Have you been looking for more ways to increase engagement, personability, or community in your online courses? The article below shares some ideas, including how we as instructors can model these ideas and how we can design our course.
https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/seven-strategies-to-promote-community-in-online-courses/
What are some ways you’ve fostered community in your online courses?If you have examples, we’d love to share them.
Have you been looking for more ways to add interaction and engagement in your online discussions? While asynchronous courses may not be the first environment you might consider with online discussions, it can be done, and at the Faculty Symposium this past June, Laurie Berry and Kristin Kowal shared ideas on how to elevate your online discussions beyond post-and-reply. A pdf of their slides are included. While viewing slides can’t replace the experience of attending a live presentation, they do offer ideas.
Part_Deux_Discussion_twists_SP2019_Final
What are some ways you’ve made discussions work in your courses?
Have you been wondering about how you might like to renovate one of your courses? At the Faculty Symposium this past June, Kristine Pierick and Ryan Martinez gave a presentation that compared the work of redesigning a course to a home remodeling project, with examples of what might be a light lift (comparable to a weekend project), a medium lift (comparable to something more substantial), and a heavy lift (the course revision equivalent of redoing your kitchen). In the attached pdf of their slides, they’ve included different examples of what a light, medium, or heavy renovation to a course might look like. These are great to think about while considering what you’d like to revise along with the available time.
As part of the DCS IL Orientation, Irena Frączek recently put together an excellent history of Correspondence Courses throughout the centuries. This was done as the WebQuest assignment, so going through this can also give you an example on how to put together a web-based research activity.
Thanks for sharing, Irena! It’s interesting to read about the earlier versions of what we do!
Irena Frączek
DCS Independent Learning Instructor Orientation
Unit 2 WebQuest
Activity A: Historical Correspondence Course Programs
Which of these programs is oldest?
The first known reference to correspondence courses dates back to 1728, when Caleb Phillips placed an advertisement in the Boston Gazette seeking students eager to learn shorthand through weekly mailed lessons. How successful was his endeavor is never mentioned but all sources are unanimous in assertion that in 1840, Sir Isaac Pitman developed the first ever correspondence course in Great Britain. By some strange coincidence it was also a shorthand course, but the long time lag between these two events is somewhat puzzling. Nobody followed in Phillips’ tracks for 116 years?
Interestingly enough, Boston became a site of the first in the United States correspondence school that opened in 1873. Funded by Anna Eliot Ticknor, a pioneer of distance education in our country, the school was called the Boston Society to Encourage Studies at Home and offered higher education (exclusively) to women. On the other hand, the Colliery Engineer School of Mines (currently called the ICS Learn, International Correspondence Schools) established in Scranton (PA) in 1889 targeted primarily men, focusing on technical and practical education.
The idea of distance education caught on also in academia and Polish universities were among the pioneers. Thus, the Jagiellonian University in Kraków opened in 1776 the correspondence courses program designed to teach crafts to workers, while the University of Warsaw ran a correspondence course in physics for general public in 1779. It took, however, almost 80 years later that programs offering correspondence courses on regular bases were set up in various European universities. The first among them was the External Programme in the University of London (1858), famous also for being the first one to offer diplomas and degrees.
In the United States, the Chautauqua Correspondence College was founded in 1881 and authorized to grant diplomas and degrees in 1883. Its founder, William Rainey Harper, established a similar program at the University of Chicago, where he became the president in 1891. In the same year, the University of Wisconsin created three new extension programs with one of them offering the correspondence courses taught by the existing UW faculty. This program was the early version of the UW Independent Learning.
What inspired the creation of the program(s)?
Inspiration for some of these pioneering programs is hard to establish, and for others it is easier to talk about motivation rather than inspiration. For example, Isaac Pitman used correspondence courses as means for promoting the shorthand system he devised. He also took advantage of the newly introduced uniform postal delivery rate that made sending course materials back and forth affordable. For the founder of Colliery Engineer School of Mines, Thomas J. Foster, the aim was to help workers pass safety tests designed to reduce the frequency of mine accidents. For Anna Eliot Ticknor, the inspiration appears to be taken from the similar correspondence school (English Society for the Encouragement of Home Study) existing already in England. And for all programs established at universities, the inspiration was to make college level education available to people who, for various reasons, could not attend the campus based classes in person.
