Imagine for a moment, if you will, sitting with an assigned group in my first ever college class. They’re all talking about when and where they’re going to meet up and all the while I’m sitting there waiting for the right moment to tell them that I commute to school and could not make it to any of the dates they were discussing. It was a terrifying moment. Besides a golden opportunity to make friends, if I didn’t meet up with them, I probably wouldn’t be able to do my part of our final project.

Could Skype be a solution!!

Finally, gathering enough gumption, I told my partners and they said that we would find a way to all meet up at once! After about a month of trying to coordinate a date, we all eventually gave up. At that time, I had just recently discovered Skype. I told my group, who knew about the program long before I did, that when they met up, they should just Skype me. Through this, I would be able to participate in all their discussions and stay within the loop. That would have been the ideal situation.

But the initial confusions…

Keep in mind that each group had five people. So, my group all decided to meet up in the library. Here they all are – gathered around a cluttered library table in order to talk to me. It wasn’t organized, which naturally caused confusion and disaster. After a while, one of my partners (let’s call her Ophelia Payne) took over the computer completely. She relayed messages from all my other partners to me. For a while, that worked until we got down to the nuts and bolts of our project. I couldn’t hear the conversation going on around Ophelia’s computer and she couldn’t listen to other people and talk to me at the same time.

Was Skype a good idea (esp. in educational projects)!!

Come back to present day. Working more with technology and education every day, I now know Skype wasn’t a good idea. The problem was that I couldn’t talk to them all at once, despite them all having computers there. Being broke college kids, none of us were about to pay for group video chat. Now you might think to yourself, “Why didn’t you just use a Google+ hangout?” Mostly because back then, in 2010, Google+ was just a distant dream. And also because it doesn’t have the capacity needed to genuinely collaborate with my partners. We didn’t want to all hang out (so to speak). We wanted an A on our project.

It makes sense that a “hangout” would be fairly limited education wise. However, a lot of people use Skype for business meetings. Skype has all the business tools needed to hold a full-fledged meeting at any time. This is not the case when it comes to education and online classes. My experience with Skype and school was not through an online course, but it very well could have been. Universities should supply programs where students can meet outside of class without leaving the comfort of their dorms or their homes.

Now I ask myself and the various Educational institutes “Why not WizIQ??” 

We have Blackboard available to us. Through Blackboard, we can use WizIQ. Why doesn’t my university pay for any of this? Time and again, our administrators will say, “our students and their education come first.” If that were true, why aren’t technology programs that would further our studies priorities for investment rather than new athletic centers? Particularly in a school where almost half the students are commuters like me? I almost failed my first ever college class because we didn’t have the right tools at our disposal. Our university professors expect us all to just meet up on our time, not taking into account commuters, adult learners, work schedules, or the fact that students who park and walk to and from our campus in the evenings tend to get stabbed (no, seriously, I like my school and all, but during the daytime…at night, police escorts are recommended for the football players, let alone an English and theater major like me).

Skype isn’t good enough anymore. If my university is planning to continue down the “improving” path that they’re trying to pave, it’s going to take a lot more effort. Or at least some remarkably cheap tools that are made for working and learning together, not merely meeting or “hanging out.”

“Why would I need WizIQ? I see my students during the day in class…I hardly need a virtual classroom when I teach in a real one!”

We hear this quite a bit as we talk to people about WizIQ. Whether the instructors are in K12 schools, universities, or even training organizations, the physical classroom remains the location of choice for a whole lot of education. However, the days in which an educator’s day ends when the students walk out the door are long over. While there has always been the need to prep for the next day or grade papers, now educators often spend long hours outside of class interacting with their students via Moodle, Facebook, blogs, and discussion forums. Teachers respond to student emails, post questions for consideration on learning management systems, and record flipped classroom lessons. Even summer break is no longer sacred, with many instructors reaching out to students for advanced preparations and out-of-school study (AP teachers are famous for this).

Even in the last five years, both the technology and the expectations have evolved such that students and teachers tend to be at least indirectly connected in ways that my teachers would certainly not have expected. All the forums, blogs, and emails, though, can’t replace an actual conversation or face-to-face meeting. They can’t take the place of a teacher and students sitting around a whiteboard while the instructor draws out concepts and talks over his or her notes.

