EMT Instructor Student Announcements

IT has installed a temporary fix on the course servers making it less stressful now for everyone to access course content and Final Exams are resuming. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Mr. Harris is out of the hospital and back to working on your submissions so please resume emailing and submitting to him. But PLEASE be patient. He tires easily and can only work a little while each day as he builds his strength back up.  So work with him patiently, and he will get you all caught up.  Thank you!

Students enrolled in the PERCOM Instructor course are given a maximum of 12 weeks from the date of payment to complete ALL course requirements.  This deadline is mentioned in your course access emails that you received to gain access to your course.  As with any course in any program, whether college or private, no one is given indefinite periods to complete a course.  You MUST complete your course within the designated time frame. Jane MAY allow ONE extension if you submit an emailed request to her with a good reason for the request at programdirector@percomonline.com BEFORE your original deadline and ask for a specific date by which you WILL be done.  No further extensions will be granted.  If you exceed your course deadline without doing this, you may be dropped possibly without notice and would be forced to place a reinstatement fee if you wish to return within 6 months of your drop.  Thank you.

Even though the Cheating/Plagiarism policy is clearly posted in the Student Handbook your received upon enrollment in your Welcome Packet email, we want to reinforce to ALL students that plagiarism IS CHEATING and will NOT BE ALLOWED OR TOLERATED. According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, to plagiarize is "to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source: to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source." Your homework assignments and research exam answers MUST be your own work and in your own words when written in an assignment. It is ok to quote something OCCASIONALLY but only if it is referenced or credited to the proper source, and a series of copy and paste statements to answer a question will also not be accepted even if they are credited properly. Effective immediately, if an instructor is able to verify or prove within a reasonable doubt that a student didn't do his/her own work and/or plagiarized from another (whether a literary source or a fellow student), he/she will be dropped from the program for cheating and a report filed with the Texas Department of State Health Services as per the policy in the Student Handbook.

We are very sorry we have to post this and realize that MOST students in our program are professionals who do their own work because they want to become solid, honest and responsible EMS professionals and because it is morally and ethically the right thing to do your own work. But apparently not everyone thinks that way so this post has become necessary as a reminder. Thank you to all of you out there in our program who work so hard to achieve even though being in an online course requires so much more of you than sitting in a classroom and being spoonfed by the instructor. YOU will be the ones out there who will be the most competent and solid professionals caring for our public.

Members of the PERCOM staff and faculty will be participating in the Texas EMS Conference in Austin, Texas from Friday, November 9th through Tuesday, November 13th. The office will also be closed for the most part during this time. Also, the office staff and faculty will be unavailable from Wednesday, November 21st until Monday, November 26th for Thanksgiving. PERCOM will also be closed from Wednesday, December 19th until Wednesday, January 2nd for the Christmas break. If you have rotations to complete during that period, you need to get those scheduled ahead of time and continue to submit your paperwork and FISDAP entries normally during that period but the Clinical Coordinator will not be grading until after the break in the order items are received. If you have proctored exams still to do, you need to plan accordingly because there will be NO proctored exams given during the Christmas break.

We are having trouble with students who either aren't meeting their mandatory participation requirements or they are submitting things to their instructor or participating in chat rooms but there is no way for administration to track that the students are participating because they are not logging into their courses. Effective immediately, roll call will be managed each week by a mandatory log into the course. If you are not planning on doing any work in the course that week or you have downloaded material to work on that doesn't require that you log in, do it anyway. Just log in and log out, and it will make an entry in the tracker portion of the program to indicate the date and time you logged in and out. This is JUST LIKE SHOWING UP FOR CLASS. If we are doing a roster date or deadline check and note that you have not logged in in over a week, you will receive one warning for missing class. If you do not reply by the stated deadline OR you continue to "miss class", you may be dropped from the program without further notice. This is just like sitting in class at a college, folks. If you miss classes, you are dropped. The difference is that YOU choose when to show up for your PERCOM class each week, and that is ok. Please understand this is a MANDATORY issue.

Also, each of you received a course access email that states how long you have from that date to complete the course. You need to figure out from that email what your deadline is and if you are getting close to that deadline and cannot complete due to personal problems or issues, you may be allowed one extension as long as you are in good standing in the course (have been making progress toward completion and meeting the mandatory participation requirements). You must email Jane at programdirector@percomonline.com to request an extension ONE TIME but you will need to state a specific "reasonable" date by which you WILL be done with the course and you will be held to that date. Thank you.

