19th Annual Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning Proceedings Conference Tracks: Quick Glance ............................................................... 3 Pre-conference Workshops .......................................................................... 5 Keynote Addresses ..................................................................................... 21 Featured Sessions ....................................................................................... 22 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support ..................... 28 Track 2: K-12 Online Education………………………………………..129 Track 3: Leadership Values and Society.……………………………….140 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness………………………………………...172 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile………………………………………….282 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support………………………...300 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments…………..353 Electronic Posters……………………………………………………….444 Vendor Showcases……………………………………………………...553 Diamond Sponsor Presentations………………………………………..564 Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 1 The purpose of the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is to help learning organizations continually improve the quality, scale, and breadth of online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines. This publication contains information obtained from conference presenters. A wide variety of references are listed. Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable data and information, but authors and the publisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials or for the consequences of their use. Publication assistant: Patricia Harvey Copyright © 2013 by Sloan-CTM All rights reserved. Published 2013. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number 978-1-934505-17-5 (online) Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 2 Conference Tracks: Quick Glance Faculty and Professional Development & Support Research continues to show the important role online faculty play in student learning, yet many faculty members come to higher education without training on pedagogy and practice in the area of online and blended learning. As online learning increasingly expands into corporate training, military training and education, workforce initiatives and professional certification programs, alternative pedagogical approaches have emerged. This track is designed to explore the wide range of evolving pedagogical models, practices, case studies and institutional strategies that inform those models. K-12 Online Education The 2009 U.S. Department of Education “Evaluation of Evidence based Practices” noted the dearth of rigorous studies into online learning at K-12 levels. Nevertheless, online learning is exploding across the K-12 sector. Over 1.5 million K-12 learners are taking online courses every year. In 2009 alone, online enrollments at state virtual schools increased by 40%. The range of models, modes and concerns for implementing online learning in the K-12 sector encompasses issues that are both the same – and very different from – those experienced in post-secondary education. Learner development/independence, parental roles, administrative structures, state regulations and instructional standards, to name just a few, pose and prescribe significantly different responses for curriculum designers, teachers and education leaders. Leadership, Values and Society Online learning is one way that higher education institutions are responding to social change and the changing expectations society has for higher education. Online learning is transforming all aspects of higher education including teaching, student services, finance, and administration, impacting and challenging the underlying values of the academy. Institutions and institutional leaders are designing new structures to deal with the opportunities and challenges online learning affords. Learning Effectiveness Online learning is reaching a more mature stage in development and evaluation in which comparative research is being replaced by research explaining learning effectiveness and theory development. Papers submitted to this track should reflect this with a focus on theory and/or research-based approaches to the design and delivery of online or blended learning. Open, Global, Mobile This track seeks contributions on research and practice that discuss emerging trends in the internationalization of online education, creative uses of open education, and the un-tethering of learners from place-based computing. We are especially interested in the growth and evolution of online education in the developing world, cross border education, and effective international partnerships. Proposals that focus on online education in Latin America are of special interest. Contributions that examine open educational resources, open models of education, massive open online courses and recent advances in assessing and credentialing learning outside the traditional university framework are encouraged. Finally, proposals that look at new forms of mobile learning - especially models of mobility that intersect with and support openness and Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 3 Conference Tracks: Quick Glance international efforts are welcome in this track. Student Services and Learner Support Student services are critical to the support of learning at any institution of higher education. When programs move online, student services need to be re-conceived in ways that are not always obvious. Papers submitted to this track should focus on issues surrounding the provision of student services to online and/ or blended learners. Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Track Online learning is evolving to include multiple blended approaches, new media for online learning, and new kinds of learning environments. The existence of new learning environments has a multitude of consequences - curricular, administrative, and pedagogic - as well as impacts on cognition – both individual and cultural “habits of mind”. Additionally, changes in learning environments have consequences for what it means to be literate. This track invites papers that investigate each of these areas Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 4 Pre-Conference Workshops American Public University System / Sloan-C Workshop on Graduate Online Teaching and Learning Patricia Campbell (American Public University System, USA) Karan Powell (American Public University System, USA) Catheryn Cheal (San Jose University, USA) Ken Hartman (Senior Management Consultant, USA) Robert Zierolf (University of Cincinnati, USA) Kate Brannum (American Public University, USA) Patrick Dickson (Michigan State University, USA) Robin Dickson (Michigan State University, USA) Robert Pauly (University of Southern Mississippi, USA) Steve Bronack (University of West Georgia, USA) Meg Benke (Empire State University, USA) Take the lead in online graduate education. Join American Public University for a first of its kind, full-day, hands-on workshop for universities looking to further develop existing online graduate programs or for those that are making the transition to online graduate education. The workshop offers participants the opportunity to explore best practices and strategies for: enhancing online graduate teaching and learning; training faculty for online graduate teaching; implementing or enhancing online doctoral programs; and defining and fostering "graduate culture" in an online environment. **Please note that this session will be recorded: All registered attendees for this workshop will be provided with the recording link post-conference. Workshop attendees are encouraged to use the recording as a learning tool and will be given permission to share the workshop recording with their organizations.** STEM Online Frank Mayadas (Sloan Foundation, USA) John Bourne (American Sentinel University, USA) Betty Hurley Dasgupta (SUNY Empire State College, USA) Kemi Jona (Northwestern University, USA) The purpose of this workshop is two-fold: (1) to assist those already involved in courses and programs for STEM online to strengthen and enhance their offerings, and (2) to provide motivation for those not involved in the area, to enter and establish their own courses and programs. An additional goal of this workshop will be to establish a Sloan-C Special Interest Group (SIG) around the STEM Online theme. The SIG, once established, will serve as a continuing focal point for the community of educators interested in STEM online. A more definite set of objectives and operations of the SIG will be established at the workshop. The Workshop and the follow-up SIG, will be established around three important relevant categories: A. Technologies and techniques for STEM-specific courses and programs. [A shortform for this category is Tools and Techniques]; B. Tools for upgrading online resources for retention of STEM learners. [Short-form: Retention]; C. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 5 Pre-Conference Workshops Resources to assist learners in STEM-related career-choice decisions. [Short-form: Careerchoice]. At the workshop, one or two invited speakers per category will briefly provide one example of work already underway that illustrates what that area is about, how the work described advances the category and evidence. Please note that for our purposes, STEM is broadly defined to include areas such as applied life sciences (e.g. nursing, medical) foodrelated, IT areas (e.g. cyber security, Geographical IS) etc. Our plan for the workshop is to devote about 2 hours to presentations, followed by a 15 minute break to allow informal interaction between attendees, and then to wrap-up with a 75 minute period for feed-back and discussion. We look for the discussion period to assist in solidifying goals and plans for the proposed Sloan-C SIG. This workshop will be chaired by Frank Mayadas, and all speakers are established STEM educators. The workshop is mainly directed towards higher education, but portions are planned to be of interest to the K-12 educator community. Key-take away: formation of STEM SIG with participant input. New to Online: The Essentials Sandra Coswatte (Sloan Consortium, USA) Kathleen S. Ives (Sloan Consortium, USA) An essential component of successful online teaching is experiencing online learning for yourself. Gain important online learning experience as you explore critical differences between teaching online and face-to-face, including faculty and student expectations, role adjustments, and course design. Your explorations will include research-based readings and discussions with other new online teachers. This exploration will culminate in a quiz that will help you focus your future online teaching skills and knowledge explorations. Learning Objectives: Upon successful completion of the workshop, you will be able to: Describe differences in course design, roles, and expectations for online courses Explain relevant research impacting course design, roles, and expectations in online courses Outcomes: The following general outcomes apply to all Sloan-C Institute workshops: Develop skills in distance education and online learning Expand current knowledge and skills in online and blended teaching and learning strategies Develop grounding in the pedagogy of online teaching and learning Strategies for Assessing and Selecting Web 2.0 Tools That Promote Meaningful Online Learning Kadriye O. Lewis (Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, USA) Jennifer M. McVay-Dyche (Excelsior College, USA) Upon successful completion of the workshop, participants will be able to… 1. Identify the pedagogical benefits, affordances, and opportunities for enhancing learning through the use of appropriately-selected Web 2.0 technologies. 2. Assess the pedagogical properties and capabilities of Web 2.0 tools to support authentic, interactive assessments. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 6 Pre-Conference Workshops 3. Develop a plan/strategy for applying best practices of Web 2.0 to an online course. The traditional approach to e-Learning 1.0 has focused on the purchase of expensive, proprietary software, often requiring significant technical and administrative support at the local level. This costly approach has not always proven successful in meeting teaching and learning needs in online education. In contrast, Web 2.0 technologies (free or open source) have evolved over the last decade and provide a wealth of opportunities for students to engage in content creation thereby supporting high-order, authentic assessment techniques. To support this generation of proficient Web 2.0 users, online instructors need to carefully assess the value and benefits of social and interactive cognitive tools and social media. The decision to include specific tools should ultimately rest on one simple question: Does the tool efficiently enhance learning? To qualify as efficient, the tool should not require more time to master than is allotted for the lesson itself. For example, if a 2-week module requires the use of a simulated (virtual) environment, such as Second Life, the tool is clearly inefficient if it requires 6 weeks to master. According to Solomon and Schrum (2010) instructors must provide opportunities for interaction, engagement, and individualized learning or risk losing students to apathy. Garrison (2011) predicts an enormous change to the higher education environment, with regard to social media specifically, stating, they will become an essential element in creating an institutional environment that welcomes students, strengthens educational values, and grows relationships that support the academic goals of the students and the learning community" (p. 127). Such increased emphasis on social learning has special pedagogical connection to the Web 2.0 platforms such as blogs, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), wikis, podcasts, and virtual worlds. Thus, a synthesis of understanding pedagogical framework for the use of Web 2.0 technologies is crucial. This workshop is designed to help online instructors assess the following pedagogical properties of Web 2.0 technologies: 1) Availability; 2) Utility; 3) Connectivity; 4) Collaboration; 5) Content creation and editing 6) Information sharing. After reviewing a variety of popular applications (e.g., Twitter, wikis, blogs, VoiceThread, Edmodo) participants will form into small groups organized around themes of interest to assess and evaluate the pedagogical properties of Web 2.0 tools. Each group will present their work to the larger group, followed by a general discussion to summarize the outcomes and to identify ways in which examples presented can be implemented in individual contexts. Workshop Agenda - (3 Hours) Topics/Activities: • • • • (10 Minutes) Activity Step 1 (15 Minutes) Welcome and Introduction (15 Minutes) Step 2 Small Group Activity Warm-Up Discussion: 1-List the Web 2.0 applications with which you are familiar. 2- Which Web 2.0 applications have you used? How? 3- How do you know you selected the appropriate Web 2.0 tool? Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 7 Pre-Conference Workshops • • • • • • • • Step 3 (20 minutes) - Didactic Slide Presentation: What is Web 2.0? Key concepts and general application based on Solomon and Schrum's (2010) Eight C's: Communication, Collaboration, Connectedness, Communities of Learners, Convergence, Contextualization, Cloud Computing, Cost-Free Popular Web 2.0 tools and application to specific curricular needs Step 4 (25minutes) - Small Group Activity: Integration of Web 2.0 Tool and Alignment to Instructional Purpose After identifying an objective from their own curriculum, group members will describe how they currently instruct and assess that objective. Next, group members will propose revisions to that objective, addressing: Desirable changes to the objective Component concepts and skills Appropriate Web 2.0 tools to support, motivate, and assess student learning Alignment of selected tool(s) to learning objective. Step 5 (15 minutes) - Large Group Sharing and Discussion: Each small group will share their curricular objective/need with the larger group followed by a general discussion of additional challenges or enhancements that would be desirable. BREAK (10 minutes) Step 6 (25 minutes) - Didactic Slide Presentation: Examining pedagogical properties of two Web 2.0 tools. The following dimensions will be examined with examples (brief demo)availability utility connectivity collaboration content creation and easy updating sharing of information Step 7 (30 minutes) - Group Activity: Self-selected groups (Twitter, wikis, blogs, VoiceThread, Edmodo. ) Web 2.0 Framework Template (technical features and abilities) will be provided to each groupdentify a shared curricular objective for the group. Explore the tools presented and select at least one Web 2.0 tool that could be used to help achieve the objective. Outline the activity, including how the instructor would present and grade the activity and a timeline for completion of the activity. Step 8 (20 minutes) - Large Group Presentation and Discussion: Each group will report their identified Web 2.0 tools' pedagogical properties to the larger group, sharing insights and reflections about the appropriateness and usability of the selected tool. Facilitators will provide clarification based on group reflections. Discussion will also include advantages and disadvantages of each tool presented. Facilitators will compile the completed templates and make available via a wiki after the workshop. Step 9 (10 minutes) - End of session: Wrap-Up Workshop Evaluation Participants are encouraged to bring laptops (one or two laptops per group) to accomplish some of the tasks in this workshop. If the participants do not have access to a laptop, we can still accommodate their needs with our alternative plans. References: Garrison, D.R. (2011). E-learning in the 21st century: A framework for research and practice (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Solomon, G., & Schrum, L. (2010). Web 2.0 how-to for educators. Washington, D.C.: International Society for Technology in Education. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 8 Pre-Conference Workshops Leveraging Institutional Investment in Online Education: A Workshop for Campus Leaders Dylan Barth (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA) Laura Pedrick (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, USA) Mary Niemiec (University of Nebraska, USA) For many institutions, significant resources have been committed to provide access to higher education for place-bound working professionals and national audiences of adult learners through online learning initiatives. What had been considered radical and suspect is now considered traditional when discussed in context with MOOCs and competency based programs. While institutions are challenged to incorporate multiple ways in which students who want a degree have access and affordable avenues to achieve that goal - we must keep in mind that this applies to our campus students as well. Consistently, institutions find that campus students want and need the same flexibility that online courses provide. Institutional decisions to invest in online education are quite often driven by mission - teaching, research, service and economic development. The alignment with mission, the consistency with goals such as retention, time-to-degree and graduation are critical drivers in the decision making process. Public institutions of higher education, in particular, are struggling to fulfill their commitment to quality and affordability despite diminishing state support. One strategy many institutions are utilizing is leveraging the investment in online education to provide access to affordable, quality education to students - those learning from a distance and those attending on campus. What specifically are these strategies, how are they being implemented, and are they successful? Through two case studies, this workshop will share effective practices utilized by several Midwestern universities to capitalize on existing infrastructure and opportunities to serve both distance and on-campus students. Participants will also be asked to share their own challenges and successes. One key goal of this workshop is to expand on the effective practices provided by the presenters by adding practices from participants via an online repository during the workshop. This highly interactive workshop is intended for administrators, instructional support professionals, deans and department heads. Participants are asked to bring a laptop or other device in which they can access the internet during the session. Predictive Analytic Reporting (PAR) Framework Essentials for Academic Risk Identification Ellen D. Wagner (WICHE, USA) Rebecca T. Barber (Arizona State University, USA) This workshop offers an orientation to the Predictive Analytics Reporting Framework, a multiinstitutional data mining project that uses big data and predictive analytics to look for patterns of student loss and uses those results to proactively remove barriers. This session will provide participants with a faced-paced overview of the analytics landscape, provide a brief background on PAR and its effectiveness for identifying academic risk, and offers hand on experiences with PAR tools and techniques that have demonstrated a direct positive impact on student success. This workshop offers an orientation to the Predictive Analytics Reporting Framework, a multiinstitutional data mining project that uses big data and predictive analytics to look for patterns of student loss and uses those results to proactively remove barriers. This session will provide participants with a faced-paced overview of the analytics landscape, provide a brief background Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 9 Pre-Conference Workshops on PAR and its effectiveness for identifying academic risk, and offers hand on experiences with PAR tools and techniques that have demonstrated a direct positive impact on student success. To MOOC or Not to MOOC? the Real Questions Underneath Rena Palloff (Fielding Graduate University, USA) Gigi Johnson (Maremel Institute, USA) Lawrence Ragan (Penn State, USA) Melissa Loble (University of California, Irvine, USA) MOOCs are not new in their engagement in media-supported education. They follow rich educational media histories ranging from educational films through public broadcasting, as well as more recent interactive video and gaming tools. Yet MOOCs are spurring two bursts of emotion: enthusiasm and anxiety. To some, they are shining examples of innovation. For others, they herald the destruction of educational organizations and programs as we know them. To complicate the existing portrait of MOOCs, the press, legislators, and even some in the general public have come to view them as a panacea for the budget woes facing higher education today. Public discussions debate MOOCs as a means by which education might be provided more widely, at what is perceived as minimal to no cost. This begs the overall question: How can we use a discussion of MOOCs to understand what is or isn't working, biases and beliefs, and how to learn from the experiences with them so far? These discussion ripple onto online learning overall. What is now being referred to as "traditional" online instruction has faced tremendous skepticism since its inception and, based on recent surveys of faculty, its quality continues to be questioned. However, many MOOCs appear to be receiving acceptance without question by these groups. Those touting the impact of MOOCs appear to have lost sight of more "traditional" online education, viewing MOOCs as their equivalent. The differences, however, are striking and need further exploration. Much of the MOOC focus has been on some of the science and technologyoriented courses offered by three of the large funded platform companies and a cadre of more than 70 universities. Yet MOOC experiences have ranged from DS106, a creative digital storytelling collaboration, through new MOOCs on mobile health and philanthropy, acting through their action research content to work with diverse local communities. How can we have concrete and beneficial discussions about these broadly labeled experiences without allowing bias and emotion to be the main facilitators? Presently, all views seem to be painted with one brush - that MOOCs represent "online" courses - and, as such, are surfacing much discussion and emotion behind the questions that have emerged about them. There are important questions that have arisen and continue to arise beyond the economics of learning at scale. We can and should focus on the widely varying intentional learning science behind MOOC designs, broad differences in quality and qualities, as well as the real learning outcomes they produce. These and more questions will let us view MOOCs in comparison and combination with other course frameworks. How can this discussion inform our visions of the future of the traditional F2F 700-person lecture hall? How do we rethink global combined with local course engagement? How can we use rubrics to envision and Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 10 Pre-Conference Workshops collaborate on more intimate distributed learning platforms? Rubrics and more detailed discussions help us expand the MOOC questions into broader spectrums of thoughtful solutions. Questions at Hand: How can we use a discussion of MOOCs to understand (a) what is working, (b) what isn't working, (c) what biases and beliefs flow around MOOCs, and (d) how we can learn from the experiences so far about how we can work with MOOC concepts and structures within our own educational environments? What is the spectrum of what is being offered and self-labeled as a MOOC? How can we measure quality in terms of MOOC design, delivery, and outcomes? Should we have a broader rubric of both measurement and creation? Not all MOOCs are alike or even have the same learning qualities in their design and execution. By creating a stronger rubric to analyze and discuss MOOCs - beyond MOOCs and xMOOCs as burgeoning labels - we can help participants make decisions about quality and usefulness and help designers look beyond their own cohorts of creators to seeing what really works in terms of design, communications/marketing, and integration into broader life-based learning programs. How should MOOCs be integrated into the landscape of higher education? How can we realistically assess learner competencies after completion and then transfer credit to degree programs? Should we even be looking at that as an outcome? Workshop Objectives and Expected Outcomes: The structure of the session will take the form of brief framing discussions - with slides and web links to be available before and after on the Sloan-C website -- followed by a series of roundtable discussions facilitated in World style, with table hosts. Participants will have the opportunity to rotate between tables to explore the various topics assigned to each table. We will explore: • • • • • Research underlying MOOCs, both in terms of design assumptions and research that has come from the various MOOC results to date, including participant feedback and how it is or isn't being utilized to assess effectiveness and achievement of learning outcomes. Differences between MOOC structures and the variety of traditional online course structures to date, which often aren't highlighted together. Responses to and uses of MOOCs, including legislative, budgetary, and regulatory response. Evaluation of MOOCs, including the potential development of a rubric that incorporates quality measures. How MOOCs fit into the general landscape of higher education today, including how we might more effectively use them in the delivery of education. Participants will leave the session with: • • Shared vocabulary and sharing of ideas on what makes MOOCs work, interesting, valuable, and effective in their own learning environments, as well as in conjunction with other's systems. Engagement between participants on beliefs and experiences in working with MOOCs, personally and professionally, as students, designers, and content experts, as well as organizational leaders. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 11 Pre-Conference Workshops • Action steps with the group to move the discussions forward in terms of rubrics, guidelines, research, and leadership. Let's explore MOOCs together in an effort to better define them and evaluate how they can be effectively integrated into today's educational landscape. The Flipped Classroom: Taking Advantage of Renewed Opportunities Tanya Joosten (University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, USA) Karen Vignare (UMUC, USA) Shari Smith (Rice University, USA) The new terminology, flipped classroom, is evidence of the changing landscape in blended and hybrid teaching and learning. This renewed interest in active learning reveals additional opportunities for Blended Learning. Although the field of Blended Learning is not new, we are witnessing a revival in interest around Blended Learning. The overarching goal of the flipped classroom is to make the most of in-class time. We can look to our research and practices from over the past decade of Blended Learning to inform us in making decisions when it comes to strategy, implementation, pedagogy, research, and support for flipped classrooms. Further, we will consider how current trends in MOOCs and OER impact these opportunities in advancing the flipped classroom. A Practical Approach to MOOC-Making Emily Boles (University of Illinois at Springfield, USA) Michele Gribbins (University of Illinois Springfield, USA) Carrie Levin (University of Illinois at Springfield, USA) Ray Schroeder (University of Illinois Springfield, USA) The University of Illinois Springfield Center for Online Learning, Research and Service (COLRS) has produced two successful MOOCs - eduMOOC in the summer of 2011 and the Emancipation Proclamation in the spring of 2013. Currently, COLRS is leading the research component of an American Council of Education project to examine the MOOC pedagogies that lead to success. The MOOC development team will lead participants through the process of conceptualizing, designing, creating, marketing, conducting and assessing a MOOC. Among the topics to be addressed are: examining motivations; identifying audiences and outcomes; applying proven pedagogies; considering credit/certifying options; creating badges; selecting a MOOC LMS; synchronous and asynchronous sessions; staffing; formative/summative assessment possibilities; and much more. Participants will leave with a process, a customized plan, and checklist for conducting a successful MOOC. Strategic Planning for Mobilization: Mobile Devices and Apps for Increasing Student Engagement and Outcomes Robbie K. Melton (Tennessee Board of Regents, USA) Tim Tirrell (California State University - Office of the Chancellor, USA) Shari Scott (TSU, USA) Nicole Kendall (TSU, USA) Jeff Horner (WSCC, USA) Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 12 Pre-Conference Workshops Matthew Smith (WSCC, USA) Kim Bolton (WSCC, USA) Linda Weeks (DSCC, USA) Keith Sission (UM, USA) This one day workshop will provide participants with information, demonstrations, and hands-on activities regarding the utilization of mobile devices and apps as teaching, learning, and workforce tools for enhancing teaching and increasing student engagement and retention. Sessions will include strategic planning for mobilization, mobilization accessibility issues, quality standards, best teaching practices, and mobile apps resources alignment to BYOD. Morning: Part One (1.5 hours) Strategic Planning and Management of Mobilization (the use of smart phone and tablets for education and workforce development) This session will provide the latest data regarding mobile devices and mobile learning in terms of business models, management, IT networks, impact on teaching and learning, and student outcomes. Presenters: Robbie Melton, TBR Session Outcome: Guidelines for developing a strategic plan for mobilization Part Two (1.5 hours): ADA and Mobilization (accessibility standards for the use of mobile devices and apps)This session will provide updates regarding accessibility of mobile devices and hands-on demonstrations of new accessibility features for Apple, Android, Windows, and Blackberry, including mobile apps for special needs students and third party assistive technology accessories for mobile devices (keyboards, stylus, braille, etc.) . Facilitator: Robbie Melton Presenter: Shari Scott, TSU Session Outcomes: Accessibility Standards for Mobilization and Knowledge/Skills for using accessibility features for mobile devices Lunch Break: Part Three (3 hours): Latest Innovations, Best Practices, Pedagogy regarding the Use of Mobile Devices and Mobile Apps for Enhancing Teaching and Learning This session will highlight the latest innovations of mobile devices, a review of the current mobile devices on campuses, mobile platforms, and mobile apps for teaching, learning, collaboration, creativity, and assessment. Participants will evaluate apps using a mobile app rubric designed by faculty and participant in a teaching activity using mobile devices. Facilitator: Robbie Melton Presenters: Tim Tirrell, MERLOT; Nicole Kendall - Teacher Education TSU; Jeff Horner, Matthew Smith and Kim Bolton - Natural Sciences from WSCC; Linda Weeks - English DSCC; Keith Sission Humanities, UM Session Outcomes: Best practices for the use of mobilization in enhancing teaching and learning; mobile apps for the disciplines; rubrics for assessing mobile apps, MERLOT Faculty Reviews; and mobile app resources. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 13 Pre-Conference Workshops The State of State Authorization: SARA and the Potential for a National Reciprocal Model Doug Lederman (Inside Higher Ed, USA) Marshall Hill (Nebraska Coordinating Commission on Higher Education, USA) Jere Mock (Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education, USA) Are we nearing the end of the state authorization challenge with the issuance of a major report and creation of 'SARA?' Well, maybe. But there is still a lot of work to be done and real implications, now and in the near term, for colleges and universities. This session will focus on the prospects for SARA, the proposed national reciprocal model and what it means for your institution's online programming efforts. More specifically, this interactive session will provide participants, using case studies and the current efforts to establish SARA, the latest information and prospects for SARA. It will address several key questions: 1. What are the implications for SARA? How will it work? How will it be administered? What will it cost? How will it impact your institution's current and future online programming? When will this be effective? 2. What should you be doing in the coming months? 3. Will this work? Can the theory of SARA become reality? 4. What other surprises should we anticipate in state authorization? Participants will have the opportunity to engage a panel of national Experts from both inside and outside the state authorization and SARA efforts. You will walk away with: a greater understanding SARA and how the national reciprocal model will work; how it will change your current state authorization activities; what will happen in the next year; what you and your institutional leadership should be doing to promote your state's involvement in SARA; and resources that are available and best practices that can be followed by institutions in addressing the state authorization challenge. Online Learning: Working with Mobile and Augmented Reality in Learning Management Systems Beatriz Pacheco (Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, Brazil) Ilana Souza-Concilio (Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, Brazil) Moran (2002) defines distance education as a teaching-learning process mediated by technology, where teachers and students are separated spatially and/or temporally. However, Litwin (2001) pointed out that Distance Education is no more characterized by the distance, since the virtual meeting allows more effective than possible in fact education. For the author, the distinguishing feature of this mode is the mediation of relations between teachers and students. To improve formal distance education systems called Learning Management Systems (LMS) were developed that are software applications or Web-based technologies used to plan, implement, and assess a specific learning process. Typically, LMS provide an instructor a way to create and deliver content, monitor student participation, and assess student performance and provide students the ability to use interactive features such as threaded discussions, forums and chats. In such environments, more and more Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 14 Pre-Conference Workshops tools are available to promote a richer process of teaching and learning.The success and the efficiency of LMS lays in the quality of services it offers and in the way it offers, and not only in its aesthetics (ALBERTIN,1999). Because Augmented Reality (AR) is known as a nontraditional interface, it arouses much interest from several researchers, due to the development of the technology and its applications, and to their social and cultural impacts. One of the areas that could benefit with AR applications is the education. In Learning Management Systems, AR is still little explored. On the other hand, the combined use of such platforms and versions for mobile devices is growing. In order to bring together the informal experiences of learners and the formal education, and to deal with complex concepts in a more ludic way, emerges at the end of the twentieth century, the concept of Learning Objects (LO), digital resource designed for educational purposes to assist the learning (WILEY,2000). The LOs are part of an area known as Instructional Design. Filatro (2008) defines it as "the process (set of activities) to identify a learning problem (a need), design, implement and evaluate a solution to this problem." Advances in computer science are significant for instructional design, because they can offer learning tools based on more varied and complex models, allowing the creation of repositories with dynamic educational products (learning objects) that educational institutions, educators and students access for consultation and study. For this purpose, this Workshop aims to debate the use of AR resources through the interaction with online LOs hosted on these teaching and learning virtual environments.Because AR is a technology relatively little explored in systems of this nature, for this Workshop the idea is to provide only the association of videos and illustrative images to the original content, to ensure greater dynamism to the educational activities. Aurasma mobile application was chosen. It allows the development of simplified, portable and multi-platform applications in AR, merging the physical and virtual worlds together. Available on smartphones, the app was created out of technology that is capable of recognizing images, symbols and objects in the real world and can deliver relevant content in real time, including videos, animations, audio or web pages. The approach will be from a quick theoretical explanation; in a second stage the choice of content to be explored and developed as a multimedia learning object. In a third stage will be presented the Augmented Reality solution, and in a final stage will be discussed the association of the virtual object to everyday situations implicated in the content of the developed LO. The following LO composition methodology will be applied, organizing actions in five distinct steps: a) Diagnosis: use of resources that help teachers to assess what is the students' prior knowledge about the content that will be worked. This diagnosis should be interactive, using questionnaires, games, chat forums; b) Presentation: use of resources for submitting content to the student. This step, although desirably interactive, can be developed through text, animation, videos, among other resources; c) Fixation: the use of elements with a high level of interactivity, which allow the learner to set the worked content; d) Assessment: the use of resources to diagnose whether or not the learning process has been completed satisfactorily; e) Supplementation or reinforcement: the use of additional elements that allow students to advance in knowledge on the subjects treated in the unit of learning or that help to overcome difficulties encountered in it.The adoption of this methodology seeks to develop the students' skills and competencies for self-learning becoming the protagonist of their own learning process, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 15 Pre-Conference Workshops constructing their own knowledge. As expected outcomes, we may highlight the improvement of teachers in their ability to create and build highly interactive LOs that merge several media resources. The implementation, with autonomy, of such resources is a first contact with the development of AR applications, a technology that tends to become popular and to attract students as a new and interesting tool to improve and motivate the learning process. Online Program Evaluation Using the Sloan-C Quality Scorecard Kaye Shelton (Lamar University, USA) Lisa Holstrom (University of Cincinnati, USA) Karen Pedersen (Northern Arizona University, USA) A hands-on workshop for using the Sloan-C interactive Quality Scorecard for the Administration of Online Programs for quality evaluation. The workshop will explore each of the nine quality categories, discuss best practices, outline the external evaluation process for the Quality Scorecard, and discuss the Sloan-C external review process. Examples of appropriate documentation will also be discussed. A hands-on workshop for using the Sloan-C interactive Quality Scorecard for the Administration of Online Programs for quality evaluation. The workshop will explore each of the nine quality categories, discuss best practices, outline the external evaluation process for the Quality Scorecard, and discuss the Sloan-C external review process. Examples of appropriate documentation will also be discussed. Disrupting Online Learning: Improving Educational Quality in a Complex World Denise Easton (Complexity Space Consulting, USA) John Sener (Founder/CKO, Sener Knowledge LLC, USA) We have long valued and defined online education by its capabilities for increasing access to learning. However, rapidly changing conditions and expectations present online education with a new challenge: how to design and use online