As the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression, so make it count!  From orientation to first-year seminars and social integration, this presentation will provide practical onboarding strategies that impact online student success and persistence during the first year of college.

Learn how a two-person team successfully redesigned hybrid and onsite courses for online delivery in the span of two weeks. We will share our project management tips as well as how we simply tracked student engagement using Federal Education Guidelines as a rubric.

The theory of andragogy provides a framework for assessing the needs of adult learners so that academic programs can be tailored to serve this growing demographic within higher education. This presentation is designed to demonstrate how online courses can be designed and managed using an andragogical approach to support the adult learning environment.

Were students’ needs met during the COVID-19 transition to remote learning? Were they able to complete their courses, despite multiple challenges? This interactive panel session helps us learn about the student experience as researched at three different public and private higher education institutions.

Adaptive and blended learning can be used together to fully leverage the strength of the online portion of classes to be personalized, mastery-based, and flexible.  Face-to-face sessions can be informed by adaptive learning analytics to focus on problem-solving, analysis, and collaborative learning best done synchronously.

Presenters discuss results from our 4-year, collaborative, adaptive learning research including student outcomes and models that proved most effective for our online, adaptive, college algebra courses. We present an emergent teaching and learning model that frames digital and adaptive learning with predictive analytics.

Interprofessional Education (IPE) is a requirement in health professions programs, affecting communication, collaboration, and patient outcomes. We utilized a collaborative course design process, incorporating an unfolding case study with a medical record in our online course, allowing students to participate on an interdisciplinary team addressing the patient’s needs.

Beyond learner-centered, is learner-driven design.

Learner-driven design empowers learners to shape their learning experiences. Because of this, it is challenging to scale learner-driven experiences.

In this presentation, you will learn about: 1) key learner-driven principles; 2) implications for course design; and 3) scaling learner-driven design in online courses.

The Coronavirus affected the closing of college campuses to safeguard its faculty, staff and students. Transitioning to fully online courses became the solution to a gripping challenge. This presentation will explore how graduate students at HBCUs experienced this transition as its “new normal” and psychosocial issues.

 The COVID-19 pandemic required rapidly moving a large number of faculty and courses online. We developed a framework, accessible to all skill levels, that incorporates best practices and strategies while collaborating with faculty and utilizing existing campus resources. Participants will actively collaborate in adapting the framework to their needs.

Creating consistency across courses is important to help students become familiar with their learning space. It can be frustrating to students if a course is hard to navigate. Find out how our team uses HTML templates to encourage best practices in course design and enhance the user experience of students.

Leadership is tricky and, contrary to what we see, simply promoting your top-performers to leadership positions is not the solution. Leaders and future leaders need assistance in cultivating leadership capacities. This session will explore ways organizations can “grow leaders” through formal and informal strategies. 

Bringing to life online courses is no longer a wish, but a reality. World events have made this goal even more relevant today. This interactive session will focus on discussing engagement opportunities that can result in making the online learning experience more personal and rewarding for both Faculty and Students.

This session will examine original research suggesting that online students have non-significantly different grades but higher withdrawal rates than face-to-face students after controlling for 15 student characteristics.  These results have important implications about how we provide education and support services online. Come discuss best practices for online education!

This session will explore parallels between instructional design processes and the process of crafting messages that communicate the value of instructional design to others at an institution. Participants will begin to develop and share ideas about strategies and messages that they can use when they return to their institutions.

This presentation is a review of the UNLV faculty development approach as a result of COVID-19 but proving to be helpful for faculty.  It is the FlexClass model of creating an online course (CANVAS) and instructor guide that can be utilized for face-to-face, hybrid, and fully online.  It can be overwhelming to consider each format and this presentation will outline the key steps and tools to help faculty to create this important tool.

The session will focus on three objectives related to online course delivery.  Those objectives are 1) engagement tools and techniques, 2) how to foster a transformative faculty to student relationship, and 3) strategies to create an engaging online learning community. 

