So, Emily Wray forwarded my initial letter in the previous post to the director of the program and she wrote back and DID address some of my concerns:
"Hi Gina,
Emily forwarded me your message expressing your concerns about the Digital Media & Education Applications course. We certainly welcome feedback from our students and it is particularly heartening to hear from someone who is obviously passionate about technology. I can assure you that our instructors share that passion and stay current with trends and research in educational technology. Equally as important, our instructors and our board of advisors have a great deal of real world experience - not only in the field of academia but also corporate and government. In fact, given your interest in iPad, you should be excited to know that we have the head of Apple Education as one of EMDT's key advisors.
The choices we make regarding our course content is based on the combination of what is current, what is relevant (real world application), and what is feasible in the accelerated timeframe of our program. It is true that the majority of our students are currently working in K-12 education. But there are also a good number of corporate trainers, e-learning designers, and students hoping to make the transition to the instructional design field. Technology does change at an astonishing rate; however, most developers of educational/training content are late adopters. They often have smaller budgets and have a backlog of legacy content that must run on any new platform adopted. The adoption cycle is often longer for training than it is for any other technology-driven group in an organization. The EMDT program takes into consideration all of these factors when we develop our courses to ensure maximum benefit for our students.
HTML5 is an up and coming technology. It is making impressive strides in some areas that Flash has traditionally dominated. Unfortunately, it is still far from mature. While I have seen some impressive samples of animation created utilizing its Canvas element, it does not quite match Flash's ability to deliver rich animation and interactive media. Flash remains the industry standard for developing instructional multimedia and courseware in numerous facets of online education and training. For organizations with little to no interactive content, iPad and other platforms that lack Flash support are easy to adopt. For those who have been developing content in Flash for years; however, the lack of legacy support will not be an option. Flash as a tool is also more accessible for those who are more designer than programmer and Adobe has already been building tools in their products that embrace HTML5 (see http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/10/adobe-shows-off-flash-to-html5-conversion-tool/ and http://www.reelseo.com/html-5-war-won-adobe-kaltura/).
Captivate, on the other hand, is stable (we are now on version 5) and is an excellent tool for rapid e-learning development. In fact, plans already exist to adopt Captivate in place of Flash in the DAE course due to a number of factors including: practicality for our students, its relative complexity in relation to Flash, and its prominence in the e-learning industry. However, even with Captivate, the output will typically be a Flash-based SWF file when interactive media is the end product.
As I have noticed over my career in educational technology, design tools come and go over time. No matter what we teach, within a few years, the technology is in danger of being obsolete. In light of this, I view the understanding of how people process the various media forms and how these media can be optimized to best deliver instruction as the key take-away from this month. I hope that you will find the concepts we cover a welcome addition to your overall media design tool kit.
Sincerely,
Lisa Smith | Course Director | Education Media Design & Technology Master of Science | Full Sail University"
And I wrote back this:
"Lisa,
Your response is so very informative and appreciated. Thank you for the articles as well.
My initial feeling is that teaching educators/trainers Flash is like teaching someone learning to swim in a raging river. I believe that it would intimidate most people and make them feel that they need far more deign and technical skills to create engaging eLearning materials. I personally think teaching Flash is a huge overkill for your basic teacher.
I worked for Apple many years ago as an Apple Education Consultant. This was back in the Macromind (before Macromedia) Director days. There was no one on the planet more enthusiastic than I was seeing and knowing all of the possibilities for teachers and how this software could enhance education. However, there was also no one more disheartened than I was a few months later after beating my head against the wall trying to get teachers to embrace a new way of teaching. So many teachers were unwilling to put the time and energy into learning a complex piece of software. In fact, none were. Which is why, I think the rapid eLearning approach is crucial, especially given the rapid pace of this program if your sincere intention in this program is to create tech-savvy educators who leave this program and use what they learn. Flash takes years to really learn and it is highly complex to create even a simple interactive quiz, whereas, Captivate combines screen capture, quizzes, powerpoint features (that they probably already know) and then produces an entire course in one file. While, I am very happy to hear that Captivate is planned to become the software for this course, (and I hope for other courses as well) it is disappointing to me that what I believed to be the most cutting edge education program is not utilizing the latest and most efficient tools to create eLearning content. I just don't think of Flash in itself as "the" eLearning tool of choice but rather a design and programming tool.
