ECI 647 - Online Learning: Week of March 1

Tasks

• New Textbook
• Discussion of Vannevar Bush
• Join Blackboard.com
• Begin Class Creation
• Assignments

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New Textbook

Finally there's a text for online learning that's pretty good. And the nice thing is that it's free if you don't mind reading on screen (or you can print it out). It is:

Theory and Practice of Online Learning, edited by Terry Anderson and Fathi Elloumi, and is available at:

• http://cde.athabascau.ca/online_book/

Please download this file (it's all in one pdf file) and have it available for reading.

It has been difficult to try and teach this course without a text, and I regret trying. But most of the books out there on elearning are just not very good. The one I really liked went out of print, which says something about my taste. But this is a nice balanced set of articles about all phases of online learning and I'm happy to have finally found it.

 

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Discussion of Vannevar Bush

Posted to our BLOG

 

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Join Blackboard.com

The most authentic activity I can give you is to have you build a learning site in Blackboard. Unfortunately, ODU will not allow you to have authoring rights on the Blackboard they are running on their own servers. So we have to use Blackboard's commercial trial site.

Please go to the Blackboard commercial site (address below) and sign up for a 60 day trial. This will give you an online learning environment to work in for the remainder of class. Assignments will be posted here later in the week for working in Bb.

• http://coursesites.blackboard.com/
• Click on Create New Account
• Fill out information
• Use your ODU email account name for your user name
  • In other words, you username should be exactly the same as the one you use to log into ODU's Blackboard. Others are going to enroll you, and all they have is your ODU account name.
• You may want to use a different password than ODU for security's sake.
• You now have the ability to create a course. It will only be available for 60 days, so be sure not to use anything you want to keep.

 

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Begin Class Creation

Create a class online, even if you're not quite sure what you want to teach. Do this even if you're planning on using a different course technology.

• Go to http://coursesites.blackboard.com/ and log in
  • Your username is the same as ODU
  • Your password is "eci647" if you have not already created an account.
• On your My Blackboard page you will see that you are teaching a course called Online Learning Test Site. This is a course I set up and enrolled you as an instructor. It is a place to try things out and for me to show you examples.

Your Online Course tasks for this week are the following:

1. Create an online class environment of your own. In your coursesites page scroll down and look in the right column. There's a link to Create a Course. Do so by following the listed instructions.
2. Enroll your classmates in your new course area. Do so following this procedure:
   1. Download and print out this list of your class members:
      • ECI 647 Class List (.rtf file)
   • ECI 647 Class List (.doc file)
   • ECI 647 Class List (.pdf file)
   2. In your course, click on Control Panel
   3. Under User Management, click on Add Users
   4. Click on Enroll Existing User
   5. Enter the username from the above list
   6. Select search by User Name
   7. Add the correct student from the results
   8. Repeat 4 - 7 until everyone is enrolled
   9. Don't forget to add me as an instructor so I can see your authoring work.
3. Add information about you by entering info in Staff Information, found in the Control Panel of your class
4. Start entering Course Information, such as a syllabus and schedule of work

This exercise assumes you have a course you want to put online. If you do not have a course please let me know and I'll provide material to you.

If you have chosen to do an online course for your final project you may use this work to get started. Your final product will be much more developed than those chosing other work.

 

 

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Assignments due March 15

• Join BlackBoard.com
• Read Chapter 2 of Theory and Practice of Online Learning
  • Toward a Theory of Online Learning by Terry Anderson
• Skim Chapter 1 if you're rusty on cognitive theories like Behaviorism, Cognitivism and Constructivism

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