By Justin Mason
April 4, 2017
Athena is an associate professor of philosophy, and this summer she’ll be creating an online version of one of her courses.
Her chair/dean has asked her to work with an instructional designer, but Athena hasn’t worked with an “ID” before. She feels a bit nervous about it, so she asks a few of her colleagues for some friendly advice.
By Eileen Horn
September 4, 2016
It’s a busy time around here! With the fall semester starting and new competency-based program development in full swing, everyone is working hard to deliver the best learning experiences possible. Back-to-school season is exciting but challenging for learners, instructors, and those of us in supporting roles. Part of that hard work is curating learning resources – open educational resources (OERs). Today’s post will explore how some of our faculty are approaching OERs.
In the midst of all this preparation, I’ve recently heard conversations about how important thoughtfully curated learning resources are to a student’s success, and it occurred to me it might be interesting to look back at the transcript of a conversation I had with Kim Kostka about using OERs. Kim and her colleagues Tom Neal and Tony Millevolte assembled and annotated an array of OERs for one of our Flexible Option competency sets.
Here are some of the highlights from my conversation with Kim.
By Kristin Barnes
May 27, 2016
The spring semester is over, summer is here, and that means faculty retreats! This year at our University of Wisconsin Health and Wellness Management retreat, a major theme we explored was student engagement. How do we keep students motivated and actively learning in online courses? Below you will find the synopsis of our session on student engagement, along with some resources if you want to learn more.
By Eileen Horn
April 25, 2016
Today I introduce Fred Baker, an instructional designer at the University of Tampa. We have a common interest in openness in higher education, and recently I learned that he took a compelling approach to faculty development. Since we are in the process of designing an onboarding and development program for our faculty, I wanted to learn more about what he did.
The project was originally conceived of as a studio learning experience in which faculty would read and discuss L. Dee Fink’s Creating Significant Learning Experiences, then create tools and course components based on principles from the text, receiving feedback from peers along the way. In consideration of the busy schedules of most faculty, the experience was divided into two phases, with Phase I focused on reading and discussing the book and Phase II being the hands-on portion. Intrigued by the idea of offering something like this for our faculty, I was eager to learn from Fred about the logistics involved, and about how things went. His answers to my questions were enlightening and encouraging so I wanted to share a bit of that interview with you.