Change Management

In one of the courses I teach - BPR the students learn about change management. In the course I am currently taking on distance education technology, we will be discussing the theory of change management in education.

From first glance it appears the two are not much different. You have personnel who are change agents, you have a growth and then a level off of acceptance of change and you have a "normal" curve of people accepting change. You have people who are first adapters and those that are laggards.

Really what that says to me is that, no matter what industry we are in, change must be correctly managed. Whether you are in a high manufacturing business or an educational field, or anywhere in-between.

September

The newness of the school year is always exciting to me. Whether it is getting ready for a brand new course or preparing for a course already taught. It doesn't matter that I start teaching and taking new courses throughout the year, September is the starting point. Maybe because August is break time for almost all my courses. Maybe it is because school has always started in September here in BC.

I guess it doesn't matter why. It is just a great feeling of renewal for the year. I always look forward to September.

WiFi Issues

Traveling and online instruction should, in theory, be easy. There is wifi available everywhere....right? Wrong. Last year I found out just how wrong. Hotels might have internet access where ever you go but we camp. So looking for RV sites with wifi was an adventure. But we consistently booked at them. What we considered good access and what we got was sometimes two completely different things. Some places were good and wifi was available at our site. Other places, the wifi was only available at a bench outside of the main office. Other places went the cheap route and had "residential" wifi instead of multiple. So, if you were the first person on in the morning, you were good to go. Otherwise, you were pretty much out of luck.

This year Rogers introduced tethering - I thought great, this will solve all my problems. Almost. You still need to be in cell phone range (camping at a provincial park in the middle of nowhere does not get you cell phone access).

All in all though, it has been much better this year. Whether I am linked to wifi access at a Starbucks or tethering on my cell phone, I can get access at least a couple of times a day.

Waiting for marks

The hardest part for me for any course is waiting for the marks. I have just finished two courses in my MDE program. Although I know that I am probably at an A level given the marks so far.....I want to know for sure.

I know that the theory is that students should learn for the sake of learning. And I do, I really do. I just also want to know how I did on the scales that are there. I know the scales are not perfect and do not test all of our intelligences, and work better for some people than for others. But for me, it is a factor in my satisfaction. I love learning while I am doing the course - but at the end of the course I want closure.

Being on the other side, I know that often you need to wait until the bureaucratic process makes its way through. So I try to be patient - not working so far.

Games for motivation

Klein & Freitag (1991) found that instructional games enhanced the motivation of students in all four areas – attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction and that students learned as much with games as with traditional methods of instruction. Games add another method of instruction that can add to understanding as well as to motivation. I am currently trying to determine how this will work in my online course. When I am teaching a face-to-face course, this objective is much easier. For my f2f introductory accounting course, I used a monopoly game to teach the students accounting entries with great success. Students’ moves on the monopoly board resulted in purchases, sales, rent or miscellaneous income and expense. Students were then required to prepare the journal entry, post it to the correct general ledger account and then prepare a trail balance and statements when the game ended (after eight classes). Online monopoly is an option that I have been thinking about but have not yet been able to figure out a way to coordinate moves. I also use jeopardy style games for review before midterms and finals. For an online course, I am still working on how to implement this in a cost-effective manner for the students. There are programs that can create online jeopardy games for students for review and I am looking into these programs but they must be able to work with the LMS or have a separate website that students where students can logon.

Content dump or training

There are many great instructors out there. There are also many great course designers. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of great experts in fields who shouldn't be instructing.

Instruction should not be an information dump. Someone standing at the front of the room trying to tell you everything they know about a subject in as little time as possible is not training. We need to ensure that training - whether it is f2f or DE - is a learning experience for the student. We need to ensure that the opportunity is there for the student to understand and apply the material - not just be a sounding board to gather information.

Unfortunately, a lot of consumers of PD want to be a sounding board - they don't want to actually learn the material - they just want to be informed about that latest information without having to make the effort to read it. So, trainers have often taken the easiest route and designed their "course" as an information dump.

My goal is to ensure that my courses are never just and information dump....but that students who complete a course of mine - f2f or DE - will feel that they learned something. Even if they didn't intend to when they signed up for the course.

Balanced Scorecard

It seems no matter what course I am teaching, the importance of the balanced scorecard comes up. It is important for both accounting and IT people to understand.

Vinfen shows the examples of the four perspectives for industry

http://www.balancedscorecard.org/Portals/0/PDF/Vinfen_FY06_Scorecard.pdf

- financial

- learning and growth

- internal

- customer

But the balanced scorecard does not need to be used only for industry.

The University of Leeds has been awarded a place in Palladium's Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame.

You can see their interactive balanced scorecard here:

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/about/strategy/strategy_map.htm#mainmap

First blog

Teaching in a number of different areas means my blogs will be eclectic. The newest ones may not be applicable to your current interests. That's okay, they are all current to mine.