Four-day week in education

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Think about this, an innovative distance education program!

Colleges are experimenting with four-day school weeks as a means to cut back on expenses and travel. I think this innovative idea has roots in distance education. The Web-Hybrid model in becoming increasing popular for an alternative to delivering F2F classes. In the Web-Hybrid model, faculty still meet with the students F2F but half the class is delivered online, thus cutting down on trips to the campus and campus space and utilities. A win win situation for both faculty and students.

For the staff, administrators are authorizing alternative schedules as an employee-friendly policy designed to soothe the sting of increasingly costly daily commutes. The alternative schedule could be telecommuting, which again has roots in distance education. Without all the Internet tools available today, telecommuting wouldn't be as productive. With Web 2.0 tools staff have access to documents, can communicate and collaborate with other staff and even have virtual meetings. Additionally, telecommuting days could be designates training days. Training could be delivered online by the HR and technology departments, an innovative distance education program!

Online Teacher & Education Certificates and Programs

University of West Georgia offers a great Distance Education Certified Trainer Program online along with another online program Advanced Technologies for Distance Education. It seems everyone is getting on the band wagon by offering Education and Technology programs online. Upon the success completion of these programs students are awarded online diplomas and certificates.

At eLearners.com they have created a list of all the online educational technology degrees, and the list is impressive with programs for certificates, Bachelor's, Master's and Doctorate degrees.

See the list at online educational technology degrees

Innovative Approach to Digital Media Training & Support

From Campus Technology, August 2008, 2008 Innovations article

At Ball State University they have a unique way of introducing more digital technology into the curriculum by developing a Digital Corps. Digital Corps is a student labor pool that works alongside faculty on media projects. In return students of the Digital Corps are offered training, conferences and even Adobe Certified Expert/Adobe Certified Associate programs. As a result the students in the labor pool are certified and get real world experiences, a win win situation for students and faculty.

According to Jonathan Blake Huer, director of the Digital Corps, "The biggest problem has been retaining students. As they ahve mastered their respective crafts, they have been recruited by outside companies ans also by other units within the university."

An innovative program like this would be a benefit to both faculty and staff and the campus as a whole because of the access to more digital media.

Formative vs Summative Evaluations

Do you have a difficult time figuring out what the difference is between a formative and summative (post-class) assessment? Here is a great video from an explanation of a professor's formative evaluation for his university class. The nine minute video is at http://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching/formative.html# . Thanks to David Pollock for this link. Visit Dave athttp://davidpollock.blogspot.com.

Another good article is: Formative Evaluation: A Practical Guide.I found this article by Lisa Neal, who just happens to work for Datatel (our college's enterprise software) and it cleared up some questions.

Her approach to using formative evaluations in course design was easy for me to understand. She points out that there are four stages to a formative evaluation; "planning the sessions, conducting the sessions, compiling the results, and prioritizing the results from the sessions."

Under the conducting the session' stage she says "For example, if a user says "I don't like these colors," an evaluation should ask "Why don't you like them?" or "Are there colors you would prefer?" In an online class, if I asked the colors question, I would make sure that I was able to get valuable feedback from them. Sure beats non-productive comments like "I don't like the colors!.

Although the article is geared more towards learning objects and interactive multimedia training elements I think the article was very understanding. I also enjoyed the Plimoth Plantation's Online Learning Center's, You Are the Historian: Investigating the First Thanksgiving Learning Object. I can see where using the four stages of formative evaluation would benefit a project of that scope.

Experience Google Earth

If you haven't experienced Google Earth yet, I would highly recommend it. I find myself visiting the site frequently to go on virtual tours around the world. Google's satellite imagery-based mapping program brings the whole world to your desktop. I recently did a search for shipwrecks. It amazing the detail you get at different locations around the world.

The next step is how to incorporate Google Earth in your classroom. I found a link for educators in Google Earth at Google For Educators. From this link there are many resources and ideas. One this page there is a link to Getting Started. This gives you the simple steps to download Google Earth to your desktop. Step number 6 "Check out the education gallery for ideas for using Google Earth in the classroom." Be sure to check out this link. You will be amazed of how easily it is to incorporate Google Earth in your classroom.

Complete list of links:

1. Google Earth for Educators: http://www.google.com/educators/p_earth.html
   
2. Getting Started Guide: http://www.google.com/educators/start_earth.html
   
3. Education Gallery: http://earth.google.com/outreach/edu_culture.html

FLASH!

This link was sent to me by a friend.
Take a look at this website: http://producten.hema.nl/ (Make sure the sound is turned on).

HEMA is a Dutch department store. The first store opened on November 4, 1926, in Amsterdam. Now there are 150 stores all over the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, and Germany.

The site must have been painstakingly made with Flash!

Welcome Distance Learning Certificate Members

I wanted to be the first to post a response because, frankly, I would like the activity in my blog. I started the blog a few months ago as an attempt to provide an avenue to discuss material regarding technology in the classroom to our faculty. My goal is to help faculty embrace technology and assist them to implement the latest and greatest technologies to bring new levels of learning to their students. So far, none of my faculty have responded to my postings and it gets a little discouraging to see my efforts go unnoticed.

I hope you find some of the entries in this blog useful, especially the links to the podcasts. I find these podcasts convenient to listen to when I am jogging.

Our distance learning community is unique in the community college setting. We deliver over 150 courses a year taught by more than 50 instructors. Right now we offer 25% of our courses as distance learning. We use Blackboard CE6 for our Learning Management System (LMS). Blackboard bought out WebCT a couple years ago and as a result the company plans to produce a hybrid version of both products next year.

A good majority of these courses are taught by part-time instructors who typically hold down a job during the day and use the weekends and evenings to facilitate their online classes.

As the Instructional Technology Coordinator, one of my goals is to make myself, and my services available to the part-time faculty as well as the full-time faculty. This blog is an example of a tool developed to provide a forum of communicating with instructors at a distance. This blog is in addition to other methods of communication which include outdated e-mail list, word-of-mouth, web sites, telephones and department mailings.

With the goal of this blog to enhance communication with the part-time faculty, I question if they are prepared to embrace such a tool. Obviously, communication is important, especially in the academia environment. We all deal with the issue of communication obstacles between the administrators and faculty. Do you have any ideas on how to facilitate better communication with faculty?