teaching outside the “box”

parkerk1 — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 09:55:28 +0000

This is a presentation on my online course ETAP687 using a tool called prezi. You can also view it from here.

To activate the presentation, just click on the arrow in the center of the screen (you may need to wait a little while it loads). To advance through the presentation, use the forward arrow that appears on the lower right corner of the screen.

The ability to embed the prezi in a blog is new – just announced yesterday. So i am testing it here.

(If you are looking at this from facebook, you will have to click here: http://etap687.edublogs.org/2009/07/21/teaching-outside-the-box/)

from prezi.com

NUTN 2009 – conference, presentation & award for innovation

alexandrapickett — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:05:19 +0000

Last year i was invited to participate in a planning meeting for the 2009 annual conference of the National University Telecommunications Network (NUTN) by Joanne Humbert from RIT from the planning committee. The 27th annual NUTN 2009: Quality In Motion conference, was held on June 21-23, 3009 in Saratoga Springs, NY. The conference started on Sunday, but we didn’t get home till 2am due to flight delays so i slept all of Sunday. I am sorry I missed Ed Bowen’s keynote address Sunday night. I heard that it was great and that he looked very dapper in his tux. : ) I know Ed becuase he was a participant in my workshop last year at the Sloan-C ALN conference and we have become social web “friends” since. The conference started on Monday with Elliott Maisie’s plenary address. He only had one slide. Elliot uses his smart phone as a cognitive prosthetic – i particularly liked the restroom finder app. that he recommends.He is an excellent speaker.

Presentation

My presentation was one of two concurrent sessions after Elliott. There were under 100 participants total at this conference and i think most of them were at my session, “twitterpated by twitter and other web2.0 technologies for instructional purposes.“ I gave the classic version of this presentation:

The presentation was fantastic! I felt like a rock star. I LOVE doing this presentation!! Ed Bowen introduced me and did a wonderful job. He was very kind!

Twitterpated by twitter and other Web 2.0 tools for instructional purposesView more presentations from Alexandra m. Pickett.

Twitterpated presentation handoutView more documents from Alexandra m. Pickett.

I spent the next hour and a half after my presentation being interviewed by Ed. We had a great conversation and i really enjoyed our time, even if i missed the Edupunk presentation.

Conference

Highlights from some of the sessions i attended:

It was wonderful to see Frank Mayadas and to listen to his keynote address.

Here is a link to the conference presentation materials.

I really enjoyed listening Kelly Hermann, Statewide Coord Disability Services, Office of Academic Affairs. Empire State College presenting- accessible courses: going beyond technology meets the needs of students w/disabilities.

Teaching on RIT’s SecondLife Island Katie McDonald, Instructional Technologist, Rochester Institute of Technology – http://slurl.com/secondlife/RIT/128/128/28

A dialogue on faculty: teaching online in 21st Century Institutions by Dana Offerman, Provost and Chief Academic Officer, Excelsior College and Connie Grega, Assistant Director for Academic Outreach Program Services, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The presidents’ panel: change as opportunity with Dr. Susan Aldridge President University of Maryland University College, Dr. Alan Davis President Empire State College, and Dr. Wright Lassiter, Chancellor, Dallas County Community College District.

Innovation Award

The highlight of the conference for me had to be the honor of receiving the NUTN Distance Education Innovation Award 2009 for the SLN online teaching survey for experienced online instructors: http://sln.suny.edu/teachingsurvey.

The National University Telecommunications Network (NUTN) Distance Education Innovation Award for 2009 was presented to Alexandra M. Pickett and the SUNY Learning Network on June 23, 2009 in Saratoga Springs, NY at the NUTN annual conference(

http://www.uensd.org/NUTN2009/) for the SLN Online Teaching Survey: http://sln.suny.edu/teachingsurvey for experienced online instructors.

This award recognizes an individual or group that has developed an innovative program or practice that contributes to the field of distance education, in the context of a new or ongoing program, student or support services, pedagogy, faculty development and support or technology.