I see so much potential in this program but so far, I don't see anything we've done so far as "cutting edge" - Rena had us pasting our formatted research papers into the cell of a Google Spreadsheet in order to collaborate with fellow students. I cannot tell you how appalling that was having used Office Live and Apple iWork.com and Glasscubes.com and Huddle.com and other countless cutting edge collaboration tools. There was no real collaboration using emergent technologies in a course with that name. I love iWeb as a tool and iMove and I do believe that educators should know them, but I don't see where they fit in a class about collaboration. The classes Wimba's were completely unorganized and uninteresting. I also received a 100 grade for a research paper that I spent weeks on and then learned during the Wimba (after I received my grade) that Rena hadn't even read my paper. So, basically, I received a 100 for pasting text into the cell of a spreadsheet.
Your email and knowledge in this field is so impressive and appreciated and I hope you can take my words as constructive criticism rather than just a bunch of empty complaints. I want this program to be cutting edge for my own learning experience but also for other students who are out in the field with the opportunities to change the course of education. And finally, I want this program to be a huge success for Full Sail as a school to be truly offering a cutting edge experience in designing eLearning materials.
Anything I can do to help this program, I am 100% on board.
Thank you again for listening and taking the time to respond.
Warmest regards,
Gina Fant-Saez"
I have heard nothing back and have been sitting and teaching myself Captivate for the last week.....
Monday, February 7, 2011
My 2nd Class: Digital Media and Education Applications
When I read the syllabus about this class and realized that the "Education Application" we were using was going to be Flash, I wrote to the instructor, Emily Wray.
"Hi Emily,
i'm here at Full Sail to learn new things and be at the cutting edge of eLearning. I sincerely apologize, but Flash is dated and in my opinion, on the way out. I believe that more and more iPads will start replacing textbooks and become more and more prominent in schools. See THIS. As I'm sure you know, Flash is not supported on Apple iPhones, iPads or iPods, which are THE most popular devices in the hands of our youth today. It just doesn't make sense to me to spend a month creating Flash animations or exercises when HTML 5 is quickly replacing it and the most prominent devices don't support it. I agree with Steve Jobs. The plug-in is buggy, requires people to download 3rd party software and it frequently crashes my computer. More and more sites are removing Flash, so why is this class teaching a soon to be irrelevant piece of software?
I sincerely want this program to be the very best it can be and I don't mean to come across as just complaining without good intentions. But I feel that this class should be using Adobe Captivate and Camtasia and maybe some Keynote which can then be posted to iWeb. I feel that teaching Flash to educators is a waste of our time and our money and I would guess that most people in the program don't realize it. I'm concerned that the Full Sail instructors are simply teaching what they know rather than innovating their curriculums each class to change and include the latest cutting edge solutions for eLearning. Blogging and Google Docs and Flash were cutting edge 4 years ago.
I would like to work on my own and learn Adobe Captivate and create my own project with other tools rather than spend a month re-learning Flash. Whatever I can do to help you or any of my instructors move into more cutting edge eLearning tools for the benefit of all of us, I am more than happy to help. I really hope you understand my concerns.
Please let me know how to proceed with this class.
Thanks so much,
Gina Fant-Saez"
I received this note back from Emily:
"Hi Gina,
Thank you for your email and for the concerns you raised about using Flash
this month.
Because your email addressed issues outside the scope of my purview as
Associate Course Director for Digital Media and Education Applications
(DAE), I shared your thoughts with Lisa Smith, DAE Course Director and Dr.
Holly Ludgate, EMDT Program Director. You will be receiving a response from
them as well.
The foundation of the EMDT program is project based learning in a
constructivist environment. We are guided in our belief that learning and
achievement will run deeper if it is meaningful to the learner, either
personally or professionally.
