Howdy folks! I was just given the opportunity to teach a US Government course for the community college. I already teach the class to dual enrollment high school kids, but I'm wondering how to successfully transfer it to an online format. I have some ideas... Our blackboard administrator transferred over the course from the last person who taught it, and quite frankly, I'm not too impressed. It lacked "oomph" in my opinion. I've taught it as a 16 week course, but this online version would be 10 weeks. That's not that big of a deal. We use American Government: Roots & Reform by Larry Sabato & Karen O'Connor. Does anyone else out there teach this course with that book? Like I said, I've used it in class, but this is my first venture in an online format with it. I'd take any suggestions! Thanks, Matt
I can't give you specifics for Govt. However, I recently revamped my Community College's online Freshman English Comp. I basically just started from scratch. I took my onsite class, and broke it down into weeks (16 for a full semester, but also did it last summer for a 10 week course). I adjusted assignments that wouldn't work for online and then uploaded everything. So it is not too big of a deal, if you plan it out first. I know that wasn't very much help, but I wanted to point out that it wasn't too big of a deal.
I've noticed that most online courses make very little use of multimedia. If you can supply students with interesting videos, such as recording lectures for them, they may appreciate it. I know I could use that in the Statistics course I'm taking! -=Steve=-
Precisely! The "shell" class that was copied over is boring as crap. There's no video, powerpoints... nothing! And Pearson even gives us power points. AND we have access to Intellicom Online videos. I can see I can make a ton of improvements. I think the biggest challenge will be figuring out how to record lectures. I know I can do voice over power point, but I'm concerned about file size, and I'd actually like to be in the video. Voice only gives you so much, and I'm an animated person. -Matt
If they have some sort of instructional media center there, you could get them to take video of you in a classroom setting. Failing that, if you can get a tripod for it, you could try experimenting with a FlipCam -- they're really easy to use and the video is decent. -=Steve=-
I've thought about that too. I'm just concerned about the file size. I know I could put them up on YouTube or even SchoolTube or TeacherTube. When I recorded a discussion last year, it was about 30 minutes and was well over a gig. I know I could compress it and all though. The problem is that because I'm not on the college campus, I'd have to drive there to do the lectures and all, and I'd like to avoid doing that. If I were full time, that'd be another story. (I'm working on that...) My class with Dr. Fritz at WNMU uses Adobe Captivate. I really don't have experience with that other than simply viewing it. I like it though. Thanks for the suggestion! Keep them coming, everyone! -Matt
How about you tell your students to skip the course, take the American Government CLEP, and save some money? Sorry, couldn't resist!! :bandit:
So I've been thinking about things I can do for the course. I definitely want to do video lectures of some sort, but now I'm wondering how I can host them. Would YouTube be an appropriate place for that, or would it just be tacky? -Matt
YouTube would be perfectly appropriate. Many organizations do that. They're there, may as well use them. The only thing is that you'll need to break up whatever you do into chunks of ten minutes or less. But that's probably for the best anyway. -=Steve=-
