Tuesday, May 29, 2012

May 29, 2012

Good Evening Online Instructors,

I hope you had a nice holiday weekend.  This week's blog post is dedicated to sharing a new tool with you on how you can personalize TED or YouTube lecture links you may add to your courses.  "The free tool located here allows instructors to personalize YouTube videos and TED.com talks with additional content like discussion questions and links to resources."   

What a great way to personalize your courses a bit more and tailor these already created lectures to be very course specific for you!  Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Heather Thomton-Stockman
Online Instructional Specialist

Monday, May 21, 2012

May 21, 2012

Good Evening Online Instructors,

This week I'd like to share with you some additional Teaching Tips on Discussion Board facilitation.  These tips come from Cheryl Anderson, our Online Health Care Management Program Chair.   Cheryl shares with us some great ideas for promoting early participation in the discussions, even participation in the discussions, and exemplar presentation in the discussions.  I hope you find her thoughts and insights as beneficial as I do.  If you have any questions or thoughts you'd like to add too, please just let me know.

Tips from Cheryl:
1.  "When the discussion board starts each week, I thank the first learner to post for being the first to post. Encouraging an early start to the discussions is a big positive."

2.  "As I am responding to posts, I will pick those who have no responses first. It seems that a discussion thread with  many posts gathers even more. This means that those who have no responses often do not get read. The same students are often in this 'ignored' group. If I start responding, there is a little momentum going forward. All students then feel included in the discussion."

3.  "I create an 'Exemplar' Discussion thread on the discussion board. I place this near the top of the discussion board. Every week possible, I invite learners who completed excellent assignments to post their assignment to this thread. I invite learners in the grade book as I am grading. It is up to the learner to share themselves. Almost all take great pride in doing this.

Posting exemplar work spurs others to see what is expected or what could be achieved. Those who are striving for excellence try to mirror this same type of scholarly work. Those that are chosen are rewarded for their accomplishments.

I post a personal note in the thread thanking each learner who shared for their nice work."


Thanks and have a great week!
Heather Thomton-Stockman
Online Instructional Specialist

Monday, May 14, 2012

May 14, 2012

This week's blog post offers an odd perspective that you normally wouldn't hear from me, but I think the following link from The Chronicle of Higher Education offers some interesting food for thought and serves as a good reminder of the importance of writing content quality:  http://chronicle.com/article/Citation-Obsession-Get-Over/129575/  

I wanted to share this article with you now as you may be grading mid-term papers or essay exams from Unit 6.  It can be very easy to get solely focused on APA and mechanics when grading writing documents, because we emphasize these so often (and don't get me wrong...they are important!), but the overall content and critical thinking strategies exemplified in a student's work need equal (if not more) attention too.  As the author of the article states, we need to teach our students the importance of "selecting credible sources, recognizing bias or faulty arguments, paraphrasing and summarizing effectively, and attributing sourced information persuasively and responsibly" (http://chronicle.com/article/Citation-Obsession-Get-Over/129575/ ).  By doing this, and by emphasizing the importance of proper citations and mechanics, we will be serving our students well.

One final reminder, I am by no means pushing aside the importance of APA or mechanics, and I don't necessarily agree with the author's overall tone and approach, but I do believe he offers some interesting food for thought that can serve as a reminder to all of us about the intricacies and complexities of teaching strong writing skills and grading student work.

If you have any questions let me know.

Thanks,
Heather Thomton-Stockman
Online Instructional Specialist

Monday, May 7, 2012

May 7, 2012

Good Evening Online Instructors,

This week's "Teaching Tips" offer additional strategies for ways to maximize the benefit of discussion boards for you and your students.

The first tip comes from Nancy Hislop, full-time medical assisting instructor.  Nancy uses the discussion boards as a great way to teach and allow her students to practice proper APA citation formatting.  In Nancy's words:
"I use the discussion boards to help students learn to do APA citations in my classes that have a paper assignment.  I require students to do research for their discussion posts and they have to have citations and source lists in their discussion posts.  I give them the first two weeks to start trying to cite their work and then they do not earn all the points on the discussions if they do not cite their work.  By the time the papers are due, they are pretty good at doing citations."

The second tip comes from Brian Craig, Online Paralegal Coordinator.  Brian likes to bring current events into his unit discussions and often uses Google News to insert key words and locate recent articles pertinent to those key words and topic focal points.

I encourage you to give one or both of these strategies a try in your own discussion boards and let me know how it goes.

Have a great Unit 6 and let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Heather Thomton-Stockman
Online Instructional Specialist