Hi all: During my first day at the MERLOT Conference, I attended two sessions related to Faculty Development. These sessions included use of the WebCT/Blackboard Exemplary Course Rubric and web-based faculty authored case studies related to implementing teaching innovations. Several uses for the Exemplary Course Rubric include on-line course design, faculty self-evaluation, course evaluation, and course design competitions. Dr. David Graf (Nova Southeastern University) presented the session, and as some of you may recall, he led a workshop on developing exemplary on-line courses several years ago at NMU. The rubric is available on the WebCT /Blackboard website. The case studies were designed by the MERLOT ELIXR team and are available to anyone via the MERLOT website. These case studies are being used to orientate new faculty and graduate teaching assistants (i.e. “First Day of Class” and “Use of Rubrics”) and contain video of faculty using various strategies in class settings. They may be useful for our Post-Master’s Nurse Educator Certificate Program students or students in the education discipline.
I also attended two sessions related to innovative online teaching and learning: using mentors in an on-line undergraduate non-profit management course and using free videos / tutorials. The use of mentors in an on-line undergraduate course was interesting. The professor (Dr. Albert Widman – Berkeley College) has his students develop a grant proposal for a non-profit organization, and the mentors, who are non-profit managers, provide feedback on drafts via email over a five week period. Clear rules of engagement are provided in the syllabus. As a result of this project, several of his students have obtained internships with the non-profits, and several have been hired by non-profit organizations and are now mentoring students. He is currently teaching three sections of this class due to student demand.
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I also attended the MERLOT ELIXR session that Lisa attended, as well as another related session on case story development. I agree that NMU could make use of the ELIXR case stories, which are at http://elixr.merlot.org/
The case stories integrate the videos along with supplementary materials. NMU-specific case stories (CTIP, possibly) could also be developed, or case stories could be used as student assignments. The second session briefly introduced one open source tool that can be used to create case stories. I want to check it out in more detail at some point.
I started the first day of the MIC in a stimulating session by Jeff Borden (Senior Director of Teaching and Learning/ Adjunct, Speech Communications, Southwestern Community College) called "How The Virtual Learning Environment can help Learners". His discussion of multi-modal and multi-nodal learners and how they need/want the variance that virtual learning can provide was right on. I see in the HM program that students react better to to having meaningful strategies addressed and then being able to react to the purposeful learning activity. He provided multiple suggestions for on line games, tools and various e-teaching updates. Great ideas for making my hybrid course a success.
I wanted to add that later on Day I I attended many speakers on the same thread. Patricia Williams (Professor, Interior Architecture, University of Wisconsin/Stevens Point)who discussed "The Hybrid Format". She discussed the D2L - desire to learn software which I will look into further and some wonderful suggestions to get students to learn the difference between knowing the name of something and actully knowing the something. She stated her success with Freshman and their hesitancy to discuss anything being dispelled by on line discussions et al.She stated her success in using Finks Taxonomy of Significant Learning as an e-learning journal guide (she also eliminated tests)was the road to having students learn how to learn. I can see this being very useful in the freshman seminar I teach.
I would like to also comment that the bulk of sessions I attended on Day I were excellent but many of the speakers only scratched the surface of the material in the 30 or 45 minutes allotted.
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