Current News

MSVCC Academy to Offer Alternative Model for Professional Development

The soon-to-launch MSVCC Academy will provide an alternative for MSVCC faculty seeking professional development training, through short courses on podcasting to courses on best practices for online instruction.

The Academy is a “sunrise to sunset service”—faculty enroll, participate, graduate, and receive certification through a single process, all managed through a new enrollment system built by SBCJC’s Ive Burnett.  The enrollment system will accommodate both Blackboard and Desire2Learn users.

Courses fall into one of three categories--the Teaching Effectively Online series, and two new categories: a Tools in Focus series and a Best Practices series.

The Tools in Focus courses drill down to the deepest level of a tool or technology.  The Best Practices course offerings are meant to be organic and evolve over time through input from participants.

The Academy launches September 7 and will offer half a dozen courses, ranging from the six-week general orientation course, offered since 2007, to the newly built Wimba Voice Tools course and Blackboard Early Warning System course.

Faculty can begin registering for the free courses at the beginning of September.

Seats are provided on a first-come, first serve basis, and most courses will be capped at 15 or 20 participants.

Faculty can enroll in these courses through the SBCJC Enrollment Tool.  Distance Learning Coordinators can also register their faculty for these courses through the ET.  Registration instructions will be published on msvcc.org by August 24.

The enrollment system will provide colleges with the ability to track their faculty participation in these courses; contact hours are provided for each course.  This should aid colleges in establishing a professional development program for their online faculty if they do not have one in place.

Faculty and staff from across the system serve as facilitators, and new courses with a pedagogical emphasis are peer reviewed by deans, instructional technologists, and distance learning coordinators prior to their launch, using the Quality Matters rubric.

Jennifer Leimer, Director of Distance Learning at MGCCC, and President of the DLC Association, is excited about the new program.

"Our instructors continually ask for training on emerging technologies. However, with such limited resources, we are often not able to meet their requests.  The MSVCC Academy will help offer training that is desperately needed to enhance our instructors' skills so that they can provide top-of-the-line courses.

Registering for MSVCC Academy Courses

Development is nearly complete on the MSVCC Academy registration system.  Faculty will be able to manage the entire registration process; faculty will be able to

• self-register for courses,
• download a PDF stepsheet with registration instructions,
• review courses previously taken (not retroactive for courses taken prior to September 2009),
• apply for CEU credit (not retroactive for courses taken prior to September 2009), and
• modify or delete enrollments in courses.

Distance Learning Coordinators will also be able to register their faculty, receive reports, and track professional development hours for their faculty.

The site is expected to go live on Monday, August 31, pending approval for release.  The link for the site will be published here when the site becomes available.

Learning Simulation Series to Teach Students Blackboard Basics

 

Sharon Hudson, Instructional Technologist at Hinds CC and a member of the state’s eLearning Trainer group (ELT) has been hard at work this past spring and summer building tutorials for students new to Blackboard.

The Flash-based tutorials are part of the new Learning Simulation series, intended to teach students and faculty about particular tasks using a linear model of progression.  The first set in the series are intended for students.

The tutorials play inside a browser and are available now in the Institutional Content area of Blackboard for faculty to place in their courses (see news story, Installing Bb Tutorials in Course).

Colleges may decide to incorporate the files in their course templates for the spring 2010 semester.

The primary investment for Sharon Hudson was to better serve students.  "When thinking of a way to increase student retention through the MSVCC, the concern that kept coming to mind dealt primarily with the students’ level of competency with Blackboard.

There are multifaceted approaches and services that can increase the capacity to serve, retain, and satisfy online students, and I felt that creating simulation tutorials was one solution.  The tutorials are between three to five minutes and students can access them as often as needed."

There are four videos in all: Navigating Blackboard, Submitting Assignments, Understanding Your Blackboard Gradebook, and Orientation to the Blackboard Discussion Board.

This marks the first time that tutorials have been built specifically for students and made available for faculty to place directly in courses; the tutorials were built using Adobe Captivate.

Keri Cole, Dean of eLearning at Hinds, sees great value in the tutorials.

"These tutorials will ensure students are receiving effective and consistent training in the technologies made available to them.  Exposing students to the tools used by their instructors will allow our faculty more time to concentrate on course curricula."

MSVCC Partners with Wimba for Full-Featured Version of IM Software

All community and junior college users now have access to the full version of Wimba Pronto, billed by Wimba as "the only instant messaging system designed for educators."  The program downloads to a faculty or student's computer after a quick signup and download process on the Wimba server (see News Story, Installing Wimba Pronto).

The application provides blended audio and video conferencing, application sharing, a whiteboard, and queued chat functionality.

"This service changes the paradigm," says Christian Pruett, SBCJC eLearning Director. 

"We are seeing elearning companies embrace tools that assist the entire institution, and this new version of Wimba Pronto is a prime example.  This tool is intended not only for faculty and students, but for administration at large.  Imagine setting up a help desk for your financial aid office.  Your financial aid staff are at their computer, working as they always do.  But now administrators can provide assistance to students at home--the queue in the hallways has been augmented by the queue function in Pronto."

Once installed, the tool performs syncs with Blackboard course enrollments. 

