Last Minute Sign-ups

In my program area I am experiencing higher than normal last minute sign-ups. This causes a big problem for me and for the instructors. You may have experienced this. The problem is we don’t know whether to cancel a class or let it run. Case in point, on a Wednesday I had 3 people signed up for a class. I needed to cancel it by Thursday and needed, in this case, 5 people for it to go. On Thursday I got number 4 with a possible number 5 so I let it ride one more day. The class ran on Monday with 7 people in it. Had I cancelled on Thursday as I had planned…well, you get the point.

I wish I could say this is something we can fix but it isn’t. With the tight economy, last minute planning and the current culture, this kind of thing may be with us for a long time.

What is an instructor to do? Decide a cut off time that works for you and communicate it to your programmer. If you are good to wait till the last minute, great. If you aren’t, that is great too. Just let us know. Make extra copies of your handouts for those last minute arrivals. Be flexible with your class plan. If you believe you are going to have 5 in class and 10 show-up, be ready to make some changes. No, this doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Finally, be aware we are watching the registration numbers but can’t monitor them all the time. We do our best to let you know who and how many you will have in class.

Please share with us any thoughts you have on this subject and what kind of challenges you face.

Building and Classroom Updates

Mark June 18th on your calendars because that is the day Community Learning staff leave the COCC campus and move to the Chandler Building. The Chandler Building is located off 9th street on the west side of town. The exact address is 1027 NW Trenton Ave.

Renovation work has already begun and we are excited about the move. Of course the actual moving of all our stuff isn’t exciting but it will be nice to have our own place. We will have an 18 station computer lab and a meeting room that seats 49. The SBDC will be there with us, as they are now, and the Bend Science Station will be there as well. Plan to stop by for a visit this summer when you have the chance or go have a look and let us know what you think.

Also, the college has given Community Learning priority over three classrooms in the Boyle Education Center. By this I mean that we control access to these rooms and have first choice at them. They are rooms 151, 152 and 154 which are down the hall from our current office location. This will go a long way in helping eliminate the issues we have with getting classrooms on campus and help with holding ongoing classes that cross terms.

COCC Names Schulz Head of Continuing Education

Central Oregon Community College’s Board of Directors recently named Gerald A. Schulz the director of the college’s continuing education department.

Schulz’s duties include ensuring overall profitability of the continuing education program, organizing contracted training and events throughout the district, monitoring and managing the department’s budget, researching and developing new continuing education programs, expanding the awareness and availability of the continuing education program throughout the region and supervising a staff of nine.

“Significant changes are taking place in the way education and training are delivered,” said Schulz. “My immediate goal is to guide a transition from traditional lecture-style classes to newer methods of engaging our students. I truly enjoy planning and collaborating to bring education to adults.”

Schulz came to COCC in 2010 as the office operations manager, a position that focused on automating and streamlining processes. He also teaches evening classes for COCC Community Learning: “Staying aware and involved with the students and the classroom experience enables me to be a better manager and discover new offerings and improvements for our program.”

Schulz earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of California. A native of Pasadena, he worked as a research chemist before he and his wife developed and managed a computer training school for adults, growing it from 1984 until 2006 to become one of the largest private schools of its kind in the San Francisco Bay Area.

How many in my class?

Wondering how registration is going for your class? You can check it online at any time. Click on the link below to take you to our new registration system and do a search for your class by class title. For instance, I did a search for Macintosh Basics. It brought up the screen showing there were 7 seats. This means that there are 7 seats available. Now I happen to know that this class has a total of 20 seats so that means that there are 13 students signed up for this class right now.

If you don’t know the maximum seats for your class you can find it in two places. It is on your contract which was emailed, mailed or otherwise sent to you or you can call your Program Manager and ask her/him. We will send you a roster before your class, but knowing the number ahead of time can help you prepare.

http://selfservice.cocc.edu:7001/flexibleregistration/index.jsp?frc=CLMAIN

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly--PowerPoint Best Practices

COCC Community Learning has planned another opportunity to continue your professional development as an instructor. There is no charge for this evening session.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - PowerPoint Best Practices for Classroom Instructors. If you currently use or are considering using PowerPoint (or a similar presentation tool) to accompany your teaching, why not put some more pizzazz into your presentations? There is an art to preparing and delivering audience-engaging presentations. Come and explore . . .

