Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Summer Downtime 2

How could I forget! I digitized all my old audio clips and video clips from my HIS 101 and HIS 102 courses from about ten years ago and put them all on ItunesU for the current students. Not sure if anything there is very useful, but some students like to listen to things.

Summer Downtime

Well, I don't blog every day, and it is summer, but it is certainly not downtime. Despite running kids around to camps and swimming, I have managed to finish up work on a second edition of the teaching manual with Jennifer Lerner (Project Pedagogy). Most of our revisions focused on technology, and we still probably haven't ended up covering most of the new web 2.0 tools and their uses in teaching. The manual is intended to give encouragement and ideas to the hundreds of adjunct instructors that teach at the Loudoun campus.

I am also far along with the Achieving the Dream (ATD) project that looks at student success in our HIS 101 courses, both online and on campus. I've got in hand some grade data, and also some more detailed data from our office of institutional research, and now I've got to look through it all and see if I can discover any patterns. Part of the ATD thing will be setting up a central BB--and everyone knows how much I love Blackboard--site with resources for all of my HIS 101 adjuncts. I think that at the moment I am supervising something like between 10 and 12 adjuncts, both on campus and online!

There was something else that I finished up this summer for my HIS courses, but at the moment it escapes me.