Faculty Resource Network

Today has been an exciting adventure into on-line learning. Like many terms, including my profession of "occupational therapy", words and phrases change in their meaning throughout time and culture development. Therefore, the discussion of instructional technology can be many things to many people, though to me, technology is the mulimedia use of computers, digital cameras and videocameras, audio, television, etc. that permeates the society in which our students live and we teach. Having only been an instructor for a year, I am still trying to grasp the "teacher" concept of my position, but with some knowledge of computers, and in particularly, the Blackboard program, I hope to now enhance my teaching through this multimedia explosion of our "culture".
Learning is a unique and individualized concept of each student as well as each field of study, so I feel that part of my job is to asssist my students in self-determination of "how" they learn as well as their perception of how I "teach" so that we can make each course as effective as possible. I do believe that, in teaching graduate level students who had to compete to get into this professional program, they should possess a certain amount of desire and motivation to learn and seek out knowledge; however, I remain realistic enough to know that I need to make it exciting, fun and interactive. I have already gathered many ideas from my colleagues here in which I can integrate an on-line component to each of my courses, and it is my goal to work on that between now and the beginning of Fall semester.
I am only familiar with Blackboard; therefore, I do not have a good example of an online learning program at this time, but will rersearch that and share if I come up with one.