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DL Delivery |
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The Newsletter for JCCC Online Faculty |
February 2009 |
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In This Issue · ANGEL accounts & Source Courses · Who’s that in my Course? · Training Spotlight: JCCC Offerings · Thursday ANGEL mini-sessions · Reading and Research Resources BlackBoard may END THIS Semester—Spring 2009 Administration is considering not renewing BlackBoard in an effort to avoid laying off employees. Blackboard has refused to consider any contract that is less than one year. BlackBoard is one of many line items being considered for elimination. This means if you use BlackBoard, and if the contract is not renewed, all of your materials you wish to keep will need to be retrieved from Blackboard by the start of July 2009. A decision is anticipated this week (Week of February 16, 2009). Conference Links
· United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA) National Conference, April 26-29, St. Louis, MO
· ANGEL User Conference May 13-14, Chicago, IL · 25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, August 4-7, Madison, WI. · 2009 Conference on Information Technology – League for Innovation October 11-14, Detroit, MI. · EDUCAUSE 2009 Annual Conference, November 3-6, Denver, CO. Get Involved A Lecture Capture/Web Conferencing Task Force is being formed.
The first meeting of the task force will be at a webinar (online session) on free web conferencing tools:
“With the price range from $0 to $0, you can choose from quick and dirty (fewer requirements) all the way to slick and sleek (downloads required).
“Presenters include Dwayne Harapniuk, Manager, Educational Technology, Lethbridge College, and Bill Fricker, president, Bonne Journee Strategies (retired from NAIT). They will discuss and demonstrate numerous tools ready for use – by you, colleagues, and/or students. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and some others have captured a lot of critical mass.
“But, hiding-in-plain-sight is a smorgasbord of tools ready to enhance education.”
If you are interested in this task force, please contact Jonathan Bacon.
Contribute!
Have you read an article recently that should be highlighted in the Reading and Research Sources? Let’s include it in the next DL Delivery.
Articles must focus on some aspect of online teaching and learning.
E-mail the link to the article or the database and article information and your summary/annotation to me, and I’ll include it in the next newsletter. Are you?
on the Distance Learning Faculty list serve? If not, e-mail me to be included. Why is ANGEL in all caps? ANGEL is an acronym for A New Global Environment for Learning Contact Me Monica E. Hogan, Ph.D. |
ANGEL Accounts All faculty now have an account in ANGEL. What does this mean?
You can log into ANGEL at http://dl.jccc.edu and look around at preferences, help, and your ANGEL home page. You can even send “personal mail” to other users or join the student orientation group. However, there are no spaces for you to build or add course materials unless you are a part of the ANGEL pilot or you have enrolled in at least one of the training sessions. If you do have a course in ANGEL, you can add your colleagues to your course to share information, get feedback, etc.
You can still “play” in an ANGEL course by getting a sandbox: http://www.angellearning.com/accountRequest.asp
Enrolling in at least one of the training sessions gets you a “source course.” Source courses are the equivalent of development shells in Blackboard. In the source course, you can develop your course and ready it to be copied to a production course (one with students). Also, source courses do not get deleted or reassigned to another faculty member.
The ANGEL Project Team anticipates being fully integrated with ANGEL by Summer 2009, which means that, starting in Summer 2009, all courses will automatically have an ANGEL shell produced, and all courses still using Blackboard will have manually generated course shells. Of course, Blackboard will continue to be available through Spring 2010. From time to time, you may see a “Course Administrator” on your roster. That title is assigned by ANGEL to tech support staff when they enter your course to troubleshoot a problem. They never enter your course unless you or a student has reported a problem through the Help Desk. In either case, they’re checking settings and trying to replicate the problem in order to find a solution. They do not go in to just browse around. If they plan to be in your course for any length of time, they’ll contact you in advance.
If you have any questions about the appearance of a Course Administrator, please contact Jonathan Bacon, Ed Lovitt, or Shannon Ford. They’ll share with you the circumstances of the troubleshooting.
