A recent US Department of Education report concluded that “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction”. In the New York Times analysis of the report, Steve Lohr said:

Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line correspondence courses. That has changed with arrival of Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools.

The study combined data from 99 studies with quantitative comparisons of online and classroom learning. The difference in grades was modest but meaningful enough to draw the conclusion, so many drew the conclusion that online > classroom learning.

I’d caution against this. As I said in a previous post, computer-based learning isn’t intrinsically more motivating, more engaging, or better than any other kind of learning, but that’s not to say that teachers shouldn’t be doing all they can to make online content accessible, engaging & useful.

Last month, I was asked by the Naace to review some online Moodle courses described as ICT Continual Professional Development resources. I realised once I started looking into them that they were essentially compendiums of links to other websites answering questions to general questions like “What is assessment?”

The entire page was set out like this, with 10 sections laid out with a header, a handful of separate pages giving nuggets of information about the topic, then some links to other websites. The overall effect was completely over facing. Yes, these courses were designed for adults, but the principles of good web design revolve around the central mantra of “keep it simple”, regardless of audience.

The standard setup in Moodle is a course broken down by weeks or topics. All resources need structure, but most students using a textbook wouldn’t start flicking through from page one in order to find the subject they’re looking for – they would flip to the index. If you’ve put together a webpage that’s double the height of a standard monitor (~2048 pixels), start your course with an overview, including learning objectives & outcomes – just as you would at the start of a lesson.

Wherever possible, embed information on the page, don’t link to it. Whether this is a paragraph of text, an image or a Youtube video, students might miss it if you hide it away in a link.

This leads me on to my favourite discovery of last year; Adobe Presenter. Every Moodle course I set up now starts with a simple presentation that introduces the subject. Because it’s more attractive than standard text, and comes with an element of interactivity in the forward & back buttons, students are more likely to take the information in.

Embed these presentations by publishing them online and inserting an iframe to a label on your course.

“A modern paradox is that it’s simpler to create complex interfaces because it’s so complex to simplify them.”

Pär Almqvist

Softening the edges of a Moodle course takes time. Softening the edges of an entire Moodle installation takes even longer, but the benefits are potentially far greater. My school is in the process of switching from the almost impenetrable course list to departmental landing pages as the main way for students to access information.

5 rules for designing a good elearning course

1. Make it active & thought-provoking

Don’t just use your VLE to present information to students. Put activities on it to encourage them to engage with the content. Hot Potatoes quizzes, Flash-based activities, crosswords, etc.

2. Encourage collaboration

Include activities that require students to collaborate with others. “In 60 seconds, write down all the words you know related to e-safety. When you have done, swap your list with a neighbour and see if there are any words you don’t know. Together write a short definition of each word from both of your lists, using formatting & images to help.”

3. Guide your students with structure

Break Moodle courses into suitable chunks – lessons, topics – using headings, subheadings & indentation to show flow of information.

4. Embed, don’t link

Wherever possible, embed information in the body of your course rather than linking to it. If you have the equivalent of a page of text, link to it, but include anything shorter to improve readability. Having to have a dozen tabs open to read all of the information on a course is not usability in action.

5. Edit your copy

Textbooks rarely contain spelling mistakes. Not so for websites. With the increasing push to electronic media replacing textbooks, it is essential to retain quality & reliability. Read through the text on your courses, check the links, and if possible have someone else do it too.

Further reading

The field of user experience is fascinating, and well-documented. Try these links if you would like to read more:

• Jakob Nielsen: Twitter postings: iterative design – “text is a UI”
• Kyle Sollenberger: 10 User Interface Design fundamentals
• Leona Tomlinson: Understanding Disabilities when Designing a Website
• Michael Agger: Lazy Eyes – How we read online
• Sigma Infotech: Website design for your customers – it’s not what you want
• Adobe: Engaging with the new eLearning

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Please do let me know via a comment or email if you spot anything that I haven’t fixed – the next couple of days will be spent tinkering, tweaking, and (the biggest job) putting together excerpts of each post, again in an effort to make the site more accessible. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

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Anyhow, I’ve had a cursory glance around the program I use the most – Word – and the changes are subtle, but potentially good news for ICT teachers. The UI remains pretty much the same; still based around the ribbon (which I like, I know some don’t). In fact, the biggest difference is that the circular Office logo is now the first tab in the ribbon… no big deal:

The first real difference I found was in the Insert menu. There’s now a Screenshot feature that allows the user to insert a screenshot of any open window directly into Word, without the need to to printscreen & paste. Alright, not a huge improvement, but what is is the fact that it will take screenshots of small windows without the need to crop them down. Anyone who’s ever taught GCSE ICT will know the royal pain in the ass that is screenshotting, so this is in my book an excellent addition.

The screenshot menu.

Inserting a screenshot of iTunes.

Inserting a small screenshot of the character menu from Photoshop.

The next new feature I found was the artistic effects menu for formatting pictures. It basically offers the default effects from Photoshop… I can see this becoming the new rainbow coloured WordArt as the bane of my life in KS3 lessons. On the topic of WordArt, though, my year 7s will be pleased to see the new WordArt available in PowerPoint 2007 is now available in Word 2010 – they never quite understood why it wasn’t in Word 2007.

