Elearning and Academic Governance

Observations on online teaching and coaching

In the new Covid19 world, I enjoy listening to podcasts as I go for my daily walk, and my favourite podcast while I’m walking is Dan John’s podcast. If you haven’t read Dan John’s extensive library of work in the strength and conditioning and coaching world, there are 35 of these podcasts already, and they only started recently!

In today’s podcast, Dan was fielding a question from someone who asked about online coaching being “the way of the future” post-covid19, and I was interested to reflect on Dan’s response. He noted that he had been doing online / remote coaching for a very long time, originally via the post (yep, writing regular letters to his coach about his workouts and training, and getting responses on how he was going and what to do next), and then via the Web (in what now might be called a Blog, but in the olden days was just a regular website).

The key feature of remote or online training is the fact that it is asynchronous. Dan reminded us that, even when it is synchronous, or live, it is asynchronous in the sense that we don’t know when or where our participants might be. When I tune into someone’s live-streamed lunch-time exercise class from Melbourne, it may be midday for me, but it might be 3:00 am for another person in Paris … and the whole way of thinking about 3:00 am training is different! It may also be summer in Melbourne and winter in Paris or vice-versa.

So while many people are happy to put on a Jane Fonda style aerobics video and “follow along”, or tune into a TV or web-cast yoga class, if you are seriously into teaching or coaching your individual students and you need an income stream from so doing, there is a whole lot more going on. Importantly, I am very happy to pay a subscription for Dan John’s workouts and member resources because I already know who he is and a bit about how he thinks, which makes me confident I will get value for money. Do you have enough free content yourself to make someone happy to pay for your ongoing services, and do you have the time, energy and skills to keep on creating fee-worthy materials?

In the podcast, Dan also talked about his experience putting college level courses online, emphasising the huge amount of work required to prepare the materials. This is the very steep learning curve many academics and teachers are on right now – the idea, as Dan expressed it, is that there is a whole lot of work required to create an online learning site, but the payoff is that it is then a bit of a doddle to teach … you just need to pop in regularly to see how people are going and to answer their individual questions. This is when I started gesticulating and trying to talk back to the podcast (so yes, asynchronous, but still synchronous in how my own mind connects with what is being said). The part that Dan may well take foregranted is that the ability to “pop in and see how students are going” is a high level skill in itself. The thing about asynchronous learning is that people have a lot of time to think about your materials – they can ask you things and raise questions that you had not anticipated, and may not be prepared for, and they can do it at times when you are not “in that headspace”. Many teachers get by with knowing enough to fill the scheduled teaching time, and answer a few extra questions, and then “sorry folks, time’s up”. Dan can “pop in and field questions” because of his own formidable depth of knowledge in strength and conditioning, and in religious studies, along with his own dedication to learning from his students. Some of us find interaction with our students to be challenging in a very enjoyable way and it’s what motivates us, but for others, it is very anxiety-provoking. The podcast and forum on Dan’s site emphasise his commitment to “closing the loop with feedback”, whereby he reflects on and responds to people’s feedback. This ensures that he is tailoring his knowledge to each individual, while sharing that learning with his broader community of practice. This is not something that many newbie online coaches will have the skills, experience and enthusiasm to pull off, and they will also not be aware of how much time it takes to do this.

Online coaching has been a “thing” for quite a few years now, and I have pretty much learned all I know about strength and conditioning online, originally through reading the work of people like Krista Scott-Dixon, Brett Contreras, Mark Rippetoe, Jim Wendler and Ross Emanit among others, but eventually settling on Dan John as my “go-to” source of information, particularly after discovering that two young Australian people I know through taekwondo, had randomly stayed at Dan’s house and trained with him (and I say randomly, because it was not a visit planned in advance, but rather Dan’s amazing generosity and hospitality to total strangers because they were interested in his work and were passing through the US with a flexible itinerary).

All of the online people I have learnt from have been building impressive online sites for training for the last decade or more, and most of them have also been building subscription services for some of their material more recently. In the time of Covid19, they already had the platform, the existing content, the strong client base, and serious skills to take it all online. People completely underestimate the amount of deep knowledge, time and other skills required to maintain a steady stream of online content, and to generate new material that matches the changing needs of a changing audience. I have worked in online education for the better part of 25 years, and for the past 5 years or more, I have a flurry of blog posts around Christmas/New Year about how I’m going to update my online presence and reorganise my resources, and then my “real work” of university classes begin, and it all falls in a heap – it really takes dedication to generate regular high quality online content and helps to be part of a team.

