We are pleased to announce the program for OLC Innovate 2018!
All Sessions are 45 minutes in length unless otherwise noted. All sessions are in Central Time (CT) and considered BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).
All Sessions are 45 minutes in length unless otherwise noted. All sessions are in Central Time (CT) and considered BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).
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Participants will learn to apply the OLC Quality Scorecard metrics, uncover and evaluate quality indicators in key categories, and consider thoughtful recommendations for implementation.
The fee for this Pre-Conference Workshop is: $205 Early Bird / $235 Full Price. Participate in any two 1/2 day OLC pre-conference workshops (Tuesday, April 17) and save $75 on the combined cost.
Be proactive, not reactive! In this hands-on workshop, we will explore helpful techniques and tools to add to your accessibility toolkit in order to become compliant and inclusive. Take a deeper dive into the principles and guidelines of the WCAG 2.0 to ultimately benefit all students and avoid potential lawsuits.
The fee for this Pre-Conference Workshop is: $205 Early Bird / $235 Full Price. Participate in any two 1/2 day OLC pre-conference workshops (Tuesday, April 17) and save $75 on the combined cost.
This workshop focuses on steps taken by a large, complex institution in implementing the OLC Quality Scorecard. This is a working case study of how to begin the work of holistically exploring the quality of online programs at an institution. The session will support participants in thinking about messaging, creating buy-in and the overall development of a project plan. The session is also intended as an opportunity for participants to share and respond to the plans of colleagues from various sized institutions interested in the systematic exploration of quality as it relates to online.
The fee for this Pre-Conference Workshop is: $205 Early Bird / $235 Full Price. Participate in any two 1/2 day OLC pre-conference workshops (Tuesday, April 17) and save $75 on the combined cost.
Come to this workshop to meet OSCQR, the OLC Effective Practice award-winning online course quality design rubric and process. Participants will use OSCQR to complete their own online course review and earn the OSCQR Reviewer badge. The OSCQR rubric & dashboard are openly licensed. Participants will take away tools to apply to their own systematic online course quality review initiatives.
The fee for this Pre-Conference Workshop is: $205 Early Bird / $235 Full Price. Participate in any two 1/2 day OLC pre-conference workshops (Tuesday, April 17) and save $75 on the combined cost.
Convening at our OLC Innovate conference in Nashville on Tuesday, April 17, 2018, this half-day event will feature presentations, small group discussions, and networking opportunities. Learn more about topics important to online learning leaders today, including:
After each presentation, participants will gather in small groups to discuss, collaborate, and tackle the issues at hand. The day will culminate with the three speakers participating in a panel session.
OLC Leadership Network: A National Collaboration of Senior Leaders | REGISTRATION
Registration fee for the Leadership Network Event is $235 (with purchase of OLC Innovate conference registration); or $290 (pre-conference workshop only registration). Note: the Leadership Network Event is not eligible for the pre-conference workshop bundle pricing.
Participants in Tuesday's invitation-only OLC Leadership Network Event are invited to a networking reception . 5:00pm-7:00pm; Delta Pavilion.
***This is an invitation event only***
Don't wait in line Wednesday morning and miss portions of a workshop, the Community College Summit, or the HBCU Summit. Check-in at conference registration Tuesday evening from 5-7pm for your conference badge and materials. OLC Innovate 2018 registration is located in the Gaylord Convention Center on Level 0 in the Ryman Hall Foyer. Walk through the hotel atriums to the conference center area, then look for the directional signs!
Join us at the Gaylord Opryland each evening (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday; 9-10pm, Delta Pavilion) for Campfire Gatherings. After the days events (and with ample time for you to go grab dinner first), we will be hosting themed get-togethers as a venue to meet with friends, start up new collaborations, or just unwind from a day packed with innovative ideas.
Tuesday Night: Crafting and Making
We will break out the knitting needles and crafting supplies and challenge the divide between crafting and ‘making.’ Knitting and crocheting experts from the Nashville area will join in to coach anyone who wants to learn a new skill, and they will also provide patterns for crafts that can be donated to local charities. Champion knitters are more than welcome to bring their own supplies, and we’ll have supplies on hand for those new to the endeavor.
We’ll also have the supplies to make swaps as part of our new Swap + Meet initiative.
Can’t join us on Tuesday, but want to jump in on the crafting effort? We’ll have the supplies available at the SWAP+MEET area inside the Exhibit Hall (Ryman Hall B1-B3, Conference Center Level 0) throughout the conference to give you a chance craft for a good cause.
Ready to start the day energized? Join us for a 1 hour Slow Flow Yoga class with Janet Smith, a fellow conference attendee and certified yoga instructor. Slow flow yoga is made up of slow flow (three breaths per posture), including sun and/or moon salutations. Yoga mat (we will have towels on hand if you don't have one), comfy clothes, and water bottle needed.
Note: OLC Innovate attendees participate in yoga classes at their own risk. In the unlikely event of injury, please note that OLC, MERLOT, and the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center may not be held liable.
Join fellow Community College Summit attendees for breakfast and networking before the Community College Summit program begins.
Participating in the HBCU Summit? Join CSU-MERLOT, Southern University System, OLC, and our Tennessee hosts for a breakfast meet-and-greet prior to the start of the HBCU Summit program.
Continental breakfast will be served from 8:00am-9:30am in the exhibit hall (Ryman Hall B1-B3) during registration check-in.
Attendees of the Community College Summit (Ryman Ballroom ABDE) and the HBCU Summit (Ryman Ballroom C/F) should proceed directly to their meeting room for summit breakfast gatherings.
The Innovation Open Labs are an opportunity to begin putting all you are learning at OLC Innovate to practice, pull up your sleeves, and get your hands dirty. Join the “mad scientists” and “lab technicians” of the Innovation Lab and participate in the various experiments they are conducting in this year’s new Design Thinking, Game Design, Storytelling, and Solution Design stations. Grab a friend and bring a challenge you have to the lab (or borrow one of ours). Take advantage of this opportunity to experiment on it during the conference and then take entirely new ways to address your challenge home with you.
While you are here, stop in at the Innovation Installation directly adjacent to the Innovation Lab to explore potential futures of innovation!
Innovation is a hot topic in education, but how do we make it happen on a practical level? This hands-on, interactive workshop introduces approaches to identifying personal and organizational drivers of innovation and visual mapping techniques for planning and developing successful and sustainable results.
Attendees interested in this session are invited to complete the Learning Environment Innovation Inventory prior to the conference. Of course, you don’t have to complete it to participate in the workshop, and don’t have to attend the workshop if you do complete it; we know plans change! The Inventory can be accessed here until April 11, 2018.
If encouraging teaching innovation is the goal, how do we identify strategies that help initiatives gain traction and drive cultural change within our institutions? Participants will be guided through a design thinking framework and evaluation model to address challenges and generate better solutions, while encouraging a flexible and iterative approach.
Visual design has important implications far beyond attempting to make things beautiful, including how we learn and process information. Join us as we play with visual design tools and explore fundamental considerations of design that you can put to use to create visually appealing teaching and learning experiences.
This workshop explores collaborative annotation as a core digital academic practice. This technology enables users to discuss on any Web page. It can be integrated into courses but also used by staff and faculty in professional development. Workshop participants will gain hands-on experience with an open-source annotation client, Hypothesis.
Data-rich reports often lack the vibrancy needed to communicate impact. It is possible to share your data in a way that is compelling and memorable. Learn how to turn your data into an effervescent story for your next report, presentation, or grant application.
8:00am-8:30am
Welcome Remarks
8:30am-9:00am
Affordable Learning Solutions
Lowering the cost of course materials makes education more affordable and provides students more opportunities to learn. The presentation will showcase the free and open online educational resources in academic disciplines and career and technical training areas available for community colleges to adopt today. Faculty, staff, students, and program developers can discover free curriculum and program support materials from the SkillsCommons free and open library (http://als.skillscommons.org) and plan how to bring affordable learning solutions to their own campus community.
9:00am-9:45am
Affordable Learning Solutions - Collaborative Ideation/Table Talk Challenges
In small groups, participants will discuss and plan ways they can use the variety of resources and tools to implement their own affordable learning solutions initiative on their own campuses. Table discussions will focus on campuses’ readiness for affordable learning solutions as well as the challenges participants will face in planning and implementation. Tables will have an opportunity to share their ideas with the entire group.
The opening 90 minutes of the HBCU Summit will focus on a welcome by your HBCU Summit leaders, an overview of HBCU Strategy for Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$), presentation of a Southern University System's system-wide intiative to enable educational quality and college afordability, and Q & A discussion focused on issues and questions raised by these presentations.
This workshop will teach participants how to build a flipped classroom hybrid model for mastery of physical skills that uses video journals for content delivery and assessment. Through partner activities and group discussion, participants leave with tangible tools that are transferable across any content, subject, or discipline.
There are many misconceptions that exist when it comes to making content accessible for people with disabilities. An accessible information technology environment enhances usability for everyone. This session will debunk some of the myths, and provide faculty members concrete examples of how they can make their instructional content accessible.
During this workshop, participants will share their motivations and contexts for implementing specific technologies into a class and outline a variety of methods to assess the different teaching and learning goals. Participants will leave with a scholarly resource list and collaboratively developed resources from during the workshop.
Interactive syllabi reformat and expand upon the content of a traditional syllabus in ways which allow students to actively explore, respond to, and participate in course content. This session advises on the design and implementation of a student-centered, interactive syllabus on a website, LMS, or other online platform.
Join us in the Exhibit Hall (Ryman Hall B1-B3, Conference Center Level 0, near conference registration) for refreshments. Not only is this an opportunity to recharge with a fresh cup of coffee or tea, but you will also have the opportunity to network with other attendees from the HBCU Summit, Community College Summit, and Innovate workshop sessions. Preview the exhibit hall, meet with our conference exhibitors, and start getting your cards stamped by exhibitors in order to win prizes!
Tired of sitting and in need of a good stretch? Join us in the yoga area of the exhibit hall (Ryman Hall B1, Conference Center Level 0, left side of the exhibit hall near the Blogger Bars) during the networking break for a 15 minute Stretch & Renew yoga class with Janet Smith, a fellow conference attendee and certified yoga instructor. Stretch and Renew yoga is made up of simple stretching using a chair as a prop. Conference attire welcomed. No mat needed.
Note: All OLC Innovate attendees participate in yoga classes at their own risk. In the unlikely event of injury, please note that OLC, MERLOT, and the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center may not be held liable.
The Interactive Faculty Development Decision Guide (IFDG) is a research-based online tool designed to help stakeholders analyse their current faculty development initiatives. The presentation will provide attendees with step-by-step guidance on using this interactive tool to evaluate, design, develop, and implement changes to develop or enhance online course quality.
From cloud-based resources and wearable technologies to augmented and virtual reality and autonomous vehicles, a steady stream of technological advances is impacting learning in unexpected ways. Bring your laptop or mobile device and engage through robust discussion and activities to explore the latest trends in learning technologies.
How might you implement your next generation digital learning environment? In this workshop, participants will prototype their next digital learning environment and produce a digital learning ecosystem map. Through this design thinking process, we will identify existing and emerging technologies as parts of your next gen learning ecosystem.
This workshop will address the impact of Mixed Reality of VR/AR/Holograms related to immersive learning regarding types of devices, mixed reality content, student engagement, faculty PD, and workforce training. Participants and presenters will have the opportunity to engage in a forum to discuss and explore (hands-on) Mixed Reality.
We will be using Google Expeditions and would like those who wish to participate to download from the App Store or Google Play store.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.vr.expeditions&hl=en_US
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/expeditions/id1131711060?mt=8
Improv is not just for comedy. This workshop will teach participants some of the techniques of improvisation and ideas on how it can be used in at work. There are studies that suggest improv does help us all to become better team members, learners, innovators, and communicators.
10:30am-11:00am
StoryTelling and Growing Expert Instructors
Community colleges face many challenges and the panel will address two distinct and persistent ones faced by career and technical training programs. First, communicating the power of educational innovations takes more than a 30 page report – it takes a good story that engages your audience and gets them to care about your innovation. How do we craft good stories for career and technical training programs? Second, industry experts are essential subject matter experts that deliver the “job-driven” curriculum in community colleges and prepares our students for success in the workforce. But frequently, being an industry expert doesn’t translate into an expert instructor. The U.S. Department of Labor’s SkillsCommons project has produced free and open tools, templates, and strategies that everyone can use to address these challenges. The panelist will briefly review the strategies and resources and walk participants through how these two tools have been applied in higher education and at the industry level.
Challenge Questions:
Wondering how to start your own Affordable Learning Solutions initiative? Join Robbie Melton, Moustapha Diack, and representatives from Tennessee Universities as the discuss how to get buy-in, build your organizational infrastructure, align to campus priorites, and level tools and templates to plan your AL$ program. There will be Q & A as well as small group work in this session where participants will start their planning.
Learners deserve better than the shallow extrinsic rewards some have called gamified learning. Join me for an interactive session where we will explore new ways of thinking about gamification that put the learner at the center and leverage design methods that focus on long-term motivation and engagement.
Institutions look for innovative and lean ways to ensure essential functional design, development and operational practices for producing quality-driven online programming. Participants will create a scalable framework for agile, quality online learning programming that aligns and coalesces with existing or emerging frameworks, workflows, guidelines and quality standards.
Much web literacy we’ve seen either asks students to look at web pages and think about them, or teaches them to publish and produce things on the web. While both these activities are valuable, neither addresses a set of real problems citizens confront daily: evauating the information that reaches them through their social media streams. For these daily tasks, student don’t need long lists of questions to think about while gazing at web documents. They need concrete strategies and tactics for tracing claims to sources and for analyzing the nature and reliability of those sources. This session will walk participants through a sampling of the actual techniques professional fact-checkers use, as well as introduce some research that shows why current approaches to information literacy may be making matters worse.
This workshop introduces and expands on the idea of open educational practice by encouraging participants to adopt an OER model for their professional development programs. In this sprint, together we will define and apply the concept of open professional developmental resources (OPDR) by designing, constructing, and sharing an OPDR.
Are you a Ranger Program volunteer or participant? Join the OLC Innovate 2018 Engagement Team for a Ranger Program Kick-Off Luncheon on Wednesday, where we will build connections among participants, extending community-building virtual discussions that preceeded the conference. Participants will join "lightning" discussions, focusing on either navigating the Innovate conference (for new attendees), or addressing specific topics or problems of interest as identified in prior discussions. Virtual communication pre- and post-conference will be supported.
Join your fellow attendees for a networking lunch to kick off the OLC/MERLOT Innovate 2018 conference! Enjoy this opportunity to network with and meet fellow attendees prior to the start of regular conference programming.
