Two courses down....

Last week, despite the craziness, I completed two courses.  First, I completed the #fslt12 MOOC, which I really enjoyed a lot!  The interactions between my peers and the facilitators were great, there was a lot of sharing of best practices and lived experiences, and I took a lot of things away; both things that I can immediately put into practice, and things that I need to read up on :-).  It was a bit of a bummer that I was not able to attend the final session and present my microteaching activity (see a blog post or two back), but my peers did discuss it and gave me some feedback which was pretty cool!

I hope that Oxford Brookes runs this MOOC again next year because I think it's beneficial to people that are new to the teaching profession :-)

The other course that I completed was a course/workshop from the Sloan Consortium on implementing the quality scorecard in online programs.  This was a pretty interesting course. Going into it, I was under the impression that excellence in an online program was just predicated on what the individual departments did (having not seen the quality scorecard before this workshop).  What I came out with was the fact that online excellence is such a multi-level process!  It depends on the faculty teaching, the advising, the department services, the college commitment to online learning, and on the service providers for the various technologies employed in online learning!

I knew that there are many levels to quality online programs going into this workshop, but I didn't know that the quality scorecard factored in all of the levels. No online program is an island in and of itself. You need to forge partnerships with many stakeholders on many levels in order to create a good online program.  In some sense, it's an all for one, and one for all approach to online excellence :-)

Comments

Apostolos K. ("AK") said…
I feel I took a lot out of the "firts steps.." #fslt12 MOOC, one of which is the human interaction and the new people I met, including YOU of course!

I will certainly blog about it in the next few days.

The second course you completed seems very interesting and it also reminded me what I was saying to my colleagues last week regarding the delivery of Information Literacy services; that these need to be a multi-agency business in order for us to be able to deliver multi-literacies. (info & digital literacies)

I do agree that Institutional culture is very important. Probably is the most important factor for success!
June 27, 2012 at 11:27 AM
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