So after listening to Dan, I thought I would put together some thoughts on what people might consider if they are thinking of taking their face-to-face training business online. This is a non-exhaustive (but somewhat exhausting) list:

Do you have a loyal face-to-face clientele who want to continue training through Covid19?
- If they are in the same time-zone, can you have them log in to their regular time-slot of class, which you live-stream?
- While the training itself may be sub-par compared with live classes, you will be maintaining the social cohesion of your classes and allowing clients to maintain a routine, which is really important in times of upheaval (for you as well as your clients).
Are you planning on your Covid19 strategy being part of your “new normal”?
- You will have a LOT of work to do in building the range of skills to make it sustainable – I think of this as being in Dan John’s quadrant 3 of training – lots of skills at a high level.
- You will also need to know what your value proposition is in this new normal – with full awareness that your competition will not just be the guy down the street or in the next suburb, but will be a whole global audience.
- At the end of Covid19, people who were ready to go online before the crisis began may have a whole new clientele some of which may originally have been your clients, but there will also be people craving for face-to-face instruction … so you need to be clear about where your primary skills lie and what that will mean into the future.
Do you want to be able to give your clients feedback?
- You can use Facetime, Skype, Zoom, Messenger as easy ways of connecting with your students and running the classes in a way that is familiar TO THEM.
- If you are live-streaming via You-Tube or Vimeo, will this be possible? Let’s Plays have the advantage that the activity being videoed is on the screen, so it is easy to interact with your live class, but it is harder to chat while you’re teaching or participating in a physical class where you may not be able to see the screen or stay in your video shot without someone actually being at the other end of a camera.
- You can have them send videos of their session for you to critique. This is a great way to do things, but VERY time consuming, and not at all sustainable if you have a large client base or a lot of time, or excellent Shark Habits. Apps like Coaches Eye work well for this.
Do you want to be able to pace your session according to how clients are going?
- If they’re your regular clients, they may be comfortable interacting, but you’ll need to be mindful of whether they have space, and whether there are other people also doing your sessions with them.
- Pacing a session to a live audience is a skill, but it is a different skill doing it online where you can’t quickly see people, you can’t quickly see or hear their breathing, when the video is not good enough to notice subtle changes in coordination that might tell you to slow down or switch things up or offer technical corrections.
Do you want them to be able to socialise with their regular training partners?
- You’ll need something where everyone is able to see each other, but your classes will need to be smaller (which is good, but will take more work)
- Forums are a great place to build a community on line, but not everyone is comfortable with “socialising” in this way.
Are you proficient with technology?
- For the most part, to be successful with online coaching, especially if you don’t have a bespoke team of tech support people, requires that you use technology you’re comfortable with.
- For many people (both coaches and clients), that will be their smart phone and services like Instagram and Messenger or Skype. You can also pay for hosted services that allow for live streaming of content, or you can use a host of available Apps, but it is important that you can use those tools well and you know how they work and what data they are capturing (e.g., your members to whom they can target their advertising …).
- Dan makes a great point that I think many people miss: he makes lots of, as he says, “crappy videos” that are “right-now” videos of people actually doing stuff and they are for instructional purposes. They are NOT beautifully curated videos of Insta-perfection and there is a whole other post to write on the difference between right-now online teaching materials for your own specific audience at a particular time versus professionally made digital resources for “everyone”. The short story is that you need a lot of deep knowledge to know what are the important instructional qualities that will help your clients, whereas Insta-perfection is more about advertising your look
Are you able to spend money on pay-for online services?
- If you are just looking to see your business through Covid19, can you really afford to be investing in pay-for online services?
- However if you are trying to create a future business model, can you afford not to. In my experience, you will need to pay for the infrastructure, and you will need to have professional technical support to take care of website issues, live streaming issues if that’s what you are offering for a fee, payment gateways and security if it is your long term business. Would you really set up a physical gym as your main business, and leave all the doors unlocked including the door to your office and to any resources you sell, and never do any maintenance on your equipment? It’s a serious undertaking to create and maintain a website with content that people pay for.

