The iNACOL teaching standards are an excellent overview of how educators in the 21st century may utilize technology, online learning, and new strategies for pedagogy and content for their instruction.  A range of professional online teachers, instructional designers, administrators, researchers, and course developers produced these standards, to offer a series guidelines for assessing online instruction and related efforts.

The standards are to be applied and utilized to assess instruction, to meet the needs of each unique learning organization and institution, as they see fit.

Each main standard has a subset of related expectations for teacher knowledge and understanding, teacher abilities, and corresponding rating scales for the performance of educators.

The following list represents the overarching National Standards for Quality Online Teaching:

• Standard A – The online teacher knows the primary concepts and structures of effective online instruction and is able to create learning experiences to enable student success.
• Standard B – The online teacher understands and is able to use a range of technologies, both existing and emerging, that effectively support student learning and engagement in the online environment.
• Standard C – The online teacher plans, designs, and incorporates strategies to encourage active learning, application, interaction, participation, and collaboration in the online environment.
• Standard D – The online teacher promotes student success through clear expectations, prompt responses, and regular feedback.
• Standard E – The online teacher models, guides, and encourages legal, ethical, and safe behavior related to technology use.
• Standard F – The online teacher is cognizant of the diversity of student academic needs and incorporates accommodations into the online environment.
• Standard G – The online teacher demonstrates competencies in creating and implementing assessments in online learning environments in ways that ensure validity and reliability of the instruments and procedures.
• Standard H – The online teacher develops and delivers assessments, projects, and assignments that meet standards-based learning goals and assesses learning progress by measuring student achievement of the learning goals.
• Standard I – The online teacher demonstrates competency in using data from assessments and other data sources to modify content and to guide student learning.
• Standard J – The online teacher interacts in a professional, effective manner with colleagues, parents, and other members of the community to support students’ success.
• Standard K – The online teacher arranges media and content to help students and teachers transfer knowledge most effectively in the online environment.

You may find and review iNACOL’s comprehensive National Standards for Quality Online Teaching and the corresponding rating scales here.

Now that you’ve seen the iNACOL standards, please do some research and submit written reflection on articles related to at least 3 different areas of assessment for online and blended instruction. Check out this rubric for topic ideas.

The Tri-Campus Blended Human Anatomy and Physiology course contains many wonderful resources for students on two great sites, WISC Online and Discovery Online. As with using any new site in the classroom, technical and instructional questions may arise. Not to worry though! You can always contact your campus ETS support if you get stuck or check out the comprehensive support resources of each site at the following links:

• Discovery Education
• WISC Online

In addition, we would love to hear your stories of how you are using these resources with your students. Please feel free to share what you have learned with other PLN members by posting to this site.

Blended learning is an methodological approach to instruction that mixes different environments:  classroom learning, online learning and mobile learning.

Learning in this multi-level environment may also be synchronous, in real-time, and asynchronous, at the pace of individual learners.

Indeed, blended learning, indeed, has several advantages and great attributes!

For students, blended learning

• meets their expectations for utilizing technology;
• develops independent learning skills;
• offers increased flexibility and convenience;
• provides better access to those with job, family, or distance barriers; and,
• helps reduce educational costs.

• gives them access to new resources;
• introduces them to online learning;
• is an opportunity for faculty development and lets them experiment with new pedagogies and techniques;
• helps meet student expectations and build student skills;
• allows for more flexible scheduling; and,
• retains the face-to-face aspect faculty may cherish.

And furthermore, blended learning offers administrators the following advantages:

• impacts the entire institution.
• offers a learner-centered pedagogy.
• may integrate with the strategic plan.
• improves classroom utilization.
• can help match delivery to academic need.
• can help fill under-enrolled courses and programs.

Here is an overview of blended learning from EDUCAUSE‘s EQ Quarterly.

This course was an exciting project to work on and we learned a lot about the fundamentals of Human Anatomy and how it relates to Hawaiian culture here at Kamehameha Schools. In addition, this is the school’s first Tri-Campus course, involving O’ahu’s Kapalama Campus, Maui Campus, and Hawai’i Campus (KS Big Island).
One of the challenges we faced developing this Tri-Campus course was finding a process to better assist with the analysis phase as the content wasn’t documented in a structural format. The analysis phase is important because we carefully collaborate with the SME (subject matter expert) to determine goals and course content, objectives, and resources for the course.

This was a bit challenging because our Subject Matter Expert had been teaching this course for so long that he knew the content very well and didn’t follow a prescribed, pre-written formula for teaching the course. He was clearly a natural, teaching it like a memorized text-book. Additionally, nearly all of the content was stored in fragmented locations and came very naturally to our SME when delivering the content to his students in a live Face-to-Face venue. This was wonderful for his face-to-face students; however, translating this quality to an online blended venue seemed challenging.