That said, you have indicated a desire to explore Adobe Captivate in
creating interactive multimedia courseware this month. As long as you are
able to meet the objectives in the rubric, I feel comfortable with you
adapting the course assignments using this tool.
Now that you have access to the course assignments via FSO, please review
them and submit a proposal of how you'd like to use Adobe Captivate as a
substitute for Flash.
I look forward to a great month and hope that your exploration of Captivate
will be both meaningful and challenging.
Emily"
Does her response make any sense to you? How does it address the issue of teaching Flash to Educators?
"Hi Emily,
i'm here at Full Sail to learn new things and be at the cutting edge of eLearning. I sincerely apologize, but Flash is dated and in my opinion, on the way out. I believe that more and more iPads will start replacing textbooks and become more and more prominent in schools. See THIS. As I'm sure you know, Flash is not supported on Apple iPhones, iPads or iPods, which are THE most popular devices in the hands of our youth today. It just doesn't make sense to me to spend a month creating Flash animations or exercises when HTML 5 is quickly replacing it and the most prominent devices don't support it. I agree with Steve Jobs. The plug-in is buggy, requires people to download 3rd party software and it frequently crashes my computer. More and more sites are removing Flash, so why is this class teaching a soon to be irrelevant piece of software?
I sincerely want this program to be the very best it can be and I don't mean to come across as just complaining without good intentions. But I feel that this class should be using Adobe Captivate and Camtasia and maybe some Keynote which can then be posted to iWeb. I feel that teaching Flash to educators is a waste of our time and our money and I would guess that most people in the program don't realize it. I'm concerned that the Full Sail instructors are simply teaching what they know rather than innovating their curriculums each class to change and include the latest cutting edge solutions for eLearning. Blogging and Google Docs and Flash were cutting edge 4 years ago.
I would like to work on my own and learn Adobe Captivate and create my own project with other tools rather than spend a month re-learning Flash. Whatever I can do to help you or any of my instructors move into more cutting edge eLearning tools for the benefit of all of us, I am more than happy to help. I really hope you understand my concerns.
Please let me know how to proceed with this class.
Thanks so much,
Gina Fant-Saez"
I received this note back from Emily:
"Hi Gina,
Thank you for your email and for the concerns you raised about using Flash
this month.
Because your email addressed issues outside the scope of my purview as
Associate Course Director for Digital Media and Education Applications
(DAE), I shared your thoughts with Lisa Smith, DAE Course Director and Dr.
Holly Ludgate, EMDT Program Director. You will be receiving a response from
them as well.
The foundation of the EMDT program is project based learning in a
constructivist environment. We are guided in our belief that learning and
achievement will run deeper if it is meaningful to the learner, either
personally or professionally.
That said, you have indicated a desire to explore Adobe Captivate in
creating interactive multimedia courseware this month. As long as you are
able to meet the objectives in the rubric, I feel comfortable with you
adapting the course assignments using this tool.
Now that you have access to the course assignments via FSO, please review
them and submit a proposal of how you'd like to use Adobe Captivate as a
substitute for Flash.
I look forward to a great month and hope that your exploration of Captivate
will be both meaningful and challenging.
Emily"
Does her response make any sense to you? How does it address the issue of teaching Flash to Educators?
Is this Emergent or Collaborative?
We were assigned a research paper that we will be working on for months. In my first class, we had 3 weeks to turn in our first drafts. We were put into a group with 4 students and we were supposed to review each other's papers. Ok, cool, but keep in mind that most of us, including me, have never written a research paper and there are all sorts of formatting hoops to jump through and lots of rules to adhere to in the writing process.
So, what did we use to collaborate? If I say, Google Docs, you think, ok cool. But it wasn't a Google Doc, it was a Google Spreadsheet. We wrote our papers and formatted them with MS Word, but then we had to copy and paste, and this is what it looked like:
On the right side of my jumbled mess of a paper are my two peer reviews.
Is this cutting edge collaboration? Should I be paying someone to teach me to paste my work into a spreadsheet?
I got onto OfficeLive.com and created an account and sent this to the teacher to show her the collaboration features built for Microsoft Office.
See at the bottom where you can add comments?