Note: All attendees are asked to RSVP for luncheon during the registration process (so that we have a proper head-count). There is no additional fee; lunch is included in your conference registration. However, you must have a ticket for the luncheon via the RSVP submitted during the registration process.
No higher ed superhero should have to go it alone in conquering the wicked challenges ahead of them. This roundtable will feature colleagues discussing how their initial meeting at conferences allowed them to organically form a connected cohort, engaging in cross-institutional initiatives and research, as well as non-traditional professional development.
This focus group, facilitated by Laurie Hillstock - OLC Director of Community Engagement, is designed to collect feedback and encourage interaction among attendees on a variety of key topics. OLC is conducting this focus group on behalf of one of our OLC Innovate 2018 sponsors.
**This event is invitation only***
Often the first obstacle to innovation in teaching and learning is fear. Our conversation will build on two central questions: 1) How have you seen fear in others or experienced fear yourself as an obstacle to innovation? 2) What strategies have worked for you to help others overcome fear of innovation?
Through lively conversation and digital collaboration via mobile applications, this session will ask attendees to consider how they might help increase peer-peer interaction in blended courses. Topics include tools, mobile devices, best practices, institutional guidelines or limitations, perceived value, and scenario problem solving.
As individuals secure their learning from multiple sources across their lifetimes, communication and certification systems are evolving to enable the efficient and reliable communication of skills. As leaders in the digital badge space, we will discuss the value of digital credentialing, help the audience develop their own best practices and showcase case how institutions and companies, are empowering individuals through recognition of achievements demonstrated both inside and outside of traditional education.
Who do faculty seek out for advice about online teaching? How does that impact the practices (both good and bad) that are shared? Using social network analysis (SNA), it is possible to visualize the online teaching community, to influence it in targeted ways, and to analyze changes to its structure.
Since 2004, Soomo has worked with many colleges and universities to increase student success through innovative course design. Today, we’ll share a few of our favorite lessons learned from each stage of our process: pinpointing problems, designing solutions, building courses, equipping faculty, supporting course delivery, and analyzing course performance.
Flipped classrooms have increased engagement, but at-home instruction is often isolating for students. We have developed 2D Discussion, a platform that creates a nodal network from discussion board posts. This method allows students to better visualize connections between topics and will hopefully encourage more robust interactions outside of the classroom.
This model proposes a flexible templated approach to course development based on the need for faculty autonomy and instructional designer engagement. Recognizing the need of instructional designers to engage multiple stakeholders, and the need of faculty to retain their autonomy, this model gives insight to how this might work in a practical way.
Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE), identified in 2015, has been an enigma; many definitions, many white-papers, few production examples. In this session, instructional designers, technologists behind the first open source NGDLE will demonstrate and discuss learner experience across a distributed platform through examples of live courses by showcasing the Next Generation of EdTech.
This session will examine an interactive augmented reality interface we developed, piloted, and have begun to evaluate in an upper-level biochemistry course. The data we are gathering compares student perceptions in two scenarios--viewing 3D protein structures via traditional monitor display in PyMol versus in Augmented Reality using iPads.
AMAs (Ask Me Anything) are fairly commonplace events in the business world. How can higher-education institutions translate this concept and practice for their unique purposes? In this presentation, we will share how we planned, revised and implemented AMAs in our university context.
Particularly within the last 10 years, education has seen the accelerated parallel development of blended learning and active learning as highly recommended practices. Furthermore, with the advocacy of STEM education, the presented mixed methods study examines a proposed framework that blended learning affordances enables or constrains active learning. Within the framework includes blended learning affordances like face-to-face lectures, in-class clicker questions, discussion classes, quizzes, online homework, and external face-to-face and online tutoring services. By the end of the presentation, participants will craft their own blended learning designs, other than the traditional blend of face-to-face and online experiences. Participants will identify the potential benefits and pitfalls to the use of particular affordances in a blended learning class. Participants will also identify how the blended learning affordances influence active learning among students.
An overview of how I used Virtual Reality and ThingLink to deliver an immersive Crime Scene experience to online and face-to-face students. During this presentation I’ll share tips, tricks and lessons learned on how I got started, where I went and more importantly where will this project be heading.
Colleges and universities are under increasing pressure to justify the value of their degrees and credentials. University of Maryland University College (UMUC) is using gamified learning in a digital badge pilot to validate how students’ academic content knowledge and experiences align with the career-ready skills employers seek.
Online dual enrollment has the potential to reach many at-risk students and gives them an opportunity to self-determine whether post-secondary education is the right option. This conversation focuses on our approach to the design and delivery of online dual enrollment courses to students who learn differently (LD).
The reflexive quality of institutional assessment requires that leaders challenge themselves and their faculty to interrogate assumptions, to think about how they are thinking and why. This presentation will outline practical techniques aimed at helping faculty develop their own metacognitive practice using a growth mindset model of engagement.
Innovation often emerges when diverse people can freely communicate dissent and agreement. The MSU Hub’s team of educators, instructional designers, and researchers are currently supporting a large-scale curriculum revisioning. Join us for conversation rooted in this question: How do you balance diverse viewpoints to keep innovation projects flowing to completion?
In the year 2020, it's estimated that it will only take 73 days for the volume of medical knowledge to double. Simple rote recall is clearly not feasible, so the question becomes how do medical educators prepare future providers to have both a foundation of knowledge and critical thinking skills.
The University of Michigan Digital Innovation Greenhouse (DIG) is scaling “homegrown” digital pedagogy. Our group of software developers, user experience designers, and behavioral scientists work with faculty to iterate and spread innovative edtech. Join to discuss how DIG was born. Learn how to support and scale digital innovation.
Join Dr. Kaye Shelton and Dr. Karen Pedersen as they discusses the OLC Quality Scorecard and how HBCUs can get started using it. They will review best practices to help you evaluate your online learning program, as well as discuss first steps for implementation with campus leadership.
SupportU is a menu of online complementary services to augment the regular curriculum and instruction. It includes 24/7 Tutoring on Demand in writing, library, and key subject-matter areas, as well as paper reviews by writing tutors who return the papers within 24 hours and an automated instant paper review tool. Learn how Bridgepoint Education improved retention through these innovative approaches.
We’ve all been inspired at some point to completely overhaul our course design in order to improve student outcomes. Why then does intent sometimes fail to take flight? What happens if the objective is not achieved? We’ll show you how to efficiently navigate each twist and turn along the course redesign and/or refresh process using a set of tools and techniques to transform the student learning experience.
This presentation focuses on increasing student motivation via design, with a specific focus on the ARCS model of motivational design as it applies to the online learning space. Participants will leave with functional, practical takeaways that can be implemented into any course.
As a result of a growing emphasis on affordability and student success, alternatives to the traditional course material model is needed. Explore tasks required for a successful paradigm shift to digital course materials. Discover an integrated content strategy to support stakeholders, improve student experience, and help achieve your institution's mission.
Institutions use lots of data to predict student outcomes. However, there’s something missing: students’ engagement with learning materials. This session will showcase how instructors can improve outcomes by using course materials engagement data.
The growing demand for online learning is challenging universities to move beyond program-specific thinking to develop strategies and resources to deliver high quality online instruction across the university. Learn how one university is using a collaborative leadership model to promote institutional learning, innovation, and change.
Between 2015-2018, we ran an experiment offering online class to alumni, focused on intense asynchronous discussion on a social platform instead of a traditional LMS. In this session, we will share our findings according to the CoI model and engage the audience in a discussion of social collaborative learning.
This facilitated roundtable discussion explores the role and identity of instructional designers. We’ll discuss how instructional designers work as consultants, project managers, creative design thinkers, and/or other roles; how to communicate roles; power dynamics and empowerment for instructional designers; and challenges and lessons learned in various roles.
Remote-Learner is looking for feedback from educators on our administrator site dashboard. The site dashboard centralizes key actionable information about site activity such as usage reports, news and announcements, support cases, training opportunities, and more. The discussion will focus on identifying the priority information for presentation in the dashboard to maximize its usefulness to site administrators. For their time and contributions, the first ten people to arrive will receive a Starbucks gift card.
Space is limited so please RSVP as soon as possible.
With a recognizable gap in the research and evaluation of immersive content in online learning, more investigation is needed. Our initial effort to evaluate the effectiveness of 360 video and research its impact will be discussed. Participants can share their experience with immersive content and discuss research and design strategies.
When it comes to supporting faculty and instructional design, the argument is often local versus central, but leveraging combined approaches fosters mutually beneficial relationships that share best practices, encourage innovation, and pilot strategies and technologies. This discussion will share the experiences of four institutions from the college and institutional levels.
Learn how to redesign your course into a semester-long game-show that develops students’ skills while promoting active learning and fun in the classroom. This session demonstrations how to apply the “Iron Chef” game show as an anchor to convert an existing classroom-led course to a competition-based curriculum.
To support students in an innovative University of Florida hybrid admissions program, where admitted students complete their lower division requirements online using the UF Online infrastructure, UF Online has developed innovative programming to create opportunities for a traditional college experience in an online learning environment.
Recognizing that incorporating academic video into instruction greatly increases engagement and student achievement, Cuyahoga Community College created a mobile, multi-stream recording platform for its online courses.
Practice incorporating the first three Universal Design Principles into your online courses, no matter the age or skill level of your students. Logical, intuitive course design benefits not just students on the Autism Spectrum, but also ADHD students, international students, and anyone else trying to navigate online course content.
Twitter is the largest Professional Learning Network in existence & we need to get you plugged in. Discover what you have been missing at this conference, the collaboration, the discussion, the conference behind the conference. We will discuss whom to follow, twitter tips, & more. Join the discussion @ #OLCInnovate.
The University of Maine implemented a digital badging initiative that aids students in developing the skills employers need and the economy demands. Sixty badges were created, taking students from participant to leader, improving their workforce-readiness by offering active engagement experiences, within a three level, stackable pathway system.
We continue to hear stories of underrepresented and first generation students lagging behind or switching out of STEM majors. Hear how we are creating more stories of thriving through a new online speaker series, where faculty, staff, and students can share ideas, learn from one another, and build a community.
Instructors face numerous challenges for getting students to work in teams. The focus of this session is to present some of the elements and strategies faculty and instructional designers must take into consideration when planning, implementing and guiding virtual teams and team activities in online courses.
In a world of innovative teaching and distance learning, educators have a plethora of technological approaches available when developing or modifying courses. By employing empirical research models of fidelity of implementation and efficacy, educators can measure adherence to instructional interventions and their effect on targeted student achievement gaps.
Online teaching and learning (OTL) is promoted at many universities in a variety of ways. This session describes the development of an office of digital teaching and learning to include the addition of a faculty fellow who serves the department and University in several ways. The roles, responsibilities, and activities of a faculty fellow are presented along with initial outcomes. How does the faculty fellow and office of digital learning connect and collaborate with fellow faculty members and administrators to specifically promote OTL practices? Examples are provided.
Curious about how version 3 of a college success skills course evolved? Join us to learn about the process and results of the redesigned course. The motivation behind the changes for version 4 will be discussed. This presentation is targeted to instructional designers and faculty who create their own courses.
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 that will define the online learning economy of tomorrow.
How do you engage faculty in teaching innovation at a research university? Join us for an interactive session where we’ll share how Cornell is engaged in a process to merge academic technologies and the teaching center to enhance pedagogical innovation and improve the student experience. We will discuss opportunities, challenges, and consider how to move the needle on innovation in teaching.
This session will brainstorm how to take existing class assignments and projects and move them into an open pedagogical framework. Using already published examples and examples from the authors' own classes as a jumping off point, the discussion will focus on the promises of open pedagogy and how to move into it.
Among faculty there is still skepticism about the effectiveness of online learning. The Ecampus Research Unit at Oregon State University has created a searchable database that will help users to find discipline-specific research comparing online, hybrid/blended, and face-to-face modalities. Participants will be able to test the database and provide feedback.
Data-rich reports often lack the vibrancy needed to communicate impact. It is possible to share your data in a way that is compelling and memorable. Learn how to turn your data into an effervescent story for your next report, presentation, or grant application.
Join the StoryTelling IMPACTcommunity for a hands-on workshop in building your organizations' story. Take the next steps in telling your project's story with the guidance of experienced StoryTellers. Participants will come away with the early stages of their own story development for national audiences. Follow-up support will be provided regarding story completion and refinement, venue delivery, marketing planning, and using the finished story as a communication tool for local project stakeholders. Explore effective storytelling delivery methods such as video, interactive online tools, and eye-catching model construction or consumables.
The academy as the gatekeeper of knowledge, whose traditions of instruction provide the key, has metastasized into a perspective that people are not capable of learning independently of these traditions. All prior human history leads to a very different conclusion. In these dramatically changing times, institutions that prosper will be those that establish new traditions and replace the gatekeeper metaphor with a more appropriate metaphor - a bridge.
Dr. Kaye Shelton and Dr. Karen Pedersen will facilitation small group discussions with HBCU Summit participants on first steps in applying the OLC Quality Scorecard at their institution.
***Warning: This session is for instructors who can handle extreme excitement and engagement actually using VR/MR/AR
The real world is not flat after all, so why constrain our online classrooms to experience the digital world on a flat screen? An online student may be isolated from the instructor and other students, this ability to be virtually immersed in another environment could be invaluable. Instead of just staring at a flat computer screen, students could be transported to a more traditional classroom environment, a chemistry lab, or even a historical moment in time anywhere in the world.
Educators will learn how students can incorporate digital literacy into a face-to-face English Composition class in order to bolster traditional content, student engagement, and authentic learning. Hands-on activities will model free online tools for the development of a student-developed website as a digital portfolio.
Session facilitators and participants will jointly explore models, benefits and challenges, effective practices, and methods of evaluation that support online international collaboration. Audience participation will be encouraged throughout the presentation and session attendees will be invited to participate in future international collaborations with the session facilitators.
This presentation will showcase how eThink Education has helped various client institutions streamline current assessment practices by leveraging Competency Framework features within their existing Moodle instance.
Ask ten people what “the best learning experience” means. You’ll get ten different answers. The real answer is clear: educators should be able to teach the way they want. The use of a smart, flexible learning management system (LMS) can help increase student engagement, improve classroom management, and enable anytime/anywhere learning. This demonstration will showcase how D2L’s Brightspace platform supports student success.
Explore the benefits MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) offers members by participating in the MERLOT Mystery Challenge, modeled after the television game show Hollywood Squares, and hosted by a veteran Associate Editor and master Peer Reviewer as they share their valued experiences.
Technology has changed the landscape of higher education, creating opportunities to build diverse faculty teams while introducing unique challenges for virtual engagement and collaboration. This workshop considers opportunities for innovatively harnessing technology to develop a geographically diverse, engaged and productive virtual faculty to train the next generation.
