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UMUC Highlights from the Maryland Distance Learning Association (MDLA) Spring 2010 Conference

Ivy Roberts

Instructional Support Specialist

Center for Support of Instruction

Published: May-June 2010

Category: » University-showcase » Conference-presentations

This year's theme for the Maryland Distance Learning Association's (MDLA) annual spring conference was "Meeting the Challenge: Guiding the Next Decade of Digital Learners." UMUC was well represented by its faculty and staff, and many of them presented sessions on topics ranging from the use of technology in the online classroom to the challenges of communication in distance education. Two UMUC staff members also received awards at the conference, as noted below.

Award Winners

Alana Fennie, Instructional Designer from Course Development, won the Instructional Designer of the Year award for her creativity, skill, and ability to meet client and student needs through her exemplary design and development work.

Richard Schumaker, Manager of Worldwide Training in the Center for Teaching and Learning, received the Special MDLA Service Recognition for his outstanding service to MDLA as president and president-elect between spring 2008 and March 2010.

Presenters

Lisa Bernstein, Collegiate Faculty in SUS, presented Bringing Language Learning to Life through the Evolving Web, explaining that today's faculty need to provide content and context to language learning that is relevant to students' lives and contemporary society instead of rote memorization, artificial situations, and outdated content. She demonstrated how media in the target language—including television, radio, and Web sites—can provide students with authentic experiences in foreign culture, current events, news, and art—all of which help make learning a new language interesting, fun, and meaningful to the student.

Irena Bojanova, Telecommunications Management Program Director, and Rana Khan, Biotechnology Studies Program Director, co-presented Acquiring Professional Science Master's (PSM) Designation for Online Degree Programs. PSM is an innovative graduate degree designed to allow students to pursue advanced training in science and mathematics while simultaneously developing workplace skills. Irena and Rana explained the procedures and challenges of implementing PSM components into the Biotechnology and Telecommunications Management programs along with lessons learned and future plans.

Les Pang, Database Systems Technologies Program Director, and Irena Bojanova, Telecommunications Management Program Director, explained in Web 2.0, Web 3.0, and Cloud Computing Learning Tools for the Next Decade how utilizing WWW technologies can enhance course objectives. They shared a Virtual Learning Tour (VLT) that was provided to Information Technology Systems graduate students in fall 2009. The VLT introduced students to Twitter, Second Life, and Google Docs; supported the learning objectives of two Information Technology core courses; and identified optimal teaching strategies when using these technologies.

CSI Senior Instructional Support Specialists Heloisa Siffert and Deb Schroeder, along with Rana Khan, Biotechnology Studies Program Director, offered perspectives on mentoring programs in their presentation Offering a Novel Online Mentoring program to Enhance Student Experience. They detailed the online community within UMUC's Professional Science Master's (PSM) Biotechnology program, which provides a custom open-source learning management system for mentoring interaction and pairs new students entering the program with industry professionals who serve as mentors. Heloisa, Deb, and Rana discussed the mentoring program development process, challenges and solutions, sustainability and adaptability of the program, and the program's potential impact on student retention and performance.

Jay Liebowitz, Orkand Endowed Chair in Management and Technology, tied knowledge management (KM) to e-learning as complementary approaches in his presentation Towards Building Strategic Intelligence: Knowledge Management and E-Learning, using UMUC's long history and leadership in distance and online education to demonstrate some of the leading work being done in e-learning. In this presentation, Jay explained how KM and e-learning are synergistic and highlighted some of the emerging work being accomplished in the field.

Mark Parker, Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Professional Writing, SUS, reviewed the results of a mixed-methods study of UMUC undergraduates who speak English as a second or foreign language and who have taken at least some courses fully online in his presentation Non-Native Speakers of English in Fully Online Courses: Benefits & Challenges of Asynchronous, Text-Based Communication. The results of the study suggest that such students, who may face both linguistic and cultural challenges in the traditional face-to-face classroom, possibly prefer and benefit from asynchronous, largely text-based online courses.

Stella Porto, Director of the Master of Distance Education (MDE) program, discussed how social software can be used creatively to support students and shared lessons learned from using social software in the MDE program in her presentation Learner Support through Social Software: A Graduate Experience. She discussed various learner support services that go beyond the virtual classroom and addressed the non-standard ways in which learner support for online programs needs to be conceived, planned, and managed. Stella demonstrated how social software can help address numerous challenges, such as providing students with access to an immediate support system, creating a continuous interconnectivity beyond the instructional environment, extending alumni relationships with the institution, and providing opportunities for lifelong learning.