* Best practices for effective presentations
* Tips and techniques to enhance your presentation
* A group work session on critiquing and improving slide design and flow

The details:
When: Thursday, January 26, 2012
Time: 6:00-8:30 pm
Where: COCC Bend Campus, Boyle Education Center
Room 151
Facilitators: Annette Witzel & Charlene Schulz

(This is not a hands-on software class. It is a group session to discuss and view best practices.)

How to Register: Email Nancy Jumper, Program Manager at njumper@cocc.edu or call 541-383-7273 and let Nancy know you'd like to attend. In your email, please indicate your experience level with using PowerPoint. Do you use it regularly in your teaching, occasionally, or not at all and would like to start? Please register by email or phone by Monday, January 23.

New Year, New Changes in the Department

Flexreg, new director, new staff, new phone system, we have a lot of changes happening at the office. We are also into the Winter term and classes have started.

First, you can check the attendance in your class by going into Flexreg and seeing how many seats are left in your class. If you don’t know your max number of seats just give your programmer a call. Remember the seats showing are what is left. Also, if there is a waiting list, it starts at 40 seats. So if your class is full and showing 35 seats on the waitlist, then you have 5 people waiting to get into your class.

We are in the midst of choosing a new director for Community Learning. More on that when it happens.

We have a new staff person who is taking Natalie’s place as a graphic designer and marketer. Her name is Denise Rucci and she starts on January 17th.

Finally, the new phone system which is an IP phone. We can see who is calling us now and many other features. If we do it right, you’ll never know the difference.

Have a great New Year and thanks for teaching for us.

Paul

New Registration System is LIVE this Weekend

Our new online registration system is going live even as I write this. Anyone going to our website http://noncredit.cocc.edu and now sign up for classes. Everything is handled online including payment and students get an immediate email reciept once they register and pay.

This is a much improved system and may take some getting used to. It offers us opportunities we didn't have with the other system especially the email reciept. We used to have to mail these to students.

It also lets you know right away if you are in the class or on the wait list.

When you have time go check it out. You will also notice the new website and the easier navigation it offers.

Let us know what you think.

Asian/Pacific Island Festival

Join the COCC fun and have a cultural experience at the Asian/Pacific Island Festival on April 9, 2011. The event will feature food booths, demonstrations, and activities for the children. Admission is FREE!

Click here for more info.

See you there this Saturday, April 9, 2011, 1 p.m.-4 p.m. in the Campus Center.

Readjusting in Class

On March 30th, Dean Dad on BlogU of "Inside Higher Ed" wrote the following about interviewing instructors that we should all consider.

"One of my favorite interview questions is 'tell us about a time you realized that something you were doing wasn’t working. What kind of adjustment did you make?' I’ve seen candidates trip over this, since in a few cases, it apparently never occurred to them that they had made mistakes. I don’t believe in perfect people; I’m looking for people who are capable of self-correction. That necessarily involves a certain degree of self-awareness. Sadly, self-awareness is not evenly distributed across the population."

What experiences have you had? Have you readjusted in the midst of a class?
I had an instructor sharing with me that he asked his computer class to click on a certain button and got asked the question by several students, "Which button do I press?" He had to back up and introduce several class members to the mouse.

What have been your experiences? Share them with us.

Rules for Using Humor in the Classroom

Following are some rules about using humor in the classroom from eHow.com.
The full article will be found by clicking here

1.Know your audience. Middle school students, highschoolers and even 19-year-old college students do not have the same sense of humor as their teachers and professors. Think about what they will find amusing and keep an ear open to what kind of jokes, cracks, remarks and anecdotes show up in your students' conversations.

