Technology & Instruction for UNEX

Eric Kim is teaching a new course at UCR Extension starting this month,  All the World's a Stage: Introduction to Street Photography . The course starts January 16th, 2012 and is being offered online, with two photography-related field trips. If you can't make it to the Riverside area for the field trips, I think Eric can accommodate you with alternative assignments. It should be an exciting class. Eric's videos and writings will give you an idea of how passionate he is about street photography, but he's also thought quite a bit about the sociological implications of taking pictures of strangers in the street, so you'll learn more than just photographic techniques. Check out Eric's website for more information about him and his photography.

One of the biggest challenges in moving a class online from a face-to-face format is figuring out what to do with the portion of the class that was spent in a classroom/lecture hall. Since our workload formula is 2 hours of work outside of class for each hour in class, the classroom portion, in theory, accounts for 1/3 of the learning time. The remaining 2/3 could conceivably remain the same -- readings, assignments, group projects, etc. with some changes needed to make things work online. My experience working with a wide range of instructors has been that those with previous pedagogical training handle the transition from physical to virtual classroom better than those who base their teaching approach primarily or solely on  the lecture model. If classroom time was mainly devoted to someone standing in front of students talking and working their way through presentation slides, things may not go smoothly if we try to replicate that experience online. (Whether that experience is...

We have three courses for instructors which are still available for registration. 113MSCC11 Teaching Online with Moodle : online, 4 weeks, starts January 10 – this class covers the basics of teaching online and using Moodle. Participants learn about the online environment as they participate in the class and complete assignments. Development of a detailed course syllabus is the final project. Emphasis is on the unique features of online teaching and learning, and the transition from face-to-face to online. Open to anyone who might be interested in teaching online, not just UCR Extension instructors; no previous experience required. Optional project is to produce a proposal for an online course at UCR Extension. 113MSCC10 Teaching Online with Moodle : face-to-face, 3 meetings, starts January 11th; 6-8 PM, Wednesdays at UCR Extension – same as online version listed above. 113MSCC12 Producing Media for Your Online Course: online, 3 weeks, starts February 7th . Instructors learn ...

The Huffington Post started their Best of TED 2011  countdown recently. It's a top 18 list because TED talks have to be 18 minutes or less. There are a wide range of topics included so far, with six more talks currently waiting to be revealed. Of all the online resources I include in our courses for instructors, the TED talks always get the most use and generate the most interest, particularly among those who are not familiar with them. This happens even though most of the TED talks are not directly related to the topics that people are covering in their classes. I think there are three things that make the talks appealing as learning resources. First is the length -- long enough to get into some depth about an issue, but not so long that people will tune out or choose not to watch. Many of the resources on sites which are targeted at higher education include presentations/lectures which are an hour long or more. My experience is that finding the valuable section in a long video ...

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...

I first came across the idea of learning styles when I was teaching online courses for CSU Hayward (now East Bay) about 12 years ago. Someone teaching one of the other courses in the program must have emphasized learning styles because many students brought it up in online discussions. I was not familiar with the idea, but I looked into it, found very little other than learning preference surveys and thought that was the end of it for me. However,  since then, learning styles seem to follow anywhere you find discussions of online teaching and learning. This is true despite the absence of academic research supporting any benefits related to designing for learning styles. Guy Wallace's article from the November, 2011 issue of eLearn magazine, Why Is the Research on Learning Styles Still Being Dismissed by Some Learning Leaders and Practitioners? is a nice summary of the learning styles issue along with a discussion of why people sometimes believe things despite evidence to the co...

Moodle 2.x has a cleaner look compared with version 1.9, but it also allows you to move blocks off the course page and into the left side of your browser window -- the dock. This removes even more of the visual clutter. Since the activities and resources in the course usually occupy more of your time than the information in the blocks, it makes sense to minimize their impact on the display. Here is a before and after look at the same course in Moodle 1.9 and then in version 2.1 where the blocks have been moved into the dock. Subtle differences but I prefer the 2.1 appearance, although I don't like the presence of the horizontal scrollbar at the top. I wasn't able to remove it even though the table with the text and graphic is not as wide as the available area for the course materials.