stop bullying and school violence

Ross Ellis founded one of the leading organizations to help STOMPOUTBULLYING in combination with Love Our Children USA has offered some excellent advice and tips for parents, educators and everyone working with children today.

1. Bullying hurts and being a victim of any kind of bullying feels really bad. And it’s important for you to know two things: You’re NOT alon...

MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching
Vol. 5, No. 3, September 2009

Replacing Professor Monologues with Online Dialogues: A Constructivist Approach to Online Course Template Design

Introduction

A common criticism of Web-enhanced course design is that online components are bells and whistles tacked onto traditional courses, which are...

It's been a while since I've written a personal teaching post. I hope my readers have enjoyed the resources however it's nice to hear from personal teaching experience sometimes. So here's a catch up post. If you prefer the teaching and tech resources, just skip over this one :-)

I'm currently teaching 6 online classes and have been since the first week in September. Only one is a grad course and i...

Fake Internet Colleges and False Credentialing: A Worldwide Epidemic

As Judith Eaton, director of the Council on Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), states:

"Degree mills and false credentialing are a serious problem worldwide, harming students, society and legitimate higher education."

Internet diploma mills also represent a growing global problem, one that is being emboldened by several factors...

E-Learning Gender Factor

The research on how boys and girls behave and learn in the classroom and online can be contradictory and controversial, though. Some studies and experts claim a clear distinction in the way boys and girls tackle academics, while others have found little or no difference....

Students find free online lectures better than what they're paying for

Interesting, yes? Do you make use of free online lectures or videos in your classes? I haven't yet but I'm compiling a resource bank for all my classes with free online videos and lectures to use next term....

Highlighting 10 Creative Professors Teaching at Online Universities

Thank you for including me on the list, especially in the top spot!

This new website, Online University Data, provides statistics and quantitative analysis of accredited online institutions. Teach Online will post an update when the data has been published....

Organizing your online course

More and more these days, instructors are required to design their own courses (at no extra pay above teaching the course). Here are some guidelines to follow to make the process easier.

How many courses have you taught where you need to go in and pretty much create everything before the class starts? How long did it take?...

Free Touch Type resources

How many students have you had who complain because it takes them hours to type postings and responses in the discussions? And papers -- those take forever. Here are some resources that can help them learn to type faster....

A Tale of Two Instructors

Interesting article about best practice and for worst practice in terms of active and passive participation, instructor response time, and the extent of teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence.

If you've had an opportunity to observe other instructors in an online class (as a student or as faculty) what have you seen in the way of best and worst practices...

Great articles about Online Teaching at the e-Learning Center

These cover online teaching and technology. Great stuff!...

National Standards for Online Instructors

Does your school provide training that promotes these standards? How long was/is the training at your school? Is it valuable or waste of time?

This is run by cops and their programs are outstanding. The current program is for up to 5th grades. Programs currently under development are geared toward middle school students, teenagers, college students, adults, and senior citizens. Predators target different age groups in different ways. This is the best program I've ever seen and it's completely written for the parent or teacher on DVD and ...

Sorry, I just have to say this: DUH!! What a surprise (NOT!).

I guess the question is: Can we (online teachers) help students learn these crucial skills? Or is it just not our responsibility and at the college level we just let them sink or swim?

If we should teach these skills, how?

New Study Identifies Self-Control As One Key to Student Success

It used to be that students learned self-control at ho...

I've always used peer teaching in some form or another, from the earliest elementary school ages and up through college students of all ages. Peer teaching is one of the most effective ways to teach. In my online college classes, I use presentations and "expert" forums for students to teach individually-chosen content to their classmates.

Here's a fascinating article about using animated teachable ...

Students in online courses learn more than those in traditional college classrooms

By W. David Gardner
InformationWeek

August 20, 2009 05:02 PM

Online education has been achieving somewhat better results than classroom education, according to a recent report prepared for the U.S. Department of Education.

The study was conducted by SRI International and delivered a conclusion that startled many...

I used to teach in both urban and affluent public schools.

I taught Kindergarten and elementary grades for nearly 15 years. When I typed
the title of this blog posting, I was taken back to those days. Who would think
that this would be a topic on a blog for college professors?

