Before I started, I had every expectation of success. I’ve always been a dedicated student and spend most of my life in front of a computer, so working online is not new to me. I also already knew many of the key foundations for success: log-on frequently, work throughout the week, create a schedule. Unfortunately, knowing these things is not the same as doing them.

If I had done these things, it would have saved me time in the long run. So that others may benefit from my mistakes, here is the first of a three-part series of what I wish I had (fully) embraced before I started. Maybe it will help you, too.

1.     Know Your Learning Style

I don’t like paper. I don’t how easy it is to lose it or the sight of messy piles on my desk. If I could function without paper, I would disable the print option my computer. Unfortunately, I can’t. When I’m tired or trying to learn a new concept, I find it much easier to process information from a sheet of paper than from a screen, where I tend to scan words rather than read them.

My course is delivered via Moodle, and the assignment deadlines were provided along with a series of other links. I didn’t click on all of these links and didn’t take the time to write down the deadlines on my schedule, which meant I didn’t realize there was a second component to an assignment. I lost 20% of my possible mark immediately.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED: Make it as easy as you can on yourself. If you like a paper calendar, use that; if you like email alerts, use them. Let the coursework be your main challenge.

2.     Log-on Frequently

This is standard advice: avoid cramming all coursework to one day a week or weekends. Try to distribute readings and assignments so that you don’t forget details and you give yourself time to process the content. I still haven’t managed this. So far, my assignments have all been started on Saturday and finished on Sunday.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED: Create a schedule at the outset of the course – a specific schedule. By dividing the course into small tasks (reading, researching, posting, assignments) everything seems more manageable. After you’ve arrived home on Monday night, scrounged dinner and walked the dog, it’s easier to sit down and read a designated chapter than just sit down and “study.” Specific goals tend to bring about specific results.

3.     Don’t Check and Forget

So one night I’m lying in bed and my phone dings. It’s an email alerting me to a classmate’s response to one of my posts. In a tired haze, I read it, rolled over and promptly fell asleep. That was a week ago, and I still haven’t responded, and I still feel bad about it.

Some people believe that you shouldn’t open an email until you have the time to respond to it. I think it’s good advice for posts, too, at least in my case, as I find it too easy to forget or push it aside for other tasks.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED: In an online course, writing discussion posts and responding to your classmates is a huge part of the experience. I may have learned more from the anecdotes and materials provided by my classmates than the course material. Don’t think of discussion posts as extra chores; they offer another way of engaging with the course material.

Up Next: The retrospective – what I learned now it’s over.

Money management is just one of the things that technology has revolutionized. A century ago, students sat in desks and teachers stood before them. Today, students can ask questions via Twitter and a teacher can answer from the other side of the world – but the majority of learning still looks very much like it always has.

So you might think higher ed is overdue for a shakeup. Recently, TRU hosted a workshop to look at how the university can (or should) make changes to the learning environment in order to take advantage of technology. This may, as Brian Lamb discusses, involve using online tools like Wikipedia, which would turn the tool into a part of the learning exercise. These tools are free, easy to use, and readily available. To higher ed, they have the potential to be a disruptive technology.

Many years ago, Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, developed a theory he coined disruptive innovation. Across many industries and sectors, he saw big, established companies being driven out of the market by products that were in almost every way inferior, but they were cheaper, and sometimes easier to use or more convenient, and they became successful because a large segment of the market preferred to pay less for fewer features. (As a modern example, the iPhone would be considered disruptive to laptops.) While traditionally we think of innovations leading to a better, improved product, disruptive innovations lead to a simpler, more affordable one.

In a profile of Christensen in the New Yorker,* he talks about how education can be affected by disruptive innovations, and retells his experience of recording one of his lectures so that it might be shown to thousands of students:

“[Christensen] realized that, whereas in a regular classroom students could learn only in one way—the way the teacher taught them—online learning offered students who thought differently from their teachers a way to get help. What’s more, recorded lectures and online learning were much cheaper than teachers in a room, so they had the potential both to bring otherwise unavailable courses to underfunded schools and to disrupt not-underfunded schools, like Harvard. Few people at the not-underfunded schools agreed with him—they couldn’t imagine that an online course could ever be as good as the old-fashioned kind. They didn’t realize that a low-end product didn’t need to be as good as a high-end one to drive it out of a market.”*

While disruptive innovation may be good for cheaper laptops, the implications of a dumbed-down education system are, frankly, alarming, and reason to have many more workshops about the intersection of technology and education. If enrolments are any indication, online courses are closer to a complement to traditional courses than a disruption. Plenty of people are, and will continue, to take on-campus courses. Though many people seem to think MOOCs – free courses available on a mass scale – will cause significant changes to the higher ed landscape. So what do you think – do MOOCs have the capacity to be a disruptive innovation? If not, what does?

