Here at the College of Business, we value our corporate partners by offering many benefits including a tuition discount for our online graduate programs and certificates. It is important that we understand if and how our corporate partners are utilizing the benefits by tracking activity in the College's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. As an introduction, I wanted to provide you with a quick overview of our Corporate Partnerships program.
As you can see, recording information about our Corporate Partners is valuable and useful when data is recorded in CRM. Therefore, I wanted to provide you with a video training tutorial for how to record corporate partnership information into the CRM. Take a look.
I have also developed a step by step guide to walk you through how to record information in CRM, which is located in Google Docs.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h5K6JzYGsiPgcgrBNrN1_Fsdc47xAoDrm0nO1bkJ-3I/pub
What did you think? Was this helpful? This is only one component of the process. I have also attached a video training tutorial on how to look up an organization in CRM.
Again, here are the step by step instructions via the training guide in Google Docs.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZfoUYRaHDUwgOIuEuXhJwVYorGR_s2gtj2vCPpVFVSg/pub
My intention is to provide you with several tools in your toolkit to successfully enter data into CRM pertaining to Corporate Partnerships, which is what I believe this course taught me. The course provided me with the tools and various resources about how I can use technology to teach and train others that are useful, relevant, and thoughtful. Together, we can learn, grow, and advanced our knowledge, skills, and tools. Thank you!
Friday, November 13, 2015
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Captivate 9 – New Opportunities for Presenting Information
In today’s world, there are many ways to deliver information. Take this blog, for example, I am providing information in a story format. I am not necessarily delivering information in the traditional sense of education but nonetheless, I am connecting with my audience. However, there are many methods for sharing information both in a traditional setting such as education to DIY projects presented in YouTube. Through my participation in an online class, I am learning about different modalities and wanted to share a new system with you called Adobe Captivate 9. Adobe Captivate 9 allows you to create professional looking and highly instructional using a single tool. Captivate 9 allows you to add interactive elements to transform static content into content that is responsive and creative. Let me tell you about one feature that I found resourceful and see if it would work for you in your job or even in a blog.
As I have started to explore, and when I say explore, I mean slowly creep through Adobe Captivate 9, there are many features that are quite overwhelming yet intriguing. One of the features that I found as a valuable asset was knowledge check questions. When working with clients or sharing information with my community, I do not necessarily need the feature of assessments such as quizzes or graded questions. I would just like the ability to check in and gain some insight and feedback from my audience to ensure that I am communicating and delivering information in an understandable and meaningful way. Captivate 9 offers the feature to insert knowledge check questions that are not graded but yet still gauge the learner’s understanding about a particular topic or subject. When you are not working in an educational setting, this feature allows you to check-in with your audience without making them feel like they are back in school.
The added bonus is that there are two ways to present feedback based on the answered provided by the learner. First, you can trigger immediate feedback. For example, the learner would answer the question and if the answer was incorrect, the feedback would pop up within the slide, which I consider immediate feedback. This allows the learner to see that they did not select the right answer and you, the author to provide them insight about the answer without moving forward in the presentation. The second option, is that you can generate feedback that takes the learner to the original knowledge slide. For instance, if the learner read information on slide A and slide B is a knowledge check point and the learner selected the wrong answer, the presentation would return the learner to slide A to review the information once again and proceed forward to the Slide B, where the learner can be re-assessed.
I hope you enjoyed hearing about just one of the many features that Adobe Captivate 9 has to offer and potentially explore how Captivate 9 would allow you to deliver in a fun, dynamic way. Here is a great news, you can try Adobe Captivate 9 on a trail base for 30 days to see if it is something you would like to explore. Click here to learn more and enjoy!
Friday, October 23, 2015
Certificates - A New Approach to Graduate Education
Many professionals want to update their professional profile, advance their career, broaden their knowledge, or continue their education but may not have the time to return to school full-time or even part-time to earn their graduate degree. So, universities are looking for ways to reach audiences that wish to develop new skills and build expertise in a specialized area. Colorado State University is now offering Graduate Certificates, which are short courses of study designed to meet the educational needs of professionals. The certificates are offered completely online, so that it provides working professionals the flexibility to pursue their course of study that is convenient for them. The certificates are transcripted which provides professionals with the credentials and authenticity of CSU's stamp of academic rigor and quality. This innovated way helps individuals continue their education without the time commitment of a full-time degree and yet provides students with the foundation to return to their graduate education when time and life allows. Take a closer look...
