Pump UpYour Distance Education Skills!

Are you ready to take your online courses to the next level?
Designing an Exemplary Course is a free, synchronous class (Wednesday at 2pm EST) and asynchronous content and activities that give distance education teachers a chance to try new ideas and learn from others.

Starts Thursday, September 26, 2012 and Ends October 17, 2012


Designing an Exemplary Course: Open Course, launching in late-September, will prepare participants to develop quality online courses using the Blackboard Rubric as a guide. The course is geared toward instructors and is LMS agnostic.

To maximize benefits of participation, optional homework assignments will be provided each week that provide guidance for applying the principles to build out one’s own course structure and materials.

Open Access Journals about Distance Education

As educators who teach online, it is important for us to stay current with technology and with pedagogy.  An efficient method to track research findings or case examples about distance education is to subscribe to RSS feeds for open access journals.  Below is a list that are published in English and contain articles from teachers from many different disciplines across the globe.

Asian Journal of Distance Education http://www.asianjde.org/2012v10.1.Contents.html
Journal of Online Learning and Teaching http://jolt.merlot.org/index.html
The Journal of Educators Online http://www.thejeo.com/
The Journal of Distance Education http://www.jofde.ca/index.php/jde
World Journal on Educational Technology http://www.world-education-center.org/index.php/wjet/index

Why Open Access?

Open Education Resources (OER) materials freely available online materials.  In March 2012 the Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Open Society Foundations co-sponsored a competition to produce short videos describing the why OER is important for local and global communities.  Take a few minutes to view the winning videos found at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/33343?utm_campaign=newsletter_1208&utm_medium=blog&utm_source=newsletter

BIG News

Big news...the Department of Education on Friday, July 27 softened its enforcement stance on state authorizations.  This means that distance education programs or schools that enroll students from states other than their home state are responsible for obtaining state authorizations, but the Department of Education will not enforce this rule.  For the entire Department of Education document, go to http://ifap.ed.gov/dpcletters/attachments/GEN1213Attach.pdf,

Distance Education Initiatives to Provde Open Access

Harvard and MIT have initiated a joint venture called edX to provide online courses by Fall 2012.  Courses will be taught by Harvard and MIT faculty and populated with courses already developed by the two universities in their open access curriculum. So what's new?  The edX initiative will also be used as a test bed for research about effectiveness of online technologies.  To read more, go to http://www.edxonline.org/release.html

Another group of 12 U.S. universities including, Univ. of Virgina, Univ. of Washington, Univ. of Illinois, Duke Univ., Univ. of California - San Francisco, Rice Univ., Johns Hopkins Univ., Georgia Institute of Technology, and the California Institute of Technology and other universities from abroad have joined Coursera to offer open access online courses. Go to https://www.coursera.org/ to read more and examine open access courses.  Why will universities offer open access courses? The reasons are varied -- some want to increase recognition of their brand, others want to offer education to people in the global community without the chance of attending a university, and others...well we will see.

Open Access Textbooks

It's the middle of July, so I am thinking about my courses before fall semester arrives.  Maybe you do some of the same things I do -- think about what I want my students to learn from the course, decide what strategies have been successful in the past, consider new teaching strategies, and make my course revisions.  There are some great open access books (freely available online) that present helpful information about collaborative learning and using web 2.0 tools. Post others that you find.

Here are a few that I have found helpful:

• Online Collaborative Learning in Higher Education http://books.google.com/books?id=01qB45CoC-UC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
• Web 2.0 Tools in Education:  A Quick Guide http://www.scribd.com/doc/58594601/Web-2-0-Tools-in-Education-A-Quick-Guide-by-Mohamed-Amin-Embi
• E-Learning Handbook http://img.en25.com/Web/eRepublicInc/Symantec_ELearningHandbook_V.pdf

Faculty Development for Online Teaching

If you are new to distance learning, you might want to take a few faculty development courses.  If your university or college does not offer any, take a look at some free online faculty development classes that can be completed at your own pace.

Go to the University of Washington Center for Health Sciences Interprofessional Education, Research, and Practice:  http://collaborate.uw.edu/faculty-development/faculty-development.html.

Getting Started in Online Teaching – Free Webinar from Sloan-C on September 11, 2012  at 2pm Eastern Time http://sloanconsortium.org/webinar_gs_sept12

Go to iTunesU and search for Northern Illinois University Faculty Development Program Archives.  http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/niu-faculty-development-program/id326308196?mt=2&ign-mpt=uo%3D4