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JOSHUA DUTTON: Let me introduce myself.
My name is Joshua Dutton and I am the team lead for the
mobile developers.
I'm an iOS and Android developer.
I've been privileged to work on both of our mobile apps,
the one for iOS and the one for Android, and I've been
with Instructure for a year.
So I have this background in computer science and software
engineering, and yet I've chosen to talk to you about
course design and pedagogy and instructional design.
So let me give you a little bit more background.
So I've always loved education, and it's been
really important to me.
In fact, my dad was an economics professor and my mom
taught elementary education, and I always figured that I
was going to go and go to college and be like my dad.
I was also a musician, as was my family.
And when I graduated from high school, we had this family
musical group thing going.
And I went on the road full time and was a professional
musician for a number of years and helped run and manage my
family's business, and so it took me in a completely
different direction.
However, I started having some health problems and I looked
at switching careers.
And as I was looking at what I was going to do that would be
more compatible with my health needs, it became pretty
obvious that I finally needed that college education, so I
went to school, to Brigham Young University.
I started in my late '20s, and I'd always liked computers so
I thought I should take some programming classes, and I
just fell in love with it.
And also, I fell in love with education in general.
I don't think there was a class that I took that I
didn't really enjoy.
And while I was going to school, I
had a couple of mentors.
Michael Bush, a doctor at BYU, teaches the French language,
but he also has a strong background in technology and
he runs a lab where he builds language learning tools.
In fact, his lab had an LTI entry and won in the app
competition that we had just now with his tool, AML.
It's a really cool language media annotation and language
learning tool.
And so I got to work with him and learn about
interoperability and modularity and designing
software tools, and he also introduced me to Bloom's Two
Sigma Problem.
Now, if you haven't heard about this, Bloom was a
researcher that did this study, and he
observed that people--
that students that had one to one tutoring had a two
standard deviation increase in performance over the control
group, which just had a regular lecture based
classroom setting.
And many people believe, including Doctor Bush, that we
can use technology and smart course design to get us closer
to that one to one type setting and solve some really
cool problems in education.
Another mentor was Doctor Ben Gibbs, who I took a sociology
class from, and his research area is
inequality in education.
And he kind of opened up my eyes to the idea that solving
problems in education can help solve a whole host of other
socioeconomic problems, and it just got me really excited
about working in this field.
So when I started looking for a job, my number one choice
was Instructure and I feel so grateful that they
offered me a job.
And it's been a great experience.
So Instructure started with this vision to disrupt the LMS
market to provide tools that were easier to use, more
accessible to all of you guys, and that vision has now
expanded to a whole learning platform with our new Canvas
app center with great LTI apps.
I'm really excited to see what keeps coming in
the Canvas app center--
the MOOC Experiment with Canvas Network.
And I'm just really excited.
This was a vision that I could get behind.
Now, my personal vision is I want to be able to provide
really cool tools for you guys, and I'm really gratified
that I can impact education in this way without being an
instructor myself, doing what I like to do, which is
building things.
But I want to provide tools for you so that your great
teaching can have a larger impact
than just your classroom.
If we're able to provide and make it so that you can make a
ripple effect where your teaching methods and courses
and strategies will be felt by thousands of your peers and
students all over the world, then I will
feel that we've succeeded.
And I'm not just talking about doing a MOOC, I'm talking
about just being able to form a community of teachers that
can really transform education.
So I've chosen to talk a little about course design
today, and first I want to talk to you a little bit about
our mobile apps.
We have Canvas for iOS and Canvas for Android, and like I
mentioned, I've had a really fun time working on both of
these apps.
And our initial offering of this was very student centric
with being able to communicate, stay up to date,
and the students be able to kind of know what's going on
in their classes.
However, there's some key omissions to this that you
guys have been asking for.
And we've listened.
and we're happy to announce our Canvas for Mobile 2.0.
Many of you probably saw Mark Suman's presentation where he
went into detail on this.
If you happen to miss it, Mark Suman will be presenting again
in the K through 12 track today at 4 o'clock.
So you can go, you can see some live demos, you can get
an in depth look of Canvas for Mobile 2.0.
But we've been demoing it to people just kind of one on one
as we've been going around the conference, and Josh
[? Roush ?]
one of my coworkers--
is he here?
