Wetland Wednesday
August 5, 2020
In this last part I wanted to go over some of the value-added features of an online class. While it may be nice to offer a class on demand or at least on a flexible schedule there is still a need to maintain a sense of connectedness between the student and teacher. There are several tools in the marketplace that can help with this.
One of the more popular communication tools for a class setting is Zoom. In addition, there are number of paid remote meeting tools that offer a variety if features. Zoom has the big advantage of being basically free, however you do get what you pay for with this type of tool. Perhaps the biggest downside to free is that you have no or very little control of who can see you meeting and how it may be archived. There have been numerous stories of Zoom bombing a meeting with inappropriate images or behaviors from unwanted guests.
Personally, I really like Big Blue Button for our internal meetings with staff and students. Access is limited to only registered Swamp School participants and cannot be Zoom bombed. It is not free, but the cost is not that bad either. It also can switch presenters very easily during a meeting. This is very handy when a student wishes to display a photo or add some more detail to a question. It also has a very tight integration with many Learning Management Systems (LMS) such as Moodle, Schoology and Blackboard. This makes it very easily to implement across an entire program.
Video tracking has always been a bit dicey. How do we know if a student has watched an entire presentation? We need to ensure that when we issue a certificate that the student has completed the material. The answer is a new tool called WarpWire.
WarpWire is both a video playback system as well as a video analytics program. It gives us the ability to see who has watched what video and for how long. It has a very nice reporting feature that is easily to access. It is also integrated with the major LMS’s so it is very to use once it is installed.
WarpWire also has a number of behind the scenes features that allow the instructor to easily create a video on the fly. This is very useful in “how to” type lessons. It also maintains a video library that can be used across classes. One of the biggest benefits is that there is a lot of control over how a video can be shared or not. Many of our videos are proprietary and we would rather not see theses blasted across YouTube for all to see. Although this is one of the more expensive features we use, the security WarpWire provides is worth it.
Sadly, there is one other value-added feature that we have had to implement. Plagiarism has become rather commonplace in the online learning world. It is very easy to Google your way through a class and just copy and pasting your way to a degree. This is especially disconcerting given how just about all of our schools are going online.
There is a solution to this in the form of a plagiarism checker. We use one called UniCheck and have been very happy with it. It integrates nicely with our LMS and is relatively inexpensive to run. There are a number of plagiarism checkers in the marketplace and pricing is all over the place.
A good plagiarism checker should do a couple of things. First it will check the student document against the entirety of the internet. Then it will check a custom repository of previous student submissions. Any duplicate phrases and paragraphs will be flagged, and a report will be quickly (usually only a few minutes) generated. This report is visible to the student and they can decide if they want to submit or revise based upon the score. Oftentimes common phrases are shown as plagiarism warnings and the student can look these over beforehand.
Once the student hits the submit button the report and the document is sent to the teacher. Usually the teacher will ignore the common phase issue, but sometimes it is a hit at a bigger problem. The nice thing about the initial student report is that the student will see how they rank thereby avoiding uncomfortable discussions with the teacher before they submit. Afterwards it is a whole other matter.
One item on our value added wish list is a photo plagiarism checker. So far, we have not seen this in the marketplace. We have had a few of our students download pictures of wetland plants and try to pass them off as their own. We usually check these manly having seen the same photo many times. We will even Google the plant name to see if the student submission matches. This is a time consuming process and some sort of photo checker would be a great help. But for now, we are always watching.
I hoe this has been a helpful review of some of the good and bad of online learning. As we move forward into the school year, I suspect these issues will continue to crop up.
All the best, Marc