So OK.  I’ve now imported all the posts from Dave’s old “Blackboard for Faculty” blog which had been maintained at WordPress.com to the new one (this one).  Recall that we are consolidating all our departmental blogs into one.  We will still maintain less formal, personal blogs, but that’s another story. The same goes for Dave’s blog as with Haydn’s, the one I imported yesterday.  The articles are now merged into the back catalog of this blog.  Since they may be a bit hard to find, I would like to draw attention to the more significant ones here.  They are...

Palomar College is certainly not alone in devoting time and resources to document the variables involved in effective teaching and learning. Instructors are being asked to include student learning outcomes (SLOs) on all class syllabi. We have a Learning Outcomes Council (LOC) as well as a Palomar Outcomes Database (POD).  This issue of learning outcomes and how best to promote them was the topic of a number of studies presented and discussed at the 2010 Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning. While some have argued that students are not effective judges of what teacher variables promote...

Spring semester 2010 has just concluded and it’s way too early to begin planning for summer school! Or, maybe it’s not too early. In this blog post I want to share an interesting list of tips for doing an online class the right way. This list of tips or suggestions was developed at Humboldt State University and is titled “A Checklist for Facilitating Online Courses.” The checklist identifies four important roles for an online instructor: managerial, pedagogical, social, and technical. For each of those roles the checklist lists specific tasks. In addition, the checklist groups...

During 2009 and Spring 2010, the Palomar Academic Technology Committee (ATC), in response to ACCJC recommendations, embarked on a series of related projects to establish processes that would ensure the quality of online classes. Ensure Quality of Online Classes The Academic Senate requested that the ATC devise some means of validating that instructors were prepared and able to develop a high quality online class. The first step involved reaching agreement about what constituted an “Accomplished” or high quality online class. An ATC workgroup researched the literature to discover published best...