With some minor “trial and error”, our core team came up with an exciting method we coined the “Content Discovery Phase”. During this phase, we collectively came up with a structured process to capture the needed content in an organized way that would assist the development team in constructing an online blended course while applying iNACOL standards.

What is iNACOL? iNACOL stands for the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (http://www.inacol.org). This organization has identified standards that best suit K-12 learners in an online and blended environment.

In addition to the Content Discovery Process, we collaborated with cultural experts to help with the goal of integrating Hawaiian culture and history with western practices typically associated with this type of course.Once all of this important and quality content was documented, we were off to development.

Thanks to the prior work of the Content Discovery Phase, we had a plan to deliver the content in an equally if not better than a Face-to-Face only setting. Within the templates that were created for the unit and lesson plans, online delivery methods had been discussed and documented.We were able to collect helpful links, videos and games that our SME was already using in some of his physical classes.

Our SME, Justin, also created lectures using software that captured him drawing on a virtual white-board while utilizing graphics of the cells, organelles, and other important materials relating to his lectures. The development team was excited to teach our SME how to utilize tools to complete these development items.

The development team was very fortunate to have a SME like Justin whom was already very familiar with technology and utilized it regularly in his face-to-face class. With this in mind, it was very helpful to have our own SME assist in the development of the white-board lectures, setting up tests, quizzes, discussion boards, and uploading content into the course.

The development team created a sound, organized course with distinguished units, lesson plans, objectives, graphics, and interactivity for the learners. In addition, course outlines and tools were created for the learners and instructors to keep them organized during their school year. The development team also created a colorful navigation system that included icons, graphics, and a visual course map for the students and instructors to follow. Once the master course was created, finalized, and reviewed the development team cloned it for the instructors that will be using the course for their students this year.

Yuki immediately accessed his course and began customizing it for his students by creating assignments, announcements, and adding his office hours and contact information to the resources and instructors page. Malia is anticipated to begin her blended course during the spring semester. Together, with a solid team, great support, and a very knowledgeable SME, we are excited to have been a part of the development process for the Blended Online Human Anatomy and Physiology course.

A colleague recently sent me the following video from Blackboard that summarizes the needs of today’s active learners in the digital native generation. Check out the video and the active learner blogs on Blackboard.com.

The with the proliferation of blended learning, we are also seeing related research grow by leaps and bounds.

In many instances, blended learning takes on a variety of different meanings, depending upon the course level or institutional levels of online technology integration.  From iNACOL, the article “Blended Learning: The Convergence of Online and Face-to-Face Education” provides an overview and profile of several cases of blended learning, their range of professional practices, and lessons learned.

These schools include the following:

• Cincinnati Public Schools Virtual High School
• Odyssey Charter Schools
• Commonwealth Connections Academy
• Hoosier Academy
• Kentucky Virtual Schools
• VOISE Academy, Chicago Public Schools
• The Community High School of Ann Arbor, Michigan
• Omaha Public Schools

For further information on blended learning-centered research, please consult these resources:

• The Sloan Consortium’s “Blending In: The Extent and Promise of Blended Education in the United States”
• EDUCAUSE’s Research Bulletin on Blended Learning
• iNACOL’s “Summary on the Effectiveness of K-12 Online Learning”
• The Blended Learning Toolkit’s Bibliography on Blended Learning
• The U.S. Department of Education’s “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies”

You may also find the following Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) to be useful in connecting with other individuals, resources, events, and opportunities relating to blended learning:

• Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE)
• Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT)
• Classroom 2.0
• EDUCAUSE
• Schools of the Future
• Twitter
• Linked-In
• Facebook
• Ning

Hi everyone.

I will be writing a meta-analysis kind of post today.

Biggest question I have as a (near-future) blended learning teacher was, “how do I do it right?”  There are many resources out there like the ones that you all posted for us and others that come across online searching.  To me, it seems like researches are all saying, be a good instructor and you will be a good online instructor.  Examples of such are:

1. Stay current with pedagogy.
2. Provide multiples ways to reach to students with different learning style.
3. Provide contents so that students feel ownership and proud of their work.
4. Keep in touch with progress and make necessary interventions.
5. Have good ethics and morals.
6. Plan well and assess well.
7. Reflect on teaching and always seeking ways to improve it.   (All of above are taken from iNACOL standards)

In addition to those quality as teachers, online instructors need to

1. Develop orientation and tutoring sessions
2. Use online sources and face-to-face contents effectively. (Use animations, videos, audios for online sources, and hands on contents at face to face)
3. Be able to handle any technical problems with computers.(taken from Mortera-Gtierrez, Fernando. “Faculty Best Practices Using Blended Learning in E-learning and Face-to-face Instruction.” International Journal of ELearning 5.3 (2006))

From looking at different articles, I think “the best” online instructor is no different from the best teacher.  Standards in iNACOL are similar to Danielson’s framework.  We have to do the right things rights.  That is my mana’o from looking at different pedagogy of blended learning.