I know, I know, it's been a long time since my last entry. Life has been pretty chaotic since May and
Lunch with Loretta and Lori but the resulting changes have been excellent! So let me jump to September when I started my new job at
Colorado Mountain College (CMC) (surprise!). I am doing what I love best besides teaching, currently working as the instructional designer for their new Integrated Energy Program. This semester we will concentrate on courses in the
Solar Photovoltaic Certificate which is the first step to becoming a solar installer.
As their instructional designer, I am helping faculty turn their courses into hybrid format. We have to do this in a hurry, I won't go into the details, but three faculty who I am working with right now will turn out four courses for launch in Spring 2012. None of the faculty have any background in online or hybrid learning, they are industry experts who enjoy teaching. So I needed a way to get them up to speed and UCF's
BlendKit Course is most definitely the way to go because it allows faculty to pick and choose what they need to learn and let's them choose how to participate best on their own schedule. Since I have known of the course and skimmed it several times but never actually took the course, I decided to take it along with my faculty so that I know what they are learning and can refer to it as we develop their courses. So far I think it is laid out very well and will make a good model for the courses the faculty are developing. So on to this first week's assignment:
The
first chapter assigned describes blended learning (also called hybrid the term we use at CMC) and gives some food for thought as to how a blended design might work in actuality. I have already discussed the questions presented with my faculty and I am hoping when we next meet they will not only have given the matter more thought but will also understand that what we discussed
IS standard best practice and
NOT something Loretta made up. :)
