-
Teaching Online: A Practical Guide
[social-bio] The Book Ko, S. & Rossen, S. (2010). Teaching online: A practical guide (3rd ed.) New York, NY: Routledge. The target audiences of this book are post-secondary instructors and instructional designers. It is extremely thorough and covers three main topics of Getting Started, Putting the Course Together and Teaching in the Online Classroom. Getting Started is an overview of online teaching, including answers to many common questions or concerns, reasons why classes should be offered online and also a detailed look at your institution’s level of readiness. At the University of Saskatchewan we fall into the high-readiness category, which bodes well for any instructors that are moving into teaching…
-
Organizing With Evernote
[social-bio] Sticky notes, notebooks, loose leaf, Word documents…we all have different ways of taking and storing notes. Many of us even have multiple methods of taking notes. Last fall I began experimenting with Evernote and haven’t looked back. Evernote is an application and also a website that is designed to take notes. You can easily type out text-based notes, take pictures, record audio and save online content. This may sound fairly common but there are a few things that set Evernote apart from its competitors. Free – there is a premium account but 99% of users only need the free features Works on all operating systems and devices – PCs,…
-
Getting Started with Blended Learning
[social-bio] Blended learning, defined as using online tools to support face-to-face instruction, is a popular term these days in education. It can represent a very wide spectrum of ideas from posting lecture materials online all the way to holding some of your classes online. There are many possible benefits to employing blended approaches and with growing pressures to offer more courses online, I think now would be a great time to start exploring. If you are thinking of doing some blending, here are ideas of where you could begin: Post your course syllabus and lecture notes – or portions of notes – to your course’s Blackboard page. This will give…
-
Debates as a Teaching Method or Course Format
[social-bio] Recently, I did some reading on using debates as a course format. I had been familiar with using debates as an instructional strategy, but not as the actual format for an entire course. I was able to find a few examples of where this had been previously done, including the Genome 475 course at the University of Washington: For this course, debates were used for all of the units. Each unit was broken into three parts A introductory lecture or discussion The debate An open discussion of issues raised in the debate Other important pieces of information from this example were that Class attendance is required and part of…