General Reminders for CCCOnline Instructors

Greetings! Today, Terry Reeves, CCCOnline’s Dean of Academic Instruction, has a few reminders for instructors as we begin the semester.

Hello,
I hope this message finds you doing well. As we’re starting spring session 2 soon, here are some “fyi” updates:

· Spring session one enrollment is up about 4% from last spring; spring session two is currently 3% above from last year, but it may pick up a bit more before the second session starts.

· A great resource is our “Who to Contact” page if you need help within CCCOnline. Please see http://at.ccconline.org/faculty/wiki/Policies_&_Procedures_-_Who_to_Contact.

· For CCCOnline related business, you must use your CCCS email address; do not use your personal email address. For confidentiality purposes (e.g., FERPA) personal email is not secure.

· CCCOnline is conducting a search for an Executive Director. We hope to have someone on board soon and look forward to sharing that news with you.

· Course Signals is coming soon. Course Signals is software developed by Purdue University as an early alert system using Data from D2L and Banner to allow an instructor to set criteria for early alerts. More information will be forthcoming, but wanted to give you all a heads-up as this will help us to further help our students.

· Maria Schnell recently joined our Training Team as our eLearning Specialist; we’re happy she’s here! If you have questions about training, please contact Maria at maria.schnell@cccs.edu. If you would like to know more about her, please see http://cccoexcellence.blogspot.com/2011/12/introducing-our-new-elearning.html.

Thank you for being a part of CCCOnline and for the teaching expertise you offer our system students. I know many of you also do course development and training work with us. Please know your efforts are noticed and appreciated. I wish you all a smooth-going and successful semester.

Best,
Terry

Valuable Library Information Coming Your Way!

This week, we’d like to remind everyone we have a wonderful resource to help us cultivate e-classroom excellence: our CCCOnline Librarian!

Check out Mary Cash’s The Librarian’s Labyrinth blog this week for news you can use:

*how your students may access article databases,
*where students may find helpful resources,
*an invitation to communicate with the librarian, and
*the latest on upcoming library webinars!

Introducing Our New eLearning Specialist

CCCOnline would like to extend a warm welcome to our new eLearning Specialist, Maria Schnell.

Maria brings enthusiasm, energy, and both higher education and corporate experience to CCCOnline’s Training and Professional Development Team. Since 2007, she has taught Communications courses, both online and face-to-face, for the University of Colorado, Pikes Peak Community College, and Community College of Denver. She also worked as a Project Manager for Global Channel Marketing in a Fortune 100 company; her responsibilities there included managing multiple projects, product launches, and international customer training. Maria earned her M.A. in Organizational Communication, emphasis in Leadership, from the University of Colorado.

A proud Colorado native and outdoor enthusiast, Maria grew up on a cattle ranch in Elizabeth, and says she “enjoys all of what my home state has to offer.” Her favorite activity is spending time with her family riding horses, and she also enjoys skydiving, snowboarding, hiking, longboarding, and being with her two dogs. Additionally, she is involved in charity and volunteer work with Seeds of Hope and Denver Children’s Advocacy Center.

Maria is excited to join us and shares that she “looks forward to supporting the staff and instructors at CCCOnline through continued improvement to training and online support.”

Library Webinar Thursday

Below is a quick reminder about Thursday’s Library webinar. If you aren’t able to make it, remember it will be archived on our wiki; in the meantime (now or later), please feel free to contribute any suggestions or comments about library services in the CCCOnline Community. Mary Cash (CCCOnline’s Instructional Online Librarian) will be around to answer your questions.

Thank you!

If you missed our conference presentation (“What’s Going On @ Your CCCOnline Library?”), please consider joining us Thursday (3:00-4:30 p.m.) for our updated webinar!

Registration information is here:
http://at.ccconline.org/faculty/wiki/Professional_Development_-_Upcoming_Webinars#What.27s_going_on_.40_your_CCCOnline_Library.3F

Items for discussion:
-library databases we have (and how to access them!)