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Am I Learning From You? – A Look at Analytics
In today’s society, everyone uses technology. We use technology to shop, purchase cars, learn, and understand what is going on in today’s world. We are connected to technology by our computers, through our phones, and even through our remote controls – it is a little crazy that we can talk to our remotes to search for shows or movies. Living in this world means that everyone is tracking our moves, watching our Facebook feeds, stalking us with ads as we move around the web. It can be a little scary if you think about too long but here is the upside, it means we are learning. We are using the analytics to become better marketers, tailor information to who our audiences are, and serving our audience with what they want. Most organizations are using analytics to have a stronger customer service model.
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Does mobile learning enhance your education? A review of Fulantelli, Taibi, and Arrigo’s “A framework to support educational decision making mobile learning.”
Fulantello, G., Taibi, D., & Arrigo, M. (2015). A framework to support education decision making mobile learning. Computers in Human Behavior, 47, 50-59.
In today’s society, more individuals are increasingly participating in informal learning settings, such as MOOCs, badged courses, Ted Talks, and from blog posts, such as mine. As a reader, you are exploring information channels expanding your personal learning networks, which I referenced last week (Blog post 9/25/15). You may be engaging and interacting with other individuals on these sites, which naturally leads to deeper conversation and further participation. You are increasing your knowledge about a particular topic or passion by participating in the online culture. You are learning! What a unique experience to be a part of, especially if you are from my era when digital learning was not available. It is also exceptional is that this type of learning is reshaping the education landscape for students and teachers alike. For example, my 3rd Grader uses a mobile tablet almost every day in class. I didn’t have my first computer class until I was in high school. This makes me wonder, are students learning more than we did because they have access to more digital information? Are we measuring the impacts of informal and formal online learning with these new technologies? How can we see what is occurring when students may not be in the traditional classroom setting? I was tasked to find articles that related to learning analytics and I could help but explore this topic more by finding a scholarly article that tied to my questions. My article review is about researchers who wanted to explore this topic to see how mobile learning supports or hinders educational decision making for both our educators and educational systems.
My article review
Over the past decade, mobile learning (learning from a mobile device such as an iPhone) has been increasingly used to support learning experiences both in the formal and informal settings. In the formal setting, Learning Management Systems (LMS) have developed apps, so that a student can download the app and access their online course through their mobile device. In the informal setting, students are using Facebook or other social sites to engage in learning through discussions. According to the research about 67% of students surveyed believe their mobile devices are important to their academic success and use their devices for academic activities. The use of mobile technology allows for educators to develop innovative methods of learnings and policies aimed at participation. Now, administrators and educators must look at learning analytics to optimize the learning process and guide teachers on how to enrich the educational settings.
Learning analytics is “the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for the purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs” (SoLAR, 2012). Through learning analytics, educators are able to respond by using educational applications which are grounded in learning theories and understand the interactions between the learning and the learning context. This research paper focuses on using learning analytics techniques to support educational decision making in mobile learning settings. The researchers use a task-interaction framework, which is aimed to support teachers in assessing and evaluating learners during a learning experiences from their mobile devices as well as an agent-based interaction classification to gain additional insight for how to predict learners’ achievement in an online course. The framework considers three main steps: 1) a real learning environment in which a planned learning activities which occur on a mobile device, which is the pedagogical model; 2) the analysis of the experience of learning activity; and 3) the undertaking of specific actions to modify the learning activities according to learning analytics also known as evidence-based indicators.
The task-interaction framework to support educational decision-making in mobile learning used for this paper is based on the relationship between the different types of interactions occurring in a mobile learning activity and the tasks associated with the activity. The framework evaluates six specific scale values which include context, tools, control, communication, subject, and objective. It is important to identify the activities performed by the students and how they are associated with the six categories described. The researchers focus on student-context interactions, which they evaluate the student relative to other students and their environment in which the learning takes place and the physical path the student followed. Next, they looked at the tools used in the mobile learning experience. The tools allow for content delivery to be controlled through prepared learning materials that the student consumes or through content construction where the student must create new content to demonstrate their knowledge. Subsequent, the researchers looked at control of the classroom. This ranges from the full instructor control, by which the instructor guides the students towards learning goals, to full learner control, whereas the student is independent and learns without support. Following this is communication. The communication between learners is important to assess in order to improve personal knowledge through cooperation. The range of communication is from an isolated learner, where students only access course material and do not interact with the instructor or other students to cooperation, where students work together to achieve learning goals. Next, it is important to consider the subjects. The researchers need to know who are the subjects, are they novice or experts, in order to maximize the learning process. Finally, the researchers must know the objective factors to understand the student’s self-evaluation of how the student engaged in the content and context of the learning materials.
All of these elements lead to the case study conducted by the researchers. For the case study, they conducted two mobile learning experiments, which were designed to meet the learning objectives and pedagogical models of two different curriculums. One experiment the students studied in the traditional classroom activities by visiting attraction sites around town. The teacher provided the materials in the mobile environment and students worked individually and provided comments about each point of interest. The second experiment aimed at students collecting information about attractions around town to create a tourist guidebook. This was a collective effort amongst the students. For this study, the researchers used a learning management platform called Mobile Environment for learning with Linked Open Data (MeLOD). MeLOD was used to provide the students with contextual learning materials and make connections between the students and their experience with the context, other students, teachers, and learning materials. MeLOD has the capabilities to analyze the information and create a dashboard as a visual tool to help teacher monitor students’ participation. Using the dashboards, teachers were able to identify students who were not participating or over-participating in the class, students who were at risk of dropping out, how well the learning community was doing based on the students engagement, and notice any change in behavior after the teacher intervened. All of this leads to a more dynamic learning environment and student success and knowledge about the course learning objectives.
In conclusion, the research study defined the main capabilities of why it is important to adopt a framework in the mobile learning setting in order to support educational decision making. The advantages of adopting the framework include determining the relationship between the learner’s interactions and tasks within the mobile learning setting, supports the teacher in the analysis of how well or poor a student is performing relevant to a specific learning setting and define possible interventions to the curriculum or task-at-hand and offers new learning analytics that are beyond the numerical data. Of course, there is room for further investigation to identify other areas in which this framework will work in other areas of mobile learning settings and scenarios.
Friday, September 25, 2015
It’s about Connections – A Review of Sie, Pataraia, Boursinou, Rajagopal, Maragaryan, Falconer, Bitter-Rijpkema, Littlejohn, Sloep’s “Goals, Motivation for, and Outcomes of Personal Learning through Networks: Results of a Tweetstorm.”
Sie, R.L.L., Pataraia, N., Boursinou, E., Rajagopal, K., Margaryan, A., Falconer, I., Bitter-Rijpkema, M., Littlejohn, A., & Sloep, P.B. (2013). Goals, Motivation for, and Outcomes of Personal Learning through Networks: Results of a Tweetstorm. Educational Technology & Society, 16 (3), 59-75.
The reason I started a blog was to connect with others whose spouses or partners are serving our country either in the military, police, or fire industries. I wanted to connect you with others that can provide support or resources, in order to make your daily life just a little more pleasant and simpler. We all have resources and connections around us but are we using trust-worthy connections? Are our connections the same? Do they help us grow? Do they help us learn a little bit more about ourselves and the passions that we have? Recently, I read an article and wanted to provide a review of the article to show that we all have Personal Learning Networks and how the power behind our networks can be stronger and encouraging to the learning we partake in. Have you empowered your Personal Learning Network to help you learn and mature?
My article review
Social media is the number one way individuals review information today. Social media are outlets for learning on topics related to both personal and professional areas. This poses challenges for learners because the information is so vast and overwhelming. Also, social media outlets are considered a format of informal learning because learners do not receive credits, continuing education credits, or professional developments merits. However, there are many advantages to social learning, such as learning from others, engaging in community practice, and partake in collaborative learning. The article went on to review other articles of literature to answer questions about professional learning including whom we learn from, how we learn, what we learn, and why learners engage in learning through networks. Social learning is a contributing factor when it comes how professional learning takes place. This is where the article turns it focus to. According to the authors, social learning occurs through personal learning networks (PLNs) and there are two approaches to PLN: top-down and bottom-up. The top-down approach is when a learner partakes in a collaborative learning environment that helps motivate them to learn more or become less isolated about the work they are focused on. The bottom-up approach learners interact within their personal learning network and monitor, refine, and tailor their environment so that their interactions are learner-centric where feedback, advice, and engagement occur at a higher level. The intention then turns to how the authors attempt to bridge the gap between the learner’s personal network learning and how workplaces and supervisors should recognize, value, and reward the learners for their engagement in the PLN.