Everybody Wave Now! Intro to Google Wave was presented by CSI Instructional Support Specialists Linda Smelser, Laddie Odom, and Floyd Csir, along with Instructional Designer Andrew Rein from Course Development. They discussed how this experimental Web 2.0 tool—mash up of e-mail, instant messaging, and documents with both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration.—has the potential for changing online communication, instruction, and learning. They demonstrated some features of Google Wave, including polling and quizzing gadgets, games, maps, and searches, and discussed how they can be integrated into the online classroom.

SUS Academic Directors Darlene Smucny (Social Sciences) and Katherine Humber (Gerontology), along with Assistant Academic Director Cynthia Davis-Sbaschnig (Communication and Writing), presented Academic Advice for All Ages: Bridging Multigenerational Gaps in the Online Classroom, in which they explained that our classrooms of "nontraditional" students also now consist of multigenerational learners. They provided practical tips and strategies for effectively managing the multigenerational online classroom, welcoming and engaging students across generations, and enhancing communication within the classroom. They also discussed how to adapt and apply successful multigenerational workplace practices to higher education to help engage learners of all ages. Participants were also encouraged to share their best practices for teaching multigenerational learners online.

Kathy Warner, Assistant Dean of Social, Behavioral, Natural and Mathematical Sciences in SUS and Emily Medina, Assistant Director of Course Development, in association with Christina Sax, Shippensburg University, presented Lessons Learned from the Redesign of a High-Enrollment Course, in which they discussed their approach to redesigning general education biology survey and lab courses from two separate courses into a single combined course using, in part, the principles of the National Center for Academic Excellence. The redesign had several components, including scaffolding of the learning activities, enhancement of the pre-existing leaning objects, and replacement of kitchen labs with virtual labs. They discussed the issues associated with implementing the redesigned course, the impact of the redesign, and the application of this strategy to general online course development.

Datta Kaur Khalsa, Director of Assessment for the Master of Education in Instructional Technology program, explained how multicultural e-learning teams exist as an intersection of technology, identity, culture, and community in her presentation Building an Online Teaching and Learning Community: Virtual Team Guidelines and Instructor Techniques. She shared and discussed a framework that included virtual teamwork guidelines and instructor plans and techniques.to help online educators become more efficient in facilitating and supporting diverse student populations. Datta also hosted a showcase roundtable entitled Building an Online Teaching and Learning Community: Matching Free Technology to the Objectives and Techniques, in which she led a discussion on how to take student learning beyond interaction, create valuable virtual teamwork, build social learning communities, and develop collaborative documents and projects.

Gretchen Jones, Director of Asian Studies, Hsiang-ting Wu, Collegiate Faculty, Chinese, and Alana Fennie, Instructional Designer, Course Development, presented The Online Foreign Language Class: At the Crossroads of Language Pedagogy and Course Design, in which they detailed the development of online language courses in Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic over the course of several years. They discussed the program vision, available resources, administrative successes and challenges, correspondence with adult learning principles, integration of audio and online activities with course modules, and evolution of the courses from the designer's perspective.

Claudia Stier and Akane Shirata, Collegiate Faculty, Foreign Languages, and Gretchen Jones, Director of Asian Studies, demonstrated how computer-mediated communication (CMC) voice software is used in an online foreign language program for both synchronous and asynchronous communication in their presentation Contextualized Language Instruction in the Online Environment: Yes, We Can! They demonstrated the use of Wimba Voice Tools to enhance instructor-student and student-student interaction in Japanese in synchronous and asynchronous activities and discussed the pedagogical implications of using synchronous and a-synchronous CMC voice tools for proficiency-oriented instruction.

Katherine Woodward, Program Director, Master of Education in Instructional Technology, and Barbara Schwartz-Bechet, Program Director, Master of Arts in Teaching, presented No Boundaries Online? How to Respond to Culturally Inappropriate and Controversial Online Conversations, in which they discussed strategies for online, Web-enhanced, and hybrid classrooms to transform potentially problematic comments from students into effective teaching opportunities. They opened discussion so that the audience could provide additional strategies and responses to presenter-provided scenarios.

To view the presentations listed in this article, go to the MDLA Forum at http://www-apps.umuc.edu/mdla_forums/index.php. Click on the presentation of your choice, and you will be directed to create an MDLA account to view the presentation.

About MDLA: The Maryland Distance Learning Association (MDLA) is a chapter of the United States Distance Learning Association with a mission to promote education, training and research for distance learning. For more information, please visit the MDLA Web site at http://www.marylanddla.org.