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Monday, January 12, 2009

January 12, 2009

Hello Developers,

Today marks the 75% completion deadline so I will be going into your courses this week to check for 75% completion. This is also the time I start to gather peer advisors to go through your courses, once they are complete, so you have feedback from other instructors that teach online. I will be sure to include you on this e-mail, so if you are interested in peer advising on another course that is currently being developed, just let me know! It is a great way to see what other developers are doing in their courses.

I also want to remind all of you that here at Globe Education Network all of our employees can subscribe to Online Classroom for free. I haven't mentioned this since August, so I thought it was time to remind you :-)

Online Classroom provides practical advice and examples of proven, research-based pedagogical techniques to help instructors and course developers create and teach outstanding courses. To access Online Classroom simply go to www.magnapubs.com/licenses/suscribe.html. Enter your individual email address and password as well as the other required information. You will need to enter a Voucher Code and PIN number where prompted - I have e-mailed this information to you.

There is a new issue that just came out last week and there are some interesting articles that I felt were very interesting. I would like to comment on just a few of them here.

The first article I would like to comment on is titled Instructors Personality: An Essential Online Course Component. This article encourages instructors to infuse their personality into the course they are teaching/developing. As a developer, you are creating a master course shell for multiple instructors to use at one time. Therefore, it can be difficult to know how much of your personality you should include in your development. My recommendation would be to include some components of your personality into the course, but to keep in mind that some instructors teach differently then you may teach and to provide options for these instructors to teach the course a little differently. You can insert hidden notes for future instructors explaining why you set something up in a certain way and you can also use this method to provide future instructors with options and ideas of how to teach the concept a little differently based on their personality.

The second article I would like to comment on is titled Tapping Into Higher Level Thinking in Online Courses. For several months now I have been mentioning the idea of including critical thinking in the development of your courses. This article takes it one step further and actually defines what it means to incorporate critical thinking. If this is a topic that still has you stumped, this article will help to clear up some of your questions.

The third and last article I would like to comment on is titled Online Teaching Fundamentals: That’s Debatable. I don't often see online debates set up in our courses, and this article provides a great understanding of not only why online debates can be valuable but offers examples and step by step guidelines on how to set one up in your course. This can be a great tool to use in your development to really engage the students as well as to get them to think critically about a topic! I encourage you to check out this article!

Have a great week! Stay Warm :-)

Amy

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