Begin your 2018 OLC Accelerate experience with leaders in the the field of digital learning research discussing empirical and evidence-based research, as well as providing insights on future areas of research interest.

In our inaugural research summit, we are joined by leaders from Arizona State University, Entangled Solutions, the Online Learning Journal, and others. 

We invite both experienced researchers as well as those interested in learning more about research and its applications to attend. 

This session will examine competency-based education (CBE) as an instructional model to provide workforce development to STEM students, promote inclusion of students with cognitive disabilities in STEM fields, and foster discussion and potential collaborations on CBE projects between participants. 

Two online learning administrators share their process for addressing critical questions related to online program development and institutional support, and facilitate a discussion among session attendees regarding strategies for staying the course, even during changes in senior level campus leadership.

During this session, staff from the Purdue University will discuss the pilot of the recently created peer review product, Circuit. Circuit is a peer review application that is easy for students to use and for instructors to manage.  It allows students to upload a variety of file types including: rich text (including LaTeX math formulas), URLs, Video and several more. It then provides a mechanism for students (an instructors) to provide anonymous feedback scores, rubrics, calibrations or a combination.

In this session, the presenters will demonstrate a variety of interactive resources designed for a large-scale asynchronous workshop and discuss how the digital tools embedded in the workshop created opportunities for participants to explore innovations in teaching and learning. Several examples of resources developed using Articulate Storyline will be featured.

It can be challenging to create a scalable online program that provides a high-quality learning experience, incorporates best practices for course design, and fosters teaching excellence.  This session describes our journey creating a popular online academic program.  Tips for course design, faculty development and staffing strategies will be discussed.

For Fall 2018, The University of Arizona is reimagining its orientation for fully online students to move from an upfront "onboarding" framework to a continual education space providing just-in-time information to all students. The presentation will provide a brief timeline of the project, as well as discuss how the "orientation space" is transforming to a longer-term student resource.

As the online education space continues to grow, questions of engagement, retention, and experience have come to the forefront. How do we as student services administrators best serve this growing population? How do we provide the same level of support and community to remote students?

This presentation will explore different aspects of the student experience, including best practices for creating an inclusive and engaging experience for online and remote students. Additionally the presentation will discuss what aspects of this experience student services administrators influence, which often does not include much of the course structure, content, and pedagogy. The presenters will explore this tension and highlight ways in which we can collaborate with instructional designers, faculty, and other administrators to create a high quality student experience. Many of these best practices are relevant to the on-campus student experience as well.

Creating videos and other multimedia for learners in an online or hybrid environment requires skills that instructors need to shape effective learning environments.  Approaching these skills in a holistic manner embedded in course design helps ensure that instructional objectives and student needs are taken into account.

This session describes results from a maturing three-year research initiative among two organizationally different universities and their common adaptive learning platform provider. Current findings indicated that the underlying pattern of learning in adaptive courses remains comparable across disciplines and institutions. These findings have implications for predictive analytics and instructional design.    

Weekly, low-stakes “Metacognitive Cafe” discussions raise students’ awareness of how they learn and their level of understanding while underscoring the need to more actively engage with course materials. This paper discusses students’ participation in, and reaction to, these discussions.

Class management techniques are tools and strategies you can use with a class to accomplish different goals.  This education session covers how various face-to-face techniques can be translated to the online classroom to monitor student understanding, engage students in topics, activate prior learning, promote student reflection, and to foster meta-cognition.

In an effort to impact student learning by increasing successful course completion, particularly in GEP & STEM courses, UCF’s Board of Trustees made a strategic investment in a course redesign process that leverages the benefits of online, blended, adaptive, and active learning. Join a discussion on implementing innovations at scale.

Instructional design teams face increasing challenges to maintaining consistency and quality of services while being able to rapidly scale up to meet institutional goals. Learn about teamwork practices that are sustainable and design-centric. Virtual teamwork spaces we’ll explore include, Team Website, Team Sandbox, Faculty Development Portal, and Google Drive.

Does online learning impact sense of belonging at a residential campus? This session will combine literature on sense of belonging with an analysis of data from the Student Experience in the Research University [SERU] survey at The University of Texas at Austin.

UDL is purposeful framework to guide learning design. However, instructors and designers face challenges implementing UDL. Luckily, there are many tools out there that can help designers/instructors to design courses that utilize multiple means of presentation, multiple means of engagement and multiple means of representations

Creating an internal, online professional development program can encourage, support, develop and retain high-quality faculty and staff. In this workshop, we will explore how to develop, launch, sustain and celebrate your online professional development programs.

Instructors must break down barriers to student learning and engagement in elearning environments. Tools for building effective social presence in instruction will be discussed.  Participants are encouraged to share challenges in design and instruction of a course. Facilitators will workshop with participants to ensure that all leave the session with a fuller toolbox.

