Online Teaching Strategies

In this 12 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Leslie Dare, Director of Distance Education & Tech Services for Student Affairs at North Carolina State University. She presented a plenary session at the 2007 ELI Fall Focus Session entitled, "Keeping Pace with the Net Generation: A Student Affairs Perspective"

The student affairs division can be a valuable partner in developing a campus response to Net Generation issues. In addition to improving the “Net IQ” of staff on campus, student affairs can and should play a significant role in assessing the impact of technology on student development and behavior, crafting policies and procedures, and educating students about technology rights and responsibilities.

Will faculty reduce lectures, become facilitators of learning, and adopt interactive learning methods? Are development tools available to help bring about these changes? Will students benefit? These questions were addressed in Florida Community College's presentation of the SIRIUS Project involving over 300 faculty. The presentation was titled "A SIRIUS Look at Faculty Development".

In this 12 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Bill Ganza, Director of Professional Development at Florida Community College in Jacksonville, Florida. He discuss professional development for faculty and the SIRIUS project that has been implemented at his and other campuses.

In this six and a half minute podcast, we feature an interview from the EDUCAUSE 2007 Southeast Regional Conference. I conducted the interview with Jim Murphy, Director of Instructional Design & Development at Elon University. He presented a session entitled, "Elon's Web-Based Summer School: An Online Success Story".

Elon University has developed a successful summer online courses program, popular with both faculty and students. In this interview Jim Murphy describes the challenges faced in establishing and maintaining the program, highlighting the factors that have helped ensure its success.

This podcast features a 9 minute interview with Barbara J. Hoskins, Assistant Dean for the College of Health, Education & Human Development at Clemson University. In this conversation, recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Southeast Regional Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, Dean Hoskins discusses the session she presented at the conference entitled, "Effective Online Program Models from Faculty and Student Perspectives".

From the session description:

With online learning, we have moved beyond the early adopter phase and find ourselves seeking effective models and best practices to ensure we are delivering a quality educational opportunity. This presentation will identify nationally accepted criteria for effective online programs and evaluate the success of delivery models from all viewpoints.

In this 44 minute podcast, we hear the opening keynote address for the  2007 Western Regional Conference entitled  "All Aboard the Digital Express". This keynote is presented by Linda Thor, President of Rio Salado College in Tempe, Arizona.

Four distinct generations, from the tech-savvy to the tech-challenged, are enrolled in higher education today. Are we as educational leaders in tune with their wants and needs? In an era where students can text message their registrations, how many bells and whistles should we offer them? How do we manage to track trends? This presentation will explore possibilities and innovative solutions for the digital age. 

A 15 minute interview with Stephen Murray, Professor of Art History & Archeology at Columbia University. Professor Murray has developed an online database that presents his unique research — chronicling the documentation of over 100 Romanesque structures through comprehensive digital photography and three-dimensional QuickTime Virtual Reality panoramas.

This project, developed with teams of student helpers in the framework of a summer field school, brings the student to the monument with new questions, new techniques and new enthusiasm. Conversely, it brings the monument to the student not as a single isolated edifice, but as part of much larger enterprise that can be understood as the production of space.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their

The latest EDUCAUSE Quarterly is now online, featuring articles on approaches to ResNet services, the future of online teaching and learning in higher ed, a model of online faculty development workshops, and e-conferencing for instruction. Click the RSS icon at the top left of the EDUCUASE Quarterly home page to access the XML required to subscribe

 

One of the faculty members at my university teaches large classes of students (in Accounting and Management), and he's eager to implement Active Learning into these courses. An obvious challenge, however, is that the students themselves tend to be skeptical of Active Learning; they are familiar with the Sage on the Stage approach, and thus they are often reluctant to embrace a teaching strategy that is not a straight lecture. To help address this challenge, I've offered to attend the instructor's course (at the beginning of the term) with a view to making a presentation (and facilitating a discussion or debate) about Active Learning. Essentially, I want to persuade the students that Active Learning can improve their performance, and therefore they should welcome their instructor's Active Learning teaching strategies. In preparation for this, I reviewed a number of studies of the efficacy of Active Learning, extracted the most salient passages, and pulled them together into a single document. That document is attached.

The latest EDUCAUSE Quarterly (EQ) includes feature articles on the financial and strategic aspects of e-learning, online certification for online teaching, the use of PDAs in the IT curriculum, and CIO effectiveness in higher education. These articles along with the magazine's regular columns are available free online.

We continue our conversation and talk about "Not School". This amazing 5 years old, multi million pound sterling a year, project sounds radical, and it is radical, but in this episode Stephen Heppell also points out that the learning outcomes of "Not School" are absolutely breathtaking. e.g. 93% of the kids on the project within 3 months of starting get some external accreditation and most have been out of the school system for 18 months to two years. This podcast is really worth a listen and "Not School" definitely supports Stephen's comment: "There is the future, the 21st Century - bang! By people, for people, with people, what a democratised century we are in"

I arrived in Dublin after flying overnight from Washington DC and was suffering from redeye, but the time with Stephen and Gavin was certainly energizing ... oh yeah the Guinness helped too. When I was podcasting with Stephen and Gavin my jetlag was completely negated by my level of engagement in hearing about this incredible experiment in learning.