Quality Enhancement Team Meeting

RLO Form

The WITS department is still working on the development of a searchable learning object repository specific to Critical Thinking activities. The process has been postponed due to other projects taking precedence.

QEC Meeting

Instructional Technologists Nancy Munce, Karen Hesting, Tim Godcharles, and Alan Shapiro attended the QEC meeting held on September 25, 2009. WITS would like to stay involved in the plans for Professional Development and the possible creation of Center for Teaching & Learning.

Fall Critical Thinking Institute

Instructional Technologists Alan Shapiro and Tim Godcharles were able to attend the Fall Critical Thinking Institute on October 9th and reported back on its success. It was nice to see faculty sharing the implementation of tools in Critical Thinking, such as Jing, learned through the WITs department.

Quality Enhancement Team Meeting

I was not able to attend today’s meeting. Here are agenda items that pertain to WITS:

RLO’s

Janice and Karen will meet to review the Critical Thinking activity/RLO submission process. This will include a more indepth look at The Orange Grove.

Karen, Nancy Doolittle, and Karen Fritch will facilitate a hands-on session at the April Faculty Champion Meeting on Friday, April 24, 1:00-3:00 p.m.

Professional Development

WITS is part of the Spring Critical Thinking Institute (Narrowing the Gulf) March 26-27, 2009.

QEP Team meetings are now going to be the first Wednesday of the month at 1 p.m.

Quality Enhancement Team Meeting

Note: This is the first set of notes by Karen Hesting

Met with Janice, Lynn, Jesse, Maggie and Gail.

Critical Thinking Institutes
Plans for the Fall Critical Thinking Institute are at the top of the agenda. Things are coming together. The ITs should not feel like the must go to the beginning session, but should get to the labs they are presenting in a bit early since they will not be used in the morning.  The machines have Office ‘07 installed. When you get to the parking garage, just be sure to tell them you are coming to the Critical Thinking Institute.

Narrowing the Gulf is the Spring Critical Thinking Institute. A campaign is being started to help people to understand this.

RLOs
Right now there is WITS form (https://it.spcollege.edu/cfsurveys/survey.cfm?su_id=2727)
that can be used to submit RLOs. This is linked off of the gateway website. To share these becomes a manual process. Is there a way that this can be connected to the Project Eagle III grant deliverables? Maybe Nancy or Alan can help to figure this out.

ePortfolio
Lynn was under the assumption that the college has already spent a chunk of money on ANGEL ePortfolio that could be used, even though it does not do all that is expected until ANGEL 7.4.  Jesse kind of feels that the existing tool really isn’t what is needed. Gail shared that this just might not need to be a deliverable at this time, especially because of resources and the economy. Further discussion will happen on this.

Quality Enhancement Team Meeting

Met with Lynn, Gail, Jesse, and Maggie. The Fall Critical Thinking Institute is still on-track. Topics from WITS:

Researching Quality RLO’s (Karen Fritch & Greg Rabelo) Learning activities can enhance a course’s interest for the students as well as encourage thinking about concepts in a more critical way. Reusable Learning Objects (RLO’s) are a way to enhance multiple courses to focus common learning.  Participants will review guidelines for evaluating RLO’s and view some well known learning object repositories. They then will have the opportunity to record their findings and ideas for use in a database to be shared with other faculty.

Create Basic and Advanced Clicker Slides that Can be Used to Promote Critical Thinking (Karen Hesting & Janice Thiel) Knowing what you know and don’t know focuses learning. Audience response systems or “clickers” give students an opportunity to participate in your lecture by expressing their own understanding of the material. In addition they receive frequent and immediate feedback. This session will focus on how to create a variety of activities for effective, active lectures, which incorporate clicker technology, allowing for students to think critically.

Web 2.0 (Nancy Doolittle & Alan Shapiro) Real-time web-based collaboration and resource management helps students to share their ideas and mentor others. Web 2.0 tools provide a wealth of creative applications to increase the opportunities for higher level thinking and interaction. In this session, attendees will explore a number of popular, free web collaboration 2.0 tools.

Quality Enhancement Team Meeting

Met with Lynn, Gail, Jesse, and Maggie via SPOC. The Fall Critical Thinking Institute will be held at the Downtown Center on Friday, November 14.

There is interest in having three 45-minute sessions from WITS:

1) RLO’s – Hands-on. Locate an existing RLO or Web resource and give an example of how it can be used to promote critical thinking.

2) Clickers – Hands-on. Create basic and advanced slides that can be used to promote critical thinking.

3) Web 2.0 – Hands-on. Watch quick demo of 3-4 tools, and then try them out for yourself. Discuss how these can be used to promote critical thinking.

