ISU Distance Education News

Behind the scenes with Flora, Lawrence, Wolt, and Hurd

This month’s Asynchronous Learning Academy (ALA) features faculty sharing their experiences teaching at a distance. ALA is an informal group of College of Agriculture faculty and staff who meet to learn about and discuss distance education.

The meeting is noon to 1:30 p.m. Thursday, April 20 in room 13 Curtiss Hall. Box lunches are provided by the Brenton Center for Agricultural Instruction and Technology Transfer. Gaylan Scofield, interim center director, welcomes anyone who wishes to attend. If you plan to attend, contact Carrie Brus by Monday, April 17 at 294-1862 or cbrus@iastate.edu.

Faculty members will talk about experiences with their courses.
Sociology 325: Agriculture in Transition/Sociology 544: Sociology of Food and Agricultural Systems
Jan Flora, Professor of Sociology
Delivery: online with supplemental CDs containing video clips

Economics 235: Introduction to Agricultural Markets
John Lawrence, Professor of Economics
Delivery: online

Agronomy 570X/ Veterinary Diagnostic and Production Animal Medicine 570X: Risk Assessment for Food, Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine
Jeff Wolt, Professor of Agronomy working in the Biosafety Institute for Genetically Modified Agricultural Products
(BIGMAP), and Scott Hurd, Associate Professor of VDPAM
Delivery: online (experiment with Microstudio)

The Brenton Center for Agricultural Instruction and Technology Transfer mission is to deliver quality credit and noncredit education, provide reliable services, and ensure exemplary support for technology use and distance education efforts of the College of Agriculture.
--Lynette Spicer, communications specialist

Deadlines? There are deadlines?

(or Why should I care when Distance Education gets my course?)

There really are good reasons. Submitting your course by the deadline ensures it is
o posted on the www.lifelearner site – which received an average of more than 9,000 unique visitors each month in 2005, most by students looking for courses
o the course is open for registration when students are looking for courses
o the course is listed on the Board of Regents, State of Iowa distance education Web site - www.iride.org
o the course is promoted by the Regents' education centers in Davenport, Sioux City, and Council Bluffs including a listing in their semester catalogs and flyers
o the course is accessible through the 1,040 URLs that link to www.lifelearner.edu, accessible to students around the world using search engines

The deadlines to submit distance education courses are
February 3 for fall semester courses
July 29 for spring semester courses
December 2 for summer courses

Sometimes courses just can’t be submitted on time… but sooner is always better than later.

What causes late submission of courses? Let me know. Post your comments.
--Lynette Spicer, communications specialist

Why and When To Use Technology

Last week I attended the International Forum for Women in eLearning sponsored by the United States Distance Learning Association. Carol Daunt, from Australia’s LearnTel Pty Ltd, opened with a workshop titled Dial M for Learning. Her presentation included the following thoughts about choosing technology.....

Having looked at the range of technologies available, we must ask "Why?" Why would you want to use any or all of those available? For one reason only - teaching is about learners. Using a combination of technologies must be for the purpose of improving learning in some way. It must not be because:
* The organization has invested a lot of money in this technology.
* Everyone else is using it.
*This is the latest and it's really sleek.
* Or....any number of such reasons which we unfortunately hear too often!

There is no formula for the right and wrong time to use technology. Only you can decide from your knowledge of the learners, the content, and the technologies available to you.

Today's choices help us meet the demand of students for "anytime/anywhere" education. When deciding how to deliver courses from Iowa State, you can choose from Web-based platforms, mixed delivery methods, CD-ROMs, DVDs, Breeze Live, Podcasting, media streaming - you name it -

Offer comments on your experience with technology.....What has worked for you - for your students? What do you want to learn more about? How can the Iowa State Distance Education staff help you?

Kris Phelps, Program Coordinator

Iowa Distance Learning Conference - April 27-28th

IACON - Iowa Connection Conference will be held April 27-28th in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

This conference on Education Futures is sponsored by the Iowa Distance Learning Association and the Iowa Association for Communication Technology.

Dr. Julian Lombardi, Assistant vice President of Academic Services and Technology Support at Duke University will be the Opening conference Keynote speaker. Dr. Lombardi is an American computer scientist known for his work in user interface design and in the design of computer systems that support collaboration between large numbers of users. He is one of 6 principal architects of the Croquet Project.

Stan Ethington, a Higher Education Executive from Apple will present the lunch keynote address on Podcasting in Education.

Detailed conference information is available at IDLA.org

http://www.idla.org/