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Home / Blogs / Instructional Design

Instructional Design

Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Michael Holly

By Gaby Huebner-Noblitt
January 11, 2023

Posted in: Faculty / News

January 11, 2023

Michael Holly, UW-Green Bay
Dr. Michael Holly, Associate Professor of Environmental Science, UW-Green Bay

Dr. Holly is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science at UW-Green Bay and teaches in UW Extended Campus’s Master of Science in Sustainable Management (MSMGT) program. Sustainable Management was one of the first collaborative programs offered by UWEX and is still going strong as students seek a degree they can use to lessen our impact on the natural environment and improve our well-being.

In his course MSMGT 785, Waste Management and Resource Recovery, Dr. Holly includes what’s called a life cycle assessment (LCA) activity, which looks at the environmental impact of a product or service over its entire life. Because prospective students commonly asked whether LCA was taught in the program, MSMGT leadership decided it should be featured in a course. Since Dr. Holly’s course already discussed the theory of LCA, it seemed like a good fit for a practical component.

In Dr. Holly’s activity, students use open-source software and a free agricultural and food products database to perform an LCA of three different pasta recipes, two selected by the instructor and one of their choosing. They start out by comparing a chicken pasta recipe and a vegetarian mushroom and lentil ragu, then create their own entirely new recipe. In this spotlight, Dr. Holly gives us a more detailed look at the activity and its benefits for students.

Why is life cycle assessment so relevant today?

Dr. Holly calls LCA “a critical tool for sustainable managers to quantify the environmental impact of processes and products.” He explains this concept further in one of his course videos:

Over the past 20 years, life cycle assessment has grown from an academic exercise to an accepted decision-making tool for sustainable management. LCA is used by large companies and entire industries…to develop sustainable products and to quantify emissions and natural resource use to stakeholders and consumers…lifecycle inventories include thousands of calculations and require LCA software to complete. (MSMGT 785, Unit 3 Introduction)

What do students do in this activity and take away?

After going through a tutorial to learn about the software they will be using, students use “openLCA (a free life cycle assessment tool) to quantify the environmental impact of two defined recipes and one recipe of their choosing. Students then write a report discussing the environmental impacts of the recipes and assumptions used for analysis,” Dr. Holly explains.

Student feedback on the activity has been positive. They see it as relevant to their career paths and appreciate the knowledge and experience they gain using a “hands-on tool they use in industry.”

What advice would Dr. Holly have for other faculty who may want to try a similar activity in their courses?

Using outside software in a course can sometimes be cumbersome or present a financial burden to students. In this activity, however, students do not need to install any software on their computers. Instead, they access it remotely through the Virtual Lab, a tool that UW Extended Campus’s IT team set up for this course. According to Dr. Holly, the “Virtual Lab can reduce some of the risk with incorporating software into a course.”

Dr. Holly’s activity is a great example of preparing students in the classroom to work in their field. The activity gives students both industry-specific knowledge and hands-on experience. It’s also well aligned with the goals of the MSMGT program itself, which is to prepare students for a variety of careers focused on the “three Ps”: people, planet, and prosperity.


Now, it’s your turn to participate! Any guess as to which recipe is better for our planet: the chicken pasta or the vegetarian mushroom and lentil ragu?

Graph showing comparison of chicken pasta recipe and vegetarian option in various categories of environmental impact
Graph generated by openLCA comparing the environmental impact of two recipes

Was your guess correct? As you can see, the chicken recipe has a significantly larger negative impact on the environment than the vegetarian option.

Take Your Online Course to the Next Level!

By Abbie Amadio
January 3, 2023

Posted in: News

January 3, 2023

Starting in Spring 2023, the UWEX Instructional Design team will be rolling out a revised series of faculty professional development courses called Level Up. In the interview below, Instructional Designer Amy Lane gives us an inside look at the new courses.

Amy Lane, Ed.D.
Amy Lane is an instructional designer with UW Extended Campus. Her experience includes several years of teaching online as well as coursework and experience working with faculty to develop instruction that helps students make meaning of their learning experiences. She enjoys collaborating with faculty to create innovative and engaging learning experiences for students using high-impact practices in online learning.

Interview

What are the new Level Up courses for faculty development?

