Learn something every day…
Technologies considered advanced a year ago have become commonplace, and the dazzling communication breakthroughs of two years ago are now on the planned obsolescence path to nowhere.
Not so for sound teaching methods – nothing replaces an established rapport and communication between the instructor and student. It doesn’t matter whether a course has a CL (classroom), WE (web-enhanced), HY (hybrid) or IN (internet) designation – the faculty member must reach out through a syllabus and teaching format that leads the student through the learning process and creates the higher education experience. Over simplified - I don't know...but stay with me for just a moment...
In the last seven years I have taken several types of classes here at COM, and without fail – have always learned a lot in every course. There is another bold statement I can make – hold on to your chair -
ALL COURSES offered at College of the Mainland would be IMPROVED by using BLACKBOARD.
A grand and bold statement to be sure, and let me be perfectly clear, your teaching is already stellar. Your instruction in the classroom is marvelous and enviable. To those of you who teach the CL Face-to-Face traditional courses, Blackboard has nothing to do with your classroom delivery and everything to do with supplementing students with MORE of YOUR brand of SME (Subject Matter Expert – acronym from my 80’s experience).
You are a Subject Matter Expert. Let’s break this down together. You became a SME by virtue of earning a Master’s degree and 18 hours in your subject area. During that time of intense study – you probably found topics and items of particular interest; tidbits of information that may or may not ever have ‘proper’ place in your current classroom environment.
Blackboard is the perfect venue for you to ‘publish’ this information.
Perhaps there has been a lively discussion during class time, excellent points are made and y'all have truly experienced a teachable moment. Capture the essence of that moment and translate it to Blackboard. There are so many creative ways this could be accomplished. Direct the students to the discussion board. You could write about the topic and add empirical data from web annotating it into your documentation.
Again, Blackboard is the perfect venue for you to ‘publish’ this information.
And here is why:
1. You choose the content. I was in a fine arts class recently and overheard my instructor conversing with two other students while looking at images in a book. I listened and thought the material was marvelous. The information he was presenting was not in the book, but in addition to the images. THIS WOULD BE PERFECT in Blackboard. A couple of images and no more than three or four sentences needed to create the entire ‘picture,’ and now it is there for everyone in the present class and classes to come, if the instructor so deems.
2. 24-7 Access – Your live class and demonstrations in studio classes can be recorded and uploaded to Blackboard. There are instructors at COM using this practice very successfully today.
3. It’s FREE - We can help you record and upload course information in the Distance Education Department and through Brad Dennison – AV guy extraordinaire.
4. CL - You choose student interaction. There is no rule the student has to look at your Blackboard content unless you give them that directive. As I stated before, for Face-to-Face classes, this product would be supplemental.
5. Your syllabus. Any document in Word, can be copy and pasted into Softchalk – the text processor for Blackboard. THEN it is DONE – it moves forward semester to semester. You can just as easily update it in Softchalk as you do Word. BELIEVE ME – I have taught Word to adults since 1993, and if you are able to work in WORD, you will do very well in SoftChalk. We give free instruction on Softchalk every semester.
6. The information is archived and YOU choose to move it forward from semester to semester.
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Jarrod Humphrey says, "How did this work?" |
7. Your students are not you. If you can remember a library’s card catalog system – you may need to think seriously about students who don’t ever remember seeing that piece of furniture standing in the library or how to use it. Here is a current student at COM looking at our old card catalog system now used to store old books and the occasional dessert. (Yep, I had to explain what the card catalog system was…operative word, “was.”)
Although obvious – your students are not you – how does this affect the organization and teaching style? Have you thought about the classroom experience and the millennium students? At some point, does technology used as a babysitter for young children, impact the college classroom as these children become your students?
Over the next several months I am going to blog about students of the millennium and what statistics tell us about OUR student population; the history of distance education and how the rate of change continues to accelerate; what does SACS have to say about Distance Education; what do national educators have to say about teaching in the millennium.
Until the next time we meet, remember what Grandmother Willis always said, “Learn something every day, live a little longer.”
