In my role as an instructional technologist, I work with instructors of varying proficiencies in using technology. At UNC, we are in the midst of a pilot using Sakai, and I thought an interesting project would be to create an online course designed to teach instructors how to integrate multimedia into their courses as well as use Sakai and Elluminate. Sakai was an easy choice to make since the majority of the instructors that I work with are using it for their regular courses. Since Sakai is new to UNC, I knew there were a lot of tools and features that were not familiar to many of the instructors.

This course was designed specifically for instructors and the course objectives were to expand multimedia knowledge and comfort level with technology as a teaching and learning tool.  Additionally, the course aimed to provide knowledge of effective ways to use multimedia. The course was over five weeks.  Each week began on a Monday with a virtual class session conducted in Elluminate. I also had weekly virtual office hours where participants could sign in to my virtual office, and we could discussion any questions they had. At the conclusion of each week, I asked for them to post their lessons learned, which was an opportunity for each participant to reflect on what they had learned, as well as start thinking about how that week’s topics could be applied in their own courses.

To help introduce the participants to the course, I created a short introduction video, which played when they first came to the site. In my video introduction, I welcomed them to the course, provided information about the goals for the course, and directed them to watch a series of tutorials I created to illustrate how the course would run.

The weekly class sessions were a chance for me to set the guidelines for the coming week, present the topics that would be covered, and allow for some synchronous interaction between the participants and myself. One of the great tools in Elluminate is the breakout rooms, and I was able to use those to let the participants work in small groups just as if we were in a traditional face-to-face class. After working on a question prompt in small groups, I brought them back to the main room and each group was able to share their responses. While this was done in a virtual environment, the interaction was similar to what would have occurred in a traditional classroom.

Instead of using the traditional syllabus tool, I decided to create a syllabus that was more interactive and could be viewed in parts. To do this, I used the lessons tool and created each week as a module. For each week, there was a reading assignment and a corresponding post to the discussion forum. I provided a direct link from the lessons tool to this discussion forum to make navigation easier for the participants in the course. Additionally, each assignment had a defined set of posting requirements. For each assignment, I wanted the participants to comment on how the article or assignment was related to their course and then provide feedback to each other. What happened was that the participants began sharing new ideas – one may have already tried a specific activity and could share that experience while another was able to learn a new activity to try in his/her own course.

Even though the discussion forums were asynchronous, I was able to create an engaging environment by giving participants the topics that I wanted them to post about. I had defined as part of the course, the weekly learning objectives and made sure that the assignments and postings would reinforce each of these objectives. As the course continued, I had to actively participate in the forums less and less as the participants were able to post and respond on their own. The key to this is that they saw a tangible and personal benefit to the postings, which encouraged them to post their own thoughtful responses. They realized that their peers were taking the postings seriously and putting a lot of thought into their responses and they responded similarly. This created a symbiotic learning environment where the peers were able to generate new ideas outside the core learning objectives.

The overall benefit of teaching an online course in this format was that it exposed the instructors to not only new tools but also how those tools may be used in course instruction. Even though the majority of the instructors were teaching in a face-to-face setting, they were each able to integrate a component of the online course into their own courses – whether that was holding virtual review sessions or having students embed videos for discussion in the discussion forum.  Regardless of the type of classroom the instructors work with – traditional or virtual – they were able to incorporate what they learned from the course into their own instruction.

[Featured image from: http://tinyurl.com/3afywun]