Circle Summaries November 2002
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- Monday 2:00 Session (Ken Collier's group)
- Tuesday 3:00 Session (Susan Jennings and Marsha Bayless' group)
- Wednesday 12:00 Sesison (Brenda Marques's group)
- Thursday 3:30 Sesison (Charles Padron's group)
- Friday 12:00 Session (Connie Delaney's group)
- Friday 1:00 Session (Anita Powell 's group)
Monday 2:00 Session (no summary)
Tuesday 3:00 Session (no summary)
Wednesday 9:30 Session (no summary)
Thursday 4:00 Sesison (no summary)
November 22, 2002
Discussion centered around the booming popularity of online classes and the concern over the loss of personal interaction and face to face contact with our students. Gail Weatherly from OIT graciously shared information on recent research and gave us several articles to browse. Copies of a helpful rubric for assessing interactive qualities of distance learning courses (created by Roblyer and Ekhami, State University of West Georgia, 2000) were distributed to participants. Several issues came up:
- the immaturity of undergraduate students to handle the responsibilities of online classes
- feelings of isolation and lack of face-to-face social interaction that may result from too many online classes
- varying learning styles of online students influencing learning outcomes
- confusions of online chats (suggestions offered to combat this: predetermined agenda; instructor intervention to give all students time to respond; instructor facilitating and guiding chats)
- best options: blending three or four in-class meetings with the online components (downside: students who live out of town/state/country); some distance courses actually being more interactive and providing more personal and timely feedback to meet students' needs than is possible in most large, face-to-face courses.
Friday 1:00 Session (no summary)
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