2006-07

Karen Johnson, Walla Walla Community College

Application for Award:

I have developed 2 courses, “Yoga Online” and “Yoga to Go”, that I think are worthy of your consideration for this Innovation in D.L. Award. I’m entering them as a team because they are both innovative in some similar and a few very different ways. I developed “Yoga Online”, a 2 credit DL physical education course, 3 years ago this season and the course has run successfully at our college, Walla Walla Community College, every quarter since. “Yoga to Go”, a 1-3 variable credit DL P.E. course has been in the design/development stage since June of 2006, and will “preview” this Winter Quarter.

Even though both courses are teaching beginning/ intermediate yoga, creating “Yoga to Go” on the upgraded Blackboard platform that we did not have in 2003 has allowed me to combine the strong pedagogy I used in “Yoga Online” with many technological advances to take the course “up a notch”. It answers the main student “suggestion for improvement” which is to be able to watch the instructor do the poses; and it satisfies their requests for (educational) opportunities to use the techno-gadgets they love and to explore the media options for which they’ve designed their computers. One of my dreams with “Yoga to Go” was to move students’ use of MP3 players a bit off the rocks of I-Tunes and into the wide and still quite vacant harbor of listening to learn.

Since “Yoga Online” has a track record and many of you might be aware of it, I’ll just briefly describe its origins and successes. “Yoga Online” came into being as my student project for Jane McCarville’s required course that we all need to take to learn to teach online. I’m a 30 year veteran of college and university teaching in humanities; English, philosophy, art, art history, psychology and education, and was a total technophobe with a much outdated home computer when I started Jane’s course. However scared and unprepared I was, still I had the sense to be greatly excited by the potential of distance learning. You know that Jane’s course requires a final project to demonstrate that we can successfully create a course. What to teach? I ruled out the subjects that my online searches showed were being taught, mostly what I’d been teaching in the classroom. What I noticed was missing were the multi-dimentional subjects that people learn mostly by “doing” – like yoga.

My decision to figure out how to teach yoga online was based on this solid practical and pedagogic experience – still it was very challenging. In 2003 despite there being over a million yoga web “resources”, there were no models of an online yoga class. To say Yoga Online was created on a shoestring is true. Production costs were limited to a $400 Distinguished Faculty grant to me for the writing, etc. and WWCC’s Teaching Learning Center’s Debbie Sands’ “free” time to load it into the Blackboard shell.

Although I have not become monetarily rich from “Yoga Online”, the real and continuing gifts of this course are far beyond money. Each quarter I receive several “thank you” notes from students about how this course and their new knowledge of yoga have made things possible in their lives that would not have been possible. In early Discussion Board assignments students share why they are taking this course: they are interested in the subject (particularly the nursing and other health specialties

students including cosmetology and P.E.); their doctor or counselor or therapist has “ordered” yoga lessons; there’s no other opportunity to study yoga (especially rural students, “poor” students with no extra funds for private gym/studio programs and the increasing number of students with intense family/work demands); “drop-outs” from trying to learn yoga via videos or television programs; and – probably the biggest reason of all: students who would be too “embarrassed” or “too out of shape” or “too old” or “with special needs” to participate in an on-the-ground class. The online students have over my campus classes is that all these students get individualized attention that I cannot give to my big campus classes, and they support each other.

Other pluses that have come with “Yoga Online” are: many students have used this course as their gateway to other DL courses; every quarter my “Yoga Online” classes teach me more about what’s “out there” to inspire distance learning; and I won a National Award for this course! In January 2005 I was contact by Adrian Alleyne of Blackboard and invited to enter Blackboard’s Exemplary Course Contest. “Yoga Online” was seventh of the ten Exemplary Courses. This got me an invitation to be one of the 3 peer evaluators of the 2006 entries at the Blackboard National Convention in San Diego this past February. The judging convention experience along with the DL training in Yakima in June this year sowed the seed of “Yoga to Go”. In “Yoga Online” students learn yoga by following my lead through an excellent book, Yoga Basics; and to a few outstanding web sites that demonstrate the specific poses and practices. The assignments encourage the understanding of the physical principles and philosophy of yoga through a variety of discussion boards. We keep up motivation by our “Yoga Buddy” networking, our class DVD and field trips – either real or cyber.

So why “Yoga to Go”? Because students want the support of their teacher – they want to “see” us and know we are there for them. Our Blackboard technology now makes this possible. As with “Yoga Online”, “Yoga To Go” has a great text (Rodney Yee’s, Moving Toward Balance) to support the pedagogy; however, the addition of two video lessons and three audio (MP3 option) lessons to each week’s six lesson format gives students an exact demonstration of the new poses and routines that the book discusses. Students can watch their teacher (me - not Jane Fonda), carefully demonstrate the poses and they can listen to me describing how to do them. The Windows Media player does this in Real Time (so I don’t look like a robot despite the orange clothes); they can repeat as much as they need to. With the audio lessons, they can either listen by their computer or download on to their MP3 players to do wherever and at their convenience, and keep forever! Although “Yoga Online” was created with a

$400 budget, “Yoga To Go” cost over $6500 to produce and required a little team: myself; WWCC’s Media gurus, David Walk and Jon Loney; and our Course Designer, Andrea Kerr.