Combining Face-to-Face Teaching with Online Content: Students’ Learning in Blended Courses

Michael Milburn will show what he has been doing as he has moved from a combination of face-to-face and fully online courses into a blended course format, and he will present preliminary results from his evaluation of learning outcomes and student satisfaction with this new format.

Mike Milburn

Enhancing Student Learning with Library Productivity Tools

In this session, I’ll demonstrate a variety of tools that can be used to support students’ research, including Zotero, LibX, SFX, and Lib Guides.

Jeremy Seiferth

CL1

Using Blackboard Blogs for Better Class Preparation

In this session, I will show how I have been using the blog option within Blackboard for assignments that help students to become better prepared for class discussions.

Varghese George

P3

Evaluating Blackboard Use in Relation to Students’ Academic Performance

My presentation will explore how students’ involvement in using various elements of Blackboard/WebCt (accessing materials, chatting with classmates, and others) affects their performance in class. Previous students report mixed results as to the effect of learning management system on students’ performance. Using my students as a sample, in this study, I am trying to explore how effective web-enhanced teaching is compared to just class discussion and whether those students who are active online gain in terms of performance.

Adugna Lemi

P3

I will present findings made by my students from a discussion on how they view participating in online discussions to build a community for learning. Hopefully, these findings will bring new light into the design and use of online communities for enhancing student learning experience.

I’ll demonstrate an activity using Wimba inside Blackboard for the online version of my "Communication and Society" course.  Students all watch "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf". They then read the chapter in Watzlawick,'s Pragmatics of Human Communication that discusses the play and applies his systems theory of communication to understanding the play.   In my face-to-face class, I divide students into groups, and each group pretends they are family therapists.  George and Martha have come to them for therapy, and the film they watched is observations they just made of George and Martha.  Each group is to develop an assessment and recommendations for the couple, applying the Watzlawick model, readings on family myths, and any other relevant information from their psychology courses.  I will demonstrate how the same activity can be done online.

Blue Lab

Mary Simone,
Jessica Downa,
John Mazzarella

White Lab

Keeping Students Connected in Large Classes

In this session, I’ll show how I integrate the use of technology with face-to-face instruction in large classes in several ways:  I use news articles that students find in the media, primarily through web searches, to start off my large lectures (200).   These engage, but as I tie them to the main concepts of the course, introduce, reinforce, and contextualize the fundamental concepts of the course. I use small group, peer instruction and work to focus on the main ideas of the day. And I use i-clickers at various points for formative assessment. One of my students will then provide a student perspective on the ways in which these activities have contributed to his/her learning.

Over the past year, a number of students opted to produce a project in Second Life in lieu of the usual course paper for the online course, Universe of Music. The intent was to engage in this technology as much as possible. This exploration was undertaken on the recently acquired umb ccde island. Here, student avatars gathered, exhibiting their newly built “prims” and their connections to musical culture and tradition. These presentations were filmed using the Web 2.0 tool, screencast-o-matic.  It must also be added that not all went perfectly; various issues, particularly, quality of audio, need further attention.

In this session we’ll show briefly how we’ve been using I-clickers in our classes and engage participants in a discussion of effective uses of this technology across different types of courses.

MGVR

Building Self-Managed Creative Communities in Online Virtual Worlds

A tour and discussion of the Virtual Art Initiative: a self-managed creative and educational community of 35 artists, writers, and scholars in the online virtual worlds of Second Life, Open Sim, and Vast Park.