What are the benefits of online courses at residential, liberal arts colleges? What kinds of online courses best support the missions of the liberal arts colleges? Can such courses successfully capture the close student-faculty interaction and a robust learning community that characterize courses on ACM campuses? What kind of support is required for faculty to develop and teach these courses?
These are some of the questions that will engage faculty from the ACM colleges at the Online Teaching Workshop on Friday, June 13 in Chicago.
The workshop will provide an introduction to developing and teaching online courses and will feature presentations by Shonda Kuiper, Brad Miller, and Chad Topaz, all of whom have taught online courses.
| Read more about ACM’s Online Learning Project |
“All three of our presenters teach in the area of math, statistics, and computer science, but they will focus on the types of lessons they’ve learned from their experiences teaching online that are generalizable across disciplines,” said ACM Senior Program Officer David Schodt, who is organizing the workshop.
“We’re hoping to draw faculty from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and to encourage wide-ranging discussion about some of the needs that online courses might address on our campuses,” Schodt said. “For example, are there courses, such as those in lesser-taught languages, which would be particularly well-suited to online instruction?”
The workshop is sponsored by the Online Learning Project (OLP), an initiative sparked by the interest of the ACM Board of Directors in exploring ways that online learning – whether through fully online courses or as “blended learning” elements of on-campus courses – might be used to enhance the educational missions of ACM colleges.
Faculty interested in participating in the workshop should contact David Schodt at ACM.
Workshop presenters
Shonda Kuiper
- Shonda Kuiper, Associate Professor of Mathematics & Statistics, Grinnell College
Kuiper developed and teaches an online class, Statistical Modeling, offered by Grinnell through the Global Online Academy, a consortium of independent high schools around the world. She received the 2012 MERLOT Classics Award in Statistics for creating Stat2Labs, a set of lab modules that enable students to apply statistical analysis to research problems from the sciences and social sciences, such as population growth modeling and global surface temperature estimation. The award is given once a year for the best peer-reviewed online resources designed to enhance teaching and learning.
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Brad MillerBrad Miller, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Luther College
Brad MillerA software entrepreneur before moving into academe, Miller’s latest research explores technologies and tools for interactive textbooks. He teaches a summer online course for Luther students, Introduction to Computer Science II, which uses an interactive textbook he developed through Runestone Interactive. The textbook, which is open source and available to anyone who wants to learn computer science, is used at more than 100 institutions around the world.
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Chad Topaz
Chad Topaz, Associate Professor of Mathematics, Statistics, & Computer Science, Macalester College
Chad TopazIn 2013, Topaz teamed with St. Olaf College mathematician Kristina Garrett to develop and co-teach ACM’s pilot online course, Calculus: A Modeling Approach, which he is teaching again this summer. For years he has extensively used online technology, such as in the “flipped classroom” format, to support his learner-centered pedagogy.
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