From Training Faculty on Blackboard to Teaching Soldiers Overseas, Central Texas College Reaches out with Wimba
In 1965, the citizens of central Texas joined together to authorize the building of a community college that would serve 11 counties in central Texas as well as Fort Hood and a local state correctional facility. In 1967, Killeen, TX became home to the first campus of Central Texas College (CTC), enrolling 2,068 students. However, CTC has seen significant growth ever since, increasing its student body and expanding its reach far beyond the Lone Star State. In fact, CTC now has students and faculty around the world, even boasting numerous U.S. soldier/students in Iraq. CTC opened on-site programs at Fort Hood and in Europe in the early 1970’s, and soon after began offering programs to military personnel stationed in the Pacific Command, Alaska, Panama, and throughout the United States. To reach its geographically dispersed students 30 years ago, CTC broadcasted telecourses and then transitioned to video conferencing in 1994. CTC taught its first online course in 1998 and by 2001 entire associate degrees were online, as CTC relied on Blackboard as the foundation of its online courses. Today, while some CTC campuses like its Navy Campus offer programs only for military personnel, other CTC campuses enroll military, civilian, and incarcerated students, all of whom may select from a number of associate degree programs and/or a variety of professional development and job-related skills programs such as basic literacy, leadership skills, foreign language skills, and occupational skills programs.
According to Kathrine Latham, Instructional Development Manager at CTC, in 2005, the College sorely needed to provide immediate and necessary Blackboard training to its worldwide faculty and student body. While at the same time it also needed to provide academically sound courseware for the teaching of languages. While web-conferencing software was available in the early-2000’s, most products were predominantly designed for businesses and the handful of applications available for education were limited, expensive, and didn’t meet CTC’s requirement of quick and easy access for all. But when Wimba introduced its Wimba Classroom and Wimba Voice building blocks for Blackboard, “We knew we had the tools we needed,” said Latham. After CTC’s Distance Education team tested Wimba Classroom with faculty members to make sure that it was user-friendly and worked with low-end technologies such as dial-up Internet connections, CTC was assured that Wimba was the technology it needed to offer collaborative experiences within its Blackboard-based online courses.
With Wimba Classroom, the Distance Education team could meet with its faculty in real-time and not only provide the technical training they needed, but could demonstrate new tools, techniques, and distance learning pedagogy. To get its faculty motivated about teaching collaboratively online, her training team has several questions it asks faculty:
- How would you like to really “teach” your online students?
- Want to talk to your online students just like you do your face-to-face students?
- Want to move the online classroom into the 21st century?
“I recall one faculty training when I had one faculty member logging in from Hawaii and one logging in from Germany. That was a tough one,” Latham joked, “I had to remember not to say ‘Good Morning’ or ‘Good Evening’ since my audience was in both.”
These training sessions led directly to faculty using Wimba Classroom and Wimba Voice in their courses. After getting faculty up to speed with Wimba, CTC’s Distance Education team then turned to the training of students. Live monthly orientations via Wimba Classroom allowed students (most of whom are new to distance learning and college) to enter their online classes with the confidence of knowing that they are not ‘behind’ other students when it comes to technological know-how. Today, in addition to specific classes that range across all disciplines from American Literature and Calculus, to Criminal Law and Poetry, CTC’s Distance Education team hosts up to 12 live online Blackboard trainings each month, multiple professional development seminars, and monthly live orientations for new students. In addition, Wimba is an essential part of the school’s math and English tutoring programs. Further, CTC’s language learning courses – covering all major languages – are emerging and student and faculty regularly meet in Wimba Classroom or meet asynchronously by using the voice boards of Wimba Voice, during which faculty provide students with real demonstrations and corrections of the spoken language, and students converse and aid each other vocally.
Beyond instruction and tutoring, CTC faculty rely on Wimba Classroom for holding live online mentoring sessions, office hours, and exam review. Since Wimba Classroom and Wimba Voice are both Blackboard building blocks, they integrate seamlessly into all of CTC’s Blackboard courses. They can easily be added and configured by faculty. CTC’s instructional design team also provides quick and easy reminders to faculty to add Wimba to their classes, as well as simple instructions for students about how to access Wimba. Three years into collaborating online via Wimba Classroom and Wimba Voice, faculty and students “love the interaction they now have with each other,” according to Latham. There are some who prefer not to use the tools – for some faculty, they simply cannot stay up late enough to provide one-on-one live time with their students overseas.
Fortunately, Wimba provides ample asynchronous tools for this communication. CTC will continue to utilize Wimba in its training and individual classes. “We provide a professional development series for faculty to study the use of Wimba Classroom and the pedagogy of implementing the Wimba Classroom in our LMS. It’s a very popular series,” says Latham, happily. CTC’s Distance Education team believes its faculty and students have enjoyed a number of important advantages through its use of the Wimba Collaboration Suite. “From the training perspective, [Wimba] has greatly increased the number of instructors able to use our LMS easily and efficiently.
Those who seemed to have problems are now using the LMS to its full advantage,” says Latham. “From a teaching standpoint, [Wimba] has greatly increased the number of students we are able to reach. Asynchronous distance courses are our mainstay, but these exclude those students who need to see that they have a real person guiding them through their classes, hear their instructors explain concepts to them, and speak to their instructors when they have questions.” Finally, in a recent 16-week Composition II class, Latham, also an instructor, decided to hold live online office hours with her students every other week – on Saturday mornings. And to her surprise, approximately half of her students showed up for each session. “I only had about half the number of “lost” students or those that register but I never see,” Latham says, pleased knowing that she was able to interact more with her students online that she normally would in a face-to-face class.
Many students commented how much easier the course was ‘this time’ compared to the last time they took it, confirming the notion that the more students collaborate, the better they’ll perform academically. “This past summer, I had a student never miss a live session,” Latham said. “He said he would read the assignments and they sort of made sense. But when he logged in to Wimba Classroom and heard me talk about the concepts, he finally grasped them. He had not been successful in the [text-only] course the first time he took it. I was his second round at passing and he claimed being able to talk to me was just what he needed.”