Quality Enhancement Team Meeting

Met with Lynn, Gail, Jesse, and Maggie via SPOC. Much of the meeting concerned the QEP presence at the upcoming Fall Faculty Meeting. Lynn mentioned that Nancy is continuing her work on the RLO blog. They are planning to meet next week to collect existing RLO’s (Merlot, etc.) that address critical thinking to add to the site.

Critical Thinking Resources Meeting

Regarding the Summer Critical Thinking Institute, positive feedback continues regarding the technology session presented by Karen Hesting and Nancy Doolittle. On June 26, Lynn reported, “I just analyzed the end-of-workshop surveys from last Friday, and 28 out of 33 said the most important or valuable thing they learned had to do with technology. Nineteen want more hands-on-workshops in using technology.”

Karen and Nancy are going to provide the next article for the QEP e-Newsletter. They are going to write a brief summary of the technology piece they did for the Summer Critical Thinking Institute, perhaps including a couple tangible ideas for faculty. Lynn would like to have this by Monday, if possible.

Nancy is going to work with Lynn on turning the Lesson Plan template into a PDF form. Nancy is acting as Lynn’s IT on this one – teaching her how to do it. Nancy will also work on the blog which will an informal RLO repository.

Lynn and Donna will be making modifications to the gateway Web site as well as including 2nd level pages for many of the links off of the Web site. It was felt that these 2nd level pages were good areas for expanding on information before sending folks into ANGEL for the Instructional Portfolio component of this project. An Instructional Portfolio will be a folder that members of the Academic Round Table will maintain in ANGELtraining containing critical thinking activities, assessments, course syllabi, etc.

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Quality Enhancement Team Meeting

Met with Lynn and Gail. The date for the summer Critical Thinking Institute is still yet to be decided, since June 20 conflicts with Online Accessibility Training. The following dates are now being considered: June 13, June 27 or July 11. Janice will let the other Instructional Technologists know as soon as this date is settled. In the meantime, Janice, Nancy, and Karen are meeting with Lynn on Wednesday afternoon to pin down the topic(s) and other details for this presentation. It is possible that the venue for the event will not have Internet access.

Janice will provide Lynn an article for the first QEP e-letter about the books that are available to instructors in the campus Faculty Development Center. Instructional Technologists will take turns submitting articles about once a month. Email article ideas to Janice.

The notes from Gerald Nosich’s Critical Thinking Institute are now published in the QEP group on ANGELtraining. Lynn is working on obtaining funds to pay to have these notes fleshed out into “courselets.”

Lynn is meeting with Nancy tomorrow to review the blog for RLO’s. At that time, Lynn will approach the topic of using a blog for the instructional portfolios.

notes-from-the-qep-team-meeting-5-12-08

Quality Enhancement Team Meeting

Met with Lynn, Gail, and Jesse. We reviewed the latest draft of the Gateway Web site. All noticed the overlap of text in the left-hand “post-it” note and some other alignment issues that Faith is still working on. It was proposed that the menu items along the top green bar be rearranged to match the headings on the three main “post-it” notes, including that the heading will be “Critical Thinking Resources.” Lynn will relay those suggestions to Faith.

Lynn reviewed the WordPress blog for RLO’s. She’d like a different photo and is curious about other widgets. She will get with Nancy Doolittle for assistance.

Nancy has created an SPC iTunes U area for QEP. Gail’s podcast on critical thinking is up and running.

Janice is still working on the online notes for Nosich’s Critical Thinking Institute.

The date for the summer Critical Thinking Institute is still being determined. It will most likely be on a Friday in June. On the agenda is a time slot for technology and critical thinking which will be presented by the Instructional Technologists.

Quality Enhancement Team Meeting

Met with Lynn, Gail, Jesse, Peg Connell, and Maggie Tymms.

Perkins/DAP-Funded Online Workshops: Peg reiterated the desire to collaborate Perkins and DAP grants with QEP goals of critical thinking. Peg stated that funds are available to help fund the creation of online workshops that incorporate accessibility standards. Lynn and Janice will meet later to outline specifics (i.e., length of workshops, materials, payment/PAR, etc.). Most likely, the notes taken at the two Critical Thinking Institutes will be converted, and possibly some workshops will be developed from this summer’s event. Janice will talk with Karen Hesting about the work she’s done in the past for Peg to help clarify the process and accessibility standards.

RLO Guidelines: The group reviewed the RLO Guidelines document. Feeback was positive overall. A few suggestions were given: Add an area for comments; Add places for Name, Date, RLO Title, RLO Location, and way to indicate whether this RLO was created in-house or located outside SPC. Jesse suggested that this may be able to be created with the WITS survey builder to facilitate data collection. Janice suggested there also be a printable version to make completion easier for faculty.

ePortfolio: Lynn has registered for the TLT Webinar on ePortfolios that she and Alan will attend for three consecutive Wednesdays 12-1 p.m. beginning 4/16. Lynn will call Alan to arrange a rendezvous viewing location to help facilitate discussion after each one-hour session.

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