OLC Innovate 2023 Program

Join us for a fun and interactive session centering on the asynchronous discovery sessions. Starting with a little bit of orientation, some guided road-mapping, and lots of key reflection and collaborative learning, this session will get us thinking about the possibilities for intentional asynchronous online engagement.

Having identified a need to ensure quality online education for students, our institution developed a rubric to facilitate a quality online course designation process to improve distance education and earn state designation. This session will share strategies for the development and implementation of a quality assurance process and rubric.

Our project involved an interdisciplinary team, technological development, and experiential learning.  We created a system, AccessCyber, to amplify experiential learning and curriculum access. Our work was supported by the [information redacted for anonymized review].

How do you know that you’re meeting the needs of the communities that you serve? How can you connect with those you are not aware of to make a bigger impact in your organization or institution?

Join us for a discussion of how OLC developed a flexible landscape analysis framework to better understand the needs of our community. In this session, we will provide key strategies for conducting a landscape analysis, which can be applied in many contexts, including professional development, online program development, and student support services. Participants can adopt and adapt the OLC framework and will leave the session with a greater understanding of how to conduct an effective landscape analysis.

Managing an online classroom requires appropriately setting up and facilitating an environment that maintains the same rigor and support students receive in a traditional setting. With minimal funding and subsequent lack of support, teachers are required to manage systems and resources on their own to ensure students remain engaged and motivated in their learning. This presentation will discuss tips, strategies, and tools that teachers can use and implement right away to provide a meaningful learning experience for the traditional student.

The "Ed3" movement champions integrating education with internet technologies targeting decentralization, learner sovereignty, and verifiable credentials, known collectively as Web3 and the metaverse. While this movement grows, the knowledge, attitudes, and concerns of those involved remain unknown. Contextual to online learning, results and implications of such a study are discussed.

Culturally responsive teaching (CRT) strategies for success in all students in higher education are the topic of this session. Successful CRT strategies designed by faculty engaging with working adults in university programs to welcome and connect with students and promote student success are the session's focus.

Does your university experience obstacles and siloing in building and executing a strategy around connecting curriculum to careers?  Is this hindering your ability to drive transformative change in this area?

Join us we reflect on launching a university-wide initiative connecting curriculum to careers via instructional design, assessment, and data analytics.

This presentation focuses on the importance of queer and transgender inclusion in OER and strategies for how instructors can both evaluate existing OER and find new sources for their courses.

Need a boost of energy without the ups and downs of caffeine?!  The presenters, both Board Certified Advanced Holistic Nurses, will provide holistic self-care tips to invigorate the mind, body, and spirit. From essential oils to forest bathing, there are many easy and enjoyable ways to rejuvenate teaching energy!

Whether starting or scaling, digital learning initiatives require intentional development of faculty and staff. Participants will learn how OLC’s Institute for Professional Development partners with institutions to provide professional learning on the latest digital learning practices and emerging technology trends. Hear directly from OLC staff and a panel of institutional leaders who have leveraged the Institute's offerings to support their faculty and staff.

Online education is rapidly trending towards Mobile Learning.  Students are not just learning online; rather they are learning on the go, self-pacing their educational path, and accessing learning content through various mediums and screen sizes. Join in to learn how online students communicate, access, and complete online learning activities!

The project Engineers & STEM contributes to a better understanding of the E of STEM highlighting the role of engineer’s contribution to the development of society. It is addressed to teachers and students of primary, secondary (K-12), and engineering education. Objectives, methodology, results, and interactive debate will be presented.

Are you looking to add more dimension to your discussions to make them even more engaging and encourage your students to develop their critical thinking skills? We will walk you through a new framework, developed out of our research (Berry & Kowal, 2022), that will help draw more out of your students to add depth to their responses and interactions with others. Come ready to apply a new model toward this essential component of many online courses and take your discussions from good to great!