The SLN online teaching self-assessment is a simple survey (

http://sln.suny.edu/teachingsurvey), the innovation lies in the report that it generates to the faculty that aids the experienced online instructor to identify areas in his/her course that they themselves feel might need improvement . The results can then be used independently by the instructor to complete the review and revision cycle of the course design process to update the online course in preparation for the next delivery, or it can be used as a component of a faculty development event, or one on one with an instructional designer to pinpoint areas in a course that could be improved, thereby giving the instructor, the trainer, or the instructional designer specific areas on which to focus recommendations, suggestions, examples, tips for improvement.

This survey for experienced online faculty turns theory into practice by assisting the experienced online instructor’s to self-assess on specific indicators of teaching presence from the COI model and on the development of online class community in the design of his/her own online course and how they teach it. Faculty are asked to self-assess on 20 specific indicators, the survey generates a report giving the instructor a numerical score for each indicator that corresponds to a key of range of scores. The instructor can then see, based on his/her own self-evaluation, what specific areas in the online course need (1) redesign, (2) need some improvement, or (3) effectively demonstrate class community and teaching presence and need no improvement. A companion piece to the survey are the handouts (

http://www.slideshare.net/alexandrapickett/sln-teaching-online-survey-course-review-materials) that provide examples of the indicators, and suggestions that faculty can use to make improvements in those areas where their self-assessment indicates they need some improvement.

(I created the this video (with jing, and prezi, and audacity, and other tools) for the acceptance ceremony and it was one of the most time consuming and funnest projects i have ever worked on. I got to learn and do stuff i had never done before. It was a blast creating it.)

I was very nice to see Frank Mayadas at the conference. And to see Karen Vignare, Joeann Humbert, Kim Scalzo, Connie Grega, Rob Steiner, Richard Hezel, and John Sener. And to meet Anna Cholewinska, Alan Davis, David Caso, LuAnn Phillips, George Timmons, and Dana Offerman – and Ann Marie Vaughan & Shari Costello who taught me how to pronounce Newfoundland, “Say understand then Newfoundland.”

Thanks Patti Jennings for all your help!

Award Acceptance Notes

The course starts today!

alexandrapickett — Tue, 26 May 2009 09:08:58 +0000

Today is the offical start date of my summer online course, etap687. It is a master’s level fully online course at UAlbany in the education department. If you are interested, here is a link to a tour of the course. I also have a cool prezi presentation that i am currently doing about my experiences teaching this course last semester, title teaching outside the “box.” I am excited and anxious and hope that i have set everything up right and that it will all work with no tech difficulties. I have about 8 students enrolled so far and am really looking forward to meeting them and learning more about them and the online courses they will develop as part of their course.

To prepare for this term, i copied the course from last term and updated it. I’ve had some challenges with this along the way. Links broke, i had to recreate several discussions, and any student-level documents that i had as part of the course i had to recreate as well. It has been interesting. i made a few modifications to the course based on feedback from the students from last semester. Mostly in the instructions to activities so that things would be clearer from the beginning. I also decided to keep the students from last term in the course diigo group instead of setting up a new one for the new course – to build community.

I am very concerned about the amount of work the course will be in terms of my own course management. Last term it nearly killed me. And my husband and family were not amused by the amount of time i spent on it. Part of the issue is manually having to tabulate all the discussion gradings. I have not made any modifications in my approach to discussion, and so expect that it will be a lot of work again. If only the course management system did this for me automatically, i could spend more time interacting in the course a less time trying to count and track all the discussion ratings. i have heard that a newer version of moodle does this… alas, i don’t believe that is the version we are in.

In any case, i am really looking forward to teaching this course and learning lots from my students. I still have to go check my rubric, and the sun is coming up : )

You can follow our course announcements on twitter and have a look at our icebreaking activity. I also really look forward to peering into my students reflections as they take their course through their own blogs. Links to their blogs are on this blog, http://etap687.edublogs.org.

here we go!