the stakeholder is a higher up trying to push a pet project. But what happens when you walk away from a stakeholder meeting and your colleague just committed to adding a whole new project to your plate? I don't think the project management world has seen that coming. I think it can be termed as "insane appeasement".

In conferences, spontaneous situations, I have seen polleverywhere being used very effectively for polling. Excellent choice when the shelf life of your content is short.

But choosing a virtual system over hardware solutions deserves a serious consideration. I will share my experience integrating both kinds of Classroom Response Systems, hardware and software. Both need extensive prep work for the instructor, which is not an issue when your content is reused with small changes.

Hardware systems like i>Clicker have a distinct cost and support component to them. I remember lugging two suitcases of remotes, making sure the USB drivers are installed on the instructor computer. Not recommended unless you train in the same location and have no security concerns.

While the reps were making a killing selling clickers on our campus, a disruption happened. A faculty in engineering created an effective and free product that integrates deeply with powerpoint, reporting - the works. He has launched a successful startup offering his baby as an industry standard tool: LectureTools. I integrated it about a year ago for a large course. No more work than physical clicker prep, but way less vulnerable.

The content, sans the narration was highly engaging and informative. Evidence of meta-research on learning styles that have burgeoned over the past few decades. As an self-taught instructional design professional with education in the applied sciences, I found the concept of learning styles intriguing. Learning styles were intuitive, but so are many concepts that may be flawed on skewed observation. Whenever I read up on learning styles in standard sources like Thoery & Practice of Online Learning it seemed like learning styles do have relevance to design and delivery of education, but no way to apply in the batch production environment that I work in.

So, seeing this partial validation of my brief experience with learning styles was exciting and intriguing. Evidence of efficacy of learning styles for improving learning retention is not solid at this point. As one colleague summarized, about 70% of learning variability may depend on prior knowledge and intrinsic motivation of learners. So the question remains, how do we excite these aspects of our learners?

The answers may lie in the field of motivational psychology and persuasion.

Of the 15-or-so enrollees in this course, she consumed 3 hours of tech support compared to an average of 1 minute required by the rest of the students to get herself setup for the online course. Of all the students enrolled in the program, she was the only one for whom I had to remote into her computer and install a standards compliant browser to use basic JavaScript libraries necessary to consume course content.

I have seen these cases before, they are accidents waiting to happen, taking down everyone within a radius of 10 miles around them. After calling this student pro-actively for any tech issues she may be facing, on the day of course launch, I had no call-back. So one would assume, meh, no news is good news. Right? Wrong.

In retrospect, what went wrong? Nothing was surprising about the finger pointing. One pattern that emerges distinctly from learning-learner mismatches is the symptom of under or overconsumption of tech support.

Balanced consumption of tech support is a definitive indicator of success with online learning. Low consumption can imply a genuine comfort with the technology or the fright of asking questions and looking stupid. The former is prevalent in western cultures and the latter in eastern cultures. So here in the states, under consumption of tech support is not a true indicator of learning-learner mismatch. Overconsumption of support resources, inability to grasp the key points and develop key skills, lack of meta-cognitive skills in general will throw an online learner off track very quickly in hard courses.

So what are the solutions to ensure a good learner-learning match? Screening processes prior to admission can be time consuming, however offering and monitoring preparatory support patterns and giving a few days to withraw for a refund are good ways to deal with the dilemma of potential mismatches.

There is a temptation to insert social media without mulling over the life-cycle of eLearning components: planning, design, deployment and evaluation. If there is no feedback or concrete rubric for grading social media participation, students will naturally gravitate away from using those components. Its true not just for social media, but non-social elements, like discussion boards.

So how to assign value and assess twitter participation? One can take clues from assessment frameworks for discussion boards and translate them into grading twitter participation. One such framework is Susan Levine's framework for graduate level instruction (2002). (See p 353 of Theory of The Theory and Practice of Online Learning, second edition)

img courtesy pixelant

Cut to about 10 years ago, as I sat in a Work Study class, as a part of my Industrial Engineering training. Our good hearted professor professed something about checklists that would burn into my mind forever, until the day Atul Gawande sat down for that chat with Colbert. We were taught to avoid checklists in manufacturing settings as they were proven to be condescending. Workers and supervisors found them insulting to their intelligence: something left to life-and-death situations only, like flying an airplane. Curiosity to rediscover a simple and powerful (and maybe pricky) tool led to a rediscovery, which was long due. And surprisingly neither my good hearted professor or Atul Gawande were wrong about checklist. They were just talking about different kinds of checklists.

