The first big event at this year’s ITC Conference was a pre-conference workshop, presented by Kari Frisch, from Central Lakes College, in the MNSCU network. The session, walked us through 10+ steps to keeping a high retention rate in her fully-online classes. Here is a list of the steps for those of you who are interested, however I’m not providing the details behind each item – that’s special for me!
- Be present
- Build relationships
- Be organized
- Assignment schedules
- Two due dates
- Extra credit for spelling mistakes
- Consistency
- Variety
- Open-book, un-timed tests
- Survey students
Most of the items on that list are things that I constantly advocate to our instructors, however are things that I never incorporated into my course. I’m not sure why, as that makes me quite the hypocrite. One of the things that I learned from this workshop is that I should be spending much more time prepping for and engaging in my course. I’m not one to “set it and forget it,” but I could be doing so much more.I’ve implemented 1 change (already) since the workshop ended and 1 more scheduled to take effect in a few weeks. During this week’s module, I created an anonymous survey to get feedback from students on how they think the class is going, thus far. In face-to-face classes, Instructional Designers conduct Small Group Instructional Diagnoses (SGID), however they are rarely done in fully-online classes due to the nature of the process. In the survey that I created, I asked similar questions as the SGID, but the process will still yield different results because there is no group work involved in the online version. Hopefully I can implement some other changes based on their feedback. I’ve also come up with a new assignment to use when we get to the Mobile Tools module in a few weeks.Anyway, Kari did a great job and all ~15 participants learned a great deal. Excellent!As I write this, the morning keynote for Monday has ended and I am waiting for the concurrent sessions to begin. I’ll post some reflections on all of today’s sessions later on.Cheers!
Matthew Evins 