eLCC 2013 summary by Nicole

I attended the eLCC Conference in Breckenridge April 10-12^thand I would like to share some key take-aways from the sessions.

Regarding Online Teams:

Maxine Christenson from AIMS presented some lessons learned and advice about running online teams. She had an opportunity to teach a 5 week online course devoted to teamwork and team building. Her words of advice:

• Be prepared to address common student concerns about working as a team
• Common concerns include: will individual efforts be acknowledged? If a student does majority of work, will that equal a better grade? Could substandard work from an individual bring a team grade down? Will the instructor protect and intervene when there is a lazy team member? What about technology hurdles?
• Have student create a set of ground rules, behaviors and expectations for how the team will function. Especially address how to deal with conflict.
• Encourage students to discover their hidden strengths before building the teams.

Another session I attended was on the Five E’s of course design. This was presented by Brenda, Vanessa and Jing from CCCOnline.

The 5 E’s are: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate. Here is a link to their google site that assembled with detailed information https://sites.google.com/site/elccfivees/

• Engage: initiates learning and promotes curiosity
• Explore: a guided journey on the topic, hands on experience
• Explain: the students describe and explain their understanding, redirect as needed
• Elaborate: students take it to a deeper level
• Evaluate: produce a product to be assessed by instructor, peers, a group, or self. Quiz,exam, PBL

The next session I attended also from CCCOnline, was about Online Instructor Evaluation. They provide a week long asynchronous D2L course for faculty that is required. They also hold a 2 week workshop on the topic of managing discussions.

All instructors get evaluated every year. They use a quality assurance rubric that was originally developed by Chico State University: http://www.csuchico.edu/tlp/resources/rubric/rubric.pdf

Another facilitation instrument that they use (http://www.humboldt.edu/aof/AssessingOnlineFacilitationInstrument.pdf) really details particular tasks and skills that the instructors should be doing. The nice thing about this instrument is that the tasks are chunked by “before your class begins, during the first week, during the course, and the last week.”

The rubrics are given to the instructors upfront so they have an idea of how they are being assessed.

Other random tidbits

• Did you know they make a typeface that is specifically designed to help people with dyslexia? It is called Eulexia.
  
• Watch this really fun “Word as Image” video based on the book by Ji Lee http://pleaseenjoy.com/projects/personal/word-as-image/
  
• Did you know thatHeutagogy is the study of self-determined learning? Wikipedia says, “Heutagogy places specific emphasis on learning how to learn, double loop learning, universal learning opportunities, a non-linear process, and true learner self-direction.”
  

Tips for Hybrids

• Alternate courses in a program from week to week. For example, a working person only needs to come to campus one night a week, one week it would be for one course, the following week another course. One college found this to be very successful.
• Try the approach of referring to it as “online with a F2F component” instead of “F2F with online component” and call them sessions instead of classroom or online.
• Make sure that students are informed of not only the unique structure of the course but also the reasoning as to why this will help them learn.