Carteret Community College Title III Grant

Although slow to develop, CCC’s online tutoring service is providing meaningful assistance to students in a variety or courses, from math and algebra to English, psychology and sociology and science courses. Here is a comment from a distance learning student this semester who was having difficulty accessing a computer CD that accompanied her textbook:
“I am amazed of how wonderful you and Mr. Brooks Pace are to us. Thank you for be here for us at anytime we need help.  It can be a stressful here at home sometimes by ourselves when we need help. You guys are our release — thanks!”

One of the best things about the service is that students who have been helped one semester are returning for help with their other course work, and they are referring other students. A few instructors are also directing their students to the Online Tutoring Service for assistance, which serves both the students and instructors.

Whether responding to e-mails or Blackboard Discussion Board postings, we try to be prompt in our responses and to provide meaningful feedback to enhance the students’ understanding of the material they are learning, and that seems to be working as evidenced by this student’s comment:

“I just wanted to thank you again for your help with my essay. I got a 97! I learned a lot from your tips too, so thank you again.”
We want to facilitate learning — not do their work for them.

We also make ourselves available by phone, if necessary, and have even met with a few students face-to-face. In addition to the tutoring, the Blackboard site offers resources and links that help some students “self-serve.”

When necessary, we will e-mail instructors to be sure we are clear on what their expectations are for their classes or a particular assignment. We would like to have even more collaboration with CCC faculty, whether it be to help their students fine-tune their work or spend some extra time with those who need some remedial help.

We all know that many CCC students are juggling, school work and families, so online learning is the best option for their education. It does, however, limit their face-to-face access to instructors during their office hours or to campus academic support. As more and more classes are being offered online and more and more students are taking online courses, the benefits and use of online tutoring is likely to grow.

Lisa Taylor-Galizia
Carteret Community College
Adjunct Instructor

The CCC Online Tutoring Service is a Pilot Program Supported and Funded by Title III.

We are now 3 weeks into the Fall semester and the Distance Learning Team in working on a variety of professional development initiatives, in addition to making sure all online courses at CCC are meeting the Quality Assurance Standards we established last year. We have cross referenced a sampling of our online courses and I must report it is good to see how all the Blackboard training has paid off and so many of our faculty are implementing more creative and innovative instructional design strategies. Our Title III funding and support has played such an integral part in the progress we’ve made over the past 3 years.

Our fourth DL Pioneer team has been selected and we had our kick-off meeting last Friday. We have an excellent team made up of both faculty and staff and they’ve all made commitments to retool and upgrade their online courses, attend professional development activities in their disciplines and essentially take their knowledge of online learning and distance education to a higher level in the next year all made possible by Title III funds. Our staff members on this team will be exploring and implementing new and creative ways (blogging, Youtube, facebook, twitter) to work with our student in the online environment

As Vice President of the NC3ADL Eastern Region I’m also in the process of coordinating a Regional DL mini-conference/workshop for Friday, November 6th here at CCC. Due to travel restraints across the state it looks like there will be no NC3ADL conference this year so we are doing a series of regional conferences. NC3ADL will pay for lunch and I’m going to look to our DL Pioneers from Phase 1-3 to assist with it and have phase 4 attend. The following is a rough outline for that regional conference/workshop.

Workshop Overview – Two Tracks  Friday, November 6, 2009 9:00 – 4:00

2 tracks in the morning 9:30 – 10:30 and 10:45 – 11:45
Lunch 12:00 – 12:45
2 tracks after lunch
1-2 and 2-3 (Optional Track 3-4 on Dl Assessment)

1. Moodle Basics
2. Podcasting for the Technically Challenged
3. Best Practices for Online Teaching
4. Learning Object Repository
5. Social Networking as a Teaching/Learning/ Marketing Tool
6. Blogging for Beginners
7. Incorporating Itunes U and You Tube in your online courses.
8. DL Assessment with Don Staub

My constant goal is to make our online classes every bit as viable, interesting and dynamic as our traditional classroom lectures and labs. Thankfully there are a host of new and powerful communications tools that are making it easier and less time consuming for our faculty to do this. Carteret Community College has a Title III grant resources to help us implement our various professional development initiatives and put these tools in the hands of our faculty so they can take their online teaching to a whole new level of technical and pedagogical excellence.

Title III sponsored another well attended Blackboard Boot Camp training workshop on Friday, July 31st in the Wayne West Computer Lab.  We had 18 faculty and staff from across the college attend and 2 graduate students from East Carolina University who requested the training without compensation.

