OLC Innovate 2021 Virtual Conference Program

Creation of new faculty development programs can be a lengthy process and may be limited to small enrollment. However, circumstances such as the recent pandemic presented the need to quickly prepare large amounts of faculty to teach online. This presentation will explore a model used to quickly create a quality faculty development course focused on the essentials of online teaching, which can be scaled based on individual institutional needs.

Online discussions can provide an ideal opportunity to support develop of critical 21st-century-skills.

This presentation will help participants:

1. Explain the importance adding the development of 21st-century-skills to existing curriculum
2. Apply a framework for assessing 21st-century-skills in their learners
3. Utilize online discussions to develop 21st-century-skills in their learner

Students seem to use their phones for everything even their online classes. But what impact might this have on their engagement? The answer might surprise you. This session presents the findings of research on the impact of mobile learning use on student engagement in fully online courses. Mobile learning matters! 

Looking for easy ways to put caring for students at the center of your teaching and design efforts? Join us as we bring together experienced educators to share their stories, tips, and tricks for promoting care and connection in courses.

This session will tell the story about the development of a two course research methods sequence and present a framework for teaching research methods fully online. The story of the design process will take attendees on a journey through the conceptualization, initial design, formative evaluation, and redesign of the courses.

The instructor-centered method adopted by the STEM field with its emphasis on Eurocentric values is not always conducive to addressing achievement barriers for diverse students in the online classroom. This session will focus on how integration strategies using Culturally Responsive Online Teaching in STEM will enhance engagement for diverse students.

Panelists from a large urban research university share their experiences participating in an innovative faculty professional development initiative in response to COVID-19. This initiative provided the opportunity for various groups across campus to come together and support faculty’s transition to online, hybrid, and blended instruction in preparation for the Fall 2020 semester.

This presentation describes actual IOT enhanced online chemistry labs where students in Zoom breakout rooms collaboratively designed experiments, gathered data and analyzed results while working in Google Docs and Sheets.  We will demonstrate in real time an IOT-enhanced online lab, while going over multiple paradigms for their use in academia.

With COVID, were you scrambling to move programs online?  Searching for best practices? Wondering if what you were doing was effective?  In this session, the presenters will provide an evidence-based framework for building robust, sustainable online programs including faculty training,  leadership, and quality rubrics. 

Creating GIFs, or animated images, is a fun, creative, and effective way to introduce interactivity into your courses.  These short snippets are ubiquitous on social media post and memes across the internet.  In this session we will explore the SnagIt platform to demonstrate the principles and applications of classroom GIFs.

Open Educational Resources need to be delivered within an engaging platform that enable faculty to remix and revise the educational content into blend coherently with the faculty’s goals, the students’ needs, and the institutional vision. The presentation will demonstrate how the ecoText platform and MERLOT’s OER can create customizable OER easily.

In this session, participants will learn how a librarian transitioned their in-person library instruction - online, in both synchronous and asynchronous formats, during the fall 2020 semester. Utilizing the campus learning management system Canvas and developing active learning workshops via Zoom, we will examine how instruction was moved virtually.  

AAA099 - Active Learning Skills is a 1-credit hour course designed to orient students to the college experience with personalized review in both math and English, alongside the exploration of a variety of proven learning strategies. EdReady, an adaptive learning technology, was incorporated as a central component of this online course. We will learn how the course was designed to engage students and increase retention, and we will explore results and student and instructor feedback.

The paper analyzes the teaching and learning of computational thinking and data literacy as it impacts pres-service teachers, and provides two research-based instructional design strategies. 

As more students elect to use mobile devices for courses not designed specifically for mobile learning, challenges faced by this group should not be overlooked. The focus of this session will be on current research in this area and how institutions may support this group toward an improved student experience.

This session will cover program management strategies and student success practices for the Master of Engineering Management (MEM) which is a fully asynchronous online professional master’s degree for working engineers. Faculty and student onboarding practices are discussed as well as strategies used in advising and building community in the program.

Universal design (UD) has emerged as a paradigm for addressing diversity and equity issues in the design of a broad range of applications in education. Learn about aspects of a UD framework that you can flesh out to develop inclusive online learning practices at your institution. 

