Educational Technology Organization of Michigan

This past Friday I attended the Educational Technology Organization of Michigan (ETOM) Fall Conference held at Mid Michigan Community College in Mt. Pleasant. It was an interesting event and I’m going to use this opportunity share a few things I picked up concerning online learning orientation courses.

You may know that Educational Media Technologies piloted an online learning orientation course with 15 online and face-to-face courses this semester. The goal of the course we developed (NMC’s Online Learning & Moodle Orientation Course) is to help students become familiar with Moodle and successful with online learning. It’s a self-study course that consists of 6 steps that students must complete in order to earn their Online Learning Badge. Once students earned the badge, Moodle course content was unlocked.

NMC’s Online Learning Badge

We presented the course in our Summer Shorts series (see the video below) and we led a session during the NMC Fall Conference outlining the pilot project results and the next steps we’ll be taking (see our slides below).

At ETOM I learned that developing and implementing an online learning orientation tool is a goal shared by several community colleges and universities in Michigan. I attended three separate sessions led by folks at Malcomb, Muskegon, and Grand Rapids Community Colleges. Each session was, at least in part, about the effectiveness of the orientation tool the respective schools have developed. I also learned that there is a similar goal at Ferris State University. GRCC is the only school requiring the course, which is our goal here at NMC.

I had a few takeaways from these sessions:

1. We’re part of a larger discussion. It’s good to know we’re right in the thick of this project like several other schools. Hopefully there’ll be a time when we can come back together and share our experiences.
2. These orientations are helping students become successful. There’s a lot of research out there that suggests orientations like these can help with student success, especially in online courses. We’re well on our way to making this a reality here at NMC. One of our next steps is to measure the impact of our pilot project. We hope to see an increase in course completion rates.
3. We share common challenges with technology. Like other schools, we’re currently looking at our SIS (student information system) to explore ways to integrate our orientation course with the registration process.

If you’d like to learn more about NMC’s Online Learning & Moodle Orientation Course, please let me know. Next week I’ll share some things I learned about developing social presence in online courses.