In order to connect these two points, the investigation focuses on learners’ goals, motivations, and expected results when he/she use their personal learning network developed in social media as a key factor of education. This research paper focuses on is based on an identified session and a brainstorm via Twitter, known as Tweetstorm. The team of researchers worked with a selected group of individuals attending a professional conference and asked them to use Twitter as a way of engaging in conversation and debate. The researchers set the context, asked questions via Twitter, participants answered the questions utilizing the hashtag as a way to flag their response, the aggregated the information and analyzed the categorization of the information. In total, there were 31 participants in the study. The advantage and disadvantage of Twitter are that due to its nature, Twitter is open to any who has knowledge of the hashtag session and participants only have a 140 characters to make a statement. This may prove not to be sufficient response space and can include individuals who are not attending the conference. Based on the analysis, the article revealed several interesting findings. First, it showed that learners mainly learn from research collaborators (experts), friends (trusted resources), and external colleagues (experts). Second, there are seven factors that play a critical role in an individual’s professional learning through the various personal learning networks. These were identified as sharing, motivation, perceived value of the network, feedback, personal learning, trust and support, peer characteristics and peer value. This emphasizes that information sharing is of great value in the workplace because it reduces duplication of effort and sits at the foundation of collaboration. Furthermore, the article concluded within motivation, several factors played a key role, including different perspectives, social media and collaboration, reciprocity, intrinsic motivation, innovation, status and reputation, and networking strategies. Overall, this study concludes that by connecting to the right peers leads to more creativity and expands the knowledge base in the virtual world and within each individual’s personal learning network.
From the study there is additional work and research that needs to be conducted because this research was based on a small sample size, and therefore, it will be important that further investigation will have a larger sample size and encompass various social media outlets such as Instagram, Facebooks, or SnapChat. Also, the authors mention that future research will need to focus on the interplay between factors that influence the interaction between networked learners.
For me, the article reiterates that network learning can be a motivation for learning and the connections we make through our PLN should be balanced between information sharing and interaction with trustworthy and supportive followers. This is why I wanted to build a network for a group of individuals that I care for and ensure that we surround ourselves with good information and trusted environment.
Monday, September 21, 2015
For Busy Fall Nights...Weekly Meal Plans to the Rescue
The fall is arriving this week, literally September 23, this means school is in full swing and sports have recently started up. This also means that our house is in full-swing. This fall, our household is only playing two sports. I am coaching my youngest son’s soccer team (Under 5) and my oldest son is playing flag football. Thankfully for U5 soccer, we only practice once a week but my older son practices twice a week for an hour and a half. For a firefighter household, some weeks are better than others because when you have two parents to orchestrate the busy night with, you can manage to get to practice and still have a good, healthy meal to come home to without the house looking like a tornado hit it. However, this isn’t the case all the time. For instance, this week my husband’s schedule is Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, which means that he is not home at all during the week for the morning routine. I must prepare all lunches, get the kids ready and out the door for school, and make sure I have left the house a disaster. Also, I must have dinner ready at night on nights when practices are scheduled. In my opinion, this is the worst schedule out of the whole set. Now, I know this schedule in advance, so I try and organize our weekly dinner meals into two categorize – crazy night and non-crazy night, because let’s admit I’m not superwoman and going out to eat seems so much easier, but we need to eat at home because it is what is best for all of us. This is when I look to Pinterest and other blogs sites for quick meals that I can either throw in the crock pot before I leave or a one-pan meal dish in less than 30 minutes. These are great resources and take away the pressure to think of something on your own. I subscribe to a blog A Dash of Sanity that sends out a weekly meal plan to my email. The weekly meal plan includes main dishes as well as desserts. These meal plans have a good idea or two that I can use for the week. So, I wanted to share this wonderful resource with you. Take a look and see if you could use any of these meal ideas for your crazy week.
For our love of serving this country,
Nicole
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