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NERCOMP EVENT
Blended Learning: Realizing the Promise of the Best of Both Worlds
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Blended learning (also known as hybrid learning) is often described as the “best of both worlds” because it combines the affordances of both face-to-face and online learning. However, good blended courses don’t just happen by default – many factors contribute to the success or limitations of fledgling blended courses and programs. This day-long event is designed to provide faculty, academic program administrators, and educational technologists with an overview of best practices in creating an infrastructure for blended learning on your campus.
The format for the day includes workshop-type exercises, presentations, and interactive panel discussions. In the morning we will focus on specific examples of blended learning in action, developing a shared understanding of this often misunderstood approach to teaching and learning. In the afternoon we will turn our attention to strategies for faculty professional development and support. As we wrap up the day, we will hear the most recent results from a multi-year national survey of blended and online learning in higher education.
Workshop Organizer/Host: Gail Matthews-DeNatale of Simmons College
Date/Time:
Thursday, April 16, 2009
9:00am - 3:00pm
Registration begins at 8:00am
Location:
Four Points Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center
1125 Boston Providence Turnpike
Norwood, MA
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Special instructions:
Your fee includes unlimited am and pm break service and lunch.
Pricing:
NERCOMP Members: $126
Non-Members: $251
By clicking on the "Register" button below, you are indicating a commitment to attend and will be held responsible for the registration fee.
Your fee can be refunded if you notify us of a cancellation at least 8 days prior to the event via email to nercomp@nercomp.org.
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Additional Information
Event Schedule:
8:00am - 9:00am Registration & Coffee
Morning: Individual Examples of Blended Course Redesign
9:00am - 10:30am Getting Started with Blended Teaching and Learning
Speaker: Alan Aycock, Associate Director, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Learning Technology Center
Successful hybrid teaching requires a significant course transformation. Faculty must rethink and redesign their course, create new learning activities and integrate online and face-to-face course components. Most faculty also have to learn new teaching skills in order to successfully manage online interaction, incorporate new methods of assessment, and effectively use the interactive and organizational tools found in course management systems. To achieve these goals, it’s essential that faculty development programs be focused upon concrete best practices of blended teaching and learning.
Towards this end, this workshop emphasizes the key issues that faculty must address when redesigning their courses, and how these issues are most effectively integrated into a comprehensive faculty development program. Following an overview of the highly successful University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee program, participants examine its implications for their own institutions. A frank summation of lessons learned and challenges encountered invites faculty, instructional designers, and IT support staff to consider next steps in the implementation of their own blended learning faculty development program.
10:30am - 10:45am Break
10:45am - 11:45am Collaborating for Blended Learning: How Faculty and Instructional Designers Can Work Together to Develop a Blended Course
Speakers:
Claudia Morner, GSLIS Adjunct Instructor; Simmons College
Liz Santiago, Senior Instructional Designer, Academic Technology, Simmons College
In making the transition to blended teaching, faculty often discover that they can’t go it alone. Yet the concept of working with an instructional designer (ID) may raise its own set of questions, such as when, and how much, to involve the ID in course development. Simmons College Library and Information Science faculty member Claudia Morner and Academic Technology Senior Instructional Designer Elizabeth Santiago will discuss the process they used to re-conceptualize Morner’s face-to-face course, “Academic Libraries,” into a blended format.
Morner is a “graduate” of the May 2008 Simmons Blended Learning Institute. Morner and Santiago will discuss their partnership and the role that instructional design played in course development and the revision process. They will also show successive drafts of course materials so that you can see concrete examples of the revision process.
11:45am - 12:30pm Lunch (with the request that you submit questions for a post-lunch discussion in a dropbox as you head to the dining room)
Afternoon: Faculty Professional Development, Program, and Support Issues
12:30pm - 1:15pm Panel Discussion: Challenges and Next Steps
Discussants:
Alan Aycock, Associate Director, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Learning Technology Center
Gail Matthews-DeNatale, Associate Director of Academic Technology at Simmons College
Claudia Morner, GSLIS Adjunct Instructor; Simmons College
Facilitator: Liz Santiago, Senior Instructional Designer, Academic Technology, Simmons College
This session will begin with panelist discussion, then flow into table-based discussions of a series of “next step” questions designed to help you consider your priorities moving forward.
