OLC Accelerate 2019 - Wednesday Morning Workshops & Summits

Orientation is a quintessential moment for residential students heading off to college. They are invited to tour campus, browse the book store, and maybe even enjoy a boxed lunch. But what about online learners?

Join Indiana University Online as it hosts Oregon State University, Southern New Hampshire University, and the University of St. Thomas in a lively, collaborative workshop (BYOD) on designing, building, and evaluating new online student success resources. Team exercises will guide participants to develop a plan to launch, redesign, or optimize their institution’s new student resources. Collaborative tools will be used to build a collective takeaway resource for all participants.

This workshop will progress through four key phases in project development via a series of guided team exercises. The four key phases are:

1. Setting the Focus: Thinking about the students you serve can help you articulate goals and outcomes for your project. For example, how might a project supporting students in 100% online programs differ from a project supporting residential students taking an online course? This is a good time to think clearly about the needs of your online learners and to put yourself in their shoes as they navigate your institution and its version of online learning.
2. Imaging the Experience: Goals and learning outcomes will guide experience design but so will other factors like budget, technology, team size, and policies. For example, how might hosting your project in the LMS instead of on a webpage impact when students are able to access resources? And how might that timing impact a hypothetical goal of supporting admit to enroll conversions? This is a good time to think clearly about how process, policy, and resource decisions can impact your vision for the new online student experience.
3. Crafting the Value Proposition(s): Communicating the “value” of your experience is critical – and you may need to communicate it in different ways to different audiences. For example, an internal administrator might ask about a return on investment for the project in order to justify using time and money for the project. A student might ask “why do I need this?” Those questions may or may not be answered the same way. This is a good time to think clearly about how to effectively introduce the resources you envision for online learners and to make the case for why they are important.
4. Engaging with the Data: There are opportunities to engage with research and data at multiple points in the project development process. For example, you might consider admissions and SIS data when setting your focus. Learning analytics can shine light on how students are using (or not using) the information you provide. This is good time to think about developing and monitoring key performance indicates (KPIs) as well as a plan to react to what data might tell you.

The workshop will focus on each phase of project development for 30-40 minutes. A brief opening presentation will set the context for the upcoming team exercise – including the criteria for breaking into teams. Panel members will embed with each team to listen for key group takeaways and facilitate discussion as needed. Teams will work from guiding questions for each exercise but will be left with the flexibility and expectation to come up with their own unique solutions and conclusions. Team contributions will be added in real time to a shared collaborative document allowing each exercise to build on prior work accomplished in the workshop as well as to serve as a final takeaway resource. Each exercise will conclude with a moderated panel conversation on key insights the four institutions can can offer for each project phase.

Throughout the workshop all four institutions will share insights and examples from their work as well as key lessons learned (and yes – mistakes!). We will explain how we check student knowledge, discuss key performance indicators, and explain how real human interaction has a role in our services for online students. We will also share how we incorporate best practices for serving adult learners, Quality Matters design standards, and accessibility considerations in the instructional design process. Finally, we will preview future plans for our work in the area of new student success resources.

By the end of the workshop, participants should be able to:

• identify primary learner population(s) and articulate what goals and learning outcomes they have for those learners;
• identify and evaluate key decision points in the experience design process and understand the potential impact of those designs decisions on the previously identified goals and learning outcomes;
• differentiate value-based massaging for internal and external stakeholder groups and choose supporting qualitative and quantitative measures; and
• understand how to apply research and data at different phases of the project and to identify key data stakeholders at their institutions.

These learning outcomes should empower participants to design or redesign new online student success resources at their institution.

All participants will benefit from bringing their own devices as the workshop will be paperless and utilize collaborative tools throughout. Session participants will be able to access sample student success resources from the participating institutions after the workshop; however, this workshop is not intended to be a showcase of a particular student success resource or institution’s programming. The workshop will (as much as possible) avoid focusing on a particular LMS or other technologies and instead focus on transferable strategies and tips.

