Inspire Blog Tag: course design

12 Ways Instructional Designers Can Be Inclusive of Low-Income and First-Generation Students

The following is a guest blog post from Michelle Coxey. Michelle completed an Instructional Design internship with OSU Ecampus during the Fall of 2022. Ian Wilkins is a high school language arts teacher, but besides the students, his passion is social justice. He shares a powerful metaphor that education is like a heavily gated castle. Those inside the castle are comfortable and safe and do not realize that the people outside are hungry (Chardin & Novak, 2021). If someone opens the gate and admits a person from the outside, would that person feel comfortable and safe inside like everyone already there? Would they know the rules of the castle? Would they feel like they fit in and deserved to be … <strong>12 Ways Instructional Designers Can Be Inclusive of Low-Income and First-Generation Students</strong>
by · December 19, 2022

Regular & Substantive Interaction in Your Online Course

If you design or teach online courses, and the term Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI) is unfamiliar to you, not to worry. It’s likely that you’ve already implemented some degree of RSI in your online courses. RSI is the US Department of Education (DoE) requirement for institutions receiving federal funds to “ensure that there is regular and substantive interaction between students and instructors” in their online courses. It was intended as a quality assurance and consumer protection measure, but it is also a key component of high-quality online learning. Simply put, student-teacher interactions must be consistent and meaningful throughout the delivery of an online course. There is a mountain of research supporting this idea by now, and we have long … Regular & Substantive Interaction in Your Online Course
by · November 7, 2022

Writing Good Documentation for Online Courses or: How I became a Documentarian

In my last post, I wrote about how designing an ‘open course‘ empowers others to make desired edits more easily. One major component of an open course is providing adequate and accurate documentation for your intended audience. If you were handed a course to teach or redesign, what aspects about the course would you like to know? Probably as much as possible, which would require a strong set of documentation detailing design processes and decisions, learning outcomes, tutorials for using novel course elements, and so on. If you care about having a solid set of documentation for your courses, then you may be a ‘Documentarian‘. In this post, I look into some components of good documentation design from the software … Writing Good Documentation for Online Courses or: How I became a Documentarian
by · September 20, 2022

Beginning to Define Presence in Online Courses

Introduction When I hear the word presence, I’m reminded of a teacher taking attendance at the beginning of class. I picture the teacher calling out each student’s name, the students responding either “here!” or “present!” in turn. In this scenario, though, while the students each affirm their presence, the teacher’s presence is a given. The teacher doesn’t mark herself present in the attendance record. The teacher doesn’t need to prove they taught class or prove they exist to students. As one might suspect, this is an area where online asynchronous courses differ from traditional classrooms: one’s presence is not a given. Presence becomes even more important in online settings. Perhaps that’s why we hear so much about it. Online presence. … Beginning to Define Presence in Online Courses
by · September 19, 2022

Two-Step Problem Solving

Are you searching for a way to increase student-to-student interaction in your teaching? Would you thrill at the idea of more creative online discussions? This post describes a well-tested approach that supports strong inter-student interaction and avoids the typically mundane discussion activity. Best of all, this approach works effectively in multiple STEM disciplines, including mathematics, engineering, coding, and other problem-solving orientated subjects. Creative Discussions Since I always look for ways to make online discussions more engaging and meaningful for students, I like to share instructors’ creative and fun approaches. Several years ago, I wrote a blog post explaining how a math instructor engaged students, asking them to find examples of parabolas they were studying that week in their local environment … Two-Step Problem Solving
by · August 29, 2022