Flight of TE150

Punya Mishra graciously resolved my petty issue with not being thanked for helping initiate the TE150 course development that won the 2008 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology Awards Competition. I have to keep my original “Update” post up on this site as an Internet record for all to see and for me to be ashamed of after Punya’s eloquent post on his blog. My contribution overall to the course was small compared to others on the team and I never wanted to glory hog credit that wasn’t due, but I’d been feeling down as a staff member since it seems the university tries hard to isolate the staff from receiving any special recognition for their contribution. So missing a chance to be listed on the MSU AT&T Award was a major deal to me.

TE150 recently won the 2008 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology Awards Competition described as an award that’s focus is “to the growing use of online technologies for instruction…and encourage best practices in the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning.” You can read about the award on Punya Mishra’s blog.

Strange thing though…I’m never once mentioned with the bevy of grad students, teaching assistants, programmers and course developers. Since the award Punya & Matt Koehler have been giving several presentations and have been heralded throughout the College of Education for thinking outside the box with online instruction…and frankly it has been rather difficult to watch knowing in a small way, I’ve been slighted. This blog stands as a record to my involvement in adopting the Moodle platform for TE150 and working with Punya and Matt in structuring the course feel. I helped behind the scenes with securing a server and for pushing to allow Punya & Matt access to open source web apps, like Moodle, in a College dominated by Microsoft and strict security policies. I’m used to being slighted as tech person, but now I know how it feels to be not thanked at the Oscars.

After a lot of tinkering I had managed to modify Moodle so that the left hand block column was displayed as a row above the main content area.  The right column was hidden, so we ended up with a one column layout just like I had mocked up in Flash earlier.  Turns out that there were several problems with this setup.  A jarring effect occured to the page as it resized when blocks were maximized and minimized.  Also, blocks have defined widths, but not defined heights so a perferred height variable would have to be created and integrated into Moodle.  By this point, with all the modifications, we would have lost one of the reasons we wanted to go with Moodle in the first place; it’s ability to be easily updated without losing our customized bits and pieces.  So we ended up going with a regular two column Moodle environment, but with custom modules developed by programmers at the College.  The final mockup was presented at a meeting with the Dean and the Assistant Dean to secure funding and support for on-line TE150.  If you’re interested in what we finally tried to do, you can access the Moodle site in the resources section.

I was assigned the task of mocking up what I thought would be interesting to see in an on-line course setting.  No holds barred, think out of the box and take no prisoners.  I first made a dummy course in Fireworks and Dreamweaver.  I didn’t even care about the conventions of Moodle’s two & three column layout.  Matter of fact, I went completely off the wall and made a mockup that did away with the traditional on-line course three column layout and put all the supporting functions, like who’s on-line and news postings, in boxes at the top of one main column.  At that point all the course material is nest below the parts that really draw users into the class, like pictures of people who are also in the class and on going forum discussions.  This also helped alieviate the thing I hate most about Moodle and Segue, which is having the center column, where all the meat is, be only 300 pixels wide.  Now we have a full browser window to play around with again.  We can put the table width at 100% again.  Of course I went a little too off the deep end and had changed the orientation of the course from being vertically scrolled to being horizontally scrolled.  This was a bit too much of a departure for the development team head, but it was worth a try!

So, the first step of putting any course on-line is evaluating what type of courseware you’re going to employ.  We looked at both Segue and Moodle as open source alternatives to what we use at MSU, which is Angel (which Punya detests).  The system that we picked to go with is Moodle because of its wider user base and thus support.  Segue has many things we like, but it doesn’t have nearly as many users.  We briefly looked at Sakai, but decided against it because we already had familiarity with the other two.

There were two factors that made us decide on Moodle.  One is that you can develop stand alone “blocks” to add auxillary content to the system.  With blocks we can make stand alone modules that are plugged into the system, without us having to edit the actual coding of the application itself.  This is a boon to us because we no longer worry about updating Moodle in fear of erasing our customized interface.  We’ll be able to update Moodle and at worst have to rework our customized “blocks” only.

This was the main reason we went with Moodle.  Now comes the hard part.  We have to customize Moodle’s interface using themes to get the look we want.  Most Moodle themes are the same boxy, clunky look that the included themes are.  I don’t really consider it changing a theme by making a border color different.  So we’re going to push the envelope and see how much we can modify a Moodle theme without customizing too much in the system’s page display code.

