iTeach2
The Instructional Design Center (IDC) at University of Alaska Southeast Sikta (UAS) in collaboration with the Center for Distance Education (CDE) at University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) offered the first annual iTeach2 (advanced) workshop for UA faculty last week. By all accounts, it was a successful and productive week! Heidi Olson and I represented CDE as instructors and facilitators, joined by Mary Purvis, Susie Feero, and Maureen O’Halloran of UAS. We met on the Sitka campus. Chris Lott delivered the keynote from Fairbanks.
iTeach2 was a great opportunity to collaborate with instructional designers and educators from other campuses. I came away from the week with several new links and ideas. Two ideas in particular stand out:
- Keep a journal of each course taught. This is such an obvious idea…but I’d never thought of it! I always tweak courses each time I offer them, based on successes and failures of the previous semester, but I just never thought about keeping a journal as I’m teaching.
- The spreadsheet application in Google Docs allows you to generate a form for students to complete. The link to the form can be pasted into Blackboard; as students submit their data on the form, it populates the spreadsheet. The results can then be shared back to students as a graph or chart. In effect, each student sees a form for data entry and the cumulative class data—with or without ever seeing the spreadsheet that generated the chart.