An Excellent Podcast for Higher Education Faculty

The #HigherEd hashtag on Twitter is one of the key channels I follow to stay abreast with the latest trends and topics of discussion for a variety of higher education contexts.  A few months ago, I ran across a link with the #HigherEd hashtag to a podcast episode talking about the value and challenges of recording videos for classroom instruction.  This episode, entitled  PA025: Recording Videos for Your Classes, was part of the Professional Adjunct Podcast series.  After listening to several recent and past episodes, I would highly recommend any faculty member, from adjunct to full professor, interested in best practices and teaching/learning in general to subscribe to this podcast.  Users can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, Android, or any RSS reader.  Enjoy!

A Key #EdTech Blog I Follow

One of the most useful blogs I have been following for many years now is Free Technology for Teachers by Richard Byrne.  The main characteristic that qualifies this as a blog is that the latest post, common in most social media services/tools, is always at the top of the page.  A second characteristic is that I can subscribe to it.  Third, I can search to an archive of past postings.  Lastly, blogs are reflective of Web 2.0 meaning that we are now creators of content, not just passive readers of content (i.e. Web 1.0 such as the AOL and Netscape days).  This blog's primary purpose is to share free technology resources for teachers that can have implications for classroom instruction.  Although there tends to be a K-12 focus, I have found that most of the resources can be used in higher education as well.  Mr. Byrne is a former high school teacher so that's part where the K-12 theme comes from.  To keep up-to-date with postings, I subscribe to the RSS feed using Feedly.  With Feedly (I migrated to this tool when Google Reader retired), I can subscribe to multiple blogs related to instructional/educational technology and see the posts on one single page.  Over the years, I have frequently re-posted links to these originating blog postings to several social media channels such as Twitter and Diigo in order to share my findings to a much larger audience.

My Quick Thoughts on Twitter to Support Learning

The short answer to the question “can this tool (Twitter) meet an instructional need?” is yes.  First, Twitter can be a valuable research tool for finding instructional resources, research, blogs, etc. through the use of hashtags.  Using Twitter as a research tools saves a significant amount of time as others already identified resources that may be useful and tagged the posting to share with a much broader audience. The Twitter feed below is an example that shows how postings with the hashtag #edtech are currated making the search process much more efficient.  Second, the 140-character limitation of “tweets” also forces individuals to keep posts short and to the point.  Well-written tweets quickly identify the resource and its purpose.  The third, and one of the most important uses of Twitter in my opinion, is establishing connections with other individuals that have similar interests.  Whether you’re interested in educational technology, science, math, biking, fishing, gaming, or e-learning, Twitter makes it very easy to find and connect (i.e. follow) to others with these similar interests......an essential component of a personal learning network (PLN).  

#edtech Tweets

Twitter’s learning curve is not steep at all.  I have been using Twitter since April 2009.  Twitter’s interface parallels with several contemporary social media services such as Facebook and blogs where the most recent posts are always at the top of the feed.  Twitter also integrates with Facebook, mobile devices, Feed.ly, the Canvas learning management system, and a wide variety of Web-based applications that makes sharing resources to a large audience in a short amount of time quite efficient. 

Instructional Strategies for Enhancing Learning in Online Courses

Teaching in an online environment often presents challenges to faculty members, especially for those that have limited to no experience teaching fully (and even blended/hybrid) online courses.  When online courses remove the face-to-face and seat time elements of traditional courses, faculty must re-think and assess the way they teach and engage adult learners.  Below, I present five instructional strategies to consider that have helped me make the transition to teaching online.

Vary the learning activities.  Implementing the same activity across lessons or units will quickly add boredom and disengage learners. Additionally, you will notice many students tend to duplicate their responses across discussions, assignments, and in their writing when using the same activities.  Consider switching between discussions, collaborative tasks, individual tasks, case studies, reflection papers and reading briefs, blog and journal entries, presentations, and end-of-module live web conferencing sessions.  For example, in one unit/module use a structured threaded discussion in your LMS (learning management system) where students are responding to posted questions and engaging in ongoing dialog with peers and the instructor.  Then, in a later unit/module, instead of a thread discussion board, have students post responses to discussion posting to a blog (i.e. WordPress, Blogger, Edublogs, etc.)

Just A Few More Common Mistakes to Avoid in Online Course Design and Development

As a follow up to my 5 Common Mistakes to Avoid in Online Course Design and Development and A Few More Common Mistakes to Avoid in Online Course Design and Development posts, I wanted to share a few more mistakes that I have been guilty of and observed higher education faculty face themselves in the online course development process.

1. Mistake #8: Not giving yourself enough time to build your online course.  Faculty members are busy.  Whether you're a graduate teaching assistant, an adjunct instructor, or tenure-track (or non-tenure track) professor, we are continuously upholding our teaching, research, and service responsibilities resulting in becoming overwhelmed.  You may even be tempted to delay building and designing your online course; however, doing so typically rushes course creation and causes quality to decline.  This frequently occurs during a learning management system (LMS) migration period or during the summertime when faculty are teaching an online course for the first time in the upcoming fall semester. 
   
   My suggestion:  Begin building your course 16 weeks or more before the course start date, and establish developmental benchmarks along the way.  By beginning the course development process early, it becomes much easier to focus on course quality and devote time to other to other priorities.