Week 6

Readings
The Learning on Demand report for online education in the US, 2009 was extremely interesting to me because it provide current data regarding online learning for postsecondary. One of the key points that caught my attention included 74% of public institutions believe that online is critical for their long-term strategy, with only 33% of baccalaureate institutions agreeing online learning is critical to their long-term strategy. Less than one-third of chief academic officers believe their faculty accepts the value and legitimacy of online education. The percentage has changed very little over the last six years. Annual growth for online courses 2003 23%, 2004 18%, 2005 76%, 2006 9% 2007 12% and 2008 16% with over 18 million students taking at least one online postsecondary course in 2008 with undergraduate seeing most of the growth.
http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/pdf/learningondemand.pdf

As with he FASTRACK program at Madison College this fall, online learning is being used more and more as the backup for major illness outbreaks such as H1N1. I also found astounding that nearly 1/5 of the instructors receive no training in online delivery.

Dr. Khalsa paper was an interesting read showing application of many of the methodology we have learned in E-Learning Certification courses.

E.C. Moore's Symposium" Putting Student Learning First" on
Cybercoaching provides a lot of practical applications on how to use online tools to coach your students. Moore recommends:
1. Using e-mail and online tools for monitoring, feedback, tutoring and assessment.
2. Promoting deeper thinking by allowing responses with no right or wrong answers.
3. Using familiar technology, which allows a focus on coaching vs. learning new technology.
4. Developing and using rubrics for formative and summative assessments.

Moore also encourages using a pre-assessment to determine prior knowledge, self-assessment for formative and monitoring, and finally a summative assessment.


Ah Ha’s
I have spoken to several students who are finishing up the E-Learning certification and wished they had accumulated all of their artifacts in one E-Portfolio. This week I spent some time putting the artifacts from E-Learning and E-Assessment on my webpage, along with linking key articles.

Class Discussion
This week one of the other students commented on my practice of taking person phone calls at home. She commented how her mother was a teacher and felt her mother at times the mother spent more of her personal time with students vs. her own children. I really appreciated the commented and reflected on my own practice. I primarly teach returning adults who may not have been in school for 20 plus years and can become extremely frustrated with understanding what to do and how to use the technology. I can empathize with them based on my experiences of going back to graduate school and taking onlne courses from two different Universities.

I typically only get 5-6 calls during a six week period, which I think is reasonable. The students are in a co-hort that complete the program together over 18 months. I have the students multiple times throughout the program and really make connections with each of the students.

Pre-assessment for Skills, Knowledge, and Abilities survey

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GYRHP5V