Join us in the Exhibit Hall (Ryman Hall B1-B3, Conference Center Level 0, near conference registration) for a networking coffee break. Not only is this an opportunity to recharge with a fresh cup of coffee or tea, but you will also have the opportunity to network with other conference attendees, catch Round 1 of the "Whose Design Is Anyway?" competition in the Innovation Lab, explore the Innovation Installation, and visit our conference exhibitors.
WELCOME TO “WHOSE DESIGN IS IT ANYWAY?” – A SERIES OF SESSIONS WHERE EVERYTHING IS MADE UP AND THE POINTS DON’T MATTER AT ALL!
Improvisation and flexibility are hallmarks of innovation. In the Innovation Lab, we’re not only prepared to live that out – we want you to join in the fun too! Join us for our second annual installation of the improv series of “Whose Design is it Anyway?”, where we will incorporate Design Thinking and educational technology. Our audience and our contestants will collaborate to generate creative solutions and suggestions for incorporating technology into their teaching practices. We will be joined again this year by our resident and master blues musician, Rick Franklin, who will partner with our improv team to tease out the connections between music, improvisation, design and education. Rick's insights and skills are can't-miss fun and entertainment!
Be sure to check out the Innovation Lab schedule below for the schedule of “Whose Design Is It Anyway?” rounds (all during the networking coffee breaks), and make plans to meet us there. If you’re looking for a great way to step out of your comfort zone or even to create solutions for others - or if you just want to hear some great tunes while you sip your cup of joe - stop by and join us. You might even pick up a prize for your improvisational genius!
Come connect with your colleagues from the OLC Institute for Professional Development. OLC faculty, participants and those interested in becoming faculty for the OLC Institute are invited to attend. An update will be provided on current and developing initiatives.
Tired of sitting and in need of a good stretch? Join us in the yoga area of the exhibit hall (Ryman Hall B1, Conference Center Level 0, left side of the exhibit hall near the Blogger Bars) during the networking break for a 15 minute Stretch & Renew yoga class with Janet Smith, a fellow conference attendee and certified yoga instructor. Stretch and Renew yoga is made up of simple stretching using a chair as a prop. Conference attire welcomed. No mat needed.
Note: All OLC Innovate attendees participate in yoga classes at their own risk. In the unlikely event of injury, please note that OLC, MERLOT, and the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center may not be held liable.
BRIEF ABSTRACT: This roundtable discussion explores the impact of educational technology and online learning on the faculty job role and faculty career.
This focus group, facilitated by Laurie Hillstock - OLC Director of Community Engagement, is designed to collect feedback and encourage interaction among attendees on a variety of key topics. OLC is conducting this focus group on behalf of one of our OLC Innovate 2018 sponsors.
***This event is invitation only***
It’s difficult to find someone who fundamentally disagrees with the concept of Universal Design; however, its principles can be difficult for us to make actionable. In this conversation, participants will discuss the barriers to institutionalizing web accessibility practices and will share out resources and potential solutions break these barriers down.
We will discuss game design as part of broader movement of active learning. Game design, like game play, readily fits into flipped and project-based learning pedagogies. Students must account for the many levels of their creation—as a narrative, as a game, as a journey to facilitate learning and self discovery.
Self-study video modules with embedded quizzes were created, using three different video formats, to provide students with multimodal review/background material. The presenters will chronicle their quest to find the optimal student self-study video format which participants will be able to experience. Be sure to bring a laptop and earbuds!
Video conferencing is one of the most powerful tools for world-wide collaboration ever invented. Based on experience facilitating dozens of video conference experiences incorporating hundreds of participants from five continents, the leaders will demonstrate why video conferencing matters, and what makes a video conference succeed - or fail.
How do we move the needle to achieve better student outcomes in courses? Learn from two large grants, the Digital Learning Innovation Awards managed by the Online Learning Consortium and Accelerating Adaptive Learning managed by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities how faculty are leveraging digital tools for classroom, blended or online to make a difference.
Online courses can feel lonely and flat. VoiceThread brings energy to your content, discussions and assignments. With VoiceThread, you can improve social engagement and provide instructor immediacy to your students.
The Online Teaching Immersion Experience program was made possible by a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Guidance for Trainees Grant. Our program taught best practices in online course design and pedagogy to STEM graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. It involved a collaborative effort between Thomas Jefferson and Widener Universities.
Innovative partnerships that unite institutions, alternative learning providers and employers create an effective educational ecosystem to prepare learners for the workforce, and for higher learning. Explore models that are designed to increase access, affordability and degree completion through use of OER’s, prior learning assessment and alignment with academia-industry standards.
Padlet is a free “virtual wall” to house comments and posts. It's like using Post-It Notes, but on the web. In this session, learn how to use Padlet as part of your teaching toolbox to summarize a large amount of information—text, photos, graphs—for various assignments and class purposes.
Can open, customizable, self-mapped learning pathways make the transition from conceptual heutagogical idea to practical classroom application? This interactive presentation will explore the pros and cons of this emerging learning design approach by collaboratively brainstorming ideas with participants for how they can practically apply customizable pathway concepts to their courses.
Imagine being able to extend learning experiences for students beyond the classroom. Enhance and transform teaching and learning with the integration of Schoology's basic tools with the SAMR framework. In this session, educators are able to understand how the SAMR framework and Schoology support personalized learning.
Educators can respond to the challenges in higher education stronger together, as a community. This mindset was the impetus for the creation of the SkillsCommons.org IMPACTcommunities. Three communities were created to address specific needs in higher education: StoryTelling, Industry Expert to Expert Instructor, and the Skills2Work (S2W). Come hear each of the three communities discuss the progressive and successful outcomes of their work.
Although experts continue to study Millienials in an attempt to understand their behavior, a new demographic has surfaced that may significantly impact institutions of higher education: enter the Centennials. Although some demographic research has been reported in industry, Centennials and their social media use have not been explored in detail in scholarly educational research (Chou, 2009). We explore these and other issues in this study.
The agile teacher, is a gameful approach to faculty and staff workshops, that provides opportunities for discussion, collaboration and intellectual collision. The workshop invites participants to think through common challenges that arise in courses, and address issues of technology integration, personalized learning and student/teacher interaction.
Colleges and universities today face greater challenges than in years past. Increases in tuition costs coupled with a deficit of high-paying, after-college jobs suggest to some that college may not be worth the investment. Additionally, schools are under increasing scrutiny from multiple stakeholders to provide evidence that students are achieving set outcomes. With these challenges, it is more important than ever that our colleges and universities embrace technology in teaching and learning, and recognize that teaching today’s students necessitates a pedagogical shift to the teaching mindset.
This session will pose questions about the changing higher education landscape for faculty and students as well as explore ways to energize existing teaching and learning by infusing best practices in technology integration.
We didn’t realize the impact of a small, department initiative until Institutional Research called to determine the cause behind some impressive statistics. Join us as we chat about implementing and working to mandate an online student orientation for all incoming students.
To what extent do online students’ perceive their course satisfaction and dissatisfaction influence their course performance? Presenters will answer this question based on findings from a dissertation study and references such as Keller’s ARCS Model and Herzberg’s two-factor theory. They will recommend strategies that could potentially improve online students performance.
Join this IMPACTcommunity for an interactive discussion regarding implementing strong onboarding practices for industry experts new to the classroom. Take a tour of the new Industry Expert to Expert Teacher self-paced onboarding course, free to download today at https://www.skillscommons.org/handle/taaccct/10609. Develop a draft plan for how you can use this free and flexible resource at your own institution.
Hybrid course approaches are typically thought of as the combination of online and classroom experiences. The performing arts-based hybrid model instead features online content paired with student attendance of theatre and music experiences. Through this novel approach, students are exposed to a variety of performance types and a rich diversity of voices from the stage. Learn about how the Pennsylvania State University is using this arts-based hybrid model and the unique learning environment of the performance theatre to open discussions about diversity, inclusion, and equity with our undergraduate student population.
Technology is making distance learning a "clear and present" option for teachers. This session will present the challenges and many opportunities of distance piano instruction, as well as the tool and strategies in how to adapt curriculums for this new medium of long-distance education.
Participants will learn more about the new OLC Online Faculty Professional Development Framework and the implementation of this framework to support and prepare online faculty at their institution.
Are you hopping on the design thinking train? Learn how faculty, staff, and students at Dartmouth College are applying design thinking to curriculum, research, entrepreneurship, and life. In this session, we will briefly introduce design thinking principles, then participants will apply the process to their campuses, organizations, and lives.
With so many different educational technologies out there, how do institutions cut through the clutter and intentionally select products that will produce impact? What are the best and worst practices of the vendors that approach you? What should all vendors know in order to improve? And conversely how do vendors identify and approach the right people at institutions? What are some easy changes institutions could make to be better customers?
In this session, attendees will hear from a panel of decision makers at institutions and technology vendors who will discuss their approaches on evaluating and selecting education technologies.
Learn how the University of Waterloo uses modern online learning tools to develop and administer customized STEM courses to thousands of students worldwide
What are the ‘secret’ ingredients to make your class experience more interactive and to have your students more engaged and successful with their learning?
For over three decades now: email, telephones and spreadsheets have been the primary team communication and collaboration tools. We’ll iterate our way forward, exploring how today’s increasingly virtual workforce is using new tools like Slack, Teams, and Jira, that foster knowledge sharing, evidence-based decision making, personal connectivity and creativity.
A great debate brews: Should teachers allow smartphones in the classroom or not? Do smartphones distract from lessons or can they be incorporated into the curriculum to serve as tools supporting learning? Presenters and attendees will debate the use of smartphones in the classroom, discuss policies and solutions. Join us!
How we teach science often reinforces the idea that the purpose of experiments is to confirm our preconceived ideas. So when an experiment fails to give us what we expect, the experiment is often viewed as a failure. In this campfire story, hear how one student's perception of their science experiment highlighted classroom supports and barriers to failing.
Shel will talk about living on the edge of Failure, what it feels like, how to cope, and how it’s led to innovative opportunities she could have never imagined.
Have you ever had a door close in your face on an opportunity you were sure was your perfect fit? In that moment did you look around only to find a window you had never noticed before with an unexpected opportunity taking you to places you never imaged? We will be exploring this kind of situation and how it can be a transformative experience. Don’t be afraid to take a chance on flying through that window!
Maggie shares the limitations of her idealized, glorious, 'fail-proof' virtual reality assignment for her business and technical writing class.
Huge Mistake - Did I really buy into a bag phone, c'mon, not Google Glass too, seriously? I am that early adopter in online education that views the use of bleeding edge technology as my own badge of honor and am quick to throw away legacy applications.
Immediately following the Campfire Stories Keynote event, join your fellow conference attendees in the Exhibit Hall (Ryman Hall B1-B3, Conference Center Level 0 - near conference registration) for networking and musical entertainment during our Innovate Welcome Reception. Refreshments will be served; don't forget your complimentary drink ticket!
The MERLOT Leadership meeting allows editors, members of the editorial boards, Peer Reviewers Extraordinaire and project directors of MERLOT to look back on the previous year's accomplishments, and plan ahead for the future. Dinner will be served.
***This is an invitation only event***
Join us at the Gaylord Opryland each evening (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday; 9-10pm, Delta Pavilion) for Campfire Gatherings. After the days events (and with ample time for you to go grab dinner first), we will be hosting themed get-togethers as a venue to meet with friends, start up new collaborations, or just unwind from a day packed with innovative ideas.
Wednesday Night: Gaming
We’ll roll out the twenty-sided dice, shuffle the decks, and calibrate the joysticks for a night of games. Whether you’re a subject matter expert on role playing games or you want to try your hand at a virtual cow milking competition, we’ll have a game for you.
Ready to start the day energized? Join us for a 1 hour Slow Flow Yoga class with Janet Smith, a fellow conference attendee and certified yoga instructor. Slow flow yoga is made up of slow flow (three breaths per posture), including sun and/or moon salutations. Yoga mat (we will have towels on hand if you don't have one), comfy clothes, and water bottle needed.
Note: OLC Innovate attendees participate in yoga classes at their own risk. In the unlikely event of injury, please note that OLC, MERLOT, and the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center may not be held liable.
All attendees are invited to start the day with a fun gathering for breakfast! Come get to know your colleagues, learn ways to get more deeply engaged with the MERLOT & OLC communities, and participate in (or get the answers to) MERLOT & OLC trivia questions with a chance to win prizes.
After conducting seven cross-institutional research studies in online learning and competency-based education, we will share what we have learned in the process and discuss ways to advance cross-institutional research.
The focus group is designed to collect feedback from OLC members regarding their experiences within the OLC Community.
***This focus group is invitation only***
We are interested in the place of online education at small liberal arts schools. These institutions are not typically grappling with pressures driving bigger institutions to online education and often have core practices cited as predictors of student success. Can online education be healthy for the mission of such institutions?
This conversation will focus on how OER programs that once focused solely on content and cost savings can also facilitate the types of activities that enable faculty to implement open pedagogies: teaching with OER in innovative ways which only open licensing could permit.
This presentation is geared for anyone desiring to utilize personalized video technology to enhance classes. Video technology can be utilized to expand upon course content, clarify assignment requirements, and provide feedback on assignments. Presenters will demonstrate the use of Loom and will share examples of how it can be used.
How does your college build capacity for innovation? How do you know if changes are actually improvements? Learn how one college is using improvement science to better serve online students. Take away useful tools for any improvement or innovation project.
Targeted data analysis can strongly impact student engagement. In this session, participants will learn effective instructional strategies for adaptive learning and how to use data to determine the most effective strategy for faculty to use.
Over the past decade, ProctorU has been a pioneer in online proctoring. From creating the very first online proctoring solution to becoming the standard in live proctoring, ProctorU now has the industry's first automated proctoring solution powered by artificial intelligence.
Looking for a way to "escape" the traditional teaching and learning environment? Creating Digital Breakout Games can help you "breakout" of your day to day routines while engaging your students, not only in content, but also the four C's of 21st century learning: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity.
In this session, participants will be introduced to a brick and mortar classroom-based strategy known as “5 Practices for orchestrating productive discussions” and consider how it might be adapted to an online discussion board with the goal of developing a new strategy for facilitating effective online discussions.
In this education session presenters will introduce a framework for online instruction. The participants will then engage with the framework and utilize it to develop ideas for improved facilitation and design practices, troubleshoot challenges faced in online learning, and evaluate the design and delivery of online courses.
As a professor of blended Instructional Technology courses, I have utilized several strategies to help build community in my classroom, including the use of social media, small group work, and requests for personal information. I will present these strategies for faculty who wish to build community in blended courses.
