in web-enhancing traditional courses; and Tom is in-terested in using PowerPoint and visual material to en-

hance his classes. The bottom line for all of these ed-ucators is present-ing material in an engaging way, re-inforcing concepts

through the use of technology, and organizing and ad-ministering course materials more easily. Professional development opportunities are available through TLC Workshops and Roundtables: Please join us.

Howard Seigelman, Tony Snyder, and Ron Sopenoff have been Brookdale educators for decades, while Tom Kapsak, Dara Evans, and Meg Natter are fairly new to teaching. All have shown a dedication to supporting the teaching and learning process by keeping cur-rent with both pedagogy and technology. And the Teaching and Learning Center is proud to support those efforts. It’s what we at Brook-dale do best: fo-cus on teaching. Ron, Dara and Meg teach face-to-face and fully online courses; Tony and How-ard are interested

Vol.4, Issue 1Academic Year 2009-2010

Focus on ...Active Learning Techniques ................................ 2 Supporting Success for Online Learners ............. 3Learning About ADA Section 508 ...................... 4 Honors: Award Winning TLC Staff .................... 5What is Quality Matters? .................................... 8TLC Open House .............................................. 10Fall Workshop Schedule ................................... 12

ContributorsDan GreenwoodNorah Kerr-McCurryErnest Oversen

Faculty Committed to Continued Professional Development

Message from Director of TLCNorah Kerr-McCurry

There can be a great deal of satisfaction in teach-ing; sometimes though, it is terribly frustrating. We’re told that everything is changing all of the time - the students, the classroom, the technology - and it seems impossible to keep up. But Brook-dale faculty have shown that they are up to the challenges, and the TLC works to support them.

We are particularly proud of our TLC Roundtables, with Professor Keating, where faculty can explore pedagogical technique as well as administrative concerns. The TLC is dedicated to educating, supporting, improving, innovating, growing and collaborating in a continued focus on teaching.

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Active Learning Techniques by Norah Kerr-McCurry

Congratulations to Newly Certified FacultyTwo sections of our certification course were offered in the Spring 2009 term. Interestingly, the completion rate for faculty mirrors student completion of online courses, around 65-67%. These 26 faculty members spent at a minimum 21 hours over seven weeks engaged in this course and began development of their own online course. Congratulations to:

Faculty interested in teaching fully online courses participate in the TLC’s “Online Teaching and Learning: Systems & Students”, where we model good design practices and teaching techniques. In our first discussion, faculty are asked to pick a word to describe what they like best about face-to-face teaching. There has been a consistency with the answers: Words like rapport, energy, dynamics, motivation, spark, and connecting domi-nate. And I always indicate that what I like best about teaching is feedback. In a well-designed and facilitated online course, you can expect these things and more.The TLC’s first Lead Faculty Fellow, Kathleen Offenholley, often said, “there’s no sitting in the back of the classroom in an online course”. Imagine that student in your face-to-face class that shows up, sits in the back row, nods occasionally, but never speaks up. Since you see this person, you know they are there, but you really have no idea if they are listening or fast asleep with their eyes open.Online, that same student does not have that luxury - they must “speak up” to be seen - you’ve forced the issue with your course design and the requirements for interaction, whether in a discussion or in group work or other activity - and in that way you’ve made contact, a connection, can assess energy, rapport and enthusiasm, and will occasionally see that light bulb go off in the aha moment. That’s rewarding, and that’s teaching and learn-ing, no matter the venue.A piece by Kathleen McKinney of the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology at Illinois State Univer-sity, really hits the mark in suggesting active learning techniques for both traditional and online courses. First, “Active learning refers to techniques where students do more than simply listen to a lecture. Students are DO-ING something including discovering, processing, and applying information. Active learning “derives from two basic assumptions: (1) that learning is by nature an active endeavor and (2) that different people learn in differ-ent ways” (Meyers and Jones, 1993).McKinney suggests utilizing techniques like think-pair-share; collaborative learning groups; student-led review sessions; games; analysis or reactions to videos; student debates; student generated exam questions; and keeping journals or logs. It is topics like these that faculty explore in our Certification Course, and at the TLC Round-tables. Read McKinney’s article online at http://www.cat.ilstu.edu/additional/tips/newActive.php, and come to a Roundtable to discuss other teaching practices with your colleagues.

