By Kristen Carlson

In March, I had the opportunity to present a poster session at the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education international conference hosted by AACE. The session focused on “Utilizing Course Shells to Improve Online Courses”. Through utilizing a course shell (or template), our online courses had the ability to look more unified. This allowed our students to learn how to navigate the course, find documents, and upload assignments the same way, no matter which course they were taking within the department. The course shell is available for all faculty at SCSU to implement within their own course and was created to follow the Quality Matters rubric.

While attending the conference, I was also able to hear how other universities were teaching technology integration to their teacher candidates. The session I found the most interesting was “Coaching for Technology Integration: a Peer Partnership Approach. In this session, faculty members from Houston Baptist University discussed the implementation of a collegial coaching model that helped faculty members integrate active learning and collaborative technology into their teacher preparation courses. It definitely inspired me to think about how we, as a University, could help faculty through a similar model.