What would a social higher-ed institution look like? How would decisions be made? How would unions evolve? How would the institution look if each person contributed -- and if each person's contribution played a role in starting conversations and evoking critical dialogue? And why are these questions critical to the future of education?These are some of the questions I explore in my new post, Imagining a Social University, on the GETInsight blog.  Each month I write a sponsored blog post for Cisco's GETInsight blog on the topic of global educational innovation through technology.  To view a collection of my GETInsight posts, click here.Image courteousy of Oana Roxana Birtea http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Thanks to Dana Howard, Brad Belbas, Jaime Vandergrift, and Amanda Volz (of VoiceThread) for joining me today for my Teaching with VoiceThread Hangout.  This was the most instructionally diverse Hangout we've had, as our participants represented K12, high school, and college instructors.  That made for a fresh and lively conversation about many topics.  Amanda shared an exciting update about some new LMS integration features on the horizon for VoiceThread site license holders -- this will appeal to Blackboard users!  And Dana gave us a peek into one of her AP art history VoiceThread activities.  Still working through some audio hiccups with Google Hangouts, folks, sorry about the sound glitch with the screenshare.Enjoy the archive. It is also available on the "Hangout" page of this blog (where you can learn about my next Hangout scheduled for Tuesday on the topic of "Online Learning: the Good, the Bad, and the Awesome."And take a moment to join the brand new "VoiceThread for Teaching and Learning" Community on Google+!

I was joined today in a Google+ Hangout on Air by a group of nine fabulous online educators encompassing k-12 and higher education institutions in California and Australia.  The conversation was dynamic, the reflections were heartfelt and inspirational including stories about students and personal growth as teachers, and the tips and strategies shared were invaluable. And the Google+ Hangout archive didn't work.  :(  As fabulous as that hour was, I am so very disappointed to not be able to share it with more of you.  Sorry, folks.  Better luck next time!

Why are emerging technologies valuable in an online class?  And what additional challenges do bring to the role of the course instructor, particularly at the community college level? How and why should college educators encourage older students to be open to experimenting with learning with new tools?  And to what extent can technology assist instructors with supporting students through their learning success?  As online instructors, we must always remain active, warm, human mentors in our students' learning.  In the post I have written this month for the GETinsight blog, you will read a true story about how one of my older, online students, named Diane, transformed from reluctant and fearful of technology to stunningly successful and leveraged her new digital skills to secure a position as a blogger with a local newspaper by the end of the course.  Here is a comment Diane left at the end of the course, intended to be heard by my next, incoming group of students (shared here with her permission). The full blog post is available at: Believing in Students: What Technology Can’t DeliverEach month I write a sponsored blog post for Cisco's GETinsight blog on the topic of global educational innovation through technology.  To view a collection of my GETInsight posts, click here.

The 6th Annual Sloan-C/MERLOT International Symposium for Emerging Technologies in Online Learning (@ET4Online) has been moved from July to April 9-11 this year in Las Vegas!  Also new to this year's festivities is The Launch Pad, a chance for a small group of leading edge educational technology startups to be featured in a showcase role at the conference for a special price. Read more about the event and the cool ways EdSurge's Tony Wan will be partnering with us on their awesome site here.I have the great pleasure to be the Chair of the Launch Pad committee this year and it's been an exciting opportunity to cultivate this new dimension into the ecosystem of the conference.  As an online educator myself, I believe the overcoming many of our current educational challenges will require a more fluid dialogue between educators and entrepreneurs.  Those who are envisioning the tools with which we, as teachers, will use to facilitate our learning environments, must understand the challenges and obstacles educators face on a daily basis. The Launch Pad is one step towards improving this dialogue and fostering a learning community between educators and entrepreneurs.6-8 companies will be selected to attend the ET4OL conference in Las Vegas on April 9-11, 2013. The lucky Launch Pad participants will receive:A booth in the specially designated "Launch Pad" area within the conference floor planFull conference registration (a $575 value)A seat on the "Art of Innovation" conference plenary panel, moderated by EdSurge’s Tony Wan, on the morning of Thursday, April 11thAn invitation to attend "The Art of the Startup", a workshop on Tuesday, April 9th featuring presentations by: Frank Bonsal, General Partner, New Market Venture PartnersHarris Goodman, VP of Development, Late Nite LabsMichael Hageloh of Michael Hageloh, Inc.Phil Ice, VP of Research & Development, American Public University SystemSpotlight promotions on the ET4Online website and EdSurge newsletterThe priceless opportunity to speak with and the world’s leading online educators and learn how to improve your product to meet their teaching needsSpecial Introductory Launch Pad Price: $400*(*There is no fee to apply. The fee will be paid by selected participants only.) Apply for the Launch Pad now! Application period closes January 23rd.

