Checking In

In the absence of anything specific to talk about, I thought I'd keep my hand in on this blog with just summarizing where I am with my two online courses this semester.

Instructional Design: We had the first class last week on Dimdim (and accessibility services created a transcript for it). This week was the first on Palace. Still having some difficulty keeping folks focused, especially on something like Needs Assessment, which seems pretty abstract and perhaps irrelevant to most. I haven't really worked out how and what to teach in that step. It's partly successful, but it could be much better. What I do need to do is redesign each part of the process. Hard to find the time for that. I am, however, finding a little time to do a demo project on the wiki, step-by-step. It is about the basics of the nautical rules of the road.


Instructional Applications of the Internet: This course always starts out seeming to be chaotic, but it really does seem like much of it has to overlap. It does work itself out, although neither the students nor I may be able to see it at first. Discussions and other things going well, but I'm discovering a lot of places that need more planning.

Improving My Teaching:  I'm working on two things for improvement this semester. I may have mentioned this in an earlier post. Doing better at discussions---that's going pretty well. I"m much more active and so far I'm keeping up with reading the posts. That's important since it is so discouraging when I get behind by hundreds of postings. I'm trying to add to discussions and answer specific questions, without taking them over completely. Using Vista better--mostly that has been to use the assignment tool and gradebook better. The other thing I should do is make learning modules. Maybe that will be next semester.