myCourses Online Teaching & Learning Strategies Course

• The online teaching and learning strategies course will emphasize a reflective-practices approach to online teaching;
• We will utilize the very method we’re trying to teach, that is, the online environment as opposed to face-to-face trainings; and
• We hope to make faculty and staff well-trained and self-sufficient users of myCourses who will always have excellent technical support.

With these premises in mind, the Instructional Development team (Magali Carrera, Damon Gatenby, Jen Riley, and Tracey Russo) has designed a two week course, myCourses: Online Teaching and Learning Strategies.

In this course, we will cover two central areas for the use of the online environment in teaching: teaching/learning strategies and the technical side of the online platform. First, you will be an online learner. As such, you will experience the issues that arise for students in the online format. This experience as an online learner will help you with your second role as a Teacher/Designer in your own course. As a Teacher/Designer, you will organize, build and teach your courses.

myCourses Online Training Course Request

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, we hope you will:

Be a self-sufficient user of the myCourses platform;
• engage in effective reflective practices that enable you to consider the goals of your assignments, as well as which online tools will most effectively facilitate your assignment online;
• be conversant with assessment issues and reflective about the most important goals you have for your students and how you might assess student progress toward these goals;
• know how to design online assignments that facilitate your course goals and that actively use online tools; and
• know how to upload your materials into the myCourses platform and administrate the online tools.
  
  Above all, we hope you will be excited by the prospect of online teaching and becoming part of a community of scholars interested in developing and discussing teaching on the UMass Dartmouth campus.

Course Overview

Our class will unfold in the following way:

On Campus Face-to-Face Meetings
Our course begins with an optional (1 hour) meeting where we will set you up with your user names and passwords, as well as introduce you to the myCourses platform. From here on, we will meet online asynchronously for 10 days using (understanding the strategies for teaching with) the myCourses platform. During the two-week session we will meet for a second face-to-face (f2f) two hour session on technical aspects of myCourses.

Expectations

Instructor expectations of students

• A commitment of 5-6 hours per week for reading, reflection, writing, and experimenting with the myCourses tools;
• A willingness to experiment;
• Dedication to your own material and to your fellow students;
• Honest feedback about our course and your experiences with it; and
• A commitment to continuing the process beyond this course.

Please be clear that this training course is critical to the creation of well organized and coherent course site and participants are expected to actively engage in the course.

Student expectations of instructors

• Dedication to the course and the course process;
• Honesty about our own experiences;
• Prompt responses to your questions and concerns;
• Help to push you deeper and further into your own teaching issues and goals; and
• On-going support as you continue your myCourses training and teaching

Course Testimonials

"The course content has been well organized beginning from the philosophical to the nuts and bolts aspects of course development. I felt as a beginning student in your course, the course was designed with the novice learner in mind – another positive! I will definitely recommend your team taught course to colleagues." -College of Nursing Faculty

"It was an awesome experience and opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about teaching."
-Biology Faculty