We are pleased to announce the program for OLC Accelerate 2016!

Is your institution on the brink of using learning analytics to inform data-driven decisions?  Or are you on the fence about the potential of analytics?  Come hear the story of one institution’s journey through analytics implementation, which will include lessons learned and helpful tips.  Participants will leave with ideas they can incorporate in their own analytics projects

This presentation discusses 'best practice' methods of cascading communication used between administration and remote faculty at one online University.  Findings will be presented on remote faculty preferred communication modes and methods.  The presentation will include an examination of past techniques used, changes made, and the perceived effectiveness of these changes.

This panel from the University of Cincinnati will discuss how we designed a Targeted Open Online Course (TOOC) as a feeder into our Respiratory Therapy program, and how this course takes the concept of a MOOC in a different direction than what is typically thought of by the term. 

Find out what experienced online faculty identify as the top online course design, facilitation, and teaching strategies to improve the student experience, manage your online teaching expectations, and also stay sane in the online teaching world.  

This session describes the design and implementation of a new competency-based, online teaching certificate program for graduate students. Presenters discuss how they scaled up their online training program to accommodate 350 students, the components of the new program, challenges and strategies for problem-solving, and analysis of program evaluation data.

What does the faculty know about learning? According to reformers, very little. Lessons from the learning sciences have been slow to penetrate teaching.  Thus, new initiatives hope to make “learning engineers” central to online course development.  Can the idea meet the challenge of maintaining important features of faculty work?  

Title: M4P - Mobile Methodology for Modeling Mobile Pedagogy

This presentation focuses on the effects of an experimental tiered-model approach to teacher education implemented by an educational technology instructor in partnership with an instructional designer. Learning goals include: triggering motivation, coaching self-help skills for implementing mobile learning, collaborating to nurture Heutagogy learning culture, and modeling instructional techniques.

In fall 2015, Tallahassee Community College’s math department shifted all sections of two high-enrollment math courses to open educational resources (OER). Learn how TCC saved students $535,000, granted day one access to all students, and turned a corner on students’ ability to succeed, all in a single year.

Research on learning technology efficacy lags far behind the explosive growth of available products.  Rapid cycle technology evaluation is an emerging approach to generating timely evidence on the effectiveness of learning technologies for specific contexts and learners. Presenters will describe this approach and discuss possible applications in postsecondary education.

While service learning has been included in many traditional learning environments, community-based applied learning poses new challenges in online environments. Research about service learning and strategies for integrating service learning activities in online courses will be discussed, including survey data regarding student attitudes about online service learning.

Learn firsthand from faculty and graduates how the OLC Online Teaching Certificate Programs can help you develop your skills and knowledge and stay current as online and digital education trends evolve.

Quality Matters (QM) Standards are adopted, simplified, and utilized as a design, development, and evaluation tool to guide the faculty on how to personalize, modify the course design appropriately based on faculty roles - Facilitator, Adopter, and Developer.

At Sacred Heart University, an audio podcast focused on the 2016 election has begun to have a global impact – with 1000+ plays and listeners from 26 countries. Using this as a case study, this session will focus on the conceptual framework for building a virtual teaching and learning commons.

As more flexible options for higher education emerge, many military spouses eagerly tap into resources allowing them to pursue their college degree.  It is essential that faculty understand the challenges military spouses face and how they can best support their students’ goals of achieving academic, professional, and personal success.

This is a growing industry of postsecondary education providers who exist outside of traditional institutions and the current accreditation structures. Some are providing educational offerings that equal or surpass college courses and do so at a fraction of the price to students. Recently, the Department of Education created an “experimental” program to allow partnerships between alternative providers and traditional colleges so that their students would gain access to financial aid. Join our session to learn how this growth presents opportunities and pitfalls to traditional colleges.

Do students who use online tutoring and other online support services have higher retention rates than those who don’t? The presenters, with extensive experience in online learning, will address this question and common myths about online student services from the perspective of both a 2-year and a 4-year institution.

