February 23, 2009

Good Morning Developers!

This week I am going to dedicate the blog to Twitter. Some of you may use Twitter often, some may be somewhat familiar with it, and some of you may have never heard of it before.

First off, what is Twitter? Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Here is the link to Wikipedia to learn even more about Twitter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

Secondly, how can we use Twitter in higher education. Here is a link to an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education that explains a little bit about how Twitter is currently being used in Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i25/25a01501.htm

In my mind, Twitter is another social networking site that is becoming very popular in the mainstream and if something is becoming popular in the mainstream we should not ignore it in the world of education. Our students are the future of their professions and it is our responsibility to stay on top of what they will be required to know about when they go out into the "real world". At this time I am not convinced that it is the best thing to come along since sliced bread, but I am seeing that it does have a place and a time and if used correctly it could add some value to a course (whether it be online or residentially). To see ways that other educators are using Twitter please see the following web site:

• http://twitter4teachers.pbwiki.com/

Additionally, if Twitter is very new to you and you haven't even been on the web site here is a link that has a video out how to get started using Twitter:

• http://edtechpower.blogspot.com/2008/01/getting-started-with-twitter-screencast.html

Beginning last week I started my very first Twitter page! You can view my Twitters under the name amyode or you can simply click on the "follow me on Twitter" link on the right side of my blog. I am hoping to connect with other Higher Education professionals through this new form of social networking in order to learn about new technologies and interesting articles as well as share my knowledge with others in the Higher Education community.

Have fun playing around with this new technology and I hope to see you on Twitter!

Please feel free to post comments regarding this blog post after you have read it. I am always open to your thoughts and ideas regarding anything that I post on my blog!

Have a great week!

Amy

February 17, 2009

Good Morning Developers!

All of you that are developing a course during this round of development have done online development before so rather than focusing on the basics of development for the upcoming blog posts, I will be discussing more advanced topics and will do my best to give you ideas to spark your development creativity.

To start off with a few announcements:

• If you haven't returned your contracts yet, please return those to me this week.
• The 25% completion deadline is on March 9th
• I will be going on maternity leave during this round of development. When I go on leave you will begin to receive updates and announcements as well as blog entries from Heather Thomton-Stockman
• We will need to create both 12 week and 10 week masters for every course

I also wanted to bring an article to your attention regarding the use of laptops in lecture based classrooms. Although you are designing courses primarily for online use, most of your shells will be used by residential instructors as well. The article titled "Can I have your half-attention, please?" discusses whether or not laptops are creating a culture of 'constant partial distraction'. As we work more and more in a technology centered educational environment, this is an important topic to know about: http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2009/02/06/can-i-have-your-half-attention-please/

In your design of your course think about whether or not it would be beneficial for instructors to have students access your course during a lecture or if it would be best used as a supplemental tool for residential instructors. Is there a way you can add items to your course shell to make it useful during a lecture situation?

Have a great week!

Amy

February 2, 2009

Hello Developers,

This will be the last blog for developments due to be complete for the Spring 2009 quarter.

I want to extend a big Thank You for all of the work you have done on your courses and I am excited to receive the feedback from the peer advisers this week - I am sure the feedback will be great!

If you have not yet completed your course (some of you have to still add course calendars, etc.) I have already e-mailed you individually this morning.

Once we have completed working in the feedback from the peer advisers the last step is to make a copy of the fully completed course and then you will convert it to the 10 week schedule. If you have concerns about this process please let me know ASAP!

I enjoyed working with all of you this quarter and look forward to working with each of you again in the future! We will be in communication over the next few weeks as we finish up the development, so as always, please be sure to contact me with any questions or concerns.

Amy

January 26th, 2009

Good Morning!

We have reached the end of the development time period! All courses must be 100% complete by February 2nd (Next Monday). At that time the peer advisers will have one week to go into your courses to provide you with feedback. After you have worked in your changes suggested by the peer advisers by February 23rd then there is only one step left

• Changing your course to the 10 week schedule

All courses must also be designed to fit the 10 week schedule because we now offer our summer quarter courses in 10 weeks instead of 12 weeks. All courses must be changed to match the 10 week schedule by March 2nd.

For those of you that have contracts an additional $200 will be added to your payment to compensate you for this additional development work.

I blogged about how to change your courses into the 10 week schedule on December 15th so if you have questions please go back to that post for the original information. If you still have questions please feel free to contact me at any time to help you through any questions that you still have. I am happy to help!

For those of you who are current faculty members I hope you had an opportunity to attend the in-service on Friday, there was a lot of great information! For those of you who weren't able to attend Brian James did a presentation on "The Changing Classroom" and discussed many great online tools that can not only be used in a residential classroom but also an online classroom. I have attached his power point presentation to the e-mail I sent out - the ideas in this presentation are great and I hope you had an opportunity to work some of them into the design of your course.

