Wiseman

A Culminating Selection of Work from My Masters of Higher Education Program

A Piece of the Online Pie

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Inside Higher Ed Article

Inside Higher Ed Article

Do you think online faculty would work harder if they were given a piece of the tuition pie?

Today, Inside Higher Ed posted this article A Piece of the Online Pie. There is a third party company, American Partnership, which proposes to do just that.

The online “enabler” company Academic Partnerships plans to share tuition revenue with faculty members at partnering universities as the company prepares a major update of its online education platform.

Notoriously online faculty are underpaid and over worked. Given the opportunity to have a bigger piece of the pie, do you think that incentive would help improve online faculty interaction and performance? Would it improve yours?

And, what do you think of that image/graphic? Look how the 3.0 online game changes learning: mobile devices, multiple languages, student interaction and credentialing….thoughts anyone?

Beyond Read, Write & Discuss

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Online courses rely far too heavily on the read, write and discuss format.  This multi-media presentation takes a tongue and cheek approach to explaining how the discussion forum became popular and how online faculty can move beyond this sometimes very boring format.

A transcript of the presentation can be downloaded and read here.

The full paper can be downloaded here. 

iPad Training

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During the last Saturday of March 2015 I watched it snow all day long. Lucky for me I was involved in a day-long iPad training session led by EdTech Teacher Greg Kulowiec.  The Center for Online & Digital Learning was there to support our Bay Path faculty as they moved through the day’s activities.

image1 2 EdTech Teacher Training

Here is a list of apps that we covered during the day:

  • Evernote
  • Google Drive
  • Google Docs
  • Notability
  • Explain Everything
  • Socrative

More iPad Training is in the plans to incorporate into our regular faculty training workshops.

MHE622 – Week Six – Reflections on Best Practices in Online Course Design

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Flying over the snowy mountaintop 2

Facilitating our online faculty in soaring?

My position at Bay Path University has me deeply involved in researching, synthesizing, training and supporting faculty in the best practices for online course design and delivery. So, I was really focusing in on ideas I could implement as I assist our online faculty to soar with their online courses.

The article entitled, “Three Ways to Breathe New Life into Your Online Courses,” has some very solid advice for implementing Web 2.0 and social media tools into an online course. As I think about the most common issues our online faculty struggle with I wondered “…how to help instructors stay current in resources, tools and lesson planning.” If some of my online faculty still struggle setting up a proper Discussion Assignment within their Canvas course, would they ever be able to handle the appropriate use of these Web 2.0 tools to engage their students?

  • How will I ever be able to suggest ‘purposes’ for tools that are: easy to use, have some relevance to the course content and goals, and enhance student learning?
  • How can our Online Learning & Digital Team best teach our faculty?

When our Team uses social media- such as Twitter, Google Plus and Linked In for example, as tools to stay connected to our professional peers, how do we ‘teach’ our online faculty to engage in some of these same practices? The article concluded with, this reassuring concept, “By relying on and enhancing instructor creativity, we can breathe new life into our online courses.” This is food for thought and I kept thinking,about this  as I continued reviewing our list of shared resources.

The Pelletier article “What Online Teachers Need to Know,” contains timeless advice for online faculty. I believed the most important piece of wisdom was this key idea, “One of the most effective types of training I have found is to enroll in an online course yourself. This will give you the opportunity to experience what it feels like to be the learner, and will no doubt reinforce the importance of presence, communication skills, engaged discussion, constructive feedback.” I can relate [and agree to this suggestion] yet I was still curious.

Having just met some of the Brown University Online Team, at the NERCOMP Conference earlier this November,  I wanted to read more about their “Best Practices for Teaching Online.”  I liked how the Brown Team organized the basic practices and supported each with their recommendations. The content was solid, however, I did find some bad links and I felt the information could use some refreshing. That said, I did find a nugget of advice [for faculty] in assessing student work online:

“We want tangible evidence of understanding!  To achieve this, we expect that you will work with your instructional designer to provide the student access to relevant content (even if it requires online research outside of Canvas) and challenge the student to use the information he or she discovers to generate evidence of that understanding.