*This article is available online through the TRU library. It may also be available through your public library.

First, a brief terminology lesson. There are three types of compound words:

1. Open (e.g. high school, web page)
2. Hyphenated (e.g. post-secondary, half-mast)
3. Solid or closed (e.g. textbook, email, highbrow)

Whether you hyphenate depends on a few factors. One is the dictionary or style manual you follow. In a university English course, you probably follow the MLA Style Manual. If you’re writing a book, you probably follow the Chicago Manual of Style. On this blog, I follow the Canadian Press Stylebook. And while many publications and organizations will follow one the stylebooks above, most also have internal style guides that list exceptions to the rule; for example, CP style recommends “web page,” but at TRU-OL, we treat it as one word, and write “webpage.”

Another factor is time. “In North America, the tendency is to drop the hyphen as soon as a new compound becomes familiar,” states the Canadian Press Stylebook. For example, today most people write “online” and “email” rather than “on line” and “e-mail” as they did a decade ago. (This is why it is important to have a relatively new dictionary, and not an ancient edition bequeathed to you by Grandma May.)

Finally, a compound’s function in the sentence may affect how you treat it. Perhaps you are thinking about purchasing a high-definition TV so that you may watch your favourite show in high definition. In the first instance, “high definition” is an adjective that describes the TV. In the second instance, “high definition” is a noun, so it can stand alone without hyphens. If you have trouble identifying whether a word is a noun or adjective, look it up in the dictionary.

Hyphens should now be about as clear as a windshield after driving through a bug swarm, right? If you’re serious about hyphens, I’d suggest adding a copyediting or grammar book to your collection. I use Amy Einsohn’s The Copyeditor’s Handbook because it’s accessible and occasionally cheeky, and not as expensive as some grammar books. If you’re not excited enough by hyphens to buy a new book, here’s what you should do:

-    Look the word up in your dictionary
-    Check your chosen stylebook, and view previous examples to see how your professor/manager/organization have used hyphens
-    Choose the least ambiguous option. If you think adding a hyphen will help make a sentence clearer, use it. Clarity should always be your first goal

If the above examples don’t help, don’t feel bad. Hyphens are troublesome. If you put the same document in front of five different editors, you may well get five different opinions on what should and should no be hyphenated. As Einsohn writes, “Some people say, ‘When in doubt, add a hyphen,’ while others say, ‘When in doubt, leave it out.’”*

Above all, try to be consistent. Nothing highlights indecision more than an “e-mail” at the beginning of your document and an “email” in the middle.

So that’s my take on hyphens. I hope that helps. Keep the grammar, punctuation and usage questions coming!

*From The Canadian Press Caps and Spelling, 19th edition.
*From The Copyeditor’s Handbook, 2nd edition

Here’s what happened: a member asked for advice on a personnel issue. A potential contractor had submitted an idea without following the guidelines for doing so, and the poster wanted to know if she should ignore it. Sounds innocent enough, right? But since the poster was discussing her website, a few other members went to said website and returned with advice on other aspects of her business.

To say she did not appreciate this would be like saying that Wellington merely did not appreciate Napoleon’s invading the world agenda. She accused people of venturing off topic in order to tear her down and destroy her business. As days went by, the conversation became increasingly vitriolic. The words “sexist,” “self serving” and “hysterical” were flung, along with a few others that I can’t write in this blog. It was like watching a trainwreck.

This sort of thing is par for the course on most anonymous online venues. But LinkedIn is anything but anonymous: it contains your full name, picture, credentials and entire professional history. People should keep a tighter hold on their temper in a LinkedIn discussion than in a job interview. And this was not happening in the comments section on a divisive political story; it’s a professional group of business people who want to network with fellow professionals.

Why do social activities online seem to so often spark bad behaviour? There are a lot of theories (this very good article suggests that people using real names may actually make the problem worse). I suspect that most people will walk away from uncomfortable face-to-face conversations, but it’s a lot easier to vent through a keyboard than at a person – plus, you can craft your response.

Which can be used for good, not evil. During the middle of the trainwreck that was the LinkedIn conversation, one commentator prefaced his opinion by stating, “I can see both sides of the issue.” He sounded like the adult preaching reason to the kids on the playground, and I think everyone should add the phrase to their own manual on conducting oneself online. You can almost assume that people will interpret your words in a way contrary to what you intended, and it is better to use more diplomacy, not less, than you would in person.