Yeah, right over here.
He got a hug and a kiss from one of our customers because
they finally have modules and LTI tools and quizzes in the
mobile app.
And we're really excited to bring this to you
next month in July.
Of course, it'll be free to all of our users and we'll be
working on tablets.
That'll be coming out in September.
You can also come for a demo at the UI UX booth, which is
just in the lobby of this hotel.
Just go down there.
Some of us will be in and out there, but the UI team, they
have devices where they can show it.
And it's a really beautiful new look and feel that they've
helped us come up with, and we're really proud of it.
So what I wanted to ask myself in preparing this is what can
we do on mobile devices that we can't do anywhere else?
It was a really interesting question, and that's what I
wanted to focus on for this talk.
And I'm not an expert and I know you guys are, so what I
hope that you get out of this is maybe some cool ideas of
things you can incorporate into your classroom.
But what I want to get out of this is building a
relationship with you experts so that we can continue to
build the tools that you need to do what you do best.
And so please email me.
My email address, again, is joshua@instructure.com.
I'll be around at the conference.
I just love to hear from you-- what works and what doesn't
work with mobile in your classroom.
Now, my first suggestion is to allow mobile
devices in your classroom.
We have this great--
these may or may not be a
representation of your students.
We have this Canvas teacher and user that says anytime she
uses mobile, her students are more engaged.
She figures that her students are on their devices anyway,
and if you can engage them that way with something that
they are so comfortable and familiar with, you'll really
get their attention.
Liz Karen Cole, the author of Toys To Tools, Connecting
Student Cell Phones to Education, said schools are
realizing the policies banning and ignoring mobile technology
in the classrooms aren't working.
Mobiles and cell phones are technology that society values
and they're not going away, so it's a technology we should
really embrace.
A national survey that PBS did from K-12 schools back in
January of 2012 found that 81% of teachers believe that
tablets enhance classroom learning.
This is a study I found called Pedagogy, iPadology,
Netbookology, Learning With Mobile Devices, and they had
some really interesting findings, including that the
mobile devices evidently acted as a motivating influence for
students to do their homework.
This is what we've been seeing, is that students get
more excited about technology and education when they can
use devices that they're familiar with.
Larry Cuban, the author of Teachers and Machines,
Oversold and Underused, said rather than making specialized
software and hardware just for school learning, students and
society introduce the technologies that school
should be integrating into learning.
This way they don't have to be limited to using technology at
school in order to learn.
So let's take the courses to the students instead of having
the students have to use special technology.
So here's some ideas, some things that I've come across,
some ideas that I had.
I'd be interested after this to hear some of
your ideas as well.
But have a race to look at answer on Wikipedia, look up
an answer, and text, email, or tweet it to the teacher.
You might want to try that.
Bring a QR code to class and give the students a quick way
to get straight to the syllabus or and interesting
video that pertains to your lecture.
Create quizzes are open device and let your students have
some exploration and discovery and use some
problem solving skills.
And create a Twitter hashtag for your class and keep a live
Twitter feed open on your desk.
Or a lot of students live in the Twitterverse, so having a
hashtag that you can use will kind of give you a feel for
what your students are doing and talking about in their
element, in an area that they are really comfortable in.
So we're going to give this a shot, all right?
You guys are going to do a quiz right here, right now,
and you can email me at joshua@instructure.com, and
we'll see who's the first to get the next
four questions right.
And if you do, you'll win these sweet '80s style
sunglasses that have the Canvas logo on them.
All right?
So here we go.
First, what was the first music video played on MTV?
What late '80s--
now, some of these you don't have to look up.
What late '80s pop band had their Grammy revoked?
What is Ted's full name from Bill and
Ted's Excellent Adventure?
And what highly caffeinated energy drink came out in 1985?
So while you're working on this, I will continue and we
will find out.
Just email me and I'll get the answer and we'll announce the
winner at the end.
My next suggestion is to use mobile devices yourself.
Shawn Gross, the project director for Project Connect,
says once the teacher utilize the tool sets available in
mobile learning they begin to see the net benefits.
I've read about teachers that are really slow to adopt some
new technologies.
They're foreign to some teachers.