What was the mission of the program?
The missions statements are not available for all the programs discussed but here is a sample of what’s available: The Boston Society to Encourage Studies at Home aspired to induce in students a habit of every day, systematic study. On the other hand, the mission of the Colliery Engineer School of Mines was to provide technical and practical knowledge to working people (mostly immigrant coal miners).’ The correspondence programs at the universities follow the idea of “extended campus” and support lifelong education.
Is the program still in operation today?
For the most part, the programs in question either functioned for a long time and/or are still in operation. The Boston Society to Encourage Studies at Home had the shortest run (24 years) as it had voluntarily dissolved after the death of Anna Eliot Ticknor. The for-profit Colliery Engineer School of Mines has split in two branches of which one has moved to Great Britain (ITS Learn), and another changed the profile to adopting to the changing job market. The University of London International Programme (new name for the External Programme) continues to flourish but the IL program is now getting nixed.
Selected Resources:
“Education for Success”: The International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, Pennsylvania”. The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. CXX (4 (October 1996)).
https://journals.psu.edu/pmhb/article/viewFile/45108/44829
IT STARTED WITH CORRESPONDENCE EDUCATION! (November 10, 2013)
http://distance-educator.com/it-started-with-correspondence-education/
Kubiak, M.J . (2017): Wirtualna edukacja po polsku (Virtual Education in Polish)
https://www.computerworld.pl/news/Wirtualna-edukacja-po-polsku,282183.html
PANDA Timeline of Distance Education
https://pandatimelines.com/V1/2bd7624e
Richard (2009): The Pitman Dynasty. Isaac, Benn, Jacob and James Pitman.
http://technicaleducationmatters.org/2009/11/03/the-pitman-dynasty-isaac-benn-jacob-and-james-pitman/
The History Of Distance Learning
https://elearningindustry.com/the-history-of-distance-learning-infographic
http://digitalservices.scranton.edu/cdm/history/collection/ics/
& relevant WIKIPEDIA entries
You can read Parts 1 and 2 of the course recap at the following links:
The article below shares some exciting information about open educational resources (OER’s). These sources, which some teachers use instead of requiring students to purchase textbooks, are free for students and can be edited/adapted by instructors to meet the needs of their courses. The article uses Michigan’s Lansing Community College as an example; within a few years, what started as five faculty members incorporating OER’s turned into seventy-five faculty, saving students an estimated $1.6 million.
OER is at a tipping point. Here’s how to keep it moving in the right direction.
Two Independent Learning courses, German for Reading Knowledge and Legendary Performers use open educational resources (links are included below).
A Foundation Course in Reading German
https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/
Learn the Legends
You’ve likely seen a few posts about the book discussion with the Association for Distance Education and Independent Learning (ADEIL) and Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education by Thomas J. Tobin and Kirsten T. Behling. If you haven’t yet read the book, it’s an excellent read on how everyone benefits when you make courses more accessible, not just people with disabilities (who are often thought of with topics of accessibility). A few key takeaways for designing and teaching courses include: what parts of your course are students not understanding? What do students keep having trouble with or need clarification? Identify those parts of your course. You can also create a “media path,” where you find supplemental media to further illustrate those key concepts that students struggle with.
The book often refers to plus-one changes. With accessibility, we don’t start with overhauling the entire structure. Rather, we find trouble spots and think of another way to present information. If you find a section of your course where students keep having trouble, find one alternative way to present the information. You can even adapt a plus-one change to your assessments. Perhaps instead of writing a final paper, a student might have the option to share what they’ve learned by making a video or website.
The book also outlines ambitious plans on how to create a team to make increased accessibility a priority for an entire campus.
Something to ponder from the book: people of all ages are increasingly using mobile devices to learn, and they’ll often use these mobile devices for just a few minutes at a time for “small, snackable pieces of content and interactions,” perhaps while waiting in line. How can we develop course content that makes the best use of those few minutes when a learner checks their phone?