You tell me, which one is emergent and built to be collaborative?
After I sent this to the teacher, she didn't even try it out or create a free account. She saw that Office Live offers business accounts that cost a fee and then abandoned it without even trying it or realizing that you can create a free account and use up to 2 gigs. God forbid Full Sail get an account on Office Live to show us the possibilties. Maybe more schools would follow suit.
I cannot tell you how appalled I am that the ONLY collaborative assignment in a class about collaboration was using a spreadsheet to collaborate. This is truly disgraceful, unprofessional, misleading and unacceptable to be taking people's money for them to be taught this.
This is doing such a HUGE disservice to the students in this program. So many students don't have as much experience with computers and collaboration that I do, so many don't have any idea about cutting-edge collaboration software or how useless this exercise was. Many, if not most of the students in the program are teachers working in the field. God forbid they take this lesson back to their students and teach them that pasting into the cell of a spreadsheet is an emergent collaboration tool.
I feel so strongly that this exercise is absolutely disgraceful that a master's level instructor is teaching this to educators paying to learn emergent collaboration methods. In my opinion, it is harmful to the field of education and the thousands of students of the program's current employed educators. Not to mention, it is unacceptable that Full Sail is either not savvy enough to recognize the disservice they are doing or they don't care enough to supervise their curriculums and to ensure that they are hiring instructors who are well-versed professionals in the classes they are teaching.
My next class had the same exact thing, an outdated curriculum and a teacher who was teaching a subject that they knew little to nothing about.
So, what did we use to collaborate? If I say, Google Docs, you think, ok cool. But it wasn't a Google Doc, it was a Google Spreadsheet. We wrote our papers and formatted them with MS Word, but then we had to copy and paste, and this is what it looked like:
On the right side of my jumbled mess of a paper are my two peer reviews.
Is this cutting edge collaboration? Should I be paying someone to teach me to paste my work into a spreadsheet?
I got onto OfficeLive.com and created an account and sent this to the teacher to show her the collaboration features built for Microsoft Office.
See at the bottom where you can add comments?
You tell me, which one is emergent and built to be collaborative?
After I sent this to the teacher, she didn't even try it out or create a free account. She saw that Office Live offers business accounts that cost a fee and then abandoned it without even trying it or realizing that you can create a free account and use up to 2 gigs. God forbid Full Sail get an account on Office Live to show us the possibilties. Maybe more schools would follow suit.
I cannot tell you how appalled I am that the ONLY collaborative assignment in a class about collaboration was using a spreadsheet to collaborate. This is truly disgraceful, unprofessional, misleading and unacceptable to be taking people's money for them to be taught this.
This is doing such a HUGE disservice to the students in this program. So many students don't have as much experience with computers and collaboration that I do, so many don't have any idea about cutting-edge collaboration software or how useless this exercise was. Many, if not most of the students in the program are teachers working in the field. God forbid they take this lesson back to their students and teach them that pasting into the cell of a spreadsheet is an emergent collaboration tool.
I feel so strongly that this exercise is absolutely disgraceful that a master's level instructor is teaching this to educators paying to learn emergent collaboration methods. In my opinion, it is harmful to the field of education and the thousands of students of the program's current employed educators. Not to mention, it is unacceptable that Full Sail is either not savvy enough to recognize the disservice they are doing or they don't care enough to supervise their curriculums and to ensure that they are hiring instructors who are well-versed professionals in the classes they are teaching.
My next class had the same exact thing, an outdated curriculum and a teacher who was teaching a subject that they knew little to nothing about.
My First Course - Emergent Technologies in a Collaborative Culture
The instructor was Rena Hanaway and I liked her. She was accessible and very kind and I want to say that my review is in no way meaning to insult or demean anyone at all. I am not pointing fingers at anyone, I'm simply stating my own experience and opinion.