-how library services can assist you and your students

-recent studies illuminating students’ need for library services and information literacy

Your Photo Here

Karla Schorzman, Arts & Humanities Division Chair, is guest speaker this week.

In addition to Karen’s thoughts about student photos, what about instructor photos?

We’re all taught in Getting Started and D2LE that our picture, or a photo of something that represents us or our interests, goes into our instructor widget/profile. Would there ever be reasons for you to NOT post a personal picture? What are the ramifications of forgetting to post or update a photo on overall student experience with your course? Does posting a photo have any benefits in online learning or the overall student experience? How so/why not?

-Karla Schorzman

Conference News

This week, Aarthi Ramesh, CCCOnline Coordinator of Training & Professional Development, reports:

It's been a very productive experience so far and I'm learning a lot. Karen Kaemmerling, our previous CCC training Coordinator, has been a fantastic guiding beacon through this transition process. I'm excited we'll also be working together on the Annual CCCOnline Faculty conference committee along with Elizabeth Dzabic, Beth Kitts, Ben Vega, Carol Verver and Lisa Marie Johnson. Yes, the plan is on and we are scheduled for September 30th, 2011:)).

We'll be sending out an announcement soon, but meantime friends, please feel free to chip in with ideas and suggestions you think Training and Professional Development needs to consider in the weeks to come as well as sessions you want to see at the Annual conference.

Next week, due to staff schedules, we will not be posting to the Cultivating Excellence blog.  We’ll be back the week of 5/30.  Have a happy Memorial Day.

Welcoming Our New Coordinator of Training and Professional Development

It is our pleasure to introduce Aarthi Ramesh, the new CCCOnline Coordinator of Training and Professional Development.  Welcome, Aarthi!  Please read on to make her acquaintance:        

Aarthi’s contributions to CCCOnline have included being the # 1 requested instructor each term, a Vista Volunteer, a D2L mentor, Gold Medal Faculty award winner numerous times, a facilitator/presenter at several CCCOnline conferences and higher education meetings, and Associate Chair of Health Sciences. She's married to a computer engineer and has 2 girls. His first name is her last name - a cultural thing, she says. She lives in Denver with her family for most of the year but loves traveling a lot and has successfully instructed from various parts of the world on numerous occasions. The world indeed has shrunk on the virtual medium!

Virtual collaboration, she believes, is an evolving process that is molded through our successes and setbacks and team work is one of the critical components to making this machinery function effectively. Having been part of CCCOnline for close to a decade though in an adjunct position, Aarthi looks forward to the innovation, challenge and outreach the Training and Professional Development Coordinator position brings her way as she joins Lisa Marie Johnson on the Training and Professional Development team.

Student Groups in the Online Classroom

You’re invited to our last webinar of the year! Join us for “Creating & Facilitating Groups in D2L” at 1:00 p.m. this Friday, Dec. 3.

In this webinar, you’ll learn about creating and managing groups with the D2L Groups tool and about resources to guide the design and facilitation of virtual team activities.

In the meantime, please feel free to share your experiences with student groups in the appropriate Cultivating Excellence discussion within the CCCOnline Community.

Effective Rubrics, Part II: Using Rubric Tools

Last week, we posted about our Rubrics Teaching Resources: that is, why and how to use rubrics for your own assignments. This week, we’d like to remind everyone about the rubric tools in D2L that are designed to make your grading life easier. Remember, you may choose to use rubrics within D2L’s rubrics tool or within TurnItIn’s GradeMark. (Both can be attached to assignment dropboxes.)

An advantage of using D2L rubrics is the grades transfer directly to the dropboxes; an advantage of using GradeMark through TurnItIn is that you can see an originality report at same time you’re grading. While you are grading with GradeMark, you also can use and re-use drop-in comments from your QuickMark library, and you and your students can toggle between a summary of all these comments, a “general comments” area, and a rubric scorecard.

Are you using these tools? Feel free to share your experiences in the appropriate discussion in the CCCOnline Community.

