FTCC - Distance Education Track

Editor's Notes

• #3: This should create a pyramid. Many will have taught online…fewer will be well-supported. Use this exercise to suggest that “many of us are tasked with teaching online, fewer of us have development experience, and fewer still feel well-supported” Here’s the bottom line: Most community college faculty are pressured to teach online BUT they feel they lack grants/money/incentives to support design and development, they have no targets for quality standards, and they are concerned about time resources for development and maintenance of online courses. So, your role here is to be suggestive of tools/considerations for self-starters.
• #4: Hyperlinks = professor overview of report’s findings AND a CNN report on the attraction to online education in bad economic times. Use the next few slides to establish urgency…there are more online students than ever before, and there is more doubt than ever before about the validity of this modality.
• #5: Quality was not mentioned in the CNN clip….convenience, job training, cost were the values. Not quality.
• #6: Quality was not mentioned in the CNN clip….convenience, job training, cost were the values. Not quality.
• #7: Use this slide to establish that, in fact, the industry is showing some great promise. Quality can be achieved, as can student success.
• #8: Get them thinking about what constitutes quality in general. Use Q/A. Then, once they brainstorm, use the next slide to demonstrate that fundamentals are fundamentals and that best practices for instruction, in general, are achievable in eLearning.
• #9: Arthur W. Chickering's and Zelda F. Gamson's book entitled, Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education
• #10: Get them thinking about what constitutes quality in general. Use Q/A. Then, once they brainstorm, use the next slide to demonstrate that fundamentals are fundamentals and that best practices for instruction, in general, are achievable in eLearning.
• #11: Use this as the framing slide for what you are delivering to the audience
• #12: Sending you a PDF file containing HLC best practices. Just use as an example of published guidelines so people understand that there are specific, industry standard resources available.
• #16: Remember, 99% of higher ed faculty have NO background in ID or pedagogy. Equipping them with a basic framework might be helpful. Provide a design document sample to illustrate the application of a design model to a development process.
• #18: Provide examples of design documents
• #21: * Palloff, R. & Pratt, K. (1999) Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers
• #23: Information organization and retrieval: Carefully structure course activities into different conferences or discussion forums, so that all of the information in one conference relates to a small number of topics, and no single conference gets so large that it is difficult to find information within that conference. Synchronization of the class as a whole: Set clear guidelines that tells students what needs to be done, where, and when so that the students are focusing on the same activities at the same time. Strictly enforce these guidelines to maintain the order laid out in the conference organization. Coordination, collaboration, and socializing among the members: A key instructor role is to motivate, encourage, and facilitate authentic, active and collaborative interaction among the students. Frequent (ideally daily) instructor activity helps to create a socially welcoming environment. Another critical strategy is establishing and enforcing a course structure that can accommodate high levels of interaction without creating an information overload, as well as support levels of trust required for open expression of views. Such a structure enables students to realize that their active participation supports content mastery, higher grades, and overall learning. The software used should enable students to have their own private conferences for doing group work. Sharing knowledge: Upper division and graduate courses usually have a mix of students with and without considerable working experience, so 'contextualized learning' is important: promote the relevance between experience and learning by teaching experienced students course concepts in the context of their real life experiences. These students then can bring these understandings to the rest of the class. Students then take what the course professor has to say far more seriously. Sharing learning and feedback: Particularly in courses with many abstract concepts, encouraging students to make experiential associations by elaborating course concepts in their own frames of reference helps the instructor to better gauge teaching effectiveness. Students may understand other students' representations and understandings better than the ones the instructor use. This is a form of the Montessori effect, i.e., having students help other students and thus minimizing instructor workload in the process. Requiring participation: Grade students on the quality and timeliness of their contributions rather than quantity (number or size) of their contributions. In the case study courses, 'required' (i.e. specified based on assignment) and 'voluntary' (i.e., discretionary) contributions each accounted for 10% of the total course grade.