Actually not reading the weekly assigned materials and not reading/following the
assignment directions is approaching epidemic proportions in the college
classroom. And in online classes where EVERYTHING is reading? Well .... it can
be really bad.

Consider this: the first item on my syllabus is how to contact the professor.
There is just one rule here and it's not rocket science. Most professors I know
do something similar if not exactly the same. The rule is: in the email subject
line type the course and section number and your name. I prefer that they also
include the topic of the email (ex. wk 1 grade question) but I can even let that
one slide. All I REQUIRE is the course and section # and the student's name.

I ask you, how difficult is that? Apparently it's pretty darn difficult because
about a third of the emails I get have nothing, and I mean NOTHING, in the email
subject line. About another third have a topic sort of like this: HELP! Or this:
what about my grade? Or even this: vacation this week

About a third of students actually remember the course and section # but half of
those don't put their names either in the subject line or in the email. So I get
an email from honeybaby@ aol.com or suzie'smom@ yahoo.com (you get the idea
here) and the subject line says BUS206 - 04 and there's no name in the email
either. I have no clue who is writing to me.

Then there are the instructions for assignments. I try to help them out here a
bit by including a simplified (VERY simplified) grading rubric. Heck I don't
even call it a rubric. I call it a grading chart. Many students still don't have
a clue what I'm talking about when I say to "refer to the grading chart that is
directly below the discussion question in the weekly lesson."

So I get this question: "Why did you take of 5 points from my discussion grade?"

My response is "Did you see the grading chart with the DQ that explains that you
have to include at least one reference to the textbook chapter in your posting
and that counts 5 points in your grade?"

Then I get this very irate email back: "What are you talking about? What chart?
Where is that?"

Oh and did I mention this is the fourth week of class!! I swear some days I feel
like I'm back teaching Kindergarten.

...

I've been using Moodle at a new school now for a couple of weeks. I've done both teaching and design work in moodle at two different schools in the past few years. I like moodle. It's user-friendly and very easy to set up. It's easy for students to use.

As with ALL course managements systems, the discussion platform could use some refinement for better usability. Moodle's discussion platform is bet...

Point, Click, and Cheat: Frequency and Type of Academic Dishonesty in the Virtual Classroom

Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, Volume XII, Number III, Fall 2009
University of West Georgia, Distance Education Center

Donna Stuber-McEwen
Phillip Wiseley
Susan Hoggatt

Results indicated that students enrolled in online classes were less likely to cheat than those enroll...

Training can be valuable or a complete waste of time. Here are two examples that came up just this past week.

First, one college where I teach has set up contingency plans for continuing classes in the event that the college is closed for an extended period of time. All campus faculty are expected to learn the basics of the course management system and have been required to put syllabi and assignme...

5 Ways We're Diminishing Learning by Assuming Face-to-Face Instruction Is Best

Assuming that face-to-face instructional exchanges are always more effective is a dangerous assumption. Many teachers struggle with making classes relevant and interesting for students, and, more often than not, students are passive in the process rather than actively learning new knowledge. Most schooling is still based...

Colleges Plan Ahead for Possible H1N1 Outbreak

"We're making specific plans down to each individual class. Do we offer labs in a more compressed time frame? Other classes may be acceptable for online learning, or learning from a distance," said Winegard.

UNO has also talked about offering online classes if they do have to shut down for a short period of time....

So the new school started this week and I'm working in Moodle for the first time in about four years or so. As always, there's a learning curve and for me, that's usually a bit higher than for most people! I tend to take longer to figure out technology stuff. Once I've got it though, I reach the advanced level pretty fast.

Moodle didn't take long at all to figure out, completely on my own. The "he...

When Online is Better than Face to Face

For an increasing number of tasks, a well-managed website is much better than a human being at helping you get the job done. Sometimes it's a mix. You go online and do a bunch of stuff on your own and then you get some online help to do some more.

"On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction...

Grading Jail: Assessing discussions in eCollege and Blackboard
To grade one class: 20 minutes versus 60 minutes.