Effective Rubrics

Rubrics in your courses can be helpful in setting clear standards for assignments and helping students to understand those standards. Visit our rubrics resources to see

*sample rubrics you might adopt in or adapt for your own courses,
*a Rubrics Virtual Tour, and
*Virtual Tour Lecture Notes for your reference.

Your own rubric-related experiences and examples are welcome in the appropriate discussion in the CCCOnlineCommunity.

Learning Key Chain Webinar

Do your students sometimes appear not to connect to your subject, its materials, or even to you? Learning preferences play a great role in how much and how well we learn or want to learn anything. When we decide to learn something, we pick the key that works for us. A flexible "lock" allows for many keys to access content.

Join us for an interactive webinar on Friday November 5th at 1pm with Leecy Wise. Participants will explore how they learn and teach best. The webinar will provide instructors with a broad perspective on how students might prefer to learn. The webinar will introduce instructors to new ways of presenting content and engaging students with a variety of learning needs and abilities.

No registration required, just join us at https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=2008363&password=M.7535BE50A6EE6D4A8B14AFA1F589FE

How do you customize content in your courses to meet different learner preferences? Share with us techniques you use or want to try in the Cultivating Excellence Blog in the CCCOnline Community before or after the webinar.

Research and Writing Toolkit Webinar

Have you ever wished for a set of quick links to assign to your students for brush-up help on research skills, avoiding plagiarism, or writing in general?

We’re happy to say we’ve been working on such a project, and we seek your feedback! Come to our webinar at 1:00 p.m. this Friday, Oct. 22, to learn about the Research and Writing Toolkit and share your thoughts.

Visit the Recorded Webinars

Each month we conduct at least one webinar on pedagogical or technical skills. On Friday Oct 1, Turnitin joined us to do their presentation from the conference. As was true at the conference, the presentation was very well received by the attendees.

BUT, what can you do if Friday at 1pm doesn’t work for you? ANSWER: We record our webinars and post them on the wiki Webinar Archive page within a few days of the event. Over the last couple of years we have built quite a list of resources on a variety of topics that you may enjoy.

My favorite part of listening to a webinar is that I can pause the presentation, speed it up, rewind it, or stop it and return to it later. I can also run the webinar and try what a presenter is demonstrating immediately in my sandbox course.

If you haven’t checked this resource out lately, please do so. If you have ideas for additional webinar topics that you would like this year, please post your comments in the CCCOnline Community’s Cultivating Excellence discussion; look for thread “Visit the Recorded Webinars”. Also, please share which webinars you’ve found most helpful and informative whether you attended in person or listened to the recording. We love getting feedback and want to schedule these events to best meet your needs.

Also, check out the Upcoming webinar page for events we have scheduled this fall.

CCCOnline Faculty Conference this Friday!

We are very excited about our CCCOnline Faculty Conference

Constructing Quality: Expand your Toolbox!

Here is some helpful information to help you arrive on Friday September 17th at Arapahoe Community College.

-If you missed registration and still want to attend, please stop by the non-registered table that morning at M1900 to ensure you receive training credit for attending.
-Please visit this website for directions to ACC and maps of the campus http://www.arapahoe.edu/about-acc/locations/campus-maps
-Parking lots are open and free for our attendees. There are no permit restrictions in any parking lots.
-The dress is casual. In fact, to go with our Construction theme, we encourage you to wear jeans.
-Your first stop will be registration which starts at 8am in M 1900, the main cafeteria area at ACC.
-We are providing breakfast and lunch items, however, the budget for this free conference is very limited. If you have special dietary requirements, please be prepared to at least supplement or bring your own food.

Thank you to our session presenters for preparing and presenting at this year's conference. Their time makes the conferences a valuable experience for us all each year. And thank you to our sponsors, D2L, Turnitin, NetTutor, and Techsmith.

For more details about the conference sessions and the overall event, please visit http://at.ccconline.org/faculty/wiki/Teaching_Resources_-_Presentations_-_2010_CCCOnline_Faculty_Conference

See you Friday!
Please contact me with your questions at Karen.kaemmerling@cccs.edu