Current News

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.