Instructional Blogging On Campus: Identifying Best Practices

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Instructional Blogging On Campus: Identifying Best Practices

6/14/2005

This professor asks her students to incorporate images from their training facility to personalize the virtual environment and classmates comment and share ideas. She added that having the program online creates a need to find new ways for students to derive a social benefit from their educational experience. Blogging helps connect these students and may lead them to “feel like a Wildcat.” This may be an important long-term use as well, because if these online students identify positively with the college they may become donors in the future.

In addition to instructional uses, blogs are being used by administrative units to promote student experiences and to provide information on services, resources and specific programs. The MBA and Undergraduate Programs departments in the College of Business and Public Administration, the Office of Enrollment Management, the College of Nursing admissions office, and this summer’s new student orientation programs are experimenting with blogs. In some cases current students are recruited to write about their college experience and in other cases the unit uses the blog promote its resources and share information. Not every endeavor is successful. Engaging student volunteers to add entries consistently can be a challenge. Ideas to remedy this in the future include paying students to write a fixed number of blog entries each week and providing them with specific topics. Feedback to student bloggers is important as well and units engaging is similar programs should explore ways to add encouraging comments to student posts.

One of the most successful applications comes from the College of Nursing admissions office where its blog gives “potential Master's, Post-Master's and Doctoral applicants another resource to find and ask for information.” The office has introduced “guest bloggers”--current students who share information about themselves, their experiences as an online student, personal goals, and advice for potential applicants. This type of blogging application has great potential for adoption by many other campus units.

The LTC is constantly looking for ways to promote blogging on campus. Last summer an attractive flyer and a website were created to share positive outcomes and highlight support services available to faculty. LTC staff regularly interview faculty who integrate instructional blogging into courses focusing on specific applications and the instructional benefits derived. These observations are being used to document “best practices” which will be shared across campus.

Stuart Glogoff Sr. (stuartg@email.arizona.edu)and Lelia Hudson will be presenting on Extending Instructional Uses of Blogs To The Campus: A Case Study at the July 2005 Syllabus Conference in Los Angeles. You can read Stuart’s blog at: http://blog.ltc.arizona.edu/stuartg/

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"Instructional Blogging On Campus: Identifying Best Practices," Campus Technology, 6/14/2005, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=38443

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