Effective Online Teaching Podcast

So I started this blog as part of a class and one of my assignments is to discuss how businesses can use RSS.  Really Simply Syndication or Rich Site Summary is a way to provide a way for people to opt-in and be able to keep track for when a website, podcast, or blog has changed content.  This allows for people to stay up to date with what is going on around a particular topic.  The biggest thing is that it moves away from forcing readers to keep checking to see if new content has changed or "pulling" them to your site a publisher of content is now able to "push" new content to a reader. This functionality can be used by a business internally to provide information around what is going on within the company and employees would always get pushed the new information as soon as it is published.  No more having to send out emails to remind people to view a new policy or procedure is published.  As soon as the policy or procedure is published everyone who has opted-in

This is the first episode of the Effective Online Teaching podcast where I introduce myself and provide a little background. Download the episode

Something that has been surfacing a lot lately in what I have been reading, listening too, and just in general and that is the idea of being intentional.  Being intentional with your finances, your health, your job, and your faith.  This ideal impacts every aspect of your life and impacts the way you teach, especially, online. Over the last decade of teaching online I have learned that I have to be intentional if I am going to impact my students success. There are two areas where intention is a big deal.  The first is in how you facilitate the online class.  I will admit that hasn't been the case in every semester I have taught.  I have got behind in grading, following up with students, and just keeping up with the class.  The best semesters have been those where I have logged in everyday, spent 30+ minutes grading, responding to messages, and looking through interaction logs for my students.  Those intentional moments have gone a long way to helping my students succeed. This sem

Like I said in my initial post I have been thinking about this blog/podcast for quite awhile and want to provide value to those who follow it.  So many of my initial posts on this blog will be my thoughts as I develop the first episode of my blog.  Any feedback would be appreciated. So for the first podcast episode I want to cover several things; the first of which is to introduce myself, not only who I am, why I feel "qualified" to do the podcast, but also to just explain where I come from.  I think my first blog post provides some of that information, but will want to enhance it so that it flows better - more presentation like. My intent is for each episode to be about 30 minutes long; long enough to provide value, but not so long that people don't want to finish.  The intro probably will only take 5 or so minutes so I will also cover a topic that I have shared with lots of faculty over the years... and would be my first Sam's Soapbox segment. Cue some so

Today is the day.  I have been thinking about this for many months. This has been an idea I have been toying with for awhile and it is finally coming to fruition.  I have been in the online learning field for a long time; pretty much since 1999.  I was only a work study at that time, but I got my start supporting the learning academy that San Juan College was running that summer.  We had a set of faculty who were learning about what it was going to mean to teach online for the first time.  I think at that time a lot of us were kinda running by the seat of our pants and since that time I have learned quite a bit about what it means to teach online.  Fast forward several years to 2006 - that was the first year that I taught my first fully online class.  It was an introduction to biology course and it included the lab component online as well.  During those first semesters I spent time "defending" the techniques, the learning the students were doing, and so on.  It has now been