Paula Baier Stephanie Bennett Thomas Berke Angela Brathovde Kenneth Brumbaugh Kevin Burkitt Caroline Calogero Mike Conklin Michael Elmes

Joanne Eskola Cathy Lee Finnegan Richard Greene Amy Gingold Lois Higbie Manjeet Kaur Joe King Laura McCullough Charles Mencel

Sue Monroe Sarah Morgan Jonathan Moschberger Nicolette Nicola Jana Phelps Bonnie Ross Joe Torchia Linda Wang

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Faculty considering teaching online courses are sometimes troubled by a national statistic: Completion rates in online courses are lower than in traditional courses. We know from the literature and our own research that course design is a factor in student success, and Brookdale’s Teaching and Learning Center works to support faculty in the design process in a variety of ways. First, faculty teaching fully online courses complete our certification course, “Online Teaching and Learning: Systems & Students” where some emphasis is placed on the Quality Matters Rubric (see article). Another fac-tor is the employment of active learning techniques that promote student-to-student, student-to-material, and student-to-faculty interaction: This too is addressed in the certification course.

But a factor that we cannot control is student readiness. It has been shown that students need good reading, good writing, and good time management skills to be successful online learners. And what we REALLY can-not control are the personal factors that affect students taking online courses: Work, family, and other issues that may be the impetus for their taking an online course in the first place.Distance education courses were originally designed for the “returning woman”. This population would not necessarily possess the skills that we measure.

Supporting Success for Online Learners

(Continued on page 10)

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Learning about ADA Section 508 by Dan Greenwood

Brookdale’s Disability Services Office provides aca-demic accommodations to qualified students with docu-mented disabilities. The accommodations provided are not to give a student with disabilities an advantage in class but to balance the playing field and address the documented deficits where possible.

The Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 508 in part requires:

“Electronic and information technology de-veloped, procured, maintained or used by the Federal government be accessible to people with disabilities. These regulations apply to all Fed-eral purchases of technology. Requirements in Section 508 may also impact state colleges and universities…”

We asked Ernest Oversen, Brook-dale’s Director of Disability Services, for some information and guidance. He reports, “A student taking an on-line course is advised to submit his or her alert form at the orientation, request and discuss accommodations with the professor at that meeting. If an orientation is not offered or the

student does not attend, the student must inform the pro-fessor (phone or email) that he or she has an alert. The student will request and discuss accommodations with the professor. The professor may contact this office and I can confirm that the student is registered for services and is entitled to accommodations requested. Finally, during the course the student must remind the profes-sor of any testing accommodations within a week of the scheduled exam”.

Ernest informs the TLC and faculty member of possible accommodation issues for students in online courses if the student self-identifies with Disability Services. The TLC then works with faculty to identify any potential is-sues and find solutions. “Students with disabilities can-not be barred from online classes due to their disability, and colleges are obligated to provide reasonable accom-

modations. What is a reasonable accommodation? This is a hotly debated subject within our field. What I can say is that colleges can deny accommodations to a qualified student if the accommodation jeopardizes the integrity of the test, course or program. Accommoda-tions can also be denied if accommodations place an undue financial burden to the college”.