learning to significantly improve education outcomes. The proliferation of new and disruptive options for delivering online education often create unanticipated and dubious outcomes. New choices require new questions. Whether you're in the early stages of using online learning to improve educational quality or looking for ways to accelerate improvement implementation and outcomes, this workshop is for you! The workshop will offer a new lens for evaluating and enhancing online education strategies and programs. You will learn how complexity offers new options for leveraging the influence of disruptive shifts in online program development, delivery and learner centered engagement by using an adaptive approach to offering online education. Traditional notions of education such as "Old Smart" knowledge, imposed authority, and a scientific rationalist paradigm are being challenged at their core by a dynamic knowledge ecology that operates on new principles and expectations. Improving online education in a complex world requires learning how to implement strategies that recognize and use these foundational shifts in knowledge, access and authority. Last year's workshop was highly attended and well-received, and this one will be even better! The heart of the workshop will be collaborative participation and exercises, informed by the presenters' deep understanding of complexity theory and human systems in organizations Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 16 Pre-Conference Workshops (Denise), a set of insights about how this new paradigm applies to education (John), and a list of effective strategies for using this knowledge to transform our thoughts and work in education (both). Using Faculty Development and Engagement to Promote Quality in Online and Blended Courses Dylan Barth (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA) Tanya Joosten (University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, USA) Nicole Weber (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, USA) With the increase in the diffusion of blended and online programming across higher educational institutions, stakeholders are looking for ways to ensure the quality of the student experience. Quality of online and blended programs can be ensured through faculty and instructional development and training, faculty and instructor evidence of competence and recognition for excellence, constructive evaluation and feedback on blended and online course design and delivery, and community-building opportunities among instructors and staff. Online and Blended Learning is becoming a prominent mode of programming and delivery in education. It is swiftly emerging and transforming higher education to better meet the needs of our students providing them with more effective learning experiences. This movement is leading to a renovation in the way courses are taught and programs support their students. Instructional and faculty development provides the core foundation to institutional programming in providing a framework for implementing blended and online learning pedagogy in the classroom. This student-centered, active learning pedagogy has the potential to alter the traditional classroom by enhancing course effectiveness through increased interactivity leading to superior student outcomes. A recent study reported that "Respondents ... anticipated that the number of students taking online courses will grow by 22.8% and that those taking blended courses will grow even more over the next 2 years" (Picciano, Seamen, Shea, & Swan, 2012, p. 128). As the demand for online and Blended Learning opportunities increases, so does the need for development of instructors to teach and design blended courses and mechanisms to ensure the quality of courses and programs. The University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee (UWM) has been providing instructional development and Blended Learning opportunities to students for over a decade. Since 2001, UWM has developed 8 blended degree programs. In the fall of 2012, UWM offered approximately 100 blended courses and enrolled 7,655 students (26%) in at least one blended course. The average age of a blended undergraduate student is 24, 23% are students of color, and 64% are from the Milwaukee metro area. UWM continues to see growth, as the nation does, and continues to provide opportunities for students to best meet their needs. UWM's Learning Technology Center has several measures in place for ensuring quality in online and Blended Learning on campus, including: 1. UWM's Faculty Development Program for Online and Blended Teaching The Learning Technology Center at UWM offers a program for online and blended teaching providing instructional development earning an international reputation in the field. The program guides the pedagogical design to move more didactic activities online while keeping tasks Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 17 Pre-Conference Workshops that require a richer media due to equivocality and uncertainty in the face-to-face (f2f) environment. This increases the capacity for mastery of content and of deeper learning outcomes. The programis delivered in a blended format with multiple face-to-face meetings and integrated online activities. The blended format allows instructors to experience blended learning and provides the facilitators the opportunity to model good pedagogical practices in the blended learning environment. The program includes presentations by experienced online and blended instructors, online and face-to-face discussions and group work, creation of course materials, and peer and facilitator feedback. As part of the program, participants begin to develop their blended courses, leaving with the draft of a syllabus, a redesign plan, a learning module, and an assessment plan (Aycock, Mangrich, Joosten, Russell, & Bergtrom, 2008). The model is currently shared through the faculty development program and is being used by hundreds of faculty, teaching academic staff, and teaching assistants across many disciplines, course levels, and course sizes, illustrating its ability to scale on UWM's campus and on other college campuses. 2. Certificate Program for Online and Blended Teaching requires the delivery of an online or a blended credit course at UWM; provision of a brief (2-3 pages) letter of reflection on how the instructor's pedagogy has changed; and a course evaluation by the LTC staff or by a certified mentor/evaluator through a peer evaluation checklist. In addition to the Certificate Program, the Learning Technology Center offers ongoing evaluations of blended courses. 3. The Online and Blended Teaching Users Group meets monthly to discuss challenges, exchange ideas, and share best practices for teaching online, blended, and tech-enhanced courses. Each meeting typically features open discussions as well as brief presentations by experienced UWM instructors and opportunities for networking with other teachers on campus. Goals of the Workshop Key Objective 1: Knowledge and competencies required of faculty to teach blended and online courses and how those can be best facilitated in a faculty and instructional development program. Key Objective 2: Incentives and motivational factors that will set a standard of teaching excellence across a higher educational institution Key Objective 3: Methods to scale support of blended and online initiatives through community buildingFormat of the Workshop. This workshop will consist of a series of group activities (5-6 participants per group) that require individuals to brainstorm potential strategies and considerations for implementation requiring that they collectively use their expertise and experiences to develop: 1) criteria, knowledge and skills, needed to teach online and blended; 2) methods of facilitating and delivering a faculty and instructional development program that would build these knowledge and skills; 3) an evaluation instrument that would include the criteria outline in #1; 4) a scalable process to implement such an evaluation; 5) methods to illustrate instructor competence to others and in their tenure review, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 18 Pre-Conference Workshops and; 6) mechanisms that will provide support and community to all those involved in blended and online programming. After each group completes their activity, they will report their group products to the larger group in order to share and gather feedback. After each activity, the UWM team will share their own considerations and examples in ensuring quality in these areas. These group activities will be documented (text, images, video) through collaborative web spaces and social media to be shared with those beyond the conference session as an open education resource on ensuring quality in blended and online courses. OER Services for Institutional Success in the US and Internationally Gerry Hanley (California State University, USA) Every higher education institution is implementing at least one strategic initiative to achieve is critical goals for its success. The initiatives include mobile learning and course redesign for improved student retention and graduation, textbook affordability initiatives to improve access and student retention, teacher education in STEM fields, online and hybrid education to access and respond to stakeholder demands, accessible technology initiative to provide equally effective learning experiences for students with disabilities using technologies, and MOOCs to improve efficiencies in educational processes. The interactive workshop will demonstrate how higher education institutions, especially the California State University, are leverage MERLOT's (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching at www.merlot.org) open educational services to deliver high quality, cost-effective, dependable, scalable, and sustainable for all these aboveInstitutional Initiatives. The workshop will also demonstrate how MERLOT is being used by a number of international partners including Chile with MERLOT Chile( a Spanish language MERLOT portal http://www.inacap.cl/tportalvp/merlot-chile), Africa with the MERLOT Africa Network project (http://man.merlot.org), and India with the Lucknow University's Innovative and Inquiry-based Teaching for Excellence project (http://iite.merlot.org). The workshop will demonstrate the many features of MERLOT's services that have enabled users from many countries, cultures, and languages to participate in the MERLOT community. The workshop will also have participants practice using MERLOT's services and draft plans for how they can apply these open educational services for their own institution's success. BRING YOUR OWN DEVICE. Goals: Participants will become aware of, comfortable with, and motivated to use the wide range of MERLOT services to support their Institutional Initiatives. Participants will develop draft plans on how they might integrate MERLOT into their institutional and/orInternational Programs. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 19 Pre-Conference Workshops IELOL 2013 Workshop Lawrence Ragan (Penn State, USA) Gary Miller (Sloan Consortium, USA) Kathleen S. Ives (The Sloan Consortium, USA) David Lefevre (Imperial College London, United Kingdom) Chris Bustamante (Rio Salado College, USA) Cynthia Golden (University of Pittsburgh, USA) Tracy Mitrano (Cornell University, USA) This culminating workshop is the final of three components of the Institute for Emerging Leadership in Online Learning (IELOL). This workshop will enable IELOL participants to report on success of their individual leadership challenges since the IELOL face-to-face institute at Penn State. Faculty will provide feedback and recommendations on the implementation strategies for each challenge. **This workshop is invitation only for participants in the IELOL program. It is not open for general conference attendees.*** Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 20 Keynote Addresses The Role of Online and Technology-Enabled Learning in Meeting President Obama’s 2020 Graduation Goal Hal Plotkin (Department of Education, US) Mr. Plotkin will review key aspects of the Department of Education€™s Learning Powered by Technology plan, with a special emphasis on the role of online and technology-enabled learning in meeting President Obama’s 2020 graduation goal including through new federal investments, such as the $2 billion dollar Trade Adjustment Act Community College Career Training grant program, which supports the creation and continuous improvement of reusable open online learning resources. The Online Revolution: Learning without Limits Daphne Koller (Coursera, USA) We are at the cusp of a major transformation in higher education. In the past year, we have seen the advent of MOOCs - massively open online classes (MOOCs) - top-quality courses from the best universities offered for free. These courses exploit technology to provide a real course experience to students, including video content, interactive exercises with meaningful feedback, using both auto-grading and peer-grading, and rich peer-to-peer interaction around the course materials. We now see MOOCs from dozens of top universities, offering courses to millions of students from every country in the world. The courses start from bridge/gateway courses all the way through graduate courses, and span a range of topics including computer science, business, medicine, science, humanities, social sciences, and more. In this talk, I'll report on this farreaching experiment in education, including some examples and preliminary analytics. I'll also discuss how this model can support a significant improvement in the learning experience for oncampus students, via blended learning, and provide unprecedented access to education to millions of students around the world. Reinventing Education Anant Agarwal (edX & MIT, USA) Digital technology has transformed countless areas of life from healthcare to workplace productivity to entertainment and publishing. But education hasn’t changed a whole lot. EdX is a MOOC (massive open online course) initiative that aspires to reinvent education through online learning. EdX’s mission is to dramatically increase access to education for students worldwide through MOOCs on our platform, while substantially enhancing campus education in both quality and efficiency through blended models that incorporate online elements created by the edX team.This talk will provide an overview of MOOCs and edX, and share student stories that reveal how they are increasing access to education worldwide. The talk will also discuss where MOOC technologies are headed, and how they can enhance campus education. Finally, the talk will provide some recent research results that will allow us to improve education online and on campus, and discuss how MOOCs might evolve in the fu Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 21 Featured Sessions Sloan-C and IACEHOF Collaborative Symposium: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same - Or Do They? Janet Poley (Sloan Consortium, USA) Gary Miller (Sloan Consortium, USA) Jim Pappas (University of Oklahoma, USA) Carroll Londoner (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA) Meg Benke (Sloan Consortium, USA) Michael Moore (Pennsylvania State University, USA) This symposium represents a first for both the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame (IACEHOF) and the Sloan Consortium. For the first time the two associations are meeting together to provide an opportunity for internationally recognized leaders in the field of Adult and Professional/Continuing Education, including Distance Education and Online Learning to share perspectives on critical issues. The individuals elected into the Hall of Fame reflect the diversity of Adult and Continuing Education practice, scholarship and global leadership. There is significant overlap in recently inducted Hall of Fame leaders and Sloan C leaders and fellows. Each panelist will come prepared to discuss the most important issues from their perspectives related to access, quality, cost, learning effectiveness and learner support (The Sloan C Pillars). All panelists have experience with a wide variety of adult learning audiences and have created learning opportunities for rural and urban populations in the United States and around the world. Their leadership, practice and scholarship includes significant development of various pedagogical and technology programs and practices. The session will include short presentations on the issues followed by discussion with the audience. The symposium conversation will be captured and shared with the broader educational community. Tracking MOOCs: Who, What, When, and Why? Jeff Seaman (Babson Survey Research Group, USA) I. Elaine Allen (Babson Survey Research Group, USA) Who, What, When, and Why? Are MOOCs going to change higher education, or are they just be an interesting side show? Using responses from a national survey of chief education officers, this study examines the higher educational institutional views of MOOCs. Why are institutions adopting MOOCs? Why are some institutions still sitting on the sidelines? What do institutions hope to achieve by offing MOOCs? How massive is massive? How open is open? What happens next? Using results from the national survey of chief academic officers at all degree granting higher education institutions, this presentation explores the attitudes, plans, and fears of higher education institutions related to MOOCs. ALN in Corporate America: Focus on Collaboration David Sachs (Pace University, USA) Barbara Farrell (Pace University, USA) Susan Kannel (CAEL, USA) Frank Mayadas (Sloan Foundation, USA) Robert Ubell (Polytechnic Institute of New York University, USA) Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 22 Featured Sessions Nancy Hale (Pace University, USA) This session is in two parts. In the first, you will learn about several successful implementations of university online programs offered to company personnel. Speakers will report on how university online learning has been adopted by the telecommunications, energy and financial industries, emphasizing corporate-university collaboration, and will show how schools and companies can work closely and supportively to ensure success.In the second part of the session, you will learn about Sloan-C's newly introduced Corporate Special Interest Group (SIG), and you will have a chance to hear about on-site and online SIG activities planned for the year ahead. Attendees will be encouraged to join the conversation and to propose ways they can participate and to recommend ways the new SIG can provide a platform for interaction and programs to bring academic and corporate learning leaders and practitioners closer together. A Second Look At Research on Online and Classroom Based Learning: Emergent Concerns and Potential Solutions Shanna Jaggars (Teachers College, Columbia University, USA) Based on several decades of research, most scholars have concluded that there are no significant differences between student performance in college courses that are taught fully-online versus face-to-face. Much of that research, however, has been conducted with relatively well-prepared university students. This presentation synthesizes the results of several new large-scale quantitative and in-depth qualitative studies which suggest that for a less-prepared student, he or she is substantially less likely to perform well in an online course compared to a face-to-face course. I explore some of the reasons that underlie these students' poor performance in online courses, and provide research-based suggestions in terms of how individual faculty and the larger institution can help these students succeed at higher levels. Branch Campuses Reinvented: To Morph, Blend, Specialize, Innovate, Virtualize or Close? Janet Poley (University of Nebraska, USA) Frank Mayadas (Sloan Foundation, USA) Karen Pollack (Pennsylvania State University, USA) Meg Benke (Empire State College, USA) Vic Lechtenberg (Purdue University, USA) Bonnie Sparks (University of Maine, USA) While major universities and state legislatures wrangle over funding and questions of online and blended learning, branch campuses may be caught in the middle of a political storm and little considered seriously other than the politics related to costs and closure. States vary with respect to needs, history, citizen expectations, culture and financial support. But - appropriate decisions about the direction of these physical campuses is linked to future local, state, regional and national leadership; business owners and business locations, educated and trained workforce. Access, quality and cost are part of the important discussion about positive future outcomes. This experienced panel will present the situation in their state in terms of access, quality and cost; discuss the role of online and blended learning in the mix and report experiences with respect to policy, accreditation and culture. They will offer their opinions as to whether1) branch campuses are a relic of the past and should close ; 2) branch campuses create opportunity for innovation, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 23 Featured Sessions especially when blended with online learning effectively; or 3) see branch campuses as a significant strategic asset that institutional leaders could examine carefully as a source for newly discovered value. Online and Distance Education Policy Puzzlements: From 2013 to 2020 Janet Poley (University of Nebraska, USA) Ray Schroeder (University of Illinois-Springfield, USA) Bob Hansen (UPCEA, USA) Ken Salomon (Thompson Coburn, USA) Christine Mullins (Instructional Technology Council (ITC), USA) 2013 continues to be a year of "policy puzzlements" for institutions, administrators, faculty and staff engaged in online and distance education. People are beginning to ask, will things get more clear as we look ahead to 2020? What is on the horizon? This session will feature leaders at the national and state levels who are working together as the National eLearning Alliance (NeLA). They began collaborating a year ago with assistance from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to reach beyond the ongoing State Authorization discussions to consider the future issues, rather than the past. The Reauthorization of the Higher Education Act will provide the over-arching framework for policy discussions in 2014. No one knows whether Congress will actually pass a reauthorization but there will be considerable heat and hopefully light in the discussions certain to impact higher education institutions and the online learning community. Certain to be considered are issues related to cost of higher education, educational outcomes, degree completion, federal and state support to institutions and to students, higher education and employment and ratings and scorecards. The NeLA panelists will provide short briefings on the most burning issues and take questions from the audience. Representatives span a variety of associations and organizations with years of experience in participating in policy analysis and formulation as well as most appropriate ways for the higher education community to work productively with the executive and legislative branches of government nationally and locally. Bringing Real-World Experience to the Remote Student: Laboratories and Virtual Worlds Frank Mayadas (Sloan Foundation, USA) Jesus del Alamo (MIT, USA) Devon Cancilla (University of Missouri at Kansas City, USA) Bruno Cinel (Thompson Rivers University, Canada) John Bourne (American Sentinel University, USA) Joe Skrivanek (State University of NY (SUNY) Purchase, USA) This session is intended to update attendees about the current state of affairs in technology and practices that allow real-world experiences to the remote learner. This is not intended to be a comprehensive review, rather one that focuses on two segments: (1) access to laboratories at the high school and undergraduate college levels, and (2) use of virtual-world simulations as a part of instruction for college undergraduate and graduate classes. These are not new concepts. They have been discussed for over 15 years. Actual implementations however have been slow to appear. This session will bring attendees up to speed on where the state of the art stands and anticipated progress over the next five years. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 24 Featured Sessions Two overview speakers will sketch out the big picture of where things stand and where continued progress is leading us. The speakers following, will discuss specific examples from their own experiences. They will be encouraged to present in such a way that their experiences might be used as a template for others to follow-up. So one expected outcome is additional practice and practitioners in these areas. A second desired outcome is to begin a process for setting standards in the practice of remote laboratory access and use of virtual worlds models in the practice of science-based education in college. Our final speaker will represent one potential user segment: community college students who aspire to go on to 4-year colleges and careers in research or other advanced development. The presentations will be followed by a round table and audience participation. Pioneering Higher Education's Digital Future: An Evaluation of the Sloan Foundation's Anytime, Anyplace Learning Program Anthony Picciano (City University of New York, Hunter College, USA) In 1992, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation established the Learning Outside the Classroom Program. The name was changed soon after to the Anytime, Anyplace Learning Program, the purpose of which was to explore educational alternatives for people who wanted to pursue higher education but who could not easily attend regularly scheduled college classes. This exploration resulted in a promulgation of a major development in pedagogical practice commonly referred to as the asynchronous learning network or ALN using modern data communications technology, including the Internet and World Wide Web, ALNs allow teaching and learning to transcend time and space in order to provide access to a quality higher education. Twenty years later, online learning and its offshoot Blended Learning have become a basic aspect of American higher education. (Allen & Seaman, 2013) In June 2009, a project was conceived to examine and evaluate the Sloan Foundation's Anytime, Anyplace Learning Program. The purpose of this project was twofold: first, to analyze the role of the Anytime, Anyplace Learning Program in nurturing online learning enabling it to evolve into a major vehicle for providing higher education opportunities to millions of students; and second, to examine the historical record and to begin the process of documenting and preserving the stories of the individuals, colleges, universities and organizations that were critical players in the Anytime, Anyplace Learning Program. This report documents the processes, findings and conclusions of this project. Does Online Learning Help Community College Students Attain a Degree? Peter Shea (State University of New York at Albany, USA) This session reports on new study of online students in community colleges. Using a nationally representative sample from the Beginning Post Secondary Student Survey, we analyzed course taking patterns and conclude that community college students who enroll in some online courses have a small but significantly better chance of attaining a college credential than their classroomonly counterparts. Implications for policy and practice will be discussed. Leading the e-Learning Transformation in Higher Education Michael Moore (Pennsylvania State University, USA) Gary Miller (Sloan Consortium, USA) Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 25 Featured Sessions Lawrence Ragan (Pennsylvania State University, USA) Ray Schroeder (University of Illinois Springfield, USA) Karen Swan (University of Illinois Springfield, USA) Meg Benke (Empire State College, USA) Wayne Smutz (Pennsylvania State University, USA) The transformation of higher education has been fueled, in part, by the emergence of e-learning into the mainstream of college and university programming. This transformation creates great challenges, and opportunities, for academic leadership. The recent release of a new book Leading the e-Learning Transformation in Higher Education: Meeting the Challenges of Technology in Distance Education provides a backdrop for a conversation regarding leadership development in elearning. The book is an outgrowth of the Institute for Emerging Leadership in Online Learning (IELOL), a collaboration between Sloan-C and the Penn State World Campus, which has, over the past five years, worked to develop the next cadre of leaders around many of the concepts outlined in the book. Join the authors in this interactive session focusing on leadership and the skills needed by emerging leaders. Quality, Policy, and Assessment: The Path to the Future for Online Education Meg Benke (Empire State College, USA) Todd A. Hitchcock (Pearson, USA) Marie Cini (University of Maryland University College, USA) Assessment, at the program and institutional level is becoming increasingly significant on the national Higher Education scene. As postsecondary education comes under increasing scrutiny; distance education likewise faces additional challenges in demonstrating itself. The challenges are coming from accreditors, political entities, governing bodies, regulatory agencies, as well as associations representing persons with disabilities in post-secondary education, and many of these are beginning to look at standards for distance learning. This session is the precursor to a more in-depth three-day research seminar hosted by Empire State College in conjunction with the Sloan Consortium in June 2014. Cross Institutional Data Sharing and Analysis to Support Student Success Beth Davis (PAR, USA) Karen Swan (University of Illinois- Springfield, USA) Denise Nadasen (UMUC, USA) Joel Hartman (University of Central Florida, USA) Analysis of very large data sets has become common practice to help organizations make predictions that assist performance and outcomes. From business to sports to police work big data is everywhere. The collection and analysis of large data sets is also increasingly common in higher education and learning analytics is becoming pervasive. This session will feature leaders in the field of learning analytics who will discuss their work on Gates and Kresge Foundation funded projects that seek to improve student success through large scale data analysis. The session will feature representatives from the national PAR project, and participants from the University of Illinois Springfield, the University of Maryland University College and the University of Central Florida who collectively serve more than 150,000 students. The panel will Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 26 Featured Sessions discuss how sharing data across institutions has led to better understanding of student needs and an emerging effort to develop inter-institutional intervention strategies that leverages this understanding to assist student performance and success. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 27 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Best in Track Award Mechanical Vs. Philosophical Considerations When Upgrading the LMS J. Garvey Pyke (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA) Kurt Richter (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA) When going through a major learning management system (LMS) upgrade, faculty development centers are presented with significant opportunities and need to consider how issues will play out in the realms of philosophical/pedagogical vs. mechanical/technological. It is easy to fall into the trap where the LMS is primarily considered an enterprise level campus technology. To be certain, an LMS upgrade presents many technological or mechanical challenges and must be treated as a major IT project, supported by many campus IT players. However, the philosophical or pedagogical aspects cannot be ignored. In fact, they should take precedence in developing a faculty development strategy around the LMS. But looking at the full picture is needed to bring together the technical and pedagogical pieces. Background/Context: The only certain things in life are death, taxes, and the certainty of educational technology becoming outdated. The UNC Charlotte Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) is charged with the responsibility of supporting the online learning management system (LMS). For four years, the campus LMS was Moodle version 1.x. When Moodle it came time to upgrade Moodle to version 2.x during the fall and spring of the 2012-2013 school year, the CTL was faced with the prospect of not only a massive IT project but also how to best promote the true learning power of the LMS to its community of instructors. Major Lessons Learned: A switch in one system requires the switch in many systems. The LMS is integrated with many additional systems and instructional technologies, so when a major upgrade occurs to the LMS, a cascading effect happens. Our clickers, synchronous web conferencing tool, video streaming system, et al. all needed to be upgraded due to the Moodle upgrade. However, this switch in hardware also gives the opportunity for a switch in pedagogy. For example, clickers can be to promote collaboration, active learning, and a flipped classroom style of instruction. And it is precisely because the LMS upgrade has caught the attention of faculty that has enabled our faculty development center to move this kind of conversation forward. We have often referred to this phenomenon as the "Trojan Horse Model of Faculty Development." When instructors ask for the technology, we are happy to wheel in the Trojan Horse of Technology into the teaching space and then unpack all the good pedagogy. The Trojan Horse Model is extended in seeing how important it is to help faculty understand that an LMS upgrade is not about importing courses from the old system into the new one but rather "the perfect opportunity to redesign your course." Many faculty admit that they had been too busy to update their now stale, several years' old course designs. This is a great opportunity to redesign and redevelop their LMS strategy for their courses. In that vein, our Center for Teaching and Learning has designed a workshop for these faculty, "Transitioning to Moodle 2." This workshop quickly dispenses with the nuts-and-bolts of content importing and such, so that the majority of the workshop is devoted to these redesign efforts. The new pedagogical tools are highlighted (e.g., marking guides), and faculty spend time discussing with each other and with Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 28 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support our instructional designers the goals for the course and how to integrate activities and assessments with these goals. Faculty leave the workshop thinking more about teaching and learning than worrying about which button to push, and when, in the LMS. There are other aspects of the LMS upgrade that require looking at the philosophical and mechanical considerations. For example, we chose to be late adopters of Moodle 2. There are certainly pros and cons to this choice, but we had to find the balance between our IT capacity and our campus culture. Our technical support staff had ensure a stable system before it was introduced to the campus, but we also had to consider the rhythms of the academic calendar, school culture and desire for change, and risks of early vs. late adoption. Another major issue is the growing external pressures federal and state will tax the LMS and its support staff. There is talk of centralizing of reporting data, certification of instructors before teaching online, and the requiring of early warning systems for students in the LMS. While all of these may have philosophical and pedagogical value, they will certainly require a great deal of mechanical and technologicalExpertise to implement. Ultimately, it is a broader philosophy of faculty development that is based on putting pedagogy first that drives us. As all technologies evolve, training to use new technologies is a basic requirement. Technology adoption must and will occur, and a faculty development center is able to support it using the underlying philosophy of the organization. Value for Audience: This session is aimed at faculty developers. We plan to engage the audience with small group interactions and whole group discussion. This will not be a lecture-style presentation but very much conversational. We are interested in the audience sharing: (1) Their organizational philosophy; (2) The extent that academic technologies are driven by pedagogy; (3) School culture regarding instructional technologies; (4) How they can use this information in project planning. As fellow faculty developers and adult learners, we are facilitating a session that all will learn from and have takeaways for our own organizations. Managing and Supporting Online Adjunct Faculty: The Case for Teaching Groups Joel Galbraith (Brigham Young University-Idaho, USA) Heather Carter (Brigham Young University-Idaho, USA) Micah Murdock (Brigham Young University-Idaho, USA) Presentation Description: Online adjunct faculty at Brigham Young University-Idaho struggle with some of the same challenges felt by adjuncts at other institutions: • They feel isolated from campus, departments, and one another. • They need/desire professional development. • Beside teaching, they often perform key administrative functions and need support. • They find themselves in an environment not wholly understood or empathized with by campus colleagues. A key strategy in addressing these challenges while simultaneously meeting the university's three imperatives to 1) Serve more students; 2) Improve quality; and 3) Reduce costs, has been the implementation of a successful "Teaching Group" model to manage, develop and support the university's rapidly growing body of online adjunct faculty. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 29 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Teaching Groups provide faculty with a community of peers for mutual support and professional development. Groups comprise of roughly ten online adjunct faculty that form a learning community and are assigned a peer mentor, or Teaching Group Leader (TGL). Teaching Group Leaders hold regular professional development meetings, provide mentorship, support, and resources. They also supervise faculty in their groups. Through regular reporting Teaching Group Leaders help ensure online students are getting their faculty's best efforts. The collaborative work of Teaching Groups occurs largely within a thriving online community of practice that is actively maintained by the Online Learning department. This professional community space serves to connect faculty to one another in their groups, to campus colleagues, and to training resources. The community space and Teaching Groups foster amongst remote online faculty, a greater sense of "belonging" to BYU-Idaho and its mission. Active Teaching Group participation is mandatory and with very few exceptions, adjunct faculty are not only content with the added responsibilities of operating within Teaching Groups, but highly value the peer mentoring environment of their Teaching Groups. This presentation will further outline the structure, management and value of Teaching Groups. We will discuss potential pitfalls and how the model scales to effectively meet the demands of rapidly growing online programs. Audience Engagement: The presenter is very familiar with the topic and can adapt well to meet audience needs. A couple poll questions will be introduced at the start of the presentation to set the tone/expectation for of active audience engagement, and to assess audience interest in various aspects of the presentation. 35 minutes is a limited presentation, but ample time will be allotted for Q&A in which audience members can ask how the Teaching Group concept might be applied or adapted to meet their unique context/university needs. Online Instructors Have a Life Too!: Balancing the See Saw of Work/Life Balance Issues Donna DiMatteo-Gibson (Baker College, USA) Problem: The lines between home and work become very blurred when online adjunct faculty are working remotely and virtually from their homes. This can lead to increased work/life balance issues, affect work performance, increase stress levels and likelihood of burnout, as well as impact overall satisfaction levels. Aguilar (2011) discusses how she struggled with work/life balance and began to neglect her physical health. Sherrington (2013) discusses how there are ways to obtain work-life balance as an educator. Session Approach: This session will include a review of survey results collected from online adjunct faculty to determine the types of work/life balance issues experienced, common barriers to achieving work/life balance, and first hand best practices from those who effectively maintain balance between their work and life roles. Interactive polls will be conducted throughout the session to determine how the group of attendees experiences compare with the survey results from the larger sample of faculty. Recommendations on how to obtain effective work/life balance will be discussed interactively as a group with attendees. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 30 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Session Objectives: Attendees who attend this informational session will… • Examine the different of types of online adjunct faculty, and how this might affect work/life balance. • Identify common themes related to work/life balance for online adjunct faculty Examine common barriers to successful work/life balance Develop best practices to achieve and maintain work/life balance • Discuss how institutions can use this information to improve training, and support faculty to reduce work/life balance issues. Interaction: • Attendees will participate in polls to explore how their experiences relate to survey sample, and participate in group activities to practice how they can apply what is covered to improve their own sense of work/life balance. • Faculty will benefit from the tips and suggestions provided related to maintaining work/life balance. • Administrators, will benefit by being able to recognize the impact of work/life balance issues, and create ways for institutions to provide more work/life balance support and/or training for their faculty. Conference Materials: Slides will be used to guide the presentation. During the session, an online polling feature will be used to increase attendee participation and interaction. All items will be provided for inclusion on the conference web site. Target audience: All audiences Institutional level targeted: Presenters will bring laptops for presentation, and use various web browser interfaces for interaction and demonstration. References: Aguilar, E. (2011). Balancing work and life: The ongoing challenge for educators. Retrieved from: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/balancing-work-and-life-teacher-elena-aguilar Sherrington, T. (2013) Teachers workload: tips on how to manage it and get a work-life balance. Retrieved from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2013/apr/08/teacherworkload-tips-manage-work-life-balance OnRamps' Innovative Faculty Development Strategies: Sustaining Engagement and Increasing Uptake Julie Schell (Harvard University, USA) Introduction: From K-12 to highly specific graduate courses, the field of education is experiencing a paradigm shift. The rapid growth of online learning materials, including short video lessons around single concepts to fully developed blended courses, is unprecedented. Along with this growth, there is an increasing demand among education constituents for 21st century approaches to teaching that leverage this hotbed of pedagogical resources and Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 31 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support innovation. Increasingly, educational leaders and individual faculty are recognizing the need to adapt to this sea change by adopting blended approaches. As blended learning models continue to propagate, the need for innovative and successful faculty development approaches is becoming more and more critical. At present, there is no gold standard approach to blended delivery, how to train instructors to use blended approaches with fidelity, or how to effectively scale blended learning through faculty development. Traditional approaches to faculty development do not translate well to the uptake and dissemination of blended learning models. These approaches typically offer short, one-time, synchronous workshop opportunities with no sustained engagement from trainers after the workshops, no learning community development, and not enough attention to sound instructional design of the trainings themselves. In this presentation, we present a case study of an innovative faculty development training program that addresses each of these training problem areas through a multi-million dollar blended-learning and faculty development initiative led by The University of Texas at Austin, called OnRamps. Introduction to OnRamps: As the number and Diversity of students admitted into Texas universities have increased, so has the realization that many among these students arrive underprepared for the demands of university coursework. The College Board reports that only one in four college-bound high school students in Texas met all four college-readiness benchmarks on the ACT in 2012. Among those, just 29 percent passed the science benchmark and 48 percent passed the math benchmark, (http://act.org/newsroom/data/2012/states/pdf/Texas. Pdf). These figures underline a clear misalignment between the expectations and standards that define success at the high school and community college level and those at the university level. OnRamps, led by The University of Texas at Austin, in collaboration with various Experts in assessment, instructional design, and the psychology of learning, seeks to ease the transition between high school and college by addressing this discrepancy. OnRamps is a statewide readiness initiative that includes vertically aligned, fully developed blended courses in mathematics, english-language arts, and computer science and a robust faculty development training structure. The program provides a state-of-the-art blended learning content delivery engine, which allows prospective college students access to dual credit and dual enrollment courses comprised of assignments that emulate the demands of postsecondary work. OnRamps courses utilize the latest learning technology and best-practice research on how people learn to expose students from all Texas schools to the skills necessary to succeed at the university level. The blended, personalized learning framework of OnRamps courses provides individualized instruction and encourages student autonomy and learning through the incorporation of innovative pedagogical practices such as classroom response technologies, advanced learning analytics via student and instructor dashboards, and content authoring tools for students and instructors. Introduction to OnRamps' Faculty Development Approach: Aligned with literature on best practices for sustained institutional change, OnRamps takes a novel approach to faculty development. First, contextually, the OnRamps faculty development model assumes that Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 32 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support developing strong professional learning communities will increase engagement in the initiative itself (Wieman, Deslauriers, & Gilley, in press). Thus, all aspects of faculty development are aimed at increasing participants' engagement with each other and initiative support staff. Second, in order to encourage the uptake of innovations, the annual faculty development institutes are designed to occur both daily over three week summer periods and as ongoing online learning communities in the fall and spring. Sustained engagement with teacher participants allows us to provide continuous support for implementation and innovation. Third, for their participation, instructor participants can earn up to three graduate credit hours in their content areas over the three-week summer period and an additional three hours over the academic year. This signals not only that their time and expertise is valuable to the community but also allows us an incentive for continued participation beyond the three-week summer institutes. Finally, OnRamps is using a backward design approach - whereby we developed learning outcomes and aligned assessment and training activities to map how we expect faculty to develop throughout a coherent faculty development experience with tracks for both content (English language arts, computer science, and mathematics) and technology and pedagogy. Method for the Presentation: In this presentation, OnRamps staff will share a detailed and emerging case study using summer faculty development implementation data and early outcomes with regard to (a) fidelity of implementation; (b) use of materials (i.e., uptake of innovations); (c) improved pedagogical approaches among instructors; and (d) engagement in professional learning communities. Data sources will include interviews and focus groups with teacher participants, observations of both summer faculty development sessions and teachers in the field, participant surveys, and quantitative and qualitative information on usage of the learning management system. Audience Engagement: In this session, we will engage the audience using interesting and thought provoking questions that we will deliver using a new online, cloud-based classroom response system called Learning Catalytics (LC). LC allows users to use any web-enabled device to respond to a rich variety of question types, including multiple choice, short answer, drawing, and graphing. We will include at least one Think-Pair-Share activity around an LC question to help keep the audience active and engaged with one another. Session Outcomes: Session participants will come away with a proof of concept for a robust, intentional faculty development structure that provides for sustained engagement with participants and increased uptake of innovations. Participants may use workshop ideas to develop their own innovative faculty development initiatives. References: ACT, Inc. (2012) ACT Profile Report. ACT.org. Wieman, C., Deslauriers, L., & Gilley, B. (In press). Use of research-based instructional strategies: How to avoid faculty quitting. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 33 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Back to School: What Happens When Faculty Experience Online Education From a Student's Perspective? Joanne Dolan (University of Wisconsin - Green Bay, USA) Introduction: Despite being dedicated to a life of education and learning, it can be easy for faculty to forget what life looks like from the other side of the lectern. This is compounded when considering online education as many faculty have never experienced an online course as a student. By facilitating this experience and promoting reflection, faculty developers can help faculty go Back to School! Context: Our two-track Online Teaching Fellowship offers University of Wisconsin - Green Bay faculty professional development on online teaching and learning. Both our Starter Track (for faculty new to the online environment) and our Advanced Track (for faculty who are experienced online faculty) are conducted in the blended format with four four-hour face-to-face sessions combined with four weeks of online materials, discussions and activities. Focus: Through a combination of pre-Fellowship surveys (which showed that 66% of our experienced online faculty had never taken any form of online class) and post-Fellowship comments, we quickly realized the importance Allowing faculty to experience online and blended education from the student's perspective. While our curriculum naturally casts them in this role, following our realization we made the learning from and the reflection of this experience a central objective of the program. Methods: We did this through a number of discussions and activities with our faculty including Weekly online private journals. Participants were required to journal about their experience as a student in a discussion forum available only to the faculty developer. The reflections were focused around a number of prompts to promote consideration of the online or blended experience on their learning, motivation and interaction with their peers. Experience of a Variety of Practices in the Online Environment: During the course, for short periods of time, we have faculty experience less than ideal online teaching practices, including confusing layouts, lack of instructor presence and delays in feedback. Following these experiences, we lead a group discussion on how the practices impacted student learning and what are some concrete ways to improve the situations. Final Presentation: Participants are required to present to their peers on a sample module of their course. They must field questions and justify their organization, inclusion of activities and technology and engagement techniques based partly on their experience as a student. Results: Since focusing on the learning and reflection of the experience of being a student we've seen deeper engagement not only with the course objectives, but with the overarching goal of supporting faculty as they become as reflective and student-centered online as they are in the classroom. Graduates of the fellowship have commented that they are more empathetic, savvy and interactive in the online environment following their student experience. Individual comments from graduates include… Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 34 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support • • "...the other thing that worked well was actually getting to be an online student for the course.” I'm glad there were required posts, journals, and readings on D2L. That taught me a lot about being an online student - thus, I will be a better online teacher." All of this encourages us to expand this element of our online teaching professional development. As a result we wish to share our successes with the Sloan community and learn from their ideas, suggestions and expertise. Presentation Objectives: By the end of this presentation, participants will be able to… • Identify theories behind placing faculty in student roles • Develop methods of placing faculty in a range of student roles in online and blended environments • Support faculty as they reflect and learn from the role-reversal Presentation Overview: A. Introduction B. Brief exercise with participants to show the importance of viewing learning from the student's perspective C. Presenter introduction D. Objective introduction E. Brief context discussion (as outlined above) • Identify theories behind placing faculty in student roles • Discussion of Andragogy and its place in Faculty Development • Discussion of other Adult Learning Theories - Experiential, Self-Directed and Transformative - Develop methods of placing faculty in a range of student roles in online and blended environments - Outline of methods used in the Online Teaching Fellowship Program to immerse faculty back into the student role. - Pair & Share activity to Allow participants share other methods - Allow participants to report back to the room at large on successful methods • Support faculty as they reflect and learn from the role-reversal • Discussion on the importance of this step in order to elevate learning during the experience - Outline of methods to promote reflection during the Fellowship - Pair & Share activity to Allow participants share other methods - Allow participants to report back to the room at large on successful methods Conclusion: Will include opportunity for questions and answers Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 35 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Can Existing Quality Guidelines Inform Faculty Participation in Online Course Design? Melissa A. Venable (OnlineColleges.net, USA) Amy Hilbelink (Ultimate Medical Academy, USA) The future of online education continues to evolve and expand with a variety of options ranging from single courses, to full degree programs, and open courses like MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). According to the Babson Survey Research Group's 2-12 survey of more than 2800 academic leaders, "the proportion of [those] who say online learning is critical to their long-term strategy is at a new high of 69.1%." As higher education institutions of all types, for-profit and not-for-profit, decide to increase their online learning offerings, the process of creating an online course, either a new course or an online version of one that already exists in a face-to-face format, can be underestimated in terms of the time, resources, and expertise required. Fortunately there are a number of existing guidelines that can be used to guide the work and two specifically addressed in this presentation are gaining popularity: • Quality Matters Rubric: Through "8 general standards and 41 specific standards" this system is "used to evaluate the design of online and blended courses. • Quality Scorecard: "For measuring and quantifying elements of quality within online education programs in higher education," this system includes 70 quality indicators organized in 9 categories. Both sets of guidelines are openly available online. Faculty members may be involved in online course design in several ways. They are often relied upon to serve as subject matter exeperts, "SMEs" providing the essential component of content area expertise working with a multimember design team. They may also work independently to create online versions of the courses they have designed for and taught in traditional college classrooms on campus. In both scenarios, the availability of faculty support resources can be limited. How can existing tools serve as guides to inform their work? Objectives of this Presentation Include: (a) Side-by-side comparison of the similarities and differences between the Quality Matters Rubric and the Quality Scorecard; (b) Proposed list of knowledge areas critical for faculty members involved in the online course design process; and (c) Suggested strategies for faculty development and support that incorporate Quality Matters standards and Quality Scorecard indicators. The presenters approach these instruments and the discussion of their possible implementation in a faculty development context from their perspectives and prior experiences in roles related to instructional design, online teaching, student support, and faculty development. Session attendees will be asked to share their concerns and experiences with the Quality Matters Rubric and the Quality Scorecard and/or working with faculty members on course design projects. The presenters will seek attendees' recommendations for future faculty support as it relates to the implementation of these guidelines and online course development. Attendees will also be encouraged to participate in session and conference backchannel communication through the use of Twitter and designated hash tags. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 36 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support References: Changing course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States, http://sloanconsortium.org/publications/survey/changing_course_2012 Quality Matters Higher Ed Program Rubric, Retrieved from https://www.qualitymatters.org/rubric. A Quality Scorecard for the Administration of Online Education Programs, Retrieved from http://sloanconsortium.org/quality_scoreboard_online_program The Bay Path College Three-Tiered Approach to Online Faculty Development - Version 2.0 Peter A. Testori (Bay Path College, USA) At the 17th Annual Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning in 2011, the presenters shared Bay Path College's three-tiered, comprehensive faculty development initiative that incorporated cohort-based orientation, peer-mentoring, and ongoing support. The presenters explored this initiative in-depth in the JALN article "Orientation, Mentoring and Ongoing Support: A Three-Tiered Approach to Online Faculty Development". Since that time, online enrollment and offerings have grown at the College (as they have at many institutions) to a point where the model employed was no longer scalable. Additionally, new faculty contracted by the College were more often than not arriving with extensive online teaching experience and had neither the need nor the time to effectively engage in all parts of the faculty development initiative. The College's Center for Online Learning (COL) recognized the challenges presented by the changing landscape and modified key elements of the Excellence in Online Education Initiative to address the needs for relevance and scalability. Presenters and participants will explore the following three main challenges and the solutions that breathed new life into this historically successful faculty development initiative. First Component of the Faculty Development Initiative: Consisted of the Faculty Orientation to Online Education ran for eight weeks. It included an introduction to online learning pedagogy and covers such topics as: Building community in an online course; How to assess online learners; and How to integrate web 2.0 tools into the virtual classroom. New faculty members began arriving at the College with extensive online teaching experience and no longer needed a "soup to nuts" orientation course. To address this challenge, the COL revised the Faculty Orientation to Online Education to Allow for a module-based, self-paced experience. The COL also developed a "Faculty Orientation Experience Survey" that no wallows the Center for Online Learning to determine which modules faculty need to complete within the orientation. Depending on the level of self-reported online teaching experience, some modules of the Orientation are no longer required. This solution addressed the need to a more relevant and personalized learning experience for all online faculty new to the College. Second Component of the Excellence in Online Education Initiative: This component involved mentorship. At the start of the orientation, participants were assigned a mentor who was currently teaching an online course. New faculty were given guest access to their mentor's course Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 37 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support so they could benefit from seeing a live class, observing asynchronous discussions in progress, and having an additional resource available to them when they had questions. The COL was not willing to compromise here and wanted to maintain the connection between new and seasoned faculty. To address the need for more flexible mentoring opportunities, the COL began polling seasoned online faculty at the start of each session to gauge interest in mentoring opportunities. Interested parties are now paired up with new faculty as soon as new faculty engage in the Orientation. This has not only maintained the mentor/mentee connection, it has provided this connection in a timelier manner. Third Component of the Excellence in Online Education Initiative: Focused on on-going support and included a thorough review of every upcoming online course. To make this quality control process more scalable, the COL placed more of the responsibility for quality in the hands of our faculty. While newly developed online courses are still fully reviewed by the COL, faculty teaching previously developed courses are charged with ensuring that their course is ready to be made available to students. Faculty are now provided with a syllabus and course review checklist that they must use to review the course and notify their program directors when ready. COL staff remains available to provide assistance, if needed, during course set up. This change has transferred ownership of course quality to the faculty and allows the COL to provide support when needed, enabling the COL to focus on areas of greatest need and address scalability concerns. Rapid growth, increased comfort with online learning, and scalability are all current trends in online education today. Bay Path College is not alone in finding that their current online faculty development efforts need a facelift. After discussing the challenges presented and resolved by the COL, participants will have the opportunity to discuss their unique challenges with the group as a whole. By remaining flexible and adaptive, we feel that our revised approach to online faculty development will allow us to continue to provide a quality online learning experience for the "next generation" of online learners and leaders. Yes! You Can Teach Math Online: A Comparison of Two Math Courses in Canvas Wendy Howard (University of Central Florida, USA) Kathleen Bastedo (University of Central Florida, USA) Traditionally, letters and numbers have been easy to display and manipulate on the Internet. However, math formulas have presented many challenges online including how to interactively teach, create, and use complex math equations. Therefore, math or math-related courses have been slow to enter the online environment until recently. This session explores:  The design of a statistics course and how problem interactivity and accessibility were addressed from the beginning stages of development.  