Three of us trekked to Madison to attend the conference held at the lovely Monona Terrace. The drive down was good but the drive back had much rain which slowed us down a lot. We did stop and stock up on Wisconsin cheese (not myself though). There were some good sessions and some not so good. Here’s the highlights from my good sessions:
- Distance Learning Czar: It was clear that so many of the schools there were way into distance and online learning. The idea of someone in charge of distance learning was repeated especially at the session featuring Carlos a fellow Frye ’09 alum!
- SEO: Search Engine Optimization. This technique was explained well at a session on Marketing online programs. The focus is clearly to capture students when they’re searching for an online program. Looking forward to getting the powerpoint on this one.
- Part Time Instructional Design: This session (see ppt) was the winner of Thursday for me. It laid out a program at Del Mar College where instructional design is done by a team: 2 faculty, 1 instructional technologist, 1 librarian, 1 director. The 2 faculty positions are 1 course release overloads for a term and are competitive slots — they apply for them. The team does instructional design with faculty, course reviews, mentoring, development of support materials, general sounding board for online learning.
- Quality Matters: Again and again places mentioned how they took the base QM rubric and modified it for their school. Seems like a no-brainer to do so we have a way to assess the quality of our online offerings. The question is who does the assessing and what is the result?
- Economics of Online Learning: you can expect 12 – 32% of tuition as revenue (25% typical) for an online program. I saw a session by someone from Compass Knowledge Group. They help institutions develop and run online programs. The data (based on 50 programs of various sizes) was useful in identifying the components and potential cost % of each. Another one I’m looking forward to the powerpoint for the details.
- Penn State Resources: faculty self-assessment and quality standards. From a session that described the complexity that is Penn State, two resources were of note. A faculty self-assessment allows faculty to test their readiness for online teaching. And quality standards
based on quality matters for their online courses.
- What do online students consider essential to their learning? Their perspectives match up well with, take a guess, the quality matters rubric. A study of 202 Penn State World Campus students found pieces what they consider essential to their learning and what pieces not so much — maybe a surprise but they don’t consider games and simulations essential to their learning. But that doesn’t mean those items don’t support their learning. The presentation is up at slideshare to see the details.
- Epson DC-06 Document Camera. For $299 you get a usb-based document camera that is so easy to use and captures a great picture. Time to dump our RCA-video based document cameras for a few of these.
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