The T3 sponsored Blackboard Boot Camp has been a very successful and benificial training program for Carteret Community College.  It has prepared and certified all (100+) its online faculty including adjuncts to teach effectively in the online environment.

This is  comprehensive “hands-on” professional development that has been supported (funded) by Title III for over 2 years.

East Carolina University Graduate student and photography adjunct instructor Adam Jacono stated that he wished East Carolina University had a certification program for online teachers like our Blackboard Boot Camp.

The Boot Camp is also a catalyst (springboard) for our “one- on-one” training that Instructional Technologist Pre-Ah Hil schedules after new instructors receive their initial training.  She assists them with all aspects of course design, retooling and rich media production.  Pre-Ah continues to go above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to supporting distance learning at CCC.

Title III support has been extremely valuable to Carteret Community College and its distance learning initiatives.  To learn more about Blackboard Boot Camps please check out the CCC DL Blog.

CLICK HERE to download ppt

“Strengthening Our Institution The Power of Title III in Impacting Assessment, Distance Learning, & Advising at a Small, Rural Community College”

A presentation made at the 2009 Noel-Levitz National Conference on Student Recruitment, Marketing, and Retention

Abstract

Carteret Community College is a small, rural college in North Carolina. In 2006, the college was awarded a Title III grant from the US DOE Title III program, which has allowed us to completely alter our approaches to assessment, distance learning, and advising – all in an effort to improve abysmal retention rates.  The College has developed and implemented, from scratch, a comprehensive outcomes assessment initiative for all instructional programs and administrative services. Distance Learning, once the playground of the eccentric, has thrust the College into a statewide leadership role for online student services and instruction. A virtually non-existent advising program now has organization, purpose, and results.  Participants will hear the story, see the outcomes, and discuss organizational culture change.

Below are some of the key handouts from today’s presentation.  Much more can be learned about our efforts through this CCC Title III blog, as well as through the CCC DL blog.   We greatly appreciate your comments and questions.

The Presentation

Carteret Community College has been working diligently for the last 2+ years on the development and implementation of an Outcomes Assessment program. This is partly because of an impending accreditation reaffirmation report and a subsequent visit. But, mostly because it’s the right thing to do: We (like many other community colleges) struggle with retention issues, and improved instruction and services may lead to lower attrition rates. However, the only way to improve instruction and services is to know where you’re starting from and what needs to be improved, along with a continuous cycle of assessment, analysis, and use of results to ensure that you’re moving forward. Thus, the outcomes assessment program.

There is no doubt that a critical piece of this initiative has been funding through Title III. This has allowed our cash-strapped school to bring in experts to provide professional development specifically for outcomes assessment, to release full-time faculty in order to attend professional development, to provide stipends to part-time faculty to ensure that they too are receiving professional development, and to send faculty and staff to relevant, off-campus professional development opportunities.

This is where we have come in the last two years:

• Institutional Level Learning Outcomes (ILLOs…aka, Gen Ed outcomes) identified and assessed at the college;

Click here to download this file: illo-matrix-07-08 If you would like to learn a little about the process of actually selecting our 7 ILLOs, CLICK HERE.

• All 34 instructional programs have identified program level learning outcomes (PLLOs) and are assessing them, analyzing the results, and making use of the results to improve instruction;

Click here to download this sample PLLO from 2007-2008: aqu-07-08

• All 34 instructional programs are on a 4-phase program review cycle; i.e. each program undergoes an intensive program review process every four years (in Fall ’09, we will begin Phase III);

Click here to download a copy of the Instructional Program Review Manual: ipr-manual You can also take a look at sample completed (Phase I & Phase II) program reviews by CLICKING HERE.

• As the instructional programs undergo the review process, they also identify and assess Program and Administrative outcomes, analyze the results, and make use of the results;
• All administrative units at the college have identified administrative outcomes and are assessing them, analyzing the results, and making use of the results to improve the services being provided;

Click here to download this sample Administrative Outcome: academic-support-07-08

• All administrative units are on a 3-phase administrative unit review cycle.

Click here to download a copy of the Administrative Unit Review Manual: admin-unit-review-manual

Click here for Spring / Summer DL Report 2009

Distance Learning End of Year Report
December 17, 2008

It’s been a productive year for the CCC Dl Team. We’ve conducted 11 distance learning professional development workshops and trained 114 staff and faculty members.

Pre-Ah Hill has also worked one on one with approximately 30 faculty members.

