Gaston College
Wiki Link: http://gastontraining.wikispaces.com/
Below are the handouts for the workshops at Gaston College on April 17, 2008.
Here are the Handouts for April 18, 2008 Workshops.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share with you at Gaston College!
Here are some extra items that I hope will help you:
How to prevent copying or Printing Tests.pdf
Powerpoint-Action Buttons.pdf
PowerPoint-How-do-that.pdf
Working With Slide Master.pdf
nacol-standards-quality-online-teaching
What did you think about the workshops? Were they helpful? Did you Learn anything? Please feel free to leave comments below!
Hi Kelly,
I learned so much at the workshops on Thursday and Friday. Thank you for coming and sharing your knowledge and experience with us. These have been the best workshops for online instruction that I have attended yet!! I am going to implement the following right away …Classroom discussion board (summer courses), Critique this Course discussion board, and Short Keys Lite. I came home on Friday and signed up for an Ed2Go PowerPoint 2007 course and completed two lessons this weekend. I am excited about learning more about using this program. Thanks again and come back any time!!!
Thanks Tonia! I really enjoyed your group. I just wish there was more time! There was soooo much more I could have shown you! Look around this site, especially on the “Resources” page. You will find plenty of good information. I also just posted a blog about PowerPoint. This was a question that I did not get to answer for your group because of the time restraints.
Kelly, much of what you talked about in the workshops was WAY over my head as I am a newcomer to online instruction. THANK YOU for your patience in answering our questions and your great tips for how to “work smarter”. I will be a regular visitor at your blog to soak up as much learning as I can before I have to “go live” in the fall.
Thanks for the input Deborah. I’m sorry you were confused. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if I can help you in any way! Start slow…it can be overwhelming if you are not careful. If you don’t take anything else away remember this: stay in touch with the students, communicate with them EXTENSIVELY, and put clear instructions in your class to show them where you want them to go and what you want them to do. Everything else is “gravy on the biscuit!” Fancy designs and software, Web 2.0, and everything else….JUST GRAVY! The most important items we covered in the “What makes a good e-learning” workshop.
Hi Kelly:
I was only able to attend Friday afternoon’s session. I wanted to thank you for the hints and assistance with trying to streamline my B.B. courses. I have passed the information and this website along to my wife, who teaches online classes a few CC schools throughout the state.
I have two questions that you might be able to answer. The first concerns converting PPT to smaller and usable file for the BB server to handle. Right now, I am using PPTs and PDF files, but I use many graphics with my Geology courses and the server just cannot handle it. Are the programs you recommend (Impatica & Articulate) free to download or do they require a school License Agreement for this software.
I would love to try anything new so – #1) my students can download my huge files (the book publisher uses huge picture files), #2) each semester, Tech. Services eliminates all extra files because the course exceeds the allotted space allowed, and #3) I am not just “giving away” my I.P.Rights so people can “steal” it, and #3).
My second question concerns the course content and assessment of students. In order to “Work Smarter, Not Harder”, you recommend changing your assessments to all multiple choice and true/false questions. I understand that this cuts down much of the grading time, changing to automatic, computer based grading.
My concern, which is shared my many of my colleagues in the Social Sciences, is are we “dumbing-down” the college courses by making the assessments close-ended questions? Are we changing courses that by definition are descriptive, open-ended, and creatively thought provoking and asking students to be very cut-and-dry, black-or-white, yes-or-no courses?
As college instructors, are we loosing touch with what it means to teach and evaluate COLLEGE COURSE MATERIAL? By evaluating with rigid assessments are we dumbing-down and robbing our students of the skills needed to succeed outside of the classroom? From my educational experiences, my best instructors and courses, and the courses in which I recall information, come from those courses in which I had to be descriptive, creative, and use writing skills.
My question to you would be is there another way to keep the rigorous academic standards of a college course and a college experience without resorting to MC and T/F questions in order to make grading more simple?
Brian…first of all, I must apologize for the delay in my response. For some reason I did NOT receive an e-mail notifying me of your comment!
First question: You can use a “Skydrive” from http://www.windowslive.com to post large files and share the information. I suggest you look into something like articulate or impatica to streamline and copy protect your files. They are both 3rd party services and are fee based.
Secondly: You bring up a great point regarding the creativity and subjectivity of some courses. These courses are difficult to use MC/TF questions and allow creativity. In this case Caps become important to help control the workload. There are other tricks you can use such as Immersive Learning Solutions, discussion areas, and games.
The goal is not to dumb down material, but to help reduce the amount of extraneous work that the instructor is doing. There are many places where a subjective question is asked when an objective question is perfectly acceptable. The point I was trying to make was to review your course and determine when and where this should be done.