Developing a 12-Hour Women's Studies Program
Through Distance Learning
Notes from Sunday, May 20
Erika Giesen
What are people's initial reactions to
the distance learning project?
· Distance learning will take a lot
of development time, more labor intensive. When will faculty have time
for research/writing? However, the energy will be predominantly expended
at the beginning in initial course development.
· We need to interrogate the word
"lecture" when teaching on-line.
· Who owns the material once created?
What are people's experiences with technology/computers?
What concerns are we bringing to the conference?
· Judy: concerns with listservs--time
consuming.
· Laura: comfortable with technology,
finds technological advances overall to be exciting, but finds it eats
her time and is apprehensive about distance learning's further drain on
her time.
· Ruth: also finds it overwhelming
and/but sometimes a convenient distraction.
· Pat: slow on computing skills, wants
to critique the class messages she reads in technology.
· Julia: concerns with the lack of
intonation, facial expression on the web, especially in teaching a class
with tough issues. Also concerned with the workload.
· Liz: main complaint is the time,
especially the learning of new technology, as well as frustration. UA needs
a format for archiving and for software/hardware.
· Erika: a little experience with
distance learning, resistant to the focus on graphics, but excited about
the content.
· Kari: we need to decide, what do
I have time to learn and what is important to me? We need to be leaders
in SBS in archiving.
Overview of the project:
· The challenge: to keep our focus
on the people we're trying to reach (who are not necessarily easy to reach)
· Structurally, we're finding that
the project is hard to pull off because of institutional limitations (i.e.
no stipend money for faculty from NAU or ASU).
Kari McBride: Creating a web page using Netscape Composer
Beth Harrison: Using WebCT for online courses: See Harrison's handout
Online
library support for distance teaching:
· Currently, the UA library is not
equipped to serve distance students--don't have staff to copy and mail
articles we own, mail books, etc. If you're not on campus, you're not getting
full library support, even if you've paid full tuition.
· Students need to graduate equipped
with information literacy. What is information literacy? Formulate the
research question, know resources, assess quality of information, use efficiently.
· Library considering a 24-7 online
help, because students need information when they need it. ("Just in time"
learning.)