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Getting Started With Your First Online Course Excerpted from Alexandra M. Pickett, Assistant Director, SUNY Learning Network in A Series of Unfortunate Online Events and How to Avoid Them What if you knew that 20% your online students have slow modem access to your online course from home? What if you knew that 60% of your online students were taking an online course for the first time? What if you knew that students would NOT read every, or all of each of your course web pages? What if every online test/quiz was take home, open book, and potentially collaborative? What if you knew that there was a significant relationship between the length of a web page with the degree of comprehension? What if you knew that there was a statistically significant positive correlation between the amount of contact and interaction your students have with you and the other students in the online course, and their perceived learning and satisfaction? Getting off to a good start in any online course happens by design, not by accident. Online students won't know what you want or how to behave, unless you clearly tell them. The more students know about what to expect, the easier it will be for you and students. Your work designing the course ahead of time pays off in the long run. Consider a welcome note that introduces you and the course to the students. Your welcome sets the tone, gives you a "voice" and is the students' first "glimpse" of you. Let students know what you expect in terms of participation in the class, cheating, and netiquette. Providing instructional documents on what they are to do first and next is especially important in the beginning of an online course to get things off to a good start. On the whole you want to go for consistency across modules in structure and length.
Current research shows that online collaborations between the instructor and students, and between students themselves, positively and significantly influence student satisfaction and perceived learning. Building opportunities for such interactions into the design of your course will be your challenge- the fun part, and the key to success.
Just Out: February Issue of Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks (JALN) Opportunities for collaboration are the internet's greatest gift; they are especially valuable for teaching and learning. Collaborations model workplace activities, help students to construct knowledge, enhance students' understanding and appreciation of diversity, and may give students a sense of belonging online. Perhaps most importantly, collaborations allow students to interact socially and develop a feeling of community in online courses, bridging distances that otherwise separate them. Yet, many online educators remain unsure of why, when, and how to introduce collaboration in their online classes. With 8 papers, including a summary of Sloan-C resources, JALN Volume 10, Issue 1 provides help with collaborative activities. A Message from the President You might find The Poor Need Training that Works for Them, by Gatta and McCabe to be interesting reading. The project was funded in its early stages through a small Sloan Foundation grant. Now a larger Sloan grant is supporting expansion for online education for the working poor across all states. Sloan-C's primary interest is ALN as a base for accredited online programs. Although we have been extraordinarily successful with ALN programs and continue to support them, we are gradually putting some additional emphasis into aspects of online learning that are not strictly ALN. Examples are blends, local connectedness, and interactions with corporate training organizations on the use of the pillars for assessment. The New Jersey project, now a national project for online training for low-wage adults, uses vendor-provided office software self-learning modules to help train low-wage workers to upgrade their office skills, with some occasional face-to-face meetings. It works. The results from the original New Jersey pilot, assessed and documented by Mary Gatta of Rutgers, were startling. In other words, this version of online blending and localness, administered by state labor departments and funded in large part with federal dollars, works and works well and cost-effectively for low wage working adults. This attractive option should be available to workers in all states. Gatta and McCabe and others on the Rutgers team are energetically engaged in making that happen. It will uplift the basic skills of millions and affect their lives profoundly. In the process it will improve the performance of the U.S. workforce in a world with a rapidly globalizing, integrated economy. A. Frank Mayadas. Ph.D., Sloan-C President The Poor Need Training that Works for Them By Mary Gatta and Kevin P. McCabe Mary Gatta is a researcher at Rutgers University, and Kevin P. McCabe is a former state commissioner of labor and workforce development. Their book, "Not Just Getting By: The New Era of Flexible Workforce Development," was published in December. Imagine you are a high school-educated single mother with two children under 10. You work three days a week as a part-time bookkeeper at your local church and wait tables on weekends at a diner near your apartment. You earn about $15,000 a year and live paycheck to paycheck. A few slow shifts at the diner one week, and you are unable to pay your monthly bills. You know you need skills training to get a higher-paying job, but you do not know when you will fit classes into your day or how you will pay for them. Locating affordable child care at odd hours proves daunting. In addition, you may be among the one-third of families earning $15,000 or less that do not own a car, making getting to class a challenge. In today’s economy, full-time work does not guarantee a living wage. Some 9 million working families in the United States are trying to survive on jobs that do not pay enough to support their families or offer health benefits, pensions or career advancement. Research is clear that education and skills training would increase these workers’ economic self-sufficiency. Yet today’s antiquated training programs do not work for them for two reasons: They do not train workers in the computer skills that employers need, and they are not accessible to many of the working poor who want to improve their skills. The United States ignores this problem at its peril. As international competition intensifies and technological advances drive our labor market, workforce training and skills development must become America’s No. 1 economic development policy priority, as they are for emerging rivals India and