Hi everyone,
My name is Debra Hargrove and I am the coordinator of a technology and  
distance learning project in Florida called Florida TechNet. Our grant is funded  
through State Leadership money from our Department of Education. We have been 
in  existence for 7 years now and actually started using online learning for PD 
in  our state 5 or 6 years ago. 
 
We currently have over 30 web-based training's on our website that adult  
educators can access free of charge. In fact, many adult educators from other  
states have accessed our training online. These training's are  developed using 
Dreamweaver and placed on our server. They are currently  non-facilitated 
courses and do not use a Learning Management System. While many  students complete 
the course and receive PD credits (inservice points needed for  re 
certification), others simply go online, gather the needed information and  then leave 
the course.
 
That being said...we are realizing the importance of a happy balance of  
smaller facilitated vs non-facilitated course modules and in that realization  
have looked into cost effective ways to migrate our content into an affordable  
Learning Management System. After much discussion with colleagues and friends,  
we have loaded the open source system, Moodle, to our server. After all, free 
is  always a good thing! We are looking forward to updating our current 
training's  and then will migrate them over to Moodle. 
 
While our existing training's are all linear based (one course - 5 topics,  
you proceed sequentially), I'm seriously considering revamping each course and  
creating smaller, learning chunks, if you will... that will allow the learner 
to  pick and choose their own course content. So what I'm interested in 
hearing  about and what's most important to me in Florida is the effectiveness of 
learner  -based PD. Will allowing learners to create their own "Course content" 
increase  the number of Florida teachers who participate in online PD? I know 
that  Wisconsin used to have something similar...learning chunks.. do you 
still  offer these? Has anyone else experimented with this concept? 
 
Will be traveling out of town the next few days so wanted to get my guest  
bio up now. Thanks to Jackie for allowing me to guest on this important issue in 
 PD.
 
take care all,
Debra Hargrove
Florida TechNet
_http://www.floridatechnet.org_ (http://www.floridatechnet.org) 
 
online training at: _http://www.floridatechnet.org/webbased.htm_ 
(http://www.floridatechnet.org/webbased.htm) 
 (http://www.floridatechnet.org)  



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