Orienting Students for Online Learning

Purpose: This presentation targets those who develop online curriculum in general, but may be of special interest to those who oversee programs and seek ideas for providing a positive experience for online students and increasing their chances of success and completion.

Objectives: We plan to provide a very brief overview of UEN’s online course program and audience as a context, then focus on how we developed a fully-online solution to meet the orientation needs of both class participants and facilitators. We will demonstrate our current online orientation in BlackBoard Vista so participants can see how it is organized and how it works.

Practical applications: Those who attend this session should leave with an understanding of:
1) Why an orientation is important and how to shift from in-person to online
2) What to include for student success and facilitator convenience
3) The time commitment and tools required to create an online orientation
4) What has worked well and areas requiring improvement or change in UEN’s online orientation model

Information: At the time of submitting the conference proposal UEN Professional Development is offering the fully online orientation for the first time. By the time of the conference we will have offered 18 courses requiring completion of the orientation online. We hope to have some valuable insights to share regarding the success or difficulties with our new model. Measures of succes include facilitators’ evaluation of the quality of participation, quantity of technical issues or problems and the number of participants who begin a course the first week and persist until completion.

Biography
Victoria manages the professional development department for UEN. She has eighteen years of teaching and training experience including high school English and biology, university courses in writing and computer skills, seminars on technology topics at the University of Utah and university faculty development centered on use of technology in their curriculum. She also has experience in technical writing, marketing, and higher education information technology services. Victoria’s education includes an undergraduate degree in English and Secondary Education, with biology minor from Utah State University, and graduate work in Communication at the University of Utah.

Purpose of presentation:
Over the years of working with faculty in the development of online courses one thing has remained the same…course content interwoven into the Course management system. So much so that one cannot be pulled from the other. Now that Course Management Systems are being combined, changed, bought out and unreliable we have discovered the need to separate our “course” from the “classroom.” We need to free ourselves from the binds of Course Management Systems, and take control of our content.

Objectives of the presentation:
The objective of this presentation is to redefine what we as instructional designers and instructors call online courses and classrooms. We will also look at the tools we use to build these learning platform independent courses.

Practical Applications:
Attendees will understand the importance of separating their course from the online classroom and find that the course can be taught online, face to face, or from anywhere.

The presenters are advocating an open course design that can be taught with any course management system – online, face to face, or mobile.

Through our experience working with faculty we have noticed trends related to course development. Most courses designed have been highly personalized that can only be taught by the instructor who built it. However with the high demand for online courses we needed to be able to pull a course “off-the-shelf” and give it to a trained instructor to teach with minimal redesign. Also we were unable to wait years for courses to be built by an instructor – we needed a much quicker turn around so we moved to a team design approach. Working on a course design team we would find, more often than not, collections of content that was either incomplete, poorly organized, or out of date rather than a fully functional course. These trends demand a re-evaluation of current course design methodology.

Biography

Marty Hill has been involved in online learning since the mid-1990s. She holds a Masters degree in Curriculum and Instruction from New Mexico State University, with a specialization in Educational Technology. Marty has held the position of Coordinator of Online Learning at San Juan College in Farmington, New Mexico since 1997. She has served as part-time and adjunct faculty in both traditional and online programs. The University of Texas presented her with a NISOD Teaching Excellence Award in 2004. Marty is a sought after presenter and trainer, conducting sessions at many conferences and associations including: NISOD, the League for Innovation in the Community College, TX-DLA, Colorado Tele-Coop, NMACC, NM CHECS, and WCET. She is a Certified Online Instructor, and is a WebCT/Blackboard Certified Senior Trainer. Marty has had experience in both online course development and instructional design, developing materials for allied health, English, graphic arts and computer applications.