This session reports on the first phase of a wide scale benchmarking study of teaching and learning centers, which developed and validated a descriptive framework and instrument, and the implementation of the phase two benchmarking.

Faculty support professionals have varied roles, responsibilities and reach.  We will explore the who and what of faculty support professions and share techniques to stay away from “The Dark Side”  and inspire “The Force” that builds awareness and supports change for improved teaching and student learning in higher education.

Join us as we share our journey of teaching our future biomedical science educators how to develop and teach online courses. Learn how a brainstorming activity identified an authentic need in a program that ultimately led to the deployment of three online, self-paced tutorials for use in a biology course.

Simulations using standardized patients offer health professional students highly authentic experiential learning opportunities to support the development of clinical skills. Participants will learn about two studies that investigated the potential to offer these experiences using virtual technologies, and discuss opportunities to use real-person, real-time online simulations in other learning domains.

Explore effective practices for blended learning based on the upcoming book, Blended Learning in Practice: A Guide for Practitioners and Researchers (MIT Press, 2019). After a brief presentation on blended learning at Georgia Tech, attendees will engage each other in fast-paced, small group discussions of meeting their own blended learning challenges.

The first part of this session will focus on an IELOL activity and the resulting lively network and groupthink it created. The second part would be sharing how each group member used this experience to highlight or jumpstart change to accessibility standards at our home university.

In this session, Dr. Bray will demonstrate how she re-designed a 120-student Intro to Exercise Physiology course with a high DWF rate into an instant success (over 100 A's) kicking lecture to the curb and using active, gamified, group project-based learning strategies. 

Higher Education is changing!  We need to adapt to meet the growing demands for students as well as potential students.  The Brenton Center at ISU has attuned its services to meet the common needs of faculty and students.  This session addresses strategies and operations of a distance education unit.

Hear how a faculty learning community uses the Community of Inquiry Framework to help University of Wisconsin-Madison instructors address misconceptions by exploring and applying best practices for quality online course design and teaching. The program engages participants with social, cognitive, and teaching presence that inspires teaching transformation. Practical and time-tested strategies are shared.

Quality was thought to be an important factor in the delivery of online courses. This study documented the effects of quality within online learning environment on the performance of the student. Does the level of course quality have a statistically significant impact on course level student grades?

Based on doctoral research, this session examines the effectiveness of synchronous online learning environments in establishing social, cognitive and teaching presence in virtual instruction. In this presentation the research framework will be discussed followed by a description of the virtual instruction sessions and the results of the research study.

This case study outlines the success of Story Centered Curriculum (SCC) implemented in an online environment at the University of Texas and Rutgers University. Story centered learning will be defined and demonstrated in this educational session and the specific impact on student retention and engagement in an online environment will be the focus.

This presentation engages participants in a critical dialogue on the importance of integrating formative assessments throughout online learning, as well as the implications for learner and instructor. Instructors can check for understanding in several ways, including the use of oral language, collaborative assignments, questioning, writing, projects, performances, and tests (Fisher & Frey, 2007). Participants will see a variety of innovative examples that they can easily integrate into their online courses that build on learners’ prior knowledge and experiences. Discussions should yield bridges and barriers, along with future considerations to enhance online learning and how they can use this data to design instruction that will meet their student’s needs. 

This presentation describes online academic program implementation strategies within a large urban community college resistant to change on both structural and cultural levels.  We demonstrate how we engaged such resistance through introducing a culture of inquiry that prioritized transparency, shared data, ongoing dialogue and a relentless focus on mission. 

Demand for online classes exceeds supply at Southeast Missouri State University. Go behind the scenes to learn the strategies and tactics to address demand including part-time instruction, graduate students, SPOC, co-copyright courses and our newest tactics – the Master Template Studio and Adjunct Integrity plan. 

During this session you will learn how Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide views the solution to creating an online immersive experience and a sense of belonging to be holistic in nature and no one technology initiative can occur in isolation and meet the multiple needs and desires of our students.  

In this session we will share a set of practices to create a high-touch environment for online students. Participants will learn a set of low-cost, high impact techniques involving both virtual and physical outreach that build connection and trust between students and those who support them.

So, you’ve decided to implement podcasts into your faculty professional development repertoire. Now what? Podcasts provide a flexible platform for anytime/anywhere, self-directed learning. This session will dive into the benefits and barriers to creating or repurposing podcasts, and how they may be integrated into a broader professional development ecosystem.

Design thinking incorporates a creative, structured, and organized process for designing projects. In this presentation, we will define and share examples of how we applied design thinking to our instructional design practices.

This presentation will demonstrate how a team of math instructors, instructional designers and instructional technologists completely redesigned college algebra as a blended, active, doubly adaptive course. This collaborative effort also informed redesign of the fully online version of the course leading to significant improvements in student success in both formats.