For example: well-designed online courses ask students to produce a variety of “learning artifacts” including projects, papers, discussions, photographs, diagrams, illustrations, videos, recorded interviews, and collaborative projects, whether produced independently or in collaboration with other students or subject-matter experts in the field of study. A wealth of artifacts allows you to assess the student’s ability to synthesize course content in great depth, and with confidence and legitimacy.”

 All these ideas can be synthesized into the work I do with my online faculty and particularly how to enlighten them as they soar within their own online courses.  I also want to be thinking of these ideas as I support my most challenging faculty in searching for that tangible evidence of their understanding in properly using the Canvas Discussion forums and Assignments 😉

NERCOMP: Proactive & Reactive Faculty Support

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NERCOMP Nov 13 2014 QandA

Collaboration during our NERCOMP presentation

Last week I drove to Norwood, MA and presented a session with Gail McKenna revolving around out tactics on Proactive & Reactive Faculty Support here at Bay Path University. We had about 65-70 people show up, some who had driven from as far away as northern Vermont.  Our session was first on the agenda and despite the early morning hour, people were really engaging and exchanging ideas with each other.

NERCOMP Nov 13 2014 PresentationThis is what the Q& A session looked like, from my vantage point.  We generated a long list of items that fell into being either a challenge or a solution when supporting faculty.

Here is a summary of  the Challenges and Solutions the room of experts came up with.  We also had some positive feedback.  Here is the results of the evaluation sent our by the conference coordinators:  Supporting Faculty Teaching Online Eval. I think people liked the whole day.  I found it to be very collaborative imaginative and a really nice way to spend the day-good lunch and snacks too- always important.

Challenges Solutions
Role Definition   Adjunct faculty who gets paid to support faculty-like a pinch hitter
  Evening training & 2 days during the summer
Buy in-building relationships   Faculty network via a wiki and LMS forum for discussions
Hearts & minds – PR   Flex time to support faculty to develop online courses
Incentives   Release for faculty to develop: rubrics
How to teach online   Use baby steps: first blended or flipped classrooms, then online
Tools & the rapid change   Tech literacy
  Introduction to LMS & to institution- exposure
  Provide examples: gallery of best practices, reception to celebrate & an academy to teach
  Institutional Quality with learning activities & implementation of technology
  Faculty network via a wiki and LMS forum for discussions
  Student feedback-evaluations

 

Day Two @OLC

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Presentation Day: Thursday, October 30, 2014
OLC2014 Session Poster

Poster Outside Our Session


Collaborative Creation: Challenges & Logistics of Launching a Fully Online Graduate Writing Program:
After a quick breakfast, Leanna and I got to the Americas Seminar room around 8:15 a.m. to prepare our Keynote. Our presentation clicked into place thanks to the help of our fabulous Educational Technologist, Chris Gaudreau. I want to give a HUGE shout out to Chris for all his assistance creating our presentation. Embedded videos and audios seamlessly played without a glitch. During the final practice run we made a few minor tweaks to our script and deemed ourselves ready.

As participants came in, we each worked the room introducing ourselves and asking where our guests were from. By 9:25 a.m. we had nine dedicated souls –coming from Utah, Tennessee, Kentucky, Connecticut, Georgia and Washington and elsewhere, all were truly interested in learning what we were presenting. By that point it felt like we were sharing stories with good friends.

During the presentation, I watched the audience take notes and the 30 minutes flew by. Before we knew it, we were into the Q&A session and then packing up our show. We are hoping to repackage the show and present it to a gathering of our Program Directors at Bay Path.

One audience member met up with us in the hallway to chat. He was interested in becoming a MFA faculty member. Peter was able to snap some pictures and also shot a video of our presentation. I hope to upload that in the near future-so stay tuned. After texting the office our gratitude for the flawless Keynote and grabbing a quick lunch we were onto the next session.

Secrets to Teaching Online:
In the afternoon, I choose to support Bill Hettinger, another adjunct faculty member, with whom I have been supporting online and had never met face-to-face. Besides teaching for the MBA, BUS, NMP and CIM programs at Bay Path, Bill also runs his own consulting company called Effective E-Learning and he has written a book on his experience supporting and guiding online faculty.

