With the prevalence of Smartphones, affordable phone plans, and texting, social media is quickly becoming one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to inform the masses. There are several tools that aid in the creation and maintenance of your online presence; implementing these tools correctly can provide make a big difference.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is the most recent institution added to the growing list of colleges and universities that are abandoning Blackboard to move to the Sakai Learning Management System (LMS). This change comes after a highly successful pilot at UNC that started in the fall of 2008. The decision to move to Sakai is greater than just a change in a learning management system; it also is a major indicator of the direction of instructional technology in higher education as a whole.
Before you begin any initiative, it is important that you have the support of other faculty and the IT support group, if you have one. Any type of change will be initially met with some type of resistance. The best way to combat this resistance and increase chances for success is to identify and develop a group that I refer to as the “early adopters.”
With the right tools, online courses can be as effective as traditional face-to-face courses. I designed an online course that would teach instructors how to integrate multimedia into their own – virtual or traditional – courses.
Web conferencing tools can be used as an additional resource for instructors trying to reach their students. Virtual office hours and online review sessions are two examples that can be very helpful in managing the classroom. In addition, these resources are easy to manage and, in many cases, are free to use.
Posted in Featured Posts, Instructional Technology, Integrating Technology 
Tags: bigbluebutton, collaborative, communication, distance education, distance learning, elluminate, emerging trends, learning space, management, online education, support, technology, virtual, web conferencing 
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