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F2F or Onground
Definition of face-to-face. 1: within each other’s sight or presence; met and talked face-to-face; a face-to-face consultation 2: in or into direct contact or confrontation; came face-to-face with the problem (Merriam-Webster, 2020) It took a while for me to get used to people at my workplace referring to face-to-face (F2F) courses as on-ground courses. I mean no ill will and am not being snooty. It’s new to me and it just fascinates me that we have these two terms to describe this in-person form of learning experience. I’m speculating that maybe people were describing and referring…
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Insourcing or Outsourcing Online Education
I thought I’d compile the slew of articles that had been written on this topic, mostly for myself to keep track of the articles and to read them more carefully at my “leisure.” Before the recent interest in OPM (Online Program Management) companies, Tony Bates had written about it in 2010: Some Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Online Education, Tony Bates, July 20, 2010 There were the occasional pieces written as more OPMs began to emerge on the online education landscape: A Tipping Point for OPM?, Lindsay McKenzie, June 4, 2018 Then…
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What’s Training Got to Do with the Boeing 737 Max Crashes
737 pilots trained for Max 8 with short online course Trained. Self-administered. Short. Online. Course. This news trended a week ago. I was both cognitively and emotionally engaged when I read it. This CNN news touched on areas close to my heart: training, continuing education, online learning, instructional and learning design. But where do I start to process this information? I who used to ride airplanes fearlessly. I have to sort through this news. I enjoy traveling, for work and leisure, and for now, I don’t trust the FAA or airline…
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Lecture Video Speed Control
I enrolled in a post-graduate diploma program in November 2018. Taking courses as a learner allows me to see how other folks design their courses. The instructor does a great job of teaching. However, the speed control feature was missing from the Vimeo videos. I wrote to the support desk to inquire because I usually watch/listen to lecture videos at 1.25 to 1.5 speed. The support person came back with this: Having a speed control may lead to participants missing out some key information shared by the faculty. Hence we…
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Tips to Create Engaging Live Sessions
[First published Feb 7, 2017 at Engaged Learning blog.] Live sessions (LS) offer opportunities for interaction between students and with the instructor in an online learning environment. Download PDF 7 Things to Know When Facilitating Live Sessions (text-only format) Acknowledge your students’ presence. Call them by name. Cultivate a sense of community. Start and stop the session on time. Show how the live session topic is relevant to the course and students’ work. Don’t repeat what’s in video lectures. Provide real life, current examples / cases / situations. Help…
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SXSWEDU 2018: Things I Remember
Check out the following padlet for things I learned at the conference. Padlet URL: https://padlet.com/ywbkreher/6qk74qw8wvbb
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Creating Online Assessments for the First Time
This is a post that needs to be written as it is a F.A.Q. — one that I often get. Even when I’m not directly asked to address this, many instructors would appreciate having this range of assessments upfront when they are creating online assessments for the first time. Some of the questions I get asked are: What type of assessment can I create? How should I create them? Why should I create this assessment and not that? How do I measure …? So, I’ve put together some information, especially for first-time online instructors,…
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Get me to OLC Innovate 2018 on Time!
The OLC Innovate 2018 Call for Proposal deadline is this Wednesday November 1. I’m rushing to get my proposal written with a graduate assistant this weekend. Doing this reminds me of my virtual participation this year via Virtually Connecting. I had not blogged about it, but it is a moment worthy of cherishing. In 2017, I wasn’t able to be in New Orleans because I had just returned from a Coursera Partners’ Conference. I wrote a bit about my virtual session and left it at that. When I received a…
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MOOC Hype and the Coursera Partners’ Conference 2017
I was fortunate to get to attend a conference for Coursera partners, of which my institution is one, a trailblazing one. Apparently, as my director said, what we are doing at our unit is new and unheard of to many participants. In fact, I shared at work that I was awed by the attention we were getting. With 24 (or 25?) of us attending, we were represented at a significant number of breakout sessions. There were several big moments for us; but for me, the two major ones were first,…
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Online Icebreaker: A Life Story Album Cover
As an online introduction, Tina Seelig invited us — participants in her MOOC — to design an album cover of our lives to construct a narrative of who we are. Add to that the creation of a 10-song playlist, fictional or actual songs, and we’ll get some bonus points. I created two album covers. Which one do you think I submitted? A or B? I think these ideas are excellent as icebreakers in online teaching. They afford students multiple means to participate in course conversations. It helped me to reflect,…
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2013 Sloan-C International Conference Notes: Good Work in Online Learning
I returned a call to a friend after returning from the Sloan Consortium’s International Conference at Orlando, Florida. “How was it? The same old people, right?” she asked. It has often intrigued me as a doctoral student that not everyone is interested in going to conferences, after all, it is part of a researcher’s practice, or so we were told — to disseminate ideas/findings and engage with one’s community of practice. Now that I’ve graduated, I still find it exciting to continue with the practice. But my friend’s comment made…
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3 days at Sloan-C ET4Online 2013
As an instructional systems designer/education researcher, I attended sessions at the Sloan-C Emerging Technologies for Online Learning with the goal to inform my professional development. In some organic fashion, my interests somehow coagulated into three main areas: 1. How do people learn: what’s the latest in educational psychology and how is it applied to online education? 2. How is instructional design and development enhanced by new technologies? 3. Scholarship of online learning and teaching: What interesting research is being done? Using what methods or instruments?Instinctively, I feel that these topics…
