Summer 2013 iTeach

Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are all the rage these days. But what are they really? In this session we cover what “open” really means and why Higher Education administration is pushing so hard for online courses and what it means for you.

If you find Copyright a little confusing, this session will help you understand what your rights as an educator are. We’ll cover Fair Use principles, Creative Commons licensing and provide you with helpful tools to determine whether you’re stepping on anyone’s toes.

Online courses need good, structural supports. In this session we teach you how to publish your course on architecturally sound platforms. We cover Blackboard, WordPress, and beyond.

We love teaching you how to use new web tools to create exciting learning experiences for your students, but all your students’ activities should lead your students to discover the central thesis of your course. Like the authors of Understanding by Design, we “aim for specific results and design backward from them accordingly.” In this session, we help you articulate those specific results.

Teaching can be messy. Learning can be even messier. We have some strategic ways of defining activities, determining assessment, and evaluating the success of that assignment. Our Instructional Designers are all experienced in both face-to-face and online teaching. This session puts that experience to work for you.

Like steel girders, good planning makes for a good course.  This workshop walks you through the process of scheduling assignments, planning your workload, and, for those of you putting your course online, creating course navigation that isn’t confusing for your students.

Written lecture notes can be dull. Keep your students engaged with high quality video lectures and screencasting. You don’t have to be a “Superprofessor” to have interesting content in your course. We offer two sessions during iTeach full of hands-on instruction.

We’ve come a long way since the days of “edutainment.” Badging can be a way of letting students know that they’ve accomplished some learning objectives and not others without misleading them with labels of “A” or “F.” Some employers are increasingly looking at observable skill sets rather than courses completed and the grades earned for those courses. This  session delves into some of the details of best practices and current trends.