The new Level Up courses provide professional development in online teaching for UW Extended Campus faculty. There are three courses in the series: one that focuses on course planning, one on development, and one on teaching. Notably, the courses contain numerous resources and peer examples from UW Extended Campus courses. They also show faculty how to use high-impact practices in online teaching and incorporate principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion into their courses.

What format are the three courses offered in?

All the Level Up courses were developed as fully online courses. There are many benefits of the online format. It allows faculty to do the following:

  • Save travel time and expense
  • Use a flexible schedule to help with life/work balance
  • Create a personalized learning space
  • Select an optimal time for their learning
  • Learn new technical skills at their own pace
  • Enhance their knowledge and experience of online learning
  • Expand their skills for future online teaching opportunities

How were the courses developed?

These courses were designed by the UW Extended Campus Instructional Design team using research-based best practices for online teaching to increase student achievement and success. The courses serve as a foundation of knowledge to support the professional development of our online instructors. Over 200 faculty have piloted these courses and have offered extremely positive feedback.

Do the courses apply to faculty with online teaching experience already?

The Level Up courses are appropriate for instructors of all levels of teaching experience; however, we developed the courses with two primary audiences in mind. The first is instructors who are new to online teaching and want to learn more about the best practices in the field. The second audience is experienced online instructors who want to level up their skills to keep up with best practices in the field of online teaching and learning.

How do faculty take these courses?

Faculty members with UW Extended Campus will automatically be enrolled in the courses by their instructional designer at the beginning of the course development or revision process. While faculty work on course development, they will work through the three courses with an instructional designer to provide a foundation of knowledge for online teaching.

What will faculty take away from the courses?

After completing the three courses, faculty will be even more prepared and confident in developing new courses and revising existing ones. Importantly, they will be able to implement new teaching methods and online strategies that incorporate high-impact practices and the principles of EDI that produce positive outcomes for their students.

See you in the courses this spring!

Small Course Changes, Big EDI Impacts

By Kristine Pierick
December 20, 2022

Posted in: Best Practices / EDI / Instructional Design

December 20, 2022

Introduction

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Three small words with huge meaning! So what do these words mean to our Instructional Design team? They mean creating courses where students see their lived experiences valued and represented and space for their voices to be heard. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to developing courses with an equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) perspective. What this looks like varies from subject to subject and course to course.

EDI can sometimes feel like an all-or-nothing task. It may feel overwhelming to figure out where to start or how to incorporate it into your course. In that regard, EDI is no different than other course design principles. For example, you may start your course development with one or two really engaging, dynamic discussions or one authentic assessment. And that is great! When the next revision comes around, you may find another assessment to modify or resource to update. EDI is similar. The challenge with EDI can sometimes be where to start. To help, we’ve created the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Reflection Document. This document can be used during new course development and revisions to help identify areas where EDI is incorporated well and areas where it could be improved. From that information, we create an EDI action plan for your course.

An Example of Using the EDI Reflection Document

A recent example of how to use this document comes from Lifetime Wellness and Self-Growth, a course that is part of the Collaborative AAS program. Chris Jones (Lecturer of Kinesiology at UW-Eau Claire – Barron County) and I started off the course development by looking at what he wanted to do, where EDI was present in the course already, and where there were opportunities for improvement. One area Chris identified early on was the list of resources provided to students for a semester-long project in the course, the Self-Growth Book Review. Early in the semester, students are given a list of books and are asked to select one related to wellness to read for the assignment. Chris identified that the books on the list were narrow in focus and perspective. Most of the books were written by professional coaches and focused on sports, which wasn’t representative of the professional interests or experiences of students in the Collaborative AAS program. This became the action plan for the semester: to create a more inclusive list of books for students to choose from. We worked with a campus librarian to identify books available to students throughout the program’s partner campuses that would provide diverse voices, perspectives, and lived experiences related to the topic of self-growth.

Along with updating the list of books, we updated the design and layout of the assignment page. The books were organized thematically, annotations for each book were provided, and callouts were added to highlight which of the nine dimensions of wellness each book related to. So not only were the books more diverse in perspectives, but those perspectives were the categories by which the books were organized, making it easy for students to find the books that they were most interested in.

The amount of time it took to make this update was low, and now students have a list of books that represent a more diverse range of voices, lived experiences, and perspectives.

Screenshots of Self-Growth Book Review instructions page on Canvas. Book titles are organized by the perspectives they take on wellness and growth.