The checklists most experienced workers would find insulting to their intelligence are read-do kind of checklists, where one would read every step, do it and then move to the next item in the list. There is another kind of checklist -- the do-check kind. Here, there are checkpoints where the worker or team are supposed to stop and check if the preceding steps were done or not. This frees up professionals to keep moving through their tasks without having to pause at every step. It also frees them up from any sequence enforcement, where it is not needed.

Do-Check checklists emphasize an important point about well designed checklists: They are not recipes (although recipes are probably a subset of the checklist universe). Thinking about how do checklists work in complex work situations, is that it is more a collaboration and communication tool, rather than an error prevention tool. Collaboration or Complex Work checklists are success tools, rather than failure prevention tools when the mapping is done to modern day distance and online learning.

In most models of online learning, asynchronous collaboration has some role. Asynchronicity suffers from challenges similar to lack of communication in a synchronous team work. This component of successful distance learning is acknowledged in learning models like the Community of Inquiry Model (Anderson). Social presence is one component to overcome distance and time asynchronicities in collaborative work. Let’s look at an idea of how this may work in a 100% asynchronous course.
Instead of spoon-feeding steps for successful submission of exercises, a check-do checklist will help the student to ensure that it has met the expectations of that specific assignment in terms of content and format.

Read-do checklists are also highly relevant to self-directed learning. We have been using To-Do lists which are Read-Do type checklists to ensure that the necessary learning modules are consumed by a student in a particular order, within a particular time-frame.
For an instructional designer / eLearning specialist, the application of checklists would entail deciding (a) where can checklists eliminate lengthy or un-readable instructions and (b) what kind of checklist is necessary (Read-do vs. Do-check).

Further Reading

1. The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande

2. Theory of Online Learning: Chapter 14: Teaching in an Online Learning Context

I use it 8 hours a day at work to manage my notes and to-do items. I use Exchange for all serious calendering and communication, and google wave in it's preview mode is no challenger to MS Exchange. Yet.

This 3 month exposure gave me a non-mission critical, yet "always-on, hands-on" experience with this technology. The features I use are the wiki nature of the main wave, and the ability to track changes and revert to previous versions. I do not use the threaded discussion feature, because, I don't collaborate much. I feel the two features should be mixed with extra care for the sake of sanity.

So ask me, vic, why not just use a wiki? It's because of a great feature under development for Wave: embedding publicly.

In the future I would be able to seamlessly embed waves as content pages in LMSs and other websites. My team will have one dashboard to collaboratively manage content and that looks quite attractive to me for team content management. The functionality does exist now, but it's not mainstream enough like embedding a YouTube video. You need to add HTML / JS code to your webpage... not ideal.

IMO, the preview stage of any service is an opportunity to critique and discover potential. Don't write off Wave yet, it may become the future of collaboration. The number of crashes while using the web interface if wave has dramatically reduced. The JavaScripts / Dhtml sometimes overheat and make the browser hang into a coma. [I use wave on the web only, I do not use wave clients.]

The apparent memory management glitches led to a discussion of Steve Job's recent comments on Flash, Apple Inc and HTML 5*. Jobs had recently made it clear that the mystery plug in that causes a majority of crashes is in fact flash. This revulsion to flash is a concern for flash developers and flash content managers (all of us?). Apple looks forward to HTML 5 which will eliminate needs of flash shells for playing video or loading up a boatload of plug ins to handle media content. last time I checked, HTML 5 is at least 10 -15 years away** and Apple is working around this problem by making flash content run as a separate thread and not bring down the entire application with it. It may not appear as a separate app like it does on the iPhone. Adobe too will not throw in the towel and is bound to come up with better flash players.

* http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/03/jobs_flash_not.html

** http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#When_will_HTML5_be_finished.3F