1:15pm - 2:00pm Supporting the Blend: Faculty development for blended learning at Babson College
Speakers:
Tova Duby, Senior Manager, Blended Learning Implementation, Babson College
Michael Fetters, Professor of Management and Accounting, Babson College
Babson College has been offering blended courses since 2001. Initially, faculty learned about blended teaching in bits and pieces and certainly not all faculty learned the same things. In 2006 Dr. Michael Fetters, previous Babson College Provost, partnered with the Curriculum Innovation and Technology Group (CITG) at Babson to develop the Innovation in Blended Learning: Faculty Fellows Program. The program is a multi-staged faculty development course for faculty teaching blended courses at Babson College.
The four stages of the program are:
Stage 1: Participating in case-based learning exercises online and face-to-face: A student perspective
Stage 2: Designing a blended learning mini course in collaboration with CITG: A Faculty perspective
Stage 3: Delivering the blended learning mini course designed in Stage 2: Both Student and Faculty perspective
Stage 4: Applying the learning directly to teaching ‘ blended’ at Babson: A Blended Faculty perspective
Come hear some examples of how Babson faculty are teaching blended and how the Blended Fellows program supports them!
2:00pm - 2:45pm Recent Findings from the Sloan Survey of Online Learning
Speakers:
Jeff Seaman, Co-Director, Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG)
I. Elaine Allen, Research Director & Associate Professor, Babson College
The Sloan Surveys of Online Learning have been examining the nature and extent of online education for six years. What began as a simple “counting exercise” has grown into a series of in-depth examinations of online education in both U.S. higher education and K-12. Today the survey goes to every VP/Chief Academic Officer in higher education in the US (>4000), with a response rate that exceeds 55% and represents input from over 65% of all schools in higher education. In addition, researchers survey faculty in >55 schools, with responses from about 10,000+ faculty in higher education. The latest results from the 2008 Sloan survey of online learning will be presented and compared to those of the previous five years.
2008 represents the sixth year that the Sloan Survey of Online Education has been conducted. We will present the data from the most recent survey and an analysis examining the six-year span of the survey and compare the 2008 results with the results from previous years. Topics covered will include estimates of the number of students enrolled in online courses and the overall growth of the online learning population, attitudes towards the quality of online instruction, the range of online program offerings by size of institution, public or private, and Carnegie classification, and the strategic role that online learning holds in US Higher Education. Future Sloan research plans will also be discussed.
2:45pm - 3:00pm Wrap-up and Time to Write Evaluations
Speaker:
Alan Aycock
Alan Aycock, Ph.D. is Associate Director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Learning Technology Center (LTC) and an instructor in the UWM Department of Anthropology. He taught the first fully online course at UWM and is also a blended instructor of more than ten years’ experience using this format.
Alan holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Toronto. He has been Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, where he taught for 20 years, and was named Distinguished Teacher of the University there. Alan also served as Professor and Chair of Sociology at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee before coming to UWM. More recently, Alan was the UW-Milwaukee representative in the inaugural cohort of The University of Wisconsin Teaching Scholars Program.
Alan speaks about blended courses and learning technologies regularly at national and regional conferences, and has offered blended course redesign workshops on campuses all over the United States. In addition to his anthropological scholarship, Alan has published articles and book chapters on the pedagogy of learning technologies and, more specifically, on blended teaching and learning.
Speaker:
Claudia Morner
Claudia Morner, Ph.D. has held administrative positions in public and academic libraries, most recently as Dean of the University of New Hampshire Library. She has been an adjunct faculty member at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College for nearly 30 years. After stepping down from her position at UNH, she decided to reinvent herself and try her hand at blended learning, exploring new technologies and pedagogies. Claudia also consults on library management, student outcomes and library space planning, with clients in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Florida, Maine and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. She has held leadership positions in the Boston Library Consortium, NELINET, (LLAMA) Library Leadership Administration & Management Association, Mass Library Association, and NERCOMP. She teaches, writes and speaks on library buildings, fundraising for libraries, and management topics. She has her BA from the University of Minnesota, MSLS from Simmons and PhD from Boston College.
Speaker:
Elizabeth Santiago
Elizabeth Santiago, Ed.M. is a Senior Instructional Designer at Simmons College where she works with faculty and staff to help conceptualize and refine instructional content in particular for online delivery. She has an Ed.M. from the Technology, Innovation, and Education program at Harvard University and a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Most recently, Elizabeth was at Babson College working with faculty to develop blended courses for Babson's Fast Track MBA program. Prior to that, she was at Houghton Mifflin in their College Division conceptualizing and managing the development of technology programs to accompany textbooks. She has also worked as an adult literacy educator at United South End Settlements in Boston and the Community Learning Center in Cambridge. She is currently teaching an ESL class to hospitality workers in the greater Boston area through the Local 26 union.
