Month: March 2012

The quarter ended quietly. Weeks of working on the internship and suddenly it is over. I did not accomplish everything I had wanted to.  So, I have spoken with my mentor Robin and we will begin an independent study to put the course I have been developing into Haiku or Instructure Canvas .I will only go for two credits Spring quarter and two during the Summer quarter to finish it. I am certain there will be a lot of work to do, even though much of it has been developed during the past six months in the internship.

I need to work on one weakness I discovered in my last interview with Michael my internship coordinator. Apparently, I do not develop my sentences enough and it often seems like I am criticizing my instructors. I was not aware I was doing this. Certainly this was not my intention. I will need to monitor myself to make certain I am not doing this when I speak with my learners online. I am somewhat critical in my overall thinking and want to see the good things that have been done; but, I want to be able to comment appropriately on those things that may need some work. The most any instructor can hope for is that the suggestion moves the learner toward improvement and not recrimination.

I believe time may be running out for me. I need to teach and must find a way to do this. I have to admit I am moving into unchartered waters. Since I do not want to teach in a classroom, most local community colleges might not want to hire an adjunct online instructor without teaching experience. I may have an obstacle in front of me, I cannot jump over or maneuver around. I suppose only time will tell. I still have to work on trying to get another teaching assistantship as an internship, where I am allowed to teach online. I know I need that experience. I am hoping by Fall quarter I have something lined up. This time I am considering something in Political Science. My major field was international relations and politics with an emphasis on national defense issues. Nevertheless I think I could teach a basic introductory course.

I will need some work on my resume, curriculum vitae and my ePortfolio. I need to have all my ducks in a row. An interview may be quite different from anything I have experienced before. I am certain I will be asked a lot of questions that I need to be ready for. Maybe, the Women’s Center at Bellevue College can help me with this part of my journey. I need to secure the funds for the internship, independent studies and with the Women’s Center. With Curt about to be laid off and my unemployment ready to expire, I really have no idea where the money will come from.

I will soon find out if chasing a dream and WOW Factor leads me to a dead-end or whether I will get the opportunities I am seeking. I know I have been chasing this dream for a while. I hope it is not a waste of the federal government’s and state’s money. They have been kind enough and generous enough to provide me with the funds I need to get the training. I know Ginney To, my contact at Worksource in Renton, has worked very hard to give me this opportunity with the federal funds allotted to her. I would hate to have to report to her that I have failed. I had thought my best shot was Bellevue College. So far, I was given an excellent opportunity to design curriculum. It is time I asked them to give me an opportunity to teach. Once I have this experience, I can seriously start putting my resumes and curriculum vitae out there. So keep your fingers crossed for me. I am hoping others ( veterans, seniors and those with disabilities) will follow in the tracks I am making. College change at the “…speed of cement” and not when we need them to. Some of this is good and some of it creates a lot of havoc for the students. I keep hearing the pleas of the younger generation about to hit the academic scene. We need to get them where they will have to go!

The Blackboard Vista site is almost complete. All updates will end on March 22st. I am still waiting for any possible revisions from Charlene. So far I have not heard from her. I know what her schedule is like; and I know she will get to it when she can. I have done what was needed on the pages and really like what I see. Once again, the true test is when the students use the site and it works for them.

Last week, I went to see Charlene regarding the set-up of the Turnitin page. She was showing me how it worked, when she made the comment that without having taught in a community college, the candidate would need a “WOW Factor.”  So how does one define what that means for department chairs in criminal justice or social science departments? I really don’t know. I just know that they would have to look at my site and ePortfoilo and say, “WOW.” I don’t think I am at the point yet.

My mom used to say, “…a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.” Right now most of my opportunities are in the bush and not in hand. Or in other words, I have not done the teaching part yet. If I do not get the opportunity to teach at Bellevue College, I might very well need a Wow Factor to teach online anywhere else. I do not have a Ph.d nor have I spent a lifetime in criminal justice field positions or working as an investigator, intelligence officer, etc. I am not an attorney and well versed in winning criminal law cases. I have never worked for the DEA or any other similar position. My work with the FBI really doesn’t qualify me either. So what do I really have to offer a potential employer that would “WOW” them?

I am not a WOW kind of person. I entered the university system while I was the mother of 6 children and divorced. I had only finished my GED. I dropped out of school after my tenth grade year to get married. I was sixteen years old when I got married and had my first child by the time I was eighteen. I was thirty-three years old when I first went to the university to get an education. I was poor, on welfare and had six children to care for. However I had a vision. I believed if I worked and studied hard enough, I would finish my studies and would never again have to be on welfare. I hated to take the money and food stamps. Each time I had to take a hand-out…I lost a piece of myself. Getting an education was something I believed no one could ever take away from me. Once I earned my first degree I was ready for a new university and my bachelor studies. I moved from St. Cloud, Minnesota to Salt Lake City, Utah with my children, new husband and with determination as a mind-set.

By the time I earned my bachelors in Sociology, I was determined to take on the challenge of changing my major and mastering in Political Science. I worked hard to learn as much as I could during those years. Eventually I applied for my doctoral studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Even though I was turned down I moved there with my husband and family, took a sabbatical and wrote a new research paper, submitted it a year later and was accepted into the program. The first quarter of my doctoral studies I had to drive circa 160 miles round trip everyday through every kind of weather. Along with my doctoral studies I had to raise my child at home, fulfill my duties as a U.S. Army officer’s wife; and I worked in a local shelter for battered women as a volunteer. I had no time to be tired and was even more determined to get my doctorate…until my nineteen year old son committed suicide in Utah during my first fall quarter at the university. I was devastated and consequently my marriage fell apart. Saddled with student loan debt and facing a divorce I dropped out of my program, after completing my course work and living for a time in Germany researching my dissertation topic.

