WCET- Managing Online Education 2010

WCET- Managing Online Education 2010

This one snuck by me. It came out last month. As of yet I have only read the executive summary, but the numbers here do show that progress is being made in the area of campus awareness and acceptance of distance education. More importantly, it shows where the largest areas of resistance are. I say more importantly, primarily because the deficiencies point toward the areas that need the most attention. If one can identify the problems, then one knows where to allocate resources to improve practice.

The study focuses on the managerial middle, the policies and people that make up the distance education team at any given school.

There are a couple of gems in this overview that really do indicate opportunities for improvement are in ADA compliance, where over 50% of the 183 responding two and four year schools have no policy, or depend upon faculty to make certain that online courses meet the requirements. There is a huge opportunity, as I see it, for training and professional development in this area.

Likewise, and no surprise, the majority of issues and impediments are internal, not external.

The video is well worth watching. By far my favorite quote from the presenter, Casey Green, is “The easy part of the infrastructure is the hardware and the software. The hard part of the infrastructure are the the people and the resources. And the explosion of online ed really still demands people and resources.”

This does relate to excellence from the standpoint that it gives us a snapshot of where we are right now and what the prevailing forces, both positive and negative are from a distance education management perspective.

http://www.campuscomputing.net/survey

Almost a year?

I am amazed. It has been almost a year since my last post. In that time I have been doing a number of things, but mostly I have been simply teaching and and being a house Dad. Simple as that. I have come to the conclusion in retrospect that I needed some time to regroup after being let go by CSUB. I am still teaching part time as adjunct, but it is nowhere near as satisfying as either the fulltime staff or faculty position. So it is time to get back into the game and become a DL player again. :-)

It has become obvious to me that I need something more than teaching for Extended University. So back to training again. I will be making a series of posts in conjunction with the courses I am taking at the present time.

Right now these include the Distance Education program through University of West Georgia: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/certificate.html . I needed a refresher, since the last courses in this area were taken in 2007, and most earlier in 2002-2005.

I have just completed the EASI course in Barrier-free E-Learning and am now enrolled in the Train the Trainer course as well. http://www.easi.cc/

The EASI courses are fairly simple and inexpensive, but are loaded with excellent information on creating an accessible environment for students in all aspect of IT. I enjoyed the first course and have decided on completing the Certificate in Accessible Information Technology provided by EASI and the University of Southern Maine. This certificate program is a series of courses designed to provide training in all aspects of accessibility application in IT. I highly recommend them if you have an interest int IT and an interest in accessibility.

I have a few other courses I wish to take between now and summer, and hopefully by that time I will be back at work, innovating distance education as is my passion.

Government doing Distance Ed

OK. Short post that is more of an observation. As I look through the posts on USAJobs I see a trend. The military and other parts of the governmental structure appear to be embracing distance education (and I do use the term fairly loosely) right now.

Contrast this with some of the major universities in CA and a few other places pulling away from DL (or giving lip service without funding) in favor of brick and mortar presence, and it makes for an interesting time to be in this business. Less distance education in public educational institutions makes them less responsive and less able to cater to the needs of non-traditional students. At the same time the military and a few other areas of government are starting to embrace DL for training.

It does make me wonder if the future of distance education may end up somewhere other than academia. I would have never believed this possible up until the last year. In order to be a creative force do I now need to look at something other than Academe? Hmmmm...

CAMEO courses through UCD Extension

I completed two online courses through UC Davis Extension yesterday. At the moment I am sampling different possible routes for my next career. Last Spring it was Real Estate through Sac City College, later this summer, when I thought I could be training for CSUB, it was Blackboard certifications. This fall I thought I might explore what my wife does, environmental related work.

The courses were taught online around the implementation of the CAMEO suite from EPA. There may have been much more of a learning curve were it not for the courses I took in environmental sciences back in the early 90s at Diablo Valley College. As it is it was a definite challenge. Anyone interested in developing emergency response plans for a municipality would do well to investigate this package. I enjoyed both courses very much, and the instructor, Kevin Smith presented some very interesting scenarios for learning and implementing the software. It is a pity that UCD does not make more of the hazardous materials program available online. Being a five hour trip each way, it is a bit far for me to go to take classroom courses.

