Attendees:
Jan Novak, Andrew Pierson, Norman Buchwald, Michael Langdon, Des Chun, Hilal Ozdemir, Gene Groppetti, Lisa Ulibarri, Ramona Silver, Richard Dinwiddie, Bob Buell, Mary Dermody.
Jan welcomed Bob Buell, Richard Dinwiddie, and Mary Dermody as new members of the committee.
Projects to be Completed this Semester:
Jan summarized the prioritization discussion from last week’s Convocation DE Committee meeting. The participants in this meeting recommended enhancing support for students, both Blackboard technical support and online learning support. The next priority was supporting new faculty in online endeavors through training and mentoring programs. Support for current online faculty (continued training, community building efforts) was the next priority. The last priority was “outreach”, which included items like marketing our online programs and building online degrees.
Based on those broad priorities, the committee identified the following projects for completion in Fall 2007:
Develop an online course to prepare students to succeed in online courses. This will be a short (0.5 to 1 unit) course that familiarizes students with Blackboard and also discusses online success tools such as time management and self-discipline. Mary Dermody and Ramona Silver, and possibly Pam Shen, will develop this course under a Basic Skills grant. The course will be piloted in Spring 2008.
Derive “mini-modules” from this course that any instructor can insert into his/her own online course. The two modules would be a Blackboard orientation and online student success skills.
Provide on-campus orientations for online students and students considering taking an online course. Perhaps 10 of these sessions would be offered during the first two weeks of Spring semester at different times and days. These sessions would demonstrate widely utilized Blackboard tools and offer some online success tips.
Expand Blackboard student support hours and methods, particularly during the first two weeks of each semester. This effort will also include exploration of software that may enhance student support.
Revamp the printed course schedule and Class-Web information about online courses to make it simpler for students and to help shrink the size of the printed schedule.
Pilot online tutoring programs and explore technology options in conjunction with the Learning Connection.
Pilot the library skills module that Norman has been developing under a Basic Skills grant.
Conduct a survey of our online students to identify their motivation for taking online courses and to identify their needs (courses, support, class design, tutoring, etc.). We tentatively agreed that this would be a mid-semester survey that would be conducted within individual online courses.
Develop an online course to assist faculty in the preparation of online course proposals.
Conduct a survey of faculty to determine attitudes toward online learning, information needs, and training needs. We hope to field this survey in upcoming division meetings.
Upgrade to Bb 7.2, and provide training to all faculty on this new version of Blackboard.
Investigate Blackboard plugins that may enhance student learning and/or provide new tools for faculty for possible integration into our upgrade effort.
Online Course Incentives:
The committee decided to offer the following support package for instructors that develop and teach new online courses for Spring 2008.
$250 stipend for online teaching training
Experienced online instructors for mentoring
A $400 course development incentive
The incentive amount has been reduced to enable us to fund more student support efforts (expanded help hours, tutoring pilots, etc.) and Blackboard plugins/upgrades.
Future meeting plans:
On August 28th during College Hour, we will invite all faculty interested in developing new online courses to an information session similar to those we’ve conducted the past two semesters. All committee members are encouraged to attend.
On September 4th, we’ll complete the remaining course demonstrations for Fall 2007 courses.
For all remaining committee meetings, we’ll select one major topic which will be our focus, and will attempt to handle the more administrative items via email.
We also plan to have two longer planning meetings during the semester, and attendees provided their availability for those sessions.
Winners of Scavenger Hunt Prize Drawing:
We drew the names of the 21 prize winners from among those who attended last week’s Online Teaching workshop.
Documents distributed:
Possible DE Projects for 2007-08