VGCC courses focus on helping educators teach online
Technology and the World Wide Web have revolutionized the way today’s students learn, and in response, two new courses offered by Vance-Granville Community College seek to help educators update their skills. The “Multimedia for Online Instruction” course will begin Sept. 19, while the other course, “Moodle Basics,” is set to start Sept. 26. Both courses are six weeks in length and are offered fully online, so that participants can learn on their own schedule at home or at work. But the instructor for the courses, Kathy Wolford of Oxford, emphasizes that, just like the students that these educators teach, participants in the class will be held to deadlines to complete various assignments. Both courses help educators learn how to use Moodle, the open-source course management software or “learning management system” that is becoming increasingly popular with public school systems and colleges. Since 2010, VGCC has used Moodle for all of its online curriculum courses and many other colleges are likewise migrating to Moodle from other systems.
In “Moodle Basics,” participants learn the essentials of adding the content, assignments, tests and interactive elements that make up an online course. According to Wolford, many middle and high schools are now using Moodle to add an online component to a traditional face-to-face course. “It’s like having an extra virtual teacher, because students can be learning when their teachers are not standing in front of them,” Wolford said.
The “Multimedia for Online Instruction” course helps educators make their online classes “fully functional, interactive, welcoming and engaging for your students,” according to Wolford. Techniques and technologies such as podcasting, webcams, and building avatars will be covered. “These types of methods help a teacher to become ‘a real person’ to their online students, with a voice and a face,” Wolford said. “It’s relatively easy to learn these skills, but the value that it adds for the students can’t be calculated. When we add these multimedia enhancements to VGCC courses, student feedback is off the chart.” Wolford works for the VGCC Distance Education department and is a graduate of the college’s Web Technologies degree program. She helps create professional development courses for VGCC instructors and wrote a successful Perkins Grant to enhance that training, which provided part of the basis of these new courses.
Wolford said that although geared primarily toward educators, the Multimedia course can benefit others, because the skills can be applied by individuals and businesses using Facebook and various technologies for communication.
The registration fee for each course is $65. Students who successfully complete the 24-contact-hour course will be awarded 2.4 continuing education units (CEUs).
For more information and to register, call Laura Peace at (252) 738-3417.
