Inspire Blog Category: Tips & Tricks

Assignment Tool Kit: Student ePortfolios

If you’re searching for an engaging, authentic, and personalized way to assess your students’ learning, consider developing an ePortfolio assignment for your online course. The benefit of ePortfolios, or digital collections of student learning artifacts, is twofold: you can formatively assess your students’ learning over time, and you can help your students craft a personalized, customizable end product that serves as both a networking tool and a professional presentation of their skills and abilities to showcase to future employers in a more humanized way than a standard resume. There are multiple approaches to structuring an ePortfolio assignment. One method is to ask your students to gradually add to their ePortfolios each week. This allows you to assess your students’ work over … Assignment Tool Kit: Student ePortfolios
by · December 30, 2015

Test Drive This CAR

Looking for a simple way to evaluate whether your teaching practice is staying on track or jumping the rails? Mark Francek, a Central Michigan Univ. geography professor, has devised a simple mnemonic to look at his teaching: CAR. Try it out; see if it works for you! There are three elements: 1 – Community: Building community within your class can pay dividends in terms of learner engagement, positive collaboration, and a supportive environment in which to work toward shared learning goals. Francek says, “promoting camaraderie and mutual respect in the classroom should be a teaching priority,” and that it’s incumbent on instructors to foster community. He also encourages instructors to consider how student learning can be applied to the broader community … Test Drive This CAR
by · December 16, 2015

Reflecting on Learning

“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.” ― John Dewey Reflection can be a powerful addition to any module or course both for instructors and for students. Instructors can inform themselves about student learning and whether their teaching is effective. Students can deepen their learning through reflection.   Reflecting both on knowledge gained as well as areas of confusion can be valuable. What types of reflective activities are of use in an online course?   Two of the simplest activities to incorporate in a course are the Muddiest Point activity or the One Minute Paper activity.   Both are short activities in which students answer questions after a brief reflection on their learning. Muddiest Point: What concept was … Reflecting on Learning
by · August 14, 2015

Modular Course Design at OSU Ecampus

Why Modular Course Design The Course Development & Training team at Oregon State University Ecampus promotes modular course design in our online courses. Laura Crowder (2011) defines modular content as “a collection of learning resources developed as a single learning object”. The major benefits of modular course design include: Saving time in the development and updating of course content Modular components are easily repurposed across courses Student learning is improved since the content is presented in smaller chunks Modular Course Design in Online Education Modular course design has been highly recommended by various pioneers in online education. Stephen Downes (Downes, 1998) stated in “The Future of Online Learning” that, “…Online courses will be modular. A course – especially from the … Modular Course Design at OSU Ecampus
by · August 7, 2015

Canvas Resources and Guides

With the migration to Canvas comes many new features and methods for facilitating your course. The Canvas Guides provide a lot of information, but you may be wondering, where do I even start? Here at Ecampus, we’ve put together a few guides to help you become familiar with some of the tools in Canvas. First, if you’re wondering, “I did this in Blackboard, but I can’t find it in Canvas; how do I…?”, we’ve created a few design options for that. These design options explore how to adapt features that you’ve used in Blackboard to the new Canvas environment. Design Options – Adaptive Release Design Options – Blogs Design Options – Discussion Boards Design Options – Folders and Items Design Options … Canvas Resources and Guides
by · February 10, 2015