Master Teacher Blogs

Hi Everyone-

I had forgotten to go read the master teacher blogs regularly, so just went back to catch-up.  (This might have been part of a mid-semester slump that several of our bloggers commented on or maybe I was just on vacation.)  If you also have skipped a couple of weeks and need a little energizing go read those blogs right this very minute.  

You can get to them in the Faculty Community shell (login to D2L and then click on the student tab) or via a public Netvibes page I set up, http://www.netvibes.com/lisacs.  

They are well worth reading!

Lisa Cheney-Steen

Sandra Phillips Art Gallery has Best of 2007 Show!

Each year the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post do a Best of 2007 series of lists. This year the list of Best Art Shows included shows presented by 7 museums and only 3 private art galleries. One of those was "Masters in Clay" presented by the Sandra Phillips Gallery owned by Sandra Phillips, who many of you know as an Arts and Humanities faculty member for CCCOnline. Congratulations Sandra!

The article can be found at http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_7823745?source=email)

I know many of you also have had events in your lives that we would all like to celebrate. We have an amazing group of faculty who bring a huge amount of talent and experience to our students. Thank you for teaching for us!

Lisa

Faculty Update

Hi Everyone-

Lots of small things to update you on today:


Late Registration: Student Services added 160 students to session 1 classes and 80 to session 2 classes during the first three days of classes. (Most of those over the weekend before classes started). In session 1 12% of those students had dropped by census day as opposed to an overall drop rate of 19%. John plans a student success study once the semester ends.

No Shows: Student Services staff are pulling these from the backend, so as faculty you no longer have to submit names. Once John Schmahl has the list of no-shows, he passes it on to the colleges. His understanding is that only PCC, MCC, and CNCC are automatically dropping those students, so you will probably not see them disappear from your courses. If you have no-show students on your grade report at the end of the term you will have to give them an F in the course.

Faculty Wiki Upgrade: Jonathan Fuller has upgraded the wiki software. Account creation has been automated once again, so if you don't have a wiki account and you are interested in using it to teach your class it is available at faculty.ccconline.org.

Bug in the Tracking Feature of Vista: The student tracking tool in Vista is behaving a little oddly. You may notice several students listed as "unknown" rather than by their name. If this is the case in your course please email Amy.Sorensen@cccs.edu and let her know. We are working with the Blackboard development team to correct this.

Thanks!
Lisa

Faculty Conference - Call for Presenters

Hi Everyone-

Our English Program Chair is looking for presenters for a panel on plagiarism for the faculty conference:

Subject: Plagiarism and Authorship at Faculty Conference

Hello everyone,

In planning this year's CCCOnline faculty conference, we thought it important to offer a session on the issues surrounding plagiarism. As most instructors are aware, the problems with plagiarism and academic integrity are somewhat amplified in the online world, where information is more readily available and where copyright becomes extremely confusing to students. In this session, we hope to explore some methods for teaching about plagiarism, for teaching about authorship, and for coming at plagiarism with a positive, constructive, trusting approach.

As the chair for this session, I am planning a panel presentation to allow for several different perspectives on the issues at hand. I am looking for two instructors from any discipline who have insights and/or stories to share on the topic of plagiarism. Each presenter on the panel will have 5-7 minutes to present their initial thoughts, followed by a general discussion with the audience aimed at building a constructive response to plagiarism.

If you are interested, please contact me before the end of the day on Friday (August 31) at olddogpaw@mac.com.

Thank you!

Best,

Sean

Sean Michael Law

Chair, English Department

Colorado Community Colleges Online

sean.m.law@mac.com

303-408-9730

"The highest justification of liberal education is that, by forming free and well-furnished minds, it prepares students to fashion for themselves a good life." - J.S. Mill

Thanks-
Lisa

Going Schedule Free Part 2

Hi All-

I was interested in Al's experience for a couple of reasons. The first is the potential conflict in what the grade is measuring I mentioned in the last email. In theory our goal as faculty is to make sure students are able to meet the official course outcomes as defined in the common course numbering system, plus whatever else we think is important in our field. The final grade ought to reflect our opinion of what percentage of the outcomes the student has met. Unfortunately life sometimes intervenes in the measuring process and we are left with a set of graded assessments that may or may not add up to a good measure of learning outcomes.

