Distance Learning Subcommittee
Friday, May 6, 2005, 2pm
South Campus, Cafeteria
Minutes
In Attendance: Martie Dixon, Carol Baker, Donna Allen, Ellene Phufas, Susan Ballard,
Trish Lanz, Mary Beth Orrange, Judy Mathiez, Jason Steinitz
1. Distance Learning Steering Committee Report – M. Dixon
 Recommendations made at the February meeting regarding faculty stipends for
online courses and the number of online courses faculty can teach in a semester
were presented to the Academic Standards Committee. That Committee decided
that these are items that should be part of FFECC negotiations.
 Both distance learning related Perkins grant proposals were approved. A full-time
Instructional Design Specialist will be hired in July.
 A discussion was held with the Business department about their online course
offerings and their strategies for faculty coverage of these courses.
2. Assistant Academic Dean Report – M. Dixon
 Advanced Studies: The flier for high schools is almost ready to go. High school
students will pay half tuition for these online and hybrid courses (rather than the
typical one-third tuition) because they are taught by ECC faculty. Three courses
will be offered Fall 2005: EN 110 and MT112 (online) as well as EC102 and
PS100 (hybrid through fiber optic). There has been a request for a Sign Language
course, but no instructor has been found to offer it.
 M. Dixon has been presenting distance learning information to departments less
represented in DL: Allied Health, Technologies, and Natural Sciences.
 Two new programs have been sent for SED registration as offering degrees at a
distance: Computer Applications for Office Certificate and Telecommunications
Technology (Verizon).
 Proposal for new online course offerings: that the faculty name and course to be
offered online be sent to the AAD-ACD (M. Dixon) by October 15th for online
courses to be offered in the subsequent Fall Semester and by March 15th for
online courses to be offered in the subsequent Spring Semester. This would apply
to any course which is eligible for a stipend payment. The course should be
developed before being approved for inclusion in the master course schedule.
After much discussion, this proposal was approved in spirit, with no formal vote
taken.
3. Faculty Support – MB Orrange and J.L. Steinitz
 The Summer Technology Workshops schedule (June 7th and 8th) was distributed.
It is also available from the HALO website.
 The two-week online training course Teaching Online with ANGEL was offered
for the first time in April with 12 faculty participants. It will be offered again
beginning June 20th. Thanks to Donna Allen and Trish Lanz for reviewing the
materials before the course began.


Developing and offering an online Basic Computer Skills course for faculty with
an interest in teaching online is under consideration. Please email to J. Steinitz or
MB Orrange any suggestions for what should be included in such a course.
J. Steinitz and MB Orrange attended a SLN training workshop on Friday, April
29. Creating and using a course template for new online courses at ECC was
discussed. This is something a course design specialist would help with.
4. ANGEL Issues – C. Baker
 ANGEL 6.3 is in beta testing – ECC is participating in this testing phase. At this
time, it’s not certain whether the new release will be available and installed for
Fall 2005 courses.
 The XP upgrade that was done the weekend of April 30th seemed to create a
popup blocker in Internet Explorer. This was creating some problems with
ANGEL. To eliminate the problem, the ANGEL site has been added as a trusted
site to the ECC network. It is believed that this should solve the problem for us.
Students may experience similar problems if they have installed the XP update on
their own computers. Instructions will be written up and distributed to faculty and
the helpdesk to assist students when fixing the problem at home.
5. Assessment and Accreditation
 Previously reported in the Distance Learning Steering Committee report.
6. Other
 ECC was featured in the ANGEL Learning Newsletter. A link to a copy of this
article is posted with this committee’s agenda and minutes at
http://south.ecc.edu/dl, on the dl.ecc.edu website (bottom right of the screen), and
will be appearing in an announcement on ECC Today for the next two weeks.
 There are some concerns about offering online courses on a three-week schedule
(winter intercession and summer session III). It was suggested that we look at
student outcomes for these short sessions to see if there is any significant
difference in student performance from a regular semester time frame.
7. Next meeting
 Meetings will continue to be held on a twice-per-semester basis. For Fall
semester 2005, we will try to use the common hour (Tuesday, 2:30pm) and
videoconference the meetings to make it easier for people to attend.