Image 1: Screenshots of Self-Growth Book Review instructions page on Canvas. Book titles are organized by the perspectives they take on wellness and growth.

Using the EDI Reflection Document

The reflection document was created to be easy to use for instructors and instructional designers. There are just three steps. Step 1 is to identify the strengths relative to EDI in your current course. The document lists many components of a course and how EDI can be incorporated into each. Step 2 is to identify the opportunities for making the course more equitable and including more diverse perspectives on the subject matter. Step 3 is to identify one of the opportunities from Step 2 and create an action plan for making that course component (and the rest of your course as a result) stronger.

When it comes to incorporating EDI into courses, the most important step is to pick a place and get started. Your instructional designer is here as a resource to help! Make it your new year’s resolution this year to make your course more equitable, diverse, and inclusive.

Four Strategies to Implement Retrieval Practice in Online Courses

By Brian Chervitz
October 20, 2022

Posted in: Instructional Design / Teaching Online

October 20, 2022

Introduction 

In May 2022, Flower Darby was the keynote speaker of the annual Collaborative Faculty Symposium for UW Extended Campus faculty and instructional designers. She spoke about her book Small Teaching Online, which documents ways that instructors can implement small changes to their courses to make big impacts on student outcomes. One important strategy was retrieval practice.  

Retrieval practice is the process of asking students to “retrieve” information from their memory, the repeated act of which strengthens the process of retrieval and improves the recall of that information. For learning that requires memorization and recall (ex. Spanish conjugations, trigonometric values, domain-specific definitions, etc.), retrieval practice is a powerful tool to help students retain information (Roediger & Butler, 2011). Spacing out the instances of retrieval of the information improves the effects (Hopkins et al., 2016; Gurung & Burns, 2018). 

Four Strategies to Implement Retrieval Practice in Online Courses

Retrieval practice can be implemented in an online course in several ways, but it might look different than in face-to-face courses. In traditional course formats, instructors can rely on regularly scheduled meeting times to implement practices at the beginning or end of each meeting. They can also ask students to speak to a peer nearby. Online courses can’t rely on those aspects, so retrieval practice will look different.

1. Knowledge Checks

Rather than asking students to recall previous course content at the beginning or end of a class meeting, instructors can prompt students to recall information at the beginning or end of a module. For instance, at the top of a page in a learning management system (LMS), like Canvas, instructors can ask students several questions about previous content and provide hidden sample answers that students can reveal to compare their answers with the provided answers. 

A callout in a webpage titled "Reflection Check" with 3 reflection questions and sample answers.
Image 1: This course asks students to recall information about the foundations of the US government at the beginning of the next module. Students can click “Show sample response” to see the instructor’s provided answers.

2. Quizzes

In quizzes already used in the course, instructors can include a few questions from previous courses as retrieval practice. No more than around 25% of the quiz should come from past modules, though. In addition, the quizzes themselves can be spaced out throughout a module, rather than clustered at the end, to specifically design spaced retrieval practice in the course.

3. Reflective Activities

Ongoing reflective activities have a variety of benefits for a course, one of which is opportunities for retrieval practice. Prompts for the reflections can require students to use specific content from past modules, such as to connect it to the most recent content. The reflections don’t necessarily have to be written either! Students could record their thoughts in audio or visual formats, too.

4. Flashcards

Flashcards are a classic method of retrieval practice, and if structured well, of spaced retrieval practice, too. Many online tools for creating flashcards can be easily embedded on a Canvas page. Quizlet, for example, provides not just traditional flashcards for vocabulary terms, but also games that can prompt students to retrieve information over and over to improve their recall. 

Flashcards from Quizlet showing one vocabulary term ("essential fat") and directions how to use the flashcards.
Image 2: This course uses flashcards embedded on the Canvas page for students to practice important vocabulary terms.

In Summary 

For information that students should be able to recall quickly, such as definitions or vocabulary terms, retrieval practice is an effective, evidence-based practice to teach students that information. Retrieval practice may look different in online courses than in face-to-face courses. Incorporating past content into knowledge checks, quizzes, reflective activities, and flashcards are four ways to prompt students to continually recall important information, which improves their long-term memory of it. 

References 

Gurung, R. A. R., & Burns, K. (2018). Putting evidence-based claims to the test: A multi-site classroom study of retrieval practice and spaced practice. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 33(5), 732-742. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3507.  

