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Introduction Welcome to the world of online learning at Florida Community College at Jacksonville (FCCJ). This handbook has been designed to help online faculty (adjunct and full-time) learn about the the College and the services it provides to support online course development and online teaching. Online courses enable the College to extend its teaching services and to enrich its diverse community of students. Mindful of the fact that many, if not most, faculty have teaching responsibilities both on campus and online, this handbook is intended to serve as an easy-to-reference informational tool. The College Catalog, which contains the College calendar, student policies, program information and course descriptions, is an invaluable reference for all faculty. You may request a copy be mailed to you, however, it is also available online at http://www.fccj.edu/catalog. The Administrative Procedures Manual, available in each College library and Campus President's office, defines College policies and procedures. It is also available online at http://www.fccj.edu/policies/index.html. Distance learning is an integral part of FCCJ that
promotes student success through innovative teaching, learning and technology.
The Virtual College at Open Campus coordinates and supports all distance learning
at the college. Think of Open Campus as a campus without walls. Our programs aren't
limited to one physical location-they're housed within the College, local businesses,
military groups, and across the globe via the Internet. Our roots are in continuing
education and serving the needs of individuals, groups, and employers through
the Women's Center, economic development, off-campus locations (including three
military bases), and community services. We then began offering credit programs
by providing onsite courses to businesses, and one of these efforts resulted in
the Deerwood Center development. In the early 1980s, the community services program
branched out through the media by producing many award-winning videos and expanding
our telecourse offerings on cable. Today Open Campus and the Virtual College is a student-centered global web of educational services. Open Campus has grown from offering courses to developing customized degrees here and around the world. Telecourses have remained a mainstay available in Jacksonville's four-county area on cable TV. Online course enrollment has made the virtual college enrollment the fastest-growing area of the college. Video production continues to produce telecourses and videoconferences. FCCJ Provides Distance Learning in the following delivery methods:
The policies and procedures in this manual are based upon certain assumptions:
Distance Learning Office Administration and Support Staff
Course Scheduling and Workload An adjunct faculty member is an unranked part-time
teacher appointed on a semester or term basis. Adjunct faculty should have at
least a master’s degree and several years of teaching and/or work experience.
They have duties associated with teaching and do not assume other responsibilities
of full-time faculty except as an associate adjunct faculty member or by designation
of the Dean or Program Manager.
Class Size First time online instructors are capped at 20 per class; otherwise standard allocations are followed for all FCCJ courses. Check http://www1.fccj.edu/curriculum for individual course
outlines and approved course allocations Virtual Mentor Program Compensation Performance Expectations and Standards of Employment Respond to email and phone requests from students within a 24-hour period, except on weekends and holidays. Notify your students and the Distance Learning Office (DLO) if you plan to go out of town, or will be unavailable for an extended period of time, that would prevent you from responding to students and DLO within a 24-hour period. • Respond to emails and phone calls from the DLO within a 24-hour period, except on weekends. • Meet all reasonable deadlines for administrative paperwork set by the Distance Learning Office and Florida Community College at Jacksonville (FCCJ). This includes book adoption, attendance verification, final grades, and other deadlines. • Teach the course for the complete session dates, as specified in the course registration system. For example, if class is scheduled Sept. 3 – Dec. 20, 2002 , class should be conducted during that entire time period, and not be conducted outside of those dates. • Permit only registered and paid students to access your course account. You will be expected to check your class roster in Artemis at least every other day during the first two weeks of the session, and after each subsequent drop and withdrawal periods, specified in the College Calendar. • Maintain your faculty web page on the FCCJ server with the required information. • Ensure that you have access to a working computer and Internet connection. Have a back-up plan if your personal computer is not working. • Follow procedures of the DLO Alternate Site Testing program if your course requires proctored face-to-face testing. If you teach a course that requires a Florida state exit exam or FCCJ exit exam at the end of the term, you are responsible for administering the exit exam and following all exit exam procedures as defined by FCCJ Assessment Centers. • Participate in online adjunct mentoring activities throughout the semester, as announced. • Facilitate the administration of course evaluations and surveys for your students. • Follow the college course outline. • Uphold college academic standards and policies, and follow grading policy, specified in the College Catalog. • Submit a copy of the class syllabus to the DLO. • Make written agreements with each student assigned an Incomplete, and provide a copy of the agreement to the DLO. • Provide current contact information to the DLO for a period of one year from the end of the course. • Participate in an administrative evaluation of your course and instruction. Course Evaluation Procedures Using FCCJ Course Shells Using Artemis Overrides Preparing Your Faculty Webpage Grading and Instructional Policies Distance Learning Testing and Assessment
Professional Development and Training Student Services
