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NAWeb 2002 Schedule - Sunday's Pre-conference Sessions:

Sunday's pre-conference sessions are half day sessions. They start at 9:00 a.m. and end around 1:00 p.m.

Sunday October 20th - Pre-Conference Sessions - Half Day

Pre-Conference Sessions are:

Session U1 - Stephen Downes - The Learning Object Economy!
9 am till 1 pm - Breakfast, Lunch and nutrition breaks are provided.
Instructor - Stephen Downes - Back from his globe-trotting adventures - Stephen returns to us renewed, invigorated and as wonderful as ever. Stephen is a Senior Researcher with the National Research Council of Canada's Institute for Information Technology
Description - What does the learning object economy mean to you? This session will give you a concrete and hands on introduction to learning objects: how to create learning objects, how to use learning objects, where to find learning objects, where to sell learning objects.
Specific Topics include:

• Arguments for using learning objects
• Learning object design principles - Rapid Application design and Object Oriented design
• Tools for creating learning objects
• Tools for finding and retrieving learning objects
• Instructional uses of learning objects
• The network of learning object repositorie

Session U2 - Practical Web Accessibility
9:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. Breakfast, Lunch and nutrition breaks are provided
Instructor - Jeni Li - Back after too many years away from NAWeb - we are pleased to have Jeni back again in the spotlight! In regard to this workshop - Jeni played a lead role in the committee that wrote the Web Accessibility Policy for the State of Arizona!
Overview - - Think accessible Web sites have to be boring, text-only, and ugly? Think designing accessible sites is hard work with little payoff for a limited audience? Think you can get away with ignoring Web accessibility a bit longer? Think again!

Designing for accessibility not only benefits audiences with physical impairments, it can also improve a site's organization, search engine placement, search results, and usefulness with handheld and wireless access devices. And happily, "accessible" does not have to equate with "boring."

In this half-day workshop, we will give an existing Web site an "accessibility makeover". In the process, you'll learn how people with disabilities experience the Web... and practical techniques you can use to make their experience a better one.

Session U4 – Dynamic Evaluation Strategies for Web-based Courses, Programs, and Technology
9 am till 1 pm. Breakfast, Lunch and nutrition breaks are provided.
Instructor - Paula Frew, MA, MPH. With over twelve years of experience in the higher educational environment, Paula is the Associate Director of Programs in Behavioral Sciences and Health Education at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Prior to joining Emory University in 1997, she was an administrator at the University of California at San Diego for several years. She has developed several integrated web-based programs and directed evaluation studies to improve didactic outcomes and assess the overall effectiveness of web-based education in meeting university teaching strategic plan objectives. During the past several years, she spearheaded efforts to place several liberal arts, health sciences, and continuing education courses on the web that have effectively reached thousands of faculty, students, staff, postgraduates, and others in the academic community. Paula holds degrees from the University of California at San Diego (B.A.), San Diego State University (M.A.), and Emory University (MPH), and has been the recipient of several academic awards and professional honors. She has been an invited speaker at numerous web-based teaching and learning conferences (most recently at EduCATE) and has been praised by attendees for her “fun, innovative methods” and “enthusiasm and creative teaching skills” in training instructors, administrators, IT professionals, and academic staff about the critical role of evaluation to guide their educational programs to success.
Overview - How do you know if your program or technology is appropriate for your target audience? Do you know what successes and obstacles your instructors and learners are encountering in the web-based environment? What are your learners learning, what skills are they obtaining, what are their attitudes towards learning in the web-based environment? How effective is your program or educational technology – what are its strengths and weaknesses? Should your course or program be continued or discontinued? Should you change your technology platform to meet new goals and objectives? How do you assess the net impact of your program or web-based course? These salient issues and many others highlight the vital role of evaluation to ensure that educational objectives are met, and disappointments are minimized.
This fun, hands-on workshop is designed to familiarize you with reasons for evaluation, the types of assessment best suited for your specific aims, theoretical orientations to evaluation, the types of questions probed in evaluation research, and with the selection of appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods for data collection. In this workshop you will:

• Prepare an evaluation plan for your specific course, program or technology;
• Write some incisive questions to guide your evaluation research;
• Learn to select an appropriate type of assessment to answer those questions;
• Select a theoretical orientation for your evaluation inquiry;
• Identify the best qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods for your assessment;
• Develop good questionnaire items for your surveys;
• Learn about the basics of conducting interviews and focus groups;
• Learn how to make sense of your outcome data to draw reasonable conclusions and recommendations to present to “higher ups” – faculty, administrators, deans, program directors, trustees, and other important stakeholders.

This dynamic workshop is designed to help you to learn more about effectiveness of your course, program, or technology – participants are asked to bring a course syllabus, program overview, strategic plan educational objectives, representative course evaluation forms, user statistics, or any other relevant material to build your evaluation in this session. This session is ideal for educators, administrators, IT professionals, program directors and their staff, course developers, and any other individuals who play a key role in achieving successful educational outcomes.