 How can we effectively engage faculty at all levels when the nature of pedagogy requires specific knowledge and support? How can we collaborate with faculty who would normally be unwilling or unable to teach online? This presentation will discuss and have participants collaborate on strategies and solutions.

Stay a while, and listen to our tale across multiple gameful projects as we share where our stories intersect and what we’ve learned from our journey. From simulations in undergraduate courses to role-playing in professional development, we wish to inform and inspire others looking for the call to adventure.

This research presentation shares results from an interview-based study of 33 faculty with 10 or more years of online teaching experience. Faculty reported their motivations for teaching online, important skills for online instructors, advice for new online instructors, and discussed the future of online education.

The adoption of open, freely available instructional materials has gained interest and merit in recent years,  making education more affordable to students.  This presentation provides faculty, chairs, and administrators with guidelines for reviewing and selecting affordable, high-quality learning materials for  individual classes and guidance on more effectively supporting Open Ed programs. 

Join us to learn how we excelled (despite Covid-19 challenges) by employing recent research and online best practices.  Our Fall 2020 journey of CCF’s primarily online courses and PBA’s return to primarily in person courses (with live online elements) including the planning, successes and opportunities for improvement will be shared. 

In this session, we’ll discuss the design of a 1-day course for online and hybrid faculty. We’ll cover course elements and share feedback received from our target audience as well as anticipated course outcomes. By participating, you’ll walk away with practical ideas for implementing an efficient and engaging online faculty development experience.

(To the tune of The Ballad of Gilligan's Isle)

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale
a tale of a fateful trip,
that started from a virus,
that grew to epidemic.

It caused everything to close,
All schools had to go online
All faculty needed to be trained,
How would that fly?
Come hear how & why!

The case for OERs has largely focused on cost-effective benefits, which can result in students having greater access to -- and engagement with -- information. However, OERs have much greater impact when students can use generative learning strategies to act upon those OERs in personally meaningful ways and generate new information in the form of OERS. This session details how classroom teachers, librarians and students can collaborate to facilitate student-generated OERs.

This session discusses the results and experiences of a successful faculty development program for 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. The session goal is to showcase evidence-based approaches for improving instituionally mandated faculty development efforts.

You’ve heard of agile development. But what about agile course design? In this interactive session, you’ll learn how Salem University and LearningMate partnered to reduce development time and costs, create sustainable online learning experiences, leverage key course components for reuse, and establish an effective process for sustaining ongoing revisions.

Are you tired of receiving email after email asking you questions about material covered in the syllabus?  Are you looking for a better way to direct students to the important information they need to be successful in your course?  If so, then an interactive syllabus is the vaccine your syllabus needs to thrive in our new normal. 

Even in the world of online, digital, and blended learning, not every organization, institution, or unit has figured out how to translate what they know about effective teaching and learning into the context of large community-wide professional development or convenings (like a conference). In this panel-style session, we will discuss a salon based discussion model called OLC Ideate that the organization has created to bring educators together in active collaboration. 

This session will highlight a course review process initiated by our Provost in the Spring of 2020 when the novel coronavirus necessitated a rapid shift to remote learning at MSU. A background will be shared along with what worked, what did not work, and planned revisions for the future.

How can you communicate care, compassion, and empathy to your online students? In the transactional culture of our day which seems only interested in "what can you do for me," how can we powerfully demonstrate our commitment to our students? It is actually easier than you would suppose. It starts with trust.

This session will compare how three institutions responded to the COVID-19 crisis in terms of faculty development, partnerships, and digital infrastructure (edtech, LMS, etc).  Attendees will walk away with an understanding of what faculty development, partnerships and digital infrastructure projects were implemented with data on cost, impact, and recommendations.

This presentation will explore ways to use online journaling within a learning management system and instructor feedback based on Carl Rogers’ model of person-centered learning to enhance teaching presence and the relationship between instructors and students.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is central to the work we all do within online, blended, and digital learning. DEI is core to community building. In this panel-style session, we will discuss what we learned from OLC Ideate: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Digital Learning Environments, a discussion based convening that brought together over 1000 educators to craft a charter for more equitable digital learning environments. 

