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Technology & the Community College
Pulling in Tandem
4/1/2007
The courses will be marketed on a national scale by McGraw-Hill, primarily to other community colleges that want to get started using online materials, as well as to small, private colleges that want to provide this type of training to their students. The courses can be delivered in any of three ways: fully face-toface, fully online, or in a blended mode. Sales, says Chambers, are expected to be “sizable.” The share of the revenue returned to the school will go toward student scholarships and into supporting the Sirius program, in the form of adding more instructional designers and paying faculty stipends for developing new courses. Chambers says he expects the cost of course material development to be fully covered (excluding overhead such as his salary) during the life of the current contract with McGraw-Hill, which has about two years remaining.
"Stop thinking the way you’ve been taught to think in an institution," warns FCCJ’s Jack Chambers. "Start thinking more creatively, and take more risks."
As for the faculty developing the new course materials, they can have access to anything in the digital asset library owned by McGraw-Hill, Chambers asserts. And for assets leased by McGraw-Hill, the school will pay the same fee the publisher is charged. Faculty will also be able to build some of the simpler components they want to offer in courses, such as crossword puzzles and flashcards, using SoftChalk’s LessonBuilder. As the course material is finished, Chambers explains, the school will deliver cameraready copy, then the company will print, stock, and distribute the books.
But the partnering doesn’t end there. McGraw-Hill has funded a full-time instructional designer for that first twoand- a-half-year phase of the contract. FCCJ is using McGraw-Hill’s math software, ALEKS and MathZone, and has set up another contract with the publisher, whereby the college can make those programs available to students online.
Training for the new tools. Along with the development of course materials and CREOLE, Sirius encompasses another initiative: an online program to teach faculty how to use the tools, and pedagogical methods to construct course materials. This part of Sirius has proven to be wildly successful, according to Chambers. Nearly 400 faculty members are participating in the learning process, which takes from a year-and-a-half to two years to complete. A $500 incentive is paid out to adjunct faculty who complete the training; for tenured faculty, their departments receive the honoraria. About 100 instructors have completed the courses, Chambers reports, and about a third of the fulltime faculty at the school have volunteered for the training.
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