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RESOURCES
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EDUCATION
Newsletters:
In This Issue Current Issue Archives
January, 2006
Online Classroom - January, 2006 - Full Issue
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Authentic Experiences, Assessment Develop Students Marketable Skills
Maureen Colenso, an instructor at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, sums up her assessment philosophy for her online courses as follows: “Whatever it is students are going to need to be doing on the job, then that’s how they need to be assessed for the classroom. I start with the assumption that the competencies for the class represent marketable skills, and I find that there’s pretty much always a way to figure out how to have students do a project that will be representative of the type of work they would do for an employer.”
Tips from the Pros
International students can add perspectives to an online course that many Americans do not encounter on a daily basis. This is one of the benefits of the online classroom, but differences in learning styles can create problems as well.
Quick Quotes
Maureen Colenso, instructor, microcomputer specialist, Northeast Wisconsin Technical College
Online Teaching Fundamentals: Four Typical Learning Assessment Mistakes
By Patti Shank, PhD, CPT
The goal of learning assessments should be to measure whether actual learning outcomes match desired learning outcomes. Here’s an analogy. Your freezer stops keeping foods frozen, so you call the appliance repair folks. They show up on schedule and charge you exactly what they estimated on the phone. Enough information to know if the desired outcome (frozen food) has been achieved? No, of course not.
Teaching Online With Errol: Establishing a Solid Rapport with Online Students
By Errol Craig Sull
We teach, we train, we tutor online: information and thoughts and suggestions go from us to them, and the same—as well as papers, etc.—comes from them to us. This twenty-first-century mode of learning has many benefits, but ask anyone who looks at it as if it were Dracula on a dark night, and you’ll surely hear these objections: “There is no personal interaction between student and teacher…the spontaneity of teaching is lost…the only rapport exists in exchanging bits and bytes of info.”
Distance Learning Faculty Liaisons Offer Online Teaching Advice
Erie Community College, South in New York does not have an online course designer, and to a large extent, faculty are on their own when it comes to creating their online courses. The campus does, however, have two distance learning faculty liaisons, Jason Steinitz and Mary Beth Orrange. Both are online instructors who help their colleagues navigate the college’s course management system and offer advice on principles they have found effective in their online course. Online Classroom, recently spoke with Steinitz and Orrange about the advice they give their colleagues.
