Session Comments from Madison DistEd

A number of excellent sessions at the Madison Distance Teaching and Learning conference held last week. Summaries follow:

Palloff and Pratt covered course, faculty and program evaluation strategies. They suggested embedding faculty evaluation into institutional faculty development efforts to ensure everyone knows what is being evaluated. They also suggested basing faculty evaluation on course design, facilitation skills, and how well teaching efforts are mapped to course outcomes. They also warn about student privacy issues when entering active courses to evaluate an instructor. Good point! A rubric was provided for asessment course and faculty performance effectiveness. The handout also included an example course evaluation form rating the course, the interaction, and open-ended questions about the course in general.

Michael Anderson and Brad Shaevel presented on a template for designing case-based courses. The template can be easily modified for creating a number of different types of courses that use case-based materials. Best of all, the model will soon be available free of charge at sourceforge.org. UT Telecampus does it again!

Ardelle Pate and Sharon Smaldino presented results of a study on social presence in online discussion forums. The research question was whether different types of forums added to the perception of social presence. Results indicated that a forum specifically designed to provide an informal place to socialize was poorly received and did little to increase social presence. However, the discussion forums in general contributed to success in the course.

The remainder of my notes are on my XO laptop which I don't currently have access to. The remaining session summaries will be posted later.