MyBrinshark

Apple recently unveiled its digital book-authoring program, iBooks Author, and I’m scared.

The last three years that I have dedicated to pursuing my Ph.D. in instructional design & technology, which centers on interactive digital text, have given me a new perspective on the delicate balance that is necessary for classroom technologies to be productive and fruitful rather than novel and superficial. The seemingly endless hours that I have spent reading journal articles, writing papers, reading book chapters, taking in lectures, reading conference proceedings, and reading some more, have left me feeling as though I have earned some sort of badge that licenses me to make qualified observations about new educational technologies.

But that’s just the problem; you don’t need to be qualified. iBooks Author allows any Apple user to design and develop an interactive, multitouch textbook. No design experience necessary.

I should be ecstatic that a layperson is able to design instructional products with applications that, until recently, required a personal computer programmer to develop. The digital revolution is finally upon us!

Not exactly. I’m concerned that the act of creating a digital book for students will impede the learning benchmarks that are expected of them. Let me put it this way: When was the last time you saw a well-designed, engaging PowerPoint presentation, where the speaker did not read the words directly off of the slide, verbatim?  This is my point.  We have allowed everyone to become an instructional designer.

This phenomenon is occurring much more broadly. We are encouraging everyone to become an expert on everything. When I feel a swollen lymph node on my 3-year-old daughter’s neck, I don’t immediately call her pediatrician. I consult WebMD. I’m convinced it is a severe case of lymphoma until the pediatrician assures me that her body is just fighting off a cold. He prescribes more vitamin C.

When I hear that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has once again dipped below 10,000, and it is only going to get worse, I jump on to my eTrade account and start selling.  I’m not a stock trader.  I don’t know anything about the stock market.  Nor am I a physician.  So why am I acting like one?  Because anyone can be an expert, and instructional design is no exception.  

I teach at a small university and an even smaller community college in the Southeast. Every semester during my brief five years’ experience, I have been assigned course sections accompanied by a blank Blackboard (or Moodle) shell and told to design a course. Not once have any of my Blackboard (or Moodle) course sites been evaluated, and most have never been viewed by anyone but my students.

The idea that instructors are somehow incapable of violating basic instructional design principles is naive.  What percentage of our nationwide faculty has heard of the split-attention effect, redundancy principle, contiguity principle, cognitive flexibility, or even cognitive load?  Now, instructors are expected to be subject matter experts and instructional designers. The two are not synonymous, and the results can be detrimental to learning. iBooks Author is giving creative license to everyone, with or without instructional design experience.

For instance, iBooks Author touts the ability to embed multiple-choice quizzes into the text, yet the research on inserting lower-level, recall-type adjunct questions in text has been mostly inconclusive since the 1960s. Its effect on comprehension is minimal at best, but its impact on extraneous cognitive load is more likely. A more desirable widget would be to allow the user to interact with the text generatively, that is, by generating unique paraphrases, summaries or analogies.  

Be aware of another thing: if you are going to use iBooks Author to design and develop that bestseller that you have always wanted to write, be prepared to sell it only in the iBookstore. That’s right. By creating your book in the iBooks Author output format, you are entering an exclusive licensing agreement with Apple. Check the fine print.

Let me be clear: I love Apple.  I love admire its pursuit of innovations in educational technology.  In fact, I composed this rant on an iPad.  So, I suppose iBooks Author is not completely negative. It opens the discourse on interactive text in education. But the thought of anyone being able to develop entire textbooks for class use on his or her MacBook worries me. Interactive, customized, and adaptive text should be the next educational technology milestone, but not like this.  

We are all going to continue to embrace and applaud Apple’s newest, sleekest application, because Apple is masterful at luring educators to its sexy designs and technology clique. But we should recognize that iBooks author is not an instructional tool that supports proven ID theory. And as a result, we will continue to build an increasingly accessible virtual world where we can act as professional instructional designers, physicians, and stock traders: with no experience necessary.  

So I will leave you with something to think about: Technology doesn’t make us experts. Let’s recognize that a teacher is not inherently an instructional designer. Let the designers design, and teachers teach. Besides, teachers don’t get paid enough to do both.  

Technology Is at Least 3 Years Away From Improving Student Success

January 13, 2012, 7:34 am

By Josh Fischman

Las Vegas—At the very start of the Higher Ed Tech Summit here this week, James Applegate threw out a challenge. Mr. Applegate, vice president for program development at the Lumina Foundation, told an overflow crowd that the United States needed 60 percent of its adults to hold high-quality degrees and credentials by the year 2025.

During the rest of the day, technology executives described programs that could improve graduation rates and learning, but won’t be able to do so for several years. They collect many points of data on what professors and students do, but can’t yet say what results in better grades and graduation rates. “We’re beginning to get lots of data on things like time of task, but we don’t have the outcomes yet to say what leads to a true learning moment. I think we are three to five years away from being about to do that,” said Troy Williams, vice president and general manager of Macmillan New Ventures, which makes the classroom polling system called I-clicker. “These are really early days,” agreed Matthew Pittinsky, who runs a digital transcript company called Parchment and was one of the founders of Blackboard.

There’s lots of technology out there that’s outcome-related. For instance, at the meeting, which is part of the international Consumer Electronics Show, the interactive textbook publisher Kno announced a suite of new features. One of them, a performance gauge callled Kno Me, gives students information about how much time they spend on different sections of a book, the results of quizzes, and the kinds of notes they took. “With thousands of students using these books, we can show them which of these variables are related to students—anonymous, of course—who get A’s, or B’s, or C’s, so students learn what kind of activity leads to the best results,” said Osman Rashid, the company’s chief executive.

But he admitted that the grades were self-reports: Students would have to add that information themselves, since colleges did not supply it to Kno. So the outcome data might not be reliable.

Video lecture capture is another tool that could help professors fine-tune teaching techniques, said Fred Singer, CEO of Echo360, whose lecture-capture software is used by more that 400 institutions. The software could identify parts of a talk devoted to a particular concept, and also detect how often students went over that segment, how long they spent on it, and all that information could be related to how students do on tests about that concept. If students don’t seem to be doing well, then a professor could try a different explanation. And even borrow one from a professor teaching the same subject whose students are doing better. But while all that information is available now, it isn’t being tied together, Mr. Singer said.

Technology companies are only beginning to realize that the tools they created for interactivity—last decade’s education buzzword—are powerful devices for learning analytics—this decade’s hot term. So now they are going to have to work with colleges to connect the dots to teaching outcomes, said Mr. Applegate.

He added that this will also require colleges to agree on desirable teaching and learning outcomes in the first place, something they don’t do now. And that’s another problem.

[Photo by Flickr user LGEPR]

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