In April, Dr. Susan James, Mechanical Engineering Department Head, received the eLearning Educator of the Year award from the eLearning Consortium of Colorado (eLCC).
Dr. James has taught distance courses for more than 10 years, but in the last two years she has moved from videotape and DVD delivery to online courses and other internet-accessible tools. The CSU Continuing Education and TILT partnership has supported her technology transformation to enhance online learning. She uses RamCT and provides links both to full audio/video recordings of lectures and to smaller bandwidth recordings of screen capture with audio.
Using multiple delivery modalities is something that very few instructors have attempted. In the last year, she has added blogs and wikis to her courses as tools to support improved class discussion and promote better understanding. Her practices facilitate better connections between campus-based students and distance students by creating common venues of communication.
Dr. James was recently appointed Department Head, and leads her department in use of distance technologies. She has adapted her presentations to take full advantage of the touch-screen Sympodium in creating recorded lectures, and makes separate screen capture and audio recordings available to help both campus and distance students.
Additionally, she is enhancing the student experience through use of blogs, wikis and other communication tools. She has become a leader in her department and college, and her approach to course design has become a model in distance education at CSU. Departments in other colleges are now using similar approaches to course development.
The Division of Continuing Education at Colorado State University develops and delivers quality programs and educational opportunities in support of the University's land grant mission with fully online and face-to-face graduate and undergraduate degrees; professional development training; certificate programs; online credit and noncredit courses; and industry specific training in Loveland, Brighton, Denver, and wherever students are located through online and distance delivery modes.
For more information, visit http://www.learn.colostate.edu/ degrees or call (970) 491-5288 or (877) 491-4336.
Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is a private comprehensive university with regional accreditation founded in 1829 and delivering distance education since 1990. RIT offers nearly 50 online program options, including ...
