Are You Ready for Online Learning? Building a self-paced student readiness tool collaboratively
Two years ago, Hostos Community College created the “Are You Ready?” course, and online student readiness tool in Blackboard to better prepare students in both how online learning works and what to expect in an online learning environment. After successfully running for two years, the goal was to share with other CUNY colleges, currently five, to be implemented and to establish a consortia approach for continuous improvement of this tool. Initial findings of this partnership, as well as results from the use of this tool at Hostos will be shared in this presentation.
Technologies
This tool was developed as a self-paced learning course, taking advantage of the features from Blackboard; especially, advanced features like adaptive release and achievement badges. The course is divided into 6 sections covering a range of topics. Each section was designed with universal design principles by presenting the student with a brief video, text, and quiz to address different learning styles . Videos were designed using whiteboard video strategies to capture the attention of the students.
Explain project results
Over 50 % of students at Hostos are hispanics, and a self-paced and multi learning style approach helps significantly to ELL students, or those who are still developing their language skills.
Why it should be considered best practice?
The majority of online courses at Hostos use Blackboard as its LMS, hence the practicality for students to take this online readiness course in Blackboard and learn about the environment at the same time. This course can easily be copied or exported to other Blackboard instances.
Over 1,300 students have completed this course at Hostos during the past two years, and the Hostos EdTech team has received a CUNY Excellence in Technology and Blackboard Catalyst awards for this project.
[maybe-frm-field-value field_id=title user_id=current equals=”Are You Ready for Online Learning? Building a self-paced student readiness tool collaboratively”]
[/maybe-frm-field-value]