This session describes, discusses, and demystifies the process of turning a completely traditional general education public speaking course into a fully online course involving asynchronous speaking opportunities using VoiceThread and synchronous sessions using Zoom. The faculty member and her two instructional designers share how the QOLT instrument facilitated this process.
During the summer of 2015 Dr. Armeda Reitzel, who had taught public speaking the traditional face-to-face setting in a university classroom for over 36 years, redesigned her course into a fully online public speaking course with the help of her two instructional designers. No one thought it could be done successfully except for the instructional designers. Even the professor herself questioned if it could be done.
That professor who I am talking about is me, and I still get questions like “Can you really teach public speaking online?” Now my response is “Yes, of course! And you can have students give different types of synchronous and asynchronous speeches in blended courses as well!” I am convinced that not only is it possible to teach public speaking fully online, but I am actively working online presentations into my upper division general education and capstone courses in Communication.
Thanks to the training that I received from QOLT, support from my two instructional designers, and a lot of hard work, my fully online Communication 100 was successful. Fall semester 2015 the success rate for the online course was 92%. Spring semester 2016 the success rate for the online course was 96%. These percentages are higher than those of the face-to-face Communication 100 courses.
A thorough discussion of my redesigned Communication 100 course may be found at:
https://contentbuilder.merlot.org/toolkit/html/snapshot.php?id=79421125426349 My course went through the QOLT review process. QOLT is a program/instrument designed to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of blended and online courses, as well as to recognize exemplary practices in online learning and teaching. Information about QOLT may be found at: http://courseredesign.csuprojects.org/wp/qualityassurance/qolt-awards-cfp/ I received special recognition by the Chancellor's Office for this redesign: http://courseredesign.csuprojects.org/wp/qualityassurance/csuqoltawardees/
This session describes, discusses, and demystifies the process of turning a completely traditional general education public speaking course into a fully online course involving asynchronous speaking opportunities using VoiceThread and synchronous sessions using Zoom. I will be there in person as the instructor of the course. My main instructional designer will join us via Zoom. We want to demonstrate the effectiveness of online discussions and presentations by actually organizing the session as a “blended” session.
I will organize the session as follows:
00:00-00:05 Audience members will do a quick write. Audience participants will choose one of two questions to answer:
How can public speaking be taught online?
What challenges have you or others had in incorporating online presentations into blended or fully online courses?
00:05-00:10 Participants will do a trio share of their responses. I will ask each trio to write down a couple of the key ideas from their discussion on a post-it note that I will give them.
00:10-00:25 I will share the highlights of the process, including the challenges and the successes, of redesigning a face-to-face course into a fully online course with synchronous and asynchronous speaking activities. I will share a specific example of three assignments that were redesigned using the QOLT instrument as a guide. My instructional designer will join us via Zoom to add her perspectives into the discussion. We want to show how effective Zoom can be for online oral presentations and collaborations.
00:25-00:35 I will give copies of the QOLT rubric to all participants. I will ask participants to get back into their trios so that they can discuss the QOLT rubric with each other. I will ask each trio to focus on one section of the rubric and come up with an example of what could be done to address the descriptor in that section. I will ask each trio to write their ideas and questions about QOLT down on the post-it note that they wrote on at the beginning of the session.
00:35-00:45 I will collect the post-it notes and ask for a few people to share out their ideas and questions.
My plan is to create a Google Doc on the session and the contributions from the participants. I will share this Google Doc with everyone who is interested. In addition, I will develop a wiki in which resources shown and discussed during the session will be posted.