The fall semester/quarter has begun and, like many of you, I have lots of grading to complete each week. Personally, I like to include comments along with all grades, discussions as well as writing assignments.

My comments tend to point out where the work fell a little short of the requirements and how to improve. I also, of course, include positive comments about content and participation.

Grading can be easy and fast or difficult and slow, depending on the CMS. Right now I’m working in two – eCollege and Blackboard. Well I’m actually also working in moodle but that just started this week so I haven’t had an opportunity for marathon grading in that yet. Will update after I’ve worked in that a while.

I have several classes in each CMS, eCollege and Blackboard 9. I’ll use one class each for demonstration purposes, assuming 15 students per class, with an average of six messages per student, each message running approximately 100-150 words.

The total time for eCollege is 20 minutes per class and for Blackboard, 60 minutes per class. Which would you rather do?

eCollege
Short, simple, sweet, gotta love it!!

1. Log in
2. Click on Gradebook – menu if right up at the top of the page
3. Use pull down menu to scroll to specific week
4. Click on Discussion
5. Click on first student’s name

At this point, I get a pop-out grading window that includes a place for numerical score, letter grade, attachment option, and comment box.

Directly below these, the student’s postings, by time and date, are listed for my review.

It takes me approximately 20-30 seconds to review the postings (I’ve already read them and responded in the discussion area throughout the week so a quick review is all I need at this point).

Another 30-45 seconds to type comments (4-5 sentences). The comment box is large enough that I can see my complete comments for a quick proofing before saving.

Then I click save and next. The next student’s grading information and discussions are displayed.

That’s it – I’m done.

Total time to grade this week’s discussion in eCollege: about 20 minutes.

Blackboard
Complicated, riddled with tech glitches, time consuming, or rather a complete waste of valuable instructor time.

There’s just no way to make this easy-to-read so I hope you can follow these various steps within steps in the grading process. Let’s get started.

1. Log in
2. Scroll down left side navigation bar
3. Click on evaluation
4. Click on grading
5. WAIT while gradebook loads
6. Scroll the gradebook so that this week’s discussion is next to students’ names

At this point in the process, it’s necessary to:

1. Open a new window for the course
2. then go to Discussion Boards
3. then click on the pull-down menu next to this week’s discussion
4. and choose GRADE (which I set up earlier for all discussions).

Still in the new window, I get a list of all students’ names with the number of postings they’ve made in this discussion. There is also a column for usernames beside the students’ names. There is pull-down menu beside each username which gives the following choices: Grade or Email.

Still in the new window,

1. I choose Grade beside the first student’s username
2. Then I have to WAIT for the information to load
3. Then a list is displayed of that student’s postings, arranged by time and date.

Again, it takes me approximately 20-30 seconds to review the postings (I’ve already read them and responded in the discussion area throughout the week so a quick review is all I need at this point).

Now I have to go back to the first window where the gradebook is still open.

1. Click on pull-down menu next to the numerical score box next to first student’s name
2. Click on View Grade Details
3. Go to bottom of that box and click on Edit Grade
4. Enter numerical score and comments.
5. Click on SAVE
6. Go back to the top of the page and click on the “Jump to User” pull down menu
7. Click on the next student’s name.
8. Wait for the window to load

FINALLY! Done with the first grade so now it’s back to the first window, where I have to scroll to the bottom of the first student’s posting list and click OK to take me back to the main student list.

There’s always a bit of lag time here between closing out one screen and loading the next one.

It’s been 3-4 minutes with all the extra clicks and the wait time for window loading and I still have fourteen students to go.

And I get to start the whole process over again.

For each student, the grading process takes about three-five minutes, depending on the technical glitches and the WAIT time for each step of the process.

Total time grading this week’s discussions in Blackboard: about 60 minutes.

COMPARISON

Well see, here’s the thing. There just is no comparison: 20 minutes versus about 60 minutes? To grade the same number of students, same number of postings each?

Of course if you’re the kind of professor who never writes comments about discussion work, then you can flip through and put numerical scores for all students in a total of about two minutes, in either CMS.

However if you’re doing your job and providing adequate feedback for students, you can do that in 20 minutes in eCollege or 60 minutes in Blackboard.

...