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November 16, 2006 - 10:43am — sloanadmin

Please share any thoughts, questions, comments, articles, or anything else that you would like share related to blended learning. With your help, we hope to develop a community dedicated to improving the quality and access to online and blended education.

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November 22, 2006 - 8:12am — suzshaff

Getting a campus ready

Hi everyone!!
Our campus is just starting to dip its toes into blended learning and interestingly because of pragmatic reasons. We needed adjuncts to teach 2 courses. They both had big distances to travel and were on the fence about taking the job because of it. A blended format was suggested to ease the travel burden. Neither had much experience with our course management system (ANGEL)and neither had experience with distance learning.

This is the kind of situation I would like to avoid in the future. You can imagine the learning curve! I would like to be a little more pro-active in future to offer a program for people who are thinking about blended learning so we have enough time to go through the training required to have a good outcome for students and faculty. Currently, I think people have little idea about the paradigm shift required and comfort level required with the technology... so I guess my question is - how do I start to build awareness about best practices, time commitment required for development, and simply that you can't just post your lecture notes and be done with it :) I'm sure I'm not alone here!!

Thanks everyone for sharing what has worked for you at your campuses!

Suzanne Shaffer, M.Ed.
Instructional Design/eLearning Support
Penn State York Campus
1031 Edgecomb Rd.
York, PA 17403
717-771-4186
http://www.personal.psu.edu/scs15/idweb

November 23, 2006 - 9:50am — Loretta Teng
Loretta Teng's picture

training for teaching online

No, you are not alone, Suzanne, about the proper training one requires to teach effectively online. It is a whole different pedogogical shift and takes proper trainng to have a good headstart. I took a couple of months completing a certificated program for online teaching and it really opened up my eyes for the new experience.

First of all if your organization have money set aside for faculty development, then perhaps you can start by setting up small workshops and mix it with training and demonstrations of best practices. Finding allies who support the ideas is very helpful. Using some exsiting resources to help you can work well too. These may include those who have had positive experiences with your online management program, experts from the region, or even talking with other instructional designers or online program staff at other institutions. If you can present reinforcing program evaluation to the audience, that's even better.

Loretta Teng
Central Taiwan Univ. of Science and Technology

December 11, 2006 - 7:29am — suzshaff

Thanks!

Many thanks Loretta for sharing those strategies. I appreciate the assist!
Suzanne

November 27, 2006 - 2:38am — tjoosten
tjoosten's picture

Moving to Hybrid

You mean you can't just put your notes online and call it a Hybrid class??? LOL

I agree with Loretta. Being able to create a faculty development program that includes workshops, one-on-one consultations, and a web repository would be very useful in helping with these issues.

Please take a look at our web repository at: http://hybrid.uwm.edu.

You will find a sample courses, advantages and challenges, tips, web resources, faculty comments and advice, information for students, and several course redesign resources, including information on our faculty development program. We discuss principles and guidelines for a faculty development program as well as numerous topics that could be covered in a hybrid course faculty development program.

Please let me know if I can provide any further info.

Tanya Joosten
tjoosten@uwm.edu
Instructional Design Consultant
Lecturer
University Wisconsin-Milwaukee

December 13, 2006 - 3:58pm — leclaire

Re: hybrid course faculty development program

Your site is extremely interesting Tanya.

How many support staff, and with what specialty skills, does UWM have available for this program and what is the total number of faculty (on-and off-campus) that your team potentially supports?
________________________________________________________
Patricia LeClaire M.S. OTL
Instructional Designer, Academic Technology and User Services
Western Washington University
Bellingham, WA 98225
(360) 650-2557
patricia.leclaire@wwu.edu

December 19, 2006 - 2:53pm — tjoosten
tjoosten's picture

Support Staff

The number of support staff depends on what type of support you are looking for. We, at the UWM Learning Technology Center, have 6 individuals in our group. We provide pedagogical and technical consultation to faculty. All of us our faculty members and consultants at the LTC, so we bring our real live experiences and knowledge to the table. Also, faculty members appreciate the peer-to-peer relationship we are able to have with them.

Regarding Hybrid, we have a few Hybrid experts in our group that have taught hybrid and conduct research on hybrid teaching and learning. We provide faculty development workshop on hybrid (details are on our site: http://hybrid.uwm.edu) and one-on-one consultations when needed.

I don't have a good count on the number of faculty we support in regard to hybrid. We have an online initiative at UWM as well, but we are responsible for supporting about 1300 instructional staff members in issues of technology and teaching.

Hope this helps...Sorry for the delay -- final exams are herre and I am up to me ears in grading ;)

Cheers!

December 11, 2006 - 7:28am — suzshaff

Thanks so much, Tanya - I'll

Thanks so much, Tanya - I'll check out those resources ASAP. Thanks for sharing them.
Suzanne