Basis for Session Design

The Keys to Creating Meaningful Learning Environments - M. Gladwell

* Effort-Based Attitude *

* Respect for Difficulty *

* Belief in the Importance of Experimentation and Feedback *

Terminology Brainstorm 

What do we know about terminology used in online courses?  

State acronyms, terms, concepts, technologies and techniques - Begin!!!

Brainstorming Tools and Links

Now let's use an online encyclopedia of computer technology terms to look up needed definitions, find extended articles and information of greater depth @ Webopedia.com.

You'll find the same sort of tool but customized for the online environment @ Linktionary.com.

E-mail as Baseline Communication

• Why use e-mail as baseline communication?
• Where might e-mail be more appropriate than a Discussion Board?
• Why use e-mail external to the Course Management System (CMS)?
• Strategies  for managing e-mail communications with learners
• Reflection, Tone and Voice in e-mail communications

 Managing Student Data

• Spreadsheet manipulation of learner data
• Using Notepad to format a group e-mail list

 The Desire 2 Learn (D2L) Course Management System (CMS)

 http://whro.hrvlc.org/

 Populating course announcements

• Syllabus
• Introductory material (Welcome Message, Evaluation, Special Credit)
• Course Policies
• Grading Policies
• Weekly assignments list (release schedule)
• Formatting Announcements with HTML (font, color, style, links)
• A word about style and voice

 Designing your own content

• Linking to internal content
• Linking to external content
• Checking Links (recovery strategies)

 Populating course discussion boards

• Release Strategy
• Formatting DBs w/ HTML
• Special DBs we create / use
• Seeding DBs – get that conversation going
• Managing DBs - (Importance of Effective Brevity)
• A word about Style, Tone and Voice in DB communications - Styles I use are...
• Sunny w/o being disgusting (daily use - as in on well controlled medication)
• Captain Direct - Just the facts Ma'am (when folks need assistance and nothing else)
• Talk-'Em Down From the Cliff (get them to calm down first and get them to stop thinking about the negative - strategies offered with a side of empathy)
• Mr. Chill (coolest guy you ever met - you just can't shake him up)
• Reflection - Just about the most important contribution of asynchronous learning technologies - time to reflect is built in - now we have to model how to use it.
• DB assessment strategies - Vozme.com

 The Dreaded Dropbox and You

• Adding Folders
• Scaffolding Assignment Submission
• File Management Strategies
• Learner Communication Issues

 Grade Book Management

• Item Creation (categories and percentage)
• Grading Individual Items Interactively
• Export and Import
• The grade book as a tool for facilitator feedback

 The Classlist

• Using the classlist to generate an e-mail list (bulk import vs. learner keys)
• Looking at Learner Participation through classlist (staff and students tabs)
• Making contact with individual learners through classlist

 What’s Often Missing in Contemporary Asynchronous Online Learning

• Reliability (Video / Codec problems, bandwidth, picture quality)
• Interactivity (Video is costly – therefore used sparingly)
• Audio formats are often overlooked (Audio can be soothing and supportive)
• When compared to video audio is less trouble-prone (easily compressed for smaller file sizes, formats are widely supported by default players)
• Audio is relatively easy to produce and distribute (recording equipment is readily available at reasonable cost and you can simply upload files to your Web server)
• Nanopodcasting (really small edited podcasts that meet a very specific need) can enhance asynchronous Distance Learning (DL) course environments and help new learners cope with the format

• Moodle - A free server-based CMS (Caution - Reported to be somewhat unstable - you would not run it on a mission-critical server)
• Nicenet - A free and easily accessible CMS (Limited to text but easy to control and often not blocked by schools - see me for login information)
• Wikispaces - A free and free-form collaboration in Web development space (with some to little content control)
• Blogger - Free blog owned by Google (more of a one-way publishing tool but does offer the ability for control and comments to be posted)

• Merlot - the search engine specifically for online course development
• Creative Commons - Copyright friendly material that may be able to be used in online courses
• Pics4Learning - Copyright friendly images posted by educators that may be able to be used in online courses
• Wikipedia - Whether you like it or not - it gets used and often outranks many encyclopedias for accuracy and depth of coverage - primary source? - No Way! - but a starting point
• Google - (web search, images, maps, blog search, books, news, scholar, specialized searhes, video,  documents and spreasheets and more)
• Audacity - Audio editor that is free for Mac and PC as well as Linux (You will need to download and install the LAME encoder to allow Audacity to handle mp3 files)