-: Okay, so as Richard said, my name is Leah Sandall.
And I'm the Distance Education Coordinator
in the department.
And since this is a fast break, I'm gonna give you just
some highlights of some of the things that
we're doing currently in online and distance education
in the department.
And highlight some of the things that we're
excited about that we've developed over the last
couple of years.
So the first thing I wanted to point out is we've
done a lot of video development.
In collaboration with some grant projects,
we've created a number of videos on various topics.
And so we've housed those online at Vimeo.
So you can see the URL up there if you're interested
in checking those out.
And the way that we use those is as individual
learning objects or also incorporating those into
various online courses that we have and also
resident courses, too.
The next resource I want to highlight is called
Journey of a Gene.
And one of the significant things about this
resource is it's a website created in WordPress.
And it's mobile friendly.
And so learners can view it on their smartphones
all the way up to their computers and it works well
in any of those environments and those platforms.
And for this example, this was a graduate student project.
And it was focused on developing a resource that was
concise and described the process of genetic engineering
using the context of soybeans and sudden death syndrome.
For 15 years, we've had the Plant & Soil Sciences eLibrary
as a fabulous resource that comes out of this
department and this is collaborative.
It's an online library of sorts.
So we have a lot of resources there.
Text lessons, animations.
And we've also been able to deliver some courses
out of there.
So currently we're delivering some non-credit
or extension courses from the Plant & Soil
Sciences eLibrary.
And we also deliver them to academic students.
So we're excited about this.
It's a good foundation and we're gonna continue to build on
this resource as well.
I want to give you some current online stats of
how things are going in the department.
So we have 38 online courses.
Undergraduate as well as graduate courses.
17 instructors in the department that are teaching
those courses.
We have 47 Master's in Agronomy online students.
And when we hit December 2015,
so May 2014 to December 2015, we'll have graduated
10 Master students in Agronomy.
So we're very happy about that.
And then we also have some certificate programs.
And so we have the Plant Breeding & Genetics Certificate
program which is a professional certificate.
And we have about 40 learners in there.
And then we have seven Grassland Management
and four Horticulture Academic certificate learners.
And the difference is between the professional
and the academic is that the academic certificates can
kind of be a jumping off point if those learners are
interested in pursuing a Master's degree
after they've earned their 12 credits for the certificate.
And so these are just a variety of the things that we're
doing, kind of snapshot of how things are going.
Finally, I wanted to give you just a quick overview
of how it is we actually deliver our online courses.
So there's three ways.
The first way is synchronous.
And there's many terms you can use.
But these are the terms that I'm gonna use.
And I'll briefly define them.
So synchronous is that it's delivery of the face to face
class while at the same time, delivering to an
online audience.
We also have asynchronous courses which are
delivered strictly online.
No face to face contact with the students in
a classroom setting.
And then we have a hybrid or a blended approach.
Where the students receive the content online.
But then they come once a week for a session
face to face with the instructor and TA's
in order to continue the learning process.
So this last picture is of the Gooding Learning Center.
And there's been some remodeling and some updating
that's been going on over the last year.
And so it serves both on campus students as well as
facilitates learning for the online students.
So I have just a short video that's gonna give you a
tour of the changes and what things look like in the
Gooding Learning Center.
(face paced music)
So with that, if you have any questions,
I'll be here the rest of the day and be happy
to chat with you.
Thanks.
(applause)