Inspire Blog Category: Course Design/Learning Design

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

Sign on the Virtual Line: Group Contracts as a Tool to Promote Accountability

If you’d like to adopt group work in your online course, but want to ensure accountability among your students, consider asking your students to create a group contract to guide their work. Beginning online group work with a mutually agreed upon contract creates a blueprint for the project, and it facilitates the process of students establishing norms and expectations within their group. These norms help to remove the instructor as the sole authority figure, and instead give the team the power to hold one another accountable, according to the guidelines they agree upon, rather than just personal opinions or perceptions. One way to help your students begin to think about what to include in their group contract is to initiate … Sign on the Virtual Line: Group Contracts as a Tool to Promote Accountability
by · November 15, 2016

Open Pedagogy and Students as Content Producers

Just came back from Open Oregon State‘s Open Education Day and can’t wait to share with you all what I have learned from the meeting: open pedagogy. The keynote speaker for Open Education Day, Rajiv Jhangiani from the University of British Columbia (@ThatPsycProf), introduced open pedagogy as an instructional strategy to promote reusable assignments and turn students from consumers of content to creators of content. Examples: a book produced by instructor and students from Brigham Young University (2012);  a wiki resources of web 2.0 tools created by students from College of Education at Purdue University (2012); a book produced by instructor and students from the Master of Science in Education: Information Technology program at Western Oregon University (2013): Examples of open … Open Pedagogy and Students as Content Producers
by · October 14, 2016

Peer Review: Why and How

Why Peer Review? According to a study by Leadership IQ, 26% of new hires fail because they can’t accept feedback (Murphy, 2015). Most students are trained to study for grades and have seldom been given enough training on how to receive feedback and how to make feedback work for them. By the time they enter workforce, they will have a hard time facing feedback from coworkers and supervisors. As instructional designers and instructors, we can help by training students in peer review skills. In doing so, we are preparing our students to be successful in their future career on the one hand; on the other hand, instructors will spend less time grading peer reviewed submissions because of the improved quality … Peer Review: Why and How
by · November 17, 2015

Working with Texts in Online Courses

TEXT(S) There’s been some discussion recently about students and lectures and attention spans.* As conversation about this turned to how students grapple with long form texts in an online course, I thought it might be useful to gather some ideas on course design and working with texts in online courses. Structure your course around the texts not the weeks Some instructors structure their reading intensive course around the books that are read. A module per book with multiple discussion boards and prompts per book. This subtly shifts the focus from what am I doing this week to what is this book doing. For example, in ENG 210 Literatures of the World: Asia, Jeff Fearnside structured the course around the five … Working with Texts in Online Courses
by · October 23, 2015