This session will present an update on the cross-institutional collaboration to simultaneously address DEI and online course quality. SUNY, Cal State LA CETL, and now 66 other institutions are developing an online, openly-licensed, and freely available resource of annotations for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in online course design that can be used with any of the main online course quality rubrics, i.e., CVC-OEI, OSCQR, QOLT, or QM. 

OLC provides official reviews for institutions to help them evaluate and address quality in their online courses and programs, and OLC relies on trained external reviewers to support these efforts. In this session, participants will learn about the scorecards within the OLC Quality Scorecard Suite, strategies for effectively completing course reviews at any institution, and the process for applying to be a Certified OLC Scorecard Reviewer.

Traditional teaching methods often seem useless when it comes to online learning. With tweaking, we can transform some familiar techniques into our digital classrooms.

We will take a few old-school, in-person instructional methods and translate them into interactive, online teaching strategies that will increase student engagement and active learning.

The presenters will share ways they have implemented Transparent Leadership practices to retain staff and build a trusting and positive work environment for their team. They will discuss benefits and challenges they have experienced and call on the audience to share their experiences, ideas, and best practices in a discussion format.

Music is a powerful and influential tool that affects everyone, possibly without recognition. Using the Ludic Pedagogy framework and model as a guide, an engaging student-centered online assignment was created to help students explore history, culture, diversity, equity, and other topics through song lyrics. Use this in your class tomorrow!

Discover how MERLOT-SkillsCommons, Ohio TechNet (OTN) and education-industry partners are modeling innovative strategies to fill in-demand, skilled jobs in advanced manufacturing. Explore strategies accelerating innovation to fill today’s demands for high-tech manufacturing jobs. Learn how OTN’s partnership with MERLOT-SkillsCommons and the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association (OMA) is creating a portal of Free training resources of relevant and vetted content for Ohio’s workforce training programs. 

What are Open Educational Resources (OER) and what role do they play in building equity into the educational landscape? OER goes beyond cost savings and provides customizable content which can reflect historically marginalized voices and viewpoints. This presentation will provide a foundation on what OER are, how they are used, and their importance in equity in education. Practical resources and tips for incorporating diverse content will also be provided. 

'Maslow before Bloom’ calls for educators to meet learners’ basic needs before striving for academic outcomes.  Common in residential settings, such motivational strategies are scarce in online tertiary environments.   Using Maslow’s (1943) theory, recognize the needs of adult learners and gain practical strategies to meet these needs in online environments.

Researchers share the results of a meta-analysis examining research on synchronous instructor presence in online courses and the relationship to student outcomes. We will discuss the research process and unexpected challenges. The discussion will include how the results can be applied by different stakeholder groups, including recommendations for researchers.

Face it! Faculty are BUSY! They are teaching, grading papers, planning lessons, engaged in service to the college through clubs and committees, and serving the university through committees. With time as limited as this; engaging in scheduled synchronous research programming is often difficult. In this session research findings will be provided related to asynchronous developmental research programming to meet the busy needs of online faculty so that they can access what they want and need easily – one ‘Bite’ of content at a time.

The Division of Digital Learning at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board is advancing the OER ecosystem in Texas and beyond. Through research, advocacy, partnerships, and trainings this work eliminates geographical, financial, and procedural barriers and fosters the adoption of quality OER practices and materials.  

Starting with an acknowledgement of lectures as a still widespread teaching technique, the presentation proposes an innovative, easy-to-implement teaching strategy that streamlines lecture planning, and transforms lectures into active, engaging encounters with course content: ACSL (ACtive SLide) is a low-prep, high-yield strategy with measurable results.

Adobe Express or Canva? Microsoft or Google? Zoom or Teams? Often it feels we focus more on the tool than the needs of our learners. Here we will discuss how understanding basic instructional design principles can help faculty effectively choose and use technology for teaching and learning. 

Digital badges have been leveraged with increasing success to bridge the gap between the language of higher education and the workforce. But what about those who never matriculate? Join St. Catherine University as it shares its innovative approach to meeting the needs of this growing sub-set of job-ready students.

