We are pleased to announce the program for OLC Accelerate 2017!

Innovation in higher education is often hindered by adherence to traditional roles and teaching practices. At The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice we are working to change that culture. Our team-based approach while challenging, is slowly changing the way we support students in their quest to change healthcare.

The pervasiveness of technology through all course modalities is increasing, exposing all students to technology whether they intended it or not. Therefore, focusing solely on preparing online students for online learning is no longer sufficient. This session shares a cross-departmental initiative to develop and implement an online learner readiness module to all first-year students, the lessons learned, and the resulting changes for student success.

Teaching and Learning Centers must remain learner-centered in their approach to supporting varied faculty needs and interest.  This session will compare and contrast an array of approaches to faculty development including online/hybrid programs, online course development opportunities, faculty learning communities, onboarding for new faculty, and support for inclusive teaching excellence. 

The call for leadership in the innovation age is a critical element in moving the needle to provide solutions around access, technology, and student success. This presentation will examine the leadership acumen needed in implementing innovative solutions and initiatives to impact student success and institutional change.

This workshop shares best practices and tools for developing an online readiness assessment tool.  Facilitators from the University of Memphis will share strategies for curating resources and will discuss assessments that may be used to determine how to best prepare students to learn online. Participants will take the role of instructional designer to analyze and develop an assessment module.   

Learning cycle and inquiry-based learning are important components of STEM education, but many topics are challenging to design engaging lessons and units around with physical materials.  Virtual tools can be used to promote inquiry, but educators must be strategic when planning to build student curiosity and ingenuity into activities.

Do you have lots of courses and lots of faculty teaching them? How do you know if each student is learning the same thing? Share our journey in developing a plan for assessment, evaluation and documentation of student learning at the course, program, and accreditation levels.

Explore implementations of student engagement through the redefined application of synchronous video. Learn how a framework for faculty adoption, training, and assessment was implemented. Delve into the best practices, how to create a movement beyond basic interactions of chat discussions/voice, and how to integrate gaming techniques/applications during sessions.

Is it possible to improve an online course in a minute? Find out during this session as the presenter addresses the basics of implementing classroom assessment techniques in online environments and how you can use classroom assessments to improve your teaching and students' learning experiences. 

If a computer scientist, a musician, and a graphic designer can collaborate to create an innovative system for teaching/learning Carolingian chant online, what can collaboration do for you?  Come and see what we have done, what true collaboration required, and brainstorm how collaboration can take your work to new levels.

Online faculty members, designers, and administrators have little guidance for using copyrighted materials for teaching. This interactive crash-course session from the author of The Copyright Ninja offers use-them-tomorrow lessons to keep everyone on the “good side” of copyright law.

For professional learning to be meaningful and relevant, it must constantly be reshaped to meet the needs of every teacher. Planning, organizing, and facilitating professional learning days that meet the needs of every teacher can be accomplished by utilizing C.H.O.I.C.E. and offering blended learning opportunities to teachers.

Do you want to improve retention by actively engaging your students?  Discover a personalized and targeted approach to student engagement.  Learn strategies for early and continued engagement throughout the application process, orientation, first term, and beyond!  Leave with an array of ideas you can immediately implement in your institution.   

This presentation describes a study designed to provide insight into what aspects of quality assurance are most important for AACSB-accredited online MBA programs from the perspective of three groups of stakeholders- administrators, faculty and instructional designers.  Expert panelists from across the U.S. were surveyed using a three-round Delphi methodology.

Designing online courses can be overwhelming; a course that is lengthy and text-heavy, is neither beneficial nor efficient to students. Effective course design increases student engagement and motivation by reducing cognitive load.  In this session, we will discuss research-based strategies for structuring content in order to create a learner-centered environment.

This presentation will discuss the behaviors of students, expectations of faculty, and strategies that instructional designers can use to help advance Academic Integrity in our online courses. The presentation will be informed by current literature and will examine strategies, solutions and tools for best practices. This presentation will discuss the behaviors of students, expectations of faculty, and strategies that instructional designers can use to help advance Academic Integrity in our online courses. The presentation will be informed by current literature and will examine strategies, solutions and tools for best practices. 