What I learned from Bill is that we are doing many things right at Bay Path and that we need to continue to re-fresh our online courses to keep them up to par. Nothing we didn’t already know-all this just takes time. One tidbit I did pick up from Bill, which is a good reminder: online courses need to have some consistency. Bill was referring to courses across a program and/or institution.  Bill’s nugget to remember is that just as with an Amazon [or any other online] experience, the user wants to arrive feeling welcomed, easily find their way around the course and enjoy the whole learning experience.

 

Competency-Based Learning [CBL]:
I moved onto a session called, Competency-Based Education and Lessons: Our First Year Swimming in the Deep End, presented by Natalie & Robert Lupton and Laura Portolese Dias from Central Washington University. Their colleague Laura Portolese joined the session via a Google Hangout [with BTW very good results].

They vacillated between explaining their experience implementing competency-based courses revolving primarily around a retail management program of studies with content provided by Cingage.

This team told it like it was and did not spare any details of the pain they went through. However, it did seam like they had plenty of support & budget to bring this to fruition.

When approaching this new learning delivery model there are many aspects to consider as many institutional systems are impacted with the implementation of this approach such as: financial aid, curricular, registration, etc. across campus. This is not something that can be done in a bubble.

Modalities are turned upside down, as Competency-Based Learning:

  • requires educating the faculty as CBL measures learning rather than time spent on the assessment.
  • becomes a challenging shift for traditional teachers and professors who think in terms of schedules & seat time.
  • introduces the concept of fluid movement utilizing technology similar to online programs.
  • utilizes technology in seamless fashion to meet course outcomes in delivery competency-based education.
  • appears seamless -yet meets outcomes.
  • implements one-on-one personal advising for both mentors and evaluators.
  • requires measurable competencies.

Challenges which Central Washington University encountered, implementing a competency based program in retail management and technology

  • Content -Central got their content from Cingage.
  • Faculty understanding
  • Program marketing
    • they recommend to start marketing early
  • Small starts = time to make operational systems changes

Questions:

  • Accreditation agency
  • Impacts on financial aid
  • How and when grades are submitted?
  • No competency based transcripts- grades are created on transcripts, just as they always have been done
  • Measure success- how?
  • How to manage faculty load? No seat hours/seat time ‘other services’
  • How many students per advisor /mentor/evaluator 1 to 30
  • Copyright issues?

 

Developing an Effective Program for Training & Supporting the Needs of Online Adjunct Faculty:
Victoria Walker Purdue UniversityAssistant professor in the learning design & technology program

In this session Victoria spoke of the challenges we all face when creating training & support for our online faculty-in particular our adjunct faculty.

Issues:

  • Few instructors in the pool
    • Locating instructors to teach additional sections
    • Instructor interest/excitement in teaching assigned courses
  • Instructor performance
    • Disappearance during course
    • Responsiveness – discussions & grades
    • Low interaction
    • Grading and feedback timing
  • Instructor loss
    • Family crisis
  • Instructor confusion
    • General program policies
    • Program & lead instructor expectations for teaching course
    • Student issues
    • Technology
  • Instructor Exhaustion – workload issues
  • Program Administrators
    • High level of support for instructors
    • Student complaints
  • Lead Instructors
    • High level of support for instructors
    • Student complaints
  • Instructors operating individually rather than as a team

Anticipated that the vast majority of the new growth will be for part-time-adjunct instructors.

  • Declines in funding and greater financial demands-adjuncts are inexpensive

Adjunct Instructors

  • Hold advanced degrees – teaching & practicing in their fields
  • Often develop some portion of their courses-or augment
  • Many adjunct faculty teaching for online programs have never
    • Visited the institutions
    • No health care or benefits
  • Locating Hiring adjunct instructors
    • Important for online programs

Benefits in hiring adjuncts

  • Remains with the institution
  • Bring expertise
  • Low cost method to increase course sections

GAP

  • Lack of studies dealing with the support of adjuncts
  • Responsibility of the admin to provide ample professional support

History of Learning Design & Training [LDT] Program Adjunct Instructor Training & Support