Are you looking for a straight-forward and successful method to help faculty flip their instruction? Join us as we showcase our process for streamlining faculty’s flipped course redesign! Please bring your own device to utilize real-time collaboration software in this highly engaging session.

Online course offerings are on the rise at most higher education institutions. One of the challenges universities face is providing high quality support services to those faculty who teach online. This session will introduce several online faculty development initiatives and discuss effective strategies for implementation at your institution.

Accelerate to Success with the OLC Scorecard: See how one institution used the OLC Scorecard to drive quality improvements. Baker Online utilized the expertise of the OLC reviewers to avoid speeding and pay attention to critical road signs, ultimately learning that quality is not a destination but an ongoing journey. 

Would you build a building without a blueprint? Then why would you develop an online class without a Storyboard? This presentation provides an overview of NYU’s course development and course revision process and detail how the “Storyboard” is a pillar in our methodology and should be in yours as well!

This session received high reviewer ratings and is runner up for Best-in-Strand.

Today's employers are seeking graduates with skills such as problem solving and collaboration. This session will explore how to build those skills in any discipline using creative problem solving framework with Web 2.0 tools.

Innovation at its core means designing and doing things differently.  This presentation will focus on the 4-year growth, evolving changes, and lessons learned of the NAU Personalized Learning Competency-Based Program, including observations as the PL programs move into the next stage of development.  This session is presented by two NAU faculty from the PL CBE at NAU who will present an overview of the highlights, changes, and most current challenges of their innovative competency-based program. 

The primary goal of the session is to give participants an opportunity to discuss how competency-based programs are serving to the student learner, adapting to local and state governance, integrating financial aid, curriculum changes, and creating a new faculty structure.

The Student Online Learning Readiness (SOLR) instrument developed and validated in this study could provide a guide on how to measure student competencies in online learning and what components should be included in their orientations or supports to enhance their student competencies in online learning.

#HigherEdScope is a co-hosted Periscope serial about online education that stretches the boundaries of the platform while also introducing online educators and administrators to pedagogy, tools, and strategies.  The co-hosts explore, experiment and share failures and successes.  Session participants should come, ready to participate, with mobile device in hand!

Do you find that facilitating discussions, grading assignments, and providing detailed feedback to your students have you drowning in your course? Are you hesitant to step into the murky online water for fear of sharks? If so, we will share LIFESAVERS for working smarter, not harder, in distance education courses.

How do we know our online students have the necessary interpersonal communication skills to be effective professionals? Can we develop activities to assess these skills in the online classroom using web-conferencing tools? This session will answer these questions, as well as allow attendees to make applications in their own discipline.

Successful distance education and doctoral mentoring in the 21st century requires that adult educators use technologies and autonomous learning strategies. The psychological and communication spaces in an online environment are never the same between any two adult/doctoral learners. This transaction distance is what deeply impacts learning and teaching.

Despite academia’s fear of dishonesty in the online environment, learn how the University of Tennessee, Knoxville is supporting cost effective, secure online testing without a proctored testing center or a third party vendor.

How do individual programs align with larger university goals?  This panel will outline how an online leadership program achieved such alignment in the face of impending accreditation.  Specifically, the panel will discuss how individual course assessments provide insight as to how the program is helping the university meet institutional-level goals.

University of Maryland, Baltimore County developed two online, self-paced internal MOOCs for undergraduate students focusing on core academic and life skills. Both tutorials are intended to support students to make effective choices about ethical scholarship and financial decisions. This presentation will review the background, design and development, usage, and next steps.

While the number of students taking online/blended courses continues to increase, strategies to engage students in learning have been slow to emerge. Discover how to use Kolb’s (1984) Experiential Learning Cycle to engage students in online/blended learning. Take home a 4-step student engagement strategy to implement on your campus tomorrow. 

In 2015 Clemson University and American International Group (AIG) established a multi-million-dollar partnership to advance research and provide graduate-level education for working professionals. This session will explore a model for creating such partnerships. Strategies for sustaining those partnerships will be shared based on research and presenter’s experience. 

