Spring is coming!

Sure, there's still snow on the ground but it's not too early to think about spring and summer courses! Check out the selection of upcoming training workshops.

Interested in teaching an online or hybrid course? Check out the coming dates for our Foundations of Online/Hybrid Course Development and Delivery workshop.

Can't fit a workshop into your schedule? We would be more than happy to plan a special training event right inside your department. For more information and workshop options, please visit our Workshops on Demand page.

Need professional development opportunities that better fit your schedule? Consider the Sloan-C workshops (sponsored by IT and the Pew FTLC). Or are you looking to become more experienced with Blackboard? Take a look at additional Blackboard training opportunities.

Tech Symposium 2013: Bigger than ever!

Quality Matters

Everywhere you turn, you can find news about the explosion of online learning. From institutions like the University of Phoenix to more established schools like Stanford and MIT, eLearning is proliferating. According to one study, 22 million students will take at least one online course in the next five years. As more courses and whole degree programs move online, it will become increasingly important for students to know that the quality of their online education meets or exceeds that of traditional face-to-face courses.

At Grand Valley, we're very concerned about the quality of our online and hybrid courses. Faculty teaching these courses receive special training in the pedagogy of online instruction.

The University has also become a Quality Matters subscribing institution. QM is an emerging international standard for quality in the design of online instructional materials. By adopting the standard, Grand Valley will be able to assure its students that their online experience will be consistent, high quality, and informed by sound pedagogical practice.

Mobile Learning

Today's college students arrive on campus with technology in their pockets that is orders of magnitude more powerful than the early computers—the ones that filled an entire floor of a building. The rise of wireless networking puts the entire internet at our finger tips, 24 hours a day. How does this new technological reality impact student learning? That is the central question of mobile learning, or mLearning for short.

Unfortunately, technology has far outpaced our understanding of how to put it to work. Anywhere you go on the web you'll find people talking about tablets, mobile phones, texting, ebooks, and more.

As a faculty member, how do you make sense of it all? By letting the IDeL team do what it does best.