Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education in Action

This month we ran our first ever Online Pedagogy Course which  I created and our instructional chair, Karen Kaemmerling facilitated. Kudos to the new online faculty who participated in this mandatory course just prior to teaching their first online course this summer. The course is an intense eight days focusing on Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson published “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education”. Participants gave the course high marks and many ideas were exchanged as they discussed and reflected on implementing the principles. Online Learning will run it again in August for new online faculty and any current faculty who have an interest in improving their course or in sharing their experiences with new online teachers may take the course as well.

Electronic Learning Consortium of Colorado

So right after I returned from Dallas, it was time to get ready for the eLearning Consortium of Colorado's once a year get together. This year the eLCC Conference was held in Breckenridge, Colorado and I am so glad about that! This is the first time I have attended this conference and frankly it was probably the best ever. The venue was Beaver Run Resort, a fantastic place even if you are not a skier! Great food, fairly easy to navigate, pools, hot tubs and clean, comfy rooms. Several restaurants, a huge bonfire right outside next to skiers and snowboarders.

But really the sessions were the best part, there was a large variety to choose from including faculty, instructional designer and administrator tracks for higher ed. I picked up plenty of new tools, not necessarily from presentations but from participants as well. I will share a few below. My co-worker in online learning, Karen Kaemmerling,  and I presented on our Online Course Quality Task Force and explained to attendees what we have accomplished so far as CMC begins it's instructional quality journey; our presentation was well received by about thirty participants. My final conference presentation for CMC comes in July (details TBA) at the Sloan-C Blended Learning Conference. I hope to see you there!

Cogdogblog.com-he was a very engaging keynote speaker

Enquire Within Upon Everything: True Stories of the Wondrous Web from Alan Levine

Math MOOC
Constant Learning
News from FRCCCoach 

Opening the Gate: Using OER to Create and Share Courses from cccscoetc

Great Tools That We Use: eT4 Online 2014

The first conference for me in April is the Sloan-C/MERLOT Emerging Technologies for Online Learning. If you recall, I was awarded Peer Reviewer Extraordinaire status at this conference in Las Vegas in 2013 and now I can add Dallas in 2014 to my resume.

 





Great Tools That We Use
Since last year I have become a MERLOT editor for teacher ed so this year I presented with the Teacher Editorial Board. We gave a wonderful presentation called "Great Tools That We Use" which is where we each share one app that we have previously peer reviewed. Our super, web designer member, Angela Gunder has put it all together in Blendspace so that we can share it all with one URL.

Opening the Gate: A Fast & Easy Way to Create, Collaborate & Share Your Courses!

Also for Sloan-C's et4Online, Brenda Perea, the instructional designer for Colorado Community College System asked me to present with her on the COETC TAA Grant project that we have both been working on. The grant deliverables can viewed here in process as the grant (and quite possibly my job at CMC(!) ends in September 2014. She will present the macro view as the project manager for the State, and I will present the micro view and the down-in-the-trenches instructional designer helping faculty to redesign their energy courses into hybrid format. Our presentation can be viewed on the Sloan-C website very soon but here is the opening video that we'll show as the audience files into our "Opening the Gate..." presentation.

Colorado Mountain College's Steamboat Campus

Suzanne Thompson, our manager of Innovations in Teaching & Learning asked me to do a few workshops out at our Steamboat Springs campus. What a beautiful town and campus! I met our adjunct faculty representative, Cho, who was a super guide, showing me around and introducing me to her co-workers in business and culinary. Attendance was low, unfortunately, but Cho was happy to learn about open educational resources and pass the information along to the adjuncts on her campus. Here is a slideshare of the presentation

SOL Summit 2014

Attending my third SOL Summit via MediaSite's streaming server today. Amazing how good the quality is from NYS to Colorado. This afternoon's hands-on workshop with Michelle Pacansky-Brock included Voicethread and Populr, among other tools. See how Michelle has humanized the online learning experience. I wish you could experience our class community activity first hand but you have to be invited to join the group. There is a nice example at this website though, plus you get other resources along with it!

Launching the Mobile Learning Lab

So far, so good! Here is a bit of information about the Spring 2014 launch of CMC's mobile learning lab. The three courses in the Basic Solar Certificate are being taught in hybrid format except for three full days of hands-on workshops in the mobile lab. Chris Ellis, our solar instructor, will be driving the lab to Edwards for this inaugural semester's face-to-face classes. He is teaching two of the classes and Dr. Shauna Kocman will teach the online portion of the Safety, Health & Environment class.

Using the Smartboard

We have a SmartBoard in almost every classroom but from what we have been able to determine, if faculty use the tool at all, they are just using basic tools like highlighters and most of the features are never used.

So we scheduled a workshop at CMC's Glenwood Center campus and wouldn't you know it, we could not get the Smartboard to talk to the computer. So we moved the whole workshop to another lab and guess what? Same thing! Turns out, the IT person was working on the SmartBoards so nothing we could have done would have worked. I ended up doing "SmartBoards in Theory" which didn't have quite the same impact, as you can imagine! However, attendees did get a nice SmartBoard bookmark with a list of resources as a takeaway.