FEP: Self Examination of Teaching – ENG101/ENG102 Course Shells/Guides
To complete an FEP each faculty member must engage in a self-examination of “THREE REQUIRED AREAS”:
- TEACHING (OR OTHER PRIMARY DUTIES). For example, instructional or service delivery, content expertise, classroom or program management, instruction/program design.
This is the first of my three required areas for self-examination. Teaching. I will focus on content expertise. I’ve been teaching online for 14 years, so I’ve become somewhat of an expert in online course development. One of the good things about becoming involved with online teaching is it brings me back to the basics of teaching and learning and course design. What I mean by that is that so much scrutiny has been placed on online teaching and online classes. For instance, in order to teach online, one must be properly trained in Quality Matters standards and have a course review after their course is developed. This is not expected of any other instructor teaching at the college, only online instructors. As a result I’ve been able to master instructional design and online course development. One of the projects I’ve been working on since transferring over to GCC is building ENG101 and ENG102 course shells and teaching guides for adjunct instructors. The course shells have been a work in progress for several years now, but the gist of the project is to make available full courses for adjuncts to use as guides for teaching their own courses.
The course shells and teaching guides include full syllabi and full course modules with included assignments, readings, class activities, and quizzes. The course shells can be used in whole or in part depending on what the instructors need. When I designed the courses, I used my knowledge of instructional design for online, hybrid and face-to-face instruction, so no matter what the mode an instructor may teach, the course shells will be a good place to start.
One key concept of designing good online classes is modularization. You can read more about how A Modular Course Design Benefits Online Instructors and Students. I figured if it works for online, why wouldn’t it work for face-to-face classes as well. So I designed the course shells using modules that incorporate the same types of components in each course module. Faculty could then pick and choose which modules they wanted to use. Modules were developed around a 3-4 week period. In the ENG101 each module included 2 assignments, handbook activity (grammar practice), journal posts, discussion forum, an essay and a module quiz. Have a look at the complete modules overview page for ENG101. Below is a screenshot of Module II from the fall semester.
The course shells were designed in Word documents as well as placed in a Blackboard course shell and shared with both full-time and adjunct faculty in the department. So if someone wanted to use the course management system if was already set up and organized for him/her. We currently have 22 people who have access to the Blackboard course shell. This semester I spend considerable time converting the Bb course shells over to Canvas. ENG102 is ready, but I’m still working on ENG101. With the move to Canvas, I’ve been working on rewriting/writing better learning objectives for both courses.
Diigo Links for the Week (weekly)
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How To Share Files Through Facebook Groups | Edudemic
The ability to share files in Facebook makes FB more relevant to teaching and learning. You weren’t able to do this before now, so I’m interested to see now how I might be able to implement a few discussions in this tool now. How to share files through Facebook groups http://t.co/hnfI4Mij #edtech #socialmedia
MIL Retreat 2012
So this past week we had a two day retreat for new and old MIL fellows. On the first day we got to spend the day getting to know each other and learning the ins and outs from the exiting fellows. The first thing I noticed was the comradeship of the five exiting fellows. They lost one fellow at the start, so they only had five. These five individuals sounded like they truly had a good time and supported each other throughout the process. They shared their experiences, as well as their research projects, and I felt overall very comfortable with the expectations of the program. I left excited to get started on my own project.
For those of you who are not familiar, “The Maricopa Institute for Learning (MIL) is a fellowship for residential faculty in any discipline who are interested in examining significant issues in their teaching fields and contributing to the scholarship of teaching and learning through classroom research projects. Its secondary purpose is to create a community of scholars that will engage in conversations about the scholarship of teaching and learning.” The program is weighted heavily in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), hence my stolen logo from some other institution.
The best part of the retreat this past week was getting to know my own group of fellows. We are a very diverse group coming from only 3 of the 10 colleges: GCC (me), MCC (3) and EMCC (2). Only two of our disciplines overlap; myself and Annie both teach English, but Annie’s project dips into dev ed and accelerated learning and my project deals with online learning and is not discipline specific. It will be relevant to all courses that can be taught online. It was really interesting to hear what each participant is planning to study during our time together. I know I will learn as much about their projects as I will about my own. I’m excited to get started.
So our first steps, as recommended by the out going fellows, are to get the project sured up so I can get my IRB submitted and hopefully approved by the end of summer. And secondly get the literature review completed during the summer when you have fewer obligations to get in the way. I think this is good advice, and I plan to do just that. I’m not intimidated by the IRB process. For one, I’ve been through this all before with my doctoral dissertation, and I stressed enough then to cover any I may have now. Also my current project is pretty basic. I’m not doing anything outside of normal teaching practices. I’m just asking to collect the results of how my students do with these practices. It should go through easily (knock on wood).
We were also given some summer reading, so I’ll probably start with that. We’re reading Enhancing Learning Through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning by Kathleen McKinney (left) and Blueprint for Learning: Constructing College Courses to Facilitate, Assess, and Document learning by Laurie Richlin. I’m going to enjoy this next week of break before I jump in full force June 1st. I’ll be back then to report out on how it’s going.
Diigo Links for the Week (weekly)
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If you are thinking of starting a study group online then you should try out Thinkbinder. This website builds a social-like platform for study groups to share files, post ideas and status updates, collaborate, and just keeping in touch. Creating a study group with Thinkbinder takes less than a minute.
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“Effective evaluation of the credibility of sources is more important than ever for students faced with an overwhelming array of content.”
