Celebrating 10 Years

What does it mean to teach and learn within and with virtual environments? It means that we as learners are no longer engaged in one way interactions, but dynamic interactions. Virtual environments have enabled us to be highly immersed in spaces that yield high social presence, constructivist learning, interactive problem solving, and are surprisingly still enjoyable. This keynote address focuses on teaching and learning in Multi-User Virtual Environments. Concrete examples are presented on how to engage learners in a virtual world webquest, entrepreneurship, community development and civic engagement. Other uses of virtual environments for e-learning are discussed.

Now web-based technologies have become an integral part of our daily lives. We refer to our traditional-aged students as members of the Net Generation; the sense of connection that technology enables is a defining part of how these students communicate and learn. The story does not end there, however. More mature, non-traditional learners are increasingly seeking formal education via eLearning. From the teaching perspective, the movement to online has been a radical transformation. Accommodating the Net Generation in traditional instruction has not yet led to the paradigm shift that some expected back in 1997.
FSI 2007 aims to focus on the current realities. There will be instructors from a wide variety of institutions around the state of Illinois. With use of technology now a more ordinary fact of life, the emphasis at FSI is on pedagogy, both in the learning teams and in the variety of hands-on sessions. And even with the heavy emphasis on the new Web 2.0 applications, this will be done in the context of encouraging students to collaborate with other learners and help them to reflect on their own learning.
We hope you find FSI an exciting and thought provoking experience. Thank you again for attending.

Faculty Summer Institute Steering Committee
Celebrating 10 Years A long time writing instructor recently celebrated his transition to a wiki-centric writing environment, even as he continued using discussion boards for some activities. By discussing current best practices and building and testing examples ourselves, our team will explore how blogs and wikis might enrich teaching, research, publishing, and collaboration.
Critical Approaches to Teaching with Technology Facilitator: Alan Bilansky The list of possible technologies to use in teaching is daunting: email, web pages you create, web pages the students create, newsgroups, blogging assignments, sharing electronic drafts, animations, full-blown course management systems, and so on. This learning team will focus on the broader pedagogical and social issues involved in the choice to incorporate a specific technology into teaching.

Teaching with Podcasts Facilitator: Daniel Cabrera
This learning team will explore the pedagogical potential of podcasting, discuss lessons learned in other FSI venues as related to podcasting, and share tips and tricks for podcasting success. Participants will work in teams to produce podcasts highlighting or demonstrating ideas and techniques for effective pedagogical use of podcasts.
Multimedia: Value, Depth, and Access to Other Learning Styles Facilitator: Rick Langlois The ability to enhance learning with a rich multimedia experience has been used by educators for well over a decade. As anyone who has produced multimedia material knows, to do it well takes a great deal of time, effort, and sometimes money. Well not anymore! We'll look at ways to produce effective multimedia inexpensively and quickly. Today's students come to the university with communication equipment "and expectations" that can challenge our more traditional ideas of student-to-student and faculty-to-student contact. This learning team will explore ways to address these expectations by investigating technologies and pedagogical strategies that help students learn to use their social communication skills in the academic environment.

Active Learning in Large Classes Facilitator: Al Weiss
Can there really be active learning in a class of over 100 students? Absolutely. Instructors across the country are developing teaching strategies for active learning curricula in large lecture classes. We will look at how technology is enabling these methods, share our own ideas, and create new lessons using technology. S p e a k e r s were able to before. We'll look at these technologies, how they work, and how they have evolved over the past few years (even the past few months). We'll examine how these technologies are changing the teaching and learning process in ways to enable learning to extend beyond the classroom; beyond the semester. And, we'll look ahead to examine the learning applications that will be enabled by the advent of the emerging Web 3.0.

Myk Garn Executive Director of the Kentucky Virtual Campus Presentation Summary
If you've never made a mistake -this session is not for you. However, if you're tired of "Best Practices" sessions where it sounds like everything went right, come to this session where group members share, in glorious cathartic celebration, everything that went wrong -and what they learned from it. Join your colleagues in a convocation of confession, fearless self-assessment, laughs, and a few tears. You will leave the "Worst Practices" session confident that others have made bigger mistakes than you, lived to tell about it, and you have learned from them.

Biography
Myk Garn is the Executive Director of the Kentucky Virtual Campus which provides online learning services to Kentucky's post secondary education institutions and state agencies. Dr. Garn, originally trained as a photographer, has been a distance learning producer and administrator in academic, governmental, and corporate environments for over 20 years including prior leadership roles at the University System of Georgia and Lamar University in Texas. While he has done his worst in many settings he is most inspired by those who can do their worst, learn from it, and change.