As for the initial LinkedIn poster, she has left the group. But the conversation will live on, and future potential employers, employees and coworkers will likely be able to find it without any trouble, just as they will many of your Facebook posts and tweets. Once you publish online, you have unleashed it to the internet, and you cannot take it back. That said, here is my entirely unscientific guide to negotiating the minefield of online interactions:

• Before you comment on an existing thread or board, read other posts to get a feel for the tone. It will be very different within a NHL chatroom than, say, a home decorating forum
• Don’t get personal. Focus on the issue
• Proofread, at least twice
• Punctuate . If you can’t take the time to capitalize your sentences, people will doubt you took much time to formulate your opinion
• Terms like “in my experience,” “in my opinion,” “I find” and “I believe” can soften a contentious statement
• If a forum is dissolving into anarchy, leave. These things rarely seem to return to stable ground

Do you have other suggestions? Have you ever been caught in the mire of an online fistfight? How did you handle it?

While pinning, I’ve noticed a common error on many typography-related images that I think is worth raising here. It seems many people still make the mistake of using “your” when they should be using “you’re.” If this never happens to you, please go on with your day. Otherwise, read the following:

“Your” is a possessive adjective, and modifies the noun or noun phrase in the sentence.
“The exam room is down the hall on your right.”
“Your mark suffered because of several grammatical mistakes.”

“You’re” is the contraction of you are. If you can replace “you’re” with “you are” in the sentence, you have the correct form.
“You’re not going to stay up all night studying, are you?”
“Try not to study when you’re in a hurry.”

Most of us already know this, but errors tend to creep in when writing on the fly or rushing to make edits before a deadline. Here are a few ways to try to catch errors:

• Read your work aloud. It’s amazing what gaffs you’ll catch when you hear your own sentences.

• Learn your weak spots. Many people have common errors that trip them up repeatedly. For example, I consistently misspell “definitely.” (Something about that second “i” gets me every time.) Learn your foibles, and scan for them specifically in your draft.

• Employ technology. Try using the “find” feature in your word processing software to catch common mistakes. For example, you might search for “your” or “you’re”, and the software will comb the document to find these words. When they’re highlighted, look at the sentence on it’s own and review it to make sure you’ve made the right choice.

Do you frequently have any particular grammar, usage or punctuation mistakes flagged in your work? Leave a comment about it and we’ll tackle them here.

Also, all Open Learning students can go to the Writing Centre to receive feedback on their writing. Help is available via videoconference for off-campus students.

As TRU-OL’s contribution to Open Education Week, please join us online for a live presentation of “Designing and Assessing Engaging Learning Activities” on Tuesday, March 6 from 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. Stay for the discussion period afterward with presenters Michelle Harrison and Melissa Jakubec, from the TRU-OL Instructional Design team.

Access the presentation at http://livestream.com/liveTRU.

ABOUT OPEN EDUCATION WEEK

Irwin Devries, Director of Instructional Design here at TRU-OL, writes regularly about open and distance education at IrwinDevries.com. He kindly agreed to be a guest blogger here and contributed the following post about Open Education Week, which runs March 5 through 12.

Educational institutions around the world are celebrating Open Education Week March 5-12. This event is organized by the Open Courseware Consortium (OCW), a global community of more than 200 universities committed to promoting dialogue and projects involving the use of open courseware and related projects. There are many dimensions to open education and increasingly the theme of openness is reaching the mainstream media. Following are a few areas where open education is seeing rapid development:

OPEN COURSEWARE. Defined by the Open Courseware Consortium as “free and open digital publication of high quality college and university-level educational materials,” which includes full courses and resources such as media clips, assessments and other learning tools. Many major universities have become involved in facilitating the use of open courseware, including MIT (the institute that famously started the OCW movement), Rice, Carnegie-Mellon, Open Universities of the Netherlands, Africa, Israel, and hundreds of other institutions. Much open courseware is available to anyone, and in many cases, is also available for other institutions to adapt and reuse. The underlying concept is the view of many educational resources as a public good that has already been paid for in their development and that should be shared. Increasingly universities and other organizations are enhancing open courseware with other support services to provide educational opportunities as well as possible credentials for those who cannot afford the cost of tuition. Much open courseware development has been supported by the Flora and William Hewlitt Foundation and promoted by UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning.

CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSING. Key to open courseware is its availability under Creative Commons licensing. Creative Commons (CC) provides mechanisms for authors to license their works under such provisions as Attribution (allowing for distribution, remixing, adapting and building upon the work but with credit to the author), Attribution-ShareAlike (like Attribution but requiring  the use of the same license for the adapted work), and various other options such as NonCommercial and NoDerivs. CC provides a concise description of the licensing scheme as well as a simple tool for creating your own CC license. Your browser will likely have a CC search function as well – if not, it is easy to locate and install.