The iterative evaluation and revision process of an advanced mathematics for engineers course as it was delivered over several semesters.  A comparison of how two instructors addressed challenges such as the presentation of online course material in an interactive environment, use of the equation editor, and testing in In structure Canvas will be presented.  In addition, the experiences of two students who provided testing and feedback to the instructors based on their unique perspectives (including one student with a severe visual Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 38 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support   impairment) and how they were able to access and complete the online math problems will be reviewed. Specific test items highlighted will include a review of the Canvas mobile app and equation editor. The testing results and recommended best practices based on the development and interactivity of the courses will be explored and shared with the audience. Issues on Strategic Online Teaching Faculty Development Albert Sangra (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain) Eduardo Fuentes-Abeledo (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Spain) Introduction: The current European Higher Education Area (EHEA) is fostering the development and implementation of a teaching and learning model in which teaching roles are being challenged and shifted. Online or blended programs are the most significant way in which most of the universities are facing this situation. A teacher's professional development becomes a key issue in getting the highest levels of quality teaching and learning. There is a discussion about the kind of competences teachers need to teach online. Some authors consider there are a set of teaching competences that are the same, but many others consider the changes to educational context made by ICT. In order to handle online teaching, teachers should have specific online teaching competences. These specific competences should be achieved through training and experience. Therfore, different programs have been put into practice to increase the capacity of teachers to become good online teachers as well. Considering the previous references it is logical to state that online teaching faculty development is a must to efficiently teach in online environments. Spanish researchers from different universities considered the opportunity of determining which is the support for and the provision of online teaching professional development in Spain. In Spain online programs have considerably increased in the last few years. These researchers are interested in identifying which strategy, or the lack thereof should underly their actions. This research project that was partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education. Methodology: A qualitative approach was the basis of the research design. Data from the entire set of Spanish universities (77) was collected through two main instruments: a) A full analysis of the existing information shown in each university website; and b) An in-depth interview with the university responsible for teacher's professional development units. Later on, analysis of data was carried out by the group of researchers who led the project. The semi-structured interview had three main parts: • • • The first one was related to institutional informatio Second one asked for the specific characteristics of the training actions The third one consisted in a set of open questions asking about the perception of the: - Advantages and disadvantages of training oriented to online teaching competence acquisition and development Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 39 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support - Problems and difficulties found for the expected implementation of online teaching faculty development actions - Any other comments or suggestions on the topic. The findings discussed in this paper lays on this second instrument… Findings and discussion: Forty-nine universities (65%) were available to participate in this second part of the study. Two main issues arose from the interviews… 1. The entire set of universities is providing some kind of training on the use of ICT, but most of them don't define which are the competencies the teachers should acquire. 2. Despite the use of ICT is widely spread in the Spanish conventional universities, it is still in an initial stage. They are not taking advantage of all the educational potential that ICT provides. Spanish distance and online teaching universities are much more advanced in this sense. More specifically, regarding the professional development for online teaching, some critical issues were discovered: 1. Cultural reluctance to change, linked to the myth of the difficulty of using technologies for teaching 2. A lack of motivating teaching methodologies 3. Tendancy to replicate face-to-face methodologies with the use of new technological 4. The role of the online teacher and its development is undervalued Issues related to the financing of training and development: 1. Institutional lobbyists stating online teaching yields a low-quality education 2. Lack of economic and technical resources to support teachers. However, some recommendations have been elaborated for those universities which realized their institutional strategy is lacking the following regarding online education… • Aware of the the potentials regarding online teaching and learning • Flexibility • Methodological innovation and modernization of teaching Teachers and institutions need to shift their minds and embrace a new educational paradigm: A. Online teaching has to be based on a new teaching and learning paradigm. B. Institutions have to help teachers to move away from traditional teaching methodologies, giving hem samples of much more innovative, motivating training activities. C. Foster online teaching faculty development, providing high-level trainers (perhaps coming from more experienced distance and online teaching universities). This should be part of a university-wide strategic plan for the development of teachers' capability in online teaching. Universities need to place this in the middle of their overall strategy, if they Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 40 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support actually want to remain competitive in the future in an educational scenario in which online education will not be marginal but central in higher education and lifelong learning. Conclusions: The emergence of the MOOC phenomenon has put online education on the leading edge of higher education provision and require teachers to improve their online teaching competences. The main findings of the research shows… • Currently, the Spanish universities’ provision and support for online teaching and professional development is far from what will be needed in the future to remain competitive. • Teaching methodologies in online education should be revised. • Many programs simply attempt to replicate the teaching methods used in face-to-face classrooms when shifting to an online course. • Faculty development has to be a relevant tool for this shift, since new teaching roles are arising (Bawane and Spector, 2009). • Institutions need a strategic plan for ICT integration and online teaching at each university. • Online teaching professional development plans should be oriented towards the improvement of the teaching and learning process (Bates and Sangra , 2011). • On the other hand, periodic assessment of the institutional impact has to be fostered, in order to identify whether the policies and strategies carried out are supporting the goals of the institutions. The Hybrid Blender: Lessons Learned in Converting A Resident Instruction Course to a Blended Experience Fred Aebli (Penn State University, USA) Many schools today are seeing the advantages of taking resident or “live” courses and delivering them online. Like many colleges and universities, Penn State also faces challenges when offering courses with low enrollments throughout its satellite campuses. In order to address these issues and offer courses required to obtain their degree, a plan was created to extend these courses out to those students too far to attend the physical classroom setting. Six months prior to our offering one of our resident instruction technology courses I was asked to begin making preparations to offer my class on human computer interaction, also known as usability engineering, as a “hybrid” or blended course. The synchronous blended offering would have a live resident section with students sitting in the classroom and an online section that would join in the class a live online via Adobe Connect. My presentation for the 19th Annual Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning will be delivered in an interactive way that tells a story as to how I addressed initial preparations, problems encountered, successes, failures, a post class student survey, lessons learned and recommendations on how to evolve a live course into a blended offering. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 41 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support In the preparations phase I will discuss the technology considerations ranging from selection of an appropriate microphone to testing the hardware and course delivery learning management system (LMS). Although the technology is important, the course materials are the foundation. A significant challenge was encountered with converting the pedagogy to fit both the resident and online student. The course already had a number of in class exercises that would no longer work the same way with students online. Additionally, a number of videos were shared during class to demonstrate various concepts but concerns about how our online collaboration tool would handle it, emerged. I will discuss these issues and how we addressed them in detail by using examples from the classroom space in Penn State's LMS, Angel. The problems that surfaced will be presented to the audience in a scenario type format that states the problem, reactions by students, and then implementing a solution or a work around with minimal course impact. I will also share thoughts on how we handled a course assignment that involved having all the students performing usability tests on live websites developed by a local informa-tion technology company. The students were then required to present these test results to the company's technology director and development manager when they were invited in to the classroom one evening. As we progress through the presentation I will share other observations pertaining to the team based course project that also required a live presen-tation. Two teams were comprised of resident and virtual team members. Having taught online and resident courses with projects for more than fourteen years, I witnessed the students enhance their online collaborative skills with little fostering from me. This was a very pleasant surprise. The audience will also have an opportunity to see and hear the feedback acquired from students in a post class survey. The comments are interesting and lend insight that you can only gain from a student engaged in a course in this manner. Lastly, the course provided a number of lessons learned that will be provided to the attendees. These lessons learned pertain to handling technology glitches, in class exercises, assessments, and teaming for a team project. To wrap up the discussion, I will present the audience with a number of recommendations to consider when undertaking such a task. As part of the presentation, I will provide two documents available for downloading that will contain the details of the classroom setup, technology chosen, and the steps we followed to setup the class for this type of delivery. The second document will be laid out as a matrix that presents the reader with the challenges/problems we encountered and how we addressed them noting the success of the solution or failure. In summary, the presentation described above will give the audience member a firsthand account of how we successfully addressed the migration of a resident course to a "hybrid" or blended environment. Overall the experience was very rewarding as we were able to enrich both the resident and online student learning experiences. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 42 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Sloan-C Certificate/Mastery Series Overview for 2014 Bethany Bovard (Sloan Consortium, USA) It’s not too early to plan your 2014 New Year’ss Resolution! This conference workshop session is a great opportunity to learn more about how the 2014 Sloan-C Institute can help you continue your professional development. The Sloan-C Institute is the premier online development program for you to continue to develop your skills, knowledge, and talent while growing your professional network. 2014 brings about many new changes and opportunities for learning! The Institute uses the Sloan-C pillars of quality in online education ”learning effectiveness, scale, faculty and student satisfaction, and access as the foundation for all learning events. Come and meet Faculty and Design members to learn more! This session will highlight: The 2014 Online Teaching Certificate Program prepares educators to teach and improve online courses and offers mentor support throughout the program and with option to specialize in your electives. The Mastery Series Programs includes – Blended, Mobile , Nursing, and Intellectual Property The Mastery Series Programs have expanded for 2014. What exactly is the Mastery Series Program? Mastery Series Programs are a series of three workshops focusing on the research, teaching, and assessment of the specialized learning environments. Throughout each of the workshops, you will explore relevant research and use that research to help you design a sound course built around research and best practices. Each workshop is one week long and between each workshop there will be a three-week break to give you time to complete some self-guided research and reflect on your learning. A Galaxy of Professional Development Melissa Kaulbach (Academic Partnerships, USA) Heather Farmakis (Academic Partnerships, USA) Context: Free professional development resources and materials available to serve faculty globally. Explore pedagogy and effective practices in the online space. Problem: Lack of flexible and convenient professional development offerings for higher education faculty. Approach: Share a social learning ecosystem for faculty, featuring a calendar of innovative professional development calendar offerings. Results: The attendees will discover and utilize a vetted online teaching resource bank, with a variety of professional development offered.Goals: Free interactive social learning community available to faculty around the world. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 43 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Outcomes: The attendees will discover and utilize a vetted online teaching resource bank, with a variety of professional development offered. Interactive Dynamic Teaching with Web Conferencing: Not as Hard as You Thought Joshua Geller (Groopex, Israel) Reliable and efficient web conferencing technology is revolutionizing education. It both breaks down geographical borders, reaching more students and tapping into the finest teachers no matter their location, as well as offering best-in-class presentation tools. In this session, we will discuss the benefits and the growth opportunities that web conferencing can bring to the higher education market and will explore 2 main topics. 1. How to utilize the presentation tools that web conferencing offers and how to implement teaching techniques that can makeAll the difference. We will show that when web conferencing is effectively used, it can result in an educational experience equal to, and at times more enhanced than face-to-face learning. 2. How to embed web conferencing platforms into the institution's Learning Management System in an easy to use manner. We will view the implementation from the course administrator perspective as well as from the student and teacher perspective. Motivating and Rejuvenating Faculty Utilizing Interactive Online Workshops Suzanne Kenner (University of Arkansas - Fayetteville, USA) Shelly Walters (University of Arkansas, USA) The University of Arkansas Master of Science in Operations Management (MSOM) program serves almost 600 students with 70 faculty members located across the country. Face-to-face courses are offered on location at Naval Support Activity/Mid-South- Millington, TN; Little Rock Air Force Base; Hurlburt Field Air Force Base in Florida; and the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville. Students may also take courses online and complete the degree without coming to campus. MSOM staff needed to create professional development programs for full-time and adjunct faculty to meet program standards. Faculty in the MSOM program are separated geographically and located across multiple time zones. Faculty members face an increasing number of demands and are interested in professional development programs that can provide an immediate return on the investment of time. The solution for the MSOM program was to develop online workshops using the built-in web conferencing software in the learning management system. The MSOM workshops are designed to address specific topics and give participants actionable items to implement in their courses. Workshop facilitators send out announcements and materials using a variety of technology tools to demonstrate innovative methods to engage students with course content. Workshops are scheduled based on specific topics such as online pedagogy, course alignment and use of tools in Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 44 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support the learning management system. Faculty are given multiple opportunities to attend workshops allowing them to choose a time that is most convenient. Workshops are also recorded for later viewing. The two-hour workshops are led by faculty, with staff serving as facilitators to keep the participants on topic or to answer technical questions. MSOM staff ask a faculty member with experience or interest in the topic to take the lead for that session. Each workshop begins with a brief introduction to the workshop topic before faculty begin sharing challenges and best practices. By participating in workshops with their peers, faculty are able to hear how other instructors incorporate technology in the course or what instructional strategies have proven most successful in the online setting. Prior to the development of online workshops, faculty came to Fayetteville once a year for a two day departmental meeting. Faculty now have the opportunity to develop collegial relationships with other instructors and as a result feel more supported and connected to the program. Session attendees will learn how the University of Arkansas MSOM program developed an interactive, collaborative faculty professional development series and hear faculty feedback on the program. The presenters will share strategies they used to adapt the workshops for face-to-face sessions with faculty on campus. During the session, attendees will participate in an interactive online workshop with MSOM faculty to experience the use of the web conferencing feature in the learning management system to discuss successes and challenges first hand. Session attendees will leave with strategies to encourage faculty participation and tips for facilitating professional development workshops. It can be challenging to find ways to encourage instructor participation as valuable time and resources are taken by course instruction, research, student advising and other commitments. The session is for anyone ready to get instructors excited about innovation in teaching and faculty-led collaboration. Online Classroom Management: Structuring Your LMS Richard Fuller (Robert Morris University, USA) This interactive research based presentation explores the online classroom management techniques and options instructors have available to structure their distance courses. Good online classroom management has a structure that promotes the learner to interact with content, other students and the instructor. In this presentation participants will discuss classroom management methods that can be employed in a Learning Management system (LMS) to address different student needs. Based upon pedagogical versus andragogical models, participants will choose the amount of structure which varies from open with little control to highly structured, with strong controls. Discussion will center on the advantages of Learner Control in online courses and when and what levels are appropriate given the target audience, content and the type of course. Participants will be exposed to different course models and online structural examples that will demonstrate the use of navigation tools, course design, adaptive release tools, different pedagogies, online instructional design, and student time on task issues as well as technological concerns associated with file size and bandwidth in consideration of online classroom management. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 45 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Participants will see how different design techniques and routines can facilitate different learning situations. Explore the levels of instructor control and how each impact online course design and learning. Based upon the research conducted by this presenter, the presentation will focus on how to develop an online routine using hyperlinks and a what research has identified as a “think forward' approach to online course management. Participants will discover how online structures effect student interaction and learning. They will discover how online classroom management effects learner control and when to provide high structure to lessons and when greater learner control is required to increase learning opportunities. Participants will have the opportunity to explore how online structure can increase interaction with content, students and the instructor and explore online instructional design and how to equate student on task time elements. Discussion will also focus on the proper use of adaptive release control parameters in providing student access to course content and activities based upon different course models and the overall course objectives as well as the target audience needs in line with andragogical and pedagogical approaches. This presentation will provide interaction through open dialogue, questions and answers throughout the session. Participants will review their own courses and describe how they currently employ online classroom management techniques and the level of access and time that they utilize. Participants will explore and discuss structures that work with different online situations. Academic Program Review: An Evolution of the Process Based on Lessons Learned and Best Practices Eric Klein (Ashford University, USA) Jodi Feikema (Ashford University, USA) The purpose of this presentation is to discuss lessons learned and best practices based on a longstanding history of academic program review at Ashford University. Program review represents Ashford's commitment to excellence in academic programs through cyclical review by expert external reviewers of educational effectiveness. Program review also provides an opportunity for each academic program to reflect on its contribution to the University's mission and its strategic plan. The results of program review guide institutional planning, budgeting, and decisionmaking. During the course of the presentation, the presenters will review Ashford's continually improving program review process, which includes collecting meaningful data, writing a thorough selfstudy, hosting a site visit by an expert external review team, and putting together a strategic faculty-driven action plan with short- and long-term goals. Added emphasis will be placed on "closing the loop" with the use of data and evidence to assess program quality and currency for the purpose of improving student success. Key Initiatives: Self-study and external reviewer templates, program review data dashboards, and a program review handbook and website will also be discussed. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 46 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support This presentation is designed to be engaging and will include opportunities for audience participation and interactive question and answers throughout the presentation. This presentation is also geared for a broad audience of faculty and administrators in higher education who are interested in an effective and evolving institutional process related to program review. Goals of this Presentation Include:  Describe the program review process at Ashford University, and explain how program review has a direct impact on improving student learning.  Discuss program review procedures and timelines that have evolved based on research, lessons learned, and best practices over the past 25 years.  Discuss the types of data necessary to assess academic program quality and currency.  Discuss external reviewer selection criteria, and discuss how to prepare for the external reviewer site visit.  Discuss "closing the loop" with data, and how analyze how faculty can strategically and collaboratively prepare an action plan that addresses appropriate short- and long-term goals. Teachers First: Proven Professional Development for Quality Online Courses and Instruction Christopher Harrington (Bridges Virtual Education Services, USA) Thomas Ryan (eLearn Institute, USA) Participants will be ready to: Understand the classroom teacher's frame of mind at the outset of a move to blended or online learning; prepare teachers to move forward with online learning, in either a blended or fully online environment; and recognize the essential components of a professional development plan that develops blended and online teaching capacity and sustainability. Essential Questions: 1. What role do teachers play in the development of a blended or fully online program? 2. What challenges will my teachers face in transitioning to online? (What questions/concerns will my teachers experience/raise?) 3. How do I prepare teachers to develop and/or teach blended or fully online classes? 4. What kind of training do teachers need, and when do they need it? (What is the best timing for training in an LMS or other system, Instructional Design, and/or Blended/Online Pedagogy?) 5. What support do teachers need as the program grows? Introduction - 5 minutes (Tom Ryan) A. Summary of various types of online/blended learning program present in schools B. Importance of tailoring professional development to specific program needs Moving teachers from face-to-face environments to online/blended environments - 10 minutes (Chris Harrington) A. Common teacher paradigms B. Supportive actions of school administrators Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 47 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support C. Incorporating professional development into program implementation/growth plans Components of effective professional development for online/blended programs – 25 minutes (Michele Gill) A. Survival skills (Instructional Design, Online Pedagogy, Sharpening Skills) 1. Instructional Design • Starting with Standards • Backwards Design • Authentic Assessment • Content Organization • Instructional Strategies 2. Online Pedagogy • Security, Legal, Technical • Time Management • Tone, Voice, Phrasing • Empathy, Approval, Support • Neutral Correction • Deepening Dialogue • Community Building • Small Groups B. Sharpening skills • Assessment • Instruction • Collaboration - Rationale - Group Work - Synchronous - Management Open discussion – 20 minutes This segment of the session will center on rich discussion among participants centered on the best practices and experiences of professional development. Creating a successful blended or online learning program requires strong buy-in from teachers. Join the discussion of how a teacher-centered professional development plan can ensure highquality online instruction and effective course design. Participants will gain insights into the process of developing effective blended and online teachers as well as strategies to develop blended and online teaching capacity and long-term program sustainability. Beginning with a focus on the teacher's central role in any significant school change, we'll discuss roles teachers will be expected to fill in a move to a blended or online classroom, concerns teachers will raise, and how best to address those concerns with positive, targeted, timely professional development. We'll collaborate on ways to help all types of teachers (from Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 48 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support the cautious or even critical to the curious or cutting-edge) manage and thrive during this time of transition and professional growth. We'll share our model for training teachers in basic instructional design and blended/online pedagogy, which provides training and support for teachers who are simultaneously building courses and continuing classroom teaching. A major portion of this session will center on interactive dialog between all attendees in an effort to share best practices as well as to share perspectives of actual current practices. This model also includes ongoing professional development for more experienced blended and/or online teachers, and incorporates opportunities for your most successful instructors to train other teachers, building capacity within the school, district, or state. References: iNACOL National Standards for Quality Online Programs http://www.inacol.org/research/nationalstandards/NACOL%20Standards%20Quality%20Online %20Programs.pdf. A Quality Scorecard for the Administration of Online Education Programs http://sloanconsortium.org/quality_scoreboard_online_program iNACOL National Standards for Quality Online Teaching http://www.inacol.org/research/nationalstandards/iNACOL_TeachingStandardsv2.pdf iNACOL National Standards for Quality Online Courses http://www.inacol.org/research/nationalstandards/iNACOL_CourseStandards_2011.pdf Going Virtual! 2010: The Status of Professional Development and Unique Needs of K-12 Online Teachers - http://edtech.boisestate.edu/goingvirtual/goingvirtual3.pdf Florida STEM Teacher Induction & Professional Support: Building a System to Support Organic Professional Growth Jason Arnold (University of Florida, USA) Daniel McCoy (University of Florida, USA) Griff Jones (University of Florida College of Education, USA) The need for reform in STEM teacher education is well documented. In Florida, fewer than half of all eighth graders have teachers who majored or minored in mathematics. Nationwide projections cite a need for 280,000 new math and science teachers by 2015. With such a marked need for the development of mathematics and science teachers, the University of Florida (funded through the Florida Department of Education) has partnered with four Florida school districts to provide a system in which new teachers (one to three years) and out-of-field teachers may share their learning and get answers from subject-specific experts. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 49 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support These experts and teachers are linked through a detailed tagging schema that not only helps them to connect to solve pedagogical problems and management issues, but also helps to organize and supply each user with new resources. Every resource that is added to the system in its vast "Collections" library is automatically tagged according to the same information schema, from subject-are taught to grade band to school district. The system was designed for mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets. Thus, the user experience is easy to navigate. The emphasis on user input (including teachers around the state) and testing has helped to create a dynamic and exciting platform for mentoring new teachers. Central to the design were the postsecondary and school district partners that formed our STEM Induction Advisory Group. This group included partners from the New Teacher Center and the University of Texas. In this session, we hope to present the planning that took place this year, the basic architecture of the system, and the professional development/mentoring that is currently happening in the STEM TIPS Online Mentoring Platform. This work helps to achieve a statewide model for mentoring online. Harnessing the Leadership Potential of Online Adjunct Faculty Amie Ader-Beeler (USA) The world of online instruction is changing and the challenge of leading and managing thousands of adjunct faculty fromAll over the world has become increasingly difficult. In order to support adjuncts during a period of exponential growth, we developed an Adjunct Faculty Team Lead model. We took our strongest adjunct professors and gave them responsibility for coaching, mentoring and supervising a cohort of other adjunct faculty members. They focus on supporting quality instruction, identification of struggling students and monitoring of quality content in our courses. We currently run about a thousand sections per term and have 100% coverage of our courses in this new model. You will leave this session with a clear understanding of this model and toolbox of strategies in guiding and supporting a diverse external workforce. Classroom Assessment Techniques: How CATs Can Battle Post-mortem Assessments Emily Bergquist (Grand Canyon University, USA) Rick Holbeck (Grand Canyon University, USA) Assessment is a crucial component that both begins and ends the teaching and learning cycles. Benson's (2008) theoretical model, The Continuous Cycle of Teaching/Learning, describes four steps:  "What do students need to know, understand and be able to do?  How will we teach effectively to ensure students learn?  How will we know that students have learned? Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 50 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support  What do we do when students don't learn or reach proficiency before expectation?"(p. 47) Angelo and Cross (1993) coined the term Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) as "... an approach designed to help teachers find out what students are learning in the classroom and how well they are learning it" (p. 4). Angelo and Cross' CATs will address Benson's third step within his teaching and learning cycle.While both formative and summative assessments are used within most traditional classroom settings, the introduction and popularity of online learning has heightened the need for modifications of these techniques. This presentation will explore Angelo and Cross' Classroom Assessment Techniques such as The Muddiest Point and The One-Minute Summary to adapt strategies that will best support online learners and educators. Due to the rapid pace of online classes, weekly assignments become summative assessments. These assess student learning regarding the module objectives; however, there is little time or opportunity to reteach or adjust following these assignments. Summative assessments can also be referred to as post-mortem assessments. Since formative assessments are important for checking for student understanding, the need to incorporate CATs in the online classroom prior to the post-mortem assessment becomes increasingly more important. Classroom Assessment Techniques provide many benefits to both the student and instructor of online classes. Well-designed CATs can provide information regarding curriculum, feedback on student dispositions and attitudes, as well as instructional methods. They can also provide general feedback to improve student learning while providing a vehicle for relationships between student and instructor. Research involving CATs within a traditional classroom has been well documented through studies and literature; however, adaptation of CATs to the online classroom has not been thoroughly explored. To effectively integrate CATs, we must first dissect the selection and development processes using Angelo and Cross' Three-Phase Model:    Phase 1: Planning a Classroom Assessment Technique Phase 2: Implementing a Classroom Assessment Technique Phase 3: Responding to the results This presentation will provide teachers with solutions to battle and bury post-mortem assessment while resurrecting learning opportunities. Participants will examine modifications of Angelo and Cross' CATs within an online classroom, formulate strategies for transitioning traditional CATs into online education, and will evaluate CATs that can be modified to meet the needs of online instructors and students. Assessing the Quality of Online Instruction with a Course Delivery Rubric Mimi O'Malley (The Learning House, Inc., USA) Class observation has long been a part of the face-to-face teaching experience. By observing a teacher while they are instructing, administrators can see what the teacher is doing well, and provide suggestions for improvement. Conversely, traditional assessment of online learning has been solely evaluated by online course design. The value of assessing faculty quality instruction Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 51 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support should be considered in the same manner as the traditional classroom. The question becomes, then, how can instructor quality interaction be evaluated online? In this presentation, we will discuss how The Learning House, Inc. developed a course delivery rubric and one university's experience with evaluating its courses using the rubric. Learning House, an online education services provider, developed a rubric based on six areas, enabling administrators and faculty to evaluate online course delivery. Fundamentally, all of the areas relate to the instructor instructional interaction whose presence guides students to achieve learning success. The areas include:       Social presence and availability Instructor feedback Student retention Forum participation Reinforcement of university and course policies Student pacing In this dynamic presentation, Mimi O'Malley, MSLS, Professional Development Administrator at Learning House, will discuss the rationale behind the standards evaluated in the rubric and recommendations for using the rubric. She will explain recommendations for implementing the course delivery rubric. Dr. Roger Wen, from William Woods University, will share why the university chose to use the rubric and how it was pilot tested with 22 courses. Dr. Wen will examine how WWU intends to use information gleaned from the rubric for training and as an upcoming semester evaluation tool for faculty learning from rubric results in order to improve the future quality of its online instruction. Attendees will receive a copy of the rubric as well as have a chance to ask questions in this engaging presentation. By the end of the session, attendees should have a basic understanding not only of the assessment tool itself, but also why measuring the six areas are important in online student learning outcome, faculty development, curriculum design, and how to use the rubric to evaluate their own online faculty. Online Mentoring: A 3 Tier Model for Training Faculty Amanda J. Rockinson-Szapkiw (Liberty University, USA) Prior to the implementation of formal schooling, mentorship was the primary manner in which individuals learned new skills. Individuals would work alongside an expert, and knowledge about the skill would be transmitted for the purpose of the apprentice becoming like the expert (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989). No matter the terminology used- supervisor, advisor, chair, mentor, facilitator- mentorship from the faculty through is a primary reason that students finish their degrees and become discipline experts like the faculty (Holsinger, 2008). As programs move online, faculty are no longer afforded the opportunity to sit in a local restaurant to dialogue with students. Faculty cannot simply ask the student to visit his or her office to review a Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 52 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support manuscript. Thus, faculty are challenged to develop a new model of mentorship and leverage information and communication technologies (ICTs) to mentor students. The technologies that have been leveraged to date have been e-mail, content management systems, and discussion forums (Hew & Knapczyk, 2007; Kelly, Gale, Wheeler, & Tucker, 2007). Most commonly, students and their mentors have exchanged information and documents via e-mail. This technology poses a variety of challenges, including lost e-mails and delayed document. This may result in feelings of dissatisfaction and isolation (Doherty, 2006; Meyer, 2003). Fortunately, in an era of the collaborative web, a variety of software and technologies are available to better support file sharing, discussions, calendar sharing, task assignment, collaborative editing, and video conferencing. Unfortunately, many faculty are not aware of this and do not have the knowledge and skills to use these technologies. Research has demonstrated that one factor that has been consistently shown to influence technology integration for instructional and mentorship purposes is professional development (Lawless & Pellegrino, 2007). Thus, this presentation demonstrates a three-tier professional development model used to train faculty to be online mentors. This model was built upon Knowles (1980) theory of andragogy and Vygotsky's (1978) theory of social constructivism and guided by the research on quality professional development for integrating technology which includes modeling instruction, technology utilization, connection to practice, and inquiry-based learning (Lawless & Pellegrino, 2007). The three tier model consists of: • • • Tier one: Live. This tier consists of training and workshops delivered in a face-to-face and online e-conferencing format. Receiving training using e-conferencing systems assists faculty in learning how to use the technology to interact with students. Training consists of direct technology training as well as training on the philosophy and process of mentorship. Tier two: Asynchronous. This tier consists of support material hosted via a collaborative workspace, Microsoft SharePoint. Faculty are provided with 2-5 minute "how to" tutorials created via Adobe Flash and Captivate, tutorial handouts, and bi-semester Update Newsletters. Faculty are also encouraged to share Resources in the Resource Sharing Library and ask questions and interact in the discussion forum. Tier three: One-on-one. This tier consists of one to one or one- to- many faculty support and mentorship. This is where individual e-conferencing meeting with individual faculty and small groups are scheduled and conducted by the model administration and other faculty mentors. As a result of this presentation, participants will be able to: (a) Identify specific practices that can support the training of faculty in the online environment; and (b) Identify technologies and practices used to train faculty and to facilitate faculty-student mentor relationship. A discussion about the effectiveness of this model will be supported through the presentation of case study research results; thus, participants will gain "lessons learned" insights that they can apply at their own universities. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 53 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support HBI Faculty Perceptions of Barriers to Online Teaching in Maryland Tiffany Thompson-Johnson (Morgan State University, USA) As the Internet expands, distance and online education are becoming increasingly important among the variety of instructional formats used in higher education. Through the Internet, distance and online education have significantly changed the dynamics by which institutions and students view education. As a result of the convergence of technology and education, colleges and universities are making higher education available to thousands of students all over the world who have no other access to advanced learning. The incorporation of online education within the traditional forms of teaching and learning has not been realized as quickly in the case of Historically Black Institutions (HBIs). HBIs have lagged in implementing and embracing online education as another form of teaching (Ghemri, Lau, Mepewou, & Abdullah, 2004). Only 20 out of 105 HBIs recently have implemented online degree programs (Abdul-Alim, 2011). Hence, they are challenged by the quick pace of technological advancement (General Accounting Office, 2003), and they are also "challenged from within to overhaul their operations and image as they face outside pressures" (Kelderman, 2010, p. 1). HBIs are also grappling with faculty reluctance in participating in distance and online education because of the perceived barriers (Olcott, 1994; Thompson, 2000). The constraints affecting adoption or reception of new ideas by HBI faculty must be acknowledged (Rogers, 1995) since research has shown that perceived barriers are having a considerable "negative effect on faculty participation in distance education" (Betts, 1998, p. 195). Dillon and Walsh (1992) believe that because faculty are the main ones responsible for the design and delivery of online course work, they should not be overlooked in the institutional adoption process. In essence, successful adoption of online teaching at HBIs depends upon the involvement of the faculty (Osika, 2006). The purpose of this correlational study was to examine whether or not the four constructs (organizational change; technical expertise, support, and infrastructure; faculty compensation and time; and technology threats) were perceived to be barriers for HBIs faculty. The researcher also investigated the faculty characteristics associated with the perceived barriers. This study also will aid HBIs in understanding the barriers that inhibit faculty members from teaching online and in some way mitigate these circumstances. The theoretical framework that guided this study was derived from Muilenburg and Berge's (2001) research on barriers to distance education. While their study identified 10 barrier constructs to online education, this study focused only on four constructs. The study was guided by the following key questions:   Are the constructs (organizational change; technical expertise, support, and infrastructure; faculty compensation and time; and technology threats) perceived as barriers by HBI faculty? Is there a significant difference among these constructs in the degree to which they are perceived by faculty as barriers to implementation of online courses/programs? Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 54 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support     Do faculty perceptions of the degree to which each of the four constructs is perceived to be a barrier relate to faculty age? Do faculty perceptions of the degree to which each of the four constructs is perceived to be a barrier relate to faculty years of tenure? Do faculty perceptions of the degree to which each of the four constructs is perceived to be a barrier relate to number of courses faculty have taught online? Do faculty perceptions of the degree to which each of the four constructs is perceived to be a barrier relate to the number of years that faculty have taught at university? The study employed quantitative methods to evaluate the relationship of faculty demographic characteristics (independent variables) age, years of tenure, number of courses taught online, and years of teaching to the dependent variables, the four barrier constructs (organizational change; technical expertise, support, and infrastructure; faculty compensation and time; and technology threats). The target population was permanent, full-time faculty members at the four HBIs in Maryland. The intended sample was 200 estimated, 50 from each institution. At the end of the data collection, there were 112 participants who responded, for a return rate of 56%. The instrument for this study was derived from Berge's original survey created June 20, 1999, and modified by the researcher. The survey was developed in two parts. The data collected was analyzed using SPSS 17.0. The study used descriptive, bivariate, and regression analyses to explore the four constructs perceived barriers. The major findings of this study indicated that the biggest barrier by faculty was faculty compensation and time. The study found strong to minimal interrelationships among the four barrier constructs. A weak, though significant relationship was found between the barrier of technology threats and faculty age, and technology threats and faculty years of tenure. A weak inverse relationship was found between organizational change and the number of courses faculty taught online as well as a weak inverse relationship with technical expertise, support, and infrastructure and the number of courses faculty taught online. Years of teaching experience was not related to the four barrier constructs. There was also a strong positive correlation found between faculty years of teaching experiences and tenure status. Only organizational change and technical expertise, support, and infrastructure were found to relate to online teaching (yes vs. no). Finally, the perceived barrier of technical expertise, support, and infrastructure was the only significant predictor of online teaching. Explicitly, for every one unit increase in perceived technical, expertise, support, and infrastructure the odds of not teaching an online course increases 1.72 times. The results presented in this study have contributed new information to the educational literature about the barriers HBI faculty members have in relation to teaching online. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 55 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Kick the Can: Crowdsourcing Faculty Knowledge to Improve Curated Curriculum Katelynn Walden (Southern New Hampshire University College of Online and Continuing Education, USA) This session outlines the process of crowdsourcing as an institution maintains curated content, often referred to as "canned content." Merriam-Webster defines crowdsourcing as "the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people; especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers." By utilizing a formalized crowdsourcing process, it is possible to provide an outlet for instructors to resolve issues, ask questions, and provide feedback to contribute to the courses that they teach while also giving the institution a wealth of valuable input to apply across all courses. Statement of the Problem or Issue: Rapid growth can present a significant challenge in the online environment; particularly for institutions using standardized curriculum. Maintaining this content becomes extremely difficult, particularly in a scalable way that allows for further development and faculty contribution. When receiving contributions from over 1500 members of faculty plus internal staff, what is the process for tracking, recording, and implementing these changes? Description of Activity, Project, or Solution: This presentation outlines the process of crowdsourcing and the development of a feedback outlet for faculty to utilize as they teach courses built on curated content. Faculty reach out to anyone they can, meaning information is often living in multiple places. A feedback outlet allows for all of this information to be directed to and stored in one area. Listed below are the key elements involved in developing a system to receive feedback and other information from faculty… • • • • Prioritization: Once the nature of the information has been distinguished (issue, feedback, or superlative), the validity and urgency should be established. A taxonomy illustrating different priority levels is essential to this process. Implementation: Based on the assigned priority level, a time frame or plan can be established for the feedback to be implemented. Tracking: All correspondence, decisions, changes, and resolutions regarding faculty contributions need to be tracked. Storage: Storage depends on the amount of incoming information. It should be clearly organized by program, course, and the nature of the contribution so that it can be easily implemented. Impact: Over the past year, Southern New Hampshire University has seen its number of faculty, students, and courses grow rapidly. During the spring term last year, there were 396 UG sections and 216 GR sections running. This spring term, there were 663 UG sections and 355 GR sections running. To maintain consistency and scalability, SNHU has developed courses that allow for 1 master course to be copied into any number of sections each with unique faculty and students. SNHU created a crowdsourcing system known as Design Feedback, and by encouraging faculty to use this system, SNHU has been able to successfully maintain its curated content while also gathering and implementing faculty input. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 56 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Beginning as a simple email address and a static spreadsheet record, it has grown into a highly developed CRM where faculty can submit issues, suggestions, and feedback and be notified by a member of the SNHU Course Development team. The backend of this system allows for easy storage, tracking, implementation, and report generation. Importance/Relevance to Other Institutions: This presentation focuses on how to use crowdsourcing to gather valuable feedback while maintaining curated content. Session interaction: Q&A to learn about others' experiences with crowdsourcing and curated content. SNHU's Design Feedback system will be demonstrated. Session outcomes: • Examine the benefits that crowdsourcing can bring to your institution even if you are not using curated content • Assess the tools you are using to gather and store feedback o Are there more efficient tools that can be utilized? o Is there another step that can be added to your current process? Can You Hear Me Now? Maintaining Instructor and Administrator Presence in the Move From Traditional to Online Learning Melissa Earle (Touro College, USA) Context: With the emergence of the MOOCs (massive open online education), online education has been embraced by institutions of higher education as a new panacea solving academic, financial, enrollment and various other problems. The excitement of MOOCs rests in their ability to reach tens of thousands of students around the world. More fundamentally, the provenance of MOOCs, as the creations of Harvard, MIT and Stanford, has given a new legitimacy to distance education, leading many colleges to introduce new online courses or expand the online courses they currently offer. One of the challenges in online education is to create a faculty "presence" when faculty members are routinely removed by time and/or distance from their students. Garrison, Anderson, and Archer's Community of Inquiry (COI) framework (2000, 2010) serves as the seminal source for describing and evaluating instructor presence within both traditional and online formats. The COI framework consists of three overlapping domains: cognitive, social, and teaching presence. In spite of the superficial differences in delivery, instructors who plan their presence in both traditional and online formats meet or exceed student expectations of perceived learning and satisfaction (Larson & Sung, 2009). We propose that administrators who similarly plan their presence to faculty within the COI framework are successful at facilitating a faculty's transition to offering both traditional and online courses within an institution of higher education. Problem: Distance education creates opportunities to address key challenges in higher education, including: • The sky-rocketing cost of tuition and the related need to change the cost structure of higher education Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 57 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support • The shift to a knowledge economy that is changing the meaning of higher education • The decreased federal and state contributions to higher education • The increased value placed on acquiring a Bachelor's or Master's degree. A persistent challenge in online education is to enable faculty members who may only meet their students asynchronously to become an educational "presence" that can help shape the student's educational experience. In parallel with that is the challenge of creating a community of learners who collaboratively engage in the educational process with their professors. In spite of emerging literature indicating that educational outcomes from online learning can be equal to outcomes from traditional face-to-face formats (Larson & Sung, 2009; Napier, Dekhane, Smith, 2011), concerns linger about the impact of student perceptions of instructor presence in the learning enterprise (Li & Akins, 2005). Professor presence is a central component of overall student satisfaction with online and traditional courses (Lim, Morris, Kupritz, 2007; Napier, Dekhane, Smith, 2011). Faculty concerns about the shift in their presence from traditional to online formats can hinder administrator's efforts toward moving educational courses and programs online (Li & Akins, 2005). Approach New 21st century technology tools are enabling an evolution in online education that was not easily imagined even a decade ago. This presentation will review a college and university system's efforts to incorporate these new technologies into its undergraduate and graduate curriculum online. The college has been involved in offering online courses for over ten years. This presentation will focus on the evolution of our thinking about online education and course delivery on both an undergraduate and graduate level. Moreover, the presentation will review some of the changes we are making in course delivery methodologies, expansions we are planning in online graduate education, and some strategic assessment tools that we are building into our online courses. In addition, we will introduce a case study for several courses in the School of Social Work and review how we used the COI framework, to ease instructor concern about the transition from traditional to online formats. We will also present a case study of the college and university system's graduate school of social work's success with transitioning traditional coursework into a blended format through deliberate planning of instructor and administrator presence across the COI's concepts of cognitive, social, and teaching presence. Attendees will receive a copy of the power point and handouts identifying key strategies for planning instructor and administrator presence. Results: Planning for administrator and instructor presence in a college and university system's transition from traditional to online learning has produced positive results in both instructor and student satisfaction with the process. Rather than embracing a one-size fits all online solution, we are exploring the use of different delivery methodologies for online courses from purely online formats to Blended Learning. We will also discuss which methodologies may work best for different disciplines and for different faculty members. Data from program evaluation data collected from the school of social work's students is included as part of this presentation. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 58 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support References: Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2010). The first decade of the community of inquiry framework: A retrospective. Internet and Higher Education, 13, 5-9. Larson, D. K., & Sung, C.-H. (2009). Comparing student performance: Online versus blended versus face-to-face. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 13(1), 31-42. Li, Q., & Akins, M. (2005). Sixteen myths about online teaching and learning in higher education: Don't believe everything you hear. Techtrends: Linking Research & Practice to Improve Learning, 49(4), 51-60. Lim, D. H., Morris, M. L., & Kupritz, V. W. (2007). Online vs. Blended Learning: Difference in instructional outcomes and learner satisfaction. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 11(2), 27-42. Napier, N. P., Dekhane, S., & Smith, S. (2011). Transitioning to Blended Learning: Understanding student and faculty perceptions. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 15(1), 20-95. A Practical Guide for Developing Online Faculty Mentor Programs Tracy Fairless (University of Central Oklahoma, USA) (University of Central Oklahoma, USA) Session Overview and Approach: The fluid and dynamic nature of online education within higher education presents strategic challenges for faculty, designers, and administrators. A common approach to meeting the knowledge and skills needed to effectively design and deliver online learning is through professional development workshops and programs. These approaches provide a generally accepted method for developing skills for online course design and teaching; however, the primary weakness is ensuring the transfer of the knowledge and skills into actual teaching contexts. The purpose of this session is to discusses the development of an online faculty mentor program at the University of Central Oklahoma. This program provides an additional opportunity to support effective instructional design and teaching practices among faculty teaching online and blended courses. Participants will have access to project and implementation templates that can be used at their own institutions. Small group discussions, scenario-based learning, and guided questioning will be used to engage the audience. At the conclusion of the session, participants will be able to:  Analyze a need to develop an online faculty mentor program Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 59 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support      Differentiate between mentoring and coaching Identify characteristics of mentoring programs in higher education online learning contexts Customize a mentoring program plan based on contextual needs and factors Identify resources needed to support an online faculty mentor program Implement