Copying, Pasting, and Getting Caught

It’s a common complaint (often exaggerated) about online education that students plagiarize, but my horror stories aren’t about students. My horror stories are about developing online courses. (Note: neither of these stories is from PLS; these happened at a prior job.)
How NOT to Hide Your Tracks When Plagiarizing
I was reviewing a course I inherited from [...]

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August Wrap Up: Give or Teach?

Assessment is a challenging subject, no matter the form it takes. Natalie pointed out that formal assessments, through the use of Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation, are effective up until a certain point.  One could argue that our end of course surveys hover in the 3rd or 4th level of evaluation but it seems that [...]

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Assessment Beyond Smile Sheets and Tests

Christy took some time to review the concept of “Authentic Assessment.” Now let’s think about traditional assessments used in a face to face classroom. What options do we have? Which ones can be used in online assessment and how?
Many of the traditional forms of assessment can be conducted online. The table below only reviews a [...]

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Authentic Assessment in Online Courses

Maybe it’s my background as a band and music teacher that makes me such a fan of authentic assessment. After all, in band it’s expected that people actually be able to play and perform, not just talk about playing and performing. In fact, music education often has the opposite problem of many other areas of [...]

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Judy Gehr – Re-designing a Course from Sequential to Global Views

Judy Gehr, an educator and teacher for over thirty years,  has been working as a Performance Learning Systems Facilitator for over 10 years.  Judy has 32 years of experience as a classroom teacher for Caroll County Schools in Maryland, and now she currently shares her talents as a middle school math resource teacher working with [...]

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Two Approaches to Course Revisions

Each week for the rest of May we’re going to look at some of our upcoming new and improved courses. In addition to our usual development of brand new courses, we’ve all been working on updating and revising some of our older online courses. Over the last six months, I’ve had the opportunity to work [...]

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P.O.C: Training Implementation

P.O.C. Piece of cake. It’s my Dad’s favorite saying. One of my favorite sayings is: the more difficult it is to do, the more you’ll appreciate it in the end. And I, personally, found it true for the training portion of the LMS conversion process.
We were certainly prepared. As Natalie mentioned last week, we went [...]

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The Road To Sakai

The road to Sakai has been a long one for the Online Development Team. Its been roughly a year* since we began this odyssey into an LMS conversion and, beginning in January 2009, we’ll offer all of our courses in Sakai! This month is about that journey, that long walk together through the heights of [...]

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What is “Craft?”

When you ask people what they think of “craft” or “crafting things,” they might associate the idea of craft with “Arts and Crafts.” They think, no doubt, of afternoons spent making creature odds and ends with pipe cleaners, pompoms and googly eyes.  For me craft has always meant making things or being involved in a [...]

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What Are We Going To Teach From?

“What do you mean, there’s no textbook? What are we going to teach from?”
That was the question from the choir teacher in January of my first year teaching. Sheila (not her real name) had been hired mid-year to replace the previous choir teacher, who resigned over winter break. Sheila’s disbelief was in reference to our [...]

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