Online Course Prep Checklist: Paperwork Be sure to provide official transcripts and fill out all required paperwork FCCJ Accounts Your supervisor will request an FCCJ e-mail account for you, as well as a web page account Your Faculty Web Page When students register, they are instructed to visit their instructor’s web page for course information. All faculty web pages are listed alphabetically at http://www.fccj.edu/current/fac_staffweb/index.html At minimum, your web page should include information about the courses you are teaching and guidelines for access. Review other instructor Web pages for examples and ideas! Orientation and Training: Make sure you are prepared by participating in any of the following training opportunities as identified in your hiring process. Blackboard training offered by FCCU You will be asked for book adoption information by the DLO; please be prepared to provide author, title, ISBN. Desk copies should be ordered by the instructor. Encoding: The DLO will ask you for “notes” for Artemis. The notes will include whether your course is “World- Wide Ready” or requires on-campus attendance, special software requirements, testing information, and orientation requirements. The DLO MUST meet college-wide textbook and encoding deadlines. Please provide us this information by the stated deadlines! Your class Web site can be done in any one of several ways. It can be done on the college server on web space created by the network administrator. You can use web-designing software, like Front Page, Claris Home Page or even MSWord 2000 to design the content. If you do not know how to do this but would like to design the class web site from scratch, you should take one of the courses mentioned earlier, like "Creating an Online Course using MS Word 2000". The other way to construct a class web site is to use a predesigned shell called a platform. There are several types among them are Web Course In A Box or Blackboard. They are designed for the novice and experienced alike. They are very user friendly and easy to learn with many instructional help screens. You will attend a course in a computer lab where you will not only be taught how to create an online class using a platform, you will actually start your class web site as part of the activities in the class sessions with hands on guidance from experienced designers. Though no experience is necessary in the web site design area, you will need the basic computer skills mentioned earlier. You will be taught how to create the banner and background, set up buttons for all the various parts on the web site, post lessons and assignments, create online tests, etc. You are required to create an announcement web page for your course. This must be a non-password protected site where any student can get essential information on your class. This could be the web space reserved by the college for your faculty home page. Some platforms include a welcome page which is not password protected which can be used as the announcement page also. This page should include the following:
Frequent communication with the student, especially early in the semester, is vital to the learning experience. The announcement web page helps serve this purpose. Student should be asked to send you a message as soon as possible. As soon as you get the message, respond immediately to the student's question and include a request to get their phone numbers in case they are not on the roster or have changed. This message should be brief but can also contain some initial instructions and should ask for an immediate response. This helps to get things started quickly. Later communications don't have to be so rigid except that students should be required to check their messages several times per week. Being available to talk to them by phone is also very valuable since it gives you the opportunity for more effective communication. Although e-mail and phone should be sufficient, having other forms of communication can't hurt. These can include instant messenger services like ICQ, AOL and MSN. This can afford you closer synchronous communications with your students and will even permit transfers of files for you to temporarily examine, such as a rough draft of an assignment. Finally, there is the platform e-mail tool. This can be for regular course communication and assignments. The agreement with the student can be something like the following:
You should plan an orientation to bring everybody together on how the class is conducted. An on campus orientation will accomplish the most if everybody is within driving distance. You should have your normal printed materials available and go through a first class procedure similar to any other class you teach. If you can do it in a lab or at least have a computer with a projector, you can show them how to log on and some of the various web site features. This, however defeats the purpose of "distance" learning. Alternatively, you can plan an online orientation. Students should be encouraged to log on the web site and the chat window before orientation to get familiar with it. This should be done prior to the first chat session and should be a question and answer session. You should also make yourself available by phone so when a student has trouble logging on, they can call you. (However, this should be the only time students should be allowed to call you during chat. For the rest of the semester, you are "in class" during the chat time and are unavailable by phone.) You can also include a couple of mini assignments sent by e-mail attachment and/or turned in online through the course platform to test the students' ability to learn and communicate online. You can have a short list of requirements in place to prevent being dropped from the class at the end of the first two weeks. This helps to eliminate the students with misconceptions about the course. However, you must spell this out in your syllabus in detail. They can include any of the following:
