IT Grants Showcase

My original proposal was to create a class based largely on scenarios with a 55% traditional, asynchronous online format and a 45% synchronous format.

As I worked with the TTLC team, I realized my plans were a bit ahead of the times in terms of technology (numbers of students who can engage in a synchronous format at one time). In addition, the team explored with me whether criminal justice students are interested and available for a class with such a large synchronous component. About the same time, UHD purchased Go-To-Meeting software.

As the class evolved, I reduced the percentage of the class that relied on a synchronous format and introduced several Go-To-Meetings for delivering that portion of the class that will be synchronous. I revamped the class so that almost half of it is based on scenarios.

Professors Cindy Stewart and Christine Bachman were awarded the Spring '09 IT grant to complete their innovative online course idea.

A course template was developed for Introduction to Psychology to increase the number of faculty using technology in the classroom and increase the number of first year students exposed to Blackboard Vista.  The course template has been used by 70% of Introduction to Psychology professors and over 400 students since its development. 

A Constructivist Approach to Online Course Template Design to be published September 2009 in the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching.

Erin Hodgess

UHD has an online general business degree. This course is an extra elective for that degree as well as several other degree plans. Now UHD can offer the both necessary statistics course in a fully online format, which is a great help to students.

Dr. Hodgess has implemented an audio welcome message as an example that professors can relay their personalities to their online students.

Anisul Islam

"I would not have been able to complete this challenging project without the constant, enthusiastic, and untiring support, advice, constructive critique, and training that was provided to me by the TTLC experts and the IT Grant supervision team members. I do not hesitate to say that

This course is an advanced level International Economics course involving various theories, models, data tables and analysis, equations, and an extensive amount of graphics.

Because of the complexities involved, this course is normally offered as a F2F course. I took it as a challenge to develop this course fully online. But to do this, I needed a grant to give me motivations and incentives to work as well as access to highly technical advice that would be needed from the TTLC experts.

The IT grant that I applied for and received from the TTLC in the spring of 2008 provided me that opportunity to take up this challenge. To develop this course, I had to learn a lot of technical and innovative tools within Blackboard Vista and had to learn how to integrate a number of different software and other tools to make them work within Blackboard Vista.

In this pursuit, I could not have been successful on my own unless I have received tremendous amount of help, advice, training, and support from a number of experts and grant supervision team member s from the TTLC who worked constantly and passionately with me to make it a success.

With their help and support, I was able to complete this challenging course to be offered fully online and it is now ready to be offered in Spring 2009.