So, who might you see in your course? These are the names of the individuals who may enter your course to troubleshoot: Jonathan Bacon, Jinhua (George) Chen, Justin Dugge, Adam Entwistle, Bob Epp, Saul Epstein, Shannon Ford, Nick Greenup, Davy Jones, Marziah Karch, Jeff Kosko, Ed Lovitt, Tim Lucas, Philip Mein, Vince Miller, Jeff Morgan, Tracy Newman, and Michael Rea.
Training Spotlight: JCCC Offerings Besides ANGEL training, the ETC and Staff Development offer a wide-range of opportunities to get information, participate in discussions, or learn new skills, all related to online teaching. Here are some upcoming possibilities: Video Editing (ZETC 110) Essential Podcasting (ZETC 140) SoftChalk Essentials (ZETC 157) Microsoft Expression Web (ZETC 180) DL Related Wednesday Brown Bag sessions February 25, Noon – 1, GEB 264, “Technology Innovation Grant Updates & Reports:” Recipients of past Technology Innovation Grants will present the results of their classroom and research efforts. April 1, Noon – 1, GEB 264, “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better” offered by Marziah Karch: Tired of going to sessions to learn about software that only runs on Windows? This session will focus on nifty software tips and tricks for Mac users. April 8, Noon – 1, GEB 264, “Web 2.0 Apps: Collaboration and Productivity Tools” offered by Keith Krieger, Nick Greenup and Jonathan Bacon: This session will touch on such topics as the effective use of Wikis, building online communities with social software (Ning), task and online project management tools (Basecamp), microblogging (Twitter) and more. April 29, Noon – 1, GEB 264, “Telling Your Story with Video” offered by Bob Epp: Discuss the required steps/ planning required to effectively communicate a concept in a video format. We will discuss such topics as storyboarding, script writing and pre-planning the video shoot. For those who’ve completed ANGEL training, but want a review session, and for those who just want to supplement their face-to-face courses, there is the Thursday ANGEL mini-session series! The complete list is on the Educational Technology Site at http://web.jccc.edu/edtech/angel/mini/ Reserve a seat at an ANGEL mini-session by calling Beth Ramirez at 3670 or email her at bramirez@jccc.edu. Reading and Research Resources Tomei, L. A. (2006). The impact of online teaching on faculty load: Computing the ideal class size for online courses. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 14(3), 531-541. Retrieved February 12, 2009, from Research Library database.
Tomei asks three questions: “1. What are the teaching demands of an online course? 2. What is the impact distance learning demands on teaching load? Does teaching at a distance demand more of less of an instructor’s time? 3. What is the ideal class size for an online course versus the traditional classroom?” Tomei offers quantitative data that analyzed such data as time spent reading and responding to student e-mail and online discussions in comparison to responding to students in face-to-face courses (p. 537). The author finds that teaching online takes 14% more hours (p. 539) than traditional classroom teaching. Also using collected data, Tomei asserts that the ideal class size for a face-to-face class is 17, and the ideal class size for an online course is 12 (p. 539). Tomei includes the mathematical equations used to determine these numbers.
Ruey, S. S., E. Gummer, M. Niess. (2008). The quality of a web-based course: Perspectives of the instructor and the students. TechTrends, 52(6), 61-68. Retrieved February 12, 2009, from Research Library database.
Ruey, Gummer, and Niess (2008) review pedagogical practices encouraged for online teaching and then turn to the findings of their qualitative study. They assert that “[m]any instructors have found that teaching online is more challenging than teaching a face-to-face course than they initially envisioned” (p. 62). Similarly, the report that online students find the courses “more stressful than traditional classroom courses” (p. 62). Ruey, Gummer, and Niess suggest that instructors need to participate in online discussions, have frequent and consistent contact with students, provide feedback that works toward meeting student learning needs, and assessment practices that support high expectations of students (p. 66).
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