>>Nancy Coleman: Hi, I'm Nancy Coleman, the Director of Distance Education at Boston University. Whether you're a current student, perspective student, faculty member or friend of the department, we thought it would be a good idea to tell you a little bit about what goes on behind the screens in the making of an online course. Here we are today in front of our offices on the west campus of BU. We're about a mile up the street from Kenmore Square and of course, the world famous Red Sox, right in the hub of activity. Before we go inside and show you a little bit about what the team is doing today, let's talk a little bit about distance education as a whole. Our mission is to work with the sixteen schools and colleges of BU. To help them put their programs online if they so choose to be there. It's never about the technology at Distance Education, it's about the petigo [phonetic] gene, it's about finding the most effective ways to put content online so students who can not come to Boston can still take advantage of the same high level, high quality Boston University education. As the Office of Distance Education, we maintain very rigorous standards for content, interactivity to insure that the quality is in place for every BU degree we grant. So, with that being said, let's take a look inside and meet some of the members of the team. Our office is pretty evenly split between a design function and a student service's function. The instructional designers are responsible for partnering faculty, translating their content online and insuring quality through the process. Now, let's meet two of our instructional designers, Brad and Jim, and see what they are working on today. >>So, this is a nice piece because you have the three individual lenses to look at the time. >>Yeah, and then you can switch between the times. >>That's not bad. >>So, we can scroll back and forth and we wanted to provide students with a review of sort of a distillation of here so we've got our three separate time periods and three categories that fit into the time line and so, you can see we've got a great deal of information that students can explore in a different fashion from straight text. >>Well, it's a great interactive piece. >>This is a good example of what we do as instructional designers here at Boston University. We partner with faculty and work very closely with them to translate what they do in a classroom to the online environment. >>Basically taking a student's eye view to meet their educational goals. >>Nancy Coleman: Student services is the other side of the DE team and is comprised of a number of individuals who serve different student's support functions. First the student services coordinators who work with faculty and students in the delivery of an online course. We also have a proctored exam coordinator and an administrative coordinator and some folks who do quality assurance and copyright force. As you can see by the map, we support students in all 50 states and we also support students in a number of international countries as well. So, as it turns out, there's a student service meeting scheduled today that's actually in process now. Let's take a peek inside the conference room and see what they are talking about. >>...we've covered that, the next order of business is for us all to, oh, my goodness, to say hello to the camera. >>Hello. >>Hey. >>Hello. >>Eric Friedman: My name is Eric Friedman, I'm one of the Associate Directors here at the Office of Distance Education and my job is to oversee the student service's team that you see meeting here today. The student service's team gets students ready for classes and we follow up when there are questions about other areas of the University like student accounting, the book store, or the library and we also want to make sure that everybody has a very positive learning experience. So, that's why we send lots of reminders. For example, that the hockey season is well under way now, go Terriers. We also make sure that classes run smoothly and one of the ways we do that is by proctored exams. So, I'm going to turn it over to Thomas Adams Martin to tell you a little bit about that. >>Thomas Adams Martin: I'm the proctored exam coordinator here at Boston University Distance Education. I help our students in the [inaudible] science and management, computer information systems and healthcare communication, schedule their proctored final exams, whether that's at one of our ACT testing centers or right here on campus. >>If you're taking a class with us, we'll see you online. >>Bye. >>Nancy Coleman: So, here we are in our studio which might look familiar to some of you because this is actually where we filmed the faculty for some of their online course videos. The one person I would like to introduce you that you almost never see because he's always behind the camera is Charles, our media producer. He's a little bit shy. So, Charles hop out and say hello to us today. >>Charles: Hi. >> Nancy Coleman: So, thanks for visiting us today. We hope you enjoyed this very quick glimpse into the inter-workings of distance education and we hope to see you online really soon and don't forget, if you're ever in Boston, stop by and say hello. ==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====