Learn how Western Governors University is leveraging an AI-based community-building platform to create a deeper sense of belonging among prospective students.  Preliminary research findings concerning the impact that belonging has on enrollment will be shared.  Attendees will discuss the research implications, especially as applied to their own institution.

In online environments, students read all the time, yet effective pedagogical approaches to reading are underexplored. In this session, participants will consider effective approaches to engaging their students in reading text. Participants will leave with a digital reading framework to apply to designing online reading activities.

In this educational session, two instructional designers are hoping to build awareness of how to incorporate open pedagogy when designing reusable assignments. During the presentation, we will be examining how to apply the 5-step course curation strategy when creating reusable assignments. Moreover, it is important to ensure all course materials and content are accessible and meet diverse learning needs. 

The rapid shift to online courses has meant that students must access academic support services in an online format as well. In this session, a team of educators shares their experiences shifting an academic resource center to an online synchronous format, including the challenges, lessons learned, and advice.

The future is now. Interviews with current high school students share their voices and offer perspectives and insights on remote learning, student support and efficacy, use of technology, and quality online learning experiences to help higher education administrators, faculty, and staff to strategically plan for these perspective students.

Presenters will provide data from research at their college revealing a confidence gap in language abilities between multilingual and monolingual students. Since confidence is an affective challenge in online learning for multilinguals, presenters will share a survey that instructors can use to make one of their courses more linguistically inclusive. 

The Doctoral Degree Coach™(the “Coach”) is a digital planning tool with several features designed to support student progress and successful completion of the doctoral capstone. The focus of this session will be a demonstration of the tool and preliminary findings relevant to student progress and their connection to its use.

Empathy mapping and design thinking provide a glimpse into the mindsets of learners. This session will provide learners with an opportunity to explore the value of embedding empathy into e-learning experiences by starting with empathy mapping and Universal Design for Learning as tools for designing for all online.

The impact of COVID-19 on higher education has been devastating. Universities across the United States were forced to make a difficult decision: close or move fully online almost overnight. Two administrators will share the story of how their University dealt with instructional continuity using online learning during a global pandemic.

The need for internally developed, employee focused online training and development is essential to ensure employees are equipped and empowered. The purpose of this qualitative, program-effects case study was to understand instructors’ perceptions, determine the effects of institutional online training and development, and understand current program successes and failures.

This presentation will outline the importance of aligning competencies with courses and course assignments. Presenters will detail strategies of how to align competencies through detailing experiences of a two-year competency alignment project. Session participants will develop a draft competency alignment map of their own program or courses.  

To rapidly transition to remote learning, we assembled a course containing pre-built example assignments and assets. By importing these resources, even inexperienced faculty could quickly convert courses and events to a remote format. In this session, we will share details of our plan, assets, and benefits of the format.

Multiple sesssions of dissertation chair training have been developed and implemented.

We will discuss the process of providing this training and what content we shared.

Also, a discussion on the methods of virtual faculty training will be explored. 

The sudden non-negotiable shift from face-to-face, to online instruction in our courses, made it clear that our ID team needed to trade the uncontested, venerable “backward design” (Understanding by Design) framework, for something much more flexible and faster. This presentation traces our journey, and points to a new destination.

After the shutdown due to COVID 19 virtual patient simulation became a necessity for student success. In this session we will show you how we created immersive environments for virtual reality simulation and how we addressed the need for students to be able to have these experiences from home.

Tyton Partners and Digital Promise surveyed faculty and students on the transition to remote learning. For faculty, this included changes in pedagogy and curriculum and availability of institutional supports. For students, this included practices and challenges in the transition and facets that mitigated these challenges. 

With a framework of disruption innovation, this session addresses a study of the COVID-19 remote teaching experience of faculty at a mid-sized, private university. With over a 25% response rate, these faculty members’ stories of struggle, vulnerability, and innovation invite discussions of how to best support faculty in the future.