During the first few weeks, you will be inundated with e-mails. This is all part of the orientation. Answer all messages in a timely fashion. After handling this initial influx, you should establish rules of communication including what days you will be responding to e-mails. A student manual should be written, which initially could be just a modular addition to the syllabus, on all the various instructions you want the student to follow. It can include all the information you want passed on to the student that is necessary and not mentioned in the syllabus. It should include instructions for writing, naming and submitting assignments, what to do if unable to log in to the chat room, what days to log on to the web site and what to do, testing procedures, chat rules, online office hours and messaging rules. This will cover you later when students may try to claim, "Nobody told me that." This manual should be sent by e-mail in the beginning and also posted to the web site. But you shouldn't stop there. You should ask them in the early chat sessions if they read the manual. If they ask a question that is covered by the manual, refer them to it instead of answering it directly. Finally, consider including questions on the manual and syllabus in the first quiz and inform them they will be questioned on it. As the semester progresses, make notes to yourself on various problems that arise and how you could prevent them. Then, periodically revise the manual by including them in it for future semesters. This will build on the mistakes of the past. You should write a brief but complete setup statement containing the minimum requirements of the college mentioned below, the additional requirements to keep from being dropped, and other setup requirements that are particular to the course. Minimum requirements for all online students are as follows: All online courses require the following: computer with personal access to the Internet (you should also be familiar with using the Internet); web-browser software (must be at least 4.5 for Internet Explorer and/or 4.7 for Netscape; an internet e-mail account; Windows 95; ability to attach files to e-mail; and virus-checking software. Some courses may require additional software. For details about a specific course requirements, refer to the information found on our web page by clicking on the "Class Schedule," scrolling to the specific course you are interested in enrolling, and then click on the instructor's homepage address.Students should be informed of what additional software is necessary in the syllabus. They should be instructed to have an alternate computer in the event their computer breaks down. This could be one provided by a relative or, if allowed by their employer, their office. The college lab can also be considered. When using a back up computer, they should immediately inform you of the computer name and make the 'Prompt for properties" change mentioned next. There are a couple of security setups that are recommended. We will discuss why later. They should be asked to inform you of the name of the computer they will be using in an e-mail that you would file in their correspondence folder. They can do this by clicking on My Computer/Help/About Windows. In here it will say "This product is licensed to . . ." If they will be using any Microsoft Office programs, instruct them to go to each application and in Tools/Options/Save, select "Prompt for document properties." Students should be informed of a suggested file setup for the course. They should be instructed on how to arrange folders on their hard drive, such as one with the class name with several folders within it, one for assignments, one for correspondence, one for term project, etc. They should be instructed to install needed software and make all other necessary preparations before or no later than the first week. This could be explained in the orientation and in the manual mentioned earlier. Many people in education especially those in leadership have asked a valid question concerning online classes, "How do you know the person taking the test or submitting the assignment is the person they say they are." Well, teachers in on campus classes usually do not ask for photo IDs when giving tests. Unfortunately, this is not a valid answer. The thing to do is to address the issue of fraud to the best of our ability. This is done by identifying the ways fraud could be committed and addressing each one. We have already started to deal with fraud when we mentioned identifying the computer name. When you receive a file from a student or download from the course platform and install it on your hard drive, by running the mouse arrow over the file name in Windows Explore, the name of the computer of origin is revealed. Also, by activating the "prompt for properties" option in the Office programs, the student is prompted by a dialog window to enter their name as author. These properties along with the date of creation and time devoted to the project stay with the document when sent by e-mail attachment or turned in online. This helps prevent copying. Students should be instructed to keep all assignments on their computer and not delete anything until they get their final grade in the mail. When an instructor informs a student of a missing assignment and the student claims to have submitted it and deleted it, this is the equivalent of saying "the dog ate it." Also students should be advised that if they do not practice routine backup, virus scans and security measures, they should also make printed hard copies. As for testing, it should be approached differently. You can have on campus testing and conduct it as you have in the past, but you will have to set up a procedure for students not within driving distance. They could contact another community college or other acceptable institution, like a public library, that would agree to proctor the test and give you the contact information. You would then contact that person and secure the conditions of the proctoring agreement. If you use a platform and do online testing, all tests must be difficult enough to be open book tests had they been a comparable proctored test. Also, students should be instructed that they cannot collaborate on tests and must use their own computers. At the beginning of the semester, students should be given a unique password and asked to put it in a safe place near the computer. When the first test starts, they can be instructed to enter that password. At the end of the test, they can be prompted to enter their name, social security number and any other identifying data. This should be followed by a statement similar to the following: By entering this information above, I certify that under penalty of fraud this is who I am and that I took this test alone and without help from anyone else. There is another approach that is technical in nature, so skip this paragraph if you want. It is to get the IP address of a certain lab or office computer. Certain platforms will support accepting tests only from certain IP addresses. Then, by prior arrangement with a staff member, students could take the test any day during a certain period. The staff member could proctor the test by checking ID and making sure the student does not use books or talk to anyone. Contrary to popular belief, chat sessions are not a classroom substitute. When using a platform, several online learning communities replace the learning experience enjoyed in a classroom. As part of the classroom grade, students