Marsha West

Hi, I am Marsha West. I live and work in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. I have had many years experience in the field of distance learning. I was part of the charter faculty of the Virtual High School for six years). I retired from the secondary school classroom in 2000, but have been working in eLearning since then through my own company, M.West Consulting, Inc.

I've been a regular SCoPE contributor for some years now (back to the day when it was Global Educator's Network).

Most recently I have been working in the area of teacher professional development K12. I currently teach online facilitation for PBS TeacherLine I helped design the Online Facilitator Training course for PBS TL several years ago, taught it for several years, and now work with facilitators in a 3 week refresher course called "OFT II-Dusting and Adjusting Your Facilitator Hat." I subscribe to the Concord eLearning Model and Facilitating Online Learning is my "bible" for online facilitation methods.

Looking forward to an interesting conversation here!

~~marsha west

My name is Marsha West. I have been working in online learning for many years now. I was a member of the faculty of The Virtual High School for several years. I developed and taught an AP level English Literature and Humanities course for VHS, worked as the Site Coordinator for my high school, and helped to train new VHS teachers as they came on board in writing and delivering netcourses.

After I retired from my secondary school position, I started my own consulting business, M.West Consulting, Inc. I have worked for PBS TeacherLine for several years, training others to facilitate the TeacherLine professional development courses for K12 teachers. I have also worked for some other entities like the Jason Foundation, Metacourse, and a project where Concord Consortium and PBS partnered in developing math courses for secondary Algebra teachers.

I participate in seminars here in SCoPE (and its predecessor, Global Educators Network (GEN), KnowPlace, etc. and occasional do presentations at conferences like ELearn, NECC, UCCP, etc. I base my work on the pedagogy I learned through Concord Consortium, as expressed in the Concord eLearning Model.

I'm here because I always want to know more about how to effectively teach and facilitate online. I'm glad to see so many familiar names here so far.

~~marsha

OK, so I am going to retreat from academia and ask a very much "real world" question on teaching science online.

When I taught for Virtual High School some 10 or 12 years ago, I was also site coordinator for my home school. And that meant I was supervising our students who were taking science courses from distant instructors.

There were many problems with how to teach science to students who weren't f2f with you. How to do a broad spectrum of traditional laboratory experiments when you didn't have a laboratory, for instance.

Some VHS teachers asked students to ask their local science teachers to allow them to do the experiments in the local science lab under the supervision of a local teacher (for safety's sake). That was a BAD idea.

There were others who proposed theoretically "safe" experiments that could be done in students' kitchens at home. Not a bad idea - but the breadth of experiments that could be conducted was very limited.

There were some who proposed that students do some not-so-safe experiments in their own kitchens. BAD, BAD idea.

There were some who supplied virtual interactives online -- GOOD idea, but again, what is lost without real beakers and Bunsen burners??

In the past 10-12 years, I'm sure many solutions have been found for these problems. For instance, we now have "virtual dissections" of frogs, etc. And we now see many hybrid courses. But I'm curious about an *entirely online* associate degree - how are these problems addressed???

~~marsha

There are many interactive resources on the concord.org website. Concord Consortium and PBS TeacherLine were the team that created a course called Seeing Math which is intended to help secondary algebra teachers reach the "highly qualified" rating needed for NCLB.

Here's a direct URL to reach the interactives related to the secondary level course: http://seeingmath.concord.org/sms_interactives.html

But also go to Concord. org, click on Resources, and you'll find many, many wonderful interactives that relate to both science and math. Here are just a few: http://www.concord.org/resources/browse/251/

Have fun playing with the toys -- they are all free.

~~marsha

I have been teaching online for several years - first on secondary level (English lit), then with K12 teacher professional development (PBS TeacherLine). I also taught a course for Jason Foundation on improving Middle School science reading - so I have that connection to science.

But I am interested, generally, in the whole idea of rethinking teaching in all areas - and how to use the new tools effectively. I wrote and taught a course a few years ago on helping math teachers use interactive applications in teaching algebra - but, again, my focus was on training people to facilitate those courses. But I was fascinated by the little applets that were used in the courses.

So I'm mostly lurking here - reading and thinking about revisioning teaching via technological advances.

~~Marsha West