OLC Accelerate 2020 Virtual Conference Program

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 two 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.

University of Phoenix has developed a system and process for delivering high quality, accessible video to online learners through a variety of platforms, for a rich experience. By utilizing Vimeo, BlackBoard Ultra, Rev.com, and WordPress, online students view video embedded directly into their course with closed captions. An extended experience allows interaction with transcripts, all within a robust and low-cost delivery network. We'll show you how it works.

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.

The role of the instructional designer has always been fluid, changing more so over the past few months. Yet it remains, first and foremost, relational. Designing while pivoting modalities is less about teaching new skills and methods and more about serving and empowering faculty in encouraging and even humorous segments.

Building an online doctoral program through the implementation of our own best theories and practices (and a bit of luck) is both a challenging and rewarding endeavor. This interactive presentation provides insights to the Baylor University online Ed.D. program’s design and development process that incorporated equal parts strategy (theories and practices) and serendipity (risk-taking and innovation).

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. 

How do you keep up with course quality and revisions after the initial development? Learn how a team of instructional designers developed and implemented an asynchronous Redesign Cohort to assist and educate instructors on how to redesign their course so that students continue to get a high quality learning environment.

Educational institutions today face increasing challenges of building up capacity to expand their online programs. Some have turned to “fee for service” option as an alternative to outsourcing to an OPM. Join us as we share and discuss our experience with integrating fee for service model with our in-house resources.

Session Takeaways: Audience attending this session will be able to discuss the benefits of leveraging an internal teams with fee for service partner to course design and development. They will see how trusting outside partners could add value to the work of an in-house team. Additionally, they will be able to articulate how beneficial it is to develop long-term relationships with external partners by setting goals and working together to meet them. Lastly, they will be able to evaluate whether this approach is appropriate for their institution.

Faculty identify barriers to teaching informatics which prevent them from preparing the nursing workforce to have the computer and information literacy skills necessary for nursing practice today. We studied faculty informatics competencies, identified faculty informatics needs, and will share creative methods to increase faculty informatics competencies.

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 US Department of Education has approved a major overhaul of regulations relating to distance education. This session will provide participants with an overview of those regulations related to regular and substantive interaction requirements for distance education as well as student authentication requirements. 

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. Student insights from the spring highlight challenges they faced and practices they responded to. Faculty responses from the spring and summer showcase how institutions responded with training and resources in preparation for the academic year.

This proposal explores alternative pedagogy that leverages online writing classrooms as training sites for future remote employees. We propose using non-traditional strategies, such as cognitive modeling and collective feedback, to align the ways we teach the writing process to that which students will engage with as the future remote workforce. 

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.

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

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.

Through the Every Learner Everywhere Partnership, the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) and the National Research Center for Distance Education and Technological Advancements (DETA) have completed a review of research done in online and digital learning at minority serving institutions and/or community colleges, with a focus on Black, Latinx and Tribal population outcomes. Come join us and learn about our findings, hear about the next steps in our process, participate in future research, and continue the conversation in equity and inclusion.

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.

This presentation will breakdown Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation and how to apply this model to training programs.

Student connectedness with online instructors is important for student learning and satisfaction. We share results from a cross-sectional survey of higher education students enrolled in face-to-face instruction forced online due to COVID-19. Responses provide insight into what students value in the online sphere and assist instructors with building connections.

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!

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.

Is your institution struggling to prepare faculty to teach successfully online? Best Practices for Teaching Online is a faculty professional development program developed in partnership with NISOD and in collaboration with multiple higher education institutions. Come learn about this exciting program and how your faculty can benefit from national recognition!

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.

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. 

It can be difficult to engage students in an online environment. Implementing active learning activities can increase student engagement. I will review the difference between active and passive learning activities, engage the audience in an active learning activity, and present a variety of resources for attendees to walk away with.

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.

This session will provide faculty with the theories, tools, technologies, and strategies for proactively engaging students in your online learning environments.  As educators transition from traditional classrooms to virtual meeting spaces and digital classrooms, it is important to create a community of online learners through meaningful interactions and social technologies.  

“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.

Interested in supporting a diverse student population? The student population of our online program reflects considerably more racial, generational, and professional diversity than our university’s broader demographics. We will share the systems we developed to support the diverse student body in an online setting, including mentorship from program staff and individualized writing support from a departmental writing center.

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.