iSean

I currently coordinate an graduate educational technology program designed to help teachers better integrate technology into their teaching. We offer about 9 courses in our program and students, which allows students to cater their master’s program to their individual needs. Most of our courses are now offered online as well as face to face. But even our face to face sections are hybrid courses with much instruction taking place online.

My doctoral work at the University of Kansas had an emphasis on the pedagogy of online instruction and I am using that foundation to help develop a high quality online learning experience for the students I teach using instructionally validated approaches from current research.

My current research is focused on online teaching and learning similar to the articles that appear in Innovate: A Journal of Online Education. I see such a broad variety on approaches to online instruction, not too unlike the broad approaches to face to face instruction. The difference is most face to face approaches have an extensive research base to support the varied approaches. Online instruction has generally been shown to be equivalent to face to face instruction, but I am looking at very specific teaching approaches to determine the effectiveness of these approaches for changing student dispositions. That is, how can online instruction best facilitate changing the future behavior of the students who complete the online course . . . And this is a struggle for all face to face instruction as well.

I have started an initiative to create a wiki-based textbook for the undergraduate technology in education courses at Grand Valley State University. The project is moving along nicely and was the focus of my sabbatical throughout the fall semester of 2008. This textbook is free for students and I do not make any profit from the use of this textbook, but the end result is a textbook that can be easily updated annually to meet the latest demands of instructors who are teaching technology courses, so I benefit in this regard.

I am big proponent of open source solutions for educators. And, I do not have anything against commercial products; however, the audience I work with most often are educators and educators tend to have fewer funds available for resources. Combine the shrinking budgets with some high quality open source products emerging and I see no excuse for schools not to be evaluating and using open source solutions. For example, Firefox is probably the most popular open source product being used by the masses. I would argue that it’s the best internet browser available despite competing with commercially developed products (e.g., Internet Explorer by Microsoft). Looking more at online instruction, many other high quality products are available. I use Drupal in all of my online classes. Drupal is most commonly used for corporate websites, but it also has a healthy following from online educators. The nice thing about Drupal is that it comes with a basic set of features, but the Drupal development community is quite large and they have produced thousands of add-on modules to help each user individualize his/her installation to best meet the needs for that audience.