David Sherman - Teaching at Excelsior College

David Sherman, one of our very best teachers at Excelsior College in the area of music history and related topics talks about teaching at Excelsior College in this video. One of the best points he makes is about how a student who would normally not respond and contribute to a learning activity in a large group due to shyness or similar reason, does contribute in an on-line format because that stressor is removed. David goes on to make several other points that clarifies why he loves teaching at Excelsior College.

Video Production - A Physical Assessment Instructional Video

In the past few months I have been working with an Excelsior College nursing faculty colleague to produce a video that helps students identify all the parts to a physical assessment video they must produce on their own. The video outlines all the skills and knowledge they must demonstrate within their submitted video. During this project I really ramped up my timeline for teaching myself some of the inner workings of Adobe Premiere which is their video editing software package. I was able to string together clips of video recorded in a different format than the eventual output format of flash video (.FLV), trim and adjust those clips, add sound files (edited in Garageband from Apple), create titles, and add still images for chapter headings. Although I know that Premiere is capable of much more, it was nice to explore those audio/video skills within such a nice application. I can say that I wish the interface was setup a little different as selecting various parts of video and moving them around was a bit clumsy. This could have also been my newness to the upgrade of the program as there might be some shortcuts or easier ways to do these things. I look forward to doing more like adding key-frames and transitions in the future. I should also say that I am a big fan of iMovie and Final Cut Studio from Apple as well. I can not share the video with you here, but if you have an interest in Nursing and are looking for a Nursing Degree program to take online, you can enroll at Excelsior College and take this NUR442 course.

Excelsior College Webinar on Managing Effective Discussions

On Tuesday November 9th myself and a few colleagues recorded a web conference for Excelsior College faculty called "Managing Effective Discussions". This webinar produced and recorded with the wonderful web conference software/service Adobe Connect Professional, focused on strategies for managing effective discussions in online courses at Excelsior College, and how developers or subject matter experts can structure or setup these discussions within development by ensuring they contain some key components. Those key components are learning outcomes, the method and way those outcomes will be measured, an initiation to orient the student to the topic of the discussion, some guiding questions or information to keep the student on track, and the main question or questions to discuss as well as the instructions for the student. I can not provide you with the link to the actual webinar as you must be an Excelsior College faculty (adjunct or full time) member, but I thought it would be helpful if a included a description of what took place because the principles can be applied to other instructional design related venues.