This session explores groundbreaking research conducted on the organizational structures of instructional design teams. Discover the influence of structure on the empowerment, role clarity, and leadership opportunities of instructional designers and the ideal structure for building a sustainable, scalable, and empowered instructional design team. Hear the story and lead the change!

The COVID pandemic crisis has not resulted in sustainable change to online instruction.  MERLOT/SkillsCommons and O’Donnell Learn will showcase their Capability Maturity Model for strategic and sustainable transition to quality online instruction and provide examples of how they are implementing this change management framework.

At Clovis, faculty are required to complete a certificate course in online teaching before becoming eligible to teach online. Faculty engage in backward design both in going through the course and in designing their own online courses. This highlights the importance of creating unit objectives and aligning assessments with them.

This session focuses on improving critical thinking and analytical skills of students in Doctor of Nursing Practice programs through the creation of a writing across the curriculum plan. Strategies promoting professional maturity among DNP students with writing, concept development, and faculty development sessions will be presented.

Online education provides flexibility for most, but skills-based education has largely been left behind due to the necessity for hands-on learning, scaffolded skill application, and assessment requirements. This session aims to explore how skills-based education can be achieved online so that all students can experience the benefits of distance learning.

This session explores the use of LMS with an innovative training approach using the TPACK model to build faculty technical skills and pedagogical knowledge while remaining contextually relevant to their discipline. It seeks to help institutions with faculty/teacher development efforts.

Faculty make assumptions related to students, curriculum and teaching styles.  Assumptions can cause both student and faculty frustration, ultimately resulting in dissatisfaction. This session will focus on how to overcome problematic beliefs/assumptions related to students, such as: this is a 100/200/300 level course, all students should know APA, etc.

In these challenging COVID-19 times, presidents and provosts look to their chief online education officer (COEO) more than ever to provide leadership and assure quality in the administration of online and remote programmatic efforts. Join this session to discuss how higher-ed senior leadership can best empower and support their COEO.

At least in a pandemic, the research isn't always right regarding what works for faculty professional development. 

Recently, faculty pivoted quickly to remote learning. This required switching from teaching in physical classrooms to virtual spaces, using web-conferencing technology. Success in doing so depends on an understanding of the pedagogical underpinnings needed to engage learners in this setting. This session provides tips for creating a community of learners.

This study explored how life events impact time and energy available for education (interviewing 49 online students at a large public urban US university). Surprisingly, 89% of reported external stressors differed from factors students indicated impacting course outcomes. Join our discussion of these complex environmental factors possibly underreported in research. 

In response to the ongoing dialog in the online community about where online programming “lives” in an institution of higher education, CORAL research collaborative launched a study to investigate the intersection of organizational structure and academic functions of colleges and universities throughout the United States.  All the results are in!

Digitally-facilitated team activities in an Engineering laboratory course will be piloted and evaluated. Researchers will measure students’ cognitive presence in synchronous team design activities facilitated via two collaboration tools: Edupad and Zoom breakout rooms. We will share the pedagogical mechanism of the remote team-design strategy and present our research findings.

This qualitative research-based presentation will highlight perceived challenges and opportunities related to requirements in the State University System of Florida’s 2025 Strategic Plan for Online Education, which calls for all new and substantively revised courses to undergo a quality certification process that follows Quality Matters course design standards.

This presentation explores the problematic of crowd-sourced plagiarism on ‘study aid’ web platforms by reviewing the results of two studies to measure the frequency and kind of coursework shared from a sample university, and discussing the academic imperatives, obligations, and recourses to address the ‘underground’ crowd-sourcing of academic course materials.

An active learning community in the online classroom keeps your students engaged in their learning experience and leads to higher levels of student satisfaction.   In this session, participants will examine how to build and nurture online learning communities in three simple steps of 1) content development, 2) course design on the LMS, and 3) instructor presence and how they all play a significant role in all learning communities.

This lecture will give an overview of the Faculty Online Training course a faculty driven initiative. Designed and presented by faculty, the course offers support for faculty designing online resources with oversight from faculty mentors, while providing best practices resources and creating a community of online educators. 