China. We need integrated workforce development that targets the working poor. It won’t work to simply allocate funding to education and then expect marginalized populations to take advantage of it. The reality of their lives — child care, elder care, irregular work hours, transportation barriers —makes it difficult to access education in traditional classrooms. Instead we must develop innovative programs that accommodate the work, family and education needs of workers. Online skills training programs address these challenges. For employers, they provide a pool of workers trained in entry-level computer skills. And they deliver training to the working poor in a format that is accessible to them at home, any time of the day or night. New Jersey and other states are in the forefront in using technology to deliver skills training by providing computers, Internet accesses and online courses at home to low-wage workers. The results are promising: 92 percent of 128 participants completed a New Jersey pilot program in 2002. Participants reported an average annual wage increase of 14 percent, and several of them went on to college. Most important, all the participants emphatically reported that they would not have been able to complete a training program if it were not available at home and 24/7. In New Jersey, the program costs about $3,000 per client, including the computer, software, Internet and support. Those figures would apparently hold — more or less — for an expanded program, although bulk buying might provide some discounts in computers or the software. Since 2002, the program has expanded in New Jersey, and several additional states — Maine, Massachusetts, Delaware, Illinois, Alabama, Texas and Arizona — are establishing online training programs with federal and state labor department funding. Another dozen states are considering such programs. Policy officials cannot rely on economic growth to raise workers out of poverty or to strengthen the labor force. Proactive steps are needed to supply workers who can meet the demands of high-wage, high-growth industries. To best accomplish this, public officials must ensure that workforce training is delivered in a flexible format. The workers who will succeed are those who will meet the skill needs of employers, and the employers and industries that will grow state and national economies are the ones that have access to the best trained workers.
Three-Workshop Series Highlights Collaboration With so many workshops scheduled this year, and more to come, now is the perfect time to save big by signing up for the 2006 Sloan-C College Pass. There’s still time to apply this offer to March’s three new workshops including the first two of a three workshop series on collaboration and our "Online Course Development for Beginners" workshop. Cognitive, Social, & Teaching Presence to Support Collaboration This is the first workshop in a special three workshop series focusing on collaboration in online learning. Many theoretical and empirical analyses emphasize the importance of collaboration among students in promoting the effectiveness of online learning; however, collaboration is not easy to facilitate in traditional, face-to-face learning environments, let alone in online ones. This workshop will not only explore the theoretical underpinnings and research support for collaboration online, but give practical advice for how to design and implement collaborative activities in online classes. Online Course Development for Beginners Have you ever thought about designing your own online course? Are you interested in best practices in online course design, teaching and learning? Have you ever wondered what taking an online course is like? Come take this workshop! Sloan-C will place you in an online course to gain first-hand experience with online asynchronous discussion, then exploring how asynchronous online courses are structured and managed. This workshop introduces you to principles and methods collected by Sloan-C from best practices and research of top practitioners in the field from more than 10 years of work. Specifically, we will model, examine, and share strategies, best practices, and results of current research on key topics in online education and asynchronous learning environments. We will also discuss your questions, concerns and perspectives on what constitutes good practices in the online asynchronous teaching and learning environment. We will take you through the steps that will help you conceptualize your own online course structure, organization, sequencing, pacing, learning activities design and evaluation of your students. Assessing (& Encouraging) Collaboration This is the second workshop in a special three workshop series focusing on collaboration in online learning. Value in any instructional system comes from assessment. That which is valued becomes the focus of activity. Many theoretical and empirical analyses emphasize the importance of collaboration among students in promoting the effectiveness of online learning. However, in most online courses, traditional instructor-centered examination remains the primary means for assessing student performance. This workshop will address that issue and provide strategies for assessing collaboration in online discussion, collaboration in small groups, and collaborative examinations including examples of specific methodologies and rubrics for assessing online collaboration.
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The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C), sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is composed of institutions and organizations dedicated to continually improving the quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs, according to their own distinctive missions, so that education becomes a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines. The Sloan-C View is published by Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C™). Responsibility for the contents rests with the authors and not with Sloan-C™. Copyright ©2005 by Sloan-C™. If you have a question or comment, would like to submit an article for publication, or would like to suggest an event to be listed on the Sloan-C View Calendar, please email publisher@sloan-c.org. Materials in the Sloan-C View, unless otherwise noted, may be distributed freely for educational purposes. However, if any materials are redistributed they must retain the copyright notice and use the proper citation. Kindly send an email to publisher@sloan-c.org indicating how you are using the material for distribution. Your privacy is important to us, you can view our privacy policy at www.sloan-c.org/aboutus/privacy.asp | |||