Incarcerated Students and Other People Who Need ELI

You all know that I'm a sociologist by training, and if you know many sociologists, you know that means I am very concerned with social justice issues. One of the biggest issues we face in the U.S. today is the problem of our skyrocketing prison populations and the many barriers ex-prisoners face when they return to society after serving their sentences. Education while in prison, especially higher education, drastically reduces recidivism rates.

Of course, access to higher education while in prison is limited. It seems to me that distance education--whether online or not--is an excellent solution to this problem. Getting ELI involved in purposefully, actively serving incarcerated people across Virginia seems to me an excellent way for us to serve our community.

I've had some great assistance recently in gathering information about what seems to be a very small number of colleges with programs for incarcerated students, and I will be working this summer on learning about these other programs and trying to figure out what we could do on this front at ELI.

What are your thoughts, questions, concerns, ideas on this? And what other underserved populations do you think ELI should be actively trying to reach?

They Stole Our Name!

Alas, we are not the only ELI in distance learning these days. EDUCAUSE has started something they call the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) to help spread knowledge about technology issues in education.

If we can forgive them for a moment for stealing our name, you might find some really useful information in their "7 Things You Should Know..." series at http://www.educause.edu/ELI7Things/7495. There are a whole bunch of quick two-page overviews of technology tools you may have heard of but not know much about (e.g., they have "7 Things" reports on Skype, on Flickr, on Second Life, on Twitter, on Facebook, ... you get the idea). These briefs would be a good way to get a sense of what each tool is all about, the pros and cons of using it in education, and whether you might want to learn more. If you do get interested in any of the tools you read about, contact ELIIDHelp@nvcc.edu (this semester, that means Fran and Maureen will be responding to your questions) and they would be happy to help you learn more and think about how you might use that tool in your teaching.

Online Teaching Blogs

Bob Loser passed along to me the link for Teach Online (http://teachonline2008.blogspot.com/), a blog by an online teacher. It is one of those blogs that mixes posts on the topic (e.g., a recent discussion of when to give Incompletes and when to give extra credit) with personal updates (dental work, family events, etc.). If you enjoy blogs or just don't mind skipping over the personal stuff, you might want to take a look.

On the blog roll (translation for folks who don't read blogs: a blog roll is a list of blogs you read or recommend, usually posted on the side of your blog near the archives and other blog menus) of Teach Online, I found a couple of others that looked promising:

Lisa's Online Teaching Blog (http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/) seems to be very focused on pedagogical issues (learning styles, students' technology knowledge, student evaluations, etc.).

Online Adjuncting (http://onlineadjuncting.blogspot.com/), as its name suggests, is particularly focused on the experiences you might have doing this work as an adjunct, although its pedagogical discussions would likely be of interest to anyone.

Just thought I'd share these in case anyone feels like getting hooked on blogs this summer! :)

Online Course Design Tutorial

A recent posting on the Tomorrow's Professor listserv alerted me to this resource you might be interested in:

http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign/tutorial/index.html

It's an online tutorial to help you design "effective and innovative" courses. The tutorial designers teach geoscience courses, so it would probably be especially effective for science faculty (and in fact, there are a lot of links on specific science disciplines which provide materials you might find useful in your teaching, separate from whether you use the actual tutorial or not--see the link list on the left). The website claims, though, that the tutorial uses a variety of examples and is useful for any discipline.

As far as I can see, the tutorial is focused on f2f classes, but I'm sure that the basic course design/revision process it outlines would be equally useful for planning an online course--you'd just be using different types of assignments and activities.

I'd be interested to hear whether you think this is a useful tool, if you have a chance to look through it. (And instructional designers--what do you think?)

ELI Professional Development Day, Fall 2008

I just sent you all an email announcing our ELI Professional Development Day, which will be held on September 12. Some of you know that I planned similar events for Loudoun campus adjunct faculty when I worked at Loudoun, and they were always a lot of fun and really useful to those who attended. I'm looking forward to trying this out at ELI! We don't get many opportunities to share with each other what we are doing in our classes, nor to sit back and reflect on what the research literature currently can tell us about teaching effectively online, and I hope this will be a chance to do both of these things. Bob Loser and I will be contacting some of you later this summer about presenting a session!

I welcome your thoughts, questions, and suggestions about what this day will be like and what you would like to see that day in terms of format, topics, or whatever you have ideas about!

Blackboard Self and Peer Assessment Tools

A few weeks ago, I gave you a link to look at a brief overview of the new Grade Center in BB8. The site has now been updated with a short overview of some new critical thinking features in BB8, called the Self and Peer Assessment Tools.

Visit http://www.blackboard.com/release8/ and click "Critical Thinking Tools" on the left to take a look. What do you think?

(FYI, it looks like we'll be going to BB8 for Spring 09. Apparently, it's not all that different from BB7 except for the major changes to the Grade Center, so hopefully it will be a relatively smooth transition.)

Random Bullets Friday

[Explanatory note: For those of you who are not big blog readers, "random bullets" refers to a day where the blogger has several small points to make but no one large theme to write about, so instead of one topic, the day's post is several unrelated bulleted points. You will often see this called RBOC ("Random Bullets of Crap").]

Apologies for not updating in the past week--I went away to visit a friend with a new baby for the long weekend, and then was at a VCCS meeting. Here are a few things on my mind now that I've returned:

• I spent the last couple of days in Staunton at the Joint ASAC/Deans meeting. (ASAC is the Academic and Student Affairs Council of the VCCS, composed of VPs, AVPs, some Directors, and some provosts.) One of the things we discussed is that it's time for a new VCCS strategic plan. Can you believe that Dateline 2009 is actually just about here?
• I've heard from a few faculty members that they experienced higher attrition this past semester (spring) than usual. Are you experiencing that, or does it seem about the same to you? Have any thoughts on what might have caused it, and/or what we could do to reduce it?
• As of yesterday, ELI enrollments were up 13.1% over last summer (which is 2.6% above our growth target for the summer term!). The College overall is up 7.6% over last summer. So those of you who have been getting lots of queries from students about getting into full classes--that's part of the reason! If you do get those queries, please let Joanna Knoll (our new faculty liaison) know. It helps us to figure out where we need new sections and new instructors.
• Have you tried yet to create your own avatar? (Do you know what an avatar is?) It can be a fun way to express yourself online. Nantana (one of our IDs) just shared with us one site where you can make them--check it out and play around a little! The IDs can help you put your avatar into your course, if you'd like to. The site is: http://uk.avatars.yahoo.com/index.html. If you want help with something like this, contact ELI ID Help (eliidhelp@nvcc.edu).