This conversation will focus on ideation and strategies for implementation of a scaleable online program to address critical technical and soft-skills gaps among University of Arizona undergraduate students. What could a successful a la carte, personalized, flexible and easily accessible curricular program look like? How can we leverage current resources and ensure effective collaboration among our academic partners?
Generate Enthusiasm in 30 Seconds! Try out a compelling engagement tool for any group. No experience needed. An anytime, anywhere, method for involving student voice into any content
While online education is on the rise, attrition of these students has remained a significant issue. This study addresses what factors can predict persistence in online undergraduate programs at a four-year institution. The factors that were explored included pre-college academic characteristics, demographic characteristics, academic performance, and learner behavior of online students.
Smartphones and tablets are rapidly replacing laptops as the student’s device of choice for eLearning purposes. Predictive analytics tells us that we will need to be ready for the tech savvy digital natives as their classroom use of interactive touch screen technology is significantly different than the educational foundations of previous generations.
Faculty understand the immediacy of integration and are interested in how mobile apps could be incorporated into their curriculum. Why then is there a disconnection between intention and adoption?
Using guided inquiries in traditional classrooms yields noteworthy learning and engagement results. However, this instructional method is rarely used in non-science fields or in an online setting. Attendees will themselves experience a guided inquiry as they learn about the method’s strengths, broad online and curricular applicability, and underlying theoretical support.
Teaching and Learning Technologies at Purdue University has developed a comprehensive pilot process to evaluate new learning technologies. The pilot planning process, establishing a diverse teaching and learning support team, faculty recruitment, implementation, and assessment strategies will be shared with the participants.
ASU and CogBooks are developing a first of its kind integrated adaptive curriculum in undergraduate education. Entitled the “BioSpine,” this project will develop an adaptable learning environment so that collaborative teaching communities can create concept charts and content that can be configured into courses by faculty to enable student success.
Self-Mapped Learning Pathways are an innovative instructional approach that facilitates learner agency while moving learners towards heutagogical/self-determined learning. Learners create their own individualized pathways through a course that potentially encompasses several different modalities. This session examines current research into practical applications of Self-Mapped Learning Pathways in traditional college courses.
SkillsCommons is providing customized services and targeted OER solutions for large scale employers, industry associations, state level educational systems such as Ivy Tech Information Technology Departments across Indiana, Ohio Manufacturing Association, and Nissan Auto. Participants will get a first look at some of today's OER innovations provided by SkillsCommons in partnership with TAACCCT initiatives and our talented technology partners.
Many of us have heard of the concept of digital accessibility and are aware of things like adding alt text to images and captions to videos, but what would it really be like to walk in someone else’s shoes to truly experience the real impact of digital accessibility? In this interactive session, you will be exposed to a variety of assistive technologies, the students that use them, and strategies that we as instructors and designers can use to make the learning experience more positive for ALL students.
The HBCU-Innovate panel will discuss the same five challenges Navin Pathak addressed in his 2015 blog, "Barriers to Adopting OER By Colleges in Developing Nations", as these challenges are very much the same facing HBCU's.
Technology has reached new heights in helping both instructors and students gain the ability to think and communicate through generated drawings. This talk will investigate: 1) tools and methods for production of drawings; 2) digital approaches to analysis; and 3) technological affordances for fostering drawing in educational contexts.
Participants will leave this dynamic session with a universal design toolkit and action plan (inspired by design thinking) meant to address issues of accessibility and inclusivity on their own campuses and in their classrooms. Expect to engage in applying the principles of design thinking and interact with your peers!
BYOD (we will test eight free apps)! Web 2.0 tools are a great way to create higher order thinking. They engage today’s technology savvy student by creating active/flipped learning environments. Come learn how to use Web 2.0 tools to update all aspects of courses including syllabi, rubrics, and pitfalls of using web tools. Leave with a boss list of free Web 2.0 tools!
You’ve decided to try an Inclusive Access program at your school. Great! But now what? Ensuring you have the right tools in place, like a communication plan, course-selection strategy and automating the process, can impact your program’s growth & success
Join us to transform a short screen recording into an engaging online lesson. Walk away with your own video complete with in-video quizzing, live video commenting, accurate closed captioning, and other interactive elements. No video experience needed!
With the successful launch of a revolutionary free student tool, eLearnReady, we analyzed students’ responses, identifying their strengths--and improving their weaknesses in online learning. This presentation discusses the identified key variables (n=3000+) of online student success, as well as the user's experience with the tool.
A phenomenological study investigated factors that promoted online course completion among African American male undergraduate students. Factors of online course completion were financial assistance, prior academic achievement, previous information technology (IT) training, continuous academic enrollment, less demanding online subject content, use of handheld digital devices, and non-prejudicial learning environment.
In this Career Forum Roundtable, participants will have a discussion with researchers in the field about how to work with other researchers, tips on how to break into the field of research, and options for publication. Presenters bring unique perspectives to the table, as they all have played a variety of roles in the research field and have contributed to the field in a variety of ways. This is a unique opportunitiy to learn, interact,netowrk, and receive mentoring around this topic.
This session will be a demonstration of the Syllabus Builder. The Syllabus Builder is a customizable template builder that streamlines the process of creating, revising, and repurposing a course syllabus. Syllabus creation is embedded into the LMS, making the syllabus a living part of the course it represents.
Substantial research demonstrates online education’s efficacy, with demand for online courses growing each year. However, critics and skeptics abound, resulting in deleterious effects for faculty who teach online and ultimately, students. Join a conversation about these effects and discuss strategies to overcome persistent criticism of online education.
Where exactly does innovation take place? Who defines what innovation is? Faculty? Administrators? Entrepreneurs? The answers to these questions are deeply contested in today’s ed-tech marketplace. This session brings into discussion a diverse group of stakeholders--faculty members, instructional designers, vendors, and conference organizers--struggling with these questions.
Online instructors need to be intentional about crafting a sense of presence in their courses. Acquire quick and easy tools for your toolbox to successfully establish your presence in your online class. Various tools we will be exploring include, GroupMe, Doceri, Remind, Google Forms, Flubaroo and other beneficial apps.
Can gamification as pedagogy be the new norm? When properly designed, gamification as pedagogy can promote learning and deepen student understanding. It can empower students to be more collaborative, engaging and imaginative. Additionally, gamification can support diverse learning styles through the inclusion of principles of good design and pedagogy.
Come learn how a team of instructors at the University of Mississippi is using adaptive learning modules to personalize the learning environment and level the field for underserved and underprepared students.
It's time to get serious about student authentication. Learn how SmarterID is different from anything else like it on the market.
The arc of a college or university professor's life can be difficult. Teaching, writing, and service to the profession is time consuming. What if you could support all three of these elements with one activity? Learn about MERLOT peer reviewing and the possibilities for your professional growth!
Podcasting is enjoying a resurgence, partly because it is so engaging, and partly because it has become relatively easily produced. We’ll explore together what it takes to make an effective podcast for the benefit of students or colleagues.
Southwest Tennessee Community College is on the forefront of groundbreaking education when it comes to integrating high impact practices (HIPs) and emerging technologies into teaching and learning. Central to the transformation is the newly formed Office for High Impact Practices and Innovation (HIPI). You are invited to participate in a thought-provoking discussion on how HIPs and emerging technologies forces us to ask new questions, find new solutions, and possibly formulate new definitions for teaching and learning. For researchers and administrators, the next layer of contemplation is how do we measure and assess the impact of high impact practices and emerging technologies within the framework of student learning outcomes, retention, and graduation.
Integrations aid in meeting quality standards for an exceptional student experience. Examples of integrations and how they help aid in meeting quality design standards will be presented.
New instructional design model IDEA (interact, develop, engage, and assess) uses a collaborative team approach to develop learning objects. This team approach can bridge the gap for faculty faced with developing engaging online activities to motivate students and facilitate learning.
This presentation will reinforce the importance of instructional technology advocacy through the of NearPod. In addition to NearPod's promotion of engaged, student-centered learning, the presentation will acknowledge the digital divide between 21st century learners and their 20th century teachers, administrators, and educational preparatory providers.
Sacred Heart University’s OER initiative has seen positive results in its first stage of planning and implementation. Five factors have been driving change – tactical planning, collaborative networking, awareness building, impact measurement, and pedagogy focus. Using evidence-based examples, we will share strategies for cost-savings, increased access, and enhanced pedagogical practices.
DigPINS (Digital: Pedagogy, Identity, Networks, and Scholarship) is a new and exciting online faculty development course focusing on participatory exploration of who we are and how we interact and learn online. Built using open resources, a Creative Commons template of the curriculum has been released which can be adapted for your institution.
It is important to understand what devices students prefer to use to access online course materials. This session shares the results of a study that examined 1,991 online students’ device preferences for accessing online course sites, viewing video content, and learning with simulations and games.
As online courses continue to increase, the use of discussion boards continues to be the main venue for communication between learners and their instructor. This qualitative study analyzed student perceptions of how students prefer their instructor to engage with them when discussion boards are being utilized in the online classroom.
Web 2. 0 technologies allow faculty members to help focus the attention of students and reach different kinds of learners on different levels. Not all Web 2. 0 tools are accessible to people with disabilities. This session will explore accessible Web 2. 0 tools that drive inquiry, and differentiate instruction.
This session addresses the challenges associated with academic integrity during online testing. Video monitoring has leveled the playing field for students and instructors using web-cam technology to create a proctored setting. A literature review of online cheating, technology tools and the impact on grade-based learning outcomes will be presented.
Healthcare and Manufacturing Editorial Boards will meet for calibrated review sessions of sector-specific materials found in SkillsCommons.
Optional meeting time for small group work for StoryTelling, IE2EI, and S2W sub-communities
The session will highlight a new generation of MERLOT that will incorporate visual and functional important technology changes that have taken place since the last release of MERLOT 4 years ago. Some examples include aspects of new developments in user interface design and machine learning concepts.
Participants will receive practical experience on how they can use MERLOT in their own AL$ initiative
Higher education thought leaders will give lightning talks, TED-style. Learn from high profile practitioners about innovations in college teaching—touching on trends in flipped classrooms, learning science, OER and more. Following the lightning talks, attendees will have an opportunity to engage in a Q and A with the speakers.
This interactive education session focuses on helping simplify the TPK part of the TPACK model by classifying mobile apps by pedagogical decisions. Apps will be presented by pedagogy and a live discussion will occur in Google Hangouts during the session. Attendees will access documents via a Google Folder.
This session will showcase a sustainable continuous improvement model through a compelling case study of the nursing program at Loma Linda University. Through a unique partnership, Loma Linda and iDesign have worked together to redesign the online RN to BS program.
The College of Business at University of Nebraska wanted to improve the consistency and usability of their online MBA courses as they migrated from Blackboard to Canvas. To help, they turned to Design Tools for Canvas by Cidi Labs, which provides helpful design and templating tools to make their courses shine.
Designed for faculty and designers who are not in formal leadership positions, this workshop encourages attendees to grow ideas, lead from where they are, and increase innovation at their institutions. Fill your toolkit with strategies and tools for supporting ideas with research, pilot planning, evaluation, and achieving buy-in.
Academic integrity in online education is critically important. This session involves a discussion of the approaches used at the presenter’s institution to educate faculty and students about academic integrity as well as the tools and processes that can be used to prevent and detect acts of dishonesty.
Join us in the Exhibit Hall (Ryman Hall B1-B3, Conference Center Level 0) for a networking coffee break. Recharge with a fresh cup of coffee or tea, network with fellow conference attendees, and visit with our conference exhibitors. Don't forget to visit the Innovation Lab for Round 2 of "Whose Design Is It Anyway?", explore the Innovation Installation, and get your cards stamped by our exhibitors in order to win prizes at the end of the conference.
WELCOME TO “WHOSE DESIGN IS IT ANYWAY?” – A SERIES OF SESSIONS WHERE EVERYTHING IS MADE UP AND THE POINTS DON’T MATTER AT ALL!
Improvisation and flexibility are hallmarks of innovation. In the Innovation Lab, we’re not only prepared to live that out – we want you to join in the fun too! Join us for our second annual installation of the improv series of “Whose Design is it Anyway?”, where we will incorporate Design Thinking and educational technology. Our audience and our contestants will collaborate to generate creative solutions and suggestions for incorporating technology into their teaching practices. We will be joined again this year by our resident and master blues musician, Rick Franklin, who will partner with our improv team to tease out the connections between music, improvisation, design and education. Rick's insights and skills are can't-miss fun and entertainment!
Be sure to check out the Innovation Lab schedule below for the schedule of “Whose Design Is It Anyway?” rounds (all during the networking coffee breaks), and make plans to meet us there. If you’re looking for a great way to step out of your comfort zone or even to create solutions for others - or if you just want to hear some great tunes while you sip your cup of joe - stop by and join us. You might even pick up a prize for your improvisational genius!
Tired of sitting and in need of a good stretch? Join us in the yoga area of the exhibit hall (Ryman Hall B1, Conference Center Level 0, left side of the exhibit hall near the Blogger Bars) during the networking break for a 15 minute Stretch & Renew yoga class with Janet Smith, a fellow conference attendee and certified yoga instructor. Stretch and Renew yoga is made up of simple stretching using a chair as a prop. Conference attire welcomed. No mat needed.
Note: All OLC Innovate attendees participate in yoga classes at their own risk. In the unlikely event of injury, please note that OLC, MERLOT, and the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center may not be held liable.
Many Ed Tech professionals enter the field as an employment opportunity, a use of their discrete skills, or a transition to another livelihood. Even with academic training there may be gaps in skills or foundational knowledge, or a realistic understanding of career opportunities. How do we support those new to the field?
This focus group, facilitated by Laurie Hillstock - OLC Director of Community Engagement, is designed to collect feedback and encourage interaction among attendees on a variety of key topics. OLC is conducting this focus group on behalf of one of our OLC Innovate 2018 sponsors.
***This event is invitation only***
This scaffolded brainstorm invites participants to examine the accessibility culture on their own campus to identify individuals that may be crucial in creating a community that can support accessibility endeavors. This will be followed by activities designed to help participants develop strategies for creating an accessibility community at their own institution.
How do laboratory exercises, and the expectations associated with them, translate into online learning environments? This question and associated solutions and concerns will be the focus of our session. Specifically, we’ll host conversation on the viability of online lab science curriculum exploring practical examples and potential answers for instructors.
This presentation will build upon our 2017 OLC Accelerate workshop with curated insights from participants in order to frame blended learning in the context of institutional change management. Attendees will be guided through resource-sharing and networking opportunities as we explore successes and challenges related to developing blended curricula.