Here is a wonderful link that should help you all grasp the basics of what constitutes Learning Domains.  It would benefit you all greatly to review this material as a supplement to what you are learning in the course and will help you understand how to write good lesson plans and knowledge objectives.

http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html

In an attempt to speed up the process of getting actual course completion certificates to individual students, we are piloting a change where we will start emailing the scanned course completion certificates, letters and attached informational docuements to students rather then mailing them. The scanned CCC will contain the signature and can be printed off on your end. This will allow us to get them to you a few days sooner and have less chance of them being lost between us and students, which seems to be happening more frequently since the last round of changes with the U.S. Postal Service. Any student who HAS to have an original from our office can request it when our secretary emails you the scanned documents.

In an attempt to speed up the process of getting actual course completion certificates to individual students, we are piloting a change where we will start emailing the scanned course completion certificates, letters and attached informational docuements to students rather then mailing them.  The scanned CCC will contain the signature and can be printed off on your end.  This will allow us to get them to you a few days sooner and have less chance of them being lost between us and students, which seems to be happening more frequently since the last round of changes with the U.S. Postal Service.  Any student who HAS to have an original from our office can request it when our secretary emails you the scanned documents. 

You should mail the DVD/CD of your final work projects, final exam, etc to your instructor at the following address:

Kenneth Harris

159 Cresthill Circle

Valley Mills Texas 76689

Please do NOT mail them to the PERCOM office as mentioned inside your course and do NOT send them fedex.  We do recommend priority mail or some method with tracking but preferably NOT return signature, as sometimes no one is present at that address to sign.  Thank you.

Please welcome Mr. Kenneth Harris as your new EMS Instructor course Lead Instructor.  PERCOM has been BOOMING lately, so the duties of the Program Director, Mrs. Dinsmore, have expanded greatly.  This has unfortunately created delays in answering and grading emails from the Instructor students.  So we have hired a new seasoned educator to fill this role so that you, as students, can receive more timely service.  It will not change our normal grading and response policy as posted in the "Welcome Page" inside your course.  However, it should help avoid any unnecessary delays and may help speed things up for you.

Mr. Harris has been an educator and EMS Coordinator for many years.  He just retired from Navarro College as their EMS Program Director.  He is very knowledgeable and interesting as well as a fine educator. I think you will all enjoy him.  Please send him an email to welcome him to the program.  His email address is kennethharris@percomonline.com.  Be sure to get the correct address from him to mail your course completion packets directly to him.

All outstanding emails and homework assignments have been forwarded on to his mailbox but please give him a few days to plow through it and catch it all up for any of you who have been waiting a few extra days.  Thank you all for your patience.

There seems to be some confusion about chat rooms.  As is stated below in a separate announcements welcoming you to observe them, chat rooms are typically held on Tuesdays at 6:30 p.m. or 7:30 p.m. CST/DST.  There is a current glitch inside the calendar program on the course website that IT is attempting to correct.  In the meantime, PERCOM staff is unable to add or edit anything on that site including testing items placed there by IT, which is where those strange chat room times came from.  So watch HERE for changes to the schedule, not there.  From now on, Chat Rooms will NOT be posted on that calendar.  Watch this page for changes to the schedule.

To clarify, these two projects are SEPARATE projects.  The Skills Project is in two parts - developing your own skills criteria and checksheet that is not a predeveloped one already in existence and then video'ing yourself, teaching, testing and critiquing that skill on a mock student.  The Final CE Project is the 1 hour CE presentation just like you were really teaching a CE class.  It requires development of a syllabus, knowledge objectives, lesson plan, handouts (if needed), presentation (powerpoint preferred), quiz, key, and your own version of a course evaluation for for your student(s) to use to evaluate you as well as a 50 minute lecture presentation that must be video'd and an essay of 750-1000 words critiquing your own performance after YOU watch your video. 

You can send the skills criteria and checksheet to me in advance by email attachment or fax.  All other items including both skills and CE video and all the development and delivery items mentioned above should be saved in electronic format (pdf or Word, for example) on a CD or DVD and mailed to the instructor all at one time.  Please do not email them individually and electronic copy is preferred on the disk because otherwise we have to scan each individual page up for your student e-file.  So please send them all on the disk together.

On the two final video projects outlines in the Course Schedule posted inside your course, please send those on a DVD.  This method is the most univeral now in the current age of computers and the easiest for your instructor to be able to view even when traveling. This might require that you convert your videos to a DVD delivery format.  Thank you.