2.Use humor at appropriate times.This means finding the right balance of instruction and joking. Don't let your whole class become an hour long comedy routine. Use humor to keep your students alert and engaged, not as a way to gain popularity. Also, using humor appropriately in the classroom means watching out for inappropriate material. Steer clear of off-color jokes and be sensitive to the cultural backgrounds of all of your students.

3.Encourage humor among your students. Let them know that it is OK to cut loose and joke around occasionally. The benefits of a happy, smiling classroom outweigh the time lost on humorous tangents. Group projects are a great place for them to use humor, as long as they cover the assigned material as well.

4.Don't try too hard to jazz up the material you are teaching. Sometimes, things like geometry and physics are going to bore students. This is OK. Don't try to compensate by delivering the material in a humorous package, like a funny song. Use humor to create a positive classroom environment, but don't let it obscure the material when it's time to really teach.

5.Don't exclude anyone. Stay away from "in jokes" between you and a few students. The whole class should feel included in the humor, not just a few popular, outgoing students or the class clowns.

Labels: encouragement, humor

Connect with Us Through Facebook

Community learning has a fan page on Facebook and we are seeking fans from our instructors. I encourage all of you to join us and add your comments and content to our page. This is just another way for you to keep in touch with us and to hear what we are up to as well.

The address is: http://www.facebook.com/COCCCommunityLearning

See you on Facebook!
Labels: Facebook, fans, keep in touch

Using Humor Effectively

This is an exerpt from an article at Education Blog Romow, on teaching youth that has some good points for teaching adults. For as I always say, an adult is just a kid in a bigger, older body. To read the full article go here: http://www.romow.com/education-blog/using-humor-effectively-as-a-teacher/

"Another key to humor being effective as a teacher is to make sure it is not at the expense of other students. If you can only get a laugh while making a student look bad, then you should not be trying. Humor should always be easy for the students to laugh at. If you are being laughed at, you are succeeding. This means they are listening, and that is a good thing. Do not be afraid to be the butt of the joke. Your students will love you for it."

When Experience is Not the Best Teacher

More from the LERN article, "Your Experience in Teaching."

•Listen to your inner voice about how you might teach. Try some of what at first sounds outrageous - you’ll likely be surprised at how successful a seemingly outrageous idea turns out to be.

•Take a risk. You’ll feel better; your students will enjoy it. Don’t worry that no one has tried the teaching approach you have in mind before, or you can’t find any research about it. Try it anyway. Your idea just might set a new direction for teaching adults.

•Most of the time don’t share your new idea about teaching with a fellow teacher until you’ve tried it with your students. You’ll too often hear, “Stay with what you know, it’s safer.”

•Watch what other people do — techniques speakers use to engage an audience, strategies discussion leaders employ to involve people and so on. Borrow the ideas and try them out in your classrooms.

•Accept failure as a stepping stone to success. Unless you fail occasionally, you aren’t trying anything new.
Experience can be a wonderful and important teacher, particularly if we learn how to reflect on and understand what we have experienced. But experience can also be a block to change because it imprints in our minds particular ways of doing things. As teachers of adults, we must learn to recognize when experience is a good and proper teacher, and when it blocks our learning.

When Experience Is Not the Best Teacher

From the article, "Your Experience in Teaching" on the LERN website, comes some things to ponder.

Many of us have long subscribed to the slogan, “Experience is the best teacher.” We tell younger people that as they gain experience, they will build on what they learn. This is true, to a point. But can
experience also be a deterrent to change, a block to our learning or a barrier to new approaches and new ideas? The answer is yes, in too many situations.

For many of us, our experience can prevent us from looking at things in new ways. Likewise, our students: as much as we prize their experiences and try to incorporate them into our teaching, their experiences often prevent them from seeing things in new ways, from learning new perspectives, from truly learning in a profound way.

What can we do about this? How can we put in our own experience, as well as help our students see a new perspective?

•Develop a skeptical, constantly questioning attitude of your experience. Ask, “Do I want to do this again, in the same way?”

