E-Learning Conference 2008: Notes from Rochelle Troyano
This was an exciting conference for me. It was wonderful to meet colleagues from all over the country and to exchange ideas. Moreover, my traveling companions, Jason Myers and Phill Allen, were great!
I learned many things, two of which will play a part in my work in the coming year:
- The philosophy of Web 2.0 as applied to academia: that learning is best accomplished if we don’t teach from the top down, but rather allow the students to participate in their own learning. I feel that the cultural philosophy of NWIC supports this kind of learning!
- The move away from traditional textbook learning and into providing our students with learning coming from many different avenues. Technology is there to aid us in doing this for our students
Featured Presentation: Learning from our Worst Practices: Dr Myk Garn
Dr Garn gave a lively, interactive and humorous presentationhighlighting the desirability of willingness to make mistakes. This willingness will enhance our creativity in being able to make interesting lessons for our students. I loved this presentation. Dr Garn involved the audience by asking that we share our “dumb” mistakes. Some of the quotes that he had circulating in his presentation:
- “A Zen Master’s life is one continuous mistake”
- “Knowledge rests not upon truth alone but upon error as well”
- “Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage”
- “In times of change, learners inherit the earth”
Creating Fast and Easy Courseware and Simulations With PowerPoint: Steve Bonham, Georgia Southern University
This was also a GREAT presentation. Almost all of us use PowerPoint and this presentation showed how to use it to make self-teaching lessons for online learning. I can’t wait to try this out.
Enhance and Enliven Your Teaching with MERLOT: James Rutledge, St. Petersburg College
MERLOT stands for Multimedia Educational Resource For Learning and Online Teaching. It’s one of the earliest collection of learning resources, or what is called OER (Open Education Resources). And it’s FREE. These are peer-reviewed, college level lessons and learning objects.You can join for free and while creating your profile, indicate your discipline. Finding material to use in your face to face and online classroom is not difficult.
http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
Strategies for Motivating and Retaining First-Term Online Students: Carolyn Stevenson and Carol Forrey, Kaplan University
I liked this session and was able to join into the discussion. Some of the things that the presenting group did or were discussed at large:
- New Student Orientation 1 week prior to start of classes for 1 credit
- “R U Ready?” group of student mentors who personalize the new student experience by calling each new student and then being on-call to them
- Support Site piggybacked on Moodle – called SOS (Support Online Site). You can out other student service options
- Solicit senior mentors by giving certificates
- Online audios/Videos of previous students’ experiences
- Web repository of why students came back to school
- Synchronous “chat”
Mashing Up the Face of Academia: John Krutsch, Utah Valley University
Does anyone remember the Simon and Garfunkle song, “The 6 O’clock News”? In this song, the 6 o’clock news (with dire events) comes on while Christmas music is playing. The news gets louder and louder by the end of the song. This is a mash-up, a term I didn’t know but I think we all know the concept. Applying it to academia, it would be like not just using the textbook, but bringing in many more resources. Applying it to technology, it becomes mixed media and it can be fun for Instructor (if they like to experiment) and student alike.
The Community College Consortium for Open Education resources: Fred Lokken, Travis Souza, Dan Jones: Truckee Meadows CC and Coastline CC
The stress in this conference was certainly on moving education AWAY from expensive textbooks and the one-prong approach to teaching and learning that usually goes along with that. I came away with MANY resources for obtaining free, vetted and quality material for serving our educational needs. This new consortium (CCCOER) offered several resources:
- MIT OCW (Open Courseware) link: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
- Connexions – Rice University: http://cnx.org/
- Merlot (mentioned earlier)
- Open Learning Initiative (Carnegie Mellon) http://www.cmu.edu/oli/
The Promise of OER: Hippocampus Reaches Out to the Underserved: Terri Rowenhorst, Monterey Institute of Technology
Terri started right off offering me an information sheet about NWIC joining Hippocampus free, because they wish to involve tribal colleges at no cost. Hippocampus is again an online repository of online course work and learning objects, funding by NROC (National repository of Online Courses). Link: http://hippocampus.org/http://www.montereyinstitute.org/nroc/
Second Life for Administrators: Andrew Jones, Patti Jennings, Erin Jennings, U. of Texas
This one was definitely not for me! This was based on gaming and simulations.
Building Communities of Discourse Online: Kevin Morgan, St Petersburg College
I felt right at home in this group because Kevin conducts his online class in the same way as I do! He felt that, given the right tools, an Instructor could make an online course superior to F2F (face to face). He stated that the “discussion Forum” is the heart and soul of online learning. I have found that to be true in my online courses as well. His lessons were called “Cyber Journeys” and students write their 500 words discussions relative to these journeys. He has a sliding point scale for when someone posts their discussion (earlier is better) and whether they respond to other students in a substantive way.I entered into the lively discussion and took away some ideas on how to enliven my hybrid classes as well!
As soon as the ITC (Instructional Technology Council) has the sessions posted, I would be happy to provide you with links to any of the sessions. Here’s the link to ITC: