Starting this summer, Saint Anselm College will offer online courses to summer school students. The pilot program will include six courses, taught through Sakai, which include Getting Schooled: Education Policy and School Reform (ED350), Understanding Suffering (NU360), Social Statistics (SO212), Spanish Semester III (SP200), Ethics (PH107), and The Pentateuch (TH102).

The program has been in the making for over a year. Twelve faculty submitted courses for approval and due to budgetary restrictions, six were chosen for the pilot program.

The program is open to any enrolled Saint Anselm student and costs $1,280 for a 4-credit course ($1,600 if it includes a lab), or $1,920 for a 5-credit course. They will run for six weeks.

Caryn Sheehan, who is teaching Understanding Suffering in the pilot, said that this abbreviated time frame means student must keep up with assignments.

“Falling behind will be devastating because we will be moving quickly” she said. “The volume of work will be much heavier each week than the in-class course that spans 15 weeks.”

“They are going to be doing this every single day. You can’t put it down at all,” Tauna Sisco, who will be teaching Social Statistics, said.

However, classes are asynchronous, so students will be able to complete the work on their own time, provided they meet weekly deadlines.

Instead of a traditional lecture or discussion format, professors create lesson plans on Sakai which students can follow along on their own time instead of attending a predetermined lecture. In order to foster discussion, professors will rely on a host of different tools, including Skype, Google Hangouts, and discussion groups.

Dr. Kim Round, Director of Instructional Technology, is leading the instructional design and technology efforts for the program.

She said that one of the new tools professors and students can use is VoiceThread, a virtual meeting place where users can type, audio or video record, or call in their answers and points of discussion. Others can then listen to and respond to the discussion.

“One of the best practices for online is to have this collaboration, this back and forth, so that there’s a sense of that instructor presence and that feeling you get when you’re face-to-face with that professor,” she said. “We’re thinking that [VoiceThread] will promote a lot of collaboration.”

In order to ensure that students are doing their own work, especially with a lot of project-based work, professors and the IT department have created a multi-pronged attack.

“My homework is pretty interesting because it’s all hand-written,” Sisco said. “Students scan it as a PDF and send it to me.”

She’ll then write notes on their assignments with an iPad app and send it back.

Her exams involve handwriting too. “Part of the exam will be timed. The other portion they have to print out, do the work, and send it to me.”

Dr. Round added that the college is testing a new plagiarism tool for papers. “[W]hen someone submits their paper through Sakai, it will check to make sure that it’s not coming form Wikipedia.”

For high-stakes exams that need proctoring, Dr. Round said they can be administered in a couple of ways.

“There’s an outfit called ProctorU that professors can leverage so students are proctored while they’re taking them,” she said. Other ways to ensure honesty is to have a librarian or a professor from another institution proctor the exam and sign off.

Sheehan said that her exams are open book, but they will be timed on Sakai. “[They’re] quite challenging,” she said. “So to complete the exam, students must have a working knowledge of the course concepts.”

Charles Getchell, director of the Geisel Library, has been working directly with Dr. Round in implementing the courses and helping faculty prepare for teaching online.

“We had an online faculty institute,” he said when asked how the library has been helping. “It’s a week-long workshop and the librarians that are involved had a part in that.”

Getchell said that he has three of his librarians involved in the course building phase, with one librarian assigned to two faculty. “They will stay with them through the design and building phase when questions about identifying needs and content, sorts of materials that we would otherwise purchase or borrow for all the right courses,” he said. “The librarians will be there when courses are offered to provide whatever type of support is determined that is going to be useful.”

According to Andrew Moore, Director of Summer School, “The online courses are like regular summer on-ground courses,” he said. “They give students the opportunity to get ahead in their degree requirements or to get caught up (if that’s what they need).”

Sisco noted that these courses not only allow the college to recapture students already taking online courses with other institutions, but will allow the college community to “really know what our students are taking in terms of the summer. They might be taking an online course someplace else and we don’t really know what that content is.”

Sisco added that “We hold ourselves up as faculty members to high standards in terms of our pedagogy, and this gives us control over that, how we do online. I think we’re going to do it really well.”

Moore concluded by sharing that “[I]f students enroll in them and find it a positive experience, then we hope to add additional courses in the future.”