Meeting #1 with Eastern New Mexico University

On Friday, June 4, Patsy and I travelled to Portales, NM to meet with officials from ENMU concerning offering the first two courses in this certification program for 3 hours of graduate level credit.  I presented the same proposal to them that I presented to you at our first meeting, and they are very interested.  In fact, they said that it looks exactly like what they have been wanting to offer their own faculty. 

A couple of nice surprises from the meeting:

• ENMU officials believe the first two courses contain enough vital content to offer them at 3 hours EACH for a total of 6 graduate hours
• They are considering making the first two courses a requirement for their new faculty, meaning we will definitely have participants from the beginning

A couple of nice challenges from the meeting:

• They would like for the first course to launched at least as a pilot in Fall, 2010

• They want to see a complete syllabus of these two courses, as well as an outline of our proposed third course, by the time of our next meeting (tentatively July 1)

Which brings us to—

Meeting #2 with Eastern New Mexico University

The officials we met with have met with other important personnel at ENMU, and they have opted to go forward with this collaboration.  A group from ENMU will be visiting Amarillo College, tentatively July 1 from 1:00-3:00 p.m.  Please make arrangements to be here if possible.

Certification Project Wiki

This is a reminder that our project wiki is at http://actxelearning.pbworks.com.  Several of you have already been adding information, and we have some great beginnings.  However, as you can see, we have lots to do in the coming weeks, so I’d encourage you to start gathering resources if you have not started doing so already. 

A couple of you have contacted me with problems getting into the wiki, and I have not had the chance to get in and see what the problem was until now (see update #1).  You received an invitation to join the wiki by email, but for some reason, some of you were unable to join.  If that was the case for you, you can click on the “request access” button on the right side of the page. That will send me an email, and I will grant access for you manually.  If you are still unable to access it, please email your resources to me, and I will put them in there for you, giving you credit of course.  Then I will see what else I can do to get you into the wiki so you can update your contact information, view others’ postings, and add other resources.

Title V Requirements

Following is the narrative of project goals and the internship assignments that I sent to Joy Brenneman as required by Title V for funding of this project.  Joy added an expected completion date of August 15 for the first two courses.

Project Goals

The goal of this project is to design a certification program for faculty of Amarillo College in the best practices of online instruction.  Most faculty who are teaching online courses have been through training in the mechanics of how to use our learning management system, Angel, but this project would take their course design to the next level.

This summer, the participants in the project will design the first two courses of the program, Effective Online Instruction and Effective Instructional Design.  Each course will consist of five to six modules each, providing a total of 24 CEU’s or 6 graduate-level credit hours for completion of both courses.  Eastern New Mexico University has agreed to provide the graduate credit for these courses, with details of the arrangement to be decided in the next few weeks.

The course in Effective Online Instruction will contain modules dealing with an introduction to online learning; adult learning styles; interactions, interactivity, and teaching strategies; communication and motivation; developing orientation materials; and evaluating online instruction.

Effective Instructional Design will consist of Introduction to Designing Online Instructional Materials; Characteristics of Instructional Design; Quality Assurance; Comparing Online Instructional Materials and Traditional Instructional Materials; Proposed Learning Outcomes, Copyright, Fair Use, and the TEACH Act; and Interactivity, Active Learning, Visual Imagery, and Effective Communication in the Online Environment

Internship Assignments

The summer interns will be designing two courses must be equal to 6 hours of Master-level graduate credit, and they require more in-depth research and design than a typical 3-hour associate level course.  This will be a collaborative effort on the part of all interns, and all will be responsible for the final product as far as gathering resources for content is concerned.  However, an emphasis will be placed on the areas of strength for each intern as follows:

    Heather Voran – project oversight, including planning meetings, organization, writing, proofreading, and overall design

    Beverly Fite – doing research and gathering resources

    Carol Buse – doing research and gathering resources

    Kay Taylor – writing, design, and navigation (ease of use)

    Jana Rice – design and navigation

    Pam George – design and navigation

Project Reports

Throughout the project, will have weekly progress meetings, either face-to-face or via email.  Joy needs weekly progress reports on the project, so I will be sending a copy to everyone.

At the conclusion of the project, the following reports will be required:

Your Role—one-two paragraph narratives from each member of the team regarding your work including documentation to substantiate the work (this could be course outline, syllabus, research data, etc.).
My Role—a more comprehensive report – maybe two pages – covering the scope of the project, anticipated enrollments, outcomes, etc.   I will forward these reports to Joy for submission with final project documentation. 

This is a very exciting project for CTL, with lots of opportunity for great things! 

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to ask.  Please reply to all so everyone can benefit from them.