ITC eLearning Conference in St. Petersburg, FL on February 16-19
This is an outline of the sessions I attended on the fourth day of the conference
Feb. 19th Tuesday morning
Sessions:
Building Communities of Discourse Online
Kevin Morgan
Discussion
The strength of online teaching is discussion.
He has a laissez-faire attitude—Tao: He claims to channel the natural desire students have to discuss.
Discovery learning:
send students out to do Internet searches and then have them post them online to the discussion
Some students need more structure, focused questions
He gives students feedback mid point in the course to see what they are doing.
He is not active at all in the discussions except in the beginning of the course. Stays out of discussion outside of giving initial feedback. He says that students should not be depended on him as the Word.
Gives corrected posts in the 1-2 weeks
He goes into discussions everyday to skim responses and grade.
After the first few weeks he grades the discussion on how many words are in the posts.
Discussion occurs so naturally that students do it readily—discussion is 20% of the grade.
To get the threaded discussions going they have to be keyed to their papers.
WebCt has a feature that marks articles read? Wonder if the new Bb has this feature?
Students are given focused questions or they can post individual discovery.
What happens in Bb if you give them more points for a particular discussion?
Give them a word range for the reply too. He gives 300 for the first post and 50 for the reply. You get more points if you post at the beginning of the week.
The last thing he said as we were leaving was to ask if we knew of any more classes he could teach--to just let him know. He already teaches 7-8 a semester. What does this say about his methods? He obviously does not read the thousands of discussion posts he gets every day. He grades them by quantity and currency. But he has a point: dealing with discussions can be done more rapidly and more effectively. He has most of his class lectures on streaming video with a transcript. He has set up his courses so that they are self sustaining.
Final Keynote session—lunch
Changing Learning: Shifting Learners, Content, Methods and Outcomes
The final session was by some big wig in elearning who sat in his office in Manhattan and talk to us over streaming video. He was going to do three more meetings that day. Good for him. Still, people like him have good ideas.
Finger tip learning—knowledge at your finger tips.
Students and others are less techy these days: they know little about the machine itself, but they are screen knowledgeable.
User content—are we ready? No but soon.
Make content discoverable and have those who use it rate the content.
6 month cycle for innovation; email took 14 years to come to harvest!
We are going through an adaptation time.
Design as a competency: MFAs to MBAs
Higher Ed is in love with real estate . . .
But students want to know where is the the best semester for . . . whatever. They won't be spending all 8 semesters at your college.
Students have to stop graduating . . . get the certificate but continue learning. He told a story of interviewing his surgeon not for what college he graduated from but what continuing med training he has had. Retention has to be redefined. We have to produce learning at the point of need.
Faculty need a sandbox—used as a verb: they need to be sandboxed. They need to have places where they can continually find time to innovate. Because it is the methodology (pedagogy) and not the technology.
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