 A showcase of our online courses designed with inspiring themes. Themed courses are a creative solution for gaining the learner’s attention with interactive media. We will share our creative and collaborative ideation process and inspire you with your own.  Our course development team consists of instructional designers and multimedia specialists.

If you were tasked to transform distance education at your institution, how would you do it? Through a team-led discussion, learn how leaders at one large, public research university envisioned and carried out a collaborative approach to transform online learning including examples of the networks and communities they created.

During this session, presenters will outline the reasons for streamlining the institutional process for reviewing and recognizing online courses for quality. With the accelerated growth of today’s online education landscape, presenters will share their process, results and lessons learned for implementing a scalable quality online course review process.

It can be difficult to understand where one might start with advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in their courses, programs, or institutions. This session will detail how a campus initiative formed around DEI, as well as document the stories of two projects and lessons learned in this initiative. 

COVID-19 forced instructors to create multimedia content for remote learning on campuses across the country. Unfortunately, most of this content lacked instructional value. This presentation teaches sound multimedia principles to guide the creation of multimedia content, and shows how these research-based concepts can enhance video instruction to increase learner comprehension.

Communities in Crisis: Student Voices on Climate Change is an Open Educational Resource developed by curating undergrad student essays and then publishing them using Pressbooks. This session will describe the project in detail including the idea, the partnership between a faculty member, a learning designer, and an undergraduate student, the student assignment, the selection process, and the technologies used to create the resource.

Participants will discover a unique approach to faculty training that integrates the following: immersive student and faculty experience, active LMS engagement, personalized support, and opportunities to demonstrate effective and inclusive practices that align with the university’s values and initiatives. Participants will leave with ideas to implement at their learning institutions.

The critical connection between post-secondary education and workforce readiness is in the spotlight more than ever before.  Yet, only 26% of working adults believe college prepared them with the necessary skills for career success. Join us as we discuss a framework for creating incremental value in learner-centric credentials.

Learn how our team of expert educators (but novice web designers) applied our pedagogic expertise to UX and web design techniques like personas, user tasks, card sorting, and accessibility to improve our teaching and learning resources website.

Learners cannot be expected to passively soak in knowledge simply presented to them. Engagement is now more crucial than ever, but engaging learners is much easier said than done. Come and discover how an Instructional Designer incorporated the powerful H5P tool to create transformative, impactful, and engaging learning experiences. 

In this session, participants will learn how one university system uses its quality course review process as a faculty development program--and how the most effective learning moments for faculty occur where the two intersect/converge.

This presentation aims to demonstrate a how virtual STEM peer mentoring training  was designed, and in turn, promotes the STEM self-efficacy of White and Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) women undergraduate engineering students at an institution serving a minority population. The design process and learning experience design study (inclusive of   remote synchronous usability test and interviews) results will be presented and discussed. Participants will have the opportunity to interact with the content and provide recommendations.

The Collaborative Active Learning Instructional Design (CAL-ID) Model is to be used by instructional designers during a course design and development process while working with a subject-matter expert. In this presentation, I will describe the research methodology used in the creation of this model and present the three pillars of the model and how these work together to create a unique design and development process focused on active learning.

As the COVID-19 pandemic forced all learning programs online, faculty were afforded the opportunity to utilize multiple resources for learning materials. The pandemic also forced changes in the administrator, access, and provision of health services. New resources, processes and programs were introduced at lightening speed, compared with prior timeframes. 

“Regular and substantive interaction” (RSI) is used in the “distance education” definition to delineate federal financial aid eligibility for courses. Based on recent information from the U.S. Department of Education, panelists will share clever strategies to comply and discuss how compliance could support best practice overall.

It’s crucial to create inclusive learning environments to include, connect, and engage every student in online and blended courses. This interactive session will share what we did and how we did to help faculty create inclusive learning environments and authentic leaning to engage all students through a DEI grant project.

To remove the barriers of educational inequality and increase inclusivity, come and discover a hidden jewel to student success. Be ready to bring your A-Team.