And if you use it yourself, I think you'll start to realize
what cool things you can do.
I actually have some really strong language from a
principal at the Sarah Banks Middle
School in Wixom, Michigan.
His name is Mark Hess, and he says, "I tell teachers that
failure to embrace emerging technologies in today's 2010
classroom is educational malpractice.
We would never send their children to pediatricians who
are practicing medicine from the '80s, so why on earth--"
I've got to scroll--
"why on earth would we expect parents to send their children
to school with teachers practicing decade old
methodologies?" So this is some views that you've really
got to use the devices that your teachers do.
Back to this study I mentioned earlier, they found that the
key success factor for any mobile program is the use of
devices by engaged, supportive,
and prepared teachers.
So my first suggestion is when you design a course in Canvas,
load it up on your mobile device, look at it in your
mobile browser, and load it up in Canvas for iOS or Canvas
for Android, and see what it looks like.
See if there's anything that could be tweaked a little bit.
And as you're doing this, think if I were consuming this
on my mobile device, what I want from this material?
And you may find that breaking things up into smaller chunks
might be nice for students that want to be able to check
something out while they are taking the bus ride home or
something like that.
So I'm sure you'll come up with some-- since you guys are
the experts, I think things will just jump out at you when
you start to use these things on your mobile device.
And that for not just the Canvas stuff, but technology
in general.
The more technology, whether it's surfing the web, checking
your email, doing things you do everyday that you do on
your mobile device, I think the more you'll be able to
understand what your students want and are
looking for with that.
Use learner centric pedagogy.
Mark has, this principle again.
He said mobile technologies break down traditional
barriers of learning.
I remember my first semester as a computer science student.
And my first day of class, I walked into this intro
computer science class and the professor said OK, a third of
you are going to have a breeze through this course-- it'll be
like review time.
Then there will be a third of you that the class is
perfectly suited for--
it's just right.
And then another third of you are going to really struggle,
and some of you are going to fail.
So he recognized this problem.
I think this third-third-third distribution wasn't really
great, but he didn't do much about it besides hold a couple
of help sessions a week.
And I got thinking about that.
He really could have done more to focus to this need.
He could have flipped the classroom, put a lot of his
lectures online, and used even more time to cater specialized
learning to those that really needed it.
He could have provided some mastery based things for those
that already knew the material to not have to waste their
entire semester going through stuff that was a review, and I
just thought that the course could have been really
designed differently to cater to this kind
of different audience.
So I encourage you to look at how you can center your
courses around your students with material they can access
anytime and anywhere so that when you're there with them,
you can become a coach, a guide, and a tutor, and cater
your teaching time to focus on their individual needs.
And as a reminder, focus more on the pedagogy than the
technology.
Technology is cool, but as this study found, they said
the most significant observation is that the
importance of the actual digital device is not as
critical as the presence of a dedicated curriculum program.
So in other words, cool tools don't replace good course and
instructional design.
Tools are just that-- they're just tools.
So don't think that having a new gadget will solve the
education problem because it's still an
instructional design problem.
And lastly, use the apps that are out there.
There are some really cool educational apps.
And I remember some of the classes that I would take, I
would talk some students and they said oh, this app really
helped me do these things that we're studying about, and
encourage that amongst your students.
And you should be looking at apps and
encouraging them to use them.
And with that I think you'll find some really good content
and tools that are specifically tailored for your
area that you teach.
Here's a couple of resources for iOS.
Apple highlights a lot of really great apps.
And then Google Play for Education, they have a page
that I'll show you in a minute where they show a bunch of
education apps.
But at Google's recent developers conference, they
just announced a stronger push to do a dedicated education
platform through their Play Store to highlight even more
specific apps and to help institutions to install these
apps on all their devices.
Let me show you that really quick.
There you go.
So here's a highlight from the Apple App Store.
Here's some mathematics, language, and science.
There's some really, really cool tools that people spent a
lot of time on and you should be familiar with them.
Likewise, here is Google Play.
Here's some apps that I saw that looked
really, really cool.
And anyway, you should be checking these out and finding
out what works well for you.
All right.
Do we have an answer?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
JOSHUA DUTTON: So the answers--
are you Thomas?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
JOSHUA DUTTON: All right, come up.
Here's the answers.
