Brainstorming a workshop for online teaching

Yesterday on twitter George Veletsianos asked if anyone was looking into online courses, and I mentioned that I’d been collecting examples for a future faculty workshop on online teaching.  As promised, here is my collection-in-progress of links and resources that I’m hoping to use over a series of workshops.

I’m planning to build the workshops as a class in Canvas.  Even if your institution is using a different LMS, you can sign up for a free instructor account from Instructure’s home page.  It’s an incredible platform and I hope I have the chance to use it more thoroughly in the future.

Open Access Online Courses: examples, ideas and inspiration

The first thing I want to give participants is the option to see how other folks are doing it, to see the variety in levels of interaction, expectations, and organization.  I haven’t been talking about iTunes U much because it is still so platform-restricted.  The vast majority of our office computers are Windows, thus iTunes U doesn’t work so well for us from a creation standpoint.

• Coursera – from Princeton, Stanford, Penn, and Michigan https://www.coursera.org/courses
• The Faculty Project http://facultyproject.com/
• MIT Open Courseware http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/
• LearningSpace: courses from Open University http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/
• Iowa State: Personal Investment http://www.extension.org/pages/10984/investing-for-your-future
• P2PU: Writing for the Web http://p2pu.org/en/groups/writing-for-the-web/
• DS106: Digital Storytelling http://assignments.ds106.us/
  • Also see the article write-up about this course at Inside Higher Ed

Canvas Course Examples:

• English 101 https://canvas.instructure.com/courses/291227 (sample course)
• Project Based Learning https://learn.instructure.com/courses/278381/assignments/syllabus

Classroom Activities:

This past Fall, the university introduced iPads to campus. Every freshman student and roughly half of the faculty received an iPad 2.  Naturally, this has brought up a lot of questions about classroom management and teaching techniques, while we also grapple with exploring new methods for assessment. I’ve been looking for links and assignment examples that might give instructors ideas about how they can tweak their own classes.

• Personal Learning Network assignment
  • http://socialmediaprclass.pbworks.com/w/page/10209709/Personal%20Learning%20Project
  • http://academic.stedwards.edu/socialmedia/blog/2010/08/28/incorporating-personal-learning-networks-into-course-projects-2/
  • http://academic.stedwards.edu/socialmedia/blog/2012/04/16/teaching-students-to-become-curators-of-ideas-the-curation-project-3/
• Group Work That Works — Michael Sweet http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/group-work-that-works-even-in-large-classes/28459
• Flipping Out Classrooms — Derek Bruff http://derekbruff.org/?p=2108
• Five Best Practices for the Flipped Classroom http://www.edutopia.org/blog/flipped-classroom-best-practices-andrew-miller
• Flipped Class Model: a full picture http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/the-flipped-classroom-model-a-full-picture/
• Planning a Class with Backward Design — Mark Sample, Profhacker http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/planning-a-class-with-backward-design/33625

Personal Workflows: 

At the same time, we’ve been looking for ways to strengthen the communication and idea-sharing process between departments.  We’re not on SharePoint and we don’t have any employee newsletter type of thing.  Only a handful of the 70+ faculty are on twitter, that I know of, but I’m hoping we can develop a core group of people who want to be proactive and collaborative – no matter what tool is used.

• Why Twitter is a Conversation — Roger Whitson (response to Sherry Turkle) http://www.rogerwhitson.net/?p=1636
• Using Twitter for Teaching — James Lang, The Chronicle http://chronicle.com/article/Using-Twitter-to-Talk-About/131442
• Classroom Experiments with Social Media — Profhacker http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/encouraging-distraction-classroom-experiments-with-mobile-media/38454
• Harold Jarche — Net Work Skills http://www.jarche.com/2012/03/net-work-skills/

Other Resources:

• Designing Effective and Innovative Courses http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign/tutorial/TOC.html
• Course Planning and Teaching Resources — Iowa State University http://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching/
• Revised Bloom Taxonomy of Learning Objectives http://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching/RevisedBlooms1.html
• Questions worth asking about educational technology http://derekbruff.org/?p=2092
• Syllabus and Course Design – Duquesne University http://www.duq.edu/cte/teaching/syllabus-course-design.cfm
• The Learning Registry http://www.learningregistry.org/
• Blended Learning Toolkit http://blended.online.ucf.edu/blendkit-course-learning-activities/