Due to the oftentimes embedded nature of online education organizational structures in colleges and universities, online leaders often find themselves working with several institutional stakeholders across many levels in the organization each day. Working with so many and sometimes competing priorities and leadership orientations, online leaders need to be equipped with effective leadership strategies to navigate complex waters. Historical leadership theories often assume more traditional lines of authority than the emerging nature of online organizations demand, causing newer frameworks to emerge that speak to the importance and need for leading from where you are.

This workshop will provide a platform for participants to discover their conscious leadership abilities, as well as plan for and practice new ways of communicating and working within their organizations that can lead to better outcomes. Participants will be engaged in self-assessment, goal-setting, and tactical planning to incorporate the proven methodology of Conscious Leadership into their everyday practice–walking away with a roadmap to collegial, meaningful, and effective relationships with co-workers, team members, supervisors, and other institutional stakeholders in their institutions. Designed to model an active learning environment, the workshop will be comprised of a mixture of creative activities meant to encourage peer-to-peer interaction, deep reflection, and multimodal engagement.

Aligning to the Leadership and Institutional Strategies track of the conference, this workshop will equip workshop attendees to:

• Explore the core concepts and models of Conscious Leadership and how they connect to online learning organizations and teaching leadership.
• Explore the 15 commitments of Conscious Leadership Model
• Discover their current conscious leadership potential.
• Explore a relationship or workplace challenge and how to permanently shift the patterns.
• Commit to ongoing improvement and practice of the tenets of Conscious Leadership.

This workshop will explore why supporting the non-cognitive factors of learning — a hallmark of face-to-face community college teaching — in online courses is critical to increasing graduate rates for students from minoritized groups. Together, we will see examples of humanized online teaching practices that accomplish this examine why it is particularly important in lower division online STEM courses. Participants will leave the workshop with toolkit of humanized online teaching practices that improve the productive academic mindset of students and encourage students to commit themselves at a higher level, resulting in increased engagement and success.

Online courses are critical to supporting first generation college students and students of color achieve their academic goals. However, students from minoritized groups are less likely to succeed online than white and Asian students. In the California Community College system in 2016-17, 51% of online students were underrepresented minority (URM) students. However, while the statewide online success rate was 66%, the success rate for Black students was about 15% lower and for Hispanic students it was about 6% lower (CCC Chancellor’s Office, 2017).

These equity gaps are concerning for many reasons, including their impact on the future workforce, particularly the diversity of those who enter STEM careers. Unsuccessful learning experiences in STEM courses, especially early on in a student’s academic career, can be particularly consequential for URM students: a black student who withdraws or fails his/her introductory STEM course had a 67% chance of not earning a Bachelor’s degree, compared to a 47.9% chance for a white student (Chen and Soldner, 2013). As a result, the United States’ inability to achieve STEM workforce diversity goals can be largely attributed to the failure of the academic pathway to maintain a steady flow of underrepresented minority students (Estrada et al., 2016).

To address this complex problem, the Foothill-De Anza Community College District (FHDA) and California Virtual Campus-Online Education Initiative (CVC-OEI), has been awarded a $1.3 million, 3-year grant from the California Education Learning Lab to initiate a systemic shift in the culture of online and hybrid STEM teaching across the three systems of California public higher education (CCC, CSU, and UC). The grant project will scale a large-scale online professional development (PD) program, the Humanizing Academy, across all three systems and will result in the development of evidence-based Open Educational Resources (OERs) to support faculty development.

Learn more at: https://onlinelearningconsortium.org/attend-2019/accelerate/olc-instructional-design-summit/

Learn more at: https://onlinelearningconsortium.org/attend-2019/accelerate/program/research-summit/

Online and blended teaching can enhance and “right-size” education, creating a personalized and engaging experience for learning. In-person delivery is familiar and steeped in tradition, online delivery breaks down space and time constraints, and blended delivery mixes in-person and technology-enhanced learning environments to bring together the best of each, hopefully achieving the benefits of putting the right activity in the right space at the right time. However, often questions remain, ‘what should happen in person, and what should happen online?,’ and ‘how can the online and in-person experiences support each other to best teach students?,’ and ‘what is the right mix?’.

