Showing posts with label bgsu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bgsu. Show all posts

Friday, March 15, 2013

Former BGSU Student Recommendation

I just received this recommendation on my LinkedIn account today from a former student I had in class in the Fall of 2012 at BGSU.  It was quite a surprise to get this recommendation over a year later and without any prompting on my part :-)  It really made my day and I wanted to share it:

Terence taught a course at BGSU that I attended and thought I was going to despise. A course I thought I had no interest in and almost regretted the decision to take. Terence put a new twist on the course and made it more interactive, engaging, and most importantly, interesting. This course became my favorite of any course I have ever taken at a higher educational level. Terence was engaged with his students and had a very unique and effective teaching style, especially for him and his students being behind computers the entire time!
Terence's energy level was very high and he was very knowledgeable on the topics he brought to class. His interest and enthusiasm for the course was contagious. Since the course I have continued in the practicing of the topics I've learned and have passed on much of this information to a handful of individuals to help them grow their "personal online brand" along with helping these individuals on how to effectively market themselves for the "online audience" to see them for how they want to be seen.
Through this course, Terence became one of my favorite instructors at a higher educational level because he was more than just an "instructor." He had great insight on the topics he brought to class but was willing to schedule a time to share insight about the professional world, or anything else, with whomever was interested. He cared for his students in and out of the classroom.
I am very grateful for having taken this course with Terence and I highly recommend Terence as a professor, colleague, employee, or employer.
Thank you Terence for all you have taught me and for your dedication to wanting to make a difference in your students' lives!
Brandon Hostetler   
Director of Communications and Ministry Coordinaton at John Knox Presbyterian Church



Posted by at 4 comments:
Labels: , ,

Thursday, May 03, 2012

Online courses: A liberating and inspiring ally to residential education

Distance learning courses have been around for a very long time and have often been treated by mainstream academia as the step child to residential face to face classes. However, all of that is changing as advances in technology have made online education an excellent way to learn as well as enhance the residential experience.  The president of MIT recently said, "Online education is not the enemy of residential education but rather a profoundly liberating and inspiring ally." I wrote about this "ally" back in 2007 in the following post, University 2.0 - Online Classes Enhance Universities.  Within that blog entry, I posed the following comment and questions, "Online information and communication is changing the way the world interacts and learns...What are universities across the world doing about this information revolution? How are we demonstrating to our future students that we are not only a part of this human network but that we are leaders in the movement?" Read entire post here.

Now in 2012, we are beginning to see how some of the most prestigious research and discovery universities are answering that question. It will be interesting to see how this effects the current higher education ecosystem.

Here is what Harvard and MIT are doing.


Here is the Michigan, Penn State, Princeton, and Stanford experimental answer:



Do you think these endeavors will affect the higher education ecosystem? Will these experimental ventures be sustainable? What is the future for traditional state universities that have invested heavily in the residential experience? 


At BGSU, my office is dedicated to working with faculty to ensure the highest quality in our online courses and programs through sound instructional design, alignment with the Quality Matters rubric (a national standard), and the strategic use of technology within each of our courses. We have since been honored as a Center of Excellence in E-learning by the Ohio Board of Regents and I am eager to see where we go from here. 
Posted by at 8 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Thursday, August 20, 2009

BLOGS.BGSU a Digital and Educational Revolution at Bowling Green State University

There is a lot more than meets the eye to BLOGS.BGSU.EDU, the homegrown blogging platform developed by Assistant Director of COBL, Terence Armentano. Blogs and microblogs such as Twitter have taken the world by storm. Why? Because they blast open the floodgates of communication. They give everyone a voice and anyone with an internet or even a mobile phone connection can listen in and talk back. Upon closer inspection of BLOGS.BGSU, one will notice it is not just about new technology, it's about a movement, a change in thinking, a paradigm shift, a leveling of the proverbial playing field. It's about what happens to a university when everyone has a voice. For the first time in history, we can leverage the collective intelligence of the university to potentially solve greater and more complex problems in the world. Think about the following scenario: Everyone at the university has unique life experiences and varying degrees of expertise in life. Some have much more life and work experience than others, but surely the sum is greater than its parts. For example, if we have around 20,000 faculty, staff, and students here at BGSU and the average age is 25 then we have 500,000 years of experience between us that we can learn from. BLOGS.BGSU is a great way to leverage such experiences as everyone can contribute. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

BLOGS.BGSU is built upon the Wordpress platform, and everyone with a BGSU email account can login today and start blogging. However, upon closer investigation of the system, one will notice that it can be used to do more than blog. In fact, one will discover the nerve center of a web 2.0 revolution at BGSU in which students, faculty, and staff are creating, consuming, categorizing, and publishing content to the internet as well as networking, interacting, discussing, and critiquing each others posts. The system is so flexible it can be used to build everything from a simple news blog to a web 2.0 portal complete with static and dynamic web pages, blogs, podcasts, flickr integration, Google statistics tracking, and more. Depending on one's goals, the system can be leveraged to create websites, portfolios, tweets, podcasts, journals, news sites, and more. One of the best ways to understand this phenomenon is to view examples of how it is being used. The following are just a few of the creative ways in which people and departments at BGSU are using the system:

Center for Online and Blended Learning
Academic Technology
BGSU Strategic Planning Blog
Dr. Sue Mota - MBA 6070x
Brad's Art 101 Blog
Blackboard Video Tutorial Database Blog
MBA Blog
Jake Graving's Art 101 Blog
Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives News
Center for Teaching and Learning
Posted by at 1 comment:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)