Is the timeliness of student introductions a significant predictor of student success?  A recent research study within the School of General Education for an online university found some fascinating results pertaining to the timing of online students’ introduction posts.

Many educators struggled with the rapid online transition with uncertainty and reluctance, but urgency necessitated change.  We developed a faculty-to-faculty and student-to-faculty support and training system to help instructors transition online.  Hear how faculty benefited from instructional design students’ and faculty peers’ help with the redesign of courses throughout COVID.

As educators move forward in the digital world, they struggle with where to place new technology tasks within this long-standing hierarchal guide to teaching and learning. This presentation will demonstrate Churches’ work in mapping Bloom's Taxonomy to digital tools for faculty to integrate digital tools for learning and teaching.

This research study investigated how students were learning from each other (shared metacognition) in a blended course. Practical results will be discussed for redesigning courses to help students develop their capacity for shared metacognition using the community of inquiry framework and digital technologies.

AY 19/20 was one for the books for New Mexico Highlands University; fall presented a cyber-attack, spring COVID-19.  Despite the cyber-attack challenge, it actually prepared the university for a quick technology response to COVID-19.  This session explores leadership and strategic elements that ensure successful navigation in an emergency.        

Drastic times call for drastic measures.  In the sudden shift to “remote learning”, higher education was struck with a drastic change in instruction using blended learning through videoconferencing.  Throughout this presentation, we will challenge participants to thoughtfully consider how to best measure learning through Blended Learning assessment.

The session presenters will share storytelling techniques using the EMPOWER (Engage, Meaningful, Prepare, Organize, Writing, Expectations, Relevant) mnemonic to create connections with students in the online classroom. Participants will learn how to utilize the EMPOWER mnemonic in an engaging, meaningful, and relevant way in the online classroom.

The use of templates is a highly contested topic in Higher Education. This presentation will provide insight into how Mississippi State University has tackled, and conquered, the pitfalls of the template by providing highly individualized templates that meet the needs of various departments.

With the outbreak of Covid-19, institutions scrambled to shift to remote learning. How did faculty cope with this transition? What could your institution have done better? We will share our surveyed faculty perceptions concerning the transition along with lessons learned that will shape future professional development and strategic response.

 I teach flipped, on-site courses. I love the student engagement and high energy this brings. Covid-19 halted onsite; I had no idea how to reproduce this online. I will share what I did to recreate my energized, productive classes online using ‘presence’ and new technologies; you will participate in a demonstration.

In this session, participants will learn about strategies to teach music appreciation online, approaching diverse methods that have been used over time, as well as adaptations made by faculty who had not previously taught online but had to rapidly transition. Although music is the subject of focus, considerations for scope and breadth addressed apply to all subject areas and introduce considerations for transitioning varaious subjects online, based on research and practice.

A small community college took its online CBE Business Law class and transformed it to a student-centric, engaging, interactive class using OER, in which the students feel the instructor is right there by their side. Sound impossible? Learn about our team approach to accomplish this feat.

Online students should have the same access to support and engagement opportunities as their onsite counterparts however this is not always the case.  Join me as I demonstrate how a tri-modal approach - programming, support services, and outreach – serves to create a supportive, nurturing, and engaging online experience.

The COVID19 pandemic has produced datasets and statistics on a world-wide scale and yet also on a more personal local scale.  By connecting authentic real-world data in online math discussions, non-math major students can learn mathematical understanding and meaning to the incomprehensible changes resulting in our world from this pandemic. 

Learning Experience Design (LXD) involves a holistic and learner-centered approach to the design of online courses. This session provides a much-needed framework based on learning science research and proven design principles that practitioners can use to enhance and upgrade conventional instructional design practices. 

We have developed an Online Learner-Driven Support System (OLSS) that is proactive, responsive, and provides flexibility for supporting online learner success and retention. Please join us in an engaging discussion about developing the OLSS and a vision for how components of this system could be applied to other institutional settings.

