One of the many lessons learned from the early years of distance education is the fact that you cannot simply pluck an instructor out of the classroom, plug him into an online course, and expect him to be effective in this new and challenging medium. Some learned this lesson the hard way, while others took a proactive approach to faculty training. All of us continue to refine our approach and discover our own best practices. Today, it’s possible to learn much from the mistakes and successes of those who blazed the trail before us. Faculty development for distance educators is a critical component of all successful distance education programs. Well thought-out faculty development weaves together needed training, available resources, and ongoing support, and carries with it the same expectations for quality teaching that institutions of higher education have for their face-toface classes. This special report, Faculty Development in Distance Education: Issues, Trends and Tips, features 12 articles pulled from the pages of Distance Education Report, including:
• Faculty Development: Best Practices from World Campus
• Developing Faculty Competency in Online Pedagogy
• A Learner-Centered, Emotionally Engaging Approach to Online Learning
• How to Get the Best Out of Online Adjuncts
• Workload, Promotion, and Tenure Implications of Teaching Online
• Four Steps to Just-in-Time Faculty Training
This report is loaded with practical strategies that can help you build a comprehensive faculty development program, helping ensure that instructors stay current in both online pedagogy and practical technical know-how. No matter what the particular character of your program is, I think you’ll find many ideas you can use in here.
The integration of information and communications technologies (ICT) in higher education, especially in North America and Europe, has reached a tipping point, where one is hard-pressed to find a classroom utterly devoid of any digital
technology. in the developing world, distance education models are increasingly being implemented in postsecondary schools, particularly to promote the development of professional skills. This special issue reviews some distance education models and sheds light on how the exponential growth of on- line social interactions via increased adoption of web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, and purposeful games has impacted student learning and instructional strategies in post-secondary schools from an international perspective. we critique the most common theoretical underpinnings for distance education and report some empirical evidence of how web 2.0 technologies are being em- ployed to improve performance in higher education
classrooms in Canada and abroad.
Many higher education institutions use student satisfaction surveys given at the end of a course to measure course and instructor quality. But is that really a true measure of quality?
All things being equal, an instructor who teaches a rigorous course will likely score much lower than an instructor whose course is a little less demanding. Then there’s the whole timing of the satisfaction surveys. For the most part, students are simply glad the course is over (even if they liked it) and put little thought or time into completing the survey. Unless of course they know they failed, in which case you will get a detailed assessment of how you are boring, inflexible, out of touch, or otherwise unfit to teach.
No wonder surveys get such a bad rap. If end-of-course evaluations are the only surveys you use, there’s a lot more you can, and should, be doing. Done correctly, surveys can delivertremendous insight into what’s working, what’s not, and why. This special report features 10 articles from Online Classroom, including a three-part and a five-part series that provides stepby-
step guidance on how to use surveys and evaluations to improve online courses, programs, and instruction. You’ll learn when to use surveys, how to design effective survey questions, why it’s important to ensure anonymity, and the advantages and disadvantages of Web-based surveys.
Articles in Online Course Quality Assurance: Using Evaluations and Surveys to Improve Online Teaching and Learning include:
• Online Teaching Fundamentals: What to Evaluate, parts 1-3
• Course and Instructor Evaluation: If It’s So Good, Why Does It Feel So Bad?
• Getting Evaluation Data through Surveys: What to Consider before Getting Started
• Using Surveys to Improve Courses, Programs, and Instruction, parts 1-5
If you’re dedicated to continuous improvement, this special report is loaded with practical advice that will help you create more effective surveys before, during, and after your courseends.
Unable to cope with the transition from secondary school to postsecondary school or the new pressures of first year, a number of students at Ontario’s universities and colleges withdraw before they graduate. What leads them to leave is still under discussion. One possibility is that they lack what are called emotional and social competencies that are often linked to academic success and retention.
Emotional Intelligence Interventions to Increase Student Success was a project undertaken at Fleming College that aimed to improve the emotional and social competencies of first semester students through the modification of a Technology Career Essential course.
In this paper, four qualitative case studies capture the complex interplay between the social and structural relations that shape community - academic partnerships. Collaborations begin as relationships among people. They are sustained by institutional structures that recognize and support these relationships.