This study investigates the decision-making inputs, processes, and practices around the acquisition of technology to facilitate teaching and learning at over 43 colleges and universities in the United States. This study was part of the EdTech Efficacy Symposium and a result of Working Group B.

Many universities and colleges support faculty in the development of robust video lectures. Short videos can replace long lectures, but how does one know if students are actually watching the videos and learning? The Learning Science Team at the W.R. Berkley Innovation Labs (NYU Stern) sought to design course videos that go beyond the dissemination of information and focus on supporting the learner from the onset. 

The presenters will discuss a process for designing videos-- illustrated by five compelling use cases rooted in learning sciences co-developed with faculty.

Current trends continue to show a swell in ownership and usage of tablets and smartphones as primary devices. This case-based educational session will explore how one provider of online learning addressed the surge of this “mobile mind shift” as more consumers (and learners!) expect a mobile-first experience.

With the growth in available resources, online faculty are left to decide which ones to include in the classroom. We will review our project on uncluttering the online classroom. We will discuss our journey from over-resourced courses to ones that provide meaningful direction and focus for the students. 

What kinds of online activities do students find most engaging? Which do they find most effective? Graduate students were asked to rate each of the online activities on effectiveness and engagement in a blended (60(in-class)-40(online)) graduate seminar on teaching in order to inform the design of future blended learning courses.

This presentation describes how widely-available technology can be used to promote online student engagement and success in a skills-based course. We present five tools and techniques that have been found to be highly effective in conveying course content and assignments, and providing assistance to students in an online learning environment.

How do you build a collaborative community for remote educators separated by space and time? What if a solution to community building was founded in technology education and application? This presentation will showcase how empowering educators to leverage technology can bring them together as a collaborative, supportive community.

In the past it was accepted that smaller online courses were better. Now, the conversation has shifted to, "How can we teach large online courses well?" Faculty at Kennesaw State University are working to create effective large enrollment online courses that are cognizant of faculty workload. 

As an instructional designer, have you been asked, “What do you do?” or “If that's all you do, what do we need you for?” This can happen when instructors are new or don’t understand the role of the instructional designer or the design process.

This presentation focuses on one of the oldest-major hurdles Instructional Designers face in designing online courses with instructors. In the consultative work we do, we come across resistance from instructors that are not interested in designing online classes for any number of reasons. To ease someone into designing an online course, a lot of creative skills come to play.

Can you teach experiential learning online? In this session, we will present how this was made possible in an online group counselling course using different technologies. We will address how to build an online learning community and a trusted environment, how to  incorporating active learning strategies using the TPACK framework.

We will explore results from the administration of the Community of Inquiry instrument in three engineering MOOCs provided by Georgia Tech. Social Presence was identified less often than either Teaching or Cognitive Presence. How can MOOCs adapt to provide this key factor in course success?

The transformative potential of the internet has been largely focused on speed and supply to a large number of participants over quality of content.  In 2014, Texas A&M University developed www.myimsservices.com to serve secondary education programs by improving connections to content standards, assessment, management tools and the ability to customize content.

Students are more engaged with content when their online courses have media elements, but many universities claim budget as a roadblock. We will demonstrate some ways that Georgetown University has effectively incorporated media and give tips and techniques to be able to include this immersive technology, regardless of budget concerns.

Learn how to leverage the ID's on your campus by understanding the problems they solve, and and the varied and unique skill sets instructional designers bring to designing high impact learning content. Help us show why we think #IDFTW (instructional design for the win!!)

Lack of faculty buy-in is the number one obstacle to effective instructional design.  This study presents the results of a national survey of institutes of higher education on the challenges faced by, and best practices used by, instructional design teams to increase faculty trust and buy-in for instructional design.

The rapid growth of online higher education and subsequent hiring of adjunct faculty can lead to teaching burnout. A recent study revealed that online instructors experience moderate levels of burnout. It is essential for institutions to implement practical ways for instructors to avoid burnout and remain engaged with their students.

The parking lot is not the only thing all faculty share! A grass-roots committee has developed a repository of tools including a manual for faculty that covers processes, resources, and important policies for online teaching. This session will discuss how people work together to get things done, for everyone.    

Are colleges preparing undergraduates with an interdisciplinary studies degree to enter the workforce?  Learn how to develop an online capstone course to equip students with skills, including resume and cover letter writing for jobs and graduate applications, job search strategies, and interviewing skills, that prepare them to enter the workforce.