should be instructed to logon to the web site three times per week. They should also post something to the bulletin board each week. This could be a response to a critical thinking idea you have posted or just posting an interesting fact they learned in that particular week's lesson. These plus the chat appearance can be requirements for attendance. A suggested activity chart is included as and appendix. The chat serves as an excellent means of decontextualizing the visual conversation and is also an excellent tool for guided inquiry (Madden, 1998). Rules for chat and attendance should be included in the manual. These rules should include no foul or offensive language, sticking to the subject the teacher determines and making a positive contribution to the subject at hand. It is a good idea to have student who want to speak up or ask a question to type the "?" which will show up in the chat window with the student's name. The student can start typing the question and when the teacher recognizes him, click Enter to post the question. This is the equivalent to raining your hand in class and saves time. For a brief period just prior to chat, it is a good idea, should your platform permit it, to hide the chat icon. Students may logon early and start a chat of their own. This may degenerate into a gripe session. When you log on, you'll spend much of your time dealing with their complaints instead of trying to encourage learning. At best you will be walking in on their conversation and directing the conversation will still be a challenge. Also prior to the session, you could type out your questions and comments in Notepad and save it to the class folder. Just before the chat, open it and minimize it. Then as you want to post each statement, copy it by selecting (or "highlighting") it, click Ctrl+C to copy. Then switch back to the chat window, click in the text box and click Ctrl+V to paste it. This will reduce the time your students will have to wait for your comments. Keep the conversation from getting personal or dealing with individual problems. Notwithstanding, conversations with individual students can be enlightening to the rest of the class if it deals with the subject at hand. One thing you can do while waiting for a student's response is to anticipate your next comment and start typing it. If it turns out to be inappropriate for the moment, but you want to post it later, select it and click Ctrl+C. This will copy it to the clipboard. Later, you can click Ctrl+V to post it and finish it, should you have stopped in mid-sentence. Be wary of students not participating in the discussion. Ask questions using student names. If they don't respond, you might assume they logged on just to be counted and went on to do something else. When the chat is over, should your platform not save the session automatically, select the entire chat and click Ctrl+C. Then open Notepad or a word processor and click Ctrl+V to paste it and save it. The word processor might be the better choice since it gives you the opportunity to clean it up by correcting spelling, etc. Later you can send it to absent students or post it to the web site. However, students who are absent frequently should be encouraged to see that just reading the chat log is no substitute for being there. Constructing lessons can be done in several ways all of which will involve a process known as uploading. It is not too unlike doing an attachment to an e-mail. While on the web site, you would click the upload button and a window will open accessing the files on your computer including the floppy and CD-ROM drives. This is where you select the file to upload. It will normally be an web page or HTML document. (Uploading other types of documents will be discussed in your platform class.) This is a document that is in a certain type of code written for web sites. It will usually have an icon that is the same as your Internet browser (blue "e" or Netscape icons). You can use a preconstructed lesson plan, such as one provided by a publisher. In this instance, all you have to do is install the disk in your computer and upload to the web site. Just look for the Internet browser icons. When writing your own lessons, this process is a little more technical in nature. It is suggested that you follow a similar procedure mentioned earlier in the Windows Setup section. Upon opening a MS Word document, immediately open the Properties in the File menu. Click the Summary tab and type the title as you want it to appear on the web site including spaces. After closing it, go to Save As in the File menu. This is where you type the file name for the computer to read. It can be similar to the one typed earlier with certain modifications. First, you must take out all the spaces. You can change the first letter of each word to a capital if you want to make it more readable, like MyFileName. Finally, if it starts with a number, change it to a letter or add a letter before it. The file upload process will be further discussed in you platform class. The method of turning in assignments must also be addressed. If you choose to take them as e-mail attachments, remember, you will have to open each e-mail and relocate the attachment to a student folder in addition to reading it. If, as most platforms provide, the student can turn in online, them the server computer that has the platform holds the assignment and may even keep some records for you. You will still have to read it, but this will save you time once you have learned it and mastered it. Orchestrating EverythingStart thinking like an online educator. This means that the Internet instead of the airspace in a room connects you to your students. The standards and learning outcomes are the same as an on campus class. You will have to ascertain this based on different information, such as e-mails, IMs, chat sessions, phone calls, submitted assignments and sometimes even lack of activity, instead of eye contact and face-to-face conversations. One thing to do is as soon as you suspect even a possible problem, send that student a message about it and see what kind of response you get. If there is none, you may have to call the student. Remember that all conversations above the routine and ordinary should be done by phone. Encourage learning communities, like the bulletin board. Facilitate discussions in the chat room. Send frequent messages, especially ones that elicit a response. If you enjoy the online experience, it will prove very fruitful for you.
Distance Learning Support Staff
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