  • 30 minutes of PPT orientation
  • LMS & Tech support
  • Course content support – lead instructors
  • Pedagogical support- administrators and lead instructors
  • Program policy support – administrators and lead instructors
  • Student issues related support -administrators and lead instructors

Design – Based Research
Systematic but flexible methodology aimed to improve educational practiced through iterative analysis design development & implementation, base don collaboration among researchers and practitioners in real-world settings and learning to contextually sensitive design principles and theories. [Wang and Hannafin, 2005, pp. 6-7]

  • Researchers & practitioners working together over extended period
  • Provide solutions to a practical problem in a specific educational context
  • Intervention – process or activity designed as a possible solution

Design Research Model

  • Generic model for design research used to outline the training & support project phases
  • 2 phases of analysis/exploration, design/construction and evaluation/reflection

Program & Instructor Needs Defined
Support and training were needed PRIOR to teaching [they had no formal training program]

  • Administrative support
  • Preparing to teach for LDT

Support and training would continue throughout the instructors teaching experience

  • Administrative support
  • Preparing to teach courses
  • Pedagogical and course content and course design support
  • Technical questions & student concerns
  • Monitoring

Intervention 360 training & support PRIOR to teaching

  • Program coordinator hires adjunct instructors
  • Curriculum coordinator to provide administration support for adjunct faculty
    • Creating university account
    • Contracts
    • General questions
    • Training sessions – scheduling, attending, and documenting attendance, recommendations.

They have an Instructional Designer who assists them in creating their online course.

Orientation training revised & significantly improved

  • 4 weeks prior to teaching
    • [retake once every 2 years or if the adjunct has not taught in 2 semesters]
  • Course housed in LMS [Blackboard]
  • Available after training concludes

Support personnel

  • Lead instructors
  • Curriculum coordinator
  • LDT administrators [program concerns]
  • Student services coordinator
  • ID – technical and pedagogical questions

Check in session

  • 1 hour length
  • Technical, pedagogical questions, policy questions concerns
  • 30 minutes questions/30 minutes learn new

each course as assigned lead instructor

lead instructor provides:

  • intro to course
  • course specific instructor – JOB Aid for that instructor
  • access to previous course
  • peer interaction during course
  • peer feedback during or after the course
  • crisis interventionist

Mentoring piece- new, new instructors

  • Paid position assistantship
  • Work with core faculty in two courses
  • Evaluated by core faculty and students
    • Scheduled to assist again
    • Scheduled to teach their own sections or
    • Dismissed

Evaluation of LDT Training & Support

  • Informal feedback
  • Adjunct instructor training & support survey
    • Distributed every 6 months

Data Collection

  • Evaluates training
  • Evaluates support received
  • Collaboration, scaffolding & mentoring

Future areas for improvement

Community of practice

  • Engaging adjunct instructors teaching online courses and provide w/community
  • Engaging discussion
  • Creating community
  • Recognize adjunct faculty
  • Benefits beyond pay

 

NERCOMP Workshop

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Supporting Faculty Teaching Online

On November 13, 2014 Gail McKenna and I will be presenting a workshop at the North East Regional Computing Program [NERCOMP]  entitled Proactive & Reactive Faculty Support.  Our session will explore the challenges we all face supporting faculty developing, building, and delivering online courses.  The presentation will include finding balance in the multi-faceted approach to proactive and reactive support methods.  We will identify and discuss strategies used at Bay Path University.  Participants will work in small groups to brainstorm more solutions. Our goal is for everyone to leave the session with ideas for bringing balance to these support situations rather than being controlled by them.

 

 

What people are saying…

I just want to acknowledge the good help I've been getting from Mary in "refreshing" my NMP 605 Financial Decision-Making in Nonprofits Course.  She has helped me put new video/voice/and analytical tools into the course to facilitate the on-line discussions and the sharing of course content.  No longer are we wedded to the typed word for communicating.
Kudo Twitter Canvas
Thank you Mary. You were so helpful yesterday and I really appreciate your time. As you can see, I put a lot of forethought into my classes and try to develop a wide array of assessments and activities for the students. The flip side of that is it takes quite a bit of pre-planning and work up front for me, which I am happy to do, but sometimes I challenge myself to do new things and having the support is very helpful.