The first video, Video Killed the Radio Star--
AUDIENCE: By The Buggles.
JOSHUA DUTTON: By The Buggles.
Video killed the radio star.
Milli Vanilli--
remember that controversy?
The whole lip-synching thing.
AUDIENCE: The Grammy was Best New Artist.
JOSHUA DUTTON: Best New Artist, nice.
Theodore Ted Logan from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure,
and of course, Jolt Cola came out in 1985.
All right.
So just to recap, last night Brian Whitmer came out and
danced for you all.
And I thought if he could do that, then I could write a
little song, being a musician, to recap what we
talked about today.
So we'll give this a shot.
[HARMONICA PLAYING]
JOSHUA DUTTON: (SINGING) If you let them use their cell
phones, they will all thank you.
If you let them use their cell phones, they
will all thank you.
You've got to teach them what they use to avoid those
teaching blues.
Canvas for Android 2.0 is coming your way.
Canvas for iOS 2.0 is now coming your way.
And mobile learning is now here to stay.
Kids these days eat, sleep, and breathe on
their cellular phones.
Kids these days, they bathe, play, and learn on their
cellular phones.
You better keep up or they're going to leave you alone.
[APPLAUSE]
JOSHUA DUTTON: Thank you.
So I'd like to open it up to you to ask questions and also
if you have experience that you'd like to share of what
has worked for you or what hasn't, then please do so.
Right over there.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
So I teach at Pasadena City College.
I teach on campus and I'm pro rate taking a class as a
student on campus.
From my iPad, when I'm trying to participate on discussion
boards, it often locks up or it stops or it thinks on its
own and I have to back out of it and back--
it's a little frustrating.
Will that change with the new app?
JOSHUA DUTTON: So your question is whether as a
student or as a teacher on the iPad app, the experience with
discussions is not quite as smooth as you'd like.
Is that--?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
JOSHUA DUTTON: That is good to know and we will work on it.
Yeah, we'll make a note of it.
There's our mobile QA quality assurance guy right there.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] support all of the platforms.
Are you going to have a Windows app [INAUDIBLE]
Windows phone or Window tablet?
JOSHUA DUTTON: Are we going to have a Windows
Mobile app coming up?
Our view on that is just to kind of wait to see what the
market decides with Windows Phone to see if there's a lot
of market share.
But we will continue to make our web app more mobile
friendly for any device.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: I'm really excited about using mobile in the
classroom, but working at a community college, I would say
20% of our students don't have mobile and don't want mobile
and don't have any funds to get mobile.
And while I love the idea of bringing all of this in, I'm
not sure what to do about this component of my students.
Now, when we get to mixing Canvas in a fully online
class, they go do training.
But to say, hey, let's do Twitter, and everybody break
out their phones.
I may have five students of 20 that don't have one and then
either feel isolated or they then disengage or they say,
well, you can't dock me points, you can't make me buy
a mobile phone.
And it's not a complaint but more of do other people have
solutions to that problem or what are they trying or what
are they doing to help?
JOSHUA DUTTON: So the question or the comment is that not all
your students have mobile devices nor inclined to get
them, and how do you do that?
In your case, my first thought is that you need to have your
material be so that it works in all the different things
that they use.
Can you do a thing where you have a quiz in the classroom
where some people can do it on their mobile devices and not
everybody can participate?
I don't know.
Did somebody want to address that that has an experience?
AUDIENCE: Well, one possibility is to have some
mobile devices you can lend the have nots.
JOSHUA DUTTON: So mobile devices you can lend out for--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
JOSHUA DUTTON: --in class and there's some challenges, yeah.
AUDIENCE: You have to take deposits and it's a hassle.
JOSHUA DUTTON: Or maybe even just use while
they're in the classroom.
So, yeah, this is kind of new--
AUDIENCE: It's a big challenge right now.
JOSHUA DUTTON: And a lot so the stuff that I talked about,
these studies, there's still a lot more data
that needs to be gotten.
Back there in the back.
AUDIENCE: I also think [INAUDIBLE].
But I think the point of your presentation, if I'm not
mistaken, is not to force students to use their phone,
it's to encourage them.
You said that many of them are using it and [INAUDIBLE].