And this, as I tell the brick-and-mortar classroom teachers, is where WizIQ shows its stuff. The concept of office hours is nothing new in university settings, but when an increasing number of students are in school part time or coming back to school as adult learners, traditional office hours may simply not be feasible for many students. Adjunct faculty, as well, are often not available to conduct the office hours that can be so helpful to students who need a small group settings.

Similarly, many secondary schools have offered “homework hotlines” with teachers or students offering phone-based assistance, but in a K12 setting, actual face-to-face help with homework or extended learning day activities are difficult or impossible to accommodate, whether because of staffing issues, transportation, or student schedule constraints.

Virtual office hours, however, bring the benefits of an actual classroom to students and teachers regardless of where they might be. An instructor can be in her dining room, students can be at the library, in their bedrooms, in a hotel room, or just settling down after getting the kids to bed. WizIQ’s virtual classroom then makes sure that learners and teachers can work together at that oh-so-important whiteboard, see each others’ faces, and discuss coursework in real time. With the latest enhancements to audio in the virtual classroom, participants don’t even need headphones. They sit down at their computers and get to work.

The virtual classroom provides a pretty solid facsimile of the physical classroom in which teachers at brick and mortar institutions are accustomed to teaching and in which their students are accustomed to learning. WizIQ also happens to be cost-effective enough that it doesn’t require a major investment in a full-blown distance education program to justify purchasing licenses for instructors at an institution. In fact, individual academic teachers can get a free account; costs are only incurred if the institution decides to adopt the software more widely, perhaps for integration with an LMS or to manage classes and instructors from a unified dashboard. Just click the “Contact our sales team” link on our plans page and let them know you’re interested in a free academic account to try WizIQ for virtual office hours (or flipped classrooms, or interactive whiteboarding, or whatever).

How do you connect online for instruction and learning? Where do you find teachers and students from around the world? One way to connect and learn from an international audience is to learn online through WizIQ live classes. Another way is to join an online conference. Connecting online (CO09-CO12) is a free annual online conference that takes place on the first weekend of February. The presenters are educators from around the globe who are passionate about instruction and learning and are enthusiastic about sharing how they engage with students through the use of technology. I have been organizing and moderating the sessions for the past 4 years with the help of volunteer teachers and the support of the team at WizIQ.

This year’s CO12 was incredible. The theme of the conference was connecting online for instruction and learning that goes beyond the classroom. The Presenters discussed the following topics:

• Connecting online to improve instruction and learning: Online learning and pedagogical/instructional experiences
• Experiences with the use of technology in face-to-face and online classes. What worked and what didn’t work for you?
• How do you use technology to promote your online workshops, consultation, business, and communities?
• Research conducted on e-learning
• 21st Century learning and teaching
• Challenges of the 21st Century learning/teaching environment
• Leading a business with e-learning technology

You are invited to view the recordings and add your comments. I would like to thank Harman Singh the CEO of WizIQ for his ongoing support and Dr. Smirnova and Nicola Avery for helping moderate the sessions. I would not have been able to spend 16 hours a day moderating the sessions. Not only is manpower necessary, but so are back up plans in case someone misses a session or technology fails.

Technology can facilitate instruction and learning and make our lives easier, but it can also pose challenges. Weather conditions may not always be compatible with technology. One of the participants, Janet Biachini wasn’t able to give her session due to heavy snow conditions in Italy. She  walked for 2 hours with her husband carrying the laptop to a neighbor to try to give the session only to find out that there was no electricity there, either. I would like to thank all the presenters for doing an awesome job and for being passionate about teaching and learning with technology and sharing their online experiences with the world. The sessions focused on lifelong learning ideas, Math, English as a second or foreign language, electronic pen, cell phones, blogs, Moodle, blended learning, second life, music, art, research, authentic learning, community building, and online connections that grow.