The TLC works with faculty in the creation of learning objects for online delivery, and has been proactive in emphasizing ADA require-ments. This is particularly important in the delivery of multi-media content. We have found though that many existing course resources need remediation, and have worked to identify software applications that can make the process easier. One example involves the online ARTH-105 taught by Mary Roth-Davies (pictured). Mary utilized Camtasia and Articulate Presenter to present a rich learning environment for her students; however, the audio portion did not contain a transcript. After recording Mary’s voice, we utilized Dragon Naturally Speak to produce a block of text. The chal-lenge now is to take that block of text and turn it into a meaningful document for student use. Department Chair Marie Maber is working to identify departmen-tal resources to complete this project.Elaine Olaoye encountered the same issue with her PSYC-245 online; Elaine recorded her voice with the same software, the TLC ran the program, and Joan Rudinski, Division Administrator for Social Sciences identified resources to produce the transcripts. It must be noted that this process is far from perfect; in fact, it is quite cumbersome. The best solution is to produce the transcript BEFORE recording audio to ensure compliance and support student learning.Ernest talked about closed captioning and said in part,

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Dan Greenwood, TLC Instructional Designer, was honored as an Outstanding Administrator by the Administrative Professional Development Committee. Dan is pictured at the Garden Party receiving the award from Brookdale President, Dr. Peter Burnham. Dan was nominated by a faculty member for his outstanding work in the development of online courses. Dan works closely with faculty in the design and implementation of rich media learning experiences, ADA compliance issues, and other im-portant aspects of the educational process.

Mike Qaissaunee, Associate Professor of Engineering and TLC Lead Faculty Fellow, pic-tured with the The HI-TEC Educator of the Year Award. Mike received this award for his demonstrated leadership in wireless education, documented collaboration with the wireless industry, support and mentoring of students in wireless projects, their own innovative research and educational initiatives, and their efforts in preparing students for employment in wireless and wireless-related industries.

Honors: Award Winning TLC Staff

“Ideally, all materials should be closed caption. In my opinion, a transcript is appropriate for any mixed media material that is less than 15 minutes in length. Mixed media material longer than 15 minutes should be closed caption. I feel the student is not able to participate fully and misses something if he or she must read a transcript of an hour long video. Simple transcripts may be acceptable for purely audio material or when written material is provided in conjunction with the transcript (example a transcript to supplement a power point presentation) or with short mixed media material”. Ernest’s guidance tracks with the TLC’s advice on “chunking” information for online delivery.

Online testing can be impacted by the student’s disability and or accommodations. The TLC should be noti-fied by the professor that a student in their class has the accommodation of extended time in order for TLC to make the proper adjustments in ANGEL. Students who are entitled to and request Oral testing – Read only or Oral testing – Answer only or Scribe with testing cannot take an online examination and will be required to take their exams on campus if they choose to use their accommodation. The Disability Office should be noti-fied immediately to make testing arrangements for the student.Blind students and students with visual impairments may find online courses difficult. With the aid of a screen reader such as Zoomtext and Kurzweil, students can participate to a certain level. The problem is that the current software is limited and has difficulty reading graphs and charts. We agree with Ernest when he says, “Online courses for the Deaf and Hearing Impaired have been proven to work at BCC. Can we do better? Absolutely. The use of closed caption, transcription and other means of com-munication has helped our students grasp concepts in the course and fully participate, which is the measure of ADA compliance.”.

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You may have heard reference to Quality Matters in TLC workshops or Roundtables. So what is Qual-ity Matters? According to the organization’s web site (qualitymatters.org) Quality Matters (QM) is a faculty-centered, peer review-based process that is designed to certify the quality of online courses and online compo-nents. QM uses national surveys and research to define a rubric with a series of standards that online and hybrid courses should meet. The goal is that certified courses

reflect the latest proven concepts on what makes a well designed course.

QM Reviews There are formal and informal QM reviews. Formal or Official reviews can be done through the QM organiza-tion or by a set of QM affiliate reviews. Both of these approaches can lead to a course being recognized as

What is Quality Matters?

General QM Standards

Course IntroductionLearning Objectives

Assessment Measurement Resources and Materials

Learner Engagement Course Technology

Learner SupportAccessibility

a Quality Matters certified course. These reviews are done by a committee. At Brookdale, we have adopt-ed some part of the QM process; we are exploring the possibilities for a more formal adoption of QM and the Peer Review process.