As of December 17, 2008 my team of online course reviewers have evaluated 85 online (hybrid and total) courses. This initiative could not have been possible without the financial support of Title III, and dedicated efforts of Pre-Ah Hill and the faculty (content specialists) who assisted in this process. The QAP’s (spread sheets) are currently located on my computer and backed-up by Pre-Ah as well.

Faculty members (courses) who didn’t pass the minimum standard have been meeting with Pre-Ah and I to upgrade their courses in order to meet the QAP standard. This is an ongoing process, although as of December 16, 2008 we only have 3 more faculty (adjuncts) to meet with in order to get their courses up to speed for Spring. These appointments have been made this week and the week before classes begin in Spring. There are also approximately 15 online courses (Business and EDU) that are being worked on (developed) over Christmas and Pre-Ah and I will be reviewing them between now and when classes begin Spring 09. We are also in the process of creating a revised QAP for web-enhanced courses that we will begin implementing Spring 2009. This is our next big initiative for 2009 – standardizing the content that must be included in a web enhanced course and move forward evaluating web-enhanced courses as well hybrids and total internet. I truly believe this initiative brought the level of our online course offerings to a higher more standardized level across curriculum’s.

We also were awarded a second NCCCS Technology Center Grant to produce instructional web resources for Blogging, YouTube and ITunes University. Our DL team has produces a script and are in production of an enhanced instructional podcast on the benefits of these web based tools for students and faculty, the equipment (hardware and software) needed for them, and information on where to obtain software needed use them effectively.

The goal is to provide all of the information that a college will need to get started on Blogging, YouTube and ITunes U. Pre-Ah Hill and I also conducted training workshops and materials as part of this Tech Center Grant. The following are the workshops (and the ECU Think-In Technology Showcase) we have conducted and/or participated in as part of this grant project and our T3 sponsored Distance Learning training.

October 9th, Wayne Community College
17 Participants

On Oct 23, 2008:
15 people attended:

On Oct 24, 2008:
8 people attended:

Think-In East Carolina University November 13th
Distance Learning Showcase

The Distance Learning Department at Carteret Community College hosted a Regional Workshop sponsored by NC3ADL on Blogging, YouTube and iTunes for Instructional Use Workshop on Saturday, December 13 from 10:00-3:00 pm. This was open to all of the community colleges in the region. 15 Participants

Our Online Tutoring Initiative (service) has exceeded all expectations and our tutors have submitted their final reports for the year and recommendations for making the service even more successful here at CCC.

A total of 260 hours and 85 students served by this service between March – December 1st, 2008.

We invited 5 staff members to participate on this year’s DL Pioneer team. They have been exploring new and innovative ways to offer their student services in the online environment. (See Brenda Long Blog)

We are also in the planning stages of a student centered distance learning / blackboard training initiative for Spring 09.

Eight faculty members will be attending the NCDLA Distance Learning Conference in Raleigh February 15 – 19th. I will also be presenting a workshop on Instructional Podcasting.

Lastly, I co-presented (via Skype) at the Noel-Levitz Conference in Denver in November. Based on the evaluations our presentation was well received and we have been invited to present again in San Antonio in July 2009.

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We are now into Phase IV of the QAP “Peer Review” process. Pre-Ah and I hope to get another 15-20 online courses evaluated by August. This has been a great learning and growing process for the DL Team and the online faculty. There is no doubt it is making our online courses better in both instructional design and technical/visual sophistication.

Our Online Tutoring service is being offered through the summer. Lisa Galizia is doing a great job facilitating the service and Jeremy Leonard our Biology tutor is working closely with Bo Sosnicki our online Biology instructor. Jeremy is actually becoming an integral part of the class and is participating in their online chat sessions each week. This is a model I plan on implementing for our Fall online classes.

The Phase III T3 DL Pioneers have been tentatively selected and will be announced at convocation this coming August. I’m still in the process of identifying the last few staff members for this team that will consist of 5 faculty and 5 CCC staff members in order to get student services and support more involved and trained with online services for their respective areas.

Thanks to a grant from Title III the DL Department has been able bring a summer intern on board until August. Her name is Shannon Ayers and she is graduating the Photography Program in August and is trained in all aspects of podcasting (video production) and enhanced podcasting. She is available by appointment to assist any faculty member (including adjuncts) in producing podcasts (and instructional videos) for online classes. This is a great opportunity for faculty get some audio and/or video content produced and uploaded into their online courses (and CCC ITunes) so it will be first come first serve as far as making appointments with Shannon to schedule your instructional podcast and/or video production. We announced this initiative yesterday and she already has 3 appointments to produce podcasts.