TEXTBOOKS. To address the high cost of textbooks, various organizations, governments and academics are looking at ways to place textbooks into an open environment, where anyone can use, adapt, revise or remix the content to suit their own needs. Two examples are College Open Textbooks and Flatworld Knowledge, a company that assembles and/or prints copies of open textbooks at a very low cost while allowing free student views. There is also increasing pressure for the provision of open journals, driven by the concern of scholars worldwide that their research publications are being locked up behind walls and available only at great cost to libraries and individual users.

As open educators, we at TRU, Open Learning are closely following and participating in the open education movement on a number of fronts. Open Learning has some key tools available for the expansion of open education, in particular Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR), which can provide formal credit for learning in many ways including open educational resources. Recently TRU-OL announced our membership as a founding anchor partner of the Open Educational Resource University (OERu) in Dunedin, NZ. As an OERu partner, we are collaborating with 12 other universities to provide and share courses and processes that are open to the world and that will lead to credible credentials. We are also developing a proposal for the development of our first open textbook.

Please take some time this week to learn more about Open Education Week. The future is open!

Describing all the advantages of Open Learning in a single video is a challenge. Through distance education, TRU-OL can offer many additional options to the programs available on the TRU campus, such as credit for prior work experience, as well as flexible start and completion dates. As a result, the student demographic at Open Learning varies widely: from full-time students recently graduated from high school, to part-time students returning to school, to full-time employees upgrading their career one course at a time.

We wanted our video to be as non-traditional as our flexible learning options and the students who take advantage of them. We hope you enjoy it.

Dinosaur Earth starts January 30, 2012

Once upon a time, an enterprising fish ventured out of the ocean. From fish evolved amphibians, and from amphibians reptiles, and for millions of years the land was dominated by Apatosaurs, Ankylosaurs, Allosaurs and their kin. Today, some 65 million years after the giant dinosaurs disappeared from the geological record, their feathered descendants rustle through the foliage outside of Steven Earle’s window.

Earle, who is both a long-time Open Learning Faculty Member and Geology professor at Vancouver Island University, is teaching Open Learning’s first course about dinosaurs. GEOL 1031: Dinosaur Earth looks at the factors in the Mesozoic era that allowed dinosaurs to flourish, evolve, and die out. Here, Earle discusses the course – as well as where you can find modern-day dinos.

Q. So are you a dinosaur expert?
A. I don’t have a background in dinosaurs. I’ve been teaching geology courses for 20 years now, and various courses I’ve taught have included some aspects of palaeontology, plate tectonics, and also climate change and how it has impacted life in the past. This course is about a lot more than dinosaurs. They form the core of it, but it goes back to evolution of dinosaurs’ ancestors, right back to fish and how they came onto land. It covers a lot of time before the dinosaurs were here.

Q. So this course won’t cover the age-old question of whether the T-Rex or a Stegosaurus would win in a battle to the death? *
A. People are excited by dinosaurs, and that’s great, but in studying them, you have an opportunity to learn about all sorts of related things, like climate change, evolution and plate tectonics.

Q. The course will examine how dinosaurs evolved and diversified. Do you look at any particular species?
A. Students will be asked to focus on a specific dinosaur for a particular project. There’s going to be a fair amount of discussion of the different lifestyles of dinosaurs; what they ate, what sort of locomotion: fast, slow, armoured; how they defended themselves from other dinosaurs; how they adapted to finding food, and whether or not they were warm-blooded.

Q. What do you think students will find most surprising about the subject matter?
A. Well, I live in the country, and right now I’m looking out my window here at a guinea fowl. When you look at the way they move, it reminds me of a dinosaur. There is no other way of looking at it; birds are dinosaurs, they should be in the class Reptilia (that is something that will change). The idea that dinosaurs are extinct is not really true; they are around us. For me, that is one of the most compelling parts of the story.

Q. At the end of the course are you going to reveal the final, definitive reason why we don’t have Triceratops’ among us today?
A. There is a part in the course that discusses why non-avian dinosaurs went extinct, and other extinctions as well, but right now we only have theories.

*Please note: the fabled matchup between the Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus is impossible,
as they did not live in the same period. It’s still fun to pretend.

With the holidays approaching, this may seem like bad advice. There are already plenty of distractions to be had: office parties; family dinners; shopping, another rerun of Love Actually. But if you’re a social person, this time of year is probably particularly tough for your motivation: who wouldn’t prefer to sit in front of a fire with some friends, eggnog in hand, over the company of a textbook?

