Connected

Do you assume that your faculty group, especially your rookies and sophomore faculty feel connected to your program group?

I subscribe to various e-newsletters on online teaching and learning and the latest Faculty Focus caught my eye. Best Practices for Keeping Online Faculty Engaged http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/distance-learning/best-practices-for-keeping-online-adjuncts-engaged/?c=FF&t=F100224-FF

The article discussed practices to more fully connect adjunct faculty to their institution. How often do we, as faculty groups, see each other face to face and make a connection? I know with my faculty group, not often enough. Yes, I do keep weekly contact with my group on various topics and issues, but we don’t see each other very often. I even have a couple instructors whom I have not met in person yet. But I worry about my new faculty feeling "out there" by themselves. I know when I first started here as an instructor, I didn't even know who the chair was and never heard from her. So how can we foster the sense of connection and commitment within our online faculty?

The article suggested these practices:

1. Mandatory orientation to the program, institution and technology. This is one area where CCCOnline does an excellent job through our initial faculty training. As chairs, how do we pick after this session and bring our new faculty into our own program? Are we available to explain policies and procedures and offer guidance to our newbies for the entire semester or do you leave that to a mentor faculty?
2. Provide program expectations. CCCOnline has overall faculty expectations but do you have further expectations for your faculty? Do you send out reminders, especially to new faculty, of what to do when (such as sending out a welcoming email prior to class and where to find the faculty gateway)? Helpful reminders go a long way in providing support to nervous rookie faculty. Don’t wait for them to ask because they may not know what to ask.
3. Another way to connect with your faculty is to recognize their efforts, time, energy and ideas. Do you send out a “welcome to our group” email to your all your faculty to welcome new instructors? Have you made sure that your newbies know who to turn to with questions and problems? Do you value the seasoned veteran for their continued hard work and recognize them publically to the rest of your faculty?
4. Encourage continued professional development in your content area and in online teaching and learning. Our training program offers a wide range of topics to enhance online teaching, but look outside of our group and identify other sources of professional development. There are local and national conferences, online webinars (and a lot for free), online classes some for small fees and a variety of other sources. Even though we may not be able to pay for faculty to attend these types of events, it should be part of the chair’s communication to alert our faculty to these possibilities.
5. Get faculty involved with other faculty by encouraging them to attend system 2:2 conferences to meet and network with other faculty. At most 2:2 conferences, adjunct faculty are welcomed and encouraged to attend.

So don’t assume that your faculty (new and veterans) feel a part of your program and CCCOnline in general. It takes work on the part of the chair to get faculty engaged and keep them committed to doing a good job.

Moldy Oldie News Items

I think a lot of instructors will be surprised NEXT semester when their spring course is duped for summer and they find all their News items still in the course. Or, if you receive some other instructor’s section, you’ll get all their News items.

This can be a good thing or a bad thing. If you want to recycle some of the News items, this is a nice feature as you won’t have to retype. However, you will need to sort out the News entries and reorder them for your new class. You might also need to delete some semester specific items. All of this takes a bit of time on your part, but once you figure out what to keep and what to toss, this is pretty slick.

And now through the magic of technology and the magic fingers of our training team, we have tutorials on how to delete and reorder those News items. See: http://at.ccconline.org/faculty/wiki/Tech_Tools_-_D2L_-_News#Tutorials

I am so bugged.....

When my daughters were little, they enjoyed the Little Critter books. The main character of these stories is a little guy who gets into all sorts of trouble and expresses his feelings in various ways (sometimes in not the best manner). Now that my granddaughter is 2, I'm back to reading Little Critter books to her. So here's my D2L salute to Mercer Mayer and his Little Critter.

• Why are there two different font styles between student view and instructor view? And the student view looks pretty ugly. I am so bugged.
  
• Why is there no “you forgot” message when you forget to enter a grade on the dropbox feedback page? This really bugs me.
  
• Why do some links in my class work just fine one day and then blow up the next day? Ahhhh!
  
• Why don’t the same files display correctly in one class and not display at all in a different section (same class)? I was so bugged.


• Why does D2L pick up junky code when I copy and paste from a Word document? It makes a messy document. Very buggy...


• Why do students leave assignments to the last minute and then complain they didn’t understand it? Drives me buggy!
  

My Groups -- Not very successful

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/index.php has identified several skill areas which students (K-12 but this can be useful for college students as well) should have to be successful in today’s world. The Learning and Innovation Skills area, (skills which should prepare students for a complex work environment), lists “creativity and innovation; critical thinking and problem solving; communication and collaboration” skills.

With that in mind, I occasionally attempt simple group project in one or more of my classes. This time my attempt was less than successful with only one out of four groups actually collaborating and communicating with each other.

For my group project, I created four discussion groups where students peer reviewed each other’s database design, asked questions, posted suggestions and basically helped each other come up with a good design for their Case Study. It has worked nicely in the past and I receive much better assignments when students have peer reviewed each other’s work prior to submitting their files. They receive 10 points for posting their design and helping each other.

It takes a little bit of work on your part to set up the groups and the group activities. D2L considers a group discussion as a place for students to discuss a problem and not really a gradeable item for the gradebook. When you try to grade that discussion by attaching the groups to a grade column, D2L creates a grade column for every group. For the groups where the individual student does not participate, they are graded with a zero which makes it very confusing for students. My work-around for this gradebook issue was to include the participation points in the rubric for their individual database design assignment. That way there was no extra gradebook column.

