Embedded Files
Program Development
Program Development
The MAFLT Program was established only a year before Dustin De Felice and I were hired as core faculty. From the beginning, I was not only designing and building courses but also helping to develop procedures and practices that would support the program going forward. We revised the MAFLT Handbook, which involved revisiting the guidelines and standards for Experiential Modules and Final Portfolios and clarifying requirements and trajectories. We made sure that the courses formed a coherent and well-balanced sequence that would prepare learners for the final projects and portfolios.
Administrative Roles and Responsibilities
Administrative Roles and Responsibilities
Given that our core faculty in the MAFLT is so small and that most students in our courses are members of the MAFLT community, we have all had to play a role in administrative processes. As directors, Paula Winke and Dustin De Felice have taken on the majority of this burden, but I have served on the admissions committee and advised students as needed for most my time on the faculty. Dustin De Felice and I have also taken the marketing and recruitment responsibilities for the program almost entirely upon ourselves.
Furthermore, we have taken steps to help the students view themselves as a community. In my first year, when my course load was lighter than Dustin’s, I also built the MAFLT Community site in D2L. We have continued to update it and add content including tutorials on distance learning, D2L, and the MSU Library and materials preparing students for their EM and portfolios. In addition to the Twitter account and private Facebook group that I set up for the program, the D2L Community allows us to send announcements, share news, and encourage the students to view themselves as a network of collaborating professionals rather than as isolated individuals. We have planned receptions and dinners when students came into town for professional seminars and graduation, and we now publish a newsletter that goes out to all our students every semester. Dustin typically frames it out, and I help with content and revisions. We have also involved students in our outreach by meeting up with them and asking them to join us when we exhibit at national conferences.
Instructional Practices and Innovations
Instructional Practices and Innovations
When I design FLT courses, I deliberately follow a consistent structure and format in order to reduce the learning curve for students as they proceed from course to course, to maintain a fairly consistent level of difficulty, and to facilitate my own development process. Every course is made up of twelve modules of new content with due dates on the same day each week, followed by two or three weeks of review and work on the most extensive assignments. Modules consistently include an overview that explains the content and tasks of the module in text form, an instructor presentation in the form of a narrated slideshow, two or three readings from textbooks and scholarly journals, supplemental materials as needed, one or two discussion prompts, and links to the folders where they will submit assignments as needed. I use different approaches in each course to hold students accountable for reading and watching the module materials, so some courses also include a weekly quiz and/or cumulative reviews. Typically my courses have three or five major assignments, and each of these has its own folder on the course page that provides students with detailed guidelines, a rubric, and often graphic organizers or examples to support planning.
Interaction and Instructor Presence
The MAFLT faculty have consistently found that asynchronous approaches to online instruction are most beneficial for our students, but I often include at least one live virtual meeting in which learners can present their work to their classmates, discuss their intentions, and get feedback. Although live meetings are rarely feasible, I offer other means of sharing work with peers including the discussions with a requirement to respond to each other, presentations that they record using screen sharing and recording software (according to tips and tutorials provided in the courses), group projects or peer review pairings at least once in each course, and a shared folder in Google Drive. Each course provides optional General Course Discussion threads that offer the students spaces to ask questions and share relevant news or materials that they find during the semester. Course pages in D2L follow a similar structure in each course, which always includes a box in the top right corner offering my name, my email, phone numbers where they can reach me at any time, a link for my ScheduleOnce site, and a link to my “personal meeting room” in Zoom, the video conferencing platform that I use for office hours and virtual meetings.
These are two handouts that I created to be shared with prospective students at ACTFL 2017. They are pictured above and embedded as PDFs below.
Handout_MAFLTOverview_LanierF17.pdfHandout_TaskstoMotivate.pdfReport abuse