Please let me know as soon as you finish your development and I will go in and check your course before I open it up to the peer advisers.

Have a great week!

Amy

January 20, 2009

Hello Everyone,

We are getting down to the end - only 2 weeks left until your courses are opened up for the peer advisers. If you finish early please let me know and I will go in and check it and mark it off as being complete.

There is exciting stuff happening at the Globe Education Network! We are looking at two new campuses: Middleton (Madison), WI and Elk River, MN. We anticipate all approvals to be in place by March 2009! All of the students at these campuses will be eligible to take courses online.

As you finish up your developments please remember to take a look at the following items:

• Spell check EVERYTHING - quizzes, discussion boards, reading assignments, etc. We want to catch those spelling errors and typos before the students do
• Make sure to include at least one external link in every unit - the external link must open in a new window.
• You should have at least one assignment in every unit.
• Upper level courses should have at least one assignment that is threaded through a couple of units. In these upper level courses it is important to connect the content from unit to unit and tie them together in the end.
• If you would like to work in a research assignment we have a ton of online library resources. Please contact Elaine Settergren at esettergren@msbcollege.edu and she can point you in the right direction.
• Please be sure to include a course calendar and check that the total points in the course calendar match the total points in the grade center.

Please let me know if you have any concerns about finishing your course by February 2nd.

Have a great week! Enjoy the inauguration and happy belated MLK day!

Amy

January 12, 2009

Hello Developers,

Today marks the 75% completion deadline so I will be going into your courses this week to check for 75% completion. This is also the time I start to gather peer advisors to go through your courses, once they are complete, so you have feedback from other instructors that teach online. I will be sure to include you on this e-mail, so if you are interested in peer advising on another course that is currently being developed, just let me know! It is a great way to see what other developers are doing in their courses.

I also want to remind all of you that here at Globe Education Network all of our employees can subscribe to Online Classroom for free. I haven't mentioned this since August, so I thought it was time to remind you :-)

Online Classroom provides practical advice and examples of proven, research-based pedagogical techniques to help instructors and course developers create and teach outstanding courses. To access Online Classroom simply go to www.magnapubs.com/licenses/suscribe.html. Enter your individual email address and password as well as the other required information. You will need to enter a Voucher Code and PIN number where prompted - I have e-mailed this information to you.

There is a new issue that just came out last week and there are some interesting articles that I felt were very interesting. I would like to comment on just a few of them here.

The first article I would like to comment on is titled Instructors Personality: An Essential Online Course Component. This article encourages instructors to infuse their personality into the course they are teaching/developing. As a developer, you are creating a master course shell for multiple instructors to use at one time. Therefore, it can be difficult to know how much of your personality you should include in your development. My recommendation would be to include some components of your personality into the course, but to keep in mind that some instructors teach differently then you may teach and to provide options for these instructors to teach the course a little differently. You can insert hidden notes for future instructors explaining why you set something up in a certain way and you can also use this method to provide future instructors with options and ideas of how to teach the concept a little differently based on their personality.

The second article I would like to comment on is titled Tapping Into Higher Level Thinking in Online Courses. For several months now I have been mentioning the idea of including critical thinking in the development of your courses. This article takes it one step further and actually defines what it means to incorporate critical thinking. If this is a topic that still has you stumped, this article will help to clear up some of your questions.

The third and last article I would like to comment on is titled Online Teaching Fundamentals: That’s Debatable. I don't often see online debates set up in our courses, and this article provides a great understanding of not only why online debates can be valuable but offers examples and step by step guidelines on how to set one up in your course. This can be a great tool to use in your development to really engage the students as well as to get them to think critically about a topic! I encourage you to check out this article!

Have a great week! Stay Warm :-)

Amy

January 5th, 2009

Good Morning!

This is my first post of 2009 - I hope that everyone had a great holiday! I hope that you all had a chance to work on your courses over the break, but just in case you didn't I want to alert you of a few changes in Blackboard:

• Over the break we updated to a new version of Blackboard. When you go into find your grade book you will now find the "Grade Center" instead. I will be e-mailing out the new "how to" document on the grade center, but a few pointers are listed below.
• To move stuff around in the Grade Center hover over "Manage" and click on "Organize Grade Center". Use the Drag and Drop Feature on the far left column to sort the assignments by unit and then click "submit" on the lower right.
• To view the total points in the grade book (grade center) you go to the "total" column and select the drop down arrow and then select Column Information.
• The Grade Center does not update as quickly as the grade book. If you update something you will likely need to go back to the control panel and then back into the grade center to see the change you made.

I hope you are all enjoying working on your courses and that you have a great week!

Amy