I highly recommend the extension at UCD and these courses if they are of interest. I wold recommend Kevin Smith as an instructor as well. You can find out more about Cameo by going to http://www.epa.gov/oem/content/cameo/what.htm

The perils of social networking to my time.

The perils of social networking to my time.

I have not written here in a couple of months now. Part of this has been a sorting out of priorities given my need to find an alternative career field. I am still teaching a class or two per quarter at CSUB, but it does appear as though in the long term I will need some other career path, if for no other reason than I do a bit of a short attention span when I am not learning myself. I would love to make a go of managing distance education and assessment again, but sadly no one is buying. Lots of formal training and experience in LiveText, WASC, and course management systems, which for the time being at least are of no use to me. Ah well, it is the nature of the (self-made) California budget crisis.


Another aspect of my relative silence here is that I become a regular Facebook junkie, for want of a better word. There is a significant difference between these two mediums. I like to think of it as roughly equivalent to the difference between direct instruction and constructivism. Here, I am alone on the stage. I can emote to my heart’s content and may never know if I have a real audience. Hey, at least in the classroom you can gage your impact with a quiz. Two way communication is available here, but it is in the form of feedback as in a classroom, not an equitable sharing of information. Blogs make virtual podiums. One can conduct a dialog in the comments, but that is not part of the design. On the other hand, Facebook can be (I do mean can be, not is) a truly collaborative environment, though not without limitations. It is by its nature built to create communities and subgroups within communities. An idea thrown out in Facebook may be picked up and elaborated on as a group. I have seen that happen. Since this is the way that I work internally myself, it is very attractive.

The one drawback as a real constructivist environment that I can see is that interaction is limited to what I like to think of as “30 second sound bites”. The length of messages is truncated, so the complexity of thought is also truncated.

But for now, it is a fascinating method for building community and sharing information. It is absorbing a lot of my time.

Blackboard 9: Teaching and Learning Online Advanced Certification Series

I just completed the three courses in this series. It was an interesting experience taking training from a provider like this. All three courses gave the tools needed to implement more advanced concepts in BB9. What was missing for me more than anything else were examples of implementation from schools using BB9. I guess that is to be expected though. The people enrolled with me were from a variety of backgrounds, everything from Community College to IT types. It would have been difficult to cater to the variety of potential applications.

If I were to give one piece of advice for someone thinking about taking this series, it would be to have a specific goal in mind for each of the courses. Again, hard to do since one does not know what specifically will be covered, but it doesn't hurt to know what you want to apply your new training to. I was fortunate in having been in the process of adapting courses from WebCT to BB9 alongside the training.

Another thing that stood out for me is that this is not to be confused with an online course. The training is not intended to build community in a constructivist sense as part of the curriculum. Almost all the objectives can be met without interaction with anyone else in the courses. This will work better for some than others.

All in all worth the $1200.

Blackboard9, webCT 41, Volvos and Ford Escorts.

School started on Monday. I'm using BB9 exclusively, having weaned myself entirely from webCT. Not that the desire to continue with WebCT isn't still strong, but to use analogy, that relationship is over and it time to move on. BB9 is flashier, has more bells and whistles, better interface, more options. I have traded in my beloved Ford Escort of a Course Management System for a late model Volvo.

My old escort was really a strippy. Most of the functionality was minimal and a bit clunky. I knew where all the controls were on the tape deck and how to make the seat go to the exact position I like, I knew all the idiosyncrasies, and how to keep the windshield from fogging up in the rain.

The Volvo is different. It is svelte and has every option known to man. I know there is a way to adjust the seat, and I also know that some of these buttons on the dashboard control the sound system.

It is just the process of figuring out what I need to do that is the issue. I have three formal classes through Blackboard and I still don't know how turn on the windshield wipers, though I was taught to change the blades. :-) Also, it isn't like the old Volvo (BB6) I drove briefly a few years ago. The controls are in different places.

I very much like Blackboard 9. Almost as much as I like Moodle. But I really do miss WebCT 4.1 right now in the first days of class.