Student learning retention may be much higher with micro learning, but it cannot completely replace macro learning, approach necessary in college setting as well as in the workforce, for building complex foundational knowledge. Successful online education strategy which aims for reconciliation of both learning approaches is the Milestone Peer Evaluation.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused us to quickly adapt our on-campus courses to online delivery and created motivation to adopt trends in course design and delivery to close education experience equity gaps.  Explore strategies for meeting your learners where they are by focusing on mobile, flexible, micro, and personal course design.

“It’s in the syllabus!” is the constant refrain of higher education faculty.  Every semester brings a repetitive batch of student questions that have already been addressed in a course syllabus. The same types of repetitive questions arise when it comes to course assignments.  Again, the instructions have been ignored

 In general, a student’s failure to demonstrate comprehension of course instructions stems from two sources:

1. The student failed to read the instructions

2. The student failed to understand the instructions

It would be naive to conclude that only the student has failed here. The author of the instructions may also be at fault. Copywriting is a pursuit that’s devoted to creating compelling, reader-friendly content.  When content is compelling, the learner wants to engage.  When content is reader-friendly, the learner understands the written text.  Most academics are not well-versed in best practices from copywriting, leaning instead towards what has been described as “needless complexity”

Guidance from three fields can dramatically improve instructional writing style.  Studies in neuroscience have suggested best practices for writing for reader comprehension. Behavioral science has suggested best practices for writing that motivates compliance. And the field of technical writing suggests techniques for simplifying specialized information.

Courses designed and executed using such principles were evaluated by students. At the close of the courses, more than 90% of students in the anonymous course evaluations agreed or strongly agreed with the statements that described the course as clear, understandable, and well-organized.

Join us as we discuss and dissect our approach to prioritizing pedagogy in a pandemic. We will highlight our 4 week facilitated bootcamp for faculty across two campuses, lessons learned, and next steps for scalable, continued professional development opportunities grounded in evidence-based practices.

A virus has become the most significant driving force of medical education transformation.  It has blended learning in medicine at an unprecedented speed.  In this panel, the educators from different medical schools discuss the changes, challenges, lessons learned; and thus shed some light for optimal blending in the future.

Blended learning and collaborative virtual reality are key in the future of education. Join us to learn how to achieve long-lasting, practical, and experience-based learning focused on developing competences and student engagement.

As online learning continues to grow, the balance between quality and convenience has become a critical issue for every university. Synchronous online learning allows for integrated classrooms to accommodate a diverse study body with unique needs. Effective practices in this mixed modality require technological solutions and engaged faculty members. 

It is important to help motivate students to reach their highest potential.  Before this can be done, faculty need to have the drive and determination to be the best role models to enhance academic performance.  Suggestions on how faculty can stay motivated during a pandemic will be discussed in this presentation. 

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) was created to remove barriers to learning. The emergence of instructional technological tools coupled with the principles of UDL has opened up new opportunities to reimagine the traditional approach to hands-on education (courses with studio or lab activities), within a virtual environment. Such a transition offers solutions to common problems with this mode of education, as well as creating an inclusive and diverse learning environment. Come to this interactive presentation to learn some best practices and discuss ideas to support your own teaching. 

The syllabus communicates critical information students need to revisit throughout the semester.   This presentation provides an overview of how an academic department and an instructional designer developed a visual and accessible syllabus template.  This presentation will also offer tips on developing an engaging, visual and accessible, student-centered syllabus document. 

Online graduate students face unique challenges as they often must juggle school with work and families. To support students holistically, and help students develop non-cognitive skills for persistence, an online open access mindfulness course was developed. This presentation will elaborate on the course design and the findings from the study.

 As distance learning became the new “normal” across the world, COVID-19 unveiled a key component of the online student experience: sense of belonging. In this session, participants will learn what COVID-19 revealed about student sense of belonging and how universities can improve student success and connection practices beyond the pandemic.

