Teaching online might improve face to face teaching

I've always thought that online teaching can force the instructor to rely on things other than classroom presence to get the job done, and this could result in rethinking teaching methods. In my mind, online teaching takes away the option of lecturing for the entire class period, so you've got to find other ways to engage students in learning. Today on chronicle.com there is a very short article which mentions the following:

Susan Patrick, president and chief executive of the North American Council for Online Learning, was one of the panelists at the event, held by Blackboard Inc. She said training teachers to teach online not only improved their teaching methods in a virtual classroom, but also in the traditional lecture hall. It helps teachers break out of old habits and gets them to rethink their approach to teaching children, she said, not just by using Web tools but often by reorganizing the structure of the course.

It would be nice to back that claim up with some kind of research. I didn't find anything related on the NACOL website, but there must be something somewhere.

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Blackboard Podcasts

I've been searching for podcasts about Blackboard and have come across a few. Some are too site-specific while others could use a little more polish before I would recommend them to others. However, one podcast I did find to be useful and high quality is Teaching with Blackboard by Jason Rhode at Northern Illinois University. Episode 5, posted last week, discusses how to incorporate RSS feeds into Blackboard using Feed2JS , a website and tool for converting an RSS feed to JavaScript which can be copied and pasted into your Blackboard course. This gives you a relatively easy way to add dynamic content to a course. For many instructors, RSS may be a foreign language, but I think if you listen to the five minute podcast, you will learn enough to get the idea. If you want more, Jason's previous podcast covers RSS and podcasting in more detail.

QuickSource Guides to Blackboard

The Resource Network in Harrisonburg, Virginia, publishes fold out guides to various software applications like MS Office, WordPerfect, Adobe Acrobat and more. They have student and instructor guides to BlackBoard for $4.00 each. Prices are lower if you buy in bulk. I got mine yesterday and they look nice and are easy to read. Each one covers the important things you need to know to use Blackboard as a student or instructor. They are also available through Amazon.com for $4.95 each.

Avoiding lost work in Moodle

When students are working in our installation of Moodle, there are some common ways that their work can be lost. Because Moodle doesn't save what you've written until you click Save (assignments) or Post to Forum in Forums, anything that interrupts your connection to Moodle can lead to lost work and frustration. Interruptions include computer problems or network outages or disconnections. If you are writing anything longer than a paragraph, it's a good idea to use a text editor to do your writing and then copy and paste into Moodle so no matter what happens, you won't lose any of your work. If you combine your use of a text editor with an online backup plan, you'll have a secure backup of all of your work even after the class ends and you can no longer access it (see below). You could use a word processor like Microsoft Word, but you may need to save your work as plain text first to avoid seeing formatting errors when you copy and paste from Word into Moodle. A...

Technology & Instruction for UNEX

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