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Editor's Notes

1. Welcome to the February 2015 School of Liberal Arts Online Update webinar. I’m Roseann Torsiello, Chair of SLA online and I’m here with Barbara Monaghan, Associate Chair of SLA online. Today, we are going to do something different.
2. This time, our webinar in focused on YOU! You’ve given us some great ideas during the past year that we’ve been putting these webinars together and we’ve been listening. So tonight, we are going to showcase some of the questions you’ve asked and attempt to answer them as we go along. We chose our questions from the ones that seemed the most broad in spectrum and from the ones that we see repeated in the feedback. We really do review the questions you ask us and either respond via email or incorporate into future webinars. Barbara and I thank you so much for your support. So as we move along in this webinar tonight, we will stop periodically for questions or comments. Feel free to share with us what you are doing along these lines in your own classes. And remember, we hope that by the end of the webinar, we will have given you food for thought. We do not in any way say these are the best or only ways to teach a class. We merely put these links, tools and processes out there for your consideration.
3. First up, we have Diane Emmolo. Diane is an adjunct in our English Department, and she usually teaches our 100-level composition courses. Diane’s question is a good one, especially for those courses that do not have an OCR attached to it. Diane asks, “What are some resources for English composition courses.” When we found the three resources we’ve linked here, we considered Diane’s request, and your needs as instructors in other areas. The first resource, The Electric Typewriter, will be shown now. The Electric Typewriter is an aggregation website that houses selected nonfiction articles and essays from the world's best journalists and writers. The articles here run the gamut from Art and Culture, to Computer and the Internet to Psychology. And just to show you the spectrum of offerings, let’s take a look at the Psychology articles, for example. Here you can see a neat menu broken down by subtopic: Intelligence, Social Personality, Happiness, and the list goes on. And, Diane, we haven’t forgotten about you. There’s a section on short Memoirs and Growing Up in the Essays on Writing area. Diane, we’ve also included our next website from Publishers Weekly, which showcases what it considers to be the best essays written since 1950. You see it’s quite a diverse selection from Mailer, to Sontag to Baldwin. So this may be useful. And for the classicist in you, we’ve found a website called “Classic British and American Essays and Speeches – from Bacon to Orwell.” We hope that all of these will be beneficial resources for each of you in some way. Any questions or comments?
4. Professor Anne Walsh teaches in our Mathematics Department, and she has a question so we see so often in the feedback about how to make discussions more thought-provoking. We imagine that this must be a real challenge in classes like math. Back in our September 2014 webinar, we focused on four ways to enrich your discussions and even offered some helpful links. Remember that you can always access previous webinars through our SLA INFORMATION CENTER located in your course list. Here we have two screen shots from that webinar that we’d like to emphasize. First, think of creative, engaging, inclusive ways to draw your student in from the subject line. Second, think of new or related examples, shocking statistics, including animation, asking a debatable point or bringing in a game or tool like Flipquiz, EdPuzzle or Toondoo to have them creatively and actively engage in the forum. And just for you, Anne, we’ve found a great page on Pinterest called “Math Talk.” Here, some of the highlights are the “Math Talk Cards,” “Math Congress” and “Accountable Talk.” We hope that you will find these useful. Does anyone have any questions or comments to add to this part of the conversation?
5. Dr. Mary Ellen Stiehl teaches so many of our wonderful psychology course here at Berkeley and she asked a question more and more faculty have been asking: “How can I facilitate online groups. This has to be one of the most daunting tasks for online instructions and online students. So Mary Ellen, let’s start at the top, it’s all about organization and setting the tone. The students must be provided with a detailed overview of the scope of the assignment. In other words, they need to see a bird’s eye view of where this is headed. Next, use samples at each stage of the learning process. We call it a process, because tasks must be chunked for the online team to work well. We just can’t throw it at them all at once. And lastly, you make every effort to reinforce the expectations. Let me show you an example from one of my classes.
6. In this class, students develop a citizen’s journalist project. In the week before it is due, I include a detailed overview of the assignment, not only the outcomes expectation but down to the nitty-gritty – minimum number of slides, sentences and even font sizes. So here they get the overview and the details.
7. During the next week, you can see the details are repeated. But I’ve chunked another task – during this week, they are enrolling in teams through Bb’s self-enroll feature. As the instructor, I set the maximum number per group (usually no more than four) and I set which functions they have access too – discussion boards, file exchanges, email, etc. I try to limit the options.
8. Next, we talk about samples and clear reinforcement. Students are then furnished with a rubric and a sample project from a former student who has given permission to use his work as a model. Notice I literally write a series of steps to take to get from creation to delivery.
9. When we reinforce, we never assume. I provide student guidance on “lesser known” technological practices through an audio/visual module. I literally screencast directions on how to upload files to a group discussion so that students can follow my simple directions both given verbally and visually. Wait, what’s this, I hear another question. Why it’s Nick Bergan, a fabulous new instructor who is teaching Economics. Nick asked if we could introduce some more cool tech tools, so we decided to show you an easy way to screencast. I use this all the time to show students everything from how to post to a discussion board to a weekly welcome in each Course Material folder. But what would take me far longer to explain, let’s head over to Screencast-o-Matic and listen to their 1 ½ minute explanation of the tool. This tool has limited functions that comes with the free version, but I purchase the complete version annually, and the price is nominal.
10. So many of you thanked us for our date reminders. Here are three to remember, March 4th, your Week 9 Progress Reports are due. All courses are to be updated and ready for review by March 7th. Please remember to upload your syllabi to the School of Liberal Arts Information Center under Course Material. All grades for the Winter Quarter are due by 2pm on March 28th. A more detailed reminder about final grades will be sent via email later in the term.