January is upon us and the start of a new semester got me a little behind with the planning of this month's "Teaching with VoiceThread" Hangout -- but it was great, nonetheless!  I especially enjoyed the terrific reflections shared in the first part of the Hangout by +Michael Kieley and +Deborah Lemon about how teaching with VoiceThread has improved their connections with their students, their understanding of their students' needs, and their ability to measure their students' abilities and growth.  We also had an interesting dialogue about the value of "community" in foreign language classes, which is a strength of VoiceThread.   I also had a chance to answer some "how to" questions about "Identities" and adding video files to a VoiceThread by using the 'screenshare' feature of Hangouts in the second half of the session.View the entire playlist of Teaching with VoiceThread Hangouts here. To be notified of future Teaching with VoiceThread Hangouts, please join the "Teaching with VoiceThread" community in Google+.

VoiceThread, a tool that has transformed the way I teach and the way my students learn online through warm, multisensory, community-building online communications, now integrates with any course management system -- Blackboard, Moodle, Desire 2 Learn, Canvas, and more!Faculty who teach online with a course management system and who use external, web-based tools to add increase interaction, collaboration and more to their students' learning are familiar with the added management tasks of navigating the student account creation process, eliminating students from the web-based activities who have dropped the class, and other steps that add to the time of teaching a class. VoiceThread has always been easy to embed in course management systems with any type of VoiceThread account, even a free one.  And that has not changed a bit.  But this week, VoiceThread announced the availability of LTI or Learning Tools Interoperability which now makes VoiceThread integrate seamlessly with any course management system, creating a single-sign on experience for students, automatic account generation for students, and more! What does this mean to me?LTI is a next-generation, standard created by the IMS Global Learning Consortium that allows for streamlined, agile integration of learning applications and tools.  In our rapidly changing technological teaching and learning landscape, it's a solution that is welcomed with open arms and seeing VoiceThread make the adoption of LTI a priority is really an exciting moment.  It demonstrates an organizational commitment to students, faculty, administrators, and willingness to respond to the challenges educators face in today's online teaching landscape. In a real-world contact, LTI creates some spectacular time saving realities for instructors and other academic stakeholders.  For example, with LTI integration in place, VoiceThread becomes a "seamless part of the LMS" for students, allowing for a single sign on experience for learners using Blackboard, Sakai, Moodle, Desire 2 Learn, Canvas, and more!Faculty will rejoice upon seeing VoiceThread accounts automatically created for students on their course roster and having those accounts sync with the ebb and flow of the add/drop period (that's right, no more manual adjustments necessary by the instructor!).Also, the integration automatically creates a VoiceThread Group at the start of each course without the instructor clicking a single button. To read about the advantages LTI brings to ITS and organizational leaders, read the blog post. Who has access to VoiceThread's LTI feature?LTI is automatically included with all VoiceThread site licenses. And Department license holders may purchase LTI integration as an added upgrade.  If you are a K12 school license holder who utilizes a course management system, you are also eligible to upgrade to LTI and it's included for K12 district and state license holders.If you'd like to learn more about VoiceThread's LTI feature, please email info@voicethread.com

I recently joined the contributing editorial staff at edCetera and will be writing brief posts that offer strategies for fostering community-oriented learning in online classes through the use of emerging technologies.My new post, The Online Teaching Welcome Mat: Energzing Learners with Animoto, showcases a simple (and fun) way instructors can utilize Animoto, an easy-to-use web-based tool, to create a warm, inviting welcome video for their online class.  Why is this a good idea? Read the post and find out!  It will also share how to get your own free Animoto educator account!If you are using Animoto in other creative ways, please share your ideas!