"So imagine a Jane Doe, who installs the program, and is enrolled in a Biology course," says Pruett.  "When she opens the program, she will now see William Doe, who is also enrolled in the course, assuming he has installed the program.  This happens without any forethought by the student--they're merely installing the program.  From there, they can start up a whiteboard session, chat, or see and talk to one another through a headset."

Chat functionality can be turned off by the instructor prior to quizzes or tests.  "Regarding test integrity," says Pruett, "our recent partnership with Respondus will allow us to lock down any browser or quiz, so instructors should use this tool in addition to Pronto."

There is also the ability to turn off Pronto chat within an entire course from within the program settings.

A Spanish language preference is also a part of the software.

Alicia Shows, Dean at SMCC, is impressed.

“I've been with the MSVCC since the beginning,” says Shows.

“Communication between student and instructor and among students, has always been a problem. Pronto can be a great tool for solving some of these communication issues and can allow the student to be a part of a learning community, not an electronic correspondence course. 

I'm a math teacher, so the idea of easy access to a whiteboard is fantastic. 

I expect that the faculty at SMCC will make immediate use of the whiteboard feature, because as soon as one instructor uses it, the word will spread, and the students will be expecting it from all instructors.”

The MSVCC has had access to the free, limited version of Pronto since January 2009.

New courses to launch on Wimba, Blackboard Early Warning System

 

Two new courses for professional development are near completion: an introductory course on Wimba and a course on Blackboard's Early Warning System.

The Wimba course, entitled Teaching Effectively Online: Wimba 101, is a three-week course, offered for professional development credit, and at no cost to the instructor.  The course is available to anyone teaching in the MSVCC.

The course was written, developed, and designed by Terry Pollard, State Board eLearning Specialist. The course, which consists of three one-week lessons, will introduce faculty to Wimba's set of audio tools and will emphasize pedagogy, not technology.

The course is intended for those looking to integrate voice into their course to improve student-to-student and student-to-teacher interaction.

Participants will

• Identify key differences in communicating with face-to-face students and online student,
• Evaluate the effectiveness of first-generation online courses in terms of student engagement,
• Apply concepts learned by
  • responding to questions posed by facilitator (using Wimba)
  • building a Wimba voice lesson in their own online course (using Wimba)
  • building a Wimba Presentation lesson in their own online course
• View a Wimba tools matrix outlining features of all seven Wimba tools and learn to choose the best tool for the task
• Write a faculty action plan for use of Wimba tools.

The course will be limited to fifteen instructors; in order to use the Wimba voice tools, headsets will be required.

The course begins on March 9.

To register to the course, email Terry Pollard, SBCJC eLearning Specialist here.

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Jenny Jones, Instructional Technology Trainer at Holmes Community College, is nearly finished building a two-week course on Blackboard's new Early Warning System feature.

The Blackboard course, entitled Teaching Effectively Online--Blackboard Early Warning System, is also available for professional development credit and at no cost to the instructor.  The course is available to anyone teaching in the MSVCC.

Blackboard's Early Warning System tool, a new tool available in version 8 of Blackboard, has been identified as a tool that may improve identification of at-risk students. This course is intended for faculty seeking to more quickly identify at-risk students and communicate with them about their performance based on certain criteria such as attendance, grade performance, or due date.

Participants will

• learn how to use a Blackboard tool to notify students based on certain criteria, such as attendance and grade threshold,
• learn about best practices for using the tool, including the creation of a single rule rather than multiple rules, and
• learn about record-keeping for the tool, in order to track rules and rule results.

The course begins on March 9. 

To register for the course, email Jenny Jones here.

Instructional Technology Guru to Speak at Creating Futures pre-conference

 

Dr. Steve Harmon, Director of Learning Technologies at Georgia State University, will present at the 2009 Creating Futures through Technology pre-conference.

The pre-conference is hosted and presented by the MSVCC.

The session description:

"Technology has revolutionized every aspect of modern society except education.  In fact, Professor Chris Dede of Harvard has opined that if electricity were to somehow vanish from the planet tomorrow, Education would be the least affected of Societies' institutions. At long last though, that may be changing. Dr. Stephen Harmon will discuss recent developments in information and communications technologies that have the potential to substantially alter the way we work and the way we learn.  But will these advances change the way we teach?  Dr. Harmon will explore some some new and emerging technologies that hold potential for advancing teaching and learning, and will propose a way of examining them to look for any true advantages they offer for education.  Additionally, he will offer a theoretical basis for learning with new media that will help faculty decide which new technologies to use and when to use them. Dr. Harmon will conclude by examining specific applications of new technology in the disciplines."

To register, please visit the Creating Futures website here.

The full pre-conference flyer is available here.

MELO Site Adds Blog, New Resources

The state Library Directors MELO committee, led by Kathleen Hutchinson and Pamela Ladner, have recently integrated blogs into the MELO site.  Here is an excerpt from their first post.

We would like you to give MELO a chance.

MELO (Mississippi Electronic Libraries Online) is a credible, electronic collection of resource information selected by librarians to assist MSVCC students with their research and classroom needs. The site contains web pages, databases, Mississippi community college library catalogs, and links to Mississippi CC library web pages.

To read the post in its entirety, visit the blog here.