Wiseman

A Culminating Selection of Work from My Masters of Higher Education Program

A Piece of the Online Pie

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Inside Higher Ed Article

Inside Higher Ed Article

Do you think online faculty would work harder if they were given a piece of the tuition pie?

Today, Inside Higher Ed posted this article A Piece of the Online Pie. There is a third party company, American Partnership, which proposes to do just that.

The online “enabler” company Academic Partnerships plans to share tuition revenue with faculty members at partnering universities as the company prepares a major update of its online education platform.

Notoriously online faculty are underpaid and over worked. Given the opportunity to have a bigger piece of the pie, do you think that incentive would help improve online faculty interaction and performance? Would it improve yours?

And, what do you think of that image/graphic? Look how the 3.0 online game changes learning: mobile devices, multiple languages, student interaction and credentialing….thoughts anyone?

Collaborative Ideas Instead of Discussions

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Over the last year, I have been working with the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction online courses.  With the program director I have developed some online collaborative activities that can work in place of the plain vanilla discussions so often seen in online courses.  Click on any of the images to enlarge.  The first is a VoiceThread embedded, so students can mimic a book talk-round table discussion.

VoiceThread used for Book Talks

 

The second is a Google Hangout, where students virtually met weekly and the Google Hangouts were recorded and then embedded on a content page, within Canvas, so students could refer back to the Hangouts.

Google Hangouts

 

The third concept was to have a class of students all simultaneously watch a full-length movie while also engaging in a simultaneous discussion.  For this activity I embedded the movie on a content page within Canvas instructing the students how to download the movie.  Students were told to open the movie in one window, then open the discussion forum in a second window. The professor will have the students start and stop their movies at a specific times so students can then engage in the discussion.

Movie viewing with discussion

 

At this writing, both the VoiceThreads and Google Hangouts have been very successfully implemented.  The movie viewing will occur at the end of the month.

Beyond Read, Write & Discuss

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Online courses rely far too heavily on the read, write and discuss format.  This multi-media presentation takes a tongue and cheek approach to explaining how the discussion forum became popular and how online faculty can move beyond this sometimes very boring format.

A transcript of the presentation can be downloaded and read here.

The full paper can be downloaded here. 

What people are saying…

I just want to acknowledge the good help I've been getting from Mary in "refreshing" my NMP 605 Financial Decision-Making in Nonprofits Course.  She has helped me put new video/voice/and analytical tools into the course to facilitate the on-line discussions and the sharing of course content.  No longer are we wedded to the typed word for communicating.
Kudo Twitter Canvas
Thank you Mary. You were so helpful yesterday and I really appreciate your time. As you can see, I put a lot of forethought into my classes and try to develop a wide array of assessments and activities for the students. The flip side of that is it takes quite a bit of pre-planning and work up front for me, which I am happy to do, but sometimes I challenge myself to do new things and having the support is very helpful.