Jossey-Bass Online Teaching and Learning (OTL) Conference 2010

Welcome from Fielding Graduate University

Web 2.0 Technologies and Community Building Online
Rena Palloff, Ph.D. and Keith Pratt, Ph.D.
This opening session of the pre-conference workshop day will present techniques for community building in online courses by focusing on the use of Web 2.0 technologies. Although this topic has been presented in various ways, new research into the area of presence in online courses has helped to create new techniques for creating and sustaining a learning community that go beyond simple use of threaded discussion. Interest in techniques such as blogging, the use of social networking sites, and exploration into Second Life is adding a dimension to the community-building process that did not exist previously and has not yet been well studied. The pros and cons of these community building techniques will be discussed in terms of how they contribute to the development of social presence, ways in which they can best be used in an online class, along with cautions for their use.

Opening Remarks and Tour
with the OTL 2010 Conference Team

Meet the Jossey-Bass and LearningTimes conference team for an introduction to this year’s event, a tour of the online conference community, and to meet colleagues from around the globe participating in OTL 2010.

The importance of creating a sense of presence in online teaching and learning environments cannot be overestimated. Presence is “being there” with others in a virtual space. Understanding presence is complex and requires taking into consideration the social, psychological, and emotional aspects of the perceptual system. Presence begins with an understanding of our perceptual nature and its influence on the creation of presence. Through learner and instructor awareness of the perceptual system, presence can be understood and realized. This interactive session will provide a model for understanding presence, a framework for designing a sense of presence online, and practical examples.

Getting started in online learning can be overwhelming, but The Online Teaching Survival Guide can help, providing principles, practices and tips. Implementing even a portion of these tips and practices can go a long way in ensuring that faculty and students have satisfying and effective teaching and learning experiences. Join Judith and Rita-Marie for a discussion of the teaching and learning theories, principles and best practices that can guide faculty making the journey from novice to confident online teachers. Sample some of the simple and practical tips for teaching an online course organized around these four phases: Course beginnings, the early middle, the late middle, and course wraps.

Eric Liu will discuss why innovation and imagination are the key to limitless possibilities. His new book, Imagination First, offers 28 and a half universal practices for opening minds at work, home and play. All of them are designed to enable anyone — from educators to executives — to get unstuck, to reframe challenges and to help others do the same.

Good instructors and instruction are the strongest marketing tools an online program can have. Because research evidence suggests that a good instructor is the key to student persistence in online courses, hiring, training, and evaluating good online instructors has become high priority for most online institutions. With scale, however, comes the need to recruit and hire faculty who may not have the experience or skills coming into an online course or program that they need. Consequently, providing good training and also providing incentives for keeping good faculty have become critical concerns. This session will explore those concerns by providing training tips to achieve effectiveness and excellence, along with tips for self-development.

Online learning has the potential to provide students with disabilities the most level learning space in history without its being expensive or time-consuming. In fact, teachers can create accessible content while using familiar authoring tools such as Microsoft Office. This presentation will describe which authoring tool features will interact with the special software used by people with disabilities and significantly enhance the content’s accessibility.

Online Happy Hour

Join the Jossey-Bass and LearningTimes teams for an informal Day 1 Wrap-up session. Connect with colleagues from around the globe, share ideas, ask any questions you have for other faculty teaching online, and simply wind down after an action-packed first day.

Thoughts on the conference so far
with the 2010 OTL Conference Team

The use of e portfolios worldwide has grown rapidly over the last decade. The e portfolio is a genre, not a specific technology. However, the characteristics of that genre and the emerging social conventions for its use reflect ideals for higher and adult education and a process for achieving them. This presentation will introduce three ideals—authenticity, integrity, and deliberation. It will argue that multiple emerging technologies can be used in concert to achieve them and provide examples of tools that help students capture, manage, and reflect on learning as well as the composition of multimedia self-representations and their analysis.

In this session, Jonathan Finkelstein, author of Learning in Real Time and facilitator of the longest running online certificate program for synchronous learning, explores unique, real-time online group and social networking activities that take learner engagement to the next level. Experience innovative learning techniques and facilitation strategies that will open your eyes to what is possible while teaching and learning online.

A graphic syllabus is a low investment/high yield addition to your online course that can assist students with information storage and retrieval of your content. In this session Robin Smith will highlight the use of a graphic syllabus to facilitate course design and development. During the session you will acquire examples of graphic syllabi, tools for creation of graphic syllabi, and templates for use in developing\your own graphic syllabus.

As online instruction has increasingly become a prevalent delivery mode for higher education, many have decried the relative absence of laboratory sciences in the online mix of courses. This situation is primarily attributed to the dilemma over how to provide online students with the experimentation activities traditionally associated with effective laboratory science learning. The authors will review obstacles to teaching laboratory sciences fully online, explore means of overcoming them, illustrate how laboratory sciences courses are currently being taught fully online, examine options available for providing online students with valid laboratory experiences, and present data supporting the effectiveness of these options.

Join OTL 2010 authors and fellow participants for a fun and interactive un-conference session. Ask questions, stump the authors, trade teaching secrets, win prizes, and conclude this year’s conference with the energy to implement what you have learned.

Join your Jossey-Bass and LearningTimes hosts, conference co-chairs Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt, and your colleagues from around the globe for for a special online conference wrap-up. The archive of this session is accessible from the previous session’s archive.

Special Podcast: Using Wikis for Online Collaboration
with author James A. West

How can online instructors and course designers’ instruction harness the popular Web 2.0 tool, the wiki, for successful collaboration and learning outcomes? Jim West, co-author with Margaret West of the OTL guide book Using Wikis for Online Collaboration: The Power of the Read-Write Web, talks about how and when to use Wikis well in online course settings.

Special Podcast:
Reflections on Technology and Education
with author Curt Bonk

The World is Open author Curt Bonk joins LearningTimes Green Room hosts Susan Manning and Dan Balzer to explore a range of issues, including mobile technologies, open learning, and the notion of a digital scholar.