It is confirmed that I will be teaching an online class in the Fall at New York University: Principles and Practices of Online Course Creation and Instructional Design.

The course description:

Designed as an introduction for faculty, trainers, and other instructors, this course prepares you to develop and teach online courses. Topics include the application of learning theory to online instruction, online course content development, and strategies for effective online curriculum planning and delivery. Learn how to define the characteristics and needs of adult distance learners; effective ways to meet these needs through online instruction; and the differences between online courses and traditional courses with respect to class participation, interaction, course materials, and instructor involvement. Reinforce your skills with the design and delivery of an instructional unit.

While the course is online, we are requiring a synchronous weekly attendance for it, though I am planning to record the sessions. The dates for the live sessions are 9/23, 9/30, 10/7, 10/14, 10/21, 10/28, 11/4, 11/11, 11/18, and 11/25. The time will be from 6:30 PM 8:00 PM EST.

I am excited to be using the new Epsilen platform, that NYU SCPS just purchased and is planning to use for their expanded online offerings.

I have been speaking with colleagues all over the Web about this class, and am interested in any and all suggestions and words of wisdom for this (as well as resource suggestions!).

Tags: Instructional Design, online

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• @bdieu One of the great things about online classes is that there is no such thing as a distance any longer. #
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• Just saw that Issac Hayes just passed away. May he rest in peace. #
• I just finished revising my slides for Tuesday and Thursday. #
• I no longer give copies of my slides before class. I make them available online after class. Much more attention and discussion this way. #

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• Folded laundry. Going to iron and start the week off all organized. Who needs Friday nights, anyway? #
• @gminks Ouch for you and that class. Perhaps I can learn more to avoid the same mistakes? #
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• @gminks What class is it? #
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• @gminks Sounds like a good class at least! #
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• So deep into updating a project plan, I lost track of the time. Late for a meeting. #
• Saw a very complicated and large homeless “village” this morning. Hope the economy does not begin to increase this trend. #
• About to facilitate course revision designs for 4 more classes. #
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• Will attend a “Introduction to Synchronous Functionalities Workshop” for the new #NYU Epsilen online learning platform. #
• @mathplourde I used to agree, but I find airlines and such a place to finally disconnect and try to relax a bit. #
• This is the second #NYU training class in a row where we have been asked to stay an extra half hour. #
• This is the second #NYU training class in a row where we have been asked to stay an extra half hour. #
• Sorry for the technical problems, but it is highly unrealistic to ask people to spend 30 minutes. 5 perhaps, but 1/3 more of the class? #
• Am I the only one who has anything else to do or other commitments?! #
• Finishing the last meeting of the day. Then, time to do the work! #

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• Today’s first meeting is about to begin. I am hoping to catch up a bit today as 2 others scheduled for 5 hours have just been canceled! #
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• Getting soup for lunch. #
• Delta will offer offer wifi on domestic planes http://tinyurl.com/5bvpyh. 2 questions–Why did it take so long and Why is there a fee? #
• Shouldn’t offering wifi on Delta be a competitive advantage alone? #
• I just posted some thoughts about the first chapter we are discussing at @CPSquare in the book discussion http://tinyurl.com/6kf4zr #

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I have been speaking with a few of my colleagues, namely Sylvia Currie and Bronwyn Stuckey, as well as reading some of the blogs of our online class members, including Leigh Blackall (the class facilitator), Joao Alves, and Mike Bogle (whose posting inspired me to write this one), and decided I want to be a little more specific.

What learning objective shall I adopt for this course?

I spoke about this a bit with a new colleague in the class, Lynne Gilliland Garber (congrats on your first blog!), and have been thinking about refining what I initially intended for me to try to accomplish in this class. I can name this or that, such as learn more or experience something or meet people or the like, yet I am not sure that I will be in the same place at the end of December when the class ends. My interests and needs and experiences and expectations all will have changed. Learning itself often means more than developing knowledge or gathering a skill. Can the learning objective I may set today be valuable for me in five months? Will I still care about what I want today when I am in a different place then? Am I just going to be satisfied with wanting something I can envision now, without allowing for or regarding that which I do not even know exists tomorrow?

As an instructional designer, I face and create objectives every day. How else can we measure how successful a class or learning experience is? How else will we be able to establish the direction for our class, or have a glimpse of what we want to get out of the experience?

Let me pose it in a different way–how can we establish an objective and then hold ourselves to it for an experience that we have not had yet? If my objective is to learn to blog, but I walk away from the class with closer friends and colleagues, or a more expanded worldview of how we can foster global communities of practice using technologies and methods I do not yet even know exist, who cares if I learned to blog? Strict learning objectives would have me count the course a failure, as I would not have gotten what I came to get. Given my worldview from transformative learning, with a little spice of Foucault, Denzin, Brookfield, and Lyotard thrown in for good measure, I believe we need to set objectives and goals, but they can change and develop just as we do.

Back to this online course. For my objectives in this course, I want to:

• apply methods of facilitating online communities to the online courses I am developing at NYU
• develop my perspective of global online community of practice-based education

Let’s see how these may develop over the class itself.

Tags: FOC08, learning objective