First of all, I own a music collaboration company. I'm a bit of collaboration junkie via technology. In my youth, I started with Compuserve in 1990 and played in the first AOL chat rooms and I played with Yahoo Messenger and the first versions of iChat. I got my masters degree at NYU in Interactive Telecommunications at the Tisch School where I learned digital audio, digital video, Marcomedia Director, Hypercard scripting etc. And as I grew out of playing with collaboration toys, I ventured into ftp servers, file sharing, iDisk, Google docs and project management and collaboration sites like Central Desktop, BaseCamp, Glasscubes, Huddle, iWork.com etc. I can say confidently that I know about collaboration in the digital age.
I realize that I have more experience than your average student but I would think that my instructor would also have some experience with collaboration tools. From what I experienced in this class, she didn't and had never even used Office Live while having her students using MS Office in a class about collaboration.
I would think that a course named after the word "collaboration" would somewhere utitlize collaboration in the course. Honestly, there was nothing emergent or collaborative about this class. We created a blog which is very outdated. Anyone current and tech savvy knows that blogging is dead. Very few people blog anymore. It's been replaced with social networking. This was known many years ago so why is Full Sail teaching us how to blog? Why aren't we using Schoology or something like that? Isn't their goal to create cutting-edge educators with this program? Wired magazine wrote an article back in 2008 exlpaining how blogging was dying. See HERE. And this was 3 years ago. There are countless articles about how blogging is down over 60% in the last few years. You'd think a university teaching education would be on top of current trends and not waste our time going backwards.
Here is the saddest thing of all that happened in this collaboration course. The only true collaborative assignment required us to read other student's research papers. Ok great, we're going to finally collaborate!! But wait, this was done via pasting our formatted research papers into the cell of a spreadsheet. This is described in detail in my next post and I show you exactly what this looked like. This assignment was the straw that broke my camel's back for me. I am supposed to pay thousands of dollars to be taught that emergent collaboration is pasting a research paper into the cell of a spreadsheet on Google Docs?? I'm sorry, but this is absolutely appalling and unacceptable.
The class meets weekly via a web conference at a site called Wimba. I've used Webex a lot for business and this is a version of that but geared more towards education. It's a cool tool. However, the instructor brought nothing collaborative for us to do during these conferences. To me, she sounded exhausted not enthusiastic and just matter of factly, explained about the week's exercises and asked if there were any questions. There were these long lulls of awkward silences because I know other students, like me, started making dinner or watching TV because there was nothing engaging or requiring our attention in any Wimba that I sat in on. She made no use of the Wimba screen to show us anything at all nor were we ever asked to collaborate. She was not organized or focused and the entire class just sat there silently while she explained the week's assignments which we could have easily read about online. Why did she not use this time to actually teach us something about collaboration? This was a collaboration tool... Show us cutting edge collaboration solutions in schools and businesses, get a guest speaker to show us if she didn't know? Why were we in a class about collaboration and not collaborating?
The class taught how to create blogs, use iMovie, iWeb and review a few "Web 2.0" tools - and while some of the skills are useful, what is truly emergent or collaborative? As stated, blogs are on the way out and the term "Web 2.0" was a buzz word back in 2007. We never really got to see or review our fellow student's work, so again, nothing at all was collaborative.
I also thought that this program was going to focus on what was actually happening in current cutting-edge eLearning environments. How are cutting edge schools collaborating? Let us research that and then show it to the class. The possibilities for this class were endless but nothing was utilized.
My experience was that I could have put little to no effort whatsoever and received an A. 10% of my grade was clicking a button that I abided by "Global Professionalism Standards" and 10% of my grade was posting to a blog and 7% of my grade was pasting into a spreadsheet. That's over 25% of my course and what did I learn? That was about $1000 right there for doing nothing.
Full Sail needs to teach what this class is named for, "Collaboration". iMovie and iWeb are great, but they should be in a separate class teaching iLife applications and after we learn iLife apps, then get us to use these applications to create something collaborative. Show us how to work together with the latest technology. Assign one group to Office Live, one group to Huddle.com etc and then lets get in the Wimba and show our sites and our collaborative projects and lets all learn something together.
Anyway - that's my basic assessment of this class. A huge disappointment and a huge waste of time and money.