Productive collaborations centralize reciprocity, flexibility, and relationship building between individuals and institutions. Our findings also indicate a synergistic interaction between collaborative processes and outcomes:
an equitable process supports the development of mutually beneficial outcomes, and the ability to sustain a collaborative process requires substantive progress towards shared change goals.
The Ontario government recognizes the importance of ensuring equality of access to postsecondary education (PSE). One group that has been and continues to be underrepresented in PSE is students with disabilities. As a response, the Ontario government has made improvements to the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005, with the end goal of making Ontario a more accessible province for people with disabilities by 2025. In addition to making changes to legislation, there has been increased funding for students with disabilities, with more than $47 million allocated in 2010-2011 to help these students achieve
success in PSE. The Ontario government now also provides targeted funding for students with learning disabilities (Tsagris and Muirhead, 2012).
The 2005 Postsecondary Review, “Ontario: a Leader in Learning,” authored by Bob Rae, addressed issues facing students with disabilities. Key recommendations1 included:
Require institutions to reach out to students with disabilities at their schools and in their communities to ease the transition to postsecondary education. Provide funding for enhanced academic and career counselling on campus. Allow for the evolution of centres of research and service excellence and distribute funding to institutions for supports and services on the basis of the size of a given institution’s population of students with disabilities (Rae, 2005: 32).
Nearly every college and university in America has refocused its attention on “student success.” Like many institutions, Cleveland State University, where I work, has erected an entire enterprise devoted to this endeavor. We have reorganized ourselves administratively, invested in new staff, updated technology and taken a deep dive into institutional data to ensure we are best positioned to make sure all our students have a high potential to graduate. We have improved as a result.
Social media, when used in a corporate setting, represents a balancing act of rewards and risks for IT, business and senior management in virtually any organization or industry:
• Rewards in the context of new business opportunities that can be created, the competitive differentiation that a company can enjoy from intelligent use of social media, the ability to build customer loyalty, and the new channels of communications that open up with current and prospective customers. Risks from the inappropriate content that can be posted on social media sites, the malware that can enter a network through short URLs or phishing attacks, and the failure to retain
important business records posted on social media. In short, although social media is a relatively new communication and information management channel relative to more traditional tools like email or instant messaging, the same fundamental
management requirements apply: social media must be monitored for malware and inappropriate content, and relevant business records sent through social media must be retained and easily accessible for as long as necessary.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
There are four important points made in this white paper:
Social media management – by virtue of the sheer numbers of social media users and the importance of the applications for which the technology is used – cannot be ignored by corporate decision makers.
Social media creates a number of potential risks for firms of any size and across all industries. These risks are focused primarily on a) the ingress of malware that could wreak financial or other havoc in an organization; b) the potential for employees to post content that could harm their employer; and c) not retaining business records that must be preserved to satisfy legal, regulatory or other obligations. Any organization – whether or not it sanctions the use of social media must develop detailed policies focused on how and when social media can and cannot be used. The technologies exist to monitor and archive social media content in a way that can minimize corporate risk – every organization should evaluate and deploy technologies that will meet their requirements.
The crisis — and there is no other word for it — in public schooling is a function of the interaction of an enormous push-pull dynamic. The push factor is that students find schooling increasingly boring as they proceed across the grades. Studies from many countries show that among high school students less than 40% of upper secondary students are intellectually
engaged (Jenkins, 2013; Willms et al., 2009). And, not unrelated, signs of teacher frustration are growing. For example, in the U.S the percentage of teachers who are satisfied with teaching has plummeted from 65% to 38% from 2008 to 2012. Teachers and students are psychologically if not literally being pushed out of school. Meanwhile prodigious technology is alluring all, kids and
adults alike, to the digital world, not necessarily productively. Within this allure we are seeing exciting new learning modes emerging from the interaction of pedagogy and technology. Education under these terms needs to be radically rethought — partly to stop the boredom, but mostly to blow the lid off learning, whereby students and teachers as partners become captivated by education day in and day out.
This report analyzes the economic impact of post-secondary education (PSE) in Canada. It is one of three foundational studies by The Conference Board of Canada’s Centre for Skills and Post-Secondary Education. The report considers three kinds of economic impact: spending in the economy (either directly by PSE institutions or indirectly through tourism and other channels), human capital formation, and intellectual capital formation. The report develops a bottom-up approach to understanding impacts, from the PSE institutions to the broader economy.
