Presenter Name & Short Bio:
Alan Aycock (BA, MA, Ph.D.) is Associate Director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Learning Technology Center (LTC) and an instructor in the UWM Department of Anthropology. He taught the first fully online course at UWM and is also a blended instructor of more than ten years’ experience using this format.
Alan holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Toronto. He has been Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, where he taught for 20 years, and was named Distinguished Teacher of the University there. Alan also served as Professor and Chair of Sociology at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee before coming to UWM. More recently, Alan was the UW-Milwaukee representative in the inaugural cohort of The University of Wisconsin Teaching Scholars Program.
Alan speaks about blended courses and learning technologies regularly at national and regional conferences. In addition to his anthropological scholarship, Alan has published a number of articles on the pedagogy of learning technologies and, more specifically, on blended teaching and learning.
Matt Russell (BA, MA, ABD) is an Instructional Technology Consultant of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Learning Technology Center (LTC) and a Lecturer in the Department of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature. He has several years experience teaching technology-enhanced courses in rhetoric and composition as well as literature. In addition, he participates in faculty development workshops, has received grants for developing web-based pedagogy resources, and has presented and organized conference panels at national conferences. In the LTC, he is a specialist in the use of electronic portfolios for the development of online and blended humanities courses. Matt will be receiving his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin.
Where & when the workshop has been previously presented:
The workshop has been presented numerous times on the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee campus, to faculty in areas as distinctive as Architecture, Engineering, Nursing, Business, Health Sciences, Letters & Science, and Education. The workshop has also been offered as a pre-conference workshop at the Annual EDUCAUSE Conference, and at the Annual Distance Teaching & Learning Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. Sloan-C hosts this workshop for its Blended Teaching Certificate, see http://www.sloanconsortium.org/info/blended_certificate.
Finally, this workshop has been presented in a comparable format for institutions around the US, including: City University of New York (CUNY), Hunter College, Simmons College (Boston), Maryville University (St. Louis), Marquette University (Milwaukee), Westminster College (Salt Lake City), Eastern Arizona College, College of Mount Saint Joseph (Cincinnati), Youngstown University (Youngstown), Coastal Bend College (Texas), State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, Illinois Community College campuses (Elgin Community College, The College of DuPage, Lake County College), Illinois Community Colleges Online, Northern Illinois University (DeKalb), University of Wisconsin campuses (UW-Stevens Point, UW-Colleges, UW-Parkside, UW-Whitewater).
Dates: March 14 and 15
Time: 9:00 -12:00 a.m.; 1:00 - 4:00 p.m - (daily) coffee/tea, lunch breaks approximately 1 ½ hours daily
Place: Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Hall – AlFaisaliah Hotel
Fees: SR 1000
Intended Audience:
Faculty, faculty trainers and support staff, instructional designers
Prerequisites:
Participants should be comfortable with the use of computers and the Web in teaching. Familiarity with a learning management system such as Jusur is desirable but not required.
Description of Presentation Format:
The workshop comprises brief presentations and live course demos, interspersed with small group breakout sessions where participants actually begin to develop teaching strategies and course materials they will need as they redesign their courses for blended teaching and learning. The facilitators, themselves experienced blended instructors, will answer participant questions and guide breakout sessions to ensure that all participants come away with an effective plan for continuing blended course redesign.
Workshop Description and Aims:
Successful hybrid teaching requires a significant course transformation. Faculty must rethink and redesign their course, create new learning activities and integrate online and face-to-face course components. Most faculty also have to learn new teaching skills in order to successfully manage online interaction, incorporate new methods of assessment, and effectively use the interactive and organizational tools found in course management systems.
The emphasis of this workshop is on best practices rather than abstract learning theories; this approach is reinforced by the fact that the facilitators are themselves faculty who regularly teach blended courses in their own disciplines. During this workshop, participants not only learn more about the hybrid course model, but also actually leave the workshop with materials they can use in designing and teaching their first hybrid course.
Agenda for March 14
• Reviewing the ten key hybrid course redesign questions
• Defining learning objectives: the practice of “backwards design”
• Developing learning activities, working with modules, integrating online and face-to-face learning activities
• Facilitating online learning community through asynchronous discussions
• Content delivery: What goes face-to-face? What goes online?
• Alternate pedagogical models of blended course redesignAgenda for March 15
• Managing small group work online
• Assessment of student work online: creating an assessment plan
• Helping your students get the most from their hybrid course
• Crisis management: when things go wrong
• Staying organized and managing your workload
• Course evaluation: before, during, and after
• Next steps: drafting your course syllabus
Outcomes for Participants:
March 14• Through an examination of the ten basic questions of blended course redesign, instructors will reconceive a traditional face-to-face course for blended teaching and learning
• Instructors will follow backwards design principles to design a course module
• Instructors will build learning community by adopting effective practices of asynchronous discussion
• Instructors will learn techniques for integrating face-to-face and online work, and apply them to their own courses.
• Instructors will use a design protocol to choose appropriate types of content delivery for their own course
• Instructors will review alternative models of blended course redesign with special reference to large enrollment courses
March 15
• Instructors will advance student interactivity by organizing a small group assignment which integrates face-to-face and online learning
• Instructors will be introduced to methods of assessment consistent with special features of blended learning, and develop a course assessment plan for their own course
• Instructors will identify strategies to help their students, to stay organized themselves, and to manage their workload
• Instructors will use a comprehensive blended learning checklist to evaluate their course redesign process before, during, and after the initial course offering
• Instructors will use the blended learning checklist to produce a course redesign plan to guide them during the remainder of the process
• Instructors will produce a draft syllabus for critique and further development
Computer requirements :
Laptop is not required.