Ed Tech in HE Reflections

Just last year, we began the hard work of making some changes and improvements to a course quality model and training sequence that was being used on campus to assess online courses & support our online faculty. It was a great model--one of the better models, in fact, that I've seen in quite some time. I wanted to really tie together the assessment and training pieces in a way that had an impact. I strove to find a way to really dig into the core concepts of what research said was "quality online teaching". (If you're interested, these are the 5 topics we arrived at after much work & rework: Course Organization & Design; Accessibility & Usability; Student Assessment; Communication & Community Building; and Interactivity)  By nature each has some cross-over, and when our first iteration of an online, self-paced workshop rolled out with these modules, I found that #1 We'd hit the nail on the head, and #2 our faculty learn FAST and genera...

Respondus Logo Learning at a distance has so many positives for students as well as faculty, including but certainly not limited to: Convenience & Flexibility Cost-savings (due to saving $ driving, parking, etc.) Independence of learning approach Material review--the ability to review materials as often as needed to enhance knowledge and retention of materials Assessments of students taking courses online or through hybrid (50-99% online) range widely, sometimes including more traditional assessments such as quantitative and/or qualitative examinations, and sometimes having more project-focused, problem-based learning techniques. For quantitative and qualitative examinations, concerns arise broadly from faculty, administrators--and yes, even students!--regarding the potential for cheating. Some questions I've heard: How do I know it's even my student taking the exam? This is supposed to be closed book! How do I make sure the students are using outside r...