In the face of any disaster, we are stronger together. This presentation will discuss how we leveraged our Environmental Barrier faculty “Champion” support program to increase faculty collaboration, strengthen the online community of care, improve student support outcomes, and expand to meet the needs of COVID-19 student impacts.

How can you easily incorporate innovation into the student learning experience? Be smart with your LMS by organizing it into three simple but powerful pedagogical learning strategies. Learn how we motivated students to “Engage,” “Evaluate” and “Evolve” as we explain how the development of one professional Ethics course became a unique example of our educational framework. 

This session will focus on the four research-identified types of learners. Participants will be presented with the characteristics of each learner and what learning environments and activities are most successful to them, and how instructors can use this knowledge to create a more personalized learning process for their online students.

Join us as we learn about the reflection process and how to add a reflective practice to your teaching practice. In this session, we will uncover the nuts and bolts of reflective teaching and practice writing short reflections weaved throughout the presentation to get you started on your reflective teaching journey.

Educators strive to provide high-quality experiences to their students – ones that lead to positive outcomes. Balancing the demands associated with a dynamic educational landscape with stakeholder questions about value can be challenging. This paper describes an online course auditing process to assess quality in a graduate professional program.

Few studies examine how instructor power is communicated in online learning environments. Communicating instructor influence can positively impact learning and success, but doing so is challenging online. This case study analyzes how community of inquiry theory enables instructors to communicate influence and allows for a systematic gauge of its effectiveness.

While institutions continually increase the amount of large-scale learning data that they collect, many faculty still do not use it to inform course-level interventions and design. Learning analytics dashboards are a common way to present this information and this session explores how institutions could grow the usage of these tools.

When integrating external resources in a course conversion, it will come with successes and struggles.  In this session, we will work to reframe the pitfalls into best practice ideas that can be faced when working along with a vendor or stakeholder outside of your organization.

Teachers were given a moment’s notice to move instruction online as COVID-19 swept across America. What have we learned from this experience, and where do we go from here? This session serves as an opportunity to explore both of these questions in the context of research and participants’ personal experiences.

In 2017, we turned to technology to engage the students who have limited and inflexible time but have greater success with live instruction. In 2020, post-pandemic, we shifted our focus as the technology allowed for a seamless transition to quarantined life. Learn how pre-pandemic planning prepared us for post-pandemic emergency.

To increase enrollment, a program revision and course alignment were completed. Linking industry competencies to course activities provide students with increased job opportunities upon graduation. This presentation describes the integration of the competencies as well as the successes, challenges, and opportunities from developing a competency-linked online graduate program.

Blended learning has been increasingly explored by institutions in response to the recent challenges brought on by COVID-19. This presentation will focus on how blended learning can address the challenges faced by higher education beyond the pandemic. Models of blended instruction that promote student success and retention will be provided.

Virtual learning has and will continue to be in demand given the current world health climate. Join us for a strategy-rich, mini-workshop sharing successful approaches to online math discussion forums that include authentic real-world situations, teamwork and plagiarism-reduced, quality content-specific conversations. 

Faculty researchers share preliminary results of their study investigating transformational aspects of teaching during the recent pandemic. The study explores how transitioning to online teaching opened an opportunity for faculty to rethink their ideas about teaching and negotiate new ethical challenges.  Results and experiences will be discussed with the audience.

The transition to online education has been chaotic for schools and teachers across the nation. The lack of funding and subsequent lack of support has put the otus on teachers to provide an online learning environment that maintains the rigor and support previously provided. This presentation will discuss tips, strategies and tools that teachers can use and implement right away to ensure a meaningful learning experience for students.

While institutions moved toward remote learning in response to the unprecedented pandemic, many institutions found the transition fraught with unexpected challenges. This timely session provides administrators and leaders with a model for evaluating institutional readiness for the development of successful distance education programming and offers practical suggestions for implementation.

Most teachers have limited experience with digital games when it comes to integrating them into the classroom. This session covers the design and development of an online professional development on gamification for K-12 teachers. Findings from teachers’ perceptions on video games are used to guide the PD content.