We have Books!!

The books that I am proposing we use as textbooks have arrived.  You are welcome to come by my office (LL307A) to pick yours up at any time.  Beverly, I have asked HQ to mail yours to you.  Now for a little information about them:

The first book to be used in the first course is called Engaging the Online Learner: Activities and Resources for Creative Instruction.  It is written by Rita-Marie Conrad and J. Ana Donaldson, published by Jossey-Bass, “a Wiley Imprint”.  Title above is linked to the description on Amazon.com so you can read more about it. 

This book is full of practical activities that instructors can use to engage online students.  It could be used in one of two ways (or you may have more ideas—if so please share). 

• We could use it for activities that the class participants do as homework assignments, so they can see how they work firsthand from the student perspective.
• We could give a couple of example assignments as above, and then require the participants to choose an activity from the book and do a “peer teaching” project where the participants guide other participants through the activity for a grade.

The second book is called Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology by Robert A. Reiser and John V. Dempsey.  Again, the title links to Amazon.com so you may find out more about the book.  This book goes much more in depth into Instructional Design, and in my opinion should be used in both courses.  In the first course, it would be the required reading text, while in the second course, it would be the reference for application of its principles as participants build their own online course.

There is a third book that I have used effectively in the past when designing a course similar to this one.  It is called Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works.  It will be used for reference only.  There will be more information about it in the Progess Report section below.

Of course, these three books would be fleshed out with the online resources and articles you have been putting together on our project Wiki.

Speaking of the wiki…

Troubleshooting the project wiki

There seems to be some confusion about how to get into the wiki.  I cannot give you a password to the wiki, I can only give you access.  You must create the password yourself.

How to access the wiki—note the corresponding diagram below the instructions.

If the invitation I sent you worked and you are allowed to enter the wiki,  do the following:

1.  Go to https://actxelearning.pbworks.com/ 
2.  If you have already created an account, enter your email address and password to log in.
3.  If you have forgotten your password, click “Forgot your password?”, fill in the resulting form, and it will be emailed to you; then repeat steps 1 and 2.

If you have never received my invitation, or if it did not work, you MUST do the following:

1.  Go to https://actxelearning.pbworks.com/

2.  Click Request Access on the right side of the page, and it will send me an email telling me you have requested access.  I will then grant you access, and you will receive another email letting you know you can get in now.

Progress report

Carol and Beverly have been putting lots of resources on the Adult Learning Styles and Developing Orientation Materials pages for us to look at, including Multiple Intelligences research, a self-assessment for participants, and research articles for discussion and reference.

As I mentioned above in the We Have Books!!! section, I have successfully used Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works in a previous online class on strategies for ESL students working in an online environment.  It is a book I used when training Education Service Center ESL Consultants in a statewide Training-of-Trainers for teachers in the K12 community.  The book was written as a companion volume for the very successful, research-based strategies in Robert Marzano’s Classroom Instruction that Works , but it was written for an audience of K12 teachers and administrators so I was hesitant to require it for our participants.  However, it has a strong research base, and the principles in the book are good, solid teaching practices for ANY age group.   

I wanted another opinion, so since Kay and I met this week to review/discuss the textbooks and how they might be used most effectively, I asked her to look through this book.  She agreed that the principles are sound for college instruction as well.  We believe we can modify and adapt some of the activities for higher education instruction.

Another thing Kay and I discussed is the need for LOTS of how-to videos and written instructions to show students how to accomplish what is required of them in the course.  This is one of the major parts of this course…do not assume the students know anything about online instruction.  We are going to model the way instructors should guide their students through the course.  We have so many of these resources already available, and Charles is working on tons more for our student center for fall.  It is simply a matter of knowing where to find the already-created resource and making a link to it in the course.  For example:  If in a course I ask a student to submit something to a drop box, I am going to link to this page in How to Use AC Online like this:
On completion of this assignment, upload it to the drop box in Module 4.
If you do not remember how to upload to a drop box, click here for a refresher:
How to Submit an Assignment to a Drop Box

So…with that in mind, I have created a form for us to begin compiling what “how-to’s”  our experience tells us we would need for online students.  It doesn’t matter if it’s AC Online, Word, Excel, or whatever. 

Please click here to access the form and begin compiling this information as soon as possible.

Publishing Platform Choices

Softchalk 6 was released just a few weeks ago, and Kay has been practicing working with it to determine if that is what we want to use to write the courses.  She says she has found several really great new features, so it is sounding promising.  Pam, could you also download it from the CTL LOR (instructions are included there) and check it out as well?

Another platform I learned about a couple of weeks ago is a program called Articulate.  It also looks very promising, has SCORM capabilities, and lots more interactive capabilities than Softchalk.  I have downloaded a 30 day trial copy and I’m pretty impressed so far.  The problem is that it costs around $650 for one education license.  I’m not sure if we have any budget for software, but I plan to find out. 

Please contact me ASAP if you have questions—Summer is slipping by!  Please also contact me if there is another pressing need that you see I have missed here.