Project-based learning (PBL) models like the one created by the Buck Institute are difficult to translate to the online environment. Two online educators co-designed several project-based online learning (PBOL) experiences for one online school that serves 4th through 12th grade. This design and development research study has resulted in a prescriptive model of instructional design for PBOL. 

Are you interested in creating innovative and collaborative projects that utilize music and technology? Do you enjoy dancing?  During this presentation faculty discuss the shared development process, utilized technologies, discipline-specific project requirements, assessment criteria, and video results of a robot dance.

This session received high reviewer ratings and is runner up for Best-in-Strand.

Are you ready to move forward on the road to meeting all students’ needs?  Learn how you can use the principles of “Universal Design for Learning” (providing all individuals an equal opportunity to learn) to make your online course welcoming and usable for all of your students.

This session will provide a case study of faculty development and diffusion of effective methods for using technology to support learning in hybrid courses. Strengths of faculty learning communities offered in a hybrid format will be illustrated. Participants will come away equipped to start faculty learning communities at their institutions.   

In a first-semester undergraduate blended nursing health assessment course, smartphone/tablet apps were introduced.  These open-educational resource apps allowed the students to perform health risk stratification assessment.   The apps were then used as part of regularly scheduled community screenings. Evidence-based literature was used when counseling patients regarding individual results.

How can instructional designers help faculty create online discussions that prompt students to have meaningful dialogue? What components make a question "good" enough to spark meaningful dialogue that will engage students?

In this session, you will learn best practices for developing asynchronous online discussions and see examples of discussion styles that have sparked meaningful dialogue in Penn State World Campus courses. 

Innovative approaches to improving math college readiness are flourishing. Many emerging approaches rely on learning technologies to address individual student needs in place of traditional lock-step developmental courses.  Panelists will share recent research on the effectiveness of technology-enhanced models and one college’s experience implementing EdReady and accelerated, mastery-based developmental modules.

Using edTPA data, this presentation provides data informed evidence of the equivalency of online teacher candidates’ performance as compared to candidates completing the same face-to-face degree.  Modes of program delivery offer deferring outcomes suggesting the existence of underlying program structure inequities associated with epistemological conflicts.

Critique is an essential practice in creative disciplines, an active learning approach that develops critical thinking, analytical skills, and communication skills in students.  In this session, we share how our open source Open Studio tool enables faculty to approximate art and design studio practice in online learning environments.

In today’s higher education climate, the path to degree attainment includes a myriad of credit alternatives including MOOCs, micro credentialing (badges), non-credit bearing certificate programs and various other opportunities.  As these alternatives evolve from their experiential learning predecessors, institutions are faced with the opportunity to treat them as credit-bearing learning experiences.  Options include prior learning evaluation such as CAEL’s Learning Counts, institution-specific credit evaluation services and credit recommendation services such as ACE’s College Credit Recommendation Service, as well as micro-credentialing such as MOOCs and badges.  However, while these alternatives expand learning opportunities for students, little is known about how institutions accept and document these opportunities, as well as whether these credits can be applied to the students’ degree programs.  Join this session to learn about the results of a research study that included six case studies of institutions that have been accepting various forms of experiential learning opportunities, or alternative credits for decades. This study, conducted by the OLC Center for Research in Digital Learning and Leadership, was commissioned by DEAC, Presidents' Forum, and USA Funds.

We will present and discuss designing an online group presentation with a faculty developer through the lens of continuous improvement. We will identify the design challenge and solution, and successes and lessons learned. This session is intended to elicit audience feedback and participation through sharing their own personal design challenges and solutions. 

What can LMS data tell us about student behaviors and course design?  With access to the full Canvas database, Utah State University faculty and instructional designers set out to answer that question.  This session will present results of that quest, and initial insights into the LMS data. 

The competency-based education movement operates with the philosophy that teachers and faculty should have the time and tools they need to do what they do best – teach. This presentation will focus on how CBE programs enables teachers to create more meaningful teaching moments, and ultimately, student success.