As dean, I tend to face that at the end of the semester when I get the students' complaints. That makes me interested in ways to avoid the mis-match up front, or at least to make it less likely. I also don't really like to be the person who has to arbitrate between the student who thought her child's pre-school graduation was more important that the deadline for an exam. She thought she'd be able to get the exam in earlier, but of course the car broke, the cat threw up, .....

On the other hand, we all want to control our lives also. We want to know when we need to set aside time for grading and we know the end of the term is a hard deadline.

How do you balance those conflicts? The math department includes an extra exam, so the lowest score is automatically dropped from consideration. That was when a student misses an exam it doesn't affect his grade. It does probably affect his learning -- we would hope to the degree it does, that is captured in the following exams.

At the end of the term when you are reviewing your grades do you look at the overall picture and think about what you really believe in terms of learning outcomes? (And just to complicate things, some outcomes are probably more important than others....)

Al's solution was interesting. What is yours?

Lisa

Going Schedule Free

Hi Everyone-

Many of you know Al Turner already as he has been teaching Political Science for CCCOnline since the very beginning. For years he was the poster faculty for strict deadlines in classes. Al never let a deadline slide and yet his students always seem to love him -- there's a fine line in there somewhere that Al has managed to walk semester after semester, student after student.

This past spring he decided to try a complete change in policy -- essentially no deadlines. Here is his description of that experience:

I just completed one of my online classes that had only two deadlines for all assignments-Recommended Due Dates and a Final Due date. I decided to try this based on previous observations from Dean Lisa’s Blog. She said, "I tend to feel that we have adult learners in most of our classes who do have very busy and complex lives. Flexibility on our part tends to make the semesters run more smoothly and help keep the learning experiences positive. Most students appear to try very hard to meet all deadlines."

Also, before the semester started, it was necessary for me to make several changes to my Schedule, Syllabus and Assignment Due Dates about the two due dates (Recommended Due Dates and the Final Due Date). Yes, it required a little extra work. But I had the time.

On the first day of class, I had posted all 21 essays questions and encouraged students to work ahead of our Schedule. And, I opened all five Unit Discussions too. I normally had only one Unit open at a time based on our Schedule. I also encouraged them to do their best by honoring our Recommended Due Dates. And if this was not possible, then to be aware of the Final Due Date when “everything” was due.

Throughout the semester, I used the Announcement, Calendar and Email tools to let students know of our two Due Dates (Recommended and Final). I was like “in-your-face” everyday. Since this was the first time, I found myself posting more Announcements then I normally do during a 16-week class. I was OK with this.

And here’s what I learned.

Students did their best to honor the Recommended Due Dates for our discussions and assignments. And if they were not able to, I was OK with that.

The rest of their work (21 essays, 42 quizzes, Semester project, extra credit and other assignments) constantly flowed in throughout the semester. I was OK with this. Why? Because I had a chance to “even out” grading their work. That is, all the assignments were not dropped on me all at once at the end of each Unit.

Another reason was that I received only one, that’s right, one excuse for the entire semester. Yes! So, I didn’t have deal with “those creative and imaginative excuses.”

Doing this for the first time also got me outside of my “normal way of doing things online.” One of my biggest concerns was being “dumped on” with all the assignments on our Final Due Date. Never happened.

Next, I think “flexible due dates” would work best for our 16 week classes. It may work in our Session two too. That would be my next attempt.

Did the students like it? I had only three positive responses and one of those made it to the Student Survey. And, it seemed the semester ran smoother because of the "accommodating due dates."

I’m sure many of you have already tried something similar to what I’ve already done. And I’d like to hear how it worked for you here in our Blog.

Would I do it again? Yes.

Al

I don't know that I would recommend this approach for everyone, but I do think it begins to get at the conflict between the grade as a measurement of the student's understanding of the learning outcomes and the grade as a measurement of the student's ability to meet the course schedule. :^)

Lisa