Inspire Blog Author: shitia

Kudos To OSU Ecampus’ Amazing Online Instructors: My Takeaways from 2018 Faculty Forum

2018 Ecampus Faculty Forum concluded a month ago. However, I am still fascinated by the dedicated quality work our selected online instructors have showcased that day. You can access recorded sessions and view SlideDecks here. Horticulture instructor Betsey Miller cares deeply about how to provide quality instructor feedback to students who truly want instructor feedback in peer review assignment , trying several rounds of three different ways of keeping students engaged and providing quality feedback comments in discussion forum grading rubrics google form contest with students voting system College of Business instructor John Morris uses a variety of strategies to prepare students in a career in business: teach students to use word cloud automation of words used in resume to … Kudos To OSU Ecampus’ Amazing Online Instructors: My Takeaways from 2018 Faculty Forum
by · June 8, 2018

Universal Design for Learning in Online Courses

UDL

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a practical tool for guiding course design to ensure that every learner succeeds, based on scientific insights into how humans learn (cast.org). As seen from the illustration below, there are three main principles of UDL, namely: multiple means of representations, multiple means of engagement, and multiple means of expressions (image by Tianhong Shi, CC0) There are many applications of UDL design principles in OSU Spring 2018 online courses. A. Multiple Means of Representations as seen in BA 354 S18’s weekly content planning. reading in text (Chapter 1 of Trevino and Nelson, Managing Business Ethics) listening to podcast (Ponzi Supernova podcast audio from Radio-lab watching instructor lectures in video (Course Introduction) Watching complicated assignment explained … Universal Design for Learning in Online Courses
by · April 16, 2018

Ready-to-Use Online Teaching Tips

Beauty is everywhere and in every moment, if we pay attention. I saw this beautiful sunrise driving by Eureka, Nevada on Highway 50, the loneliest road in America, during the tail of my one-week road trip vacation. Similarly, good teaching practices are flourishing in OSU online courses as we discover from our talks with Ecampus instructors. To inspire you to expand your teaching toolkit, here are some ready to use online teaching tips from the book “Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning” by James Lang.  Teaching Strategies Online Teaching Tips Retrieving Syllabus Quiz Weekly reading journals Frequent quizzing such as quizlet practices or weekly quizzes predicting Pretesting with immediate grading and immediate feedback including exposure of content teaching; Role play: how might … Ready-to-Use Online Teaching Tips
by · February 2, 2018

Humanizing Online Learning

Why should I care about humanizing online learning? First of all, the United States Department of Education requires regular and substantive interaction between students and faculty in distance learning courses (Policy from DOE & interpreting the Policy from DOE). Secondly, it is well documented that instructor-student interactions and quality and timely instructor feedback in online learning are prominent faculty behaviors that impact student retention and student satisfaction of online learning (Riedel, Dinauer, Jobe, Lenio, And Walsh, 2016; Bawa, 2016; Shaw, Burrus, Ferguson, 2016; Boling, Hough, Krinsly, Saleem and Stevens, 2012; Liaw, 2008). How do we humanize online learning? Think of the task for humanizing your students’ online learning experience as building a house. And there are three major pillars to … Humanizing Online Learning
by · January 9, 2018

Course Design Ideas from Canvas Analytics

Do you ever wonder where your students go once they log into an online course? John Whitmer (Blackboard analytics, blog link) and Kevin Reeve (instructor and director of Teaching and Learning Technologies at Utah State University, Canvas Analytics video link) did some hard work to seek answers to this question. Kevin presented his team’s preliminary results at Online Learning Consortium conference in Nov. 2016. Some of the findings were obvious, some not so. My question is: what can we do with this information? How can we use this learning analytics to guide our course design practices as online instructors and online instructional designers? Here is a summary of Kevin’s report and my ideas of course design based on learning analytics … Course Design Ideas from Canvas Analytics
by · December 5, 2016