03.23.07
Posted in Blended Learning, Learning Theory, Learning Styles at 3:01 pm by Norm Garrett
We need to adapt. I know many professors who can’t see that the students that are coming into their classes are different than those of, say, 20 years ago. First of all, these students don’t much like books and rarely use them. Second of all, they want learning to be more “pull” than “push.” But we can’t just throw technology at them. In the first place, they aren’t all necessarily fond of it and, secondly, does the technology fit the pedagogy? Further, does the professor know anything about (or have any comfort level with) the technology?
Here’s a great article from The Chronicle of Higher Education about implementing some Web 2.0 practices in our classrooms. Personally, I am a great fan of social networking in the classroom. Accordingly, I use RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, and forums extensively in my classes, both face-to-face and distance learning. But not everyone is comfortable with that. Still, everyone needs to learn to adapt and there are some good ideas here about doing so.
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Posted in General at 10:25 am by Norm Garrett
Online courses have taken off, but are they all good? They range from PowerPoint slides without narration (i.e. “read the chapter and look at the PowerPoints”) all the way to sophisticated courses that use a variety of technologies, foster a great deal of interaction, and have actual learning taking place! How can you tell where your course falls?
A good place to start the evaluation is using a tool that was developed at the Illinois Online Network. It is called the Quality Online Course Initiative and it was two years in development, taking the best of many other instruments that are out there and placing everything into one easy-to-use rubric. The rubric framework makes it straightforward to use to evaluate a course.
If you are just starting out developing online courses, I would highly recommend that you look at the rubric before and during the development process.
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03.09.07
Posted in Conferences at 11:17 pm by Norm Garrett
The Illinois Online Conference was a great success. Here are some observations:
- The live Elluminate sessions were great. There was a lot of interaction between participants. Even in the concurrent sessions there were at least 20 participants, at least in the sessions I attended.
- It was interesting how many international participants we had this year. Just those I met included Australia, Argentina, and Germnay. Isn’t it amazing how an online format can flatten the world?
- Topics were varied and addressed just about every aspect of online and distance learning.
- There were many web poster sessions to visit in addition to the live sessions. In addition, there were quite a few recorded (podcast and vodcast) presentations that were excellent.
In all, it was a fun and productive conference. One thing it did was make me want to hook up with some of the participants in person just to have a bull session. That’s one thing that’s missing from a real conference: The ability to go out for dinner and continue talking things over. Maybe we’ll figure out how to do that remotely too. The virtual dinner would be a great addition to next year’s conference.
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