I was sitting at my own computer the other day, procrastinating by reading random things on the net, and came across a story from Wired about education. It was about a conference on how digital technology can inspire school reform, but what the writer took away from it was that no amount of YouTube lectures or tablets or videogames in the classroom will make a lick of difference because kids want to be cool – and it’s cool to rebel. So until the “geeky” kids become cool, and find it fun to discuss equations and metaphors and earn As, schools will remain untransformed.

Now, this article was about secondary schools, not universities. At most postsecondary campuses, I’d say it’s cool to be a little geeky. (It just seems silly to rebel against something you’re paying for.) But the principle, I think, still applies – the people around us can have a major affect on our outlook. So if your coursework becomes a more social endeavour, especially during the holidays, it may help keep your engagement high.

Here my thoughts on where you can start:

Consider an Online Course. If you typically enrol in print-based or web-based courses through Open Learning, you may want to try an online course instead. An online course typically involves more interaction with other students: you can chat in online groups, perhaps meet a study buddy and hear other opinions on the material that may make you think about it in a new way. 

Join a LinkedIn Group. If you haven’t been to LinkedIn in awhile, it’s worth taking a look. The site has become far more lively than it was years ago, and you’ll likely be able to find several groups related to the subject you’re studying (some groups you can join automatically; others require permission from the group administrator, which may take a day or so). To find your next social group, search by keyword and narrow the search range to “Group” in the drop-down menu. For example, I started out searching for business, and came across a group called the Project Manager Network, which had an active discussion going about how a PM can handle a project that is handed to them in the red.  

Join us on Facebook. There are two main Facebook sites you should check out for TRU-OL: one is a page and the second is a group. People often go to our page to talk about general topics, and to the group to find people who are taking the same courses.

Where do you go to spend some time with other students?

DISCLAIMER: At TRU-OL, we recommend that students set aside 10 to 15 hours per course, each week, to study. We aren’t suggesting you count course networking as part of those hours. Think of it as a supplement to your course material, not replacement.

Open Learning at the TRU Student Orientation, 2011

Last week I was at the Welcome Back BBQ and Student Orientation session on the TRU campus where I happened to meet a very dedicated student. She was enrolled in a full-time TRU program and was taking two additional courses through Open Learning. The amount of work she had cheerfully signed up for was chilling, and while she’s a old pro at this and knows what she’s getting into, it got me thinking about what can happen in the beginning of the school year that gets people into trouble later.

In September, the course material all seems new and interesting and exams are naught but a distance speck on the horizon, a mere cloud in a bright and shining sky. Optimism can lead you to think you’re capable of a full-time course load, a rockin’ GPA and several part-time jobs. I know I did, but by the time exams rolled around I was usually a frantic mess.

There are ways to avoid this. We have information on scheduling your time on our orientation pages, and there are a host of other opinions – expert and otherwise – on how to create a schedule and stick to it. Here are some things you should not do if you don’t want to reach the end of your course feeling let down.

Don’t be a hero. When you sit down with your calendar to map out your schedule for the course(s), don’t imagine that between now and then you’ll somehow acquire superhero qualities that will have you studying between 10 p.m. and midnight, working all day and coming home to recreate a Bobby Flay recipe. Prepare to work hard, but be kind to yourself too. As a general rule, we recommend that students taking full-time distance ed courses for the first time take no more than three courses at a time; for students who work full-time, try one or two courses at once.

Don’t alienate your peers. This may sound obvious. But it can be easier than you think to send the wrong message to other students in an online course – and if you start off on the wrong foot, the atmosphere can turn chilly, and that can quickly sap your enthusiasm for the course. Keep in mind that jokes and sarcasm may be interpreted differently when written than spoken, and if you’re really serious about making online interactions with your peers better, you may like to check out this paper from the U.K.’s Open University.

Don’t get sloppy. When I was in second year, I asked my professor if she would be a reference for a job I was applying for. When I emailed her the details of the job, I spelt her name wrong. She still wrote me the reference letter, but pointed out that this was a pretty shoddy mistake. I have not yet recovered from the shame. In all your interactions with your prof, even those for which you aren’t  graded, be professional.

Don’t let your health slide. When you go back to school, you may as well be placing your routine in a blender. It may be tempting to change other, good habits – like the amount of sleep you get, or what you eat for dinner, or how much you exercise. But if these things work for you when you aren’t taking a course, you should continue to make time for them.

Don’t miss out. If you’re an off-campus student, you might not feel that you are getting a fresh start at all. But I always found it was helpful to create my own rituals. Even if it was just buying a new pen or notebook, having something blank or different can make it feel like a fresh start. Oh, and while you’re at it, organize your desk. You’ll feel like a new person.