Speaker:
Gail Matthews-DeNatale
Gail Matthews-DeNatale, Ph.D. is the Associate Director of Academic Technology at Simmons College. She collaborates with faculty, staff, and administrators to plan and implement innovative projects for teaching and learning with technology across the curriculum. She also is the Project Coordinator for the Sloan Blended Learning Initiative at Simmons College. In addition to her work with Academic Technology, Gail has an Adjunct Faculty appointment with the Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science, where she teaches continuing education courses in Instructional Design and graduate level courses in Oral History. Previously, Gail was on the faculty of George Mason University's Institute for Educational Transformation, Projects Manager for Northeastern University's EdTech Center, and Learning and Technology Specialist for an online Masters in Science Education degree program developed in collaboration by TERC and Lesley University. Gail has a Ph.D. from Indiana University and eighteen years of experience developing, implementing, and assessing online educational projects.
Speaker:
I. Elaine Allen
I. Elaine Allen is the Research Director of the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship and an Associate Professor of Statistics and Entrepreneurship. She is also Co-Director of the Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG). Prior to joining Babson, she held executive positions in the healthcare and biotechnology industry, including at Centocor, ARIAD and MetaWorks, Inc. She also held faculty appointments at the University of Pennsylvania and at Rutgers University. She continues to consult in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries and has served on several NIH panels on best practices in statistics and evidence-based research. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Society for Quality.
Speaker:
Jeff Seaman
Jeff Seaman current serves as the Survey Director for The Sloan Consortium, Co-Director of the Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG), statistical consultant for the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) project, and an independent technology consultant.
Dr. Seaman holds degrees in Demography/Statistics, Sociology, Electrical Engineering, and Housing, all from Cornell University. He has taught social science, information technology and statistics at several colleges and universities, including Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and Babson College. Dr. Seaman created and ran the Computing Resource Center and served as Associate Vice Provost for Computing for the University of Pennsylvania and served as Chief Information Officer for Lesley University. Dr. Seaman has served on academic technology advisory boards for a number of information technology companies including Apple Computer, IBM, and Microsoft. Dr. Seaman has been conducting research in the impact of technology on higher education and K-12 for over a decade.
Speaker:
Michael Fetters
Michael Fetters is the Walter Carpenter Distinguished Professor of Management and Professor of Accounting at Babson College. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Fetters was Babson College’s first Provost and served in this post from 2003-2006. Prior to the creation of the position of Provost, Dr. Fetters was Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty for five years and served as chairperson of the Accounting and Law Division for nine. He was on the faculty team that designed and launched the innovative, integrated entrepreneurial MBA program, and on the design and launch team for the integrated undergraduate program. In addition, he designed and directed the MS in Strategic Cost Accounting Program for Lucent Technologies, and is currently working on the design and teaching of Babson’s distance learning offerings offered in blended MBA programs.
Speaker:
Tova Duby
Tova Duby is Senior Manager of Blended Learning Implementation at Babson College. She joined Babson in 2001 and is a founding member of Babson’s Curriculum Innovation and Technology Group, which was formed in early 2002. Tova has partnered with senior administration to lead formal and informal sessions at Babson such as the Faculty Blended Best Practice workshops, panel discussions for the Graduate Decision Making Board and curriculum innovation overviews for various key players. Tova also leads student focused eLearning tools exercises for the graduate school programs as well as co-developed and co-leads the Babson Blended Innovation Fellows faculty teaching program.
Related Media Files:
Blended - Simmons.ppt
Blended Sloan Survey-Babson.ppt
Blend-FacultyDev-Babson.pdf
Blend-Aycock.ppt
10 key questions NERCOMP.doc
Contact Information:
Lisa DiMauro
860-345-2081
ldimauro@nercomp.org
Hotel Information:
Rooms are available at the Sheraton Norwood, the conference location.
To make reservations contact the Sheraton Norwood at 781-769-7900 and request the "NERCOMP Room Block".
The room block for April 15th, will be released on March 23, 2009. Standard queen guest rooms are available for $150 per night.
Technical Requirements:
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NERCOMP reserves the right to use any photographs or other mechanical recordings taken at NERCOMP events in promotional materials.
No mechanical recordings of any kind may be used at NERCOMP events without the prior written consent of NERCOMP organizers and presenters.
The views and opinions expressed at NERCOMP events do not necessarily reflect those of NERCOMP, nor does NERCOMP make any representation regarding the information presented at NERCOMP events.
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