Beginning September 1, our faculty volunteers at the Program for Online Teaching will lead our year-long Certificate Class, which is open to all.
POT resides at MiraCosta College in Oceanside, California. We were founded in 2005 to provide online, on-site and hybrid instructors with professional development opportunities focusing on pedagogy rather than just technology and how to use it. We have since grown to offering over a dozen workshops on campus each year, and many online.
The Certificate Class follows the academic calendar, with 12-week semesters covering different topics. It is absolutely free, and successful participants will receive POT’s Online Teaching Certificate and a logo to display on their class websites (shown at left, available in three color schemes).
Participation in the class will focus on assigned readings and viewings for each week, with attendees blogging consistently and commenting on each other’s blogs to form a community of practice. Each participant will need his/her own blog (or a tag on their regular blog) and our aggregated Pedagogy First! blog will show everyone’s posts and contain all the information for the class. Each week will be spent on both the theory and practice of teaching via the web, with much opportunity for playing with tools and reflecting on our work.
Our class can be considered a MOOC (a Massive Open Online Course) if it gets big enough. Like other MOOCs, participants should feel free to engage in distributed online activity and social networking — the tag is potcert11. But all work for earning a certificate must take place on each participant’s blog and be aggregated into Pedagogy First!, so we need to know who you are. The cohort will consist of certificate earners, but anyone may participate in the conversation and follow whatever readings and conversations interest them.
For more information, see our Certificate FAQ and the Syllabus for 2011-12. To join, just email me with your preferred email address, what subject you teach or area in which you work, and where you’re from. We’ll be contacting all participants in mid-August.
