SEED - Spreading Educator to Educator Development (A Group of Educators in Maine) - the source of the "Seedlings" name.
The guest speaker, Stephanie, in this podcast got her degree in Instructional Design at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. She recently go a job developing learning initiatives and developing online courses and programs at the University of New Hampshire. Previously she was the technology coordinator at a school district in Maine, which is how she got into SEED. Instructional designers serve a lot of different purposes in different schools; at Wentworth, she was basically a curriculum coach, an assessment analyst, and tech help person. Also at this school, it was a laptop school, which created an understanding among students and teachers how to handle and deal with laptop schools and curricula. Stephanie said that while she was at Wentworth, a new provost came in and was somewhat appalled that this "institute of technology" had no online courses, so the provost turn to Stephanie and others like her to develop these online courses. They partnered with the professors and successfully developed a lot of hybrid/online courses. They were successful because they considered not what makes a good online/hybrid course, but what make any course a good course. This experience at Wentworth inspired her to get things going at UNH.
A few things they found about online classes and programs is that students are much more likely to present their true opinions and thoughts on an online discussion board than in regular class discussion; also it gives them more time to think out an intelligent way to convey what they really think. Stephanie said that all the teachers who head the online classes have said the discussion board is THE MOST important part of the online class. She also said that some students don't really have a frame of reference for online classes and don't know how to deal with it, but I don't think this will be any big issue in the future, since technology constantly growing as a player in learning and social networking. Stephanie also discussed how these online classes are truly different than physical classes, or the same depending on how you think about it. You don't show up to online discussion with a Power Point presentation, because it's about collaboration and real discussions, not lecturing. This is another area where people's views of education and class discussion are changing for the better.
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