Initial Results of CDL001: Orientation to Learning Online Look Promising

A critical component of JSRCC's Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) focuses upon preparing students for online learning prior to their enrollment in distance classes. For several months in Spring and Summer 2011, faculty and staff members from various divisions collaborated in the creation of CDL001: Orientation to Learning Online, a new and vigorous two-week orientation module that introduces students to resources, key strategies for effective online engagement, and fundamental academic attributes for distance learning. The orientation integrates the use of Blackboard (Bb) technologies and features so that students also become familiar with the technical requirements of navigating a course management system. Students who successfully complete the various requirements of CDL001 receive a certificate. 

In a survey that is one of the exit assignments for the Orientation, participants report an overwhelming degree of satisfaction with the learning objectives and outcomes of the two-week module. They also report feeling a high degree of preparation for their online, academic classes.

Apart from participant satisfaction with CDL001: Orientation to Learning Online,  the College is also beginning to see evidence of academic success among those who complete the full two-week module.  The 47 students who finished the Summer 2011 pilot of the Orientation progressed forward to enroll in 65 distance learning courses in Fall 2011. In these 65 DL enrollments, students successfully passed 60 (or 92.3%) of their courses. While the success of the "oriented" students rests upon several factors, these initial results speak promisingly about the potential effects of a solid introduction to online skills and strategies.

Sleepless Since Seattle: Reflections on MLA 2012

As a teacher of first-year community college students, I’ve returned from the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2012 conference in Seattle, where as many as sixty sessions touched on digital pedagogy, more convinced than ever of our collective responsibility to wean our students and ourselves from traditionally packaged textbooks, course management systems, and assessments. It’s clear to me that my first-year college students need to be prepared for what Cathy Davidson calls the “keywords for a digital age” in her new book, Now You See It: things like “attention to work flow (multitasking, remix, mashup), interaction, process (publish first, revise later), collaboration, blended, interdisciplinary, “hard” and “soft” skills, and datamining.”

Asking our students to participate alongside us in the ongoing process of building a body of readings and resources can be a powerful way for us to encourage reflection about the social construction of knowledge.  By challenging our students’ and our own assumptions about textbooks and challenging the constitutive power they have held over our collective understanding of education, we can consider the implications of all the tools and lenses we use in our everyday teaching and learning lives. By foregrounding the full, messy context and often tortuous history of digital texts, and helping students to view digital content as dynamic and fungible, we can escape the blanching process textbook anthologies and academic databases use to promote the fiction of textual stability and consistency.

The generation of students left behind by No Child Left Behind is most in need of this disruptive gesture.  Our students have been taught by K-12 textbooks tied to rigid state curricula and standardized testing to “look through” a text as a window through which to see content -- to borrow Richard Lanham’s distinction in The Economics of Attention – rather than to “look at” a text in a way that foregrounds its medium, its genre, and the conditions of its production, dissemination, and consumption.  Eschewing a traditional textbook in first-year composition may be the best way to initiate a productive break from a standardized K-12 education while readying our first-year writing students for the new and richer kind of information literacy they’ll actually need in order to navigate the digital texts they’ll encounter during their academic and professional careers.

--Miles McCrimmon

Professor of English

J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College