I am an Instructional Support Specialist (formerly Distance Education Coordinator) with the Center for Support of Instruction at UMUC. The key function of my job is to help our faculty members with their online classes and content. This can vary from using simple HTML coding to jazz up a note in the online classroom, to putting up webpages of the content for the students to access. Duties run from training sessions for the faculty to troubleshooting technical problems as they pop up. I rarely lack for a challenge and inspiration in my line of work.
The WebTycho program that our faculty use for online course delivery offers more to Distance Education than simply a place for webpages and bulletin boards. The WebTycho program offers a conference area for asynchronous discussions (much like many bulletin boards at once), a chat room for Real Time chat sessions, an assignment area to store, turn in and grade student assignments online (without relying on the USPS to deliver papers), an online syllabus and online materials section. It is much better than most other Distance Education programs out there, and offers much more.
