It was a pleasure to participate in a UAS three-day faculty development workshop this week with the Instructional Design Team from UAS-Sitka. Along with Maureen O’Halloran and Kathi Baldwin we provided some best practices for online learning as well as some practical software application training.

A lot of the resources that I used for the sections I presented came from the CDE iTeach Resource site. A new section was added on Course Organization. Here is the workshop agenda and resources site: https://facdev2011.wordpress.com/.

One practice that we used this week was to actually deliver some content through elive (participants in separate rooms) so that the instructors could get a better sense of what it is like for a student. In this way we could showcase some of the tools and how they might be used. I think this is a really affective way to showcase the potential. After we used the tools we came back together and they were shown how it looked on the moderator’s side. It would have been great to have more time to then have them try out being the moderator but we just couldn’t fit it in. Those who were really interested, however, practiced during work sessions.

UAS has a site license for Adobe Presenter (combines audio with power points) and SoftChalk (helps create something like learning units) which are two very nice tools for online course delivery — especially for asynchronous delivery.