CCC has upgraded to Blackboard 8.0 and the biggest change is with the Gradebook. It is completely different with lots more functionality. Pre-Ah and I are conducting 2 training sessions on the Gradebook this afternoon. Both are sessions are full.

For the past 2 weeks the DL Department with the assistance of Jeannette have been conducting an inventory of all equipment purchased through Title III since we got the grant. We have created a spread sheet (data base) of all the equipment (laptops , digital cameras and IPods) and have put labels on this equipment as well.

Pre-Ah is developing a new improved online orientation and we hope to have this available to students by Fall semester. She is developing this with Camtasia and creating screen casts for all the various functions of Blackboard. She is also working with online faculty upgrading courses, creating videos, podcasts and troubleshooting on a daily basis especially since we have upgraded to a new version of Blackboard.

This past February the CCC DL department received an $8,400 grant to produce an instructional web resource for podcasting that will be used by the entire Community College System. We completed this project last week and it has been well received. You can view this Quicktime video version at this link along with out Tech Center Grant Resource Blog.

Once we get our faculty trained with the new blackboard Gradebook we are planning a series of Thursday afternoon training on various aspects of online instructional design and producing rich media content

Submitted by Patrick Keough
Director of Distance Learning
CCC

Since posting my last Distance Learning Report (see link below) on February 28, 2008 the distance learning team has continued moving forward with a variety of initiatives.

Our Online Tutoring Service went LIVE this past March 17. We are starting off slow due to the fact that we started offering the service mid-Spring semester however this has given us an opportunity to work the bugs out of the service and develop viable methodologies for assisting students with their classes.

Our Online Peer Review QAP initiative continues to make headway. We are now into phase III and should have these 12 courses evaluated by May 5, 2008. As we evaluate these courses we are contacting the instructors of the online classes we are evaluating and either letting them know they passed or asking them to make appointments with us to upgrade their courses in order to make the minimum grade on the QAP.

10 of of our distance learning faculty (DL Pioneers) attended the recent DL Alliance Conference in New Bern earlier this month. Mary Walton and Laurie Freshwater co-presented with me at the conference on our Blackboard Boot Camp Certification initiative. They both did an outstanding job presenting at the conference.

As I stated in my last report CCC received an Tech Center Grant to develop and produce a variety of resources for online instructors throughout the state. Our first project is writing and producing a set of “Best Practices” for instructional podcasting. I am in the process of ordering digital audio and video equipment with the grant money and paying online faculty volunteers to assist us (after work hours) with the production of a video on all aspects of podcasting. Check out the progress we have made so far at our Tech Center Blog Link – the podcast and video are linked at the bottom of the page.

We have our last BB Boot Camp scheduled for the Spring semester on May 7 and 8. As of today all three modules are close to being full.

Pre-Ah Hill is designing and gathering material (articles and pictures) for our first DL Newsletter that will be out in May. We hope to make this a monthly newsletter on all aspects of Distance Learning at CCC.

Our DL Forum is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, April 22nd in the upstairs of the Civic Center. This forum is sponsored by Title III and we hope it will give us additional information to assist us with planning for new dl initiatives in the coming years.

DL Forum Title: Demystifying Distance Learning @ CCC

Date: April 22nd

Time: 1:30 – 4:00

Location: Crystal Coast Civic Center – Moderated by Dr. Abby Brown and Dr. Bill Sugar, from East Carolina University Instructional Design Program.

Overview

Faculty & students are invited to discuss all aspects of DL, voice their apprehensions and concerns, and to walk away with specific action plans to improve DL offerings, procedures and approaches at CCC.

Organization

* Divide the audience into round tables (we will pre-organize each table’s participants, based on rsvp)
* Each table will have a facilitator (a DL Pioneer)
* The facilitator will lead a discussion on SWOT of DL
* Tables will report out on the results of the discussion [each facilitator records results on form, then emails them to Don, who will project them for discussion]
* Bill & Abbie will lead debriefing session of roundtables – including panel discussion comprised of each table moderator
* Action plans will be generated from discussions
* Closing remarks and wrap-up

John Green is in the process of setting up Blackboard Templates for ALL summer online courses. We are upgrading to Blackboard 8. It has been a very busy and productive semester in DL and we plan to keep the momentum going into summer with the QAP process and building on what we have accomplished over the past year.

