Contact: John Chandler ,
(818) 677-5674 or 677-2130
jchandler@exec.csun.edu

CSUN Conference to Highlight Online Teaching Techniques

"Virtual Visions: A Regional Conference on Web Teaching" will be a collaboration between Cal State Northridge faculty and their community college peers in the fast-growing field of online education. CSUN faculty have been working the past two years to help expand online teaching in local community colleges.

"The world is just at the beginning of exploring the use of the Internet for teaching and learning," said John Hartzog, a conference organizer and director of CSUN's Learning Resource Center. "What we're really doing through the conference is connecting excited and engaged faculty with each other to share ideas."

CSUN offers 20 to 30 of its own courses each semester in an online mode, meaning Internet-based communication replaces at least some class meetings. But the university also has been sharing that expertise, hosting a dozen workshops that have reached about 200 local community college faculty members since mid-1998.

The Virtual Visions conference is an outgrowth of those sessions, in which CSUN faculty have traveled to campuses such as Pierce College in Woodland Hills, Santa Monica College, Los Angeles City College and Ventura College. The conference is the first collective meeting opportunity for those various faculty.

The conference will be held Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Cal State Northridge campus, starting in the Engineering 100 auditorium. The conference and campus parking are free, but there is a $10 charge for lunch. Registration and other information is available at http://www.vcsun.org/~john/virtualvisions.html.

Beyond the online teaching workshops, Hartzog said CSUN also has made its Internet teaching technology and programs available to community colleges in the region. For example, various college faculty members, lacking in-house resources, are using CSUN-based Internet tools and programs to teach their own classes.

"Here at Cal State Northridge, we've developed a very inexpensive and what we think is a very good model of online teaching. We think our tools are as good as they get," Hartzog said. "We're also just at the beginning, in online teaching, of matching the power of our tools with our creativity and imagination."

The conference will start in the morning with presentations by four local community college faculty members profiling courses they now teach entirely online, meaning there are no physical class meetings. The faculty will be from Oxnard, Mission, Moorpark and Santa Monica colleges.

The midday portion will be on "Virtual Visions: Future Possibilities," including sessions on how College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita is linking different classes via the Internet, and on Cal State Northridge's plan starting this spring to add a new online component to a special CSUN degree program for working adults.

The afternoon sessions will split into two tracks. For the more veteran online teachers, "The Power of Teaching Tools" will feature CSUN and community college faculty members demonstrating some of their best practices using online teaching programs such as HyperNews, Internet Relay Chat and Quizmaker.

For those looking to start online teaching, "Learning the Teaching Tools" will be a beginners workshop focusing on creating web pages, using threaded discussion forums and conducting virtual real-time discussions and even holding virtual office hours. All the afternoon sessions will be hands-on and held in computer labs.

The conference was planned by CSUN faculty along with their counterparts at Mission, Moorpark, Oxnard and Santa Monica community colleges. CSUN's portion was coordinated through the university's Web Project, a four-year-old initiative to help faculty and students use the Internet for teaching and learning.

"The Internet is a hugely powerful tool for teaching and learning," Hartzog said. "This is really the fruit of our collaborative work with our local community colleges and their faculty during the past year and a half. I think we've given them a way into online teaching that many would not otherwise have had."