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Off My Chair

Written by terrya
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Off My Chair

I’m celebrating today, in my last day sitting on  a Canada Research Chair (virtually of course!). I doubt if chairless tomorrow will be much different than today, but it is the passing of a personal academic era.

I came to Athabasca University 10 years ago as the Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Distance Education. The CRC program is funded by the Canadian federal government to support scholarship – in a very backward country that does not have any federal educational mandate nor initaitves. The feds are however constitutionally allowed to participate in research. They choose to do so through the funding for up to 2,000 chairs in all disciplines in 2000. Each University was allocated Chairs based on the amount of federal research council funding they are awarded – and Athabasca got three. The catch is however, that the Chairs come in two funding levels – Tier 2 for newer academics, with a 5 year term, renewable once and Tier 1 for all scholars, for 7 years, renewable indefinitely.  Unfortunately for me,  Atahabacsa was not awarded any Tier 1 Chairs, and thus 5 years after my renewal in 2006, it is out of the chair for me – as of tomorrow!

All in all, I have enjoyed the expereince and the prestige. I had a slightly lower teaching load than my colleagues and commensurate higher expectation for research output. A quick look at the old CV shows output over the past 10 years (authored or co-authored) of 5 books, 25 book chapters, 44 peer reviewed articles and more presentations, keynotes and rubber chicken, than I can accurately count.  So a great opportunity!

Life, post CRC, carries on pretty much same as before – without a chair to sit in!  I continue as a tenured Prof here at Athabasca where I teach in the Centre for Distance Education (mostly in our EdD program this year), advise students, edit IRRODL and keep our SSHRC funded research agenda on social networking in self-paced courses afloat.

Thanks to all my colleagues for the visits, correspondence, critique, collaboration and good times over the past decade!

Distance Education, My Work, Personal

Interaction Equivalency Site Announcement

Written by terrya
2 Comments

I am pleased to be able to introduce a new site – http://equivalencytheorem.info/ created by Terumi Miyazoe from Tokyo Denki University and myself to invite more use, critique and understanding of my 2003 distance education Interaction Equivalency Theorem.

Interaction has always been a defining (but expensive) component of all forms of education. In distance education, we have  expanded the definition of interaction to include that taking place between students and content- in addition to student-student and student-teacher interaction. Randy Garrison and I wrote an article in 1998 detailing the final three forms of educational interaction (teacher-teacher, teacher-content and content-content,- however the 3 student forms are the focus of most DE research and discussion.

In 2003 I began thinking that if you could get one of the three student forms of interaction at very highly levels of both quantity and quality in a formal course, then you have the necessary ingredients for a quality  learning experience – even in the absence of either or both of the other two forms. I expressed these and other ideas in more academic form in the 2003 article, but never took the idea much beyond this because I couldn’t figure out a way to disprove the theory . As the citizendium wiki puts “for a proposition to be considered scientific, it must, at least in principle, be possible to make an observation that would show it to be false. Otherwise, the proposition has, as Karl Popper put it, no connection with the real world.”

Thus, I was most delighted when Bob Bernard and his colleagues published a meta analysis of empirical DE research articles that generally served to support the theorem.  Since then a number of authors and doctoral studies have also confirmed or expanded upon my origional idea. Links to these articles and more is available at the website

Terumi and I welcome suggestions for other links, discussion or expansion of these ideas at the site.

References

Anderson, T. (2003). Getting the mix right again: An updated and theoretical rationale for interaction. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL), 4(2).

Anderson, T. D., & Garrison, R. D. (1998). Learning in a networked world: New roles and responsibilities. In C. C. Gibson (Ed.), Distance Learners in Higher Education (pp. 97-112). Madison, Wisconsin: Atwood Publishing. – The first manuscript that referred to the fourth interaction dimension of teacher-teacher, teacher-content, and content-content, called Modes of Interaction.

Bernard, M. R., Abrami, P. C., Borokhovski, E., Wade, C. A., Tamim, R. M., Surkes, M. A., & Bethel, E. C. (2009). A meta-analysis of three types of interaction treatments in distance education. The Review of Educational Research (RER), 79(3), 1243-1289 – A meta-analysis on interaction research in light of the Equivalency Theorem covering 1985 – 2006 empirical studies in distance education.

 

Distance Education, IRRODL, My Work

What I did (am doing) this summer

Written by terrya
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What I did (am doing) this summer

I remember with unpleasant memories the task of having to write the “What I did this summer” essay in September every year of grade school. I thought I would pre-empt the pressure by getting it out of the way in early August!

I mostly wanted to share the scene (below) that I ‘ve been staring at every morning from the deck of my Father-in-laws cabin on Allen Lake, near Blind River, Ontario.

