Stephanie Hicklin EDET 755 Course Portfolio June 28, 2012 Research and Practice in Distance Education

This course exposed me to many aspects, recommended practices, and hands-on experience with online courses and learning management systems (LMS). Through each assignment, I gained more experience researching, creating online courses, and evaluating courses. These new skills will be used throughout my remaining coursework in EDET 755 and in my duties at work on a daily basis. The following information shows how different assignments throughout this Summer I semester have led to me meeting the three goals listed for this course. Goal 1. To be knowledgeable about research in aspects of distance education and the use of telecommunications in educational and other settings. Research Synthesis: http://hicklin755.wikispaces.com/Research+Synthesis The assignment was to create an annotated bibliography of 20-25 research articles dealing with a specific topic related to distance education. Because I provide training and technical assistance at my current job, I was very interested in best practices in online professional development. This assignment helped me gain more experience searching for relevant journal articles. The more journal articles I read, the more comfortable I become following the research. When I first began reading these types of articles, I had to read slowly and usually more than once. My comprehension improves with each new article I read. Along with the process of searching for articles and creating the annotated bibliography, the actual information that I found in each article was very applicable to my everyday work. Many articles focused on strategies and factors that have been found to increase a professionals motivation to use e-learning in the workplace. Our online modules are a requirement, but it was very helpful to learn things that we can do to make it a more voluntary and positive experience for our personnel. The majority of my job is to keep staff up-to-date on recommended practices in the field of early intervention. Many times, new practices are questioned or meet resistance to change. Creating an annotated bibliography that contained research that backed up the changes would be a strategy we could use to send out research on the changes. Our personnel complain that they dont have time to read the articles. So this type of summary may help them to narrow down just a few articles they may want to read. As far as the information that I found in my research, I would definitely like to share it with my co-workers and incorporate many of the suggestions into our modules and into the structure our LMS.

Goal 2. To critically evaluate examples of distance education implementation in educational and business settings. LMS Rubric and Evaluation: http://hicklin755.wikispaces.com/LMS+Evaluation This assignment was divided into two parts. Part 1 required us to research the criteria that should be included in a rubric used to evaluate online courses. After we researched the necessary components, as a group, we developed our own rubric that included what we thought were the most important characteristics of a quality online course. The second part of the assignment was to use that rubric to evaluate two online courses of our choice. For the most part, our group agreed on most ratings. There were a few places where some of us were stricter than others. This assignment made it clear to me how many courses are out there that completely ignore standards and recommended practices. I found that there are many rubrics and guidelines for online courses that have already been created by very reputable sources. I most definitely want to go back and look at our rubric and others that I found during my research and compare the criteria to our LMS modules at work.

Goal 3. To construct effective delivery of courses, topics, or training by using existing CMS tools. LMS Course Build: http://tinyurl.com/743e89h LMS Reflection: http://hicklin755.wikispaces.com/LMS+Reflection This assignment was for our group of four to create an online course, allow other EDET 755 students to participate and then write a reflection of the entire process. This assignment allowed us to used everything we had learned about online courses up to that point and incorporate those strategies and features into the LMS online course. This project really made me think about how our content is delivered at work in our LMS. Because we have so many people (1500+) that have to use our LMS and complete the same introductory course/modules, it is very difficult to include many of the aspects and features we have learned about this summer. This course has really made me start thinking of different ways in which we can still get the information to our staff, but incorporate the other features of the LMS (discussion boards, projects, etc.). This work has also inspired me to begin thinking about topics for my internship in EDET 650. I really want our LMS to be more than just a website with posted presentations and quizzes. I have learned (mostly through modeling from our EDET instructors) so many ways to effective teach online and I want to share those strategies with all of my co-workers. I definitely think that within the next year, we will be making drastic changes to our LMS based on the work and research I have done in EDET 755.