Online Student Engagement Tools and Strategies
Most online students, even those who are successful, will tell you it takes an extra dose of motivation to stay on top of their assignments compared to the traditional classroom. In fact, the anytime/anywhere convenience of online learning sometimes makes it too convenient … to procrastinate, forget about, and become otherwise disengaged. No wonder online courses have an attrition rate that’s 10 – 20 percent higher than their face-to-face counterparts.
For faculty teaching in the online classroom, this reality underscores the importance of having activities that build student engagement and help create a sense of community among their geographically dispersed students.
Online Student Engagement Tools and Strategies features 11 articles pulled from the pages of Online Classroom and provides practical advice from online instructors who recognize the value of engagement and its role in student retention and success.
Here are just a few of the articles you will find in this report:
• Engaging Students with Synchronous Methods in Online Courses
• Indicators of Engagement in the Online Classroom
• Teaching Online With Errol: A Tried and True Mini-Guide to Engaging Online Students
• Engage Online Learners with Technology: A Free Tool Kit
• Promoting Student Participation and Involvement in Online Instruction: Suggestions from the Front
In short, this special report explains how adjustments in tone, technology, teaching presence and organization can bring positive changes to student learning.
The community college field is evolving dramatically. It has been 10 years since the Center for Community College Student Engagement presented results from the first national administration of its flagship survey. Over the past decade, institutions enrolling more than 80% of U.S. community college students have used Center surveys to assess their students’ engagement so they can improve institutional practice and student outcomes. This focus on engagement is one of many changes in the ways community colleges are using data to understand and improve the educational experiences of their students.
Now, as colleges increasingly understand the importance of intentionally engaging students, the field must turn to the game-changing challenge: bringing high-impact practices to scale as part of a concerted effort to increase college completion rates. In an era of growing demand, shrinking budgets, and greater accountability, meeting this challenge requires singular focus. Colleges must make decisions—about every hour spent, every dollar allocated, every policy set, and every practice implemented—based on whether those decisions will make engagement inescapable for large numbers of their students.
As video-based instructional materials become available to distance learners to learn practical skills at a distance, it is important to assess the instructional effectiveness of these materials and to understand how students respond to them. This paper is the second part of a larger exploratory study that assessed the instructional effectiveness of video-based instructional materials for teaching distance learners practical skills in block-laying and concreting and how learners respond to these instructional materials. Specifically, this paper aims to assess learners’ acceptance and satisfaction with the materials. It also aims to determine whether levels of learner satisfaction and acceptance differ according to study centres. Data were collected from 71 respondents at three study centres using a self-completion questionnaire comprising 17 Likert-type items. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, ANOVA, and Scheffe’s post hoc test at a 0.05 level of significance. Learners appeared positive about their learning experiences with the use of video-based instructional materials to learn practical skills at a distance as they rated highly all the items assessing their acceptance and satisfaction. Results of item-by-item ANOVA regarding learner acceptance indicated that the respondents, categorized according to study centres, exhibited similar levels of acceptance for nine of the ten items. For learner satisfaction, there were no statistically significant differences for six of the seven items. Thus, learners of different study centres exhibited about the same level of acceptance and satisfaction.
Keywords: Block-laying and concreting; distance learning; learner acceptance; learner satisfaction; technical and vocational education and training (TVET); technology acceptance model (TAM); video-based instructional materials International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning
Vol. 12.5 June – 2011
Assessment of Learner Acceptance and Satisfaction with Video-Based Instructional Materials for Teaching Practical Skills at a Distance
Francis Donkor, University of Education, Winneba, Ghana
Student wellness is an essential component of academic success in higher education and subsequent opportunities in the labor market. The Ohio State University Office of Student Life’s Student Wellness Center uses a model that includes nine key dimensions of wellness: career, creative, emotional, environmental, financial, intellectual, physical, social and spiritual.
