Kenai Peninsula College and AEIN 2008

1. Kenai Peninsula College and AEIN 2008 Director Gary Turner and Christine Gehrett, education faculty and AEIN liaison have actively pursued the necessary resources to enable our education students to participate fully in the required course of study for their degrees. This has meant establishing partnerships with other UAA campuses, coordinating course offerings, and working closely with the College of Arts and Sciences. Faculty of education were the first to attend the workshops. Then we included adjuncts, and those who taught the support courses in liberal studies. Now we are including those who teach any courses our ed students must take. KPC is a community campus on the Kenai Peninsula. We offer the Bachelor of Arts in Elementary Education Degree, the Early Childhood AA degree, and Post Baccalaureate teacher certification and so, work very closely with College of Education. We are all learning the ins and outs of Blackboard and Elluminate Live! Student feedback has been positive for those of us who have had experience in the workshops. The quality of the courses has greatly improved as we learn to incorporate more of the most effective strategies into our distance learning environment. Also, we are now planning our own workshop event for May. Some of those who have been involved in the past sessions will help with instruction our faculty who are newer to Blackboard and Elluminate Live! We have developed a cadre of experienced faculty who can now teach others! The main focus of our AEIN work has been to develop our capacity to offer very high quality distance courses to our education students. We have sent many faculty members to the distance education workshops offered by AEIN on the UAA campus. Moving beyond the basics, funds have been used to hire a part-time consultant who helps us to further enhance the quality of the courses we offer. We are excited about making meaningful connections with other campuses and through that network, we hope to continue to make the education degrees more accessible to all students in Alaska. AEIN is funded under a $9.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The ideas and opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the policies of the U.S. Department of Education or endorsement by the Federal Government.