Web 2.0 Student Success

Char Gore and I are creating (and co-teaching) a class for summer and fall called "Student Success" or something generic like that. It will go through the curriculum committee again with something more descriptive maybe. It is a credit only, two unit course that will be multimodal which means that the students can take it completely online or come in once a week to the lab where we will be basically doing a workshop. The whole point of the class is to give new Health Information Management students the tools to succeed in college and in real life by introducing them to the tools to manage their work, manage information, and to build communities. The class is based on the "15 Minutes" article by Stephen Abram who has a particularly useful blog. There are no papers in the class. It is portfolio assessed. The students start a blog and learn about new tools each week and embed and link to those tools in their blog and write (or record/podcast/film) about what they found helpful or difficult. They will also look for other tools like the ones we recommend and evaluate them (free research for the next iteration of the class). At the end of the class, they will have a portfolio of tools and a network of colleagues. Our goal is to eventually bring the class to the whole college. It serves as an introduction to the our learning management system and Elluminate as well.