Oregon Online
Leaders
Meeting Notes
Friday, January 11, 2002
Lane ESD, Eugene
Oregon Online
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Meeting Notes Lane ESD, Eugene |
Participants in
Eugene
Questions/Thoughts: Mary Bunn: For past year, Mary has been working on distance education with Camille Cole; huge focus has been on implementing SB622. Scheduling, fee for use, priority of use, higher ed courses delivered over the network…are some things that have come up and that they have tried to deal with. As a result, a document dealing with these issues was developed. It was called "Setting the Course for Distance Education." It was a document that talked about all types of distance ed, but that focuses on the OPEN Access Network. It hints at the other types of distance ed, although they are not really included in the document. The document is a really just a beginning and next year the focus will be on online education which will be incorporated into the document. The original members of the council were thanked for their work and new members of the distance ed council has been appointed and will meet later this month (1/25); they represent different elements of distance ed, who represent different geographic regions of the state, administrators,… Mary Jean has agreed to serve on the council. Question: How many schools will stay connected to the Access network? No specific numbers were given, as the numbers are changing every day. Some will connect through DAS and others will aggregate. Camille is working on this right now. Marty: We have great organizations in the state that can help. ODE has expertise in curricular areas, money, involvement in distance ed. Is there money available from ODE? OPEN has servers, people, expertise. Can OPEN help in delivery? Schools have courses and teachers. What can they contribute? OETC has a group of inst tech folks who get together. How can they help with training…? These are my thoughts about how we can focus as a state instead of working in a top down manner? Where are you all coming from? What part is your organization willing to do? Mary Jean: This big question tends to bog us down. We don't individually want to give our own vision because it may seem self-serving. From my perspective, there could be a statewide model. What is unique to our program that could be offered statewide? We are planning to be a 3-12 program; perhaps 3-8 opportunities could be what we offer. We are also developing a lot of courses for next year. Perhaps we could develop "open source" curriculum; courses developed with state dollars are available to all to use. Perhaps we can look at the community college model; the Kansas Greenbush model. We need to capitalize on our grass roots efforts. We have courses and a unique niche with the 3-8 population that we are beginning to address. Tom talked about making courses available to all kids, anywhere, without having to worry about costs. Dave Moore: Provide support, training and resources to those in our region. Blackboard and a video capture system called "Tegrity (http://www.tegrity.com/ptr.html)." We not providing content. Dennis Schultz: Searchable database creation and hosting; posting of courses so that they all look the same. Similar to the ONE site for higher ed. A clearinghouse model so that students can find courses regardless of where they are offered. Toolsets is another thing that OPEN does; currently doing this with CyberSchool. We would like to integrate vendor products to address chat, teacher tools, etc. Depending upon how the licensing works, perhaps we could make the tool sets available to other teachers around the state in their face to face courses. This allows teachers to think about online instruction without having to jump in full force. Some discussion ensued about BlackBoard type interfaces. Tom emphatically spoke to the point that you must think about the ability to get your courses out of a system if the company goes out of business or charges sky high prices. Tina talked about a strategy for creating courses that are separate from BlackBoard but that can be put into BB to take advantage of BB's features. Bruce talked about the fact that the vendors are approaching everyone with different prices. He endorsed a unified, statewide approach to purchasing products like BB. What has been done to determine what courses people want? Tom indicated that CyberSchool surveyed rural schools and then built the top five courses that were desired. SK Online courses were developed based on the initial focus group's directives. Currently looking at how they can address Spanish-speaking students; other courses developed on what students need (grad requirements, etc). SOOS has a governing board that made the decision to target core courses. Holly Zanville talked about the efforts of OUS to do statewide purchasing amoung the state universities. One point that she made was that some vendors offer 24/7 support which is important in supporting students and the school personnel are not available. She also discussed the possibilities of incorporating K-12 opportunities into the ONE database. Mary Bunn: Role of department could be to provide coordination, try to find funding through partnerships with others. Providing a broad perspective of what is available through all modes of distance learning. Jim Saffeels: We have something that can be provided to all students across the state. BUT, it is funded locally. How can we use scarce local resources to do that? Mary suggested that a proposal is made to the K-12 council for ODE's role in online learning: What do you think is the best proposal to meet the needs of the kids, how do we move forward to make this happen.? Policies, procedures, staff development materials, registration database, templates, etc. are all things that SOOS can share with others. Action Plan1A: Create/Acquire Course Content
Who: Jim, Tina, Bruce, Thor,
OPEN? Come up with a plan/proposal by mid-April. Dave suggested that perhaps ODE could help to identify (grant) funding and then doing some statewide approach to go after it. Marty asked about how one might purchase the rights to CyberSchool courses from the teacher/author. Tom replied that courses are not as easily mobile as one might think (ie: taking a current CyberSchool course and then putting it into BB). Tom also said that a course would probably get about 25-30K on the open market from a vendor. He has been approached by Jones International to rent the courses, which would then be re-rented to schools around the world. Tom indicated that courses should either be purchased or "rented" from the teachers. Marty wants to come up with a way to reimburse them so that there are no future costs to use the online materials. Biggest costs are the teachers' salaries. Other costs include updating the courses. 1B. Design a Model for Centralizing Access to Online Coursework and Resources
Who: Dave, OPEN, Jim, Marty,
Bruce, Mary, Holly. 2. Design Online Training For Web-Based Teachers, Site Mentors, Counselors, and School Support Personnel
Who: Tom, Tina, Warren Cooley,
Stacy, Ken McCoy, Laurie Simmons. Aim for April. 3. Design a Student Information System Comments: There needs to be a way for teachers at different locations to access the contact information of students in a variety of schools. Because there is no 'office' to walk to, this information must be somewhere. Discussion ensued on how online schools deal with students from different schools/districts.
Who: Marj Oughton, OPEN,
Marty/Tina, Laurie Simmons (?) 4A. Establish Policies and Procedures for Online Learning 4B. Create Standards for Instruction, Facilities (local school site's equipment), Teachers and Content
Who: Existing schools Jeanne
White, Susan Waddell, Tina Mondale. Initial conversations; identify key questions and send to other groups for feedback. Posting of issues on newsgroup to help move things along. 5. How Are You Going To Move The Money Around? · Discuss an Enrollment Model for all Oregon Students Discuss a Cost Infrastructure Mary will talk with the folks at ODE about funding. A concern that Bruce mentioned was that different sup'ts were getting different answers. Susan talked with Aaron Munter and Mary Jean talked with Bob Jones; they were both told that online learning is considered "large group instruction." We need to put together some arguments that address the fact that online learning is really equivalent to small group instruction, which is funded differently.
Who: Colin Cameron, Dennis
Dempsey, Marty, Susan, Mary Jean 6. Create a Marketing/PR Plan for Online Education Questions:
Comments from Kathryn Dysart, Salem-Keizer Public Schools marketing guru:
What do we need to address:
Who: Kathryn Dysart, OPEN, Mary Bunn, SK Online Point Person: Kathryn COSA Conference Bill Beck was pleased with the direction of the technology component to the conference and tying in online learning. Saturday Conference Center is available. Two audiences · People like us · Course consumers COSA wants to know what the program would like like; breakouts, roundtables… Also, what do you want to do on Thursday, Friday. We can have sessions on those days also. Potential Topics:
Saturday: Go until about 1 or so; provide snacks. Mary Jean will request funds from OETC to sponsor the online learning conference in conjunction with the COSA conference.
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