What is good learning? That may be a subjective question. But it's likely that many educators would give answers that fall in the same ballpark'sstudents collaborating and discussing ideas, possible solutions project-based learning, designed around real world contexts connecting with other students around the world, on topics of study immersing students in a learning experience that allows them to grapple with a problem, gaining higher-order thinking skills from pursuing the solution
To many educators, these notions are music to their ears. Would it seem terribly strange then to hear that students indeed are doing these things regularly outside of their classrooms? While Timmy or Susie may not be running home from school saying, “What fun, deeply-engaging learning experience can we do today?, they are engaging with new technologies that provide them with the same opportunities. Every day, many students are spending countless hours immersed in popular technologies such as Facebook or MySpace, World of Warcraft, or Sim City which at first glance may seem like a waste of time, and brain cells. But these genres of technologiesSocial Networking, Digital Gaming, and Simulations deserve a second, deeper, look at what is actually going on.
A consortium of six colleges in Eastern Ontario have been working together for the past eight years to support faculty as they work to design, review, and revise curriculum at both the program and course level. Eight cohorts of faculty from the contributing colleges have participated in a two-part program called Aligning and Building Curriculum (ABC). In fall 2008 this group launched an ABC Curriculum Resource Project. Phase 1 of the project focused on developing a website to house a variety of curriculum resources, tools, and web links that are useful to ABC participants as they engage in curriculum work. The resources are organized to support a conceptual framework for curriculum design (Curriculum Road Map) that was developed by this group to frame curriculum work in college programs. More information about the program can be found on the program website at http://innovation.dc-uoit.ca/abc/.
In 2009-10, with the support of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) funding, the participating colleges were able to build on this work to engage ABC participants in using a knowledge exchange network (ABC-KEN). ABC-KEN allowed them to share knowledge about curriculum and to contribute to the expansion of curriculum resources available to ABC
participants and to others working on curriculum in Ontario’s colleges. Curriculum information, tools, and links to curriculum cases and the ABC-KEN site can be found on the ABC Curriculum Resources website at http://abcresource.loyalistcollege.ca/index.htm.
Given the success of the 2009-10 project, which provided insights into the use of a knowledge exchange network to mobilize, shape, extend, and share knowledge and tools for aligning and building curriculum, the ABC Planning Team was eager to address an additional research question:
How can curriculum resource materials (policies, tools, processes, and practices) used in Ontario’s community colleges be identified, shared, adopted, and extended to build capacity for curriculum development in the college system?
Four frogs are sitting on a log, and one decides to jump off. How many frogs are left? Th answer is
four, not three, because deciding is not the same as doing.
This paper is about how an entire system from bottom to top can engage in systematic, deeper reform on a continuous basis — from school and community, through district and regions, to system or national levels. It’s about getting the agenda right comprehensive, coherent, deep focus on teaching and learning) and doing it in a way that results in continuous improvement in actuall practice.
This study investigates the relationship between approaches to studying and course completion in two online preparatory university courses in mathematics and computer programming. The students participating in the two courses are alike in age, gender, and approaches to learning. Four hundred and ninety-three students participating in these courses answered the short
version of the Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students (ASSIST). Results show that students demonstrating a deep approach to learning in either course are more likely to complete. In the mathematics course, a combination of deep and strategic approaches correlates positively with course completion. In the programming course, students who demonstrate a surface approach are less likely to complete. These results are in line with the intentions of the course designers, but they also suggest ways to improve these courses. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that ASSIST can be used to evaluate course design.
This research uses the Youth in Transition Survey, Reading Cohort (“YITS-A”) to compare participation in postsecondary education (PSE) in Ontario to other Canadian regions. We begin by presenting access rates by region, which reveals some substantial differences. University participation rates in Ontario are in about the middle of the pack, while college rates are relatively high. We then undertake an econometric analysis, which reveals that the effects of parental income are quite strong in the Atlantic provinces but much weaker elsewhere, including within Ontario. We also find that the relationship between high school grades and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test scores (measures of academic “performance” and ability”) differ by region and are generally strongest in Ontario. From this perspective, Ontario would appear to have a relatively “meritocratic” system, where those who are more qualified are more likely to go to university and where attendance rates are less affected by family income. Interestingly, the effects of parental education, which are generally much stronger than those of family income, are similar across regions. Understanding the reasons underlying these patterns might warrant further investigation.
Much has been written about the challenges of teaching an online course. While not discounting the unique (and sometimes frustrating) aspects of the online learning environment, it could be said that, despite the numerous differences, many of the same course management strategies that are essential to success in a traditional classroom also apply in the online classroom. These strategies include the importance of a strong syllabus, clear directions, well-organized materials, and timely feedback.