Random Mind attended a round table given by Bret Nelson of San Jacinto College at the 2007 Conference on Information Technology, on making a smooth transition to online teaching. Her post seems to have captured the essence of the round table.
Topics included:
- On the difference between teaching online and teaching face-to-face
- On developing your course
- Using discussion as a tool
- Strategies to help you cope
- Keeping the lines of communication open

The Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education are a popular framework for evaluating teaching in traditional, face-to-face courses

You can read how these Seven Principles are used to evaluate good practice in online undergraduate courses:
- TLT Group
- The Technology Source Archives
- SUNY Learning Network
- Journal of Online Learning and Teaching
- Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks
- Learning In a Flat World

Finally, I was struck by how difficult it felt to accept much of what I was hearing because, and this is something that is really concerning me (seriously), few if any of these folks had the network creds to be “trusted.” Now I know this is an admission that is going to get me in trouble, and it likely should. But it is also a consequence of being rooted so deeply in this network. It’s not that I distrust their “traditional” creds out of hand, but it’s almost like for me, these days, if you’re not doing at least a little bit of social, networked learning and publishing that I can tap into and track and engage with, I’m just not as inclined to buy in when you’re talking about reforming education with or without technology.

Source: Weblogg-ed

The biggest problem is how few of our educators still cannot relate to this description. They are neither networks unto themselves or nodes of a larger system, and they understand little about what it means to be either in a world that is more globally interconnected. And our students are not only left without models of what it means to be networked, they also get relatively little content that is contextualized through the network. So network literacy, the functions of working in a distributed, collaborative environment (Jill Walker), is an important aspect of learning and education that precious few of our students get a chance to practice. And it is only by practicing these skills, whether teachers or students, that they can truly be learned.

Source: Weblogg-ed

Understanding Immature Technologies

The report analyzed each technology (time-sharing, client/server computing, LANs, relational databases, VLSI design, etc.) from first inception to the point where it turned into a billion dollar industry. What was consistent among virtually all the results was how long each took to move from inception to ubiquity. Twenty years of jumping around from university labs to corporate labs to products was typical. And 30 years, as with the mouse and RISC processors, was not at all unusual (and remember, this is the “fast-paced world of computers,” where it is “almost impossible” to keep up).

Source: Business Week

Understanding Immature Teaching Technologies

I think this creates a bit of a practice dilemma for the instructional technologist working with faculty members interested in exploring technology to support learning. As we take the time to learn about the next emerging tool – Twitter, Ning, Facebook, blogs, podcasting wikis, etc. – we forget that the vast majority of faculty we encounter in our work will not likely adopt these tools for years, if at all! By the time the long nose of innovation runs its course, entire new chapters of internet history will have been written. From this perspective it seems that most technological innovations in education are limited to the early adopter, constraining potential change on a wider scale.

Source: Techne

A literature review was conducted to investigate the adult education and faculty development literature and research to discover what is known about changes or transformation in teaching assumptions and beliefs when faculty prepare to teach online or when they are engaged in online teaching, and to uncover any gaps in research involving these changes. There were four primary themes that resulted from the analysis of the articles: moving from classroom practice to online teaching; changes related to online teaching, framing faculty development within adult education; and faculty development models.

Source: Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration

Thomson Learning, one of the largest academic publishers in higher education, today released survey results examining faculty views on social networking sites and new media tools. Faculty members recognize the role new media tools can play in higher education because of their popularity among students.

Source: Thomson Learning via Choice Learning

Using Web 2.0 Tools for Teaching - Where to Start?

This article considers the practice of training faculty candidates to become quality instructors at a well-known, online university. Two perspectives are given: that of a faculty candidate who has just completed the initial, four-week preparatory class and that of a veteran trainer, who has conducted, or facilitated several Training courses.

Source: USDLA Journal