12 Days of Learning: PLN

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Kris McElroy

Atomic Learning has created the 12 Days of Learning, a series of articles designed to kick off resolutions to keep learning in the new year. We thought this was a great idea and have decided borrow (shamelessly steal) it and do our own. Our Day 7 post will look at creating a Personal Learning Network.

A Personal Learning Network, or PLN, is a group of people and resources that you use to continue learning, growing, and developing your knowledge and skills. You can ask questions, get advice, share knowledge and build community. You probably already have a group of friends and colleagues for this, but many people have expanded their PLN online. A PLN may include people you follow on Twitter, blogs you read, learning communities and social bookmarking sites such as Diigo.

Never heard of a PLN before? Not sure you have one or how to start building one? Watch the short video below for an introduction to PLN’s. Then review the handy Building Your PLN guide at Edublogs Teacher Challenges.

New Online Training: Art Portfolio Reviews

Posted on October 20, 2015 by John McCormick

Alumni Admissions Ambassadors from across the country can now learn to review the arts portfolios of prospective students who may be interested in applying to Lesley University. Alumni Ambassadors with a background in the arts will use online, self-paced training to learn how to assess arts portfolios and to communicate with students during portfolio review events.

This new training system is being piloted this fall semester and will be used will be used by BFA and MFA alumni admissions ambassadors. This effort to extend and streamline the training process is important to the goal of enlisting more ambassadors with training and experience in the arts to assist prospective Lesley students in applying to our university.

Central to the training was the development of a set of guidelines by which to assess portfolios. These guidelines were tested by a group including recent Lesley alums and members of the Marketing Design team and updated based on their input. Trainees will learn to assess portfolios primarily by reviewing many sample portfolios and receiving automated feedback on their choices.

Arts Portfolio Guidelines Pilot Testing Event: Lunder Arts Center

The development of this training has been a collective effort involving staff from the Alumni Recruitment, Undergraduate Admissions, and eLearning and Instructional Support departments.

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about this project, please contact Liana Caffrey (Director) or Shirley Chin (Sr. Assistant Director) of the Alumni Admissions Ambassador Program: lcaffrey@lesley.edu (x8201); schin@lesley.edu (x8806).

Project Staff

Alumni Admissions Ambassador Program: Liana Caffrey, Director; Shirley Chin, Sr. Assistant Director.

Undergraduate Admissions: Erik Gullard, Assistant Director / BFA Specialist; Mike McCarthy, Assistant Director; Lauren O’Neill, Assistant Director / BFA Specialist / International Student Coordinator.

eLearning and Instructional Support: Robyn Belair, Instructional Technologist/Interface Designer; John McCormick, Director of eLearning Design; Bill Porter, Learning Technology Designer

Faculty Development Community at Lesley

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Kris McElroy

A new faculty community has been created in myLesley as a central place to share information and events from the Dean of Faculty Office and eLearning and Instructional Support. The community is still a work in progress so if there’s content you want to see and would find helpful please let us know.

A key element of the Faculty Development community will be events calendar. The calendar will list events sponsored by the Center for Teaching, Learning and Scholarship, eLearning and Instructional Support, Faculty Development and the Provost Office. We will also post relevant events by other Lesley offices.

To access the Faculty Development at Lesley community, log into myLesley. Click on the “my community” tab at the top. Look for Faculty Development at Lesley in the list and click on the title. my organizations To access the events calendar, click on Faculty Calendar in the left-hand menu. faculty calendar link

Want to add the Faculty Development calendar to your own calendar such as Outlook, Office 365, Google, or your iOS or Android phone? Simply scroll to the bottom of the myLeslsy calendar and click Get External Calendar Link.

Copy the link for the myLesley calendar and add it to your personal calendar. See the instructions on our support site to learn how to add the calendar link to many of the most popular calendar tools.

Designing an Online Course with Brandon Strathmann – Part 2

Posted on September 11, 2013 by Kris McElroy

Read Designing an Online Course with Brandon Strathmann – Part 1

I am a visual and linguistic storyteller who uses the communicative powers of the drawn character along with physical acting to engage my students. These are the personal touches that keep my students engaged in the learning process. The only way I could replace my lectures and demonstrations of original artistic lessons was by making videos of my teaching, so I prepared transcripts for the dozens of visual demonstrations that accompanied this class, where I provide all of the visual examples and instructions for the course’s many lessons. Without the content I put into these video transcripts, I would not have been able to write the in-depth weekly modules I needed to envision how the class would run online.

You design a very different course for students online than you do for a traditional class, one that has a great deal more in common with writing a book. It’s not a how-to-manual, but rather an autobiographical novel that tells in writing the things that would be difficult to convey without the written word.

The end result is a very different sort of classroom experience for my students and myself which required the development of it’s own teaching philosophy. Writing out the plans for these lessons I found that I could use exactly the right words to communicate the necessary concepts to I wished to teach my students. Creating these classes is a real test of how well you know your material; everything has to be planned in advance. I would have missed out on the opportunity for personal growth if I had immediately produced instructional videos for this class without making my write-ups.

Writing this course out in advance of teaching it required that I generate many thought provoking questions to provide for students I would never meet in person. In person critiques generate a fair amount of interesting comments and challenges to the artwork that is being presented by students in response to their assignments. But they do not come up with questions as insightful and instructional as the ones that an experienced artist, like myself provides. There is no way I could have each student in a traditional classroom answer the number of complicated questions I am able to pose to them as participants in this class. There is more time for students to give feedback on one another’s artwork in an online format, something I think will be very artistically enriching for everyone.