I would never force all of my students to use mobile phones,
nor would I want them to access an academic discussion
from a mobile phone where they're not going to even
spellcheck or proofread, but it's great for other options.
So that's kind of what I'm getting.
It's not saying hey, everybody, use mobile phones,
but saying, recognize that we should allow it [INAUDIBLE].
JOSHUA DUTTON: Yeah.
So that the comment is it's not necessary that we're going
to switch everything over to mobile or say everybody's
going to use mobile devices for all their learning now.
It's that it's going to be another way that they can
consume their content that might work better for some and
not for others.
The only possible difference to that are schools that do
have one to one tablet programs and things like that
where you'd be using tablets or some mobile
devices all the time.
But yes, for most of you, it'll be just adapting it so
that mobile is just another great way to access.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: Since 2004, I've been teaching an English 102
research paper class in which the first day they have to do
an exercise where they can use any device that's
connected to the web.
It's a group exercise, so some people don't have devices but
they can use any device--
their laptops, phones, whatever--
to answer the research questions.
I give them about 20 questions and so they play this through
as a group and the first group that answers all the questions
gets a reward, just like you did.
JOSHUA DUTTON: So Sam here, he says that he does something
similar, but he makes a group exercise so that people can
kind of use whatever devices that they have to do it and
they get a reward for doing the end presentation exercise
we did today.
AUDIENCE: And here's the interesting thing.
My point is to make them aware that everything they've got,
everything they have a connection to is a useful tool
for research.
But it's amazing how many of them have been beaten down so
badly by the schools they come from that they'll come up to
me and they'll ask me privately, well, am I allowed
to use my phone or am I allowed to use my laptop?
It's kind of sad, but I get the point across, and the rest
of the semester's pretty interesting.
JOSHUA DUTTON: Cool.
So starting out, some people kind of wonder is this really
OK, and it works out well for you.
That's awesome.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: I want to offer some praise.
We just moved to Canvas about six weeks ago, and started
exploring the app.
I went to the discussion board.
I was playing around with it, and I saw that on the
discussion board [INAUDIBLE] attach to a video.
That frees up so much if you can have the students say,
here I am, I'm at the museum.
This piece of work speaks to me because of whatever, blah,
blah, blah--
boop, and it automatically goes to a discussion board.
How frickin' cool is that?
JOSHUA DUTTON: Thanks for the praise.
She just thinks it's so cool to post video I even thought
of a video or a picture scavenger hunt that people
could go on with their mobile devices.
Feel free to give Josh [? Roush ?] a hug, OK?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: I use your app, both Android and iPad, and actually
one of my favorite things is I have it in my favorites part
of my iPhone [INAUDIBLE]
email students, because that's secure with FERPA where
regular email is not so I use it that way.
You might want to consider just a phone app for email
only [INAUDIBLE].
JOSHUA DUTTON: So just a messaging app that just takes
the messaging out.
AUDIENCE: Right.
So we can do the FERPA in there so that it will give me
a little alarm when I've got an email [INAUDIBLE].
On my phone, I use a different one than I do on a tablet.
With the phone, I'm just doing email.
JOSHUA DUTTON: Well, on our road map, it's--
we don't have a date for it yet.
So she was saying that a messaging app just so that she
could communicate with her students and not be in their
emails because of FERPA guidelines
would be really great.
And we have push notifications down on the road map.
And yeah, I agree, being able to do that sort of thing.
And we are going to start doing some more customized
apps like the polling and quiz apps that
Mark announced earlier.
I think we have time for maybe one more question.
AUDIENCE: Going back to the discussion board, [INAUDIBLE]
will students be able to attach files to the discussion
board besides the library photos and videos?
JOSHUA DUTTON: So will students be able to attach
files to discussions besides just videos and pictures or
video and audio?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] attach to get to the library
[INAUDIBLE]
and then do the audio upload or video upload.
But I was wondering whether you'd be able to access your
files [INAUDIBLE].
JOSHUA DUTTON: I'm not sure.
Is that supported in web Canvas?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, it's something we currently don't support in
mobile yet, but we plan on adding--
JOSHUA DUTTON: So that won't be with 2.0, but it
is on our road map.
All right.
Well, thank you so much.
This was really fun for me to explore another area.
Thank you.