This session will engage participants in a discussion on defining quality design practices for self-paced eLearning. We will discuss how self-paced fits into the eLearning landscape, examine theoretical assumptions to determine impactful design choices, and discuss the design challenges.

While hands-on training for students came to a halt during the pandemic, the University of Saint Augustine for Health Sciences leveraged its technology, simulation expertise, digital resources, and innovation culture to deliver active learning. We provide our framework and share cases of how faculty creatively used resources such as video, 3D printing, and simulation to “keep teaching” now and into the future.  

As we reimagine online education, let’s also reimagine speeches and reframe presentations as conversations.  Speeches are stressful, whether in F2F, hybrid or Zoom environments and sometimes the format can increase the anxiety. Let’s collaborate and reimagine speeches as intentional opportunities to share stories and connect in meaningful and empowering ways. 

This interactive session explores how we drew upon foundational teaching and learning practices--scenario-based learning, backwards design, curriculum mapping, and the latest neuroeducation research--to redesign an MBA program to meet new challenges and opportunities identified by our students, faculty, and the employers who hire our graduates.

Accelerated online courses (8-week courses, for example) are being offered at an increasing rate due to non-traditional students’ desire to complete courses more quickly and utilize the flexibility and convenience that online learning affords. With this condensed format, it is natural for faculty to focus on how to get all of their content across in a limited amount of time. Rather than focus on the limitations of this structure, let’s consider the strategies necessary for student success and satisfaction in this ever-growing format.

This session introduces a visual approach to online discussions and combines social and educational elements to help faculty and students easily create and share knowledge and reimagine the possibilities of online collaboration and learning.

Our faculty training program was developed by the Center for Teaching and Learning at Shepherd University in West Virginia.  Geared toward instructors at all experience levels (and all motivation levels), and designed to be highly flexible and adaptable, this six-module, no-cost training greatly fosters learner satisfaction, as well as wide-reaching access and scale.  Assessment data gathered throughout the training help us reinforce a culture that values best practices in teaching and learning, as well as continuous improvement.

This interactive session will apply and illustrate how 5 principles for inclusive teaching and learning (adapted from Columbia University’s Teaching and Learning Center) using a Purposeful Learning Framework.   Using examples for adopting OER to applying UDL principles, the outcome of the session is to provide participants a better understanding of inclusivity and to become familiar with tools, technologies, and design strategies that can be immediately adopted to strengthen inclusivity in their own programs

This session will cover the variables and considerations necessary to develop a data vision and strategy that assures near- and far-term success. It will include an analysis of the various components, contributors, and barriers to that strategy, including stakeholders, systems, institutional momentum, and implicit and explicit drivers that must be considered, all from the perspective of a variety of institutions reflecting varying levels of maturity regarding institutional data and approaches. It will also offer some of the key barriers that are often encountered, as well as common strategies to address or elude those barriers.

Eastern Gateway Community College in Ohio has been delivering free college education to more than 60,000 students over the last 5 years and saved over $12M in course materials through the adoption of free and open educational resources with MERLOT and SkillsCommons. How did we do it? Stop by.

Build a creative final assignment for students to demonstrate their learning, add an opportunity to share and publish their work and you create an engaging student experience. Our university has provided everyone with access to the Adobe Creative Cloud. The opportunity for students to utilize this level of professional software in an assignment not only enables them to demonstrate their learning in a creative way but introduces them to tools to increase their digital literacy. The assignment is then peer reviewed and eligible to be part of an Open Educational Resource that will be published each semester.

Join us to learn how online programs can grow and prosper, even in this pandemic era, by employing recent research and online best practices.  We will also share our institution’s return to in person (with live online elements) and online courses including the planning, successes and opportunities for improvement. 

Looking for FREE teaching materials and exemplary online teaching practices using Open Educational Resources? Join us for a guided tour in exploring free resources to help teachers and their students prepare for successful online and hybrid learning. Walk away with FREE teaching tools you can put right to work!

This session will share feedback gathered from students regarding their online learning experience in a virtual chemistry lab. Specific examples will get shared regarding the perceived transferability of the skills mastered online with those required in a physical lab.

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.