You may be wondering why there’s an astronaut in the upper left corner of this site with a “For Sale” sign. I put ‘em up there just to keep the ideas that we’ve had about making TE150 something out of the ordinary alive on this blog. When I looked up images associated with the term ‘flight’ I came across items ranging from Wilbur and Orville Wright to Jet Propulsion Lab image gallery of manned spaceflight.  Intrigued by the JPL’s images, I did an image search on ’spacewalk’.  This one definitely caught my fancy.

On-line classes have become more and more popular in the University setting lately. Most universities now have some sort of on-line component. It’s a big money maker really. A faculty member develops the content, refreshes it every semester and T.A.s can run the course. No overhead of having to have seats for people to sit in. At the College of Education at Michigan State University, we already have a successful on-line Master’s program and the faculty is eager to branch into other domains. This is where TE150 comes in. According to the Description of Courses at MSU:

Course:	TE 150 Reflections on Learning
Semester:	Fall of every year, Spring of every year, Summer of every year
Credits:	Total Credits: 3 Lecture/Recitation/Discussion Hours: 3 3(3-0)
Description:	Students’ experiences as learners in comparison to psychological, sociological, and anthropological theories and assumptions about learning and teaching in and out of school.
Interdepartmental With:	Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education
Administered By:	Teacher Education
Effective Dates:	FALL 1992 - Open

Two enterprising Associate Professors at the college, Dr. Punya Mishra and Dr. Matt Koehler have decided to tackle the challenge of taking an undergrad Education intro course on-line. I can’t imagine two better people to try it since both of these Profs are tech savvy, design oriented and clever fellows. Lately their research on “TPCK” has been looking into using technology in a pedagogical and content rich way, so TE150 seems like a grand place to test out their theories. They have a lot to tackle, since by default neither of them want to use the MSU Angel LMS/CMS system to administrate and manage the course, plus Dr. Mishra, who’s very adept at teaching on-line, has some really interesting course management ideas.

This is where this blog comes in. From here on out, while I’m working with Dr. Mishra and Dr. Koehler, the rest of their team, I’ll be documenting the technical process of getting TE150 off the ground, much like the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk. I’m helping them design the CMS to their specifications as well as trying new and innovative ideas in the realm of on-line teaching. We’ve already discovered teaching Master level courses is far different than teaching undergrads on-line. We’re excited for the process and excited to see how everything falls into place over the next several months.

Here is the list of links and resources for “Update”

• Punya Mishra’s blog & corresponding blog post
• MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology Awards Competition
• Matt Koehler’s blog
• Online Teaching and Learning Colloquia Presentation on TE150

Here is the link to our final TE150 Moodle mockup (it is not the final look of the course):

http://dirkinke.fts.educ.msu.edu/TE150

login: punya pass: mishra

After clicking on the links below, hit “continue” on the login prompt (it’s just a mockup of the login screen). A side note needs to be entertained here. My wife came up with the little people icons located at the top of the three text blurbs. She’s currently developing a set of on-line courses herself and she is probably one of the hardest working, most thoughtful people I know when it comes to designing an on-line course and establishing a presence in such a course as the instructor. So I have to give her a lot of credit for letting me steal her icons.
Interface Mockup:

• Horizontal Layout
• Vertical Layout

Here are resources for things mentioned in the article “Moodled”:

• Moodle
• Segue
• Sakai
• Angel
• Creating Moodle blocks
• Moodle themes

Links of interest from the posting titled ‘Astronaut’:

• Astronaut with a ‘For Sale’ sign
• Google search on ‘Flight’
• Google search on ‘Spacewalk’
• Jet Propulsion Lab

This is a new idea I’m trying, putting supporting materials and resources in the right hand column for entries that are posted in the left hand column of this newsletter style layout. Whenever there is a new post, look here for any links that may be present in the often times massive text blurb on the left. Here are the links to the introduction to “TE150 on-line”.

• Dr. Punya Mishra
• Dr. Matt Koehler
• Ken Dirkin
• College of Education
• Michigan State University
• MSU Description of Courses