Minutes for February 28, 2008 CTL Workroom, 3:15 P.M.- 4:45 P.M. AS192

In attendance at the DLMG meeting: Biray Alsac, Alex Cheroske, Scott Gustafson, Linda Evans, Laura Kobar, Georgianna Anderson, Marianne Arini, Shabana Kausar, Misa Vening, and Peggy Johnson. Absent: Sharon McLaughlin

Paul Hietter discussed his experiences constructing four online history classes and teaching them at MCC. He's been using a Learning Management System (WebCT) for over ten years. While acknowledging it isn't perfect, Paul says that WebCT has become even more integral to his classes as he now uses WebCT for each of his face-to-face classes also. He posts the syllabus there, provides any hand-outs, and has students take quizzes online. This frees up valuable class time for other activities.

Paul, like most online instructors, continues to tweak his courses each semester. In the current version he teaches of Arizona History (HIS 105), Paul especially likes the Announcements tool, the Mail too, and the Who's Online tool. He tells his students that whenever they see he is online (using the Who's Online tool), they can ask him questions. He views as an online office hour. Paul likes that the Mail tool keeps each student's work in the proper class section (rather than integrated into lots of other emails as it would be in his MCC mail account) and he can tell who sent the email. In the past he had problems with students sending an assignment from a friend or relative's account and not putting their name on the assignment.

The course is divided into units. Each unit begins with an introduction, a list of what the student should know, an online "mini lecture" explaining some of the more difficult topics the students will be reading about, reading assignments (in the textbook and on the internet), a unit quiz (open book and no time limitation), a writing assignment (consisting of three essay questions), and a bulletin board discussion.

Paul has become increasingly convinced that what happens on the discussion boards is a very important part of the learning so he encourages student interaction there. There are two discussion boards for each unit. Students are required to post three times to each discussion board, and these postings must be on at least two different days. Paul sees his role as asking follow-up questions to stimulate quality discussions.

Based on student feedback, Paul makes the discussion deadline the day before a writing assignment is due. Then students can use what they learned in the discussion to improve their assignment.

Writing assignments include questions such as List and describe.... or Define...and give three examples of how it affected Arizona.

In the past, Paul used extensive peer reviews of assignments, using Calibrated Peer Review software that is free from UCLA. However, he's decided that the improvement he saw in student writing as a result doesn't justify the amount of set-up time it took him.

He also tried using the Peer Review function in WebCT, but it didn't work well for him. It was supposed to make each students work anonymous to the other students for review, but it actually made the student submission anonymous to the instructor also.

Paul recommends making your course files portable so they can be uploaded to whatever course management system you want to use.

To get good discussion questions, Paul asks students at the end of his course to identify their most favorite discussion, their least favorite discussion, the discussion that was most interesting, and the discussion that was the most surprising. He uses student feedback to select the most desirable, open-ended questions for future classes.

Paul is working with a publisher on creating a HIS103 online class that can be handed to adjunct faculty for teaching. He and several other history faculty are developing three options for each assignment and discussion board. If a faculty member utilizes these resources with the publisher's resources, they can teach the class without having to start from scratch. They can edit the class if desired, but if not, the class is ready to go.

Paul says it is really important to students that you answer their emails within 24 hours or so. They will tolerate an assignment that takes awhile to get graded if you let them know when it will be ready. But they get very frustrated when an instructor does not answer their questions quickly.

Peggy recommended Animoto as a possible way for students to create introductions of themselves they can post on the web. It's free and students can create a short video (12 to 15 photos) that is set to music. It could be posted on the discussion board in WebCT along with a few lines of text.

COMING ATTRACTIONS

Next week Melanie Kroening will give us a Breeze workshop. Breeze software can be used to compress your Powerpoint presentation for uploading and delivering on the web, along with audio files that accompany your slides.