Stanford Continuing Studies Program Teacher Technology

or

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Teaching Without an LMS

by Ken Romeo, Ph.D.

This site is an illustration of how I have used technology to facilitate the three classes I teach in the Stanford Continuing Studies Program (CSP). However, my hope is that it can be a source of ideas for others teaching without a a Learning Management System (LMS) or maybe even those just thinking about how to use technology to facilitate instruction. 

Normally, when teaching matriculated graduate students in English for Foreign Students (EFS), I use CourseWork, Stanford's Sakai-based LMS.  However, students in the CSP are not matriculated and therefore do not get a sponsorship for a SUNetID, which is required to login to CourseWork. So, I had to be innovative and use readily available technology that allowed me to do the same things.  In the end, however, I think I may be doing even a bit more ....

If you are just interested in the details of how I set up my classes, please see the Implementation section.  If you are interested in the reasons behind my choices and where I think this is going, please take a look at the Larger Issues section.  Below that, I have included my Syllabuses for reference.

Implementation

• Basic communication - A method for announcements, assignments, lesson powerpoint slides, resources for extension, etc. 
• Collaboration - Sure, I can give my students a list of idioms or other vocabulary to memorize, but it means a lot more to them if they can focus on words and phrases they find.  I do this with a collaborative site (a wiki) where they can add words and sentences of their own. 
• Video - Presentation is best taught by showing the students what they are actually doing so that they can review it and fix their mistakes.  This entails video recording each student and making that recording available to that student. 
• Audio response assigments - When teaching speaking (conversation), it is very easy to go down the slippery slope of relying on writing for assignments, which has very little to do with how we talk. CourseWork has the audio recording applet in the Assignments tool, and I needed a way to re-create that. 

Larger Issues

• Two important constraints:  Privacy and ease of use
• Successes - What I do here that can't be done on CourseWork
  • Course site organization improvements
  • Collaboration improvements
  • Audio response assignment improvements
• The Future - What I wish I could do

Syllabuses 

• COM23 - Presenting in English
• COM32 - Writing in English
• COM34 - The Art of Conversation

About

• This site, the title, etc.