conference on Quality Assurance in Online Learning Program in Tucson, AZ. Held at the wonderful Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, the conference was a mix of hundreds of instructional designers, curriculum developers, and program administrators who all came together with a common goal to promote and improve the quality of online education and student learning.

Started by MarylandOnline, Inc., the Quality Matters Program is a three-part peer review certification process consisting of a set of quality assurance standards to be met by online and blended courses. Its three parts are comprised of the QM Rubric, the Peer Review Process, and QM Professional Development. K-12 schools, higher education institutions, and community and technical colleges are encouraged to subscribe to the program to assure quality and continuous improvement in their online education offerings. West Virginia University has been a QM subscriber since February 2012.

There were many sessions running concurrently during the conference, and I was able to participate in about ten of them with topics such as exploring the collaborative relationship between designer and subject matter experts (SMEs), designing a course template based on QM principles, incorporating universal design for learning into course creation, and examining the arrival of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and their potential for QM standard integration. There were also a variety of vendors in attendance with displays exhibiting an array of educational support services.

My trip was not only highly informative but also extremely relevant to my position as instructional designer. I found that many of the sessions were focused on finding solutions to the kinds of tasks I may be challenged with on a daily basis. I hope that everyone involved in producing online courses is someday able to attend this type of conference, as it was an enriching and rewarding opportunity to be among so many peers who share the same commitment to quality online courses.

MOOCs and Online Distance Education

There have been a lot of attention with regards to Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs this past year. Many have wondered if they are worthwhile, believing that the MOOC pedagogy just isn't viable for a robust education. While there are good arguments for and against that belief, we should recall that Distance Education is not new. Distance Education can be traced back as far as Aristotle and Lyceums, some of which are still around. Indeed, Lyceums provided information and guidance for many who wanted to simply learn more or who were not permitted access to education because of gender or social status.

Alas, even today, many are still in that same situation, unable to learn more and thus earn more. Part of the problem for some is the huge gap of knowledge between what they currently know and what a professor teaches. How are we to bridge the gap? This is why the article "Gates, MOOCs and Remediation" by Paul Fain in Inside Higher Ed caught my attention.

Got MOOC?

What is the nature of a MOOC? Why should anyone care and how does it affect the general public and educators alike? For those who don’t know, MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course. These are courses open to anyone with access to a computer who wishes to enroll. On top of the open enrollment, MOOCs are taught by industry experts from the likes of Stanford, Harvard & MIT among others.

Many in Higher Education have been carefully watching MOOCs as they have caused some controversy. A lot of money has been put into Distance Education and the World Wide Web by just about every institution of higher learning; and now some of the best schools in the nation are offering courses online for free. This has many in Higher Ed wondering what the future may hold for them, as they try to sort out how MOOCs will affect online distance education. While some distrust the whole MOOC genre, others want to embrace it. There is a lot of disparity between the two opinions. In fact, some have insinuated that MOOCs were part “philosophical differences” that led to Virginia University President Teresa Sullivan resigning (she was reinstated later).

A New Twist...

Before we go any further, we need to address the controversy of MOOC pedagogy.  According to Paul Fain, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation “seeks applications for MOOCs with content that focuses on a “high-enrollment, low-success introductory level course that is a barrier to success for many students, particularly low-income, first-generation students.”¹

Many have doubts that MOOCs can really deliver quality education due to the 'massive' amount of students in the course.  In his article, Fain quotes Amy Slaton of Drexel University saying: "MOOCs are about economies of scale"..."which are not compatible with the personalized support remedial students typically require to succeed".

Others disagree stating that the amount of student to student engagement compensates for lack of instructor engagement.  Furthermore, former Udacity students claim that the course structure promotes: "collaboration and workplace skills that aren't taught that well in the traditional education system". ²   

Fain’s article in Inside Higher Ed, does a fantastic job of posing both sides of the argument regarding quality online education. And we have to admit that the “fruit” of MOOCs still has yet to be harvested; and the harvest is debatable - I admit. Regardless, I believe that the harvest will be big. In fact, I believe that every institution should look at what the Gates Foundation is doing and repeat it. That is to say, online distance education should invest in free online remedial education (say that three times).

