Engaging Ideas Workshop

Background

I have spent my entire 15 year teaching career focused to a significant extent on online teaching and learning. In the ten years I have worked at FRCC, online learning has grown from a mere handful of courses taught without any real organization into its present state serving thousands of students with many hundreds of classes.

I have been fortunate enough to work with many innovative faculty and staff colleagues over the years and to review their courses, discuss their views about course design and pedagogy and to explore what it means to teach online. I believe our entrepreneurial spirit and innate curiosity and creativity have served us well. I think we should be proud of what we have accomplished in ten years.

I am confident, however, that the next ten years will see more even change than the previous decade. I am excited about the possibilities and the challenges that the future holds. Online instructors will, in a quite literal way, help to invent the future of higher education.

Recognizing the vast changes of the past decade and anticipating more of the same in the next, I believe humility is a virtue that must be constantly acknowledged. For every lesson I've learned about online teaching and learning, for every success I have had, I realize how little I really know.  But, I think I know enough now to suggest a general model of online teaching and learning that works well for both instructors and students and that will encourage ongoing experimentation and assessment of new ideas that will help us move forward in a positive way.  The idea here is not to cast a course model in cement but to agree on a baseline that we can use to measure from as we move forward.

I want to invite you to read further where I will outline this model.  If you are intrigued by what you read and if you are up for what I think will be a rewarding professional and personal challenge, I invite you to join the Engaging Ideas Workshop.

Mission Statement

The future success of online teaching and learning depends on developing course design and pedagogical models that serve the interests of both students and faculty. Participants in the Engaging Ideas Workshop agree to adopt a common set of content, design and pedagogical principles in their online courses and to work together as a professional community to improve this model through experimentation, research and collaborative discussion.  Participation in this workshop is voluntary and alternative course models outside of this workshop are encouraged. 

Engaging Ideas Workshop Goals

1. To focus on instructor satisfaction. The best teachers are those who derive significant personal satisfaction from what they do.  The workshop will explore what it means to teach online and focus on the love of teaching that means so much to great instructors.  It will be paramount to confront issues related to the workload that online teaching demands and to identify efficiencies that will minimize busywork and allow an instructor to focus on teaching. To be sustainable over the longer term, we must find ways to allow online faculty do a quality job and feel professionally competent without spending significantly more time than they would in a traditional course setting.
   
   
2. To explore instructor presence in the online classroom, a factor that is a preeminent student concern.  How can the need for instructor presence be balanced against the impossibility of the 24/7 demands that the online medium allows?  Specifically we will focus on the use of threaded discussions to create a community of learners who work collaboratively and/or interact with each other and with their instructor in a sustained and ongoing way.  Best practices for the development of interactive discussion questions and on managing, participating and moderating discussions in various disciplines will be a priority.
   
   
3. To focus on the instructor as a content expert and author. A quality online course depends to a significant extent on instructor generated content. This content includes written materials, audio and video materials as well as open-source materials from the Web that provide relevant and topical connections to the 'real world'.  We will focus on developing content in ways that can be shared between instructors and courses.  We will work to organize and archive content in ways that can be easily shared with colleagues and imported into their course sites.  Where possible we will look for ways to reduce the focus on traditional textbooks or even to totally replace standard texts with instructor generated material.  This has already been done in several courses to great success.
   
   
4. To focus on meaningful assessment of student learning. All good instructors are interested in knowing which strategies work (or don't work) in which situations. We will ask questions and work to implement clear research methodologies that will allow us to find answers to these questions. This focus on student learning will be faculty driven and collaborative. Results will be shared and discussed with other workshop participants.

Engaging Ideas Course Model ~ Required Elements

1. Courses are intended to be interactive as opposed to independent-study. That is, all students will work on the same material at the same time (within a one-week window). Students will not be allowed to work ahead or fall behind (without penalty). 
   
   
1. Syllabi will specify that students are expected to log into the course and actively participate on at least 3-4 different days per week.
2. Instructors will agree to log in and actively participate on at least 3-4 different days per week.  Instructors will answer e-mail within 24-48 hours.
    
2. Courses will be organized by unit with each unit comprised of similar elements.  Required for each unit will be:
   
   
1. Instructor generated content including an overview of the unit and discussion of specific objectives, written lectures, notes, etc.  These materials will be textbook independent.  It is acknowledged that the development of robust instructor-generated content may take several semesters.
2. A graded quiz focused on the most important main ideas or concepts from the relevant reading. Quizzes will be designed to provide automated feedback to students. 
3. A self-assessment quiz focused on the most important main ideas or concepts from the relevant reading. Quizzes will be designed to provide automated feedback to students.  Self-assessment quizzes will not be required.
4. At least one interactive discussion question will be required per week.
   
   
3. Faculty will focus on the development of multimedia materials to accompany each unit. Suggested ways to start will be audio/video syllabi, welcome messages, and course-specific tutorials. Suggestions for further development include short audio lectures, video demonstrations, screen casts, etc.  
   
   
4. Faculty will focus on finding and integrating open-source materials from the Web into their classes in a meaningful way. These materials might include news articles, essays, articles, audio or video files, etc.  One reason for this focus is just to supplement instructor-generated content with additional textbook independent materials relevant to the course objectives. Another reason for this focus is to provide students with recent topical materials that tie course objectives to current events, real-world issues and relevant examples.
   
   
5. Courses will have a significant interactive discussion focus. There will be at least one open-ended discussion question per week. The question should be relevant to the course materials but specifically intended to generate ongoing interaction between students and between students and the instructor. The instructor will be an active participant in these discussions, using discussion to provoke higher levels of thinking, to capture the teachable moment and to encourage the development of a community of learners. 

Engaging Ideas Course Model Suggested Additional Elements

1. Group projects and presentations
2. Service Learning
3. Use of screen casts or audio for commenting on student work. This would be in addition to or as a replacement for traditional written commentary.
4. Learning Communities.  Formal learning communities comprising two FRCC courses where a cohort of students is co-registered in both courses and where instructors work to integrate learning objectives and assignments have proven successful in the traditional classroom. We want to experiment with online learning communities.
5. Informal Learning Communities. Can students from different courses collaborate on specific projects? Can we integrate our students for specific discussion activities tied to essays of mutual interests?
6. The sky is the limit on additional elements!

Engaging Ideas Formal Research and Funding

With the current budget outlook I can't promise any funding for workshop participants.  However, I will work hard to secure funding for participants who want to put a special focus on researching and reporting on one or more of the elements discussed in the Engaging Ideas Workshop model.  My goal for 2009-2010 will be to secure $10,000 in funding. I'll hazard a guess that participants might expect to earn $250-$500 for their work on various research projects. 

My goal is that participation in the workshop will be inherently worthwhile since I hope it will improve our teaching, add to teaching satisfaction and place a high value on faculty members as authors and professionals.  I would not advise anyone to agree to participate only for the money.

Engaging Ideas Workshop Collaboration

Workshop participants will be able to (and expected to) interact with each other in both formal and informal ways online to share ideas, get advice, to collaborate and build a community of online faculty.  We will either use our online course LMS or an external weblog with social networking elements. We will also try to find ways to meet face-to-face as appropriate.

While not delineated yet, my hope is that participants will visit each others' courses in both formal and informal ways.

Next Steps

If you are still reading then I encourage you to contact me directly to continue the discussion. There are no strings attached and you would only be asked to participate for one semester while I hope you will agree to become a charter member of an ongoing workshop.

In Good Spirit,

Eric Salahub

eric.salahub@frontrange.edu

(970)204-8234