Are You Behind the 8 Ball-- or Ahead of the Curve?
1. Are you behind the 8 ball ---
or ahead of the curve?
Sharon Fratta-Hill, PhD
Vice President of Distance Education
2. Evaluating Your Training
• Do you need to make your training:
– more cost effective?
– more agile?
– more engaging?
– produce measurable skill improvements in
employees?
• …..(and do it without travel funds)
3. Heading Down the Right Road
• We wanted to create a high end distance education
training platform.
• We wanted to move away from the text-based point
and click experience that was so familiar to the
government and military employee.
• We wanted to find out how to change skill levels and
hold the interest of an adult student.
• We wanted to provide the right technology and
pedagogy for a new generation of federal learners.
4. Choosing the Right Distance
Education Modality & Pedagogy
• Page turner format may be able to produce Bloom’s
Taxonomy Knowledge (rote) level learning, but student
engagement is needed for Application (or higher) level
knowledge acquisition.
• Students must have the opportunity to:
– Acquire basic knowledge.
– Share and analyze knowledge with their peers and instructor.
– Engage in hands-on activities which apply the newly acquired
information or skill set.
5. Our Survey said:
• We needed a platform that allows students to chat or interact
with the teacher in a real time collaborative manner.
• We needed:
– The ability to share video and audio with students
– To create a continuous learning environment
– The ability to allow students to privately work and speak
with each other
– To be able to share simulations and application software
with students
6. The Journey
Blackboard Adobe Connect
• Used v. 6 of Blackboard to • Used Adobe Connect 7.5 to
create initial online classes create asynchronous and
– Federal clients wanted more synchronous online classes
interaction with faculty and – Asynchronous classes lacked
fewer independent activities structure
• Blackboard version 9.1.4 was – Students could not determine
adopted with an Adobe the sequence in which
Connect Building Block learning events should be
completed
• Bb Collaborate now provides
– Bb provides a building block
the options in one portal.
for seamless access
7. What Makes an Experience Engaging?
Accessible Collaborative Compelling
Easy to Use Personalized Responsive
9. START
The Graduate School DE
Program started with:
•A huddle room
•2 face to face ISDs
•1 designer with Blackboard
administration experience
•A Bb managed hosting
agreement
-----------------------------------------
Use a contractor to help you
design your first courses.
10. What Do You Want to Add to Your
Courses to Make them Engaging?
Interactive Features
• Captivate Simulations
• Quizzes
• Flash Content
• Video and You Tube links
• Polling
• Wikis and Blogs
• Recorded lectures
11. Down the Road -----Staff Wish List
• Project Manager
• Flash programmer
• ISDs with rich media
experience
• Help desk contact
• Video/audio editor
12. How Did We Measure Success?
• We were able to meet contract
training needs when travel dollars
were gone. (HUD Leadership)
• We were able to measure and
improve student engagement.
• Student and agency satisfaction
ratings
14. It’s Also About the Experience
• Starbucks is more than a cup of coffee.
• Amazon is more than shopping.
• iTunes is more than music.
• Why shouldn’t your elearning programs be more
engaging and effective?
15. Questions?
Dr. Sharon Fratta-Hill
sharon.fratta@graduateschool.edu
202-314-3600
Notas do Editor
CSRS RETIREMENT BENEFITS GRADUATE SCHOOL, USDA
CSRS RETIREMENT BENEFITS GRADUATE SCHOOL, USDA
What Makes an Experience Engaging? Achieving engagement is the objective, the business imperative; now let’s take a closer look at the nature of the actual touch points, interactions, and experiences that “move the needle” on engaging—or disengaging—customers. The key attributes (not exclusive to technology) of an engaging experience are: Accessible —Readily available to the customer any time, anywhere and on their medium of choice. For example, United Airlines enables you to book a flight, choose your seat, check in, and get flight delay info 24x7from your desktop or mobile device. Wells Fargo provides 24x7 account information, service enrollment, and transactions. Collaborative —Facilitates interaction with others (e.g., social networking sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook), unlocks tremendous value, is personalized, crosses boundaries between business and personal networks. For example, booking a vacation and reading reviews from previous guests at Yelp.com to find out more about hotels or restaurants in the area Compelling —More interactive and entertaining—for example, Nike.com website where you can customize your own shoes with NikeID, order different right and left show sizes or different colors for the sole, base, lining, etc. Easy to use —Interactions and transactions are easy. For example, Amazon.com with one-click purchases, iTunes with easy no touch synchronization, and, as you’ll see in a short demo, a faster-to-complete insurance claim form process built into LiveCycle and Flex) Personalized —Customized to individual customer needs—for example, MyYahoo portal, which is an eBay application built on Adobe AIR that enables eBay users to have their own watch list notifying them when they are outbid Responsive —Allows you to respond to the customer in a timely fashion, such as live chat on a customer support or direct commerce website—for example, Amazon.com offers to call you at a time you specify. Amazon.com knows who the customer is when the call starts, there is no wait for a representative, and the rep is ready to immediately resolve customer problems. That’s where Adobe comes in…Adobe’s innovative technologies, services, and solutions help enable individuals, organizations, and businesses to actually create and deliver experiences that fulfill expectations for engagement with their own customers and audiences.
Shawn Starts Here.
CSRS RETIREMENT BENEFITS GRADUATE SCHOOL, USDA With many of our synchronous courses we use Blackboard for a ‘course auxiliary website to use in between the live sessions. An example is our Leadership Skills for Non-Supervisors course. On this site, students access the PowerPoint slides for each session, handouts and other information such as links to articles. They also participate in facilitator-moderated discussions . If your institution uses Wimba or Elluminate, you can integrate Blackboard into your courses as we do with Connect. There are a number of interactive features that we include in our synchronous courses as shown here—some of them such as Captivate simulations and quizzes, are also used in our asynchronous courses, which we’ll look at shortly. Now let’s go to our studio in Washington, DC, where Shawn Redfern will highlight some features of our synchronous classes.
Now that you’ve seen what synchronous engagement looks like--let’s look at what asynchronous engagement looks like. With the latest release of Blackboard, we are able to build in Web 2.0 features such as wikis and blogs. Using these helps create a sense of community for students. They not only have you, the instructor, to dialogue with—they also have each other.
Now let’s go to Blackboard and look at some examples and then give you a little hands on with a mobile device. Open desktop sharing………….. After showing……… Both synchronous and asynchronous engagement means that all student activities involve active cognitive processes such as creating, problem-solving, reasoning, decision-making, and evaluation.