How does LMS/CMS quizzing features as formative assessment compare to openly available game based response systems in online courses? What is the impact of including student generated quizzes? How do these different strategies compare on summative assessments? Join us for the interactive Blackboard vs. Kahoot vs. Quizizz challenge!

Discussion boards present the opportunity for engagement with course topics and higher level thinking if designed and structured well.  Adaptive learning provides for self-paced, flexible learning paths. How can the self-paced, personalized flexibility of adaptive learning be combined with online discussions between students at very different places in course content?

In this session, we want to present and explore different technologies and tools that can make videos interactive and fun. These tools and technology can change the passive nature of watching these videos to an active and engaging experience. We will discuss best practices, examples, and resources for these tools.

This session defines student success through a gamified exercise, delving into technologies that collect and manage data, and preparing participants to lead data discussions. Our dashboarding activity challenges attendees to classify student success indicators, practice bridging direct and indirect evidence, and collaborate to synthesize meaning from real-world institutional problems.

As increasing numbers of faculty arrive at their new institutions with previous online teaching experience, the question becomes: how do we effectively assess and certify these faculty members to teach online?  This session focuses on our individualized online faculty development option that operates alongside our standard online faculty development course.

Since 2012, the University of South Florida has certified online instructors through a fully online course. The course is successful; however, there were administrative challenges including scalability, tracking, and maintenance. In this session, you will learn techniques and tools we used to streamline processes, reduce facilitator workload, and improve tracking.

This session describes a multidimensional training institute for new and experienced faculty focused on developing exemplary online learning experiences. The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) model serves as the conceptual framework. A systematic process of data collection describes outcomes and supports replication and use by others

Evaluating published figures and tables for informational visual quality is a vital skill across many fields, yet students often struggle with mastery. In this interactive session, we will demonstrate a multimedia learning object developed for biomedical informatics students and share preliminary results from a research study evaluating its effectiveness.

Conventional wisdom says that the shorter a video is, the more students watch. A two-year study of student video viewing habits is presented here, attempting to find the “sweet spot” in length for lecture content. The study also explores the effectiveness of segmenting a long video into shorter sections.

Join in for an interactive, “recorded live” episode of TOPcast: The Teaching Online Podcast, a podcast for leaders in online/blended learning. Stimulate your thinking. Grow your network.

Access and delivery of tutoring, peer mentors, and librarian support resources by integrating them directly within a LMS platform connects students to support at their point of need. Partnering with our course system engineers, our Library and Learning Services staff implemented innovative ways to increase students’ awareness of essential academic support resources.

Few platforms exist for faculty to collaborate, learn, and develop new techniques which foster inclusion and diversity especially when in the online environment. This session will provide educators with researched strategies and ideas to be interactive when working with students to promote awareness and acknowledgement of diversity.

Storytelling is key to student engagement. What better way to design a course than as a storyboarded, engaging narrative? From exciting characters, to a rising plot, and multiple dialogues, this panel presents a case study in thinking about course development as storytelling.

Together we will explore how the brain learns and apply those concepts to the technology and pedagogical theories that tap into the parts of the brain that enhance learning. Participants will map the parts of the brain to the technology and theories that maximize learning.

Over the last 3-5 years, an increasing focus in higher education has occurred around the topics of universal design, inclusivity, accessibility, and diversity of learners. The increasingly complex digital resources incorporated both within and outside of the classroom have presented challenges towards inclusivity for faculty who are striving to make their class materials accessible to all. 

Seeing this obvious gap between faculty knowledge/skill and student needs as a growth point for enhancing services, the presenters (administrators in online learning and faculty) will outline several distinct case examples from multiple campuses' successful implementation of a tool to heighten the overall accessibility of educational content;  to shape the culture of accessibility on a university's campus; and to provide metrics to assess growth in digital accessibility over time in a campus envioronment. Additionally, through an audience demonstration and participation activity, we will illustrate some remaining gaps in full educational inclusivity and understanding that have yet to be addressed, and will provide best practice recommendations on how to address these concerns.  

The use of adaptive learning technologies improved student success in STEM courses at our institution and now supports blended and online courses. In this session, participants will identify their own needs, consider best practices, and develop a plan to gain support for integrating adaptive learning technologies on their own campus.

In this session, we will share our approach to reimagining our general education core curriculum for adult learners where the essential workforce skills and behaviors that are critical to the future of work are introduced, practiced, and mastered through the lens of traditional liberal arts disciplines.

This session will demonstrate how to obtain and use free software, originally developed for gamers, to record and broadcast your content for free.  Record and broadcast in real-time almost any combination of screens, computers, green screens, video backgrounds and other video sources with little to no post-production.

In order to engage online students, FlipGrid was used in place of one-dimensional text-based discussion boards. Flip Grid is a web-based video discussion platform that allows meaningful collaboration in an online environment. During this interactive presentation, FlipGrid will be explained and participants will be able to try it out!