The saddest part about teaching online for me is losing the interaction between students and myself. I suppose some of this can be made up during on-campus office hours. There is a spontaneity that occurs in the chaos, urgency and danger improving the creative process that is missing for my online students since I’m not controlling the time they get to spend on the drawing exercises. You lose the benefits of the energy you feed off of a class when you lecture, but you gain absolute control of the classroom experience.

I found generating the all-encompassing content for this class to be very demanding, since it was an entirely new experience for me. I recommend that you give this learning process the time it needs so that you can reflect upon it as you go through the steps. I was lucky to have been able to plan for this class a year before I have to teach it. Online classes are designed to be accessible by a wide variety of learners through student-centered learning and require multiple examples of clearly described instruction. A huge advantage is that students have the opportunity to pause the content for breaks and have the chance to review the content at their own speed.

Making this class was a very time consuming process, due to my experimenting in intellectual territory I was unfamiliar with. That being said it was neat to test my ability to create a course that removed myself as a physical entity from the teaching process. I regret not accumulating more imagery resources early on during this process, as this would have made it easier for me to role-play and visualize how the class would go, rather than muscling through the content in a multitude of written attempts. But, I made a richer and heavily researched class as a result having to write it out, minus all visuals. So the struggle of writing taught me new methods of learning strategies and uncovering new ideas and working processes.

Collaboration is essential to succeeding at this difficult task, there is still a fair amount of work left to-be-done on this class before it is ready to be automated. I am grateful that I have help from the Learning Technologies Department to bring this class to life. Our student body is ever-changing and online classes provide them with new ways to learn with hi-tech tools.

Note: Image orignally published on aquariumofthepacific.org

Designing an Online Course with Brandon Strathmann – Part 1

Posted on September 10, 2013 by Kris McElroy

Note: Below you’ll find Brandon Strathmann’s description of his experience working with eLIS to develop his first online class.

First let me commend all of you who contribute to this blog for the excellent variety and quality of content posted on it. It’s a great reflection of the dynamic and growing world of online teaching. I’m glad to have been introduced to such a useful resource.

I’d like to share my positive experience building an online class with all of you. I’m an Associate Professor of Animation and Motion Media Art at LUCAD (Lesley University College of Art and Design) who learned about the opportunity to design an online class at a Faculty Development Day event last Fall of 2012. I spent the past few months building an all-new “Advanced Character Design” class. It is designed to provide artists the chance to improve their skills of perception and rendering of caricatured humans and animals. I delve into the psychology of how humans are manipulated by the things they see. Artists learn to play around with the physical traits that viewers make conscious and unconscious judgments of when they look at a character. They end the class with a portfolio of the art they have done.

I entered this online academic realm with some practical computer and programming skills, hoping to expand the sort of content I could offer to students. I have seen technology innovate and improve the field of animation and video games during my own career, and learned that it’s always good to be one of the earlier practitioners of a trade to adopt advancing technology. Technology isn’t so much of an inevitability as it is an opportunity.

The training process for this class took two stages, that eased me into the unique methodology required in designing an online class. Part one was an online group class where participants learned how to modify existing classes to work in an internet-connected environment. This stage was challenging for me since I was designing a new class that had to be an advanced part two to an existing class that also needed to exist as a stand-alone graduate class. I was introduced to the various online tools to instill knowledge and skills in my students through four weeks of challenges and exercises done independently and in groups. The class ends with a complex final project testing the skill accumulation along with the creativity of the student.

The second part of this training was getting to work one-on-one with a Senior Learning Technologies Designer to build the written framework for this class. My course needed a customized format to provide a rich environment for students to learn in online. There was some trial and error in designing this since I was becoming better at understanding how the online teaching tools worked. I had to write a few drafts of my weekly course modules, honing in on how I might best communicate with online students as part of this learning process. It took me a while to learn what tool would be best for addressing various lesson plans but luckily my trainer was very patient and helpful.

I think it helps to be an experienced teacher when you design one of these non-traditional online courses. You need to really understand the specific challenges that your students face based off of your personal mastery of their educational medium. Art courses rely upon a lot of creative energy in a student’s learning environment to keep them interested and passionate about the material. I felt very challenged having to come up with an advanced class in character design as an online class. When I first embarked on this creative journey I felt that this would just be a correspondence course, something where I would provide instructional videos and provide written critiques about the work my students turned in.

Most of what a character designer does is hands-on and experiential in nature, these artistic factors are complicated visual elements that were challenging to translate into a written format. I designed symbolic language that my students could use as a guide to envision and review the topics covered in the lessons. Taking lessons that are primarily hands on and instead building them as systematic, written steps required me to predict how students would experience each portion of the designing process.

Early in the process I saw that I would need to plan out my lessons from the start to the finish for each of these class sessions, and that these lessons would have to planned out in a written form. Writing provided me with powerful tools to summarize my lessons. I’ve learned that I form ideas and describe them differently when I use the written as opposed to the spoken word. I enjoy getting feedback from my pupils and had to envision how students working in my class would react and feel about the lessons they are taking in class. So my pedagogical approach had to be modified to one where I was entirely reliant upon my existing understanding of student behavior in the classroom. This required me to research online content delivery methods and the educational philosophies of many other teachers to see what educational techniques I might use.

Click here for Part 2 of Brandon’s story…