•Figure out ways of making the usual, unusual, the ordinary, extraordinary.
When things are horizontal, make them vertical. When they are squares, make them circles. Ask, “What is the opposite of this?” Or, “What are five ways of teaching this topic that I haven’t tried before?”

Instructor Professional Education Workshop

As a Community Learning instructor, we know you are a lifelong learner just like your students. We are pleased to provide occasional learning opportunities to build your teaching tool kit.

Dealing with Varying Abilities in Your Class
As an instructor in the adult learning environment, it can be rewarding and challenging to facilitate learning in a room full of students with varying levels of knowledge and experience. Join us for a two-hour facilitated discussion to brainstorm new ways to work with varying abilities in your classes. You'll come away with new and creative ideas to bridge the gap and include everyone in the learning process.

When: Monday, February 28, 2011 6-8 pm
Where: Boyle Ed Center 151
Preregistration is required - space is limited. Please register by 2/22.

Register by phone (541) 383-7270 or send us an email and let us know you'll be attending.

New Year and Time is Short

Welcome to 2011! Our enrollment has taken a jump as people are looking for ways to fulfill their resolutions through a class or simply want to continue learning.
This first post of the year is a reminder that we programmers are in a very tight scheduling timeframe. We are now planning for Spring and Summer term. If you have ideas for new classes you need to contact us right away. If we contact you, please respond as soon as you can.
We hope you all have a great year!

The Next Term - What You Can Do NOW

It is that time of year when we are releasing the schedule for the next term, in this case, Winter term. The classes don't start till January, but we need to get the word out now.
Since it is Christmas time and even we are planning for the holidays, raising awareness of our upcoming classes can be a challenge. We need your help to make this happen most effectively.
We are asking you to talk up your classes and encourage those you know to sign up. We can send you an email flier, if you request one, which you can send out to any on your email list. You are the front line that our clients see and we want your classes to go.
Do you have any other things you do to get the word out about your class? Share them with us here.

Important Feedback

As instructors, we want to know how we are coming across to our students and how effective we are being. It is always gratifying to hear how good we are doing or uncomfortable to hear we have missed the mark. Often this feedback doesn’t come until the end of class when we can’t do anything about it.
Carol Smith, from the Helium.com website, writes, “Don't be afraid to ask your students how they feel the course is going. If you are relaxed and friendly they will feel they can give you an honest answer. If they aren't happy, ask them what they would like you to change - and change it! You will be a better teacher for it and you will have happier students.”
How do you handle this situation? Do you regularly check in with your students or pull one aside during a break? What has worked for you? Comment below and share with us.

Dealing with Late Arriving Students

We all want to start our class on time; it is respectful to those who are present and we don’t like to repeat ourselves. Carol Smith brings up an interesting point that we need to also be aware of as we teach adults. She writes for Helium and says the following:
“Remember that your students have lives. If they are late arriving there is probably a reason. It isn't helpful to turn into your old form teacher and be rude to them. I remember attending a course myself a few years ago. One night I was late leaving work, and then was caught in traffic. I arrived home, wolfed a speedy sandwich and went straight out to my class. All the tutor said when I arrived was 'Do please try to be on time'. I hadn't been late before. Needless to say I didn't return to the classes.”
Sharing the expectation of being on time at the start of the first class and then understanding that life happens, can keep you and the class on track for a good experience.
You can read her complete post at: http://www.helium.com/items/980193-tips-for-teaching-adult-learners-instead-of-younger-learners

2010 List of the Top Tools for Learning

The Centre of Learning & Perfomance Technologies has compiled a list from over 545 learning professionals worldwide of the top 100 Tools for Learning. They do this every year and one can see the changes over the last three years of what technologies have been seen to contribute most to learning.

This list included many things I use on a regular basis and quite a few I have never heard of before.

I invite you to read the list and share with us which technologies you have found most useful. Also please share how you have used them inside and outside your class. You may find something new you can use.

Here is the link to the list: http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/top100-2010.html