Assess for Success: Use of Surveys in an Online Course
Presenters: Dr. Hoyet Hemphill and Dr. Leaunda Hemphill Theme: Assessment and Evaluation Audience: All Prerequisites: None Session Format: Forum Description: Come and find out the basics of designing surveys for your online course. The uses of surveys will be discussed for audience analysis, formative feedback, learner understanding, concept brainstorming, and summative evaluation. The principles of good survey and survey item construction will be defined and discussed. Examples of different types of surveys and survey tools will be demonstrated. Participants will work as a group to begin developing surveys of their own. Need ideas for assessing online students beyond testing? Come find out about a wide variety of assessment techniques that provide important diagnostic and formative information. These techniques can easily be adapted to effectively measure students' background, perceptions, and learning, as well as to measure your online instruction. Participants will have an opportunity to develop assessments of their own. WebCT/Blackboard is a tool that facilitates the creation of sophisticated World Wide Web-based educational environments. WebCT/ Blackboard provides a variety of tools "at the click of a button." Features include assessments, assignments, goals, calendar, chat and discussion, mail, announcements, media library, learning modules, and course syllabus. We will discuss uploading and managing lecture notes, and other multimedia content, selectively releasing course materials, administering assessments, communicating with students, and tracking student usage.

Creating Tests and Surveys in Respondus
Presenter: JP Dunn Theme: Teaching and Learning Audience: Beginner/Intermediate Prerequisites: None Session Format: Hands-on Workshop Description: Respondus is a tool that facilitates the creation of tests, quizzes, and surveys in Blackboard, WebCT, or with the traditional paper and pencil method. Learn to create a bank of test questions and publish them to a course management system. We will be using Blackboard (WebCT) CE 6.x (Vista 4.x). We will work with creating test questions both in Respondus and in MS Word and importing them. A demonstration of using Respondus to generate reports from previously taken test will be given. This interactive forum is designed for instructors interested in assessing their own teaching using systematic means, specifically those using instructional technologies. We'll cover the basics of educational technology evaluation, going into some of the methods and defining key terms. We will discuss the design of an evaluation (related to an individual classroom or a larger initiative) including evaluative questions, data collection, and some analysis. The presenters will provide handouts and online resources for future reference. In this hands-on exploration of Web 2.0 and some of its pedagogical potential, participants will establish an online presence by getting started with free online sites for blogs, wikis, images and portal pages. In the process, discussion will focus on the creative pedagogical use of each of these types of resources as well as the possible pitfalls. Participants may wish to bring a thumb drive with some prepared text on a topic of their choice along with some digital images to help them get started, but this is not required. Would you like to use narrated PowerPoint presentations in your online classes, but are worried about generating huge files? In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to produce narrated Power-Point presentations and compress them with Impatica, an extremely easy-to-use program that creates streaming files that play in the web browser without plug-ins. As a bonus, you will also learn how to quickly optimize images for the web using a little-known tool in Microsoft Office.

Holistic Teaching and Learning in Online Environments
Presenter: Gail Taylor Theme: Teaching and Learning Audience: All Prerequisites: None Session Format: Forum Description: This session is a brief introduction to the holistic perspective of teaching and learning in online environments. Participants will work together with others in small groups to gain insights and understandings of notions of multiple intelligences that are being promoted by Daniel Goleman, Howard Gardner, and Robert Sternberg, among others. Activities will explore strategies and techniques that can be applied in online environments to promote meaningful learning among students from the holistic teaching perspective. In this double session hands-on workshop participants will learn how to use iPhoto and iDVD, which are two of the six applications included in the Apple iLife '06 suite. Participants will learn how to use these two application to create books, calendars, slide shows, cards, movies, pictorial databases, and DVDs.

Keeping the Class Together
Presenter: Lisa Bathe Theme: Instructional Design and Course Development Audience: Intermediate Prerequisites: Prior teaching experience, preferably online. Session Format: Forum Description: The biggest question at FSI seems to be what about student retention? This session will be a discussion on student motivation and how that can impact student retention. Come prepared to share any tricks you may have!

Let the World Know Why You Teach: Putting Together an e-Teaching Portfolio
Presenters: Jane Alsberg and Alfred Weiss Theme: Teaching and Learning Audience: All Prerequisites: None Session Format: Forum Description: An important change is taking place on college and university campuses: there is a push to improve classroom instruction and reward good teaching. A necessary component of this new emphasis is factual information about one's teaching. By developing a teaching portfolio, faculty members can display their teaching accomplishments. This workshop will guide you through the portfolio process, including content selection, design, and the technical aspect of putting it into an electric form. In this poster session the presenter will discuss and demonstrate some of the many pedagogical possibilities with online image sharing community site Flickr and how the Web 2.0 browser Flock helps to facilitate use of Flickr.