FEP: Survey Says: Podcasts & Screencast are Helpful
So for my FEP (Faculty Evaluation Plan) this year, I decided to work on improving instruction in my online courses. It seemed appropriate and easy to measure, so I went for it. You can learn more about the FEP in future posts, as it is due June 30th, and I’ll be posting it all here. For now, I just want to jump to the end and talk briefly about the results.
The plan involves creating more podcasts (video and audio) and screencasts to provide additional instruction for students in the online course. I had a few of each in the past, but I didn’t have something for every assignment. This semester I committed to at least one visual/audio aide per lesson and a weekly podcast. I wanted to see if students found them helpful to their success in the class. The screencasts usually walk students through the process of doing the week’s assignment. An example of this is when students are assigned to search the databases in the library for periodical articles, I created a screencast that shows them how to access the databases, log in from home and search successfully using the advanced search tool. Other instructional videos included how to write opposing views and counter arguments and other such skills needed to write an argumentative essay.
The weekly podcasts were weekly updates and guidance announcements that let students know where they should be in the process, as well as updates about upcoming assignments and due dates. Here is an example of a weekly podcast from my ENG102 online class.
Students were exposed to these podcasts and screencasts all semester long, so at the end of the class I surveyed them to see how useful they found them to be. The results were not surprising, as you can see below.When asked if the weekly podcasts in the course were helpful, 56% strongly agree and 37% agree that they were helpful. Only 6% responded that they neither agreed or disagreed with that statement. When asked if the screencasts in the course were helpful, 62% said they strongly agreed and 18% agreed that the screencasts were helpful. Six percent didn’t feel the need to watch them and 12% neither agreed or disagreed that they were helpful.
Nintey-three percent also stated that they preferred Canvas over Blackboard.
Diigo Links for the Week (weekly)
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Asynchronous Learning and Trends – Faculty Focus
Asynchronous learning, or teaching and learning that occurs when the interaction between the instructor and students is not constrained by time and place, can cause feelings of isolation, resulting in disappointment and low retention rates in online classes. Faculty Focus examines new, proven collaborative learning techniques you can use in the online classroom to promote social interaction and have a positive influence on learning, motivation, and problem-solving.
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5 Essential Technology Podcasts That Geeks Should Listen To
from MakeUseOf http://www.makeuseof.com
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Using Twitter for Communication / Independence – Resources – TES
RT @tesict: This blog is full of tips on how make use of Twitter in your lessons. – http://t.co/qNcVIK3X #edtech #edchat
Diigo Links for the Week (weekly)
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Add Green Screen (Chrome Key) Effect to Screencasts with Camtasia
Useful for creating online lectures.
Diigo Links for the Week (weekly)
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Dropbox Takes Livescribe Notes To The Cloud [Updates]
from MakeUseOf http://www.makeuseof.com
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My ideal smartwatch [Opinion and Poll]
from Android Phone Fans http://phandroid.com
Impossible Working Conditions – Forget Accountability
Working on campus the last few weeks has been nearly impossible. Forget 6 hours of accountability. It’s not happening. Not on campus at least. Here’s what’s happening instead. Nothing. Lots of meetings for HLC. More nothing. Go home. Work. Yep, I literally show up to campus to make an appearance. I can’t get anything done because the network is slower than (fill in with appropriate simile). Last week we got this message from IT:
The GCC OIT networking team has been working diligently to try to resolve the Internet connectivity issues we’ve all been experiencing. In some critical applications, this has resulted in connections being “dropped” entirely. Just as frustrating has been the overall slowness of those systems that are working.
At this point, we basically have two choices: 1) live with the situation the way it is, or 2) deal with some slowness during peak times but keep as much application integrity as possible. We have decided to go with option 2 so that key applications like Blackboard, AccuPlacer, and others, are able to run without “timing out”.
Those were our only two choices? I found that odd. Am I the only one who is finding it nearly impossible to do my job while on campus? I can’t grade anything. I can’t create anything. Basically I can’t teach. I can’t even goof off and watch YouTube videos, not that that’s what I would want to do, but hey, it was a district email that sent the links. 😉
So yesterday we got an update to the system and supposedly the problem has been fixed. The email states:
With the assistance of Tempe support services, a firewall bottleneck was isolated and removed. Network performance monitoring confirms the effectiveness of the change.
We wish to thank our GCC community for your feedback during this trying time. Your comments helped our technical staff identify the root issue.
Is it any better. No, not really. It still takes forever to load pages. But I’m not really complaining. I like working from home better, and I’m getting good at composing quick tweets about nothing important while I wait for my pages to load. It’s like I’m encouraged to goof off and to fill my idle time while sitting here staring at my browser window. I also love having an actual excuse for why I didn’t get those essays graded sooner. And some times we just need a mental break from non-stop work, work, work. So it’s all good that our network stinks. I’m not mad at ya! In fact, I was able to write this post in between page loads as I try to grade journal posts for my ENG102 class. Now I’m off to help faculty create hybrid courses – not on campus obviously. We even have an excuse to meet up at the local pub! W00t!
Diigo Links for the Week (weekly)
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MentorMob – Learn What You Want, Teach What You Love – MentorMob
MentorMob is an attempt to organize learning into relevant chunks i.e. playlists. Learning playlists are created by the community of users, and this collaboration it is hoped will lead to quality. As each playlist is rated by the community, the good ones will come to the surface.
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Free Technology for Teachers: How To Use Evernote for Bookmarking and More
from Free Technology for Teachers http://www.freetech4teachers.com/
