"College Classroom Online” Instructors Present Lessons Learned at Distance Education Conference

Katherine Friedrich

At the University of Wisconsin-Extension’s Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning in August 2007, Timothy Stiles and Erica Siegl shared the results of a technological experiment – delivering CIRTL’s College Classroom Course completely online.

The conference “has a really long history or being at the frontier of distance education,” Siegl said. “It attracts really great people. We had… always wanted to go.”

In fall 2006, working together with Sandra Courter, Director of the UW-Madison’s Engineering Learning Center, Stiles and Siegl used a wide variety of Web tools to teach the course and interact with graduate student and faculty participants.

The conference paper, “An Interactive Course on Instructional Methods for Future Faculty,” described how well each instructional tool worked for the graduate students. Students were asked to rate the effectiveness of each technique. The tools included business presentation software, live video, video clips, and an online forum.

“The students said they really appreciated [their] microteaching experience,” said Siegl, a graduate student in Sociology. The “microteaching” consisted of each student selecting a familiar subject, designing a plan to teach the topic effectively and concisely, and then teaching the material to a small group. Students uploaded the videos of their experiences to the Web for their peers to view and evaluate.

Videotaping events made the course more welcoming for students. Students responded well to both the video conferences, which were designed to introduce members of the class to one another, and the microteaching videos.

Since Microsoft LiveMeeting is designed for business purposes, Siegl said, it took some innovation to adapt the software for an interactive style of teaching. The instructors used the program’s “chat” feature to encourage dialogue between students. Some students enjoyed chatting, as well as using the interactive “whiteboards,” while others thought that the PowerPoint presentations were too formal.  

The technology that was least consistently used by course participants was the Desire2Learn forum. For the course this fall, Courter is experimenting with “Wiki” programs and blogs to encourage students to participate in the online discussions.

The conference participants were excited about the course, Siegl said, seeing it as a much-needed opportunity for graduate student professional development.

The presentation paper will be available on the conference web site in September 2007. (Search by presenter to find the abstract.)

9/13/2007

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