As I noted, these are just a few ideas that came to mind after listening to Dan’s podcast, and the reason why my own website is only updated in bursts and spurts, is that I vacillate between publishing what I’m thinking right now (as blogging used to be) versus trying to write the perfect go-to article. I’m trying to be more like Dan, to put my stuff out there quickly in case it’s useful to others, even though the primary value has been to clarify and record my own ideas and reflections. And I’m trying not to clog up Dan’s forums with overly long posts 🙂

Leadership versus management

As I was sitting in a meeting this afternoon (actually, I was sitting in my garden in the Autumn sun in a virtual meeting), I had an epiphany about the realities of leadership versus management in the time of Covid-19. Leaders lead the way, and managers then implement whatever needs to be implemented to support that way. Good leaders still lead the way even through previously uncharted territory, and they communicate calmly, confidently, truthfully AND regularly – so even if they don’t quite know where they are going, even if they can’t quite see how they’ll get there, they communicate their main message: that they will look after their people to the best of their ability. Good managers then scramble to make it happen.

If your leaders turn out to be managers rather than leaders in a time of crisis, they will say nothing until they have formulated a clear plan and an approved set of processes and sign-offs, despite the fact that such a level of clarity is not feasible when everything around them is changing every day. The end result is that, despite the best of intentions to support their people, they communicate nothing of substance, and their people can feel abandoned.

And for light relief in terms of leadership, I can’t go past this M*A*S*H Covid advice video

Or, in an absence of leadership, some useful advice to get you through from one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, Douglas Adams.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2bcFfMt6rGLTPpbG0yLwPw0/42-douglas-adams-quotes-to-live-by

How to keep exercising and training at home

As you probably already know if you know me, apart from my university life, I like to train in martial arts. In particular, I have been training and instructing ITF taekwondo at the United Schools of Martial Arts for more than 15 years, and more recently I have added some (very intermittent) cross training in boxing at Murphy’s Boxing Gym

I’m now trying to put together some stuff on Moodle to allow specific face-to-face classes, i.e., classes with the instructors and people you already know and work with, to continue online into the future.

Update to this post in 2021 – as it turned out, I did not get very far trying to help out my taekwondo and boxing schools. Why not? Setting up independent websites for production quality presentation is no longer a cottage industry that can be managed on-the-side while running a full time job, especially during a pandemic, when you can’t walk through ideas and concepts with people. Big tech was much quicker to respond and update services so that everybody could use Zoom, Skype and Instagram Live to stay in touch with clients. As each product got better, the others had to boost themselves to keep people in their ecosystems.

But in the mean time, there are already some great training options already available online for general fitness and conditioning. Here are two (two people, four sites) of my favourites:

Dan John Workouts (with a free Covid-19 trial I think)
Dan John’s open site
Ross Enamit’s Training site (with lots of ideas over many years for how to build your own gym equipment)
Ross Enamit’s Boxing site

Why Moodle, and not just YouTube channels and Skype? Because it allows for interaction and classes for your own specific clients as an interactive process rather than consumption of media.

Marking, grading and assessment in higher education

It is disturbing to find that many people in the higher echelons of education do not seem to understand some basic aspects of marking, grading and formative versus summative assessment.

Firstly, we assess the quality of the artifact or performance, not the inherent quality of the student themselves. We are identifying that the assignment is a credit level assignment, not that the student is a credit level person, or has credit level intelligence.

Secondly, when we mark an assessed piece of work, we might begin with 100% and deduct marks for each “error”, or we might start at 0 and add marks for each relevant point. However when we grade a piece of work, we are using an ordinal scale, not an equal interval scale. If we inherently use a grading system, we need to understand the inherent qualitative properties of such a scale, and the fact that it is ordinal at best in quantitative terms. I say “at best” because within the non-passing grade category, there are a number of different ways to fail that are not all equal, and I would probably argue that a 45 – 50 based on a genuine attempt at all assessments is lower in rank than a half-baked attempt on some assessments in the 30-40 range.

Thirdly, even when we use so-called objective assessments such as multi-choice tests, not all questions are created equal. There are many methods by which we could scale/rescale scores on MCQs including providing different weightings for questions of different levels of difficulty, or deducting points for incorrect answers. These methods may be much more robust than scoring each question as one point, but would most likely be very unpopular with students, and would actually be difficult to implement at a conceptual level (how do you actually rate the difficulty of each question – by performance, by expert-ranking, by whether it differentiates between “good” and “bad” students (but how do we know who these people are given that we are using the test to assess this?).