After a brief overview of online education compliance (e.g., program integrity and web accessibility) presenters will guide a discussion of policy formation and implementation strategies that are inclusive of the various stakeholders affected by compliance mandates, including students, faculty, staff, and vendors.

Faculty and online master’s students conducted a study to examine the hallmarks of an ideal online learning community, determine the strength of their online program’s community, and recommend improvements. This presentation will describe the methodology and findings regarding key elements of community and facilitate a discussion of successful community-building strategies.

Open Educational Resources (OER) offer the promise of more affordable, more current, and accessible learning for our students. This unique session, itself an Open Educational Resource, is for those who want to better understand and promote the most effective and research-based use of OER at their own institutions or in their own courses. Participants will learn how to identify, find, evaluate, and implement OER, and will walk away with workshop materials, enabling them to adapt and deliver a faculty development program at their own institution and start integrating OER into their own courses.

We know what constitutes student success in online education, but can we define institutional success online? This session compares different institutional models, based on the CHLOE surveys of chief online officers, and contrasts the organizational structures, goals, policies and practices of online enterprise-level, community-based, regional, and specialized programs.

Harness the power of authentic assessment through innovative strategies for online, blended, or face-to-face learning environments. Educators from all levels will be introduced to the attributes of authentic assessment, and engage with multiple student-centered approaches for implementation in any content area.

What if we already have what we need to be truly connected in our educational encounters – including engaging students? What if connection and engagement does not require technology? What if all we need is love? In this session we will consider the idea of caring pedagogy as an expression of that love.

One of the biggest challenges for online faculty is to elicit participation in their synchronous sessions.  What’s the best way, they ask?  This session will present 7 tried & true methods; participants will share ideas; resulting in a crowdsourced set of shared best practices by the end this session.

An online course requires careful development of a setting that encourages and promotes student learning. Incorporating five fundamental elements (CASE) - Climate, Access, Support and Safety, and Engagement - into the design of your course can help you to create a successful learning environment.

UCF is redesigning the foundational Business curriculum from a large-scale lecture capture model to a new model of instruction combining blended, adaptive, and active learning. Goals are enhanced student engagement and increased success—at scale.

Faculty ask, “how can I notify someone about a student who needs help beyond my scope?” Student support teams poder how to reach those same online students proactively. Join Oregon State Ecampus to learn about faculty/student support collaborations that offer creative solutions and effective interventions for all.

This session focuses on the use of student engagement strategies and technology to personalize master courses. Presenters will review best practices to increase student engagement, and discuss how implementing these strategies can help online instructors bring their personalities and expertise to master courses. Presenter and audience experiences will be shared.

It has been described as the most important technology since the internet, and for good reason. The blockchain is no longer a fringe technology with narrow economic applicability; it has become the digital backbone for thousands of innovative applications. Discover the tools and trends on the verge of (re)defining online learning.

The University of Central Florida’s Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning and Center for Distributed Learning collaborated to offer a blended semester-long Course Innovation Project about active learning across modalities for faculty. In addition to receiving the materials from this project, participants will engage in activities which model active learning.

We built an online faculty development course to explore games and gaming concepts in online course design. The course itself implemented gaming concepts and gave the faculty an immersive, gamified, online learning experience. Come see how we did it, and how faculty experienced it! 

We know that students and even some instructors, especially online, view group work unfavorably. Does this have to be the case? There are different levels of group work that can ease both students and instructors into the benefits of collaboration that can only be practiced through a group work experience.

The idea is simple yet transformative: empower faculty and designers to create engaging instructional content without needing to understand all the traditional considerations of producing that content. Give them flexibility. Give them robust options to educate students. Make it easy. Make it accessible. Give them HAX.

People use social media every day to connect and gather information. Its presence in higher education is increasing as educators find ways to incorporate technology to engage their student and enhance learning in their course. This session will provide information on how to use Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube in a formal class setting to engage the student and promote active learning.

Abstract:

More than simply being about the technology, effective teaching with adaptive courseware is about ways in which faculty, coaches and their institutions can provide support to prepare students before they arrive on campus and to continue that support in class on an on-going basis.  The quality of faculty effectiveness is greatly improved with focused faculty development sessions that prepare them to use the software to its best advantage for themselves and their students.

Was your dream to become a reading teacher?  Students struggle with the required reading in an online course.  This session will provide research-based strategies for faculty to aid students in becoming more proficient readers using eText.  Attendees will leave with tools to assist students in diving deeper into the content!

All full time and adjunct faculty are required to successfully complete our online teaching orientation prior to teaching online in graduate programs. This three-week facilitated online course includes assignments directly tied to preparation of the courses they will be teaching.  CBE  (Competency Based Education) exemptions are awarded depending on existing skills.