**This session received high reviewer ratings and is runner up for Best-in-Strand.**

We will share how we used feedback from faculty surveys to drive the development, launch and revision of professional development and support services for faculty with an emphasis on meeting the needs of adjunct and online instructors.

Recognizing the power of open educational resources, the Affordable Learning Georgia Initiative has provided Textbook Transformation Grants to University System of Georgia faculty. This presentation shares the first round of research on student success and satisfaction regarding an open technical communication textbook resulting from an Textbook Transformation Grant. 

This session received high reviewer ratings and is runner up for Best-in-Strand.

A knowledge management-based instructional design framework guided the creation of a blended learning “teaching strategies” course for adjunct faculty. KM is used to identify, share, and validate knowledge to improve individual and organizational performance. Our session focuses on how this framework can be used to design similar blended learning experiences.

Military students offer unique challenges for online science courses. This session will discuss examples of hands-on laboratory investigations and assessments that enable students who require asynchronous learning to still experience an authentic, data-driven, science learning experience. Though chemical in nature, these examples can be applied across scientific disciplines.

In this session we will present the Open SUNY Center for Online Teaching Excellence (COTE) use of badges to support a complex ecosystem comprised of constellations of badges supporting membership and engagement in our community of practice, and online competency development and a culture of continuous improvements in online course design and teaching practices. 

In this presentation, participants will be introduced to online instructional activities that enhance learner motivation and social interaction and that can be inserted into any online course. The research and theories that are the basis of these instructional activities will be also discussed. In addition, empirical data from courses with and without these instructional activities will be presented.

Find out how we changed our classroom status from ordinary to superhero status using best practices to increase emotional presence and community online. Solve crimes committed in the classroom using tools learned to increase student retention and academic success. Join us to find your true online superhero.

Open College at Kaplan University (OC@KU) is a division of the university that is organized around helping non-traditional students access the resources they need to enhance their lives and careers through education. The college’s unique approach is straightforward: Learners create their own pathways to reaching their goals, using a variety of educational resources from inside and outside Kaplan University. 

This presentation provides an overview of OC@KU, information on open courses at KU, the Bachelor of Science Degree in Professional Studies, Professional Competency Tutorials, and Documenting Experiences for College Credit.

A faculty partnership program creating online/blended courses with an integration of emerging technologies, improvement of the student experience, and increase in student engagement will be introduced. A framework of faculty recruitment, project selection, and individual course project design along with example course projects and initial results will be explored.

Providing an innovative way to connect abstract ideas with real world examples can make learning more successful. Watch how students used Aurasma, an augmented reality program, to activate interactive videos by scanning images in their textbooks (or instructional materials) with mobile devices to explore difficult concepts further.

Here we present our Virtual Teams Toolbox. To create our toolbox, we researched and collected/developed material and software tools to
support virtual student teams. The goals are to educate students on best practices for successful virtual teams and to provide a set of tools to support their experiential, team-based projects.

A discussion addressing challenges in the areas of resistance to online education across disciplines within a university. The discussion between the audience and presenters will recognize strategies around overcoming such resistance.

A study of 25 strategic plans from colleges and universities across the United States reveals that strategic planning is a poor model for online educational programs. Planning strategically represents an alternative approach for leaders, managers and implementers of online programs.  Three approaches to planning strategically will be described.

As part of a larger first year student initiative, Walden University piloted the use of “Welcome Kits” using a treatment-control design. Kits were designed to build excitement, foster a sense of community, and provide information in order to increase persistence. Results showed statistically greater retention among students receiving Welcome Kits.

Learn how UCF is utilizing various technologies to efficiently scale online course accommodations for students with disabilities.

Participants learn how an online master’s program in instructional design and technology was developed for accelerated competency-based and course-based options by leveraging a project-based approach that ensures learners demonstrate mastery of IDT competencies by producing artifacts representative of the range of authentic performances expected of 21st century IDT professionals.