After fourteen years of being alone and not finding a job I really wanted to do, I longed to fulfill my dream to teach. I did not have the funds and my student loans were more of a burden than I knew what to do with. Nevertheless, I found a great man to share my life with and decided to try the new program at Bellevue College called, “eLearning for Instructors.” After the first course I was convinced this is what I wanted to do. So why am I telling anyone this story through the pages of my student posts? Is this really too personal? In my opinion, it should serve as a beacon for anyone wanting to give up or not believing something really good could come out of so much hardship and disappointment. That being said, I intend to find the “Wow Factor” a department chair wants.  But, I will accomplish this in my own way.

I have surrounded myself with books and studied on my own for most of my life. I have had to play “catch up” as far as getting educated for most of those years. I had a personal learning environment long before I knew what one was. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt what it means to be a self-directed learner. I know what it means to overcome adversity and succeed. I hope to teach others that you can be anything you want to be with hard work, determination and the help of those who truly want to give you a hand up and not a hand out. I managed to get an education and not just degrees by refusing to give up. I have never let what society thought (regarding my personal life) stand in my way. I have never let being poor,  having a handicap or being an older adult stand in my way.  I believe with all my heart we can all get where we want to be by following our vision, living our lives fully in our own way, refusing to give up and by chasing the Wow Factor!

I have the modules uploaded and completed in the system. My last feat is making a tutorial on Camtasia. I worked five hours yesterday trying to get the sound set correctly so I could make a clean clear recording, But, as it turns out that was not to be. I have the recording from he#%!  Since I have no ability to ask for technical help when I am working from home and because I am an intern, I am going to have to figure this out myself. This usually means hours of watching videos and experimenting until it works.

Okay, I have watched hours of video on setting the sound. I have done everything these videos are telling me! Still the background noise on the recording for Camtasia sounds terrible. I am beginning to wonder why I embrace technology when it takes so much to figure out how to work it. After hours of watching these videos you would think I would have found the answer to the problem. I am staring rather fiercely at my Logitech headset right about now. Since it is a year old it might be my problem. Nothing else seems to be working at this point in time.

After several more hours of setting the sound, I managed a pretty good sounding video. While the video is not perfect, I might be able to re-record it a bit later. My problem was having the sound set too high. This caused a lot of background noise. So all is well that ends well.

My final clean up has been done. Unless Charlene wants me to change something at the last-minute, the course is ready to go. Most of the work was put into creating the modules. Uploading it into the LMS system was pretty easy. I keep wondering why I ever thought this was going to be a difficult task. With patience and persistence and good suggestions from the people helping me, it seems to have turned out quite well. I am just waiting for Charlene’s final approval and I know she will be working on it soon.

I have a meeting with my internship coordinator on the 21st of March and have already handed in my final paper. I keep wondering why this project was looming so large when I first began to work on it. It was totally “do-able.” So, now I can just kick back and rest.

The modules have been uploaded into Bb Vista. It will need to be approved by Charlene, since it is her hybrid course I am creating for her. I have made friends with Bb Vista and found it extremely easy to use. It has its short-comings. The discussion thread is prehistoric and the email is very outdated. The only real updates would be to make it more open source and up-to-date. With that being said, it appears the college may be looking at Instructure Canvas as its new system.

I am not certain how I feel about a system like that. At first I was all for the system. Since I have tried to create my own course and put it into the free application, I am not quite as sold on it. But, I hope to give it a fair shot at some point in the near future. It certainly was a top three pick of mine when trying out and learning about the new Learning Management Systems. One of my instructors, Jen who taught us “Backward Design” and how to manage a course once it was online, loved the system. I am certain she would approve.

My primary concern is the discussion thread area and storage for videos and links when learning in the system. One should not have to go outside the system to store the research one finds on-line for the class. However, once the course is over anything stored in a LMS is lost. So far I have seen nothing that gives learners the security it needs to keep this information other than “Diigo.” Not only does Diigo save the learners research; but it saves all the discussion that is taking place in it. No learning system I know will do this. Once the quarter is over, the information is gone and cannot be referred to at a later time.

My second concern, is the email portion of the LMS system. Since the two most important features of any LMS system are the discussion thread and the communications feature of email and chat, those should at least be as advanced as they are outside the system. I am finding the chat room is out-of-date in Bb Vista and the emailing feature is well lets just say…belongs to the days of typewriters. I want to be able to email my learners quickly without a lot of hassle and be able to place them in a folder so I can refer back to them if I need to. I want the feature of sending video (not yet a capability on Comcast my email service) and not just links;  and I hope someday the techs will solve this problem.

With the cost of gasoline around $4.00 a gallon and rising in the Seattle area, I think not only hybrid courses but online courses will become a necessity. At $5.00 a gallon, I would find it difficult to go to work and still be able to pay my bills. Being a student, I can understand their struggles when it comes to money. College tuition keeps going up and what is left of their funds disappears very fast. Finally a way to cut cost for them is the possibility if ebooks and rentals. My wish is this new course will help their budget a bit. I will have to wait and see how many students sign up for the class.