Glossary of Online Terms

Any course offered through Distance Education. Distance Education online courses allow students from all over the world to participate fully in all class activities, therefore face-to-face meetings and extensive synchronous interaction are not usually a component of these courses.  Proctored exams are use by many Distance Education online instructors.  Contact Distance Education at http://distance-ed.bcc.ctc.edu/ or email Liz Anderson at landerso@bcc.ctc.edu for more information about Distance Education programs.  Students attending online courses offered through Distance Education are charged a fee which helps support curriculum design, server support, faculty support services and online student services.

Any course not offered through Distance Education but using an online environment is referred to as a Hybrid or Distributed course.  This term describes a spectrum of courses ranging from a course that meets as a regularly scheduled face-to-face course every day but includes an online discussion to a course that cancels three hours of face-to-face class per week and requires students to complete a significant percentage of the learning activities online.  Hybrid or Distributed course do not necessarily require students to pay a fee, however, many do.  To find out more about policies regarding Hybrid or Distributed courses, contact your department or division chair.

Many courses and programs have websites where students can access syllabi or other course information and handouts.  Contact your division secretary to find out if your division already organizes such web resources for students.  The Faculty Resource Center can help you develop your own web resources if you wish.

Anyone who designs their own course content from scratch is a course designer.

Very often course designers have been paid by Distance Education to develop their course content.  

• Each time a faculty member contracts with the Executive Dean and their department for course section content development, the contract requires the department to offer that section online two times a year.  Distance Education does not designate which course content should be used to teach those contracted sections and Distance Education does not designate who should teach those sections.  That is a department issue.
  
• Faculty who were contracted to build course content before AUGUST 2003 are paid to maintain their course content.  They receive $15 per student attending a section using course content created by them.  Any course developed under a contract signed after September 2003 will have the $15 per student fee delivered to a department or division fund.

A course or section instructor is the instructor of record of an online course and is the instructor responsible for the integrity and quality of the course.  They may be teaching another instructor’s course content or they may be using their own course content.  You can be a course instructor and a course designer. [More Information]

Mentors are online faculty who have volunteered (and are paid $300) to help guide a faculty member new to a specific online course or the online environment through curriculum and instructional issues.  Mentorees get $300 for participating in the mentoring process. Mentors are paid for mentoring at the end of the quarter in which they mentor; mentorees are paid at the end of the quarter that they teach the class for which they were mentored. [More Information]

VISTAFACULTY is the listserv the Faculty Resource Center uses to communicate with all faculty using online resources for instruction.  All faculty teaching with online technologies should subscribe.  To subscribe, send an email to lyris@list.bcc.ctc.edu.  In the subject field write:  subscribe VISTAFACULTY. [More Information]

An e-pack is course content developed by a textbook publisher that can be directly imported into VISTA or WebCT .  Ask your textbook publisher about e-packs or visit the WebCT site at http://www.webct.com/content.