Alexandra M. Pickett

Alexandra M. Pickett is the Associate Director of the SUNY Learning Network (SLN), the asynchronous learning network for the State University of New York under the offices of the Provost and Learning Environments. A pioneer in instructional design and faculty development for asynchronous web-based teaching and learning environments, Ms. Pickett has since 1994 led the development of the instructional design methods, support services, and technical resources used by SLN to support the development and delivery of full web online courses by SUNY campuses and faculty. She has spent the past 15 years conceptualizing, implementing, and refining scaleable, replicable, and sustainable institutionalized faculty development and course design and delivery processes that in the 2005-2006 academic year resulted in the delivery of 4,000+ fully asynchronous online courses, 107 degree and certificate programs, with 100,000+ student enrollments. One of the original SLN design team members, she co-designed the course management software and authored the 4-stage faculty development process and 7-step course design process used by the network. Her comprehensive approach to faculty development includes an online faculty resource and information gateway, an online conference for all faculty with the opportunity to observe a wide variety of online courses, a series of workshops for new faculty, instructional design sessions for returning faculty looking to improve their courses, a developer's handbook, a course template, a faculty HelpDesk, online mechanisms for faculty evaluation of SLN services, and an assigned instructional design partner. Her leadership and direction of this area of the program were recognized when in 2001 SLN was honored to receive the first Sloan Consortium Award for Excellence in ALN Faculty Development. In 2002 SLN received the Sloan-C award for Excellence in Institution-Wide ALN Programming, and the Educause award for Systematic Progress in Teaching and Learning for 2001. Most recently SLN was honored with the 2006 USDLA 21st Century Award for Best Practices in Distance Leaning. Today, working with 40+ of the 64 SUNY institutions, she has directly supported or coordinated the development of more than 3,000 SUNY faculty and their web-delivered courses. Her research interests are in faculty satisfaction and the effective instructional design of online courses, and student satisfaction and reported learning. She has co-authored a number of studies on these topics and has published and presented the results both nationally and internationally. Visit http://SLN.suny.edu/developer, http://tlt.suny.edu/tlt_library_research.shtml and http://SLN.suny.edu/conference.

Also see:
http://etap687.edublogs.org
http://tinyurl.com/bfxa6o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GAZ8K-QgpY
http://tinyurl.com/59dh9l
http://sln.suny.edu/teachingsurvey
http://tinyurl.com/5l83or
http://twitter.com/alexpickett
http://www.slideshare.net/alexandrapickett