This session will focus on best practices for developing the course and offer examples of content, delivery, and assessment.  Attendees will experience a live interactive demonstration of the virtual Mock Interview.

In this session, We will introduce the concept, value and examples of learner-generated contexts. It transforms from content consumers  to content creators. It also produces final products (such as information resources) that are sharable to the general public. It lives beyond the life of a course, outside the LMS. 

Everyone has a learning style that’s best for them. We’ve all heard this and accepted it as fact, right?  Would you be surprised to learn it’s not true?  Come to this fun, interactive session on spotting and avoiding this and other learning myths that can result in bad instructional design.

Replay is a new, gamified quizzing application that is easy for students to use and for instructors to create content.  It combines formative and summative assessment, badging, leaderboards, and data collection to allow students to compare their performance with those of their peers.

• Evidence and scalability of successful digital courseware initiatives will be shared from two perspectives, the faculty innovator(s) and the broader institutional initiatives

• Themes illustrating barriers faced by underrepresented students across institution types and how digital courseware implementations have overcome those barriers will be identified

• Program improvement trends in courseware implementation research will be discussed

Learn more about how VR and online learning can be used to create an innovative classroom setting in this session with the Founder and CEO of VIVEDU, an educational arm of HTC.

Assessing students is hard! Rubrics can help with assessing students authentically, communicating instructor’s expectations to encourage student success and more. Join us for this hands-on workshop to learn about four types of rubrics, when to use each type, and most importantly, how to easily write them for the greatest impact.

This research explored the characteristics of students taking online courses to investigate whether the online setting itself or such characteristics primarily affected retention rates. Results from 108,637 university students revealed variables that predicted online course taking, and the effect online course taking had on student retention at seven four-year institutions.

Innovations in Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) have provided the opportunity to enhance the accessibility of library and tutoring resources by integrating them within a LMS. Partnering with instructional design, our Library and Learning Services staff discovered innovative ways to increase students’ awareness of the most relevant academic support resources.

Accessibility is often a tangled puzzle for many people, especially when creating accessible materials retroactively. This session explores a training document created without accessibility in mind and examines inherent accessibilities problems within the design, the process needed to make it accessible, the solutions, and the benefits of Accessibility Beyond Accommodation.

Using a web-based interactive polling tool (Sli.do), attendees select and prioritize from our menu of modular presentation topics, enabling us to share our experience and guide discussion on learning management system migration – the good, the bad, and the ugly! Questions and attendee insights will be captured and shared. 

In a world where we have no shortage of data, one thing that is present is a lack of understanding around our students and their interaction with online learning content. We talk about using data science and machine learning to help us understand more about your students.

There is a systemic need for practical research that examines edtech efficacy. This session illustrates how schools nationwide are using a rapid-cycle evaluation tool (i.e., IMPACT™) to collect and analyze data, and discusses the evidence schools are generating to inform decisions about edtech discovery, purchasing, and evaluation.

Online group debate is an effective problem-based online teaching strategy to help students develop highly transferable skills to discover scientific-based evidence, enhance collaboration, present cogent arguments, and evaluate solutions for controversial issues. Participants will discuss/explore pros and cons of online group debates through didactic discussion and group activities.

This presentation practically demonstrates how online science courses that align with state and national content standards and criteria for science teacher preparation and certification, and that utilize alternative laboratory learning spaces, can be delivered in a non-traditional and asynchronous format that allows non-traditional students the opportunity to become science teachers.

Creating instructor presence in a room with 300+ students can be a challenge. However, actively engaging students in large lectures halls is possible and now innovations in technology have made it easier than before. This session will explore some technologies that enable instructors to be mobile in the classroom.

In this session, we will discuss how our campus has implemented professional development solutions to: (a) distribute knowledge about instructional accessibility, (b) increase faculty engagement in discussions about Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and (c) facilitate online course design congruent with the UDL principles of engagement, representation, and expression.

This session describes training for faculty members in Touro’s School of Health Sciences to enable them to teach online. Training was delivered via webinars and cybercafes and used the Touro Rubric for Online Education to guide them in in online course structure and pedagogy.  Session participants will learn about a powerful model for training new online faculty.