Online and blended learning offers exciting opportunities for assessment and engagement, to increase access to knowledge and expertise, and to provide greater flexibility for students, instructors, and institutions. New and emerging technological advances can be leveraged to increase student satisfaction, success, and engagement, as well as encourage student interaction with content, instructors, and peers. Even with all the challenges associated with change, the real potential for technology’s transformative effect on higher education is to harness the disruptive power of technology to impact how we teach students.

Relying simply on technology is not sufficient to change teaching. The philosopher Martin Heidegger noted that “Teaching is even more difficult than learning… because what teaching calls for is this; to let learn.” (1968, p. 15, as quoted by Sturm, 2001). In order to let learning happen, teachers must create a learning environment that facilitates the delivery of content, while balancing student interaction with content, instructor, and peers. The challenge is to determine what to teach when and where, with the right activity in the right space at the right time.

Following a brief overview of engagement and presence literature, the presenter will share teaching experiences for assessment and engagement in online and blended teaching with graduate and undergraduate students. Through examples shared from using tools to support synchronous and asynchronous discussions, simulations, and application-based projects, the presenter will guide participants through hands-on exploration of online and blended learning and promote a decision-making framework to decide what to do in-person, what to use technology to support, what happens best synchronously, in-person, or asynchronously, and what aspects of the learning experience can be flexible, with the intent to guide the decisions to right-mix the learning experiences for students, promote engagement and effective assessment strategies, and let learning happen.

Story (narrative) provides a structure for sharing information in ways that engage receivers, enhance memory, and create meaning (Haven, 2007). Humans are hard-wired to use story as an organization and storage mechanism. Consequently, we remember facts gained through story much more effectively than through any other means.

Story is a powerful method for engaging students with course content, especially in an online learning environment, where establishing personal connections between learners, content, and the instructor is an ongoing challenge. It solidifies the purpose of instruction and increases the sense of connectedness (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000), which ultimately builds online learner confidence. A great story also gives learners an opportunity to relate to the material on an emotional level. Learners are more likely to remember a lesson when key points are embedded in a heartwarming story about someone who overcame obstacles or experienced a transformation in life. Empathizing with a character helps to cement that story– and the associated information– within the learner’s memory (Haven, 2007).

We are partnering expert storytellers, learning designers, and instructors to guide participants on a journey to develop their own story-driven learning experiences. At the end of this pre-conference workshop, participants will be able to:

• Describe the elements of a story-driven learning experience
• State the benefits and potential challenges of creating a story-driven learning experience for online delivery
• Create a story plan for an online learning experience.

Note: To optimize learning in this hands-on workshop, please bring a syllabus for a course of your choosing and a laptop or other mobile device.

This workshop provides you with relevant and actionable information on the Neuroscience of Learning and how to apply it in the classroom through design, pedagogy, technology and teaching. You will experience neuroscience learning techniques throughout the workshop and participate in hands-on activities to demonstrate real-life learning in the classroom. We will also bust the neuro-myths of neuroscience and show you why these myths are really myths.

You will come away from this workshop with a better understanding of the Neuroscience of Learning or Cognitive Psychology, how to apply this in your courses using pedagogical techniques and/or technology, and the importance of doing your own data collection to better serve your students and their learning journey.

Neuroscience and brain learning has allowed scientist to map the specific parts of the brain. Through the use of cutting-edge technology, you can view how neuro connections in the brain impact short and long term memory and learning. These scientific breakthroughs are driving a new series of degrees and certificate programs at most research universities. Using this research faculty, curriculum developers and instructional designers can use these scientific advancements to understand how certain technologies and learning pedagogy can tap into those neuron connections and stimuli to maximize learning.

The field of neuroscience investigates the structure and function of the brain and nervous system. Since anything that has an impact on the brain, will ultimately affect learning, neuroscience-informed education can be utilized for the development of effective instructional pedagogies to support student’s learning. Some of the main themes of neuroscientific research, focusing on cell differentiation and pruning, neurogenesis/neuroplasticity, and cognitive-emotional neurocircuitry, will be used to discuss the following themes: 1) neural maturation and neural plasticity across the entire life span, 2) social and emotional learning, 3) spaced learning and memory consolidation, 4) experiential, multimodal, sensory and kinesthetic learning, 5) the effects of the external and internal environment on attention, learning and memory 6) the effects of physiological exercise, sleep and nutrition on learning and memory.

