November 9

Free online course: Designing Digital Media for Teaching and Learning

A team of students and a teacher at the UMassAmherst College of Education have created a 4 week long open online course on digital media in education. The course has its own website and a Google + community.

I have enrolled in this course in just a few easy steps, and its open access to anyone. Today, Week 2 started, but the course has Week 1 materials available and the only firm deadline for completing the assignments is the end of the course, December 7th, 2015.

The activities are there to help “explore, evaluate, and choose digital media tools for use in your own classroom.” I would recommend it both to beginner and advanced users of digital media. It suggests and teaches many useful tools, so this could be a good starting point if you have thought about using digital media in your classroom.

photo credit to Designing Digital Media course website, welcome page screenshot

 

 

November 3

Free Webinar from Minnesota eLearning Summit: Exploring Affordable Course Content

As our team members attended the Minnesota eLearning Summit this summer, there are some follow up sessions related to the presentations. Here is the information we got:

Over the next eight months, the Minnesota Learning Commons (MnLC is the sponsor of the MN eLearning Summit) will be offering a series of free webinars, many based on the most popular sessions at the 2015 Summit.

This coming Thursday from 1-2 pm,  a session on affordable course content featuring Kristi Jensen and Shane Nackerud from the University of Minnesota is featured. A description of the webinar and connection information is provided below.

Exploring Affordable Course Content: The University of Minnesota Libraries Partnership for Affordable Content Project

Thursday, November 5, 1:00 – 2:00 pm

Session Description

The cost of textbooks and course materials continues to rise and has created financial hardships for many students. In response to this dilemma, the University of Minnesota Libraries created the Partnership for Affordable Content, a competitive grant to help faculty find and use alternative, high-quality, low- or no-cost materials for their courses. The Partnership provides faculty with the opportunity to explore innovative course content options from Open Textbooks to student created course content. Customized teams including library subject and technology specialists and other campus partners focused on teaching and learning will support the creation of innovative, alternative course content. This session will discuss the initiative including goals, project design, proposals received and reviewed, library team development, and next steps.

Connection Instructions:

To join the WebEx:  https://mde.webex.com

Meeting number:  804 981 853

(WebEx can provide both the audio and video)

[If you need to use telephone instead of computer audio, you can also connect via phone:

Call-in toll-free number:  1-888-742-5095

 

Conference Code:  710 945 5454]

 

Related Project Website: https://www.lib.umn.edu/elearning/partnership

 

October 26

Quality Matters 7th Annual Conference – presentation materials

QM logoThe online education quality assurance organization Quality Matters is holding their 7th Annual Conference.  In case people who are interested cannot make it to San Antonio on November 1 through 4, they presented several options. There are presentation materials available on the website and they offer a few free webcasts (follow the links for specific information).

Meanwhile, I will be preparing more posts on what Quality Matters offers to our institution, so that all faculty interested in Quality Matters can get quick facts on our blog.

October 6

Building Community in an Online Course

Woit_081002_223Thursday, October 8 is Fall break for our students. However, Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at SCSU organizes the Faculty Workshop Day. This year’s sessions are on student retention and success. Among many excellent presentations that will discuss this year’s topic, online and distance education are certainly a setting to be taken into account.

A member of our Academic Technologies Team, Roseann Wolak, will be holding a session on  Effective Online Teaching – Creating a Sense of Community from 2:15-3:30 pm in Voyageurs North, AMC:

“Sense of Community Theory is based on the work of Seymour Sarason (1974).  Sarason’s research explored community identity and social bonding.  In the online environment, where students are physically separated from one another, the strength of the learning community depends on the extent to which students feel like insiders rather than outsiders.
Faculty play a key role in designing an online learning environment which fosters interactivity, connectedness, and meaningful learning.  This hands-on session will cover instructional design that gets students interacting with one another:  student led discussions, peer review, collaborative research projects, and group presentations.”

Until then, here is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that focuses specifically on building community in an online class by doing student video presentations.

 

September 1

Academic Support Services at SCSU introduce online tutoring service Smarthinking

Attention instructors!

Please refer your students to their D2L/Brightspace home page that will show the academic support services for them or Tutoring Services/Options.

This leads our students to the listing of all SCSU on-campus tutoring services and Smarthinking.

Smarthinking is a 24/7 online and on-demand tutoring service, available at no charge to all enrolled students (each student is assigned 15 hours per semester by default).  They can use Smarthinking to schedule live tutoring appointments, participate in drop-in live sessions, ask questions, or submit writing assignments for feedback.

Students are able to access the Smarthinking website via a link on their D2L/Brightspace main page.

Finally, just below this new resource, remind them that there is a list of free self-registration offerings as well as student help documents and student overview videos for navigating D2L.

D2L help and tutring screenshot

 

August 25

Literacy nowadays

Literacy in 21st century has certainly expanded its definition. In fact, we have plenty of different definitions on different literacies.

Here is a series of mini-posters that quickly refer you to literacy definitions. Rather interesting for either classroom or online use in a course. Students should be aware of all these different ones included:

Information literacy
Visual literacy
Critical literacy
Media literacy
Tool literacy
Digital literacy
Data literacy
Global literacy
Economic literacy
Civic literacy
Health literacy
Historical literacy
Traditional literacy

digital literacy

 

August 11

MOQI/MnSCU SIG Webinar Resources Now Available!!!

Image credit: minnesota.qualitymatters.org

Image credit: minnesota.qualitymatters.org

In a post last month, we advertised the ongoing series of free webinars sponsored by Minnesota Online Quality Initiative and The MnSCU Special Interest Group (SIG): Learning Spaces & Instructional Technologies in association with D2L Brightspace Webinars. Check our calendar at the bottom of the A.T.T.N! homepage for upcoming events.  Also, you can now access support materials on MOQI’s resource page, including the SIG webinar presentations and handouts.

August 6

St. Cloud Alumnus Champions Free Textbooks

 

Screenshot credit: http://www.kare11.com

Screenshot credit: http://www.kare11.com

We mentioned David Ernst in our previous article on the MN eLearning Summit.  Ernst happens to be not only CIO at the U of M’s College of Education and Human Development but also Executive Director of the Open Textbook Network where he created the Open Textbook Library. What’s more, Dave is a St. Cloud alumnus! Please see yesterday’s news video and article about the Open Textbook Network on KARE 11.

Reference

Xiong, B. (2015, August 5). U of M explores free textbooks for students. KARE 11. Retrieved from http://www.kare11.com/story/life/family/take-kare/money/2015/08/05/u–m-explores-free-textbooks–students/31187033/