ADEIL recently interviewed Thomas Tobin about the book, and you can view the interview here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeUoELksNGXi3WNxr9qDK0g
Erin Paul-Schuetter took a course on soft skills, and she’s shared a summary of her experience below. What are some ways you might be able to incorporate these ideas – critical thinking, communication, self-motivated learning and teamwork – in your own courses? Thanks, Erin, for sharing what you learned!
Summary of Soft Skills Course
This past fall I took Matthew Hora’s online course, Teaching Soft Skills in College Courses Certificate. My motivation for enrolling in the DCS course was both intrinsic and extrinsic; as an educator hoping to stay current with the needs of 21st century students, I wanted to learn ways to incorporate these skills into the Spanish language and literature courses I teach for Independent Learning. I believed that doing this would, in turn, help me be prepared for upcoming course revisions by incorporating the skills that many employers are asking for today. This course helped me reach those goals and exceeded them in many respects as well. What follows is a brief summary of the course from my perspective as a student and a testimonial of my experience. I hope this will prompt you to think a bit more about where these skills can fit into your classes.
As the course summary states (you can find it here), this online certificate provides research, theory and frameworks to introduce each of the four “soft” skills: critical thinking, communication, self-motivated learning and teamwork. The readings, video lectures and web resources helped establish a base of knowledge that could be used to provide a rationale for why a particular skill is practiced in the course. Furthermore, the practical suggestions given in the course materials could easily be incorporated into a classroom activity, syllabus, or lesson plan. I can’t stress the practical nature of the course enough; we were encouraged to take what we had learned from the assigned texts and course lectures and videos and apply it to the curricular artifact we had chosen to revise to incorporate at least one or more of the soft skills.
For the final project I chose to revise the syllabus for an existing Spanish literature survey course I teach online. I wanted to overhaul the course objectives so that my students would see the practical and real-world skills they could develop and hone within the context of studying Spanish literature, even if this is a course they take as a degree requirement. In the end I came up with a set of course objectives that focus in on the skills employers are searching for in today’s global economy: critical thinking, communication, and self-motivated learning. (Teamwork was something I had to leave out since my course is asynchronous with students having six months to complete the requirements at their own pace.) In the process I came up with some activities to practice these skills that I intend to use in this class and others: mini check-ins scattered throughout the course that give students the space to monitor their progress and think about how they can actively work toward achieving their personal learning goals (self-motivated learning), a step-by-step guide to identifying the reliability of an online or print source (critical thinking), and practice revising one’s work in a foreign language (communication).
Regardless of the discipline, the practical knowledge gained from this course can help reinvigorate any course with a focus on 21st century skills.
Greetings, IL Instructors! We hope teaching in Canvas goes well. Something that was recently discovered regarding student assignment submission and Speedgrader: if students use the “textbox” to submit their assignment instead of uploading a document file, we will not be able to grade the assignment with Speedgrader.
You might wish to indicate in your New Student Welcome E-mails that assignments must be saved as documents and then uploaded. If Speedgrader isn’t working, then have the student resubmit the assignment as a document upload.
Much thanks to Jen for discovering this! And please let us know if you have questions or make similar discoveries with Canvas!
Copyright can be a dry subject, but author Thomas Tobin and a team of artists have created a comic book that explains – with clear language, striking visuals, and fun – some do’s and don’ts of copyright law within academia. At 14 pages, it’s a quick read, and there’s a handy one-page summary for someone wondering whether or not they can use copyrighted material in their class. A few takeaways:
Copyright law doesn’t prohibit linking to copyrighted material (for example, something posted to YouTube). However, for ethical reasons, we should avoid linking to online material that we think might have broken copyright law.
Many owners of content give permission for others to copy, share, or recreate their content. See if there’s a Creative Commons license agreement, or something similar, to check if you can copy it.
Fair Use is a legal defense that, while not concrete, offers some guidelines:
Purpose: Are you copying something for teaching or research, or for monetary gain?
Amount: Are you including a sample or the entirety of a work?
Nature of the work: Factual information is generally more shareable than creative works.
Economic impact: If you include this content in your course, will the copyright owner potentially lose income?
If you still aren’t sure, you might even be able to contact the copyright owner and ask him or her for permission to copy their work for your course.