An opportunity exists for Universities to partner with local employers, supporting strategic student career choices and uncovering employment laddering to lay foundations for students to upskill in specific career categories. Studies indicate that students lack skills, knowledge, or opportunities to strategically align career goals with educational aspirations and job pathing.
In this session, we will explore best practices in e-learning video conferencing. We will apply the theories of "transactional distance" and "Communities of Inquiry" as we evaluate this technology and consider the most popular tools and what current research is saying related to student success.
Learn about building an online science kit with hands-on investigations for your students and a free textbook. Stop by our presentation to discover how your learning outcomes can be synced with individual investigations and specific sections of OpenStax texts, giving students a one-stop-shop for their text and kit that makes online science easier than ever.
Pinterest has seen a meteoric rise in use in recent years with 200 million active monthly users as of September, 2017. This presentation reports on the results of a study that seeks to explore the use of Pinterest as a teaching and learning tool.
Is the grass greener working elsewhere? Or is your work environment the golden unicorn everyone desires? Come learn about the competencies instructional designers expressed are needed in the field, those they are actually using in the workplace, and ways instructional designers would prefer filling their capacity in the workplace.
OER production has yet to become popular in higher education for reasons including lack of awareness, technical inhibitions, policy confusion, IP concerns, time constraints, and lack of incentives. Our solution is the OER Schema, a specification that aims to promote interoperability and portability of OER content utilizing principles of remixing.
Formative assessments have the potential to be a very effective tool for learner success in online higher education. We set forth exploring the literature to define and implement a scalable solution. We discovered much more and have distilled it into a set of key principles and a simple pragmatic approach.
This session is about a course activity and assessment for web resource evaluation. Using a free social bookmarking tool as the foundation, this multi-part assignment includes individual work, group work, and peer assessment. Created as part of an OER course redesign, relevant activity instructions and grading rubrics will be shared.
We will explore how technology can effectively inform, expand, and provide structure for the design and development of courses and assessments. Lipscomb University will share the process of designing a program in a new learning platform, Sagence Learning. What are the key elements to be considered in designing new pathways?
A small group of faculty can drive big decisions regarding services and faculty development. This session aims to invite participants to share what they have learned about gaining broader understanding of faculty online teaching and technology needs, including surveying faculty.
The #eduFollowChallenge is an ever-developing idea to better connect educators. It began with a listing of 100 P-20 educators from every state and has grown into a global challenge to connect those who have a passion for education. Hear the story of why & how you can participate, connect, & collaborate.
The results of a study of impact and user features of a menu of online writing supports are shared. Findings suggest that learners who use writing supports experience higher pass rates, lower drop and fail rates, and higher course grades than students who do not reach out for writing supports.
Surprising barriers and successes have come with the transition from teaching non traditional students biology in face-to-face versus blended learning environments. Key to success was fostering a committed learning community where persistence and collaboration mattered and blending of hands on and online resources was strategic. Come see.
Title: Utilizing technology for effective and efficient online instruction
The ubiquitous nature of online instruction poses time management issues for online instructors. Although there are many best practices studies available regarding online instruction, there is still a gap in research in efficiency and time management. This presentation will provide data on where online full time faculty and adjunct faculty spend the most time, as well as strategies to impact instructional efficiency and efficacy using technological tools.
SkillsCommons has developed partnerships with a variety of organizations and companies to accelerate the adoption, revision, and improvement of OER produced by the TAACCCT grantees. The presentation will review the SkillsCommons partnership strategies and a guest partner will demonstrate its technologies and services to makeover OER so it is more interactive and easier to integrate into institutional practices.
We present results from collaborative, adaptive learning research between two universities and a vendor. Results describe student attitudes across different college settings, students’ adaptive behavior patterns and gains in student outcomes. Suspending the vendor/university relationship allows for collaborative research partnerships--what should become the new normal in higher education.
11:15am-11:30am MERLOT and SkillsCommons: Workforce Training & Careers
This session will focus on OER resources for career and workforce development
11:30am-12:00pm Hands-on AL$ Workshop on OER (Connecting to Your Planning Activities)
Digital education faces a number of challenges in 2018: increased enrollments, budget shortfalls, competition for enrollments and widening disparity in access, economics and student success. These challenges are fuelled by a number of factors including the value (or possibly, declining value) of college degrees, social movements, local contexts, and demographic change (Smith, 2014).
This moderated panel seeks to surface some of the challenges and opportunities for growth presented by diversity and inclusion initiatives in technology-enhanced and distance higher education and student success. Panelists represent perspectives from an array of institution types, and will interact with not only the moderated questions, but also questions and prompts from the panel audience.
“Creating an inclusive higher education community is an essential ingredient in helping achieve social equality, and is an important element of meaningful lifelong learning (Stefani & Blessinger, 2014, p. 3).” Join our panelists for an open, critical discussion of the challenges we face as a field, and how we might collaboratively shift the structures and cultures that allow them to manifest.
Smith, D. G. (2014). Diversity and inclusion in higher education: Emerging perspectives on institutional transformation. Routledge.
Stefani, L., & Blessinger, P. (Eds.). (2017).Inclusive Leadership in Higher Education: International Perspectives and Approaches. Routledge.
In this fun and highly interactive workshop, participants experience a sample teambuilding exercise using simulation software. You will take on the roles of a starship crew, teaming up to defend the galaxy. You will learn to set up a starship bridge to conduct exercises in any typical academic computer lab.
This session features ways in which the CSU Quality Learning and Teaching (QLT) program supports effective design and delivery of online-blended-flipped courses. An open access Quality Assurance Resource Repository (QuARRy) features standards-indexed exemplars from peer-reviewed and certified courses. All resources from the QLT program are available via Creative Commons.
At Georgia Tech, we built and tested a MOOC-style for-credit course using McGraw-Hill's SmartBook, edX, and Vocareum, achieving equal performance as a traditional class while improving many elements of the student experience.
How to get usable improvement-based data in the hands of faculty to help in strategic planning, student satisfaction, and the overall quality of education.
We are constantly working to offer new “gourmet selections” of LTI tools to expand the capabilities of the LMS and to encourage pedagogical innovation and collaboration within the online environment. Each tool demands a specialized implementation plan including varying levels of evaluation, preliminary testing, piloting, documentation and support development.
The purpose of this interactive session is to explore the conditions that impact collaboration in boundary-spanning partnerships. Through brainstorming and concept mapping activities, we will build upon the collective knowledge of the session participants to identify strategies for nurturing and leveraging the creative power of multi-faceted, multi-perspective teams.
Join us for lunch as we honor OLC and MERLOT Award winners for significant contributions to knowledge, practice, and innovation in online and blended learning. The OLC Effective Practice Awards and Best-in-Track Awards will be presented, as well as the MERLOT Classics Awards and other MERLOT Awards. Tickets for the awards luncheon ($22 early bird; $30 regular and onsite) are on sale during advance registration and onsite at the conference registration desk (Ryman Hall Foyer B, Convention Center Level 2).
All attendees and guests who wish to attend the Awards Lunch must purchase a ticket. OLC and MERLOT subsidize the additional cost of this plated three-course meal above the ticket fee for registered conference attendees. Guest lunch tickets are available as well ($60 early bird; $65 regular and onsite). If you do not plan to attend the Award Lunch, lunch will be on your own.
TBD
What if you really only have 2 weeks to prepare your online course? We are confronted with this challenge more often than we’d like to admit. The challenge is identifying where to start and who to engage in a quick-start process. Join the conversation to share ideas and solutions.
How do we engage with terms and conditions set by teaching and learning platforms used in higher education? This hands-on session offers a tool, created by the presenters, for analyzing platforms with the goal of protecting students’ data and privacy. Get out your “red pens” and prepare to annotate!
Innovative teaching through students-centered use of iPad and its positive impact on meeting different learning styles, promoting students’ creativity, self-reflection and collaboration.
Adopting innovative courseware and tools can be time consuming and frustrating, but it doesn’t have to be. Each of our panel members is at the forefront of adoption practice in their own way. They will share their current process, best practices for communicating, and what they see as next.
This presentation is both interactive and educational, as I poll the audience to show why taking your subject matter from an ugly duckling to a beautiful swan affects the learning experience. Our best practices will show how to inject life into your content with colour, audio/video, avatars and gamification.
Institutions of higher education are involved in a variety of initiatives to improve student learning. In this session participants will review, analyze, and discuss seven ways in which institutions are using data and assessment approaches to yield actionable information and improve student learning outcomes.
Successful faculty development programs, flipped faculty development, faculty-centered/faculty-driven approached to supporting innovation, student-centered learning, design thinking, bottom-up inspiration vs. top-down mandates, cross-discipline collaboration, agile instructional design teams, a learning culture, transparency, sharing across departments and models, iterative cycle of innovation and development, cross-functional partnerships, faculty engagement, learning through mistakes, human-centered approaches to design, spotlight on faculty as driver, balancing efficiency/scale and creative expression, experiential learning, grass-roots vs. top-down driven change, human aspect of change management, organic and faculty-driven innovation and models, faculty and institutional narratives.
Completing a dissertation online is challenging, often compounded by feelings of isolation and uncertainty. To support online students as they dissertate, we designed an app—akin to theknot.com or thebump.com—to provide customized support and resources in a calendar. This session will provide innovative ideas about this pilot project.
The primary purpose of the following presentation is to showcase the design of a hybrid/blended graduate course in community and public health which is nationally certified (Quality Matters)- using best practices and research to actively engage the learners and meeting effective student learning outcomes.
Universal design for learning (UDL) provides guidelines to support diverse populations of learners. This conversation, led by a team of instructional designers, will demonstrate how the Office of Digital Learning collaborated with an online program in implementing UDL principles from concept to completion.
Creating Killer Content with an Apple iPhone
Apple’s line of phones have always been able to capture footage but now that the new iPhone 10 has been released - it changed the playing field. Shooting great video has never been easier and we all know on-line learners love video.
The new camera (that also works as a phone) can grab 1080p high-definition clips at 60 frames per second, take 240-fps slow-motion shots, shot time lapse scenes, provide cinematic video stabilization, and even has up to 256 gigabytes of storage which is more than enough for a short film. Join 2-time Emmy award winning filmmaker Steve Julin in the innovation lab as he'll share his insights after testing the camera out on numerous video shoots and demo some filmmaker friendly iPhone gadgets.
Engagement, the new frontier. These are the voyages of the Designer’s session. It’s 45 min. mission: to explore innovative design, to seek out engagement, and new faculty training. To boldly go where no designer has gone before. Join us for an interactive session focused on innovative design and engagement in online faculty training. Grab your tech and we’ll see you on the Holodeck.
Employers demand communication skills, problem-solving skills, and fluency in virtual teams. The discussion board in the virtual classroom aids students in developing and refining these skills. However, a large, multi-part research study suggests that discussion boards may not be achieving this goal. This interactive session will share our lessons learned.
You know that someone told you using online discussions was good, but why was that again? Is there a better way to do online discussions? This session looks at research on discussions, ideas for improving discussions, and time to share what you are doing for online discussions.
As the trend increases with more online enrollments, instructors are looking at new technologies to facilitate student discourse and increase student social presence. This study looked at the use of Yellowdig, a closed social media platform, to gauge student social presence.
Many online learners struggle to integrate academically and socially to the online learning environment, resulting in student attrition.The panelists will explore the relationship between developing and nurturing an intentional online learner community with a focus on improved student satisfaction and persistence. Through a series of questions, panelists will reflect on a connected set of strategies to support hybrid and online students.
Learn how UMUC is incorporating a problem-solving approach and real life applications of concepts in a new statistics pathway alternative to college-level algebra using open educational resources. The goal is to increase transferability of career-relevant skills by enhancing both metacognition and relevancy of mathematical concepts to solving novel problems.
In this conversation, leaders from Oregon State Ecampus will briefly present findings from a national study about instructional designer participation in research. Attendees will discuss instructional designers’ current roles, barriers and opportunities inherent in current organizational structures, and potential benefits of engaging instructional designers in research on teaching and learning.
The Interested in Teaching Online? resource is a large-scale online faculty professional development initiative intended to reach the largest most diverse group of potential online faculty in SUNY.
The SkillsCommons Ambassador Network is sustaining TAACCCT project successes through IMPACTcommunities. These communities of experts and the SkillsCommons team are launching the next steps in SkillsCommons programs to sustain and scale up the efforts develop under TAACCCT initiatives.
In this interactive, moderator-led panel, university faculty will provide tools and tactics for transforming curricula and fostering engagement in the online learning environment. Each panelist will showcase an innovative instructional design or educational technology then open the discussion to include audience members to share quick tips for creative online pedagogy.
Every institution is facing its own accessibility challenges in its own way. One thing that joins us all is the reality of change management. This session will take an honest look at the idea of "accessibility as change."
Explore the innovative free and open source software powering the Excelsior College Online Writing Lab: a customizable OER that replaces expensive textbooks with custom writing and reading resources; a learning object delivery platform with hundreds of embeddable interactive exercises; and a learning management tool for students to track OWL activities.
We propose “Design for Universal Active Learning” model by blending active learning with universal design for learning, in hope of using it to guide simple design that supports learner success. We will also demonstrate how to use this model to guide the design of two courses/trainings at two universities.
We will demonstrate analytical reports that we can provide from a live online class.
Employers know the skills they need recent college graduates to possess, and they’re not necessarily seeing those skills demonstrated by the job candidates they interview. To ensure that our graduates are prepared for the workforce, first we need to understand how employers define workforce readiness.
This session will share how California State University's SkillsCommons project is curating over 40,000 workforce development open educational resources and program support materials created by TAACCCT grantees.
The data analysis of online supplemental instruction for 5 online general education courses has revealed unexpected results. We will share our data and open a discussion about the value of supplemental instruction, methods for program evaluation, and alternative interventions to improve student success at your institution.
Learn how universities have implemented an online proctoring system to meet the unique needs of their programs and students while protecting the integrity of their online assessments.
How do you ensure quality courses when you cannot mandate course design? What motivates faculty participation: time, money, digital badges, or something else. Let’s have a conversation about what has or has not worked at your institution as you address the issue of quality in your online programs.
What if universities never existed? Would a degree still be the mark of an educated individual? If degrees were no longer the benchmark of learning achievement, how would a society gauge learning? Alternative educational providers are beginning to answer these questions and the impact on higher education will be extraordinary.
Explore the US Department of Labor’s National Repository of workforce development OER and save time and money by adopting and customizing quality online curriculum for workforce development. Learn about the tools, templates, and techniques for rapidly development quality career and technical training by using the TAACCCT OER.