The connections develop as presenters and participants come back year after year to learn from one another. This year the presenters agreed to write a collaborative book for CO12. The purpose of the book is to share the topics of the presentations in writing. Readers will be able to gain a deeper understanding of the presentations and how technology can be used to enhance instruction and learning. We hope that the book will be out before the next free Connecting Online conference for 2013 (CO13). Presenters may begin the registration process for CO13, today. You may also join the Ning social network for CO12 for updates for CO12 and CO13.

We learn from one another by connecting online via WizIQ’s live classes and online conferences. Online conferences provide us with opportunities to meet and learn from educators from around the globe. We would normally not be able to travel to so many countries for face-to-face conferences because of the prices and time involved. Take advantage of these online conferences and join us on CO13. In the meantime, you are invited to watch the videos and add your feedback so we can make CO13 even better.

Attending a liberal arts college as a writing major requires very little technology. We bring to class a pencil and a notebook and that’s the extent of it. Once in a while, the professor may scribble something onto the chalkboard. (And yes, these are actual CHALK boards.) So my involvement in technology is very limited on the educational front.

However, a few of my classes, specifically the LAS core classes (liberal arts and sciences core classes–my school’s version of “gen eds”) are beginning to dabble in the use of learning management systems (LMS). As Noah explains in his post, “LMS (like my status) for LMS (learning management systems)” a learning management system is a site, such as Moodle or Blackboard, where a professor can post resources and homework assignments and students can post work and engage in online discussions.

Columbia College’s LMS of choice is Moodle, though we also have to use a site called OASIS to deal with class registration, so some professors choose to post handouts on OASIS instead of Moodle. (If that sentence was confusing to read, think about how students feel having to sort that out in a real life situation.) In my four semesters of college, I have already witnessed a variety of different ways professors utilize Moodle and I’ve come to realize that some work better than others. The biggest mistakes I’ve seen professors make are actually the two extremes of overuse and sporadic use.

I’m currently in a science class that heavily depends on Moodle. The professor often posts hand-outs straight to Moodle instead of wasting paper printing them out and every week, we’re required to post on the forums with a response to the reading assignments. So far, so good. I’ve actually found a lot of benefit in this, as it really forces me to read the material and to think about what I read.

However, we are also required to comment on someone else’s reading response every week. Personally, it feels like busy work. Every week, I go through the responses and find a little nugget of opinion I can comment and agree on, elaborating on why I agree. (And by “elaborate,” I mean I rephrase what they said in my own words.) I think the idea is to generate discussion and to feel more camaraderie in the classroom. Or something like that.

Here’s the problem I have not only with that assignment, but with the concept of learning management systems in general: I did not sign up for an online course. If I wanted to take online classes, I would not be paying over $20,000 on tuition and spending over $12,000 living on campus. If I wanted to take this class online, I would not have made the choice to get up at 8:00 every Tuesday morning and sit in a classroom for three hours. When more discussion happens online than in the classroom, what’s the point of going to class to every day?

At this point, I learn more on my own than I do in the classroom. We have so many outside readings that I feel like I’m teaching myself the material. This is fine; a critical aspect of college is learning how to be more independent in your studies. However, if most of the discussion is done in online forums, then we have little to talk about in the classroom. Don’t get me wrong—this particular professor does make good use of class time with various videos, Power Point presentations, and in-class activities. However, I think when using an LMS to this degree, you do run the risk of making class time feel irrelevant to students, which could result in an inattentive class.

Then there are professors who use Moodle only once in a while. These are the worst. I had a professor who would randomly remind us to “check Moodle” because she would sometimes post readings or videos on there that we were expected to journal about. I don’t think I ever did any of these assignments on time. Since she used it so irregularly, I never remembered to check and wouldn’t know about the assignments until the next week in class when she would ask us what we thought about the readings or videos. Personally, I think that using Moodle simply to post resources for students to access is the best use of the site. However, if the students never know when these resources will be posted, lack of participation is likely to increase.

Despite my focusing on the negatives, I do truly believe that learning management systems are a great resource for college professors. It’s good for the environment, as cuts down on the amount of paper we use in schools; it can be a good way for the shy or quiet kid to voice their thoughts and opinions; and it’s simply a breath of fresh air from old teaching techniques. I just think it’s extremely important for professors to step back and look at how they make use of it. These websites should act as a supplement to the classroom learning experience—not a replacement.