Finally, the File menu now looks completely different, encompassing all the options it used to link to.

The best improvement here is in the print menu, which now combines print preview with the print options menu in a far more user friendly format:

So so far, after half an hour’s play, all seems well. More steps in the right direction when it comes to usability & a polished interface, and I’m not surprised there weren’t more changes as I can’t really think of much else that would be needed. I’m no card-carrying Microsoft fan, but I think they’ve got a lot right with both Windows 7 and what I’ve seen so far of Office 2010. Whether you love them or hate them, better software from the Microsoft camp encourages better software from their competitors, so it can’t be a bad thing.

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The Human Oriented Technology Lab at Carleton University’s website reads “As technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and pervasive in people’s lives it is important to foster research and innovation that remains closely linked with the needs, wants and capabilities of people.”

Sure, but whose needs, wants and capabilities were taken in to account before now?

For decades, gadgets marginalised people who didn’t understand them. In the 1980s programming your VCR was as much a standing joke as airplane food. In the 1990s, nobody over the age of 20 could send a text message in less than half an hour.

These gadgets didn’t meet our expectations. Tapping dozens of buttons, scrolling through list-based menus or trying to work out what two circles joined by a line at the top aren’t natural ways of interfacing with the world. That’s not to say they weren’t popular, but rather than them being used intuitively their owners had to sit down and learn how to use them. Not quite man-machine synergy.

I am 24 years old, and for 14 of those years I have been the technology expert in my family. My dad, an intelligent, articulate, savvy man, has not only been confused by his gadgetry, but has sometimes been so flummoxed by the thing that he’s been unable to describe the problem.

Why? Because they don’t do what he expects them to do. My nan’s first mobile phone didn’t have predictive texting on it. Her second one, bought after a year of practicing with her first, did – and did by default. She couldn’t work out how to turn it off, so she stopped texting again. Are we born with the innate knowledge that hitting the hash key twice switches from predictive to normal texting? I’m no neuroscientist but I doubt it. Is not understanding the intricacies of these gadgets her fault? No.

If anyone’s to blame, it’s the guy who designed the phone, but we have to bear in mind the limitations imposed on mobile phone designers over the last ten years – size, cost, performance, hardware limitations, battery life… when you really start to think about it, there’s little wonder the things have been such a chore to use.

There is an awful lot that we do innately understand, though. Bobby McFerrin demonstrates this brilliantly in the video below:

Did you know that he was demonstrating the pentatonic scale? Even if you did, did you need to in order to sing along? Thankfully, we’re now at a point where technology has advanced enough to meet us half way in rising to these natural expectations within us all.

The two examples that leap to mind are the iPhone and the Nintendo Wii.

Give someone an iPhone (even, shock horror, someone over the age of 40) and just through playing with it they will very quickly learn how to use it, initially being impressed by the clever little touches like swiping to scroll, pinching to zoom & twisting to rotate up to typing on the qwerty keyboard & noting the changes in interface when the accelerometer detects it has been tilted. It’s outselling most other phones in most markets, and not just because it’s cute.

The majority of Nintendo Wii games are cute, with oodles of the fuzzy anime-like charm Nintendo does so well, but the real reason behind the blinding success of the console is in its revolutionary, pseudo-real movement-based interface. Demonstrating this with my year 11 top set, I mimed my way through several different games with a Wii controller in my hand (baseball, tennis, shoot ‘em up, golf, etc) while dragging a hapless volunteer to stand beside me and mime the same genre of game using a PS3 controller. Smirks all round, but they got the point. These inventions make sense.

“Who here has a Nintendo Wii?” Hands fly up. “Keep your hand up if you have ever needed to read the manual.” Hands snap back down.

So are we there? Have we truly reached the technological nirvana of seamless human-computer interaction? Not quite, but over the last few years we have seen some considerable steps in the right direction.

“What else do we need?” was the next question for my class. Here’s what they came up with:

• Voice recognition & commands: lights on, music, coffee
• Gesture recognition: wave, point, stop/go, nod/shake
• Further developments of touch technology: integrate with PCs, not just phones
• Develop movement recognition: Xbox Project Natal is another step in the right direction
• Biometrics: fingerprint, iris scan, DNA recognition

Quite an extensive list, really – I was impressed by the last one. The guy who suggested it had been reading up on the ID cards that have been causing a furore since they were announced several years ago. The idea of biometric integration with technology reminded me of the closing section of an excellent lecture given at Huddersfield University last year by Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, inventor of the DNA fingerprint.

In the lecture, he described the effect technological progress had had on the process of identifying a sample for DNA fingerprinting – identification of a person, or even a person’s relatives, by using samples of skin, hair or bodily fluids.

When he invented the process in 1984 it took two weeks in a laboratory in order to get a result. In 2008, it took about an hour with a kit that could fit into a briefcase.

And so he revealed his vision for the future; a Britain where nobody would ever worry about losing their keys. A nation of doors without locks or handles – when you get home you wouldn’t have to put your key into the lock. You would spit on the door, it would analyse the DNA contained in the sample and as if by magic open before you.

A utopian vision of the future; millions of homes with phlegm-covered doors.

Yeah.

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