The GarNet Group Goals and Activities

The major goals of GarNet:

Participation in GarNet is completely volunteer.  Its major goal is to encourage more faculty to develop a true distance course by introducing them to needed skills in a friendly environment and allow them time to develop the first parts of their on-line course.  It is the hope of GarNet that several new ULM-based distance courses will develop from this first effort.

The general method of the group:

Once a week the GarNet Group will gather together for a 1-2 hour work session early in the week.  During this period, we will work together to develop on-line distance learning activities to be used in one class during the week.  This on-line distance activity will serve as a substantive exchange for resident seat-time; in other words, whatever the activity developed, it should be a fair learning exchange for one class period plus homework. In exchange, participating faculty will release students from their seats either every Friday or every other Thursday class.

The on-line activity:

·        Should be substantive, that is, be an academically justifiable exchange for seat-time.

·        Should be tailored to each teacher's own pedagogical goals.

·        Should make it necessary to dismiss one Friday class per week or one Thursday class every other week.

Compensations:

During the weekly meetings, experienced on-line faculty will assist faculty efforts by resolving technical problems and fielding impromptu discussions.  Discussion will be geared toward working out methods for accomplishing faculty pedagogical goals, advising new faculty on ways of avoiding work overloads, and developing new skills and methods of delivering interactive courses at a distance. 

Although the workload is slightly greater during the development and first implementation of on-line activities, participants can expect the following compensations:

• Faculty will become more comfortable working on-line and develop a new repertoire of teaching strategies and skills.
• Faculty will quickly and clearly see where students are weak and what individual students need to improve.
• Faculty participants will see that combining on-line strategies with traditional methods can achieve as good or better learning outcomes as they are getting today both in their distance and their resident classes.