Brookdale, through membership in the NJ Virtual Community College Consortium (NJVCCC) is an affiliate member of the Quality Matters Consor-tium.Who makes up a formal QM review committee? The chair of the com-mittee must be a QM Master reviewer who has been specifically trained and experi-enced in running QM reviews. The rest of the committee is made up of two QM peer reviewers. Of these three individuals at least one must be from an external institution.. One reviewer must be a subject matter expert in the course’s discipline. All reviewers must have taught an online course within the last 18 months.The review committee checks the course against the eight standards; remember that each standard has multiple requirements. In total, forty items are examined when reviewing a course. Each item has an assigned point value. The points indicate if each specific standard recommendation is Essential, Very Important or Important. For a class to be certified it must meet all the essential standards and earn at least 72 points. As you can see this process is rather intricate and takes a lot of time.Informal reviews use the same standards but do not go through the QM system. Informal reviews are a

Brookdale has adopted use of

this rubric for the course design process. There are 40 specific requirements in support of the

eight general standards.

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that a course using a lot of multimedia content that doesn’t help the student achieve the stated goals for the course may not pass a QM review while a more text-based course may.

Course Delivery Technology - Brookdale uses the ANGEL system at this time. The QM review does not include an analysis of which LMS is used. This means that courses can be QM certified re-gardless of the LMS. As long as the course meets the QM rubric any system can be used. Likewise the school’s institutional infrastructure is not relevant to a QM review. Both of these aspects make sure that both large and small schools can attain QM certified courses. Obviously though the reviewers need access to any systems that are used for the course during the review process.

Faculty or Students Readiness - Neither faculty nor student readiness is part of the QM standard. The reviewers do not investigate whether everyone involved in the actual course has taken either techni-cal training or prerequisite courses for example. In fact the QM reviews typically occur on courses that do not have student information or work. The QM review is all about the course not the instructor’s capabilities to use the LMS or even teach the subject. Another example is that the review doesn’t check to see if students can use the LMS or need specific skills to take the course. Remember though that the QM review does look at the design of the course. As the TLC and faculty explore the possibilities of Quality Matters our focus remains the same: The well designed course’s contri-bution to student learning.

good way to prepare courses for formal review or to simply help improve the design of the course. Quality Matters recommends that a course have been taught at least two terms before going through an official review.The TLC’s Certification Course models course design that meets QM standards, and devotes a unit to the Quality Matters Rubric. But the focus of our course is pedagogy - teaching, not technology.

What Isn’t Covered in a QM Review?Both as a potential reviewer and as a course developer, it’s important to understand that QM isn’t about items such as the teaching techniques or course content. It’s about the design of the course. A good way to expand on this is with a few examples.

Instructor’s teaching approach - Obviously different people have different ways of teaching, both in face-to-face and online courses. Teaching approaches also often vary widely from one course subject to another. QM in no way dictates how a course should be taught. If you feel it is best to have students follow a well defined sequence of learning activities before mov-ing onto a new topic then QM neither encourages nor discourages that approach. Conversely if your teaching style has students proceed at their own pace or more independently QM supports that approach. Your teach-ing pedagogy is completely yours to follow. Since Quality Matters is concerned with the design of courses, a QM review focuses on if your course meets the concept of alignment. So if your approach is to pace student progress as they proceed to new topics, QM is concerned that you have some means of ensur-ing that each student has met the unit objectives. QM does not review your approach to ensuring this align-ment.

