Now that we are into the realities of teaching in a COVID-world, I keep hearing similar sentiments from my colleagues, something to the effect of, “It’s going fine, but I don’t feel like a good teacher anymore.” What I hear in these statements is not a bad teacher but one who has lost confidence in their teaching. Whether teaching fully online, a hybrid model, or in-person with social distancing requirements, everyone has had to make changes to the way they teach. The pedagogical style and practices that we previously relied on are either no longer an option or are not as effective given the current constraints. So, we have
adapted, learned the technology, and made necessary adjustments. We’re doing it, but we don’t feel like we’re doing it well. We’ve lost our confidence, and thus feel like we’re not good teachers anymore. The good news is that we don’t have to wait for teaching to return to “normal” to feel like good teachers again. We can start to feel confident again by building self-efficacy in our own online or hybrid teaching.
The need for online and blended programs within higher education continues to grow as the student population in the United States becomes increasingly non-traditional. As administrators strategically offer and expand online and blended programs, faculty recruitment and retention will be key. This case study highlights how a public comprehensive university utilized the results of a 2012 institutional study to design faculty development initiatives, an online course development process, and an online course review process to support faculty participation and retention in online and blended programs. Recommendations based on this case study include replicable strategies on how to increase faculty participation and retention in online and blended programs using collaboration, support, and ongoing assessment. This case study is a compendium to the 2012 Armstrong institutional study highlighted in the article "Factors Influencing Faculty Participation & Retention In Online &Blended Education."
The need for online and blended programs within higher education continues to grow as the student population in the nited States becomes increasingly non-traditional. As administrators strategically offer and expand online and blended programs, faculty recruitment and retention will be key. This case study highlights how a public comprehensive university utilized the results of a 2012 institutional study to design faculty development initiatives, an online course development process, and an online course review process to support faculty participation and retention in online and blended programs. Recommendations based on this case study include replicable strategies on how to increase faculty participation and retention in online and blended programs using collaboration, support, and ongoing assessment. This case study is a compendium to the 2012 Armstrong institutional study highlighted in the article "Factors Influencing Faculty Participation & Retention In Online & Blended Education."
Technology moves at lightning speed, Facebook’s algorithm has new rules daily and marketing strategies are ever evolving as the audiences we all seek to reach become increasingly fragmented. And yet, some of us find ourselves
in workplaces where the prevailing sentiment is don’t rock the boat—if it worked in the past, let’s not make any
major changes.
If the culture at your college is all about not fixing what’s not broken, you may have a challenge ahead of you as you
try to suggest and implement some needed change. Turn that challenge into an opportunity with these tips for
shaking things up in a change-averse environment:
Over the last decade, there has been a steady increase in online learning enrollments. The proportion of college students taking at least one online course is at an all-time high and 66% of higher education institutions indicate that online learning is critical to their long-term strategy (Allen & Seaman, 2014). Universities are increasingly relying on adjunct faculty to meet this need;
as such, it is important for institutions to understand the unique motivations, characteristics and needs of online adjunct faculty to better support teaching effectiveness. A survey of 603 adjunct faculty teaching online courses provides an overview of characteristics of modern online adjunct faculty and highlights institutional adaptations necessary to accommodate a changing
faculty body.
“Without having to miss out on fun, just outsource your test to us, an expert will take it and you will get the awesome grade that you deserve. All at prices you will not believe. How does that sound?”
—Excerpt from one of many results of googling “take my test” This pitch is more than incredibly crass. It is really just outright pimping of hired poseurs to online students willing to “pay for performance.” With the massive growth of online education, such parasitic companies have sprung up like weeds, presenting a serious threat to program integrity.
This study examines online and offline political engagement and pays special attention to the role of social networking sites in people's political activities.
Overview of the Special Report
This Special Report’s prime objective is to help policy decision-makers and educational leaders understand what
today’s classroom technologies are evolving toward, and, more importantly, why. It is hoped that examining current
classroom technologies will spur conversation as to how the practice of teaching is evolving and why that evolution
makes sense.
The most difficult challenge in putting this report together was to adequately address all of the key technologies
deployed in classrooms today. Technologies range from tactile objects in Pre-K to hyper-dense 3D modeling programs in
graduate-level science classes at research universities. They involve devices, interactive software and assessment tools.
Ultimately we chose to group technologies by function as they would be used in the classroom, regardless of curriculum
subject or grade level.
Confederation College president Jim Madder delivers his state of the college address on Wednesday; May 24; 2017
(Leith Dunick; tbnewswatch.com)
Thunder Bay school might be celebrating its 50th anniversary, but it's certainly not standing pat says, President Jim
Madder.
In a recent blog post in Inside Higher Ed, Joshua Kim explored the value of telecommuting, rightly suggesting that
the proven success of online education means that one need not be physically present to do a job well. “What we’ve
learned from online education,” he wrote, “is that with a combination of thought, investment and a willingness to
make data-driven continuous improvements, distance is not a barrier to quality.” And he closed by asking, “Should
the champions of online learning also be advocating for telecommuting?”
It is absolutely the case that teaching remotely and doing it well is possible, particularly if professors accept that
teaching online requires the mastery of new skills, an awareness of online pedagogies and best practices, a
commitment to valuing those in digital spaces as much as we value those physically in front of us, and, in some
cases, more time. And Kim is right to imagine that using the “methods and tools” of online education can help us
improve productivity in workplaces that accommodate telecommuters. Certainly, tools like Slack and the Google
suite have enabled synchronous collaboration among remotely situated parties.