Educational organizations need evidence about educational interventions that is practical, actionable, and relevant. This workshop delivers the knowledge and skills necessary for individuals to conceptualize and operationalize rapid cycle evaluations, and thereby develop the ability to collect and utilize evidence through the practical application of research.
Since its founding, the Online Learning Consortium has had as a foundation the Five Pillars of Quality Online Education. The Pillars have long signaled that quality and excellence matter and a focus on quality is an eternal quest. Showcased in this session will be the Quality Course Teaching and Instructional Practice (QCTIP) scorecard which focuses on best practices for teaching in the online classroom.
Research shows that the cost of course materials is one of the biggest challenges college students face. Students must make tough choices - finance their materials with debt, buy used copies, share digital resources, seek counterfeit options, or worse, nothing at all. Learning is suffering.
The Positive Reinforcement Tutorial was designed by Dr. Lyle Grant in the late 90s and has been a cornerstone in a series of tutorials designed by Dr. Grant and other members of psychology department at Athabasca University. Now retired, Dr. Grant used principles of behaviour analysis to create a tutorial where students could gain practice in the discrimination of key features that operationally define the concept of positive reinforcement in psychology.
SociologyInFocus.com is a website where current events, pop culture, or common everyday experiences are used as illustrative examples of a sociological concept or to highlight a sociological research finding. The site which is written for a student/general reader was made by educators for educators. Each piece on the site ends with four questions so that teachers can assign them to their students or use them to launch a class discussion. SociologyInFocus.com, which is completely free & open to all, was created by Dr. Nathan Palmer and funded by Pearson.
Affected by challenges at your institution? Join us, for a discussion about real-world problems solved collaboratively with synchronous discussions and asynchronous work using online and open source technology tools.
HHMI BioInteractive advances science education by using the power of story to inspire students to learn about and engage in the scientific process, and care about the living world. BioInteractive creates and distributes free, high-quality teaching resources and professional development programs for tens of thousands of educators each year. Produced by educators and scientists, available in English and Spanish, and aligned to recognized curriculum, the media resources on www.BioInteractive.org include short films, hands-on activities, interactive features such as virtual labs, data sets, and animations. Many highlight the work of scientists at different career stages, from undergraduates to senior research professors, talking about their research and their lives as scientists.
Flipgrid is where social and emotional learning happens! The leading video discussion platform for millions of PreK to PhD educators, students + families.
The Mixxer is a free social networking language exchange site integrated with Skype and hosted at Dickinson College. Individuals can find language partners on their own as well as submit writing for feedback. Instructors have additional functions to organize exchanges during or outside of class hours.
Much web literacy either asks students to look at web pages and think about them, or teaches them to publish and produce things on the web. While both these activities are valuable, neither addresses a set of real problems students confront daily: evaluating the information that reaches them through their social media streams. For these daily tasks, student don’t need long lists of questions to think about while gazing at web documents. They need concrete strategies and tactics for tracing claims to sources and for analyzing the nature and reliability of those sources.
This book and website are unabashedly practical guides on how to use features of the web to check facts and verify sources, often in less than ninety seconds. They show you the sorts of skills and habits professional fact-checkers develop, and help you apply them to civic and professional questions in your own life.
Metacognition refers to an intentional focusing of attention on the development of a process. It encourages awareness of one’s current state of accomplishment, along with the situational influences and strategy choices that are currently, or have previously, influenced accomplishment of that process. Through metacognition, one should become better able to accurately judge one’s progress and select strategies that will lead to success. There are two primary goals of this website. First, we want to highlight and focus on how metacognition plays a key role in the process of learning academic content and developing skills in higher education. Second, we want to highlight and focus on how metacognition may play a key role in the process of teaching (i.e., metacognitive instruction). We consider this site to be a collaborative resource for both students and teachers, and we welcome additional contributions from both!
Learning Environment Modeling (LEM), comprised of a shared, one-of-its-kind visual language and design technique, provides educators with a powerful solution for facilitating effective communication throughout processes and advancing and energizing learning environment design and learning. LEM is easy to learn and quickly implemented. Its minimal components render it widely accessible, highly affordable, and easily scalable. Developed at the Center for eLearning and Connected Environments (CeCE) at the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO), LEM has been successfully integrated into all facets of the Center’s daily operations. It lies at the core of CeCE initiatives for developing and sustaining high-quality elearning offerings and advancing innovation in learning across a spectrum of modalities. LEM has also been successfully adopted by users at other education and corporate organizations. Information and evidence presented throughout this document reflect how LEM supports the five pillars of learning effectiveness, scale, access, faculty satisfaction, and student satisfaction.
Peer review can be stimulating and enjoyable, but busy faculty and designers often find it difficult to make time for review, reflection, and idea sharing. I conceptualized and pilot-tested methods for small- and large-group peer review that required very little time on behalf of my participants, and had successful outcomes for course design and revision. The large group peer review process may be easily scaled for different group sizes, and may be utilized by faculty, designers, and other program or course stakeholders.
In 2011, Walden University implemented a coaching model as a means of targeted professional development for faculty with the goal of continuous improvement. It was designed to be facilitated through a peer relationship and it offer problem-focused, contextualized opportunities for faculty to collaborate, thus making the experience and outcome more meaningful. The Walden coaching model is individualized, confidential, non-evaluative, and voluntary. Since its inception, the Walden coaching model had been used regularly by faculty and remained essentially unchanged. In 2017, the University sought to capitalize on the success of the coaching program through an internal research study and a series of expansion projects. The purpose of these efforts was to determine the effectiveness of the program and identify opportunities for expansion. In 2018, research findings are being applied to the model to ensure access and improve services to faculty.
Imagine, during an online Blackboard course, having your students put theory into practice by interacting with avatars in a virtual classroom. Through a mixture of human control and specific programming, each avatar has its own back story and personality. Online adult learners interact in real time in an unscripted fashion with the student avatars to apply effective practices in a safe environment where they can learn from their mistakes before working with actual students. The MS in Education with a specialization in Special Education (SPED) program at Walden University in collaboration with Laureate’s Digital Teaching and Learning (DTL) team and Mursion/TLE TeachLivE™ conducted two pilots using simulation scenarios with avatars.
Healthcare and Manufacturing Editorial Boards will meet for calibrated review sessions of sector-specific materials found in SkillsCommons.
Optional meeting time for small group work for StoryTelling, IE2EI, and S2W sub-communities
An award-winning teacher discusses his unwilling transition to online education. He discusses the problems, the successes, and provides an early analysis of the results on student learning and instructor motivation/buy-in.
Problem: Historically, traditional textbooks have been written from the perspective of the dominant culture (white/male).
Soltuion: OER are revisable and adaptable, so teachers and faculty at HBCUs and Tribal Colleges can revise or add examples from the students' culture. Examples of leaders, historical perspectives, languages, images - can all be adapted to suit the needs of the course objectives and campus. There are many advantages to replacing traditional textbooks with OER and Open Textbooks (such as cost savings, and that they are available on the first day of class to all students), but one of the most important aspects for equity and inclusion is the ability to adapt and revise OER.
Shel will share a framework for Human Centered Design and demonstrate how to apply it towards innovation and corporate transformation.
We all love a good campfire story, but what do you do if you’re not all at the same camp site? There are so many online meeting solutions to choose from nowadays, how do you choose? Learn what questions to ask and practical strategies in this hands-on lab.
First-person game-based learning (GBL) fosters cognitive, affective, and sociocultural engagement with subject matter. In this presentation, attendees will split into small groups and use one shared mobile device to play the web-based game, Spent. This GBL activity challenges the student to subsist on minimum wage in contemporary American society.
Making OER a game-changer for learning impact takes more than cutting textbook costs. Join this session to test-drive Lumen’s Waymaker OER courseware with intelligent messaging tools that deepen student engagement and offer just-in-time help. Learn how Broward College’s implementation empowers instructors to save time and strengthen their students’ success.
The Online Learning Consortium and The Learning House, Inc. partnered in 2017 to survey academic administrators on the topic of innovation in higher education. From this survey and follow-up interviews, OLC and Learning House developed The State of Innovation in Higher Education report. Join this session, presented by co-authors Dr. Jill Buban and Andrew J. Magda, to learn key findings and insights from The State of Innovation report, including:
You are invited to participate in a highly interactive, practical, and hands-on workshop to learn how to use various instructional technologies for assessment in online and blended learning that will enhance your students’ educational experiences and your ability to understand what your students know and can do.
https://canvas.instructure.com/enroll/YM79FK
What does a development team do when they discover that endorsement changes mean creating 17 new courses in less than three months to ensure all graduates can receive teaching licenses? How did this challenge become a growth opportunity for the team at WGU to create an effective rapid development process?
Healthcare and Manufacturing Editorial Boards will meet for calibrated review sessions of sector-specific materials found in SkillsCommons.
Optional meeting time for small group work for StoryTelling, IE2EI, and S2W sub-communities.
Join us in the Exhibit Hall (Ryman Hall B1-B3, Conference Center Level 0) for a chance to grab a cup of coffee or tea and network with fellow attendees prior to the Thursday keynote address. Stop by the Innovation Lab to enjoy Round 3 of the "Whose Design Is It Anyway?" competition, explore the Innovation Installation, and continue securing those stamps on your prize card from exhibitors.
WELCOME TO “WHOSE DESIGN IS IT ANYWAY?” – A SERIES OF SESSIONS WHERE EVERYTHING IS MADE UP AND THE POINTS DON’T MATTER AT ALL!
Improvisation and flexibility are hallmarks of innovation. In the Innovation Lab, we’re not only prepared to live that out – we want you to join in the fun too! Join us for our second annual installation of the improv series of “Whose Design is it Anyway?”, where we will incorporate Design Thinking and educational technology. Our audience and our contestants will collaborate to generate creative solutions and suggestions for incorporating technology into their teaching practices. We will be joined again this year by our resident and master blues musician, Rick Franklin, who will partner with our improv team to tease out the connections between music, improvisation, design and education. Rick's insights and skills are can't-miss fun and entertainment!
Be sure to check out the Innovation Lab schedule below for the schedule of “Whose Design Is It Anyway?” rounds (all during the networking coffee breaks), and make plans to meet us there. If you’re looking for a great way to step out of your comfort zone or even to create solutions for others - or if you just want to hear some great tunes while you sip your cup of joe - stop by and join us. You might even pick up a prize for your improvisational genius!
Tired of sitting and in need of a good stretch? Join us in the yoga area of the exhibit hall (Ryman Hall B1, Conference Center Level 0, left side of the exhibit hall near the Blogger Bars) during the networking break for a 15 minute Stretch & Renew yoga class with Janet Smith, a fellow conference attendee and certified yoga instructor. Stretch and Renew yoga is made up of simple stretching using a chair as a prop. Conference attire welcomed. No mat needed.
Note: All OLC Innovate attendees participate in yoga classes at their own risk. In the unlikely event of injury, please note that OLC, MERLOT, and the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center may not be held liable.
The primary challenge facing educators today is not to teach “new literacies,” but rather, to find ways to prepare tomorrow’s citizens with adequate habits-of-mind for a connected world. They need to learn to make use of language, knowledge, and academic content within the context of new social, cultural, and economic paradigms. In this provocative keynote session, Jordan Shapiro will take us on a disruptive tour of past, present, and future—helping us discover what really matters as we re-imagine education paradigms for a world of predictive algorithms, block chains, and artificial intelligence.
You are invited to join ProctorU, an OLC 2018 National Titanium sponsor, immediately following Thursday's keynote for a "Beer, Bourbon and BBQ" Happy Hour and a Half from 5:30-7:00 pm. Located in the lobby directly outside the general session (Tennessee Lobby A) you will be greeted by live country music provided by the Brassfield Alley band. Mingle with other conference attendees while enjoying BBQ sliders, a bourbon tasting station and beer or other drink of your choice. Once you've used your drink tickets, a cash bar will be available (so be sure to bring cash!) Kick up your heels and enjoy the band while networking with other attendees and get your evening off to a great start!
Stop by ProctorU's booth (403) in the exhibit hall (Ryman Hall B1-B3, Conference Level 0) anytime Wednesday or Thursday to pick-up your two complimentary drink tickets - one for the bourbon-tasting station, and one for a regular drink - and plan to join us for a boot stompin' good time!
Join us at the Gaylord Opryland each evening (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday; 9-10pm, Delta Pavilion) for Campfire Gatherings. After the days events (and with ample time for you to go grab dinner first), we will be hosting themed get-togethers as a venue to meet with friends, start up new collaborations, or just unwind from a day packed with innovative ideas.
Thursday Night: IDEA Night: Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Advocacy
Join us for a special networking event celebrating diversity and inclusion within our field, with a focus on the intentional support of all voices in online leadership. Bring your colleagues for community, camaraderie, and new collaborations to support advocacy for equity in our field. This event is open to participants of any gender and role – if you are a champion of diversity and inclusion within digital learning leadership, and want to participate in a gathering for a good cause, please accept our warm welcome to attend.
There is a $20 required donation to attend Thursday evening’s campfire gathering: IDEA Night: Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Advocacy. The ticket price includes one drink ticket and a dessert reception. The ticket fees collected will go towards the OLC Women in Digital Learning Leadership scholarship fund. Add a ticket to your conference registration to attend Thursday evening’s Campfire Gathering.
Ready to start your final day at OLC Innovate energized? Join us for our final 1 hour Slow Flow Yoga class with Janet Smith, a fellow conference attendee and certified yoga instructor. Slow flow yoga is made up of slow flow (three breaths per posture), including sun and/or moon salutations. Yoga mat (we will have towels on hand if you don't have one), comfy clothes, and water bottle needed.
Note: OLC Innovate attendees participate in yoga classes at their own risk. In the unlikely event of injury, please note that OLC, MERLOT, and the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center may not be held liable.
Breakfast will be served from 7:30am-9:00am in the general session room (Tennessee Ballroom, Convention Center Level 2). The Friday keynote by Ruha Benjamin (Princeton University) will begin at 8:15am.
Whether sitting in the same room or interacting through a computer screen, relationships are at the heart of education. How do we design experiences that draw on the strengths and energize the potential of all students? In this talk, Ruha Benjamin will pair concrete examples of social and emotional learning with social scientific insights on equity and justice which, taken together, provide educators with tools to create authentic and transformative learning environments.
Interactive technologies can provide a fun and meaningful way to engage students in a variety of learning experiences. This session will share technology tools and learning strategies which can be effectively adopted in a variety of teaching approaches. A variety of web links will be provided to support future exploration of the concepts related to the presentation.
It is recommended that participants bring a laptop or tablet to best engage with the learning experiences.
Developing an online course requires collaboration, which can present unique challenges between faculty and the instructional designer. This roundtable invites discussion about assumptions of roles and responsibilities that instructional designers and faculty have during course development, to ultimately improve interaction between the two roles.
Join this dynamic discussion of strategies and barriers to leading innovation at scale within diverse and complex institutions. We’ll bring our best tips and share the places where our ideals didn’t quite match reality. You bring your burning questions and your own stories to share as we all build our toolset for leading innovation on our home campuses.
Promoting and maintaining active collaboration within online classes continue to be a vital concern among distance educators. Let’s explore effective practices we’ve used to foster online interaction among faculty in training. This conversation provides opportunities for you to share your own applied effective practices for collaboration in the online classroom.
Join HBCU Summit leaders for 1:1 conulting on implementing your own AL$ program.
HBCUs, OLC, and MERLOT will share practices, strategies, and resources for reducing the costs of instructional materials for students, making higher education more affordable for more students in Historically Black Universities (HBCUs), and best practices and lessons learned for online and blended programs for HBCUs.
Tennessee has become a national leader in its innovative approaches to credentialing and completion for its citizens. Higher Education, the Department of Labor, and other agencies associated with upskilling thorugh Workforce Development have a unique opportunity to create a platform using emerging technologies for on-demand traning.
We are living in times of connection. And it’s not just about networked information technologies. Today, cross-continental travel is easy. Economic interdependence among nations is a ubiquitous. Migrants and refugees move in greater numbers than ever before. Our lives depend on complex energy grids and sophisticated infrastructure. Around the planet, connections bind us together in new, exciting, and often challenging ways.
Today’s educators need re-evaluate the conventions of schooling for this new world. Some are trying. But unfortunately, most efforts fall short. Even the most forward-thinking teachers remain tethered to old educational paradigms. Many new blended and online learning systems simply attempt to smoosh old pedagogical structures into shiny new boxes.
It’s because we struggle to acknowledge that the routines and conventions of learning that we all take for granted were actually derived in response to distinct technological needs. Schools are full of old tech: chalkboards, copy machines, loudspeakers, books and more. All literacies are tech literacies. And education has always been “blended.” But now, it’s divided. We keep reinforcing a false distinction between online and offline—which is just code for: learning through old tech and learning through new tech. Haphazard hybridization will quickly prove problematic because it can’t adequately condition people to live and work fluently within a globalized world.
In this intimate townhall style discussion, we will interview keynote speaker Jordan Shapiro. Come prepared to challenge your thinking, ask lots of questions, and participate in an imaginative and though-provoking conversation about re-imagining what learning means in a world where everything is blended and connected.
With real-time data at their fingertips, instructors and advisors can make appropriate interventions before students fall behind in their courses. Hear how Indian River State College closed the gap between online and F2F student success rates.
Previous studies reported the low completion and engagement rate at Massive Opening Online Courses (MOOCs). This proposal presents an intervention design by using digital badging system as means to boost and sustain massive learners’ engagement in the self-regulated learning (SRL) environment as MOOCs and conduct analysis to evaluate its effect.
This session will demonstrate how to use screencasting technology to improve the way higher education students receive their feedback. Utilizing this method will reduce professor workload while increasing specificity and timliness of feedback to students.
Participation in the Burroughs Welcome Fund Career Guidance for Trainees grant required, in part, that participants create learning modules for students in the STEM fields. In this session, graduate student and post-doctoral fellow grant participants will share their experiences with module development, deployment and results of this effort.
Too much technology, not enough time? This session will explore how a professor and a graduate student designed a technology partner initiative to mindfully explore, practice, observe, and reflect on their use of technology. This ongoing project identifies technology habits to adopt a more mindful, presence stance toward technology.
Online Physical Education courses at Harford Community College use a BYOM curriculum that incorporates “app smashing” to assess course objectives. LMS, video, file sharing, and GPS apps are combined to assess skill acquisition, address academic honesty, and promote student-directed exercise progression in an untethered, active learning environment.
This Emerging Ideas Session will present outcomes from a 2 year, campus-wide faculty incentive program focused on improving the quality of courses and programs offered both online and in hybrid/blended online learning environments.
Through collaborative work with information technology, the teaching and learning center, academic colleges, and administrative channels, a faculty incentive grant built around providing support and training was implemented and evaluated. Outcomes from the training and incentive program are discussed, along with lessons learned on implementation of a campus-wide, monetary faculty incentive program focused on the outcomes of quality.
In 2015, the Instructional Design team at MSU Denver recognized a growing need to establish added structure and improved processes in order to meet the growing demands of online and hybrid education. In response, the MSU Denver Agile Instructional Design Network (AIDNet) and Course Design Xchange (CoDeX) was established. AIDNet represents a new practice, mindset, and organizational infrastructure supporting instructional design at MSU Denver. Consisting of dynamic, cross-functional, three-person teams, AIDNet members work with autonomy, agility, and a focus towards collaborative efficiency. Each instructional design team within the network includes a senior instructional designer, online course developer, and instructional media specialist. This strategic coalition and scalable networked structure creates an exciting design environment which stimulates ongoing creativity, productivity, and continuous process and product improvement. Teams are empowered, self-organizing, self-managing, and accountable for the delivery of results that consistently meet faculty needs and expectations.
A traditional Lightboard costs between 5000-10,000 dollars; with a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach and basic tools, we were able to build our version for approximately $600, a savings of up to 94%. Join this session to learn how to build this powerful learning tool for pennies on the dollar.
Get a taste for all of the essential ingredients in creating the perfect podcast. A high-level overview of best practices regarding content, production, marketing, hosting, and transcription. Learn how to craft a unique and engaging experience for listeners.
Machine Learning has become ubiquitous in the technology world. Can the same technology powering search engines and shopping recommendations help instructors in the classroom? Is it ethical? We will provide an overview of the machine learning research and development process and show some real world examples of schools using machine learning algorithms to promote student success.
Recent years have seen a rise in academic makerspaces in response to the growing trend of providing informal learning spaces for undergraduates (Barrett et al., 2015). In spite of a commitment to inclusivity academic makerspaces find that women and minorities are underrepresented in the space (Beuchley, 2016.) This emerging ideas session will discuss research ideas to give voice to female undergraduates' decisions to participate or not in academic makerspaces.
Video is one of the most powerful and engaging ways to enhance the learning experience but with great power comes great responsibility. Skillful use of multimedia can help your audience grasp concepts that are difficult to understand using only the written word. In this session, learn about effective strategies to introduce video and other multimedia elements in your training. And, review some of the cutting-edge technology available to make your learning experience out of this world.
Deeper discussion opportunities from finding, uploading, and refinement of OER to telling the story of your projects successes and challenges overcome, receive customized technical assistance from the SkillsCommons team, IMPACTcommunity members, JFF, and technology companies. Scheduled as needed.
Optional meeting time for small group work for StoryTelling, IE2EI, and S2W sub-communities
Learn how your institution can lower the cost of textbooks and improve learning opportunities for your students today by leveraging free and open educational services and resources in academic disciplines, career & technical educations, and virtual labs.
This research-based, interactive session will review the results of a liberal arts college introducing fully online courses for traditional-age residential students. The process of implementing the initiative will be described, including student perceptions, and how faculty concerns about intellectual property and academic integrity were addressed.
Despite the promise that digital learning can expand access, improve outcomes, and decrease costs, institutional data on the impact of digital programs is limited. With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Arizona State University and the Boston Consulting Group conducted a study of six institutions with the goal of understanding and quantifying the impact of digital learning on institutional priorities (e.g., enrollment growth, student outcomes, and financial returns). In this session, Lou Pugliese of ASU will discuss insights from the study and best practices from across a diverse cross-section of institutions and programs.
The benefits of using OER materials in the classroom has become a longstanding discussion. Now, let’s go beyond talking about OER hypothetically and take the deep dive into implementation. This Innovation Lab demonstrates building an effective institutional model of OER. From grant writing, operational logistics, content curation, to cost and scalability. Participants will engage with hands-on scenarios to prototype OER implementation models for hypothetical courses, leaving the session with working plans for project teams, roles, cost models, and timelines to meet their institutional goals.
If you’ve ever faced a faculty who is mad about online learning then this session is for you. Helping faculty to teach online requires knowledge of emotional regulation and the specific role of anger and fear that are sometimes a part of designing and teaching an online class.
This presentation will relate experiences navigating the challenges of developing a new online MBA program with OER content. The presenters will outline issues faced, solutions explored, and lessons learned (so far). They will also report the initial results of research examining the perceptions of students and faculty participating in the program.
Learn how over 1,000 institutions use LockDown Browser and Respondus Monitor to prevent cheating during proctored and non-proctored online exams. This session will include a demonstration of both applications and you’ll learn strategies for a smooth rollout on campus.
Are you tired of creating the same classes over and over, just linking to sources on the Internet and really want to try something new and exciting? You can provide an engaging, media-rich experience for your participants even when finances are tight, and create useable assets to help you scale.
Explore the role of Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” in establishing students as the “epic heroes” of online courses. Participants will play three original games inspired by old MS-DOS favorites like Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego, and reflect on narrative in the design of online curriculum, environments and processes.
Join us in the Exhibit Hall (Ryman Hall B1-B3, Conference Center Level 0) for our final networking coffee break. This is your last chance to get your cards stamped by our exhibitors; turn them by 11:15am to the OLC Booth for the prize drawings. Don't forget to visit the Innovation Lab for the rousing finale of the "Whose Design Is it Anyway?" competition, and take this final opportunity to explore our third and final Innovation Installation. Stop by and thank Rolin Moe for three years of providing his inspiring vision for the Innovation Installation!
WELCOME TO “WHOSE DESIGN IS IT ANYWAY?” – A SERIES OF SESSIONS WHERE EVERYTHING IS MADE UP AND THE POINTS DON’T MATTER AT ALL!
Improvisation and flexibility are hallmarks of innovation. In the Innovation Lab, we’re not only prepared to live that out – we want you to join in the fun too! Join us for our second annual installation of the improv series of “Whose Design is it Anyway?”, where we will incorporate Design Thinking and educational technology. Our audience and our contestants will collaborate to generate creative solutions and suggestions for incorporating technology into their teaching practices. We will be joined again this year by our resident and master blues musician, Rick Franklin, who will partner with our improv team to tease out the connections between music, improvisation, design and education. Rick's insights and skills are can't-miss fun and entertainment!
Be sure to check out the Innovation Lab schedule below for the schedule of “Whose Design Is It Anyway?” rounds (all during the networking coffee breaks), and make plans to meet us there. If you’re looking for a great way to step out of your comfort zone or even to create solutions for others - or if you just want to hear some great tunes while you sip your cup of joe - stop by and join us. You might even pick up a prize for your improvisational genius!
In this "Conversation, Not Presentation" we will discuss how to encourage civil online dialogue in a web of cyberbullies, trolls. bots and flames. A single slide will present our question with a few moments used to define key terms before entering the discussion.
Does your team utilize visual communication? Can we interpret the visual cues all around us? Are we clear and specific when we share? Do we send/receive mixed messages? Visual communication is a dynamic tool for reaching our communities wherever they are. Add your voice to this essential conversation.
Identifying and evaluating appropriate content are two key steps in preparing to use immersive reality in the digital learning space. The emergence of immersive reality devices has opened doors no one knew existed. Presenters will discuss these devices, their impact, educational applications as well as emerging practices in selecting content.
Video use is growing dramatically in higher education for lots of reasons. You can instruct, evaluate, critique, report, blend, flip with it. You can also flop with it. This session will feature Carleton College’s Dann Hurlbert as he discusses how to Plan, Produce, and Evaluate good instructional video.
This session explores distributed ethnography as a scalable, participatory approach to institutional research. We will describe our experience with Sensemaker, a novel instrument for distributed ethnography, and its application in QEP assessment. Session participants will be able to participate in a Sensemaker analysis and explore applications for their contexts.
Court England from Zoom will explore challenges and possibilities for video and interactivity in virtual/hybrid classrooms, including several university case studies.
In April 2017, the Personalized Learning Consortium (PLC) at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) launched a self-paced, online course, A SMART Approach to Student Success: Strategic Management of Advising Reform and Technology (SMART), to provide guidance to executive and project level institution leaders on redesigning and improving the delivery of advising and student support services and incorporating the use of technology. The objective of developing the course was to expand understanding across the postsecondary sector of successful models for integrating advising, technology and student support services and to increase the number of public colleges and universities implementing this model on their campuses by providing accessible guidance based on the experiences of peer institutions.
Presentation Abstract: Selected open educational resources (OER) from MERLOT’s digital resource collections highlight tools, media, and e-resources that positively impact teaching and learning.
Let’s discuss a 24/7 accessible knowledge base full of responses to some of the most common student questions. We say the needs of our learners “run wide and deep”. But what are students asking? The content initially represented areas such as financial aid, but quickly expanded in unexpected ways.
Through a collaborative design-based research process, learners, teachers, instructional designers, and content experts have contributed to the development of a Virtual Patient Based Learning Model that blends online language learning, cultural competency, and community engagement in support of a medical Spanish language program for healthcare professionals.
The field of learning analytics is evolving at a rapid pace as faculty and administrators have access to more data than ever before. With the wealth of information available, it’s a difficult task to discern what information can be transformational for the student experience to offer invaluable learning pathways.
By combining sound pedagogical principles with new methods of data collection, the Online & Digital Learning Department at the Fox School of Business has developed a prototype for presenting this data to students, faculty, and administrators in a holistic format.
Leveraging data visualization to present meaningful relationships between course materials, assessments, and student performance, personalized learning pathways are created, while also offering an evaluation of overall course achievement at the instructor level.
During this presentation, we will share the pathways we have created through the analysis of specific relationships across student progress, learning outcomes, and course concepts. Performance visualizations provide students with areas of success, and most importantly, areas that may need improvement. Students are provided with materials that will lead them to mastery of the specific concept within their course.
Working well with others is important. We have developed a 3-section tool that helps build one’s self-awareness and increases transparency towards their partners’ working preferences, needs, and desires allowing for a more authentic and effective partnership, as well as thoughtful pair planning by managers at the macro level.
An interactive demonstration of immersive 360° Video content developed for online instruction with best practices shared from a pedagogical and instructional design perspective.
This presentation will focus on student engagement and blended learning by introducing five digital tools great for teaching blended courses. Anyone who is interested in blended learning will take away with practical ideas and free resources that can be used to engage students in blended learning.
In 2016, APLU selected Georgia State University as one of eight universities to implement and scale adaptive learning coursewares in general education courses. Georgia State’s adaptive learning program manager and pilot faculty discuss their experiences with the exploration, evaluation, and piloting of adaptive coursewares in grant years 1 & 2.
Impaired students are typically served through disability resource centers. But is this the best, most efficient way to make sure that students have access to equal educational opportunities? In this session, we will discuss different models of disability and explore new ways we can proactively serve all learners online.
What is student engagement? What does student engagement look like in online activities? This session will explore the answers to these questions through a variety of activities including conversation, games, and design thinking exercises. Whether you are limited to tools in your LMS or you enjoy exploring new tools and technologies this session will leave you with ideas and inspiration that will hook your students.
In 2016, the libraries at Furman University, Johnson C. Smith University, Davidson College, and Duke University launched joint Faculty Open Educational Review Programs at their institutions. The Programs educated faculty on the concepts of OER, assisted them in identifying OER relevant to their areas of expertise, and trained them how to strategically review and assess OER. Julie Reed, from Johnson C. Smith University, will discuss the librarians' work in effectively planning, promoting, and implementing the Programs at their respective institutions, and provide a summary of findings across all four Programs.
Learn first hand how Missouri's Workforce Innovations Networks (MoWINs) three TAACCCT grants engaged with all 15 of their Regional and State Workforce Boards. Session participants will receive a sample scripted MOU as a take away. Strategies covered: negotiating an MOU, defined roles, shared performance measures, coenrollment and more.
How can we take what we already know about good face-to-face teaching pedagogy and apply it to online teaching? In this session, participants will examine face-to-face frameworks for defining high quality classroom discussions and consider how they can be used to generate specific strategies for facilitating engaging online conversations.
Plan, ideate, and build! Come and learn about rapid prototyping with low and high technologies. Participants will work together to quickly iterate, build, and showcase an idea.
This session reviews a flipped, blended and integrated model of learning design and facilitation in an interdisciplinary doctoral program, reviewing best practices for course design and curricula integration based upon active, collaborative and integrative pedagogies. We also present evidence of interdisciplinary knowledge integration and application resulting from this model.
With over 30,000 online students and 400 online faculty members, improving online student outcomes at Wake Tech not only requires organizational support for innovation but also hinges on individuals embracing and applying changes. Join this session as we share ideas, challenges, and lessons on our journey through large-scale change initiatives.
It's impossible to keep up with the pace of change in technology both for students and staff. Pluralsight makes it possible.
The session will train learners to deliver a workshop for higher education faculty on Digital Accessibility. Hands-on, practice, and discussion strategies provide take-aways to prepare participants to return to their institutions and train faculty and staff to create accessible course content and meet the challenges of a diverse student population.
Social media and emerging collaborative technologies have changed the way we think, learn, create and innovate, carving out intentional spaces for co-creating actionable knowledge and distributed intelligence. Social technologies deliver on-demand, agile information that can edify, empower and educate connecting generations, cultures and worldviews. The focus of this session is on collaborative systems and frameworks that facilitate innovative practices that validate replicable and reliable knowledge sharing within groups and between groups.
Join us in Tennessee Lobby A at 12:00pm for a wrap-up of OLC/MERLOT Innovate 2018! Mingle with your fellow attendees as OLC CEO Kathleen Ives and MERLOT Executive Director Gerry Hanley bid you adieu and lead the celebration and concluding remarks. 2018 Conference Co-Chairs Jessica Knott and Angela Gunder, along with the winner of our keynote 'StarSearch', will present closing comments on the importance of 'failing forward' in online teaching and learning in 2018 and beyond.
Light refreshments will be served at this fun and casual event.
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8:00am-8:30am
Welcome Remarks
8:30am-9:00am
Affordable Learning Solutions
Lowering the cost of course materials makes education more affordable and provides students more opportunities to learn. The presentation will showcase the free and open online educational resources in academic disciplines and career and technical training areas available for community colleges to adopt today. Faculty, staff, students, and program developers can discover free curriculum and program support materials from the SkillsCommons free and open library (http://als.skillscommons.org) and plan how to bring affordable learning solutions to their own campus community.
9:00am-9:45am
Affordable Learning Solutions - Collaborative Ideation/Table Talk Challenges
In small groups, participants will discuss and plan ways they can use the variety of resources and tools to implement their own affordable learning solutions initiative on their own campuses. Table discussions will focus on campuses’ readiness for affordable learning solutions as well as the challenges participants will face in planning and implementation. Tables will have an opportunity to share their ideas with the entire group.
The opening 90 minutes of the HBCU Summit will focus on a welcome by your HBCU Summit leaders, an overview of HBCU Strategy for Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$), presentation of a Southern University System's system-wide intiative to enable educational quality and college afordability, and Q & A discussion focused on issues and questions raised by these presentations.
10:30am-11:00am
StoryTelling and Growing Expert Instructors
Community colleges face many challenges and the panel will address two distinct and persistent ones faced by career and technical training programs. First, communicating the power of educational innovations takes more than a 30 page report – it takes a good story that engages your audience and gets them to care about your innovation. How do we craft good stories for career and technical training programs? Second, industry experts are essential subject matter experts that deliver the “job-driven” curriculum in community colleges and prepares our students for success in the workforce. But frequently, being an industry expert doesn’t translate into an expert instructor. The U.S. Department of Labor’s SkillsCommons project has produced free and open tools, templates, and strategies that everyone can use to address these challenges. The panelist will briefly review the strategies and resources and walk participants through how these two tools have been applied in higher education and at the industry level.
Challenge Questions:
Wondering how to start your own Affordable Learning Solutions initiative? Join Robbie Melton, Moustapha Diack, and representatives from Tennessee Universities as the discuss how to get buy-in, build your organizational infrastructure, align to campus priorites, and level tools and templates to plan your AL$ program. There will be Q & A as well as small group work in this session where participants will start their planning.
Since 2004, Soomo has worked with many colleges and universities to increase student success through innovative course design. Today, we’ll share a few of our favorite lessons learned from each stage of our process: pinpointing problems, designing solutions, building courses, equipping faculty, supporting course delivery, and analyzing course performance.
The University of Michigan Digital Innovation Greenhouse (DIG) is scaling “homegrown” digital pedagogy. Our group of software developers, user experience designers, and behavioral scientists work with faculty to iterate and spread innovative edtech. Join to discuss how DIG was born. Learn how to support and scale digital innovation.
Join Dr. Kaye Shelton and Dr. Karen Pedersen as they discusses the OLC Quality Scorecard and how HBCUs can get started using it. They will review best practices to help you evaluate your online learning program, as well as discuss first steps for implementation with campus leadership.
SupportU is a menu of online complementary services to augment the regular curriculum and instruction. It includes 24/7 Tutoring on Demand in writing, library, and key subject-matter areas, as well as paper reviews by writing tutors who return the papers within 24 hours and an automated instant paper review tool. Learn how Bridgepoint Education improved retention through these innovative approaches.
This presentation focuses on increasing student motivation via design, with a specific focus on the ARCS model of motivational design as it applies to the online learning space. Participants will leave with functional, practical takeaways that can be implemented into any course.
The growing demand for online learning is challenging universities to move beyond program-specific thinking to develop strategies and resources to deliver high quality online instruction across the university. Learn how one university is using a collaborative leadership model to promote institutional learning, innovation, and change.
Between 2015-2018, we ran an experiment offering online class to alumni, focused on intense asynchronous discussion on a social platform instead of a traditional LMS. In this session, we will share our findings according to the CoI model and engage the audience in a discussion of social collaborative learning.
Recognizing that incorporating academic video into instruction greatly increases engagement and student achievement, Cuyahoga Community College created a mobile, multi-stream recording platform for its online courses.
The academy as the gatekeeper of knowledge, whose traditions of instruction provide the key, has metastasized into a perspective that people are not capable of learning independently of these traditions. All prior human history leads to a very different conclusion. In these dramatically changing times, institutions that prosper will be those that establish new traditions and replace the gatekeeper metaphor with a more appropriate metaphor - a bridge.
Dr. Kaye Shelton and Dr. Karen Pedersen will facilitation small group discussions with HBCU Summit participants on first steps in applying the OLC Quality Scorecard at their institution.
***Warning: This session is for instructors who can handle extreme excitement and engagement actually using VR/MR/AR
The real world is not flat after all, so why constrain our online classrooms to experience the digital world on a flat screen? An online student may be isolated from the instructor and other students, this ability to be virtually immersed in another environment could be invaluable. Instead of just staring at a flat computer screen, students could be transported to a more traditional classroom environment, a chemistry lab, or even a historical moment in time anywhere in the world.
Session facilitators and participants will jointly explore models, benefits and challenges, effective practices, and methods of evaluation that support online international collaboration. Audience participation will be encouraged throughout the presentation and session attendees will be invited to participate in future international collaborations with the session facilitators.
Explore the benefits MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) offers members by participating in the MERLOT Mystery Challenge, modeled after the television game show Hollywood Squares, and hosted by a veteran Associate Editor and master Peer Reviewer as they share their valued experiences.
Technology has changed the landscape of higher education, creating opportunities to build diverse faculty teams while introducing unique challenges for virtual engagement and collaboration. This workshop considers opportunities for innovatively harnessing technology to develop a geographically diverse, engaged and productive virtual faculty to train the next generation.
Online courses can feel lonely and flat. VoiceThread brings energy to your content, discussions and assignments. With VoiceThread, you can improve social engagement and provide instructor immediacy to your students.
Hybrid course approaches are typically thought of as the combination of online and classroom experiences. The performing arts-based hybrid model instead features online content paired with student attendance of theatre and music experiences. Through this novel approach, students are exposed to a variety of performance types and a rich diversity of voices from the stage. Learn about how the Pennsylvania State University is using this arts-based hybrid model and the unique learning environment of the performance theatre to open discussions about diversity, inclusion, and equity with our undergraduate student population.
Technology is making distance learning a "clear and present" option for teachers. This session will present the challenges and many opportunities of distance piano instruction, as well as the tool and strategies in how to adapt curriculums for this new medium of long-distance education.
Participants will learn more about the new OLC Online Faculty Professional Development Framework and the implementation of this framework to support and prepare online faculty at their institution.
With so many different educational technologies out there, how do institutions cut through the clutter and intentionally select products that will produce impact? What are the best and worst practices of the vendors that approach you? What should all vendors know in order to improve? And conversely how do vendors identify and approach the right people at institutions? What are some easy changes institutions could make to be better customers?
In this session, attendees will hear from a panel of decision makers at institutions and technology vendors who will discuss their approaches on evaluating and selecting education technologies.
For over three decades now: email, telephones and spreadsheets have been the primary team communication and collaboration tools. We’ll iterate our way forward, exploring how today’s increasingly virtual workforce is using new tools like Slack, Teams, and Jira, that foster knowledge sharing, evidence-based decision making, personal connectivity and creativity.
A great debate brews: Should teachers allow smartphones in the classroom or not? Do smartphones distract from lessons or can they be incorporated into the curriculum to serve as tools supporting learning? Presenters and attendees will debate the use of smartphones in the classroom, discuss policies and solutions. Join us!
How we teach science often reinforces the idea that the purpose of experiments is to confirm our preconceived ideas. So when an experiment fails to give us what we expect, the experiment is often viewed as a failure. In this campfire story, hear how one student's perception of their science experiment highlighted classroom supports and barriers to failing.
Shel will talk about living on the edge of Failure, what it feels like, how to cope, and how it’s led to innovative opportunities she could have never imagined.
Have you ever had a door close in your face on an opportunity you were sure was your perfect fit? In that moment did you look around only to find a window you had never noticed before with an unexpected opportunity taking you to places you never imaged? We will be exploring this kind of situation and how it can be a transformative experience. Don’t be afraid to take a chance on flying through that window!
Maggie shares the limitations of her idealized, glorious, 'fail-proof' virtual reality assignment for her business and technical writing class.
Huge Mistake - Did I really buy into a bag phone, c'mon, not Google Glass too, seriously? I am that early adopter in online education that views the use of bleeding edge technology as my own badge of honor and am quick to throw away legacy applications.
Over the past decade, ProctorU has been a pioneer in online proctoring. From creating the very first online proctoring solution to becoming the standard in live proctoring, ProctorU now has the industry's first automated proctoring solution powered by artificial intelligence.
Many of us have heard of the concept of digital accessibility and are aware of things like adding alt text to images and captions to videos, but what would it really be like to walk in someone else’s shoes to truly experience the real impact of digital accessibility? In this interactive session, you will be exposed to a variety of assistive technologies, the students that use them, and strategies that we as instructors and designers can use to make the learning experience more positive for ALL students.
The HBCU-Innovate panel will discuss the same five challenges Navin Pathak addressed in his 2015 blog, "Barriers to Adopting OER By Colleges in Developing Nations", as these challenges are very much the same facing HBCU's.
Technology has reached new heights in helping both instructors and students gain the ability to think and communicate through generated drawings. This talk will investigate: 1) tools and methods for production of drawings; 2) digital approaches to analysis; and 3) technological affordances for fostering drawing in educational contexts.
BYOD (we will test eight free apps)! Web 2.0 tools are a great way to create higher order thinking. They engage today’s technology savvy student by creating active/flipped learning environments. Come learn how to use Web 2.0 tools to update all aspects of courses including syllabi, rubrics, and pitfalls of using web tools. Leave with a boss list of free Web 2.0 tools!
With the successful launch of a revolutionary free student tool, eLearnReady, we analyzed students’ responses, identifying their strengths--and improving their weaknesses in online learning. This presentation discusses the identified key variables (n=3000+) of online student success, as well as the user's experience with the tool.
A phenomenological study investigated factors that promoted online course completion among African American male undergraduate students. Factors of online course completion were financial assistance, prior academic achievement, previous information technology (IT) training, continuous academic enrollment, less demanding online subject content, use of handheld digital devices, and non-prejudicial learning environment.
It's time to get serious about student authentication. Learn how SmarterID is different from anything else like it on the market.
The session will highlight a new generation of MERLOT that will incorporate visual and functional important technology changes that have taken place since the last release of MERLOT 4 years ago. Some examples include aspects of new developments in user interface design and machine learning concepts.
Participants will receive practical experience on how they can use MERLOT in their own AL$ initiative
Higher education thought leaders will give lightning talks, TED-style. Learn from high profile practitioners about innovations in college teaching—touching on trends in flipped classrooms, learning science, OER and more. Following the lightning talks, attendees will have an opportunity to engage in a Q and A with the speakers.
This interactive education session focuses on helping simplify the TPK part of the TPACK model by classifying mobile apps by pedagogical decisions. Apps will be presented by pedagogy and a live discussion will occur in Google Hangouts during the session. Attendees will access documents via a Google Folder.
Designed for faculty and designers who are not in formal leadership positions, this workshop encourages attendees to grow ideas, lead from where they are, and increase innovation at their institutions. Fill your toolkit with strategies and tools for supporting ideas with research, pilot planning, evaluation, and achieving buy-in.