While I have always been a proponent of grading rather than marking, I have become accustomed to using marking pro-formas that define marking criteria and their weightings. I note that these rubrics tend to use grading of sub-sections of an artifact to generate a numerical score that is then combined with other scores from the rubric weighted according to the pre-defined set of weighting criteria. This allows for an acceptable spread of grades for each artifact and is apparently “more objective” than grading the artifact itself holistically. From where I sit, it is really a way of ensuring that there is a spread of marks that we can then post-hoc turn into a distribution of grades without further reference to the actual artifacts being graded.

So far as I am concerned, when we have done this, we have actually abrogated our professional responsibility to our disciplines, and become part of a credentialling factory that is obsessed with quantification of performance outcomes under the umbrella of “quality assurance” -while being oblivious to the notion that quality and quantity are inherently different constructs.

The slow-motion death of conservative politics

Waleed Aly makes some important points here – we end up so far down the slippery slope in what we don’t bother challenging in our leaders that it becomes hard to identify when it all went so horribly wrong. Each incremental step seems small until you look at how far we have collectively fallen in our acceptance of injustice, intolerance, corruption and greed. The problems in Australian academia reflect the problems in Australian society – so much is corrupted and wrong, but it is difficult to know how to make appropriate change from within.

It’s true in a sense that Trump has stolen the Republican party. But it’s also true it was there for the taking. There are many reasons Trump is succeeding – anger and disillusionment among a humiliated electorate is one of them. But there’s also the fact that the Republicans have been training their voters to indulge every reactionary prejudice for years. Trump simply does this better, louder, and with less varnish than his rivals. Can we be surprised when he vanquishes them? Can the Republican establishment really cry foul when he outdoes them?And is it so different here? Well, in a way, yes. A moderate is presently in the top job and the reactionary forces aren’t yet taking endorsements from former Ku Klux Klan wizards (they’ll have to settle for Reclaim Australia for now). But there’s an important commonality too: that the contradictions that were once holding conservative parties together, and delivering them political success, have now fallen apart. The most important of these is the contradiction between liberal economics and the politics of “values”.It’s hard to be the staunch defenders of family, culture and tradition while you’re also staunch advocates of things like high-skilled immigration and workplace “flexibility” of the kind WorkChoices offered. It’s hard to believe the market should be free to exploit and commodify whatever consumers will tolerate – sex, culture, children – and yet pretend we are bound together by inviolable, sacred values.

Source: The slow-motion death of conservative politics

New Technologies

It’s that time of year again – time to organise my technology world and work out what tools I’ll be using to make stuff happen at work and at play. I spent a month in Africa at the end of 2013, and for a variety of reasons, that time away involved very little use of technology and almost no use of voice/text. Given that my average number of texts per month has been around 500 for at least the past 5 years, this was quite a change, but not one that was at all difficult. I sort of liked not being at the beck and call of anyone.

I also have a few computers that have reached their complete end of life. I have a 12″ Powerbook G4 Which I purchased around 2003 when I first became a “web developer” – it was my badge of street cred 🙂 I also have a 15″ Powerbook G4 with an Intel chip purchased in 2006 when I became a bona-fide Consultant. Both computers have lasted well beyond their life expectancy – one is being used for dev work by a colleague, and the other finally met its death during the recent heatwave, when Tim left it in the car for 5 over 40 deg days.

During my travels (Sudan, Tanzania, Canberra), my work laptop, a 13″ Macbook Pro housed in a hard-shelled case, suffered screen-cracking in my checked luggage, despite having been transported in a similar fashion many many other times. I use an external monitor for my Macbook Pro at work anyway, so the laptop is still very usable, and I am also trying to return to being a regular bike commuter rather than a fair-weather occasional bike rider, so I also want to reduce the weight I carry every day by not hauling a laptop with me everywhere.

To this end, I’ve been playing with a Sony Experia Android phone (big but with a 22 MP camera) as a possible alternative to an iPhone/iPad/laptop combo, and I’ve been thinking about switching from an iPad to an iPad mini and then using a non-smart phone just as a phone. What I’ve realised is that I really want a lighter but fully functional laptop and that the smartphone/iPad solution is not workable for what I do (data analysis, writing, editing, graphics). So the real answer was a Macbook Air.

The days of burning DVDs seem to be a thing of the past now that we have cheap multi-gigabyte thumb drives and multi-terabyte external drives, so the limited hard-drive capacity of the Macbook Air is no longer a consideration. I did a quick pricing of a tricked up version via educational pricing, and was a bit despondent that it came out at over 2K – money I can’t really justify if I want to travel as well.