Instead of presenting my normal monthly report I’m going to review (contrast and compare) where Distance Learning at CCC was before Title III and where we are a year and a half into the grant. I think you’ll be impressed with what we’ve been able to accomplish in less than 2 years, as far as content and course information placement in the blackboards was concerned and CCC had no established procedures for how online courses should be designed, developed and be taught.

For the most part it was whatever the instructor wanted to post to the course and this for the most part was primarily text based. In some cases this approach worked fine, however since every online course had a different look, methodology and expectations from the various instructors – there was some frustration on the part of students because there were no standardized course design and development parameters for our online faculty to follow. This was the catalyst for me to develop a set of course design (and content placement) parameters and steps for successful online teaching.

We first initiated the Extreme Blackboard Course makeover where a faculty member could make appointments to have their courses “overhauled” both visually and in course actual design and delivery. Looking back I believe this early initiative was a factor in our getting the T3 grant.

Once we got the Title III Grant we initiated the
DL Pioneer initiative.

This is essentially a “train the trainer” professional development program. I initially chose 10 online faculty from across curriculum’s to be a part of this project.

Each faculty member received a laptop and IPod, in addition to being offered a variety of professional development opportunities both in-house and off campus.

We are now into the 2nd year of the Pioneer Program – we have 20 DL Pioneers who committed to one of the following three options.

1. Upgrade one online course (total or hybrid) and begin developing a new course. Dl Pioneer must teach at least one of these courses in Spring 2008.

2. Upgrading 2 courses that you already are teaching online. Must be teaching at least one Spring 2008

3. Develop a NEW course to be offered Fall 2008. (New online faculty)

In March 2007 T3 funds enabled us to hire Pre-Ah Hill as our DL Instructional Designer. She has conducted approximately 100 “one on one” training sessions (to assist with Blackboard Upgrades) since coming on board. Pre-Ah has also been instrumental in assisting with the various professional development activities across campus and has been at the forefront of learned new instructional delivery software and training others (including me) on programs such as Jing, Camtasia, Garage Band, Imovie, Skype and Movie Maker to name a few.

I see 4 major accomplishments for our DL Program in the past 18 months.

#1. DL Pioneers and the Mentoring Program. 20 DL Faculty Pioneers in the Program at this time.

#2. BB Boot Camps (Every faculty member both full time and adjunct) that teach online for CCC have been through 4-6 hours of in-depth training and many have worked with Pre-Ah in “one to one” hands-on sessions since last Spring. 6 BB Boot Camps have been offered with one scheduled for mid-March. Faculty receive digital recorder and adjuncts are paid $27 per hour to attend thanks to T3 funds.

#3. Peer Review Process QAP’s – 50 online courses will have been evaluated by a content specialist and instructional designer by April 1, 2008. All online courses both total and hybrid will go through this process by December 2008. Pre-Ah and I are incorporating what we learn from the QAP Process back into our faculty training. Each content specialist is paid $50 per course to do this evaluation. Click Here to Download QAP Master Spreadsheet

#4. The CCC Online Tutoring Initiative spearheaded by veteran online instructor Lisa Taylor Galizia. This pilot program received $8000 seed money to get an online tutoring service off the ground. A tutoring Blackboard “hub” has been developed using IM, Skype, Discussion Boards and E-mail and 4 tutors have been selected. We hope to start offering tutoring services to our Math, English, Biology and Anatomy & Physiology students by March 17th.

Title III has also enabled us to take our faculty to a variety of excellent DL workshops, seminars and conferences and next month 3 of our pioneers will be presenting with me at the DL Alliance Conference in New Bern.

We are also sponsoring a campus wide DL Forum in the Civic Center on April 22nd. This forum was the result of a DL Problem Solving Session we conducted with our DL Pioneers in December of 2007.

Due to the strides we have made in the past year, CCC was asked to partner with FTCC on Tech Center DL Grant to establish guidelines, processes and procedures for producing instructional media (podcasts, video, simulations) for the entire CC System. We are receiving $8,400 to begin this initiative.

So you can see a great deal has been accomplished over the past 18 months, BUT there is still more work to do such as getting more of our faculty producing more rich media content (podcasts and video) in order to address the various learning styles and needs of our online students.

As of now we have our faculty have produced approximately 200 Podcasts with 150 of these being stored in our CCC ITunes U site.

Pre-Ah Hill is also completely revamping the Online Student Blackboard Orientation. She will give you all a demonstration of this at the next meeting.