Abstract:

This poster presentation develops an analysis of engaging post-secondary instructors and students with e-learning. The poster describes how a team of sixteen community colleges collaborate to offer online education to students throughout a province in Canada and how a team of online faculty deliver courses to online students. Our presentation will explain our twelve years of e-learning delivery experience as online instructors and online coordinators. It is unprecedented in Canada for community colleges to unite and offer the best collective e-learning opportunities to students around the province.

We describe our early work when we began developing online curricula, delivering online courses in a Portal, and coordinating the advising, registering, and instructing students. We discovered a disjuncture between what actually happens in online facilitation, delivery and coordination and our beliefs and values about the collaborative model.

Early evidence suggests that the bureaucratic process of developing curricula and seeking approval to actual teaching techniques are only the beginning to understanding e-delivery and e-learning.

Our poster will provide evidence of what e-learning achieves in the lives of adult learners and their instructors. E-learning achieves its potential when used repeatedly over time and placed by engaged participants. Engaged people seek online lessons and references – and now, in a learning environment (Portal), they also contribute generously, making choices to both consume and create resources. Obviously, e-learning has grown to be more than lessons and tutorials.

Students ask the following questions about the engagement with e-learning:
• Will others do what I do and take advantage of this new delivery mode?
• Is it as flexible as I think?
• How many courses are accessible when I want to take them?
• Will I access the learning at work, on the road, and at home?
• Will I contribute ideas so that others may benefit?
• Will employers encourage their employees in this direction and contribute themselves?
• Will instructional specialists embrace participative and emergent forms of e-learning?
• What can be done to make online experiences compelling and increase the odds that employees and students will give these approaches a chance?

We would like to offer our experience with online teaching, developing, and working in an e-learning collaborative. It is our hope that the poster presentation will be of inestimable value to the conference attendees who consider transitioning their college and university programs to an innovative online format.