Anyhow, to cut a long story shorter, many planets aligned when I went to ride my bike to work and discovered a popped spoke – I went to my favourite bike store in Mount Waverley so that Dicky could fix my wheel, and this brought me within spitting distance of my favourite Apple reseller. I went to look for my Macbook Air, and discovered that smaller Apple resellers find it hard to get into the Apple Educational pricing (not best pleased with that, since I want to support local businesses and they’ve been great in the past when they were in Burwood. However, I also discovered the ex-demo market and for less than my brand new Macbook Air educational pricing, I now have an ex-demo fully tricked up Macbook Air plus an ex-demo iPhone 5, both of which are mine. Very happy. (For the moment. Until I find out things like iPhone 5 and Macbook Air can’t use Airdrop between them, nor can they pair up to send files via Bluetooth. Say what????? I have to go via email or DropBox???? I could send files from my old Nokia to my old Mac so what’s going on here – it doesn’t stop piracy in any way, shape or form, but it makes it a pain in the arse to take a photo on my iPhone and insert it into my blog post!). I was able to support a local business, and in the two days that I’ve had my new toys, I’ve referred more than 10 people there too!

So, in the next few months, I am planning to ramp up my technical proficiency in a number of areas:

Using R for file manipulation
Performing analyses in R
Using R and Gephi for Social Network Analysis
Blogging effectively and regularly, trialling MarsEdit
Getting proficient with WordPress
Getting proficient with Excel (because most people who should be using databases, graphing software, mathematical software or R/SPSS are probably doing things in Excel instead
Having a good backup and data storage capability

So my new tools of choice are going to be my Macbook Air for anywhere, anytime work/play and my software tools of choice may well turn out to be:

MarsEdit – blogging tool that allows posts to be written offline and published to a blog at a later date
R – open source stats tool with advanced scripting capabilities
Gephi – network data visualisation software with some built-in quantitative analyses
WordPress – blogging software

I will also be exploring the different options for file sharing, as befits someone whose expertise is supposedly in Digital Technologies and Training, and as we head into the possibly-post-Facebook world 🙂

DropBox, iCloud, Swinburne’s netstorage
Flickr, Picasa
Vimeo, YouTube
SlideShare

The “jazz” of teaching

via Stephen Theiler: New York Times opinion piece on Online education

I particularly like this idea:

Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition. There is the basic melody that you work with. It is defined by the syllabus. But there is also a considerable measure of improvisation against that disciplining background.

Learning outcomes

There is a push in my academic world to focus on learning outcomes rather than learning objectives. However I was reminded by the Coodabeens this morning that paradoxically sports coaching is all about process not outcome. I will need to think more about this strange contrast given the intrinsically outcome-focused nature of sport versus the process focused nature of academic study.

Reactivating my blog – time to practise what I preach in terms of reflective journalling

It used to be that every few months, I would have a sudden burst of online activity and update my own website, or write a few things. Then it spread out to every year, somewhat like a spring cleaning activity. I just noticed that it is almost two years to the day that I have made any real contribution to my web-presence other than updating my list of publications.

I now have a number of research threads operating at the same time, and I am teaching into a number of different streams of psychology, so it becomes important to collect the tidbits of information that I’m thinking about into one easily-accessible place. The mobile technology is ripe for it, and my physical notebooks are becoming scrappier and scrappier, so I plan to write regularly on the things we are thinking about, working on and reading about. I might even try to develop an active readership for commentary and link-sharing!

In flicking through my most recent posts (ie early 2010), I was reading the things that have become part of my thinking life, things like James Paul Gee, Csikszentmihalyi, Vygotsky, Hirstein, and possibly just starting on the work of Marshall McLuhan. I had probably also delved into Pylyshyn’s work and started re-reading Fodor. I was beginning to think about relationships between attention and spatial coding in the martial arts and sports world and attention and cognitive processing in general, and I was trying to grapple with the idea of causal contact with the real world.

Now that I almost have a real lab and real technical equipment that can be used to collect real data (I’m almost back to being a real scientist!), I have also returned to the idea of finally mastering at least a small amount of maths – particularly the geometry stuff required for motion capture, and the statistical notions that match the research questions we are dealing with. But the things that will need ongoing discussion and consideration will be on how to ensure that the “real science” doesn’t get side-tracked by the things we can measure rather than the questions we want to answer.

[As always, I need to develop the discipline to write regularly in small doses on a blog so I can have a head start on the longer pieces for academic papers. Somehow, my small doses never seem sufficiently finished to post …]