Technology & Instruction for UNEX

We have two free courses for instructors set up for the summer. An additional online course, Producing Media for your Online Course, will be added later and will start in early September. I'll post the details once that is set up. 111MSCC80  Teaching Online with Moodle , online, 4 weeks, starts August 9th (was previously starting July 27th) – this class is open to anyone who might be interested in teaching online, not just UCR Extension instructors; no previous experience required and they don't need to be scheduled to teach. If you have had inquiries from people interested in teaching online, this would be a good option for them. The goal for this class is to attract more potential online instructors as well as to prepare current instructors. Final project is to produce a proposal for an online course. We had 36 people enroll in this class during the Spring although most did not complete it.  111MSCC81  Creating and Teaching Your Moodle Course , face-to-face, 3 m...

Faculty Focus has a great short article today --   Five Common Pitfalls of Online Course Design by Elizabeth St. Germain. All 5 pitfalls are on target, but I see #1 -- " Upload your course materials, then call it a day" -- all the time. I think this is the most common mistake made by first-time online instructors who don't spend any time understanding the differences between face-to-face and online teaching. The thing that typically goes along with this design mistake is to fail to replace the face-to-face time with anything at all. In the worst case, the course assignments and readings are retained and narrator-less presentations are uploaded to the course, and that's it.  All of these pitfalls can be avoided by participating in our free online courses for online instructors.

Our Spring Moodle courses for instructors ended today. The experiment with Twitter was a partial success and it turned out that LinkedIn was a better resource for finding potential online instructors. We had a huge increase in enrollments -- 36 in our Teaching Online with Moodle and 28 in Producing Media for your Online Course. In the past when these courses were only open to people already teaching at UCR Extension, we had enrollments between 2-5 each quarter and in some quarters we had no students at all.  As might be expected, actual participation in our free courses was not as high as our enrollments. Probably half of those who enrolled actually participated at all, and a smaller number were active throughout the course. We had a small number of people who were already teaching at UCR Extension, and the benefit for them was the vast experience shared by many of our other participants. Several of them have been teaching online for many years and had not used Moodle in the pas...

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been tweeting about our training courses for online instructors. I can't say the response has been overwhelming, but I have gotten a few clicks and at least one student so far. I'm sticking with it, but here's the information about our classes -- all of them are free: Our Spring quarter Moodle classes for instructors are now available: 104MSCC79 - Creating and Teaching Your Moodle Course, face-to-face, 3 meetings, starts April 12; 6-8 PM – covers everything needed by an online instructor to get their course ready for the first time. 104MSCC80 - Creating and Teaching Your Moodle Course, online, 3 weeks, starts April 13 – same as above, but online. 104MSCC77 - Teaching Online with Moodle, online, 4 weeks, starts May 5 – this class is open to anyone who might be interested in teaching online, not just UCR Extension instructors; no previous experience required and you don't need to be scheduled to teach. The goal for this class...

If I had an iPad, I would give mTouch+ a try. It's a Moodle app for students and it looks like it has enough features that you can do pretty much all your work in most courses using an iPad. $2.99

Last week's New York Times Room for Debate - Can Young Students Learn From Online Classes? - had some interesting perspectives on online learning, particularly for middle and high school students.  I think one of the perspectives was not based on any experience with online learning, but the rest added to the conversation. As with many such online articles, the discussion is as interesting as the main articles. Maybe they'll do one on "Can young children learn in overcrowded classes?" which I think might be a more relevant topic than this one. As a parent of a child who completed one semester of 8th grade online through Kaplan, I know there can be challenges with online classes for young students. He suffered through 30 different teachers in 5 weeks for the 6 courses he was in! Imagine starting each week with a new teacher and sitting through a different live presentation about how each class would work every week for 5 weeks. Not a good thing. He also had to deal w...

iSpring free lets you convert a Powerpoint presentation into a Flash video which can be viewed online. Similar to what you can do with authorstream.com but since it's available on your PC (Windows only), you have more control. I can't test it because I don't have a PC, but it sounds like a good deal. I don't know if it retains any audio that has been added to the Powerpoint file. That would be a nice feature. The latest version, 5.7, is free for anyone to use with no licensing restrictions. It looks like iSpring does handle the audio in Powerpoint. Here's a nice explanation of how the software works .