Actual Course Content - As the course developer or instructor, you can choose the content that works best for your course. While the review committee is re-quired to have one subject matter expert, that individu-al’s role is not to critique the course content itself. They are there to verify that the subject matter represented in the course helps meet the QM standards. This means

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The Teaching & Learning Center has explored the possibilities for giving students information about themselves that will allow for informed choices in the selection of courses and delivery methods. Our web site is comprehensive, giving students infor-mation on requirements, but we knew that some-thing more was needed.So Instructional Designer Dan Greenwood created an Online Course Self-Evaluation Survey to mea-sure three important areas for students: Learning Style; Time Commitment and Schedule; and Tech-nological Skills and Resources. Over 800 students took the survey since it was launched, providing them with information to make important educa-tional decisions.While we are not tracking these students, we can be assured that we are providing students access to tools and information; the College does not have a gateway through which students must pass before they enter the world of online learning. The TLC supports student choice: We cannot know if a student will take online courses even if they do not possess some of the skills we have identified, but we do know that many online students would not have access to a higher education without this flexibility.

Supporting Success for Online Learners (cont.)

Based on their answers, each student receives an analysis of their:

Learning Style Time Commitment/Schedule

Technological Skills

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TLC Open House and Faculty Appreciation DayApril 2009

Dan Greenwood and Maria Breger demonstrated educational software applications.

Thanks to featured faculty Dara Evans; Brent Costleigh; Alex Idavoy; Meg Natter; Elaine Olaoye; Mike Qaissaunee; Jane Scimeca; Ron Sopenoff.

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Fall 2009 TLC WorkshopsTLC Workshops and Roundtables are designed for full and part-time faculty.

SeptemberDay Date Time Title Tues 9/1 10:00 a.m. Intro to ANGELTues 9/1 2:00 p.m. Intro to ANGELWed 9/2 9:00 a.m. Intro to ANGELWed 9/2 11:00 a.m. Intro to ANGELWed 9/2 4:00 p.m. Language Dept. ANGELFri 9/11 9:30 a.m. ANGEL RefresherFri 9/11 11:30 a.m. ANGEL GradebookFri 9/11 2:00 p.m. Intro to ANGELMon 9/14 11:00 a.m. Camtasia StudioMon 9/14 5:00 p.m. ANGEL GradebookTue 9/15 10:00 a.m. ANGEL for LeadershipWed 9/16 11:00 a.m. ANGEL RefresherFri 9/18 10:00 a.m. Camtasia StudioWed 9/23 9:00 a.m. ANGEL GradebookWed 9/23 12:00 p.m. Discussion ForumsThur 9/24 11:45 a.m. TLC RoundtableTues 9/29 4:30 p.m. Intro to ANGELTues 9/29 6:00 p.m. Certification Course

Copyright © 2009, Teaching & Learning Center, Brookdale Community College

September 24th Roundtable Topic: The 10 Worst Teaching Mistakes? Professor Paul Keating and Norah Kerr-McCurry will lead our TLC Roundtable discussion. Join us for a lively discussion over lunch; location TBA. RSVP Please.

Certification Course to Teach Online Courses:Online Teaching & Learning: Systems & Students

Initial meeting for Course:Tuesday, 9/29 at 6:00 p.m.

OR Friday, 10/2, 11:30 a.m.

Note: A minimum enrollment of 10 is needed to run this course.

Focus On Teaching Newsletter Staff:Norah Kerr-McCurry, EditorDan Greenwood, Graphic DesignerMaria Breger, Photographer

Teaching and Learning Center Staff:Norah Kerr-McCurry: nkerr-mccurry@brookdalecc.eduDan Greenwood: dgreenwood@brookdalecc.eduMaria Breger: mbreger@brookdalecc.eduDenise Vigil: dvigil@brookdalecc.edu

732-224-2089

OctoberDay Date Time Title Fri 10/2 9:30 a.m. Intro to ANGELFri 10/2 11:00 a.m. Certification CourseWed 10/7 2:00 p.m. Camtasia Studio Tues 10/13 9:00 a.m. Discussion ForumsWed 10/14 11:00 a.m. PowerPoint Thur 10/15 9:00 a.m. ANGEL GradebookFri 10/16 10:30 a.m. Articulate Presenter Thur 10/29 11:45 a.m. TLC Roundtable

Teaching and Learning Center