Month: November 2006

Collaboration Frustration

Post author By cindyu
Post date November 30, 2006
No Comments on Collaboration Frustration

Students and instructors share ambivalence when it comes to groupwork online. When it goes well, the learning experience is positive and provides a foundation for future collaborative work. When it doesn’t, it can be like a bad case of food poisoning – you’ll want to avoid a repeat episode at all costs.

This month’s edition of Online Classroom has a brief but useful article about teamwork: Activities 101: Improving Results and Reducing Frustrations from Team Activities. The summary: the most common reasons for learner frustrations include inadequate preparation and communication, and the most common reasons for faculty frustration include the need to deal with learner frustrations.

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I’ll be working with some colleagues to develop an orientation piece on Group Work for learners. Look for it this Spring as one of the Learning Toolkits on LEAP and as part of OLT’s Orientation to Online Learning in WebCT.

If you have any ideas/resources to share here – they would be much appreciated.

Cindy

Start of Term

January…coming soon!

Snowy Gastown

Originally uploaded by gray_eminence.

Time to prepare for another term start. Here are a few things you may want to do in preparation for the start of another term:

Review your course site. Your course will typically be cleaned out and reset somewhere between the final exam and the start of the new term. Check with your course developer to find out when you can access the reset course to check links and review content.

Prepare any new exams as required. If you’re not sure whether you need a new exam for your course, or you would like to view previous exams, contact Enrolment Services.

Check your course enrolment on the Faculty Service Centre

Check out the Orientation to Online Learning. If your course is online, your students will have access to a self paced Orientation resource in WebCT. If you would like to check this out yourself, send your CWL with your request for access to our helpdesk

Send a welcome email to your students on or just before the term starts (this year it is January 8th).

If you’re a new instructor, be sure to familiarize yourself with the OLT Instructor’s Guide

You may also want to download the full Term Prep Checklist (pdf)

Many things to many people

Post author By cindyu
Post date November 21, 2006
No Comments on Many things to many people

Weblogs can be used for many purposes. This one is for sharing information relevant to teaching a distance course at UBC. So far, this has kind of been a one way street. But what about you? I’m sure many of you have comments, stories and issues to share with your colleagues, perhaps you’d like to seek some feedback or generate a discussion. One way to do this is through the use of Comments.

Click on the word Comments at the bottom of this entry and try it out! Your comment will appear as soon as it has been approved (annoying, I know, but the approval process cuts down on spam).

You might also want to post an entry on a subject of interest. In this case, for now, please send it to me and I will post it. If you want to post regularly, let me know and we’ll set you up as an author on the blog.

That’s all there is to it! Comment away!

Cindy