As an online California Community College (CCC) instructor who has worked hard to promote practices for cultivating high quality, high touch, humanized online learning, I am watching the news about Steinberg's proposed bill (SB 520) to allow California's community college students to complete MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) offered by third party vendors to complete high demand courses that the students are unable to access through California's community college system. The concept is rough but is being applauded by open educational resource (OER) supporters and certainly makes significant strides to support a mission of the CCC system which is to promote access to low cost higher education to Californians.  And Steinberg has been quoted, "This is about helping students. We would be making a big mistake if we did not take advantage of the technological advances in our state" to do so.But is it high quality learning (another thread of the system's mission)?  This is the question I want to untangle here.  The concept at the heart of SB520 is driven by the exciting work of Simon Thrun, who received a 2012 Smithsonian Ingenuity Award for "transforming the way people learn around the world" and Daphne Koller, co-founder of the MOOC-hosting site Coursera.  Thrun and Koller have become to popular pioneers of MOOCs (but are by no means the founders -- scroll to "The Forgotten History of  MOOCs" by Audrey Watters here) which are massive open online courses.  MOOCs are online classes that have lots of students -- lots of students, like over 1,000.  This is why the model in California would promote alleviate the road blocks that students have hit in recent years as the system has cut classes in response to the state's devastating budget deficit.To date, there is no large scale effort in the uS have an entire system of education grant college credit for the completion of a MOOC.  If SB 520 is approved, California's community college system, the largest system of higher education in the nation which serves roughly 2.6 million students, would make a huge precedent in higher education and MOOCs would make quite a foray in formalized learning.The ProblemI agree that MOOCs will find a place in the future of formalized learning.  But I also believe figuring out how, where, and to what extent is a fragile venture and the leap that is proposed in California is poised to fracture the foundation of community college student learning. The problem lies in the demographics of the students that are served by the MOOCs.  Thrun and Koller are Stanford professors.  They do not teach community college students.  Those of us who teach community college students understand the unique blend of needs our student demographics bring into our classrooms and how these unique needs tie into our pedagogy -- whether the class is face-to-face or online.  When teaching a community college class, you (the teacher) are pivotal to the success of the learners.  That is true regardless of whether the class is face-to-face or online.  Each semester, in my online class, I work to support students with a variety of needs.  For example, many have cognitive disorders like ADHD and I often identify students who I suspect have dyslexia but have not yet been tested.  I have a student now who is about to give birth -- her due date was yesterday and we have made arrangements to support her through her delivery.  And I have another student this week who I needed to set up a special quiz for to accommodate his ADD.  I understand that by reaching out to understand and support the needs of my learners, I will increase their chances of success. That's just one of my roles.  I also must design learning activities that support a range of cognitive levels and differences.  Using tools like VoiceThread and blogs, in addition to traditional assessments creates scaffolded learning spaces where students receive personalized voice and video feedback from me and their peers.  My teaching and social presence resonates with my students. Dyslexic students have accommodations built in and more proficient students take roles as community leaders in our participatory learning environment. MOOCs are teacherless.  That's why they are so efficient.The IssuesTaking the teacher out of an online community college class is a bad idea for students.  The active presence of a teacher in an online class has been validated as an essential element of a student's success for decades (Anderson, 1979; Paloff & Pratt, 1999; Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000;  Richardson & Swan, 2003). And when the the mix of learners in a class becomes more diverse, the demands of the teacher to work more closely with the learners to understand and facilitate their understanding and comprehension of the mastery of the objectives becomes more critical -- not less. Some studies have noted that MOOCs have a success rate as low as 20%.  A strategy Udacity is using to improve this is to hire "human mentors."  I could not agree more that we have problems in California's community colleges and that students are feeling the pain of an ugly financial crunch that has landed on our community college system.  But the problems that we are disregarding pertain to the value of high quality community college teaching.To start, more than 300,000 students have been turned away from California's community colleges because our state has elected to cut programs and classes and get rid of teachers.  And this solution replaces them with MOOCs developed by third-party vendors that are teacherless.Moreover, out of the roughly 58,000 faculty members that teach California's community college classes, Jonathan Lightman from FACCC shared that only 31% of them are full-time.  Even though state law mandates California to maintain a 75:25% ratio of full-time to part-time faculty, this has been deferred in recent years because the budget has just been too weak.  I find it interesting that the system's proposed increased funds this year may go to support teacherless solution.The solution proposed by Steinberg is not good for community college student learning.  It does not support the diversity of student needs that are critical to success in community colleges.  Community college learners need teachers who are held accountable to high standards to foster high quality, community-oriented learning experiences.  Motivation, engagement, morale, and ultimately cognition will not thrive in a MOOC environment with most community college learners.  Some will do fine, yes.  But most will not.  AlternativesIn the future, learners will have no shortage of access to free, open content.  So what will the function of a community college be in society?  That is the question.  I think we are in the midst of re-envisioning the role of the institution from an access provider to a facilitater of learning.  In a lifelong learning society, individuals need to understand how to master their own learning and this will continue to play and increasingly critical role to both the success of the lives of people in the 21sst century and the relevance of educational institutions. To put this more clearly, learners -- with all their learning differences in tow -- will come to community colleges because they will need teachers to inspire them, to help them understand and master new skills, and to help them create digital content that will demonstrate their mastery to the outside world.  Access to the content will not be the issue.  It will be how to learn the content.  Community college leaders today should be funding the creation of centers of innovation in teaching and learning -- empowering hotbeds of research and experimentation where instructors are incentivized to understand what it means to teach effectively with emerging technologies in their discipline and how to foster high touch learning environments that demonstrate ways to develop students into critical, mindful users and creators of digital media.  From these sites, resources would flow to other colleges through an interconnected, open sharing system that would empower faculty to learn together in community.  In contrast, as an instructor in California, it's devastating to experience how disconnected I am from my 55,000+ faculty peers at the most connected time in human history.  We should all be learning in community from each other, sharing with each other, and in a constant dialogue with each other.   A new online instructor at a college in Chico should be able to locate an experience online instructor in Palm Springs in a moment and develop an informal mentor-mentee relationship.  A simple online commons, like the Academic Commons developed by CUNY, would foster a space for sharing and connecting across the state. Innovations in teaching and learning is the area in which California's community colleges should be leading the way.  We have tens of thousands of committed, bright, passionate educators who teach because they are dedicated to their students.  Instead, we're sending our students to third party vendors and applauding the use of technology to deploy content to them.

