a branch of

ocotillo central

OLG Meeting Notes May 2, 2003 ...

Ocotillo Online Learning Group
Meeting May 2, 2003

District Office
9:00 - 10:30 AM in room 311

Welcome and Introductions
Anna Rosa Lampis (GateWay Community College) and Sandra Wells (Phoenix College)
This is a special year-end meeting with representatives from the colleges. For the first time, we have done this to prepare the meetings and ideas for next year.

What is Online Learning to You?
all participants
Brainstorming...

• Encouraged adjunct faculty to attend these meetings (to consider using technology in their teaching).
• Adjunct feel they are a part of the community after attending these meetings.
• Word-of-mouth advertising works better than emails.
• Concrete examples - what can I take away and add to my bag of tricks.
• District-wide group - what we are ALL doing with technology.
• A variety of participants - faculty, administrators, staff.
• Good to see other viewpoints.
• A difference between a "district" group and a "district-wide" group - we are all involved. A college driven group.
• OLG is not operational.
• Can we set up a listserv or have an online discussion board to share projects? An external listserv.
• A monthly topic to discuss online to publicize. As a reminder of meeting dates and times, too.
• Support - notes at each meeting - handouts from presentations are also shared. Very helpful.
• Criticism - pedagogy for online learning is not stressed enough. Highlight teaching more. The theme approach might help with this.
• A reading list for review online.
• At the meetings - "I'm having trouble with É," time to brainstorm with the group.
• Coordinated online presence for alternative learning opportunities at the colleges. The new SIS is supposed to have this.
• Faculty preparation issue - coordinate district-wide. Working with faculty-staff development committee.

What is the role of Online Learning? Do we want to continue on as a safety zone for sharing projects or do we want to address more political issues? These types of issues will naturally bubble up during the meetings and people need to know about them. This group needs to provide a discussion board for continued conversation, we want to keep the meetings about sharing and exploring new technologies.

Alan suggested a prize drawing for those who attend and sign-in at the meetings. We will also be looking at having a few "extended" sessions on specific topics.

Jim Daugherty wants to find out from each campus how they deliver their English 101 courses. How much seat time versus online time? Why kind of CMS are the instructors using to deliver their courses. Please send your college's information to Jim Daugherty.

Meeting Attendance
(Anna Rosa Lampis)
Anna Rosa analyzed the attendance from the meeting sign-in sheets, a total of 165 attendances. We had an average of 26 people per meeting this year and a total of 93 unique attending persons. We agree this is a minimum because many people do not sign the sheet.

OLG Meeting Attendance Summary
summary data
Adobe Acrobat file: olg_attendance0203.pdf [48k]

The group would like to have an unofficial OLG representative at each college to serve as the communication conduit - to get the word out and to get more people at these meetings, mostly likely starting with those present at this meeting.

A MEMO distribution list has been set up for our OLG coordinators, DL-OLG-REPS

In addition, we discussed how to achieve more exchange and electronic communication in between meetings. We agreed to use the MEMO list for announcements, and create a listserv for those interested in more topical discussuions. Alan will set one up, a self subscribing and unsubscribing list that will have a web based archive as well.

In August 2003, a new OLG listserv be created on an MCLI server. We will populate with names from this year's attendees, along with removal instructions. More information on this list will be posted to the OLG site.

What can be done to keep the online conversations vital?

Online Learning Group Survey Results
(Alan Levine)
We have some results in, but it was offered rather late in the semester. We should do this more aggresively next year. See the results at:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/olg/survey/rep.php

Contact Alan for the access code.

OLG Survey Summary
printable version of survey results (N=24)
Adobe Acrobat file: survey0203_results.pdf [92k]

Topics for Next Year
(all)
Brainstorming (colleges interested in hosting this topic)...

• Online Tutoring
• Adjunct Faculty Teaching Online - Skills
• What tools does each campus use/have?
• What's New (theme-based from campuses)
• Online Collaboration Communication (Estrella Mountain)
• Plagiarism - Students & Faculty (tentative Dialogue Day??)
• Assessment (GateWay)
• Math and Science Challenges with the Online Environment
• Simulations
• Visualizations
• Wireless Access - Support of Instruction (Glendale)
• Hybrid Courses (panel discussion)
• New software products that are being demonstrated/piloted at campuses and generic versions of higher-end software
• Macromedia - Impatica - software that compresses Powerpoint documents and also changes them to html for web publication.
• (MS Producer - is similar and free).
• Online Faculty Development (Mesa)
• Learning Communities Online
• Quality of Online Enviroment/Evaluation of Courses

OLG Meetings for 2003-2004
(all)
The meetings will move to 1:00 - 3:00 PM. Alan posed the idea of specially scheduled meetings/demos with vendors separately from the regular meetings.

All meetings will have these regular agenda items:

• What's New - General and Topical: updates like we did this year
• Faculty Presentations
• Hands-On Presentations
• Problem Solving Corner: a 5-10 minute session where participants can ask for ideas, suggestions addressing specific issues.

A tentative meeting schedule was agreed on (below). Please send 1-2 sentence descriptions of your college's selected topic, 3 weeks prior to the meeting date, for advertising purposes.