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| Wednesday, 20 July 2005: 11:15 AM-12:00 PM | |||
| Nob Hill C-D (San Francisco Marriott) | |||
| B-14: WebCT Orientations: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly | |||
| Detailed Description: | Today’s community college students begin classes with widely varying computer skills, motivation levels, and time constraints. To provide student support, cut back on drop/failure rates, and reduce calls to the WebCT helpdesk, we strongly encourage students to attend the WebCT course orientations. This session will identify the basics of a successful WebCT orientation, focusing on why students need an orientation, how orientations have increased student success, and how they have reduced WebCT helpdesk calls. | ||
| Presentation Format: | Showcase | ||
| Topic: | Driving student success: Attracting, supporting and retaining learners | ||
| Target Audience: | Academic Technology Directors, E-learning Managers, Faculty and Other Instructors | ||
| Appropriate Audience Level: | Beginning or new users of WebCT, Experienced WebCT users | ||
| Abstract Text: | Lamar State College-Orange is an open admissions, two-year institution located on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Our students come from many walks of life, and many of them enter college underprepared. As our distance education offerings increased in popularity, we realized that we needed to better prepare our students for the use of WebCT. To do so, faculty and computer center staff worked together to create an orientation that would introduce students to the platform as well as assess their skill levels. We believe that our mistakes along the way and our findings can help other campuses provide student support, cut back on drop/failure rates, and reduce calls to the WebCT helpdesk. Using PowerPoint as well as web links to orientation materials provided to students, we will be illustrating the need for student orientations as well as some of what we have found to be the best practices involved in creating and delivering those sessions. Our on-campus research indicates that stronger orientations lead to fewer Helpdesk calls; thus, we will also provide an analysis of Helpdesk calls based on the student's attendance at orientation. We have also examined student's drop and failure rates in correlation to their orientation attendance, and we will discuss our findings. | ||
| Session Leader: | Tara Lanphar Lamar State College-Orange | ||
| Co-Presenter: | Gwen Whitehead Lamar State College-Orange | ||
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