Today's article from Inside Higher Ed concentrates on the Calumet's Distance Education Mentoring Project.
Researchers at Purdue University at Calumet believe that learning how to do distance education properly can make professors better at designing and administering their classroom-based courses.
“Most of the professors who teach at the university level have had no experience with pedagogy or instruction in general,” says Janet Buckenmeyer, chair of the instructional technology master’s program at Calumet. “They’re content experts, not teaching experts.”
When teaching online, she says, “You have to pay more attention to the navigation of the course, the clarity of the course, the objectives of the course, the reason why you’re assigning activities and assessments, [and make] certain everything is perfectly clear to the students. In a face-to-face situation, you can get by with just coming in and not having prepared and winging a class session. You can’t do that online.”
That was the thesis behind the creation of Calumet’s Distance Education Mentoring Project. The project takes faculty who are looking to adapt their classroom courses to the online environment and teams them up with Web-savvy colleagues. Those mentors advise the novices on best practices for online course design and oversee them through the first semester of the online version of the course. (An article detailing the project, authored by Buckenmeyer and two colleagues, is scheduled to appear in the January issue of the International Journal of E-Learning.)
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