iterativelearning

In a meeting today, we were talking about ideas for a workshop on DE pedagogy. During one part of our discussion, we were sharing stories about how we use the various tools to support our teaching strategies, when one of the faculty shared an interesting detail about the Announcements tool.

With our LMS tool, WebCT, you can configure an announcement to appear as a pop-up window when the user logs into the site. Of course, this is designed to make it practically impossible for students to miss the announcement, which in theory, is a good thing, especially if you want to alert them to something important like a change in deadline or crucial assignment detail. But here’s the interesting usability angle: this colleague mentioned that some students had indicated to her that they ignore pop-up windows because they view them in the same way they view pop-up ads in all other websites — spam. I wonder if this was really the case or if the students were just using it as an escape hatch for avoiding responsibility for whatever the announcement may have obligated them to. If legit, it would be interesting to know what the rough percentage is out there of student users who ignore them? Has ignoring pop-up windows become such an ingrained user behavior that it’s applied even if they’re in a LMS? Based on a recent study at NC State

students seemed to find any dialog box a distraction from their assigned task; nearly half said that all they cared about was getting rid of these dialogs.

maybe …

Image credit: Swiss Bones

DE faculty periodically write about using blogs as a complement to a CMS/LMS because of its easy scalability. WordPress recently announced the addition of a polling feature, PollDaddy!. To set it up, all you need to do is click an icon, enter your questions, and follow the prompts.

With Yammer now extending the success of microblogging, it will be interesting to see if a similar sort of app carries over into educational CMS platforms. To be sure, one of the recurrent threads in online learning research has been greater interactivity and so would, for example, a Yammer-like tool help promote a greater sense of spontaneity among groups? And more specifically, could it promote the type of spontaneity that could lead to creative problem-solving? One factor to consider would likely be integration, that is, how well that app could be integrated with the CMS so students could, for example, easily receive updates via their phone or participate without having to be tethered to a laptop or desktop machine.