Good Afternoon Developers,
I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend! If you live in Minnesota, it is finally starting to feel like summer here. If you live in other states, I hope you are enjoying some summer weather too.
As you continue working on your course development(s), please be thinking of ways to incorporate writing into your course(s). Globe Education Network's Writing Across the Curriculum initiative serves to prepare our students to be effective communicators in their professions. Recognizing this at the development stage of a course helps to reinforce this in all programs.
When it comes to creating a writing assignment, in today's media world the options are endless. While the informality of online or social writing and its place in academia is highly debated,
The Chronicle of Higher Education highlights an excellent study out of Stanford in terms of what students can gain from both formal and informal writing assignments. I encourage you to click here and read this article: Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers. The "Curricular Implications" segment in particular offers some great ideas on how informal writing as part of a course can strongly prepare students for the real life professional environment.
After reading the article, I encourage you to think of a writing assignment that you could implement into your course development(s) even if the course(s) is not a traditional writing course.
If you have any questions, please let me know.
Thanks,
Heather
Showing posts with label Online Classroom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Online Classroom. Show all posts
Monday, June 15, 2009
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
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
Monday, December 1, 2008
December 1, 2008
Hello Developers,
I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving Holiday! I know many of you used the days off to do some of your developing to be ready for the 25% deadline today - I will be going into your courses this week and providing you with feedback :-)
This past week the latest issue of Online Classroom became available so be sure to check out the latest information in this great newsletter! The article that I found the most interesting was titled "Document Sharing Can Help Students Collaborate". This particular article discusses using google docs to document share however we have a document sharing feature within Blackboard and students can share documents by using the "team function". I have been talking about interaction between students for quite some time now, so I was happy to see an article in this newsletter that backed up the idea of collaboration in the online environment.
If you have questions about how to access this newsletter just let me know! Have a great week - stay warm!
Amy
I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving Holiday! I know many of you used the days off to do some of your developing to be ready for the 25% deadline today - I will be going into your courses this week and providing you with feedback :-)
This past week the latest issue of Online Classroom became available so be sure to check out the latest information in this great newsletter! The article that I found the most interesting was titled "Document Sharing Can Help Students Collaborate". This particular article discusses using google docs to document share however we have a document sharing feature within Blackboard and students can share documents by using the "team function". I have been talking about interaction between students for quite some time now, so I was happy to see an article in this newsletter that backed up the idea of collaboration in the online environment.
If you have questions about how to access this newsletter just let me know! Have a great week - stay warm!
Amy