UW-Milwaukee has been very busy over the past few months with its faculty development programs. Each year we partner with the Sloan C organization to offer our blended course redesign program fully online to an international audience; this program remains unusually popular, more so even than the Sloan C’s own online course redesign program. We are also offering our blended and online faculty development program to our own faculty, of course: this past year we completed 4 cohorts of nearly a hundred faculty, and anticipate a continuation of this high rate of participation this coming year.
For the first time, the LTC, in conjunction with the Provost’s office, awarded formal certificates to our faculty who have completed our faculty development program, offered an online or blended course, and who write a pedagogical reflection on their redesign experience. This first time we awarded 15 certificates, and there are another 40 or 50 faculty who have applied for the next round of awards.
The UWM campus is especially eager that as faculty redesign their courses, their work reflects a known standard of excellence for online and blended learning. For this reason, we have developed a handbook on peer course evaluation, which we are using to offer workshops for faculty who wish to learn how to evaluate their own and their colleagues’ courses. We are also strengthening the role of student evaluations by building a “front end” for Qualtrics so that department or program representatives can automatically download CSVs of the enrolment for all their online courses, which can then be distributed to students via a unique email link to the course survey.
Finally, the Provost’s office and the LTC have announced the Joanne Lazirko Award for excellence in the use of teaching technologies. This award, named for a late colleague who was a pioneer in the use of learning technologies in her courses, is offered annually together with a cash award of $1500.
Submitted by Alan Aycock
Archive for the 'UW Milwaukee' Category
The UWM Second Life pilot is now entering its third year starting in Spring 10, with over 60 instructors receiving faculty development and almost 20 instructors adopting it for their own courses. Second Life is a virtual world which provides access to a network of information, organizations, people, culture, and languages not easily available in real life. It increases retention through engaging and interactive activities. Second Life creates a status-leveling effect for students from diverse backgrounds. It increases social presence by providing a media rich 3D environment. And finally, Second Life offers an immersive environment for experiential learning.
Invited Presentations:
2009, November 6th. Student Perceptions of Second Life. Presented at EDUCAUSE 2009 Online.
2009, November 5th. Harnessing Social Networking Tools to Build Connectivity and Learning Community in Online Courses. Presented at the 2009 EDUCAUSE Annual conference.
2009, November 4th. The Top-10 Questions You Should Consider When Implementing Second Life. Presented at the 2009 EDUCAUSE Annual conference.
2009, October 30th. Using Second Life to Meet Your Pedagogical Needs More Effectively. Presented at the First UW-System’s LTDC Technology Conference.
2008, October 17th. Transformation for Online Learning. Presented at Youngstown State University Annual Distance Learning conference.
Conference Presentations:
Joosten, T. (November, 2009). Best Practices for Using Second Life for Teaching and Learning. Presented at the 2009 EDUCAUSE Annual conference.
Joosten, T., and Stalewski, S. (November, 2009). Student Perceptions of Second Life. Presented at the 2009 EDUCAUSE Annual conference.
Joosten, T. (July, 2009). Using Second Life and Desire2Learn to Best Meet Your Learning Objectives. Presented at the Desire2Learn Fusion annual conference in Minneapolis, MN.
Joosten, T. (June, 2009). Meeting Your Pedagogical Needs More Effectively: How to Best Use Second Life. Presented at the Sloan-C International Symposium on Emerging Technology Application for Online Learning in San Francisco, CA.
Joosten, T. (March, 2009). Virtual Worlds (Second Life) Constituent Group Discussion. Facilitated at the EDUCAUSE Midwest conference in Chicago, IL.
Joosten, T. (October, 2008). Second Life in Education, Panel Presentation. Presented at the EDUCAUSE Annual conference in Orlando, FL.
Joosten, T. (August, 2008). Evaluating Second Life as mediated communication to facilitate learning. Presented at the Distance Teaching and Learning Annual conference in Madison, WI.
Joosten, T. (June, 2008). An Example of Second Life in a Communication Course: Human Communication and Technology. Presented at the Games, Learning, and Society Annual conference in Madison, WI.
Submitted by Tanya Joosten, UW-Milwaukee
Currently, there are five UW campuses participating in a D2L ePortfolio pilot that will last from Spring 2009 to the end of Spring 2010. At UWM, we have 28 faculty, instructors, and administrators who have signed on to participate in the pilot over the course of the upcoming year. This group will either teach or work with approximately 250-300 students. The disciplines, colleges and units on campus represented by this group includes Administrative Leadership, Anthropology, Architecture, Business Administration, Education, English (Composition and Business Writing), English as a Second Language, French, Japanese, Journalism and Mass Communication, Library internships, Nursing, Sport and Recreation, Translation, and Visual Arts. Many of these courses are within programs that have attempted to use portfolios in one form or another over the years, and so their uses of the ePortfolio will range from the simple collection and distribution of finished products to the development of group projects using the ePortfolio tool for the creation of files and documents.
In addition, two courses used the ePortfolio during Summer 2009: “UWM Writing Project: Teachers as Writers” (Curriculum and Instruction 740), a course that helps teachers develop a sense of self-awareness as writer by creating portfolios of work in order to be better writing teachers; and “Applied Clinical Chemistry” (Clinical Science 542), a senior capstone course in which clinical science students work on collecting documents and evidence of professional development for program review. Both classes have approximately 25 students and multiple instructors working together. Feedback from students and faculty in the two courses was generally very positive. Technically, students were able to use all of the tools available in the ePortfolio fairly easily and without any major problems; a one-hour training session appeared to be more than sufficient for them. Course instructors and students shared documents amongst each other, offering comments and feedback for the development of course assignments; students were then asked to use the ePortfolio to assemble these documents into web presentations that were submitted for final evaluation in D2L Dropboxes.
Because faculty in the pilot are experienced users of D2L, we anticipate that faculty will be able support their own students fairly well, as the interface for the ePortfolio is generally very similar to that for D2L instructors. Support for the pilot is run through the Learning Technology Center, and we are planning to use the ePortfolio tool to create and distribute our help sheets and FAQs to students and faculty. Finally, we will distribute formal evaluation mechanisms to the students and faculty after their participation in the pilot has ended.