Hopkins, R. F., Lyle, K. B., Hieb, J. L., & Ralston, P. A. S. (2016). Spaced retrieval practice increases college students’ short- and long-term retention of mathematics knowledge. Educational Psychology Review, 28, 853-873. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-015-9349-8.  

Roediger, H. L., & Butler, A. C. (2011). The critical role of retrieval practice in long-term retention. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(1), 20-27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2010.09.003. 

Step Up Your Students’ Motivation Using Instant Feedback

By Brian Chervitz
October 6, 2022

Posted in: Best Practices / Teaching Online / Tips

October 6, 2022

It can be difficult knowing how to increase student motivation in your online course. But online learning has a ton of ways to raise engagement and students’ motivation! This article focuses on the ways that providing kinds of instant feedback can ensure your students are getting the resources and comments they need at the moment they need them.

How to Use This Article

Use the following article in the way best suited for your needs:

  • Read just Step 1 if you want the most important information and a simple example. This is for faculty who just want the abstract or are looking for an easy way to improve their instruction.
  • Also read Step 2 if you want to implement more advanced instant feedback on an assignment. This is for faculty who want to improve their quality of feedback and want more than the basics.
  • Continue to Step 3 if you want to learn more about using instant feedback throughout your course, beyond just quizzes. This is for faculty who are open to changing different parts of their course. Your instructional designer can help you implement instant feedback in many parts of your course!

Step 1: Introduction to Instant Feedback

Timely feedback for students is integral to effective learning and students’ satisfaction with their learning experiences (Espasa & Meneses, 2010). Providing that feedback, however, can be more difficult in online classes. Although your lack of physical proximity to your students can be challenging, your feedback remains essential. It can be a powerful tool for motivating students through online courses, especially instant feedback (Bridge, Appleyard, & Wilson, 2007).

Instant feedback could include praise for excellent work, corrections of mistakes, or helping a student assess the quality of their work and assess the pace of their learning.

Instant feedback provides several benefits for students:

  • Mistakes and misconceptions can be immediately corrected.
  • Correct knowledge and skill application can be positively reinforced.
  • Corrective feedback can be personal, which avoids embarrassing students.
  • Students gain more self-awareness of strengths and gaps in knowledge or skill sets.
  • Instant feedback can increase the amount of time a student is engaged in the course.

Two Types of Instant Feedback

In an online course, students can benefit from two kinds of instant feedback: instructor comments and norm-referenced feedback. Norm-referenced feedback is feedback students get by comparing their work or progress to other examples or standards, often created by the instructor. For instance, giving students an example of an exceptional essay to help them with their essay is providing norm-referenced feedback. Both instructor comments and norm-referenced feedback are common in coursework, though the latter form may not be immediately recognized as instant feedback.

Instructor Comments

You can provide automatically generated written comments in response to specific answers or behaviors provided by students. For instance, when students choose an incorrect answer on a quiz, you can set up an automatic comment to provide the student with the necessary resources to fix their mistake the next time they need that knowledge (for example, in an assignment or exam).

Norm-Referenced Feedback

Students don’t just receive instant information from their instructors in the form of comments in response to answers. If you provide your students with norms for the class, such as deadlines, suggested timelines, and models of good work (and examples of poor work), they can compare their work and learning progression with those norms. They can instantly recognize when they are falling behind, need to improve their answers, or need to complete specific, upcoming work, all as soon as they need it.

Example of Instant Feedback in Canvas

In this political science course, the instructor set up a Canvas quiz to automatically provide feedback based on a student’s answer. In the first image, the correct answer provides positive feedback.

An example of positive feedback automatically appears when the correct answer is selected in a quiz.
Image 1: Positive feedback for the correct answer.

In the second image, an incorrect answer provides instant feedback as well, explaining the likely misconception that would lead a student to choose that answer.

An example of constructive feedback automatically appears when the incorrect answer is selected in a quiz.
Image 2: Constructive feedback for the incorrect answer.

Step 2: More Advanced Instant Feedback

Thanks for striving to improve your feedback! While any helpful feedback is better than no feedback (Espasa & Meneses, 2010), there are ways to improve its quality and effectiveness. The third and fourth images below show more detailed feedback for both correct and incorrect answers, demonstrating the characteristics of effective feedback.

Read more »

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