The TWT FIG met on April 25th.  We worked on an activity about how technology has changed education.  TWT s18 worksheet how tech has changed ed

Technology has definitely impacted how we teach and students learn, both positively and negatively. These include:

• access to information:  students are now able to access information at almost anytime and anywhere.
• assessment:  instructors can use online quizzes and easily give students multiple opportunities to take quizzes.  However, these quizzes to take time to set up in our lms.
• communication (between students and instructor; between students): using discussion boards, students are able to communicate their ideas and have time to think about what they want to post before making it available to others to read.  Also, students that are more shy might find posting their thoughts less intimidating than speaking in class.  For an instructor, reading all of the posts and commenting might take more time than an in-class discussion.

Thinking about email communication, sometimes students expect an instant response regardless of the day or time.  To alleviate this issue, it’s important to be clear at the start of the class what a typical email response time will be.  For example, the instructor checks twice a day on weekdays only and will send a response within 24 hours.

• accessibility:  availability of all class materials to all learners is important.  Videos with captions, word docs that use the heading features in word make your materials more accessible to all learners.  The next TWT meeting will focus on accessibility.
• time:  students and faculty are spending more time on classes that have less face to face time!  Students have more reading to do and faculty are reading and grading/commenting on  more student work.  Thinking about the assignments and the amount of time it will take students to complete the work and faculty to grade it is an important consideration when developing your course.

The TWT FIG held its first meeting on March 28th and April 17th in order to try to accommodate as many interested colleagues as possible. Here is a list of tools we discussed:

Time toast – creates timelines

Timelines can be created to digitally represent a series of historical events as a way to present course content or used as a way to visually illustrate when class assignments, drafts of papers, and quizzes will take place.

https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/the-world-s-space-program-timeline-thing-link-http-science-nationalgeographic-com-science-space-space-exploration-timeline

Vialogues- use a video and have people discuss it

Students can view an assigned video and add then have an online discuss and comment on the video.

https://vialogues.com/

Kahoot!- games 

great to use as icebreakers in your class

https://kahoot.com/welcomeback/

Edureations- short videos created by users

Educreations allows you to draw and talk and record a short presentation.

https://www.educreations.com/features/

We also talked about e-learning at KCC.  A townhall meeting is being organized so that the KCC community has the opportunity to discuss online learning at KCC. A report about online learning at KCC and national trends in community college distance education and student success has been written by Dean Cathy Leaker and distributed to the college community. KCC’s plan is to increase the number of hybrid and online courses offered. In addition, the college would like to attract a different audience of students, such as adult learners, by offering an AA Liberal Arts online starting Fall 2019.