First of all, I own a music collaboration company. I'm a bit of collaboration junkie via technology. In my youth, I started with Compuserve in 1990 and played in the first AOL chat rooms and I played with Yahoo Messenger and the first versions of iChat. I got my masters degree at NYU in Interactive Telecommunications at the Tisch School where I learned digital audio, digital video, Marcomedia Director, Hypercard scripting etc. And as I grew out of playing with collaboration toys, I ventured into ftp servers, file sharing, iDisk, Google docs and project management and collaboration sites like Central Desktop, BaseCamp, Glasscubes, Huddle, iWork.com etc. I can say confidently that I know about collaboration in the digital age.
I realize that I have more experience than your average student but I would think that my instructor would also have some experience with collaboration tools. From what I experienced in this class, she didn't and had never even used Office Live while having her students using MS Office in a class about collaboration.
I would think that a course named after the word "collaboration" would somewhere utitlize collaboration in the course. Honestly, there was nothing emergent or collaborative about this class. We created a blog which is very outdated. Anyone current and tech savvy knows that blogging is dead. Very few people blog anymore. It's been replaced with social networking. This was known many years ago so why is Full Sail teaching us how to blog? Why aren't we using Schoology or something like that? Isn't their goal to create cutting-edge educators with this program? Wired magazine wrote an article back in 2008 exlpaining how blogging was dying. See HERE. And this was 3 years ago. There are countless articles about how blogging is down over 60% in the last few years. You'd think a university teaching education would be on top of current trends and not waste our time going backwards.
Here is the saddest thing of all that happened in this collaboration course. The only true collaborative assignment required us to read other student's research papers. Ok great, we're going to finally collaborate!! But wait, this was done via pasting our formatted research papers into the cell of a spreadsheet. This is described in detail in my next post and I show you exactly what this looked like. This assignment was the straw that broke my camel's back for me. I am supposed to pay thousands of dollars to be taught that emergent collaboration is pasting a research paper into the cell of a spreadsheet on Google Docs?? I'm sorry, but this is absolutely appalling and unacceptable.
The class meets weekly via a web conference at a site called Wimba. I've used Webex a lot for business and this is a version of that but geared more towards education. It's a cool tool. However, the instructor brought nothing collaborative for us to do during these conferences. To me, she sounded exhausted not enthusiastic and just matter of factly, explained about the week's exercises and asked if there were any questions. There were these long lulls of awkward silences because I know other students, like me, started making dinner or watching TV because there was nothing engaging or requiring our attention in any Wimba that I sat in on. She made no use of the Wimba screen to show us anything at all nor were we ever asked to collaborate. She was not organized or focused and the entire class just sat there silently while she explained the week's assignments which we could have easily read about online. Why did she not use this time to actually teach us something about collaboration? This was a collaboration tool... Show us cutting edge collaboration solutions in schools and businesses, get a guest speaker to show us if she didn't know? Why were we in a class about collaboration and not collaborating?
The class taught how to create blogs, use iMovie, iWeb and review a few "Web 2.0" tools - and while some of the skills are useful, what is truly emergent or collaborative? As stated, blogs are on the way out and the term "Web 2.0" was a buzz word back in 2007. We never really got to see or review our fellow student's work, so again, nothing at all was collaborative.
I also thought that this program was going to focus on what was actually happening in current cutting-edge eLearning environments. How are cutting edge schools collaborating? Let us research that and then show it to the class. The possibilities for this class were endless but nothing was utilized.
My experience was that I could have put little to no effort whatsoever and received an A. 10% of my grade was clicking a button that I abided by "Global Professionalism Standards" and 10% of my grade was posting to a blog and 7% of my grade was pasting into a spreadsheet. That's over 25% of my course and what did I learn? That was about $1000 right there for doing nothing.
Full Sail needs to teach what this class is named for, "Collaboration". iMovie and iWeb are great, but they should be in a separate class teaching iLife applications and after we learn iLife apps, then get us to use these applications to create something collaborative. Show us how to work together with the latest technology. Assign one group to Office Live, one group to Huddle.com etc and then lets get in the Wimba and show our sites and our collaborative projects and lets all learn something together.
Anyway - that's my basic assessment of this class. A huge disappointment and a huge waste of time and money.
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