Sustainable Course Design: Responding to changing learning environments in Higher Ed

Concurrent Session 6

Brief Abstract

The session focuses on best practices related to online teaching and learning using a sustainable course design format which begins with designing an online asynchronous course that can be used to teach in other modalities. Participants can share their experiences and apply our best practices at their own institutions.

Presenters

Extended Abstract

In March of 2020, the world stopped turning for a while and educational institutions were stunned for a good minute when they were told that all education was to now “pivot” to online as we were in the grips of a pandemic that has still not left us and has no intention of leaving us soon. This required that Educational institutions, specifically Higher Ed Institutions, develop support systems and frameworks that can adapt and respond to changes in the teaching and learning environment at a moment’s notice. During the “Conversation, not Presentation” session we aim to share details about sustainable course design best practices at our institution based on faculty feedback and reflections about how they managed to pivot to online using existing resources, the sustainable course design workshop format and details which help streamline the course design and development process for faculty, and the feedback received from our participants who completed the sustainable course design workshops.

Some of the questions we would like to discuss with participants during the session would be related to:

1.What are some of the core components of sustainable course design that are “sustainable” across modalities?

2.How can our existing LMS (D2L in our case) support faculty in adapting an online asynchronous course to a different modality like Face to Face, Online Synchronous, or Hybrid?

During the session, we will demonstrate our workshop design in our LMS, some feedback from participants who have completed the workshop and encourage conference participants to participate in discussion questions and share their views and opinions about the sustainable course design workshop as well.