Online summer programs are now routinely offered at many community colleges and large public universities, but they are still a relative novelty, particularly at small liberal arts colleges where the idea of online courses or programs remains unthinkable in many cases. However, savvy institutions are using summer online courses and programs for several purposes: • Increase student retention rates • Revamp poorly attended campus-based summer programs • Help students maintain a connection and sense of community with their home institution • Help students reduce time to degree • Retain tuition dollars that their students would otherwise spend on summer courses at other institutions. The presenters will describe how to plan and implement a effective strategy for launching a successful summer online program. Rodica Neamtu, Special Instructor of Information Technology at Emmanuel College, will describe how to implement a summer online program based on her successful experience with launching a now-established program at her institution. John Sener (Sener Knowledge LLC, Sloan Consortium) will provide a big-picture perspective on the implementation process. The presentation will analyze how to implement such a project from a variety of angles: • What are the essential elements of an effective strategy for initiating and launching a successful summer online program at a college that is new to online learning? • Which departments or units should be involved in this process? • How do you convince skeptical liberal arts faculty, administrators, and students that online is a viable option for delivering quality courses? • How do you demonstrate to skeptical audiences that students learn as well online or in hybrid formats as they do in face-to-face courses? • What are the other obstacles you're likely to encounter, and how do you overcome those obstacles effectively? • What are some viable strategies for expanding summer online and hybrid course offerings throughout the academic year? • How can the affordances of online teaching be used to improve the quality of the teaching process in general ? • Which aspects of the online teaching process are difficult to accomplish successfully? Implementing online courses for the first time will bring members of the administration, faculty and instructional designers together creating teams that better understand the technical infrastructure and resources, the possibilities and limitations of using course management software and other tools to deliver better courses, to accommodate diversity in the classroom, to provide more inclusive teaching, to appeal to a generation of technically confident students, to make higher education a more viable option for adults etc. Online courses can turn into a great opportunity for faculty development, allowing faculty to work closely with individual instructional designers to re-think the content, delivery and presentation of courses, assessment, collect and display student work using e-portfolios, engage and enrich the dialogue in cyberspace using blogs, wikis and online discussions, add new facets and experiences to critical thinking and problem solving. Running such a pilot program yields new information on the limitations and new creative uses of technology emerge. The level of interest in using technology to enhance the delivery of courses will dramatically increase among faculty. Students' participation in class discussions and self-assessment processes as well as their level of engagement will increase as well. The challenge of establishing a personal connection and creating an engaging classroom environment in cyber-world will continue. Although you can't re-create the dynamics of a classroom, you can find new creative ways to incorporate social and emerging technologies to offer opportunities for interaction, engagement, and support. The use of Voice over IP technologies, lecture capturing, blogs, journals, self-assessment and peer review tools, use of creative projects such as Digital Stories are all examples of technologies and tools to be used in all teaching and learning environments: face-to-face as well as asynchronous. Summer online programs can change online education from the unthinkable to the indispensible.
