Poll: Best Practices In Online Teaching Case Studies (Part Two)

Following up on the initial poll this month (see Poll: Best Practices In Online Teaching Case Studies), I wanted to repeat the poll using some of the options folks listed in the “Other” category.

As a reminder, a few years back Iowa State University and a series of partners received some funding to create the Good Practice to Inform Iowa Learning Online’ case studies.  My understanding of the purpose of these case studies was to outline specific issues related to teaching online that virtual school teachers could use as a reference.  If you look at the list of topics, you’ll note that they are very science and very lab-based.  The project that I am outlining would take a more general approach to online teaching and I am wondering what issues related to online teaching you would like to see address.

As such, I would ask that you respond to the poll below.  If there are ones that you feel are still not represented by the current choices, please use the “Other” box to make additional suggestions.

Thanks for participating…

Poll: Best Practices In Online Teaching Case Studies

Continuing the monthly polling feature, I want to use the next two months as a way to generate some data that will assist in a project that I am currently preparing.  A few years back, Iowa State University and a series of partners received some funding to create the Good Practice to Inform Iowa Learning Online’ case studies.  My understanding of the purpose of these case studies was to outline specific issues related to teaching online that virtual school teachers could use as a reference.  If you look at the list of topics, you’ll note that they are very science and very lab-based.  The project that I am outlining would take a more general approach to online teaching and I am wondering what issues related to online teaching you would like to see address.

As such, I would ask that you respond to the poll below.  Please note that PollDaddy requires at least two responses, so I included two general issues related to online teaching that I could think of, but I am more interested in having folks use the “Other” box to make additional suggestions.

This month (and next) we’ll have a two part poll.  About half way through the month I’ll take everyone’s responses and create a new poll to see how popular each of your suggestions are.  Thanks for participating…

Tapped In PD – Online Teaching and Learning

I haven’t seen this in the monthly/weekly updates yet, but later this month there will be another Tapped In session on Online Teaching and Learning at 7:00pm EST on Friday, 29 October 2009.

I haven’t been able to attend any of these sessions yet, but here are the resources provided in the room – which may give you a sense of how they view online teaching and learning:

•		2007 Horizon Report: Seven Technologies to Watch
•		A Learner-Centered Framework for E-learning TC Record Article
•		ALN Principles for Blended Learning: A Collaboration Sloan Consortium 2004 book. Edited by Janet Moore
•		Blended Learning k – 12 “From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection.”
•		Blended/Hybrid Learning Research PPTs dealing with Blended and Online Learning: University of Central Florida. Deals with categories of students (Boomers, Xers, Millennials) approaches and levels of satisfaction.
•		Creating Sustainable Media —UNC Paper
•		E-learning, Practice and Research (One of my Blogs. An assortment of references dating back to 2005)
•		Handhelds and Mobile Devices in Higher Education
•		Handhelds K – 12 Podcasting and handhelds in OL
•		Higher Ed. Pedagogy/Andragogy, Applied (One of my blogs. Useful info. for K-12 too.)
•		Jing For Image and Video Capture and Share
•		Learning and Knowing in Networks: Changing roles for Educators and Designers Networked Learning pdf Paper
•		MIT Media Lab Research Project . . .Future
•		Persistence in Online Classes: A Study of Perceptions among Community College Stakeholders Because online learning presents unique challenges for not only learners but faculty and administrators as well, those involved in these cyber-environments must think beyond the boundaries of the traditional classroom.
•		SLOODLE (3D & LMS) Open Source Project to Merge Moodle with Second Life.
•		Social Networking – The Evolution of Communications pdf paper
•		Strategies for Blended Learning ASTD Paper providing information and models of various blended/hybrid arrangements.
•		Teacher Mentoring Resources Middle Web (Exploring Middle School Reform)
•		The Basics of Online Learning Listing of links, which lead to more links, wihich lead to more links, which lead to (You get the idea.:-)
•		UK LMS Survey Indicates Use Outside Ed. USA & UK Institutions The corporate world is making increased use of LMS’s such as Moodle, WebCT, Blackboard. The article describes results of a survey involving 2,300 members of The E-Learning Guild. Uses by corporates include: training, corporate portal, small project work.
•		Visual Learning for the Future New applications, gadgets integration
•		Weblearning Resources Web-based Learning Resources Library
•		Why Teach a Hybrid Course? Single page description for faculty. (University of Wisconsin)
•		Wikipedia On Blended Learning Descriptions, general discussion and a number of links.
•		Wikis In Plain English (You Tube)

As I find out more I’ll post it here.

Virtual School Teaching Internships

I guess this is kind of a Florida Virtual School (FLVS) themed few days.  As I was exploring the FLVS website yesterday for the FLVS: Completed Research Projects entry, I came across a page marked “University Partnerships“.

http://www.flvs.net/areas/aboutus/Pages/UniversityPartnerships.aspx

The page itself describes FLVS’s openness to partnerships with universities and states:

These collaborations include grant partnerships, research opportunities, professional development for teachers and pre-service teacher observation/internship opportunities in our virtual classrooms.

What is interesting is that immediately following that statement is a section that is specifically devoted to:

Pre-Service Teacher Program
The demand for online education is growing and FLVS’s pre-service teacher program is the most innovative in education today. There is no other place where education majors can work in an online classroom. According to NACOL ‘s “Keeping Pace” report, 44 states have online learning programs. A Sloan Consortium report estimated 1,030,000 students engaged in online courses. This was a 47% increase from 2005-2006. Faced with the fast-paced expansion of online education, FLVS decided to open this school in an effort to help education majors prepare for the 21^st century classroom.

We offer opportunities for students to complete their observation requirements in our classrooms along with internship placement up to 14 weeks in the classroom of a clinically-trained, supervising teacher. Please click here to see pre-service teachers’ work and reflections of their time spent in our classrooms.

The presentation is worth the 5 to 8 minutes to takes to watch.  Anyway, this got me wondering how many other virtual school programs have relationships with teacher education programs where they are allowing pre-service teacher education students to complete their student teaching or teaching internships (whichever terms you happen to use) in a virtual school.  And when I use these terms I am not thinking about a teaching practicum that often comes earlier in the program to give students some exposure to the classroom (brick-and-mortar or virtual), maybe even teach a lesson.  I’m thinking of situations where the students spend a full semester doing nothing other than being in a classroom to teach (and in theory be mentored into that role in some systematic way).

I’m going to assume that the FLVS example has something to do with the University of Central Florida program that I last discussed in the entry Student Teaching Online.  And I know that the Teacher Education Goes into Virtual Schooling (TEGIVS) program at Iowa State University also has an internship component (and it dawns on me that when I examine the TEGIVS tag for this blog I have never written an entry totally devoted to the TEGIVS program, so I’m going to have to change that).  In addition, I do know of a number of other programs that do have the practicum components where students get exposed to virtual schooling, its environment and have some limited opportunities to teach.

So, are there other university programs or virtual schools out there that do similar kinds of student teaching or teaching internship program?

Reminder: Tapped In PD – Online Teaching and Learning

As was first mentioned back in Tapped In ASO Schedule (September 2009), a reminder of this event coming up later this week…

Event Information
Title: Online Teaching and Learning
Start Time: Sep 24, 2009, 4:00 PM PDT U.S. Pacific Time* [GMT-08:00]
Duration: 1 hour 30 minutes
Leader: Roger Goodson
Event Room: Online Teaching and Learning – The Online Teaching and Learning Group Room.
Event Type: After School Online
Topics: Teacher Education, Technology Education

Hope to see you there.