Representatives at Western Kentucky University have developed the Coaching for Academic Readiness & Excellence (C.A.R.E.) program to provide digitally accessible alternatives for student support. This session will explore the role success coaching plays in bridging the gap between those services offered to on-campus students and those learning at a distance.

This session explores how WPI Online develops gap/refresher and “ramp-up” pathways for graduate students, in partnership with academic departments in order to help adult online learners succeed. Program-specific examples will be highlighted, along with key lessons learned in the process and these innovations’ impact on retention.

This session will feature the release of the 2017 Inside Higher Ed Faculty Attitudes on Technology Survey. Slated for this this year is a supplement to the survey that is conducted in collaboration with OLC and features data collected from administrators. This session will include commentary by others in the field conducting similar research.

From large lecture halls to small seminars, faculty often teach with storytelling. This session aims to inspire faculty to tap into the stories they already know and reconceive them for an online format. Because, as e-learning tools and technologies evolve, good storytelling remains integral to our most successful online courses.

***Please note:  this session was live webcast, but the on-demand recording file was corrupted and is unavailable for viewing.  We apologize for the inconvenience.***

Through sharing of resources and responsibilities, a group of institutions developed and sustained an inter-institutional online master’s program to enable persons who are living in remote locations or who have family/work responsibilities to complete a program potentially leading to Family and Consumer Sciences Education teacher licensure or other professional positions.

In this interactive presentation, participants will learn how to integrate international and intercultural examples in their online courses and degrees. The key concepts covered will allow instructors to internationalize their courses, teaching methods, learning outcomes and assess these outcomes. Participants will design a strategy to achieve this goal and measure their progress.

Recent literature has started to explore the importance of the role of instructional designers within higher education. However, one area that has received little attention is the role of instructional designers in teaching and learning research. Anecdotal evidence suggests that instructional designers may feel underprepared to collaborate with faculty on teaching and learning research. This presentation reports on a national survey study conducted by the Oregon State University Ecampus Research Unit that explores the research engagement and training of instructional designers in institutions of higher education. This study targets instructional designers with a range of experience levels and training backgrounds in order to better understand what previous training they have received in research methods and design; how they are using and engaging in research on teaching and learning in their current roles; and whether they feel prepared to conduct research on teaching and learning in their current roles.

What do you do when faculty are not available to participate in on-campus professional development? Podcasts are well-positioned as an accessible medium for disseminating information and anytime/anywhere learning. This presentation offers an innovative model for addressing some of the challenges of delivering professional development by creating a podcast series.

This session will commemorate the passing of Robert Pirsig, and the implications of his iconic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” for online learning.  Specifically, the presenters will discuss online learning with respect to engagement, quality, change, shelf life of information and how Pirsig addresses each of these issues.

Designing effective Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) assessments is a challenge due to class sizes, diverse learner needs, and platform constraints. We will discuss methods we adopted when designing three MOOC courses as well as strengths and weaknesses and suggestions for improvement based on research and empirical data.

“Introduce yourself on the discussion forum and reply to your classmates.”  Who has not seen this in an online class?  Educators hope the students will meet, establish community – instead another task is checked, with nothing gained. Discover strategies to combat this phenomenon and create value in the self-introduction exercise.

Using a multi-faceted approach to learning, AIU addressed the challenge of disengaged and underprepared students by building a scaffolded curriculum, incorporating peer to peer experiential learning, developing a faculty community that cultivates best practices, and elevating the student body to engage early and frequently to support effective learning.

Needing custom solutions to the challenges that arise in higher education is a universal experience for distance learning administrators. Kennesaw State University’s Distance Learning Center and University Information Technology Services worked with vendors to create custom captioning solutions, setting KSU on a path to become a truly inclusive academic community.

This presentation will share the results of examination of the instructional design properties used in 18 interactive nutrition modules. The levels of analysis included pedagogic strategies used in the interactive modules; level of cognition related to the module objectives; six domains of instructional design and interactivity level of the modules. 

Be a resource for your institution! Want to share the knowledge gained from your OLC Online Learning Certification with your faculty? Pellissippi State Community College presents how we transformed knowledge gained from our OLC certification into scalable professional development opportunities to support the needs of our diverse online faculty groups.