Oh I Know I Know: Designing Online Courses Using Knowledge Hierarchy
Presenter: Eric Wignall Theme: Teaching and Learning Audience: Intermediate Prerequisites: None Session Format: Forum Description: The workshop will introduce four knowledge types and the evidence supporting their use as design guides for creating effective learning environments. Participants will be able to map a learning event and then a larger module of activities as part of a planning and design activity. Participants will also be able to match media with interaction using these principles in order to plan for the types of learning that are required by objectives. The session will expose the audience to interesting uses of Respondus by bringing in educational resources freely available on the Web (embedded images, audio, video, and text) as well as resources crafted by the instructor/designer to produce a narrative that is interspersed with questions and feedback to those questions. This is a good way to meld technical content with narrative. In addition, instructors can administer such hybrid presentations to their students and then have their students make them (and deliver them to classmates) in lieu of other forms of course projects.

Online/Web-Enhanced Learning for Students/ Faculty Experiencing Disabilities
Presenter: Thomas Bierdz Theme: Teaching and Learning Audience: All Prerequisites: Basic computer and on-line/web-enhanced skills. Session Format: Hands-on Workshop Description: Addresses the use of adaptive technology in on-line/web-enhanced learning; instructional considerations; social responsibility/the law; prevalence of disabilities; basic definition and characteristics of disabling conditions; and pros & cons of online/web-enhanced learning for students and faculty experiencing a disability. This session will have participants using some of the software available for people experiencing disabilities and how to access adaptive technology that comes standard on most computers. Participants will experience the challenges of some handicapping conditions.

Personal Learning Environments
Presenter: Jason Rhode Theme: Innovative Technologies Audience: Beginner Prerequisites: Basic computing skills. Session Format: Hands-on Workshop Description: Personal learning environments (PLEs) are systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning. Such systems provide support for learners to set their own learning goals, manage both the content and process of learning, and communicate with others throughout the learning process. This hands-on session will introduce PLEs and explore various strategies and applications for integrating PLEs in the classroom. The best way to learn the online environment is to experience it! This multi-faceted course was specifically designed for instructors to "try out" a variety of online tools, while at the same time, experience them from a student's perspective. Learn about the challenges students face so you can avoid disasters in your online course. Pedagogical topics will also be covered with tips for success.

Usability: A Moral Mandate and an Attainable Goal
Presenter: Cordelia Geiken Theme: Instructional Design and Course Development Audience: All Prerequisites: None Session Format: Forum Description: People are more important than technology. Thus, user-focused design is an indispensable expression of our commitment to the humanistic mission of higher education. This session will discuss and demonstrate how usability is not a set of methods but rather a mindset, as well as how user input can be obtained inexpensively, without a full-scale usability lab.

Using Horizon-Wimba for Online Meeting and Teaching Parts I & II
Presenter: Michel Nguessan Theme: Teaching and Learning Audience: Beginner to Intermediate Prerequisites: None Session Format: Hands-on Workshop Description: The purpose of this workshop is to teach attendees how to use Horizon-Wimba for web conferencing and online teaching. In the first part of the workshop, attendees will experience Horizon as participants in a meeting/class. In the second part of the workshop, attendees will experience Horizon-Wimba as presenters/instructors.

Using Popular Video Games in Undergraduate General Education
Presenters: Christian Sandvig, Emily Shaw, David Ward, Matthew Yapchaian Theme: Innovative Technologies Audience: Beginner Prerequisites: None Session Format: Forum Description: In the course "Communication Technology & Society," students were required to play the popular computer game "Civilization IV." Instructors created a modified version (InnisMod) that emphasized content relevant to course goals. Then, the game was treated as a simulation: students were asked to deduce the rules and comment on them in light what they had learned so far about "society." This forum will cover both the pedagogical and the practical lessons from this experiment.

Using Technology for Student Engagement in Asynchronous Learning
Presenters: Lisa Dallas and Linda Simpson Theme: Teaching and Learning Audience: Intermediate Prerequisites: None Session Format: Poster Description: As globalization infiltrates every aspect of life, preparing students to engage in virtual environments is essential but challenging for both the student and the instructor. Although technology is to be transparent to the learning process, there are situations where technology impedes the proposed learning experience. Utilizing best practices for designing virtual teams, group work, and student engagement, the session will explore the benefits and deterrents of utilizing technology for interactivity to enhance learning and minimizes pedagogical headaches.