Intellectual and Social Capital

In his book Trust, Francis Fukuyama talks about the concept of social virtues and especially Social Capital. Indeed, Fukuyama defines Social Capital as society’s ability to work together in groups and organizations for a common purpose. ³ In his presentation at Brigham Young University, Fukuyama reiterates that many innovations in technology came out of social capital that arose in cafe’s, bars and restaurants in Silicon Valley.  These were places that programmers and otherwise from various tech companies shared information with each other and casually collaborated to solve problems.⁴ Fukuyama’s point was that collaboration and “trust” sowed the seeds of technological innovation that we all enjoy today.
 
Can MOOCs leverage similar social capital for distance education in universities and higher education? Certainly if there is any truth for MOOCs being efficacious in remedial education, any institution of higher learning would want to leverage it.   However, there are many who acknowledge that MOOCs do not produce a degree of any sort and therefore are not worth much.  However, one of the benefits Sebastian Thrun (Udacity) touts is his ability to match learners with possible employers.  That alone could be worth completion.  Keep in mind that most who do take Dr. Thrun's courses already have their terminal degree - already fulfilling one of the default "door opener" criteria for employment.  But social capital runs both ways.  Getting a recommend from Sebastian Thrun could be valuable to the potential employer as well as the learner.  Could MOOCs be self serving to the instructors?  Maybe....but anyone who has read Fukuyama's book would say that is the benefit of  social capital.

So far so good for "Ivy League" MOOCs...what about MOOCs for remedial studies?  Is Sebastian Thrun going to recommend the learners participating in remedial MOOCs to his high tech firm buddies?  Hardly.  But, remedial courses aren't worth much in higher education anyways except to prepare students for college level courses, and that to me, is where their value is.

Furthermore, remedial MOOCs could act as a great funnel for community colleges and universities to gain enrollment. But beyond gaining enrollment in larger numbers, educating people is good for any society, whether it be in Morgantown West Virginia or Cape Town South Africa. Indeed, general education, “social capital”, and innovation go hand in hand. The real issue with MOOCs is the ability for any institution to leverage technology, educational and business heuristics in a way, not only to really educate, but to manage the whole back end of the education process. This is no easy task! Some, say it can’t be done. I disagree. And those who figure out how, are going to be the real winners.

Filling an Educational Need

In the United States, there are 3.8 million jobs being unfilled along side an 8.5 +% unemployment rate. Why wouldn’t any nation want to educate or re-educate its population in order to improve employment and gain a global competitive edge?

Remedial style MOOCs, can help improve and help educate many who otherwise cannot be reached due to lack of education and lack of funding. There are many who feel that they lack the skills for higher education. And there are those who feel that they will never be able to afford to attend. The online nature of MOOCs can help facilitate those who fall in either or both of these categories. Granted, there is a lot of failing grades with online learning. In fact, many believe that this is why online distance education doesn't work. But the blame really is on both students and instructors. Students have to be disciplined and dedicated in their approach to learning. Instructors, need to be innovative and leverage technology in a way that enhances their course. As an instructional designer, I have realized that if a professor has a inadequate face to face course, putting it online merely magnifies the problems. Likewise, if a student has discipline issues with completing assignments and staying on task - an online course will only magnify the disorganization of that student.

Regardless, neither of the previous downfalls for online distance education are proof that online distance education is a failure. They are merely short downtrends and hiccups in an overall uptrend that will overrun those who are not on-board. As with any investment, the smart ones will jump on board early and ride the up-trend.  Good investors realize that the profits don’t always come right away - but they will come.




Works Cited

1. "Gates foundation solicits remedial MOOCs | Inside Higher Ed." 17 Sep. 2012 <http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/14/gates-foundation-solicits-remedial-moocs>

2. "How will MOOCs affect higher education?" 5 July 2012
<http://blog.udacity.com/2012/07/how-will-moocs-affect-higher-education.html>

3. Fukuyama, Francis. Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity. Free Pr, 1996.

4."Fukuyama, Francis - BYU Speeches." 2012. 17 Sep. 2012 <http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=authorsearch&authorChosen=Fukuyama%2C+Francis>