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OLG Meeting Notes Mar 7, 2001 ...

Ocotillo Online Learning Group
Meeting Mar 7, 2001

Paradise Valley Community College
2:00 - 4:00 PM in Room E-144
map for finding PVCC
map of campus showing E Building

Welcome and Intros

(Roger Yohe, EMCC & Tom Foster, CGCC)

Demos from Paradise Valley Community College

Jeanne Franco, Accounting - She created a Blackboard tutorial for the first week of her Accounting Principles I course. It navigates the student through with elements from her course and blackboard tools. She has graciously provided us with her tutorial.
    Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file: acct_principles.pdf [16k]

Jeanne has also created interactive lessons. Each lesson has approximately 5 multiple choice questions. If the student answers correctly, it links them to a page that rewards the student with flashing stars and a "way to go". If the student answers the question incorrectly, it takes them to a page with a humorous graphic of a stick figure banging his head on a keyboard. It also encourages the student to try again. In addition, she has provided a link at the bottom of each question that takes the student to a page that explains why the wrong answers are wrong and why the correct one is correct.

Donna Rebadow, Physical Education - Donna presented several tools that she uses to create lessons and activities for her online courses.

Donna provided an overview of a lesson building technique known as "WebQuests", essentially a way of taking a collection o web sites you have found and building a compelling lesson around them, rather then just "sending students off to look a a great site".
    http://edweb.sdsu.edu/webquest/webquest.html

WebQuests were created to help faculty create lessons. It walks faculty through an online lesson plan, giving them definitions of each section. The WebQuest site provides some basic templates that are very easy to edit in a tool as simple as NetScape Composer. An example of a WebQuest Matrix can be found at:
    http://wrt-lattimore.syr.edu/literacy/

She also provided the group with several helpful web sites:

• Training Materials
  http://edweb.sdsu.edu/webquest/materials.htm
• Building Blocks
  http://edweb.sdsu.edu/people/bdodge/webquest/buildingblocks.html
• WebQuest Templates
  http://edweb.sdsu.edu/webquest/LessonTemplate.html

To help you find web sites in your discpline, Donna referred to an onlione workshop she developed aith Mary Lou Mosley (PVCC) and Alan Levine, MCLI, called "What a Site! Finding, Evaluating, and Integrating Web Sites":
    http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/show/what/

PDF demo

(Roger Yohe, EMCC)
Roger showed the group how to use Adobe Acrobat to create cross platform and offline documents. These "PDF" files that are "read only" and can be viewed by anyone with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader program (comes installed with almost every new web browser). This allows anyone to view documents created in Word, PowerPoint, etc, without requiring them to have that software installed. It preserves the document "integrity" (the formatting) and prevents anyone from editing it.

Roger also showed how PDFs also be used for presentation back-up. It cuts the file size of a PowerPoint file in half! And even more impressively, Roger showed how it is also excellent for offline presentation- you can create a PDF that is a series of web pages that can organized like you were presenting it online.

Media Integration from CD

(Tom Foster, CGCC)
We ran out of time (and the CD was giving Tom trouble) so we are deferring this to the next meeting.

Discussion

(Tom Foster, CGCC and Roger Yohe, EMCC)
The group has agreed to broaden the scope to address online learning in general and what direction Maricopa is going in regards to online learning. This group should not just discuss tools, but pedagogies. Learning issues are the same regardless of the tool. The group would like to discuss teaching and learning issues and teaching strategies need to be shared.

This coincides with next month's meeting at Mesa Community College, which uses WebCT for their online course materials. Look for a new name, some variant of Online Learning Group.

Anna Rosa Lampis suggested that we have demonstrations from all learning platforms in use at Maricopa (WebCT, Blackboard, Anlon).

Possible agenda topics include:

• MCC demonstration by Steve Budge, Foreign Language
• Other platform demonstrations
• Student Hub Issues for online students
• Online Assessment Tools - Pedagogical and Technology discussion
• Media Integration from a CD

Suggested Reading:
"Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace : Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom" by Rena M. Palloff and Keith Pratt
    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0787944602

Next Meeting

April 6, 2001
2:00 - 4:00 PM
Mesa Community College