The past decade has witnessed an explosion in online learning opportunities for post-secondary students throughout the United States. The university has developed a Faculty Online Observation (FOO) model to allow for an annual observation of online adjunct faculty with a focus on five major areas of facilitation. To test the effectiveness and support of the FOO, a survey related to the observation areas was administered to online faculty and students. The results determined a number of areas of agreement and non-agreement between the groups. The findings will provide valuable information for future training and professional development needs of online instructors, and processes of teaching based on perspectives of instructors, course developers, students, and discipline managers.
The growth of competency-based education in an online environment requires the development and measurement of
quality competency-based courses. While quality measures for online courses have been developed and standardized, they do not directly align with emerging best practices and principles in the design of quality competency-based online courses. The purpose of this paper is to provide background and research for a proposed rubric to measure quality in competency-based online courses.
E-learning holds the potential to profoundly change the way post-secondary education (PSE) is designed and
delivered.
From a quality perspective, e-learning may be more engaging, less passive, and more customized to different
learning styles than traditional lecture-based learning.
There are about 1.3 million enrolments in fully online university and college courses in Canada. E-learning
accounts for between 10 and 15 per cent of PSE learning.
Greater adoption of e-learning will happen if institutional focus on traditional classroom delivery can be reduced;
faculty are adequately supported when they teach online; and e-learning design, development, and delivery
practices improve.
We have heard a lot of talk about MOOCs, or massive online open courses, over the last couple of years. On the plus side, MOOCs often draw enormous enrollments and are easy to sign up for and use; all you need, it seems, is an Internet connection and an interest to learn.
On the down side, they have significant attrition rates – about 90 percent of those enrolled never complete a course – and, according to their most alarmist critics, these courses may even threaten the jobs of college professors nationwide.
Each year, many of us make New Year’s resolutions and try and keep them. Others, usually newspapers and media outlets, speculate on the key things to watch out for during the coming year. Rather than resolutions or predictions, we list ten developments we wish for online learning in 2016.
We hope these come true, but it will take clear resolution, firm commitment and lots of hard work by all to make them happen. This is why we refer to this as a “wish list”.
Not from the realm of pure speculation, all items in our list are developments from current practices in technology, learning, and public policy.
Massive open online courses are often characterized as remedies to education disparities related to social class.
Designing an online course shares many of the same elements and processes that go into designing a traditional face-to-face course, however the online environment brings a unique set of challenges that require special attention and a different approach.
Designing an online course shares many of the same elements and processes that go into designing a traditional face-to-face course, however the online environment brings a unique set of challenges that require special attention and a different approach. Faculty charged with developing their own online courses can find learning the new technology particularly frustrating, and those who are not early adopters to technology might resist the process entirely. Indeed, many institutions are realizing that the development and delivery of online courses is an increasingly complicated process, requiring both a specialized pedagogy and a technological expertise – and it’s rare to find both qualifications in the same person. In the article “The Collaborative Approach to Developing Online Courses,†the author explains how one university adopted a centralized and standardized approach to the design, development, and management of online programs that respects the talents of both instructional designers and faculty by allowing each to work in their own specialty. As a result, courses have the same quality standards and a more consistent look and feel. This special report features eight articles pulled from the pages of Distance Education Report, and covers a variety of different aspects of online course design. Some of the articles you will find in
the report include:
. The Collaborative Approach to Developing Online Courses
. Building Course Quality Systematically
. Who Ya Gonna Call When a Course Needs Help?
. Developing a Course Maintenance Process for Your Online Courses
. What Learning Object Repositories Mean for Your Program
Whether you’re developing a new online course from scratch, or updating one that’s starting to show its age, this report will give you new ideas to consider.
ABSTRACT
We describe a cheating strategy enabled by the features of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and detectable by virtue of the sophisticated data systems that MOOCs provide. The strategy, Copying Answers using Multiple Existences Online (CAMEO), involves a user who gathers solutions to assessment questions using a “harvester” account and then submits correct
answers using a separate “master” account. We use “clickstream” learner data to detect CAMEO use among 1.9 million course participants in 115 MOOCs from two universities. Using conservative thresholds, we estimate CAMEO prevalence at 1,237 certificates, accounting for 1.3% of the certificates in the 69 MOOCs with CAMEO users. Among earners of 20 or more
certificates, 25% have used the CAMEO strategy. CAMEO users are more likely to be young, male, and international than other MOOC certificate earners. We identify preventive strategies that can decrease CAMEO rates and show evidence of their effectiveness in science courses.
Keywords: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), Cheating Detection, Educational
Certification, Educational Data Mining (EDM), Security.
Technology’s potential to transform education has become a mantra of the 21st century. Much has been said about the tools and solutions that can provide opportunities for enhanced student learning. Frequent discussions have focused on the need for schools to have a robust infrastructure that supports continually evolving educational models. However, not as much has been written about the teacher’s role in this dynamic environment and the fundamentally new and different functions teachers
may have.
The days of teachers covering a defined number of pages in a textbook and assigning work at the end of a chapter are quickly disappearing. Instructors are leveraging technologies that give students access to interactive content from myriad sources. In this digital classroom, the teacher is more than a static oracle of information who delivers lectures. Instead, he or she is an active participant and facilitator in each student’s path of discovery and exploration.