Instructional designers discuss the design, development, and delivery process for launching a series of MOOCs to address institutional needs arising in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The MOOCs are open to all, completely free, asynchronous, and provide pathways for college credit should students wish to enroll at our institution.

This presentation will showcase how we merged 360° technology and an interactive "choose your own pathway" platform to create personalized experiences for our students. Participants will have the opportunity to interact with these virtual learning experiences to better understand the capabilities of 360 technologies and personalized learning pathways.  

Employers continue to complain that college graduates do not have the 21st-century-skills they need.

Through this presentation, participants will be able:

1. Utilize a competency framework to evaluate students’ 21st-century-skills

2. Identify the value of digital micro-credentials

3. Explore how their institution can begin addressing these high need skills

This session will benefit professors seeking to create engaging video content in their courses.  We will discuss tools and approaches for creating videos, including types of educational videos (i.e., webcams, screencasts, animations, editing, etc.), options for software and platforms, logistics (e.g., presentation, scripts, lighting, etc.), and general tips and techniques. 

Leaders influence their organizations and followers. Overall, we accept this; however, we rarely consider what happens if leaders are toxic. This session explores the true influences of toxic leadership on both organizations and followers. Additionally, this session equips attendees with an understanding of toxic leadership, behaviors associated with toxic leadership, and strategies to mitigate toxic leaders' influences. 

How did pivoting to remote student services due to COVID-19 provide equity of access between online and campus-based students? Presenters address unexpected findings from a study exploring the nature of online units at 31 HEIs. Results and questions of equity and continuation of expanded online services will be discussed.

Join us in celebrating the Online Learning Journal’s (OLJ’s) 25th anniversary! To celebrate we’ll spend time reflecting on what makes high quality research, suitable for publication in OLJ or other peer-reviewed journals. We will also discuss how you can become involved in our efforts to continuously improve the quality of research on online learning.

The rapid shift to online learning caused by COVID-19 has exacerbated existing inequalities for underrepresented learners. Research shows that inclusive, equitable, and welcoming learning environments can close educational gaps and promote the learning of all students. Our CARE framework provides practical design principles that can make online learning welcoming for all learners.

This session will summarize an analysis of over 300 undergraduate online courses. Course level data were analyzed to investigate the relationship between class size and student performance (average GPAs and DFW rates). A discussion will be led about how results can be applied to class size in online education.

This education session is an effort to provide quick strategies and techniques for active learning to Academic Faculty and Instructional Designers in Health and Medical Education for their synchronous/asynchronous/blended sessions and course designs that can be applied to teaching all didactic lecture, clinical, and laboratory sessions.

Embedded within ‘simple’ practices for teaching online are ways of thinking and doing that can be ‘invisible’ to practitioners and troublesome for faculty who are learning how to teach online. This interactive session presents early research findings and invites participants to strategize constructivist approaches to preparing others for online teaching.

One of the best ways to combat feelings of isolation online is through providing meaningful feedback to students. Join us as we conjure some magic and cover best practices of feedback in the online classroom.

As teachers, we rely on peer review to help students improve their writing. But how do we ensure peer comments are actually helpful? This study provides detailed guidelines for how to make shorter comments (21-40 words) more productive.

The static MOOC model has not evolved since its widespread adoption in 2012.  This session will explore the development of a dynamic Global Adaptive Instructional Network (GAIN) to create the means to personalize the learning experience for every learner everywhere.

This paper explores the decision-making process during the construction of an online teacher professional development course. The analysis revealed repeated attention to the underlying pedagogy and the process of aligning pedagogical structures with technological affordances. Such alignment is essential for harnessing the potential of online and blended learning designs.

As leaders are re-examining their programming post-inoculation, including incorporate new course modes and programming modes, including expanding blended and online programs, they are seeking answers to key strategic questions.  Leaders are determining how they can build capacity and better support processes and procedures to ensure quality programming.  This capacity building and quality depend greatly on the organizational structure (units, reporting lines, staffing, cross-functional teams) and activities (e.g., faculty development, instructional design support, learning technology administration) that take place on campuses.  This session reviews the research on organizational models to support quality blended and online learning and brings in leaders in our field to discuss their own experiences in creating a capacity to support quality.