My students had over a week to work in their groups. Their individual assignments were not based on contributions from any other group member. They just had to help each other. According to 21st century skills, collaboration is a skill which should be incorporated in academic work to help prepare students for the workforce. And technically, no person really works in a vacuum without anyone else. So why the poor response? I have no answer for this question but I will try it again.

Chairs, Do you have a voice?

I don’t. Seriously, I don’t. I’ve had this nagging cold for a couple of weeks now and it has settled in my throat causing me to alternate between sounding like Lauren Bacall or a raspy whisper. My husband, while sympathetic, I’m sure is secretly happy that I am a lot quieter these days.

When I first started as Chair of the ECE-EDU program, I was told I should attend various meetings but not say anything. Just go and be quiet! Ten years ago, the online program was not looked upon as a fad. However, now, online learning has become an accepted part of education.

So where’s your voice at faculty meetings? Do you attend? We’ve been invited to become more involved at faculty meetings such as the upcoming 2:2 meeting on Feb 19th. These meetings are an excellent opportunity to meet other faculty in your discipline and network with other Program Chairs. I feel we should work in cooperation with our campus programs to provide courses that fill a need and that will be supported by campus faculty. For example, the EDU program provides courses that our sister campuses can’t fill because of lack of faculty or minimal students. When we aggregate students from all around the system, we have enough to run a class and therefore provide this class to students who wouldn’t normally have it available. I’ve also helped my colleagues understand online learning and technology. Over the last decade, I’ve made it a point to get to know each campus chair and as a bonus, I’ve made a lot of very nice friends in the process.

What are you waiting for? An invitation? We did receive a personal invite to the 2:2 conference from Lisa, Donna and the System Office. Are you going? Use your voice for promoting your program. It will probably be a lot louder than mine these days.

Are you a Cold Chair?

Are you a cold Chair? I was not pleased to see the snow on one of my favorite chairs today but this got me thinking about Chairs and their faculty. Do you know your faculty or do they know you only as an occasional email message?

I am lucky because I’ve been able to build my EDU program from the ground starting 10 years ago. I had a handful of interested ECE faculty who “volunteered” to try online teaching as an experiment. They knew their content (early childhood deducation) but they didn’t know much about computers, technology in general and teaching/learning online. That’s where I came in, as the technology mentor.

Over the past 10 years I’ve got to pick and choose my faculty, mostly through other faculty recommendations and now I have over 20 dedicated instructors. I’ve made it a point to personally meet each one of them and take them to lunch. I’ve sent Christmas cards with Starbucks cards inside. We talk about our kids and grandkids, our time at the beach, farm or mountains. I feel like I know each instructor and they know me as well.

Can you say that? When was the last time you personally thanked your faculty for their hard work? Do you send reports about what’s going on at CCCOnline, maybe summarizing important information from an A-Team meeting? Do you send emails of encouragement especially now that we’re involved with a new LMS? Have you called any of your faculty or even given them your phone number?

I realize you might have a much larger program than what I have, but come on…defrost that cold chair!

Adding a Human Touch

As I was checking the D2L courses in my program group getting ready to make my Spring 2 dupe list, I noticed that a few of my faculty didn’t put a picture in their Instructor Widget.

This got me thinking “Why?” Online instructors have reported that they feel they “know” their students better through online learning than in a “regular” class. We make a connection with every student through discussions, email and comments on assignments. If you’ve taught in a f2f classroom, there are always quiet students who never contribute to a class discussion. We never seem to get to know this student as a person. But through our discussions, our online students seem to reveal more about themselves than they would in class, maybe too much in some cases. Is the opposite true? Do our online students feel they know us?

One simple way to add a little human touch is to post a picture of yourself. Why wouldn’t we? I can think of a couple excuses, but no good reason why not.

• Excuse 1:” I don’t have a picture of myself. I’m always the picture taker.” Just about everyone has a camera on their cell phone. Turn that cell phone around and snap yourself.
• Excuse 2: “I don’t have a good picture of myself.” Heard of PhotoShop or some of the other photo editing programs?
• Excuse 3: “I don’t know how.” This is where your favorite D2L mentor comes in handy. Ask them for tech assistance.

The purpose of our job as instructors is to make a connection with our students and facilitate and encourage knowledge acquisition and development. Reminds me of that great Bruce Springsteen song, “Human Touch”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85cNRQo1m3A

I just want someone to talk to

And a little of that human touch

Just a little of that human touch

Add a little human touch to your online class!

Phyllis' Blog

Hello out there! I'm Phyllis Dobson, EDU Program Chair and online instructor. I will be taking up Lisa's invitation to blog in this space throughout the spring semester. I've been teaching online since the last century, which probably makes me one of the seasoned veterans (a polite way of saying she's old)! I'm passionate about this method of teaching and compassionate toward new online instructors.

This space will be a collection of my thoughts on teaching online, being a program chair to an online group and just random thoughts. I have never done this before as my writing tends toward cheesy novels, children's stories, family cookbooks and a textbook or two. I heard someone tell me, "take what you need and leave the rest." I don't know if anyone will even read or care what I write, but if you find something of value or worthy of further thought, this experience will be worth it. I look forward to 'e-sharing' with you.

Phyllis