It is a wonderful place and though Telus mobility reached my wife Susan’s cell phone out on the end of the dock, I was blissfully unable to connect to either a phone or the net for a couple of weeks. But of course, I did peddle the 8K to the local pub when I really needed an Internet fix.

In this ‘blended holiday’ I did write a forward to an upcoming Networking book Exploring the Theory, Pedagogy and Practice of Networked Learning  (sigh, not Open access), prepare for an inotroduction to the keynote of Clark Quinn at the Madison conference, read a book on educational research (way too American) and another on chaos theory BUT  spent lots of time just reading fiction  (really enjoyed Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce – Athabasca’s first ‘writer in virtual residence’) swimming and visting with new and old friends – including (of course, my wife and best friend Susan).

I’m now at the annual Madison Distance Learning and Teaching conference and looking forward to meeting a colleage and ex student Terumi Mitazoe from Japan. Terumi and I have published 3 articles, a book chapter and a co-authored a book, but have yet to meet F2F. She has expanded upon my “Equivalency Theory” and is creating a site with various studies that have validated the ideas in that early 2003 work  So Friday we present together this combined work.

Then my summer ends with 6 days of sailing off the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia. tough life…..

Distance Education, My Work, Personal

One Small Step for Athabasca

Written by terrya
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I participated in an interesting meeting of the Athabasca University Academic Council (our senate equivalent) this morning and the most contentious item concerned our option for ‘challenge for credit” alternative, that is offered in most of our undergraduate programs.
By way of background, Athabasca undergrad programs are offered as continuous enrollment and mostly self study programs that follow the old correspondence model. We offer support from an individual tutor, a study guide (that roughly serves as an interpretation of the study materials), a FEW interactive options (little used) via Moodle and a course pack that typically consists of a reading package and a text or two.  Students are given 6 months (can be extended with $$$ to a year), as much access (phone and email) as they want to an assigned  tutor, tutor marked assignments and an invigilated exam. We have recently been offering ‘optional’ networking and support via our elgg based social networking system (the Athabasca Landing) but the take up by tutors, faculty and students has (to date) been modest.
Credit for challenge (as opposed to seat time or completion of course activities), is an old idea first institutionalized by the University of London in the 19th century. Read More

Distance Education, My Work, OERs, Open Scholarship,

Three Generations of Pedagogy and Elephants in the Room

Written by terrya
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Three Generations of Pedagogy and Elephants in the Room

The good folks at DERN (Australia) posted a nice summary of Jon Dron and my article from the recent Connectivist special issue of IRRODL.  They write:

“A review of the three dominant learning theories: Cognitive-Behaviourist, Social-Constructivist and Connectivist, and the pedagogies derived from them. The review is very relevant to the use of digital technologies in education using a community of inquiry analysis model beginning with a description of each learning theory and then analyses of the cognitive presence, social presence and teacher presence, and concludes with a summary of the strengths and weaknesses of each. This paper is a must read for educators interested in elearning.”

Over a beer and salty tears yesterday, (we were watching the Canucks get hammered by the Bruins), Jon and I were talking about a slide set he was preparing for a presentation to our Nursing Faculty here at Athabasca.  One of the slides shows a fourth integrative pedagogy that it refers to as holist.Read More

Distance Education, IRRODL, My Work

The Publish or Perish Book

Written by terrya
The Publish or Perish Book

Well, after surviving end of term marking, coupled with two online keynotes and a real f2F one at Canadian MoodelMoot I’ve finally found some time to skim through two books that arrived on my desk that I want to share with you.

Product DetailsThe first is The Publish or Perish Book (P 0r P) by Anne-Wil Harzing. Harzing is one my heroes because she created and released  PorP Open Access program that uses Google Scholar to evaluate journals, articles, and authors based upon the number of citations of the work, collection or journal in other scholarly works.Read More

Distance Education, IRRODL, My Work, Open Scholarship

Passing of Gary Boyd – a great scholar and friend

Written by terrya
Passing of Gary Boyd – a great scholar and friend

I was saddened today to learn of the passing of my friend Gary Boyd, Professor at Concordia University in  Montreal. Gary exemplified scholarship in education technology and came to personalize what I think are the necessary, but far too uncommon characteristics of  scholarship and application of new technologies and pedagogy to teaching and learning.

I first met Gary in 1988, when Robert Sweet and I went on a research trip to Concordia. I still remember two things about that first meeting- first the vivid introduction to scholarly mess – Gerry had mountains of texts, papers, floppy disks and conference proceedings spilling out and over his desk and the floor. Second, I also remember his big smile and very warm greeting to Robert (a past Concordia colleague) and to myself, At that time, I was about  million psychological miles from an academic vocation and life style. I was impressed by both aspects of Gary’s life.

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Distance Education, Personal