Virtual adjunct faculty have largely carried higher education into the cyber classroom. Adjunct faculty have always been broadly used in higher education, especially in the community college setting. Nationally, adjuncts teach 30-50% of all credit courses. At community colleges, adjuncts compose about 60% of all faculty (Gappa and Leslie, 1993).
About 80% of all online course offerings are taught by virtual adjuncts. About 70% of the active 250 adjuncts teaching in the program reside in the state of Florida , and the other half in assorted states.
As colleges and universities work steadily to get full-time faculty onboard with distance learning, virtual adjuncts have eagerly stepped up to fill the void, thereby enabling institutions to respond promptly to market demand.
Having familiar, collegial, and multiple points of contact helps them develop and maintain the confidence they need to be successful teachers. And, mentoring is a proven-effective strategy for support, improvement, and community building.
. Adjuncts who know that they are working for a professional organization are more likely to feel a sense of pride in their affiliation, and feel accountable to the institution.
These required training opportunities allow new adjuncts to actively learn about FCCJ's instructional culture, and build community with other instructors. They actively discuss their teaching experiences, best practices, learn new strategies for teaching online, and apply those strategies to the courses they are currently teaching.
In the online environment, Virtual Adjuncts need to know clearly what the institution's expectations are of them, and whether they are meeting those expectations. There is very little continuity among contemporary online programs, and each institution has its own instructional priorities, goals, constituencies, and definitions of excellence. Many adjuncts teach simultaneously at multiple institutions, and so it is important to define expectations clearly.
Peer-based sharing is the most effective model for the professional learning community
Evaluation of Synchronous Online Tutoring for Students at Risk of Reading Failure
This study examined the effects of online reading instruction for at-risk fourth-grade students in Philadelphia. The authors used a multiple baseline design to assess the extent to which the students increased their oral reading rate given systematic supplemental online reading instruction. Tutoring consisted of 4 sessions per week with 50-min lessons of instruction delivered over Adobe ConnectTM. Analysis of the multiple baseline across participants revealed gains in oral reading fluency for all participants when placed into the synchronous online tutoring program. Participating students and tutors reported an awareness of increased reading skills and value of synchronous online instruction. Teachers and parents generally reported that students demonstrated increased reading skills after receiving instruction.
Learning can happen anytime, anyplace, at any age. Learning happens in K-12 and college classrooms, adult education and in professional development programs. Learning also happens in an array of other online and in-person environments: in afterschool programs and online tutorials, through mentoring, playing games, interacting with peers in person and in social networks, with smart phone apps, in volunteer workshops, at sports camps, during military training, and in countless other ways and other places.
The interactive learning theory matrix was created by Tina Nobi, a student in Walden University's education program. See the last slide for the complete matrix.
"The successful outcome of any educational program is highly dependent on how the students learn and how effectively they can function at the workplace after completion of their study."
Above all, it’s the emotions elicited by teaching that make it such a powerful vehicle for learning. Student tutors feel chagrin when their virtual pupils fail; when the characters succeed, they feel what one expert calls by the Yiddish term nachas. Don’t know that word? I had to learn it myself: “Pride and satisfaction that is derived from someone else’s accomplishment.”
Nachas is a word used in gaming as mentoring, teaching presence from players is common
On a subsequent test of their skills, the students who had observed agents using rules of reasoning to solve a problem “significantly outperformed” students who had only practiced applying the rules themselves.
A 2009 study of Betty’s Brain published in the Journal of Science Education and Technology found that students engaged in instructing her spent more time going over the material and learned it more thoroughly.
The benefits of this practice were indicated by a pair of articles published in 2007 in the journals Science and Intelligence. The studies concluded that first-born children are more intelligent than their later-born brothers and sisters and suggested that their higher IQs result from the time they spend showing their younger siblings the ropes. Educators are experimenting with ways to apply this model to academic subjects. In an ingenious program at the University of Pennsylvania, a “cascading mentoring program” engages college undergraduates to teach computer science to high school students, who in turn instruct middle school students on the topic.
In this 2009 report, the Hanover Research Council reviews the best practice teaching strategies in the field of online education. Report also provides case studies of exemplary programs
a lot of educators have heard about wikis but just aren't sure how to use them in the classroom. In PBwiki Summer Camp you will learn the best way to structure your classroom site, engage your students with audio and video and connect with experienced wiki mentors.
At the end of the summer, Campers who have followed the program receive a free platinum wiki for the school year, as well as some fun swag along the way.
Online colleges, online universities, and online schools offering accredited degrees approved by U.S. Department of Education recognized agencies. Online degrees from an accredited online university or accredited online school offering the online degree you need. Online college degree programs searchable by degree, college, university or school. Enroll in college online.
In the present study we review ongoing issues of pedagogy
and faculty development, and their relationship to student satisfaction, and reported learning in SLN. We
provide an overview of the SLN program, and summarize a conceptual framework for our current
research on higher education, online learning environments. This framework integrates research on how
people learn [2], with principles of good practice in higher education [3] and recent research on learning
in asynchronous learning networks (ALNs) in higher education [4]. We also present results of a follow-up
study on one aspect of the model, "Teaching Presence".
How relevant is a liberal arts education today to most youth? Will it get them a job? How much debt will this education incur? Are students well informed and advised well about their chosen degree programs, and the demand for jobs, or expected career paths and salaries? Will they learn things they can ever actually use in the “real world”? If I were a college student today, i would be pissed off.
For more than a century, American schooling has ben conducted in much the same way: The teacher assigns a text for the students to master and then assesses their learning. Known as the "recitation script," this repeated cycle of assign-assess is far from the natural kind of teaching by which societies have been instructing their young since the dawn of time. Contemporary educational
reform is now emphasizing the fundamental, natural method of teaching, which is the assisting of learners through the instructional conversation. Newly understood through the principles of socio-historical theory, real teaching is understood as assisting the learner to perform just beyond his or her current capacity. This assistance in the "zone of proximal development" awakens and rouses into life the mental capacities of learners of all ages. This assistance is best provided through the instructional conversation, a dialogue between teacher and learners in which the teacher listens carefully to grasp the students' communicative intent, and tailors the dialogue to meet the emerging understanding of the learners.
This pattern of relationship should be characteristic of the communication of the entire school, in which the teachers assist and converse with one another, administrators assist and converse with teachers, and administration provides activity settings in which these instructional conversations can occur. Such a school becomes a true community of learners, in which school reliably assists
the performance of all.
Despite the many educational projects and programs now being funded and offered, practically no effort is being made to create and implement a better, more future-oriented education for all our kids.
This distinction is critical because one can change almost everything about the "system" -- the schools, the leaders, the teachers, the number of hours and days of instruction and so forth -- and still not provide an education that interests our students and gets them deeply engaged in their own learning,