What a difference 8 years makes. St. Peter's Square in 2008 and in 2013, the day Pope Francis first greeted the public.When pondering the importance of weaving mobile learning into a class, there are so many benefits to consider.  These include increasing student access to content, supporting Universal Design for Learning, and cultivating more authentic assessment strategies that require students to become active creators of digital content.But I also think it's important to understand the cultural relevancy of the smartphone to today's traditional college age student demographic.  Smartphones are more than hand held computers or phones with internet access which is often how someone from my generation may perceive them (I dislike that I just said that, by the way).  A smartphone is a personal companion through which a young person stays fluidly connected to his peers at all times.  Sharing images on Instagram is quickly outpacing the popularity of Facebook among the pre-teen population.  One's smartphone is the method through which an adolescent communicates with first loves and uses to document, share, and dialogue about her experiences through photographs and videos and text.I really don't know why we still call them phones.And the speed at which the transformation has occurred is staggering.  Five years ago, nobody had smartphones.  In 2012, 67% of 18-24 year olds in the United States were smartphone owners (an 18% change from 2011).So when we ponder the question, "Why teach with mobile devices?" we must also consider the significance of cultural relevancy.  If our goal is to encourage our students to engage with content on a meaningful level, does it not make practical sense to create a class that makes it feasible for them to use the device that through which they document, share, and dialogue the rest of their experiences?