Francine's Course

The ___ course is well under way. We have just begun our second week of courses. Francine's course will be a little harder to design for because of the interactive style for presenting content. The information for the course will be easy to present, but providing a similar class experience for those at a distance will be difficult.

Realizing the difference between stand and deliver teaching and classroom facilitation is obvious in the classroom. However making the difference apparent in the distance education courses will be a new learning experience for me. I have a few ideas that include required activities that have students interact with other students taking the course at a distance and also working with individuals in the community.

Unfortunately live discussions aren't currently possible, but delayed discussions in Moodle will make discussion between students possible.

Susan's Course

Susan's class on clinical aspects of HIV/AIDS is well under way. I have been recording visually using a web cam that the school has available, auditorially using macromedia breeze, and in written format using PowerPoint and other document files.

After having collected this information I am transfering the information to the Moodle server to be used for the school. There have been a few limitations that have made working on the class rather difficult. First is the microphones that we have been using have had a lot of problems which might require the teacher to redo the recordings on her own time for use with macromedia breeze. In addition to this the Moodle server only allows 2MB files to be transfered and many of the Macromedia breeze files are larger than this so we will have to find a way to upload the files directly to the server. I am working on this, but this may be difficult for teachers to perform in the future without the help of a computer technician.

We have the organization of the class well under way and we are transfering information to the Moodle Server despite these difficulties. Progressions are being made and I am very excited about the new microphones that we have received. They are wireless and we are trying to figure out a way to record without the use of a mixer. I will be working with Judo on this before class starts this afternoon and I hope that everything will be good to go so the recordings will go better.

The next class begins the following week and I hope that I can be caught up with all of the course creation by that time.

The moodle web site is:
http://www.espnur.org/courses/

Classes Officially Begin

Susan has arrived and we began recording lectures for the Clinical Aspects of HIV/AIDS and other Opportunistic Diseases. Susan is a hard worker and I have enjoyed the time that we have spent together putting class content into Moodle and in SoftChalk.

Unfortunately she didn't have any materials created before she arrived and so course creation has been on the fly. I am doing the best I can and so is she with the limited amount of time that we have together.

In addition to lack of content. The microphone that we ordered isn't working properly and so we are getting a lot of static in the recordings as you will notice when you view her course in Moodle (www.espnur.org/courses/). Email me if you would like to login as a student.

I have placed two courses up on Moodle, prepared the course framework for the remaining teachers to arrive this summer, worked on a filing system for teachers to follow if they don't have one created, and devised some solutions to the bandwidth issues.

The major solution is being very organized so packets of information can be placed in small sections. Second creating more than one option for students to receive the information. And finally keeping high bandwidth media (audio/visual) to a minimum.

We are recording lectures live to save time and also to make the lectures much more interactive. If we had better (microphones, mixer, and video equipment that worked in sinc and software to edit) the recording would be flawless and the presentation much more professional. Right now we are doing the best with what we have.

Hope things are going good with projects that you are working on.

Work Building Up

As you can see from the number of posts that I have been able to post recently, I am getting a lot busier. The internet had gone down for three days which also posed a little drawback in course design.

I am currently working on a course for faculty members to take on distance education course design to put up on Moodle. The course I am creating is a formative evaluation of the materials I have created for teachers to follow when creating course materials. The test is going really good so far and only minimal changes have had to be made with the materials that I have created.

I am working with a professor that is creating a course for distance education. It is taking a large amount of time for him to finish his lecture information for his slide shows. He is teaching at two institutions and is currently working on a few research programs as well.

In addition to this I have been working with Solange on revamping the web site to be more usable by faculty and students. We have the areas of the web site ready to go, but need to put together the information so we can submit the information to the web designer for creation.

Right now projects are mounting up, web site, courses, teacher development, and also assisting students who don't understand how to use WebCT for posting information from last semester.

I don't feel overwhelmed, but meeting deadlines may be difficult if we don't find some solutions to the slow internet bandwidth and slow teacher information creation.
I may have to start cracking the wip on already taxed faculty members, but that may be the nature of the beast.