Changing the brain to optimize learning occurs when the brain observes conditions which it is able to change in response to stimuli referred to as neuroplasticity and produce new neurons, (neurogenesis). Effective learning involves engagement of all parts of the brain. These regions are associated with memory, senses, and cognitive functioning.

Some recent studies have shown that the brain performs best when some stress is introduced in the learning task producing cortisol which can be measured in the bloodstream. Too much stress causes the brain to have less activity in the cortical areas where learning takes place. Creating just the right amount of stress for each individual person is the key and knowing what activities in the course will produce the right amount of stress is crucial for optimizing learning. In this workshop, you will be introduced to various learning activities and tasks to recommend to students prior to taking a test, or performing a task.

Using the work of Dr. James Zull, in “The Art of Changing the Brain” (2002) and Stella Collins, Neuroscience for Learning and Development: How to Apply Neuroscience and Psychology for Improved Learning and Training (2012), the brain, and more specifically the cortex has important functions that can be matched with each stage of the learning cycle to enhance learning. The learning cycle consists of, concrete experiences, reflective observation, abstract hypothesis and active testing. The learning cycle is based on the fact that learning experiences are initiated through concrete experience or experiential learning. We can use the map of the brain, previously authenticated and validated by scientist, to determine the methods and technology that best enhances learning. For example, the sensory cortex is the first to receive output from the outside world through the senses such as vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste, etc. The sensory cortex aligns with the part of the learning cycle for concrete experiences from the outside world. The sensory cortex takes in the vision, audio/verbal, touch, smell or taste (Zull, 2002).

This workshop will also introduce you to the work of Yana Weinstein and Megan Sumeracki, and their book, Understanding How We Learn, Using Learning Science (2018). You will experience live throughout the workshop, the techniques of spaced practice, retrieval practice, elaboration, interleaving, concrete examples, and coding practice. These are pedagogical tools you can use in your online classroom or blended learning program.

We will also emphasize the importance of collecting data from your students to validate their learning as well as validate the practices you are employing in your courses. We will talk about what to collect and how to interpret this data into actionable techniques that will further enhance student learning.

Lastly, we will discuss how to apply these techniques and pedagogy to your classroom using technology that can aid you in developing cost-effective courses that directly increase retention of adult learners. In addition, faculty, student advising, and student services individuals will be brought into the mix to learn how to apply these techniques to help students outside the classroom.

Come join us for 3-hours of myth-busting, engaging, hands-on activities that will make you understand the exciting field of Cognitive Psychology or the Neuroscience of Learning.

US-Sino Online Higher Education (USOHE) was founded by CMSquared in 2016 with the objective of enhancing academic collaboration between US and China for online higher education. In 2017, the first annual USOHE conference was organized in partnership with Shenzhen University in Shenzhen city, China. USOHE 2018 and USOHE 2019 took place in Shanghai in partnership with OLC and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

This November, CMSquared is partnering with OLC and the University of Florida, Digital Worlds Institute to host our first US based USOHE conference in Orlando. With many top 100 Chinese universities’ scholars and Ministry of Education’s representatives participating alongside US education experts, we will have an in-depth presentations and discussions around the following topics:

• The development of online education in China
• How to develop deep partnership around online education between China and US
• The role of new technologies in online education for US – Sino space
• The demand and cooperation models for US – Sino degree programs and skill-based training

Moderated by Charlie Nguyen of CMSquared, USOHE 2019 will be hosted by CMSquared as part of OLC’s Accelerate conference on November 20th and in Gainesville Florida at Digital Worlds Institute on November 21st.

In this interactive and informative forum, our speakers will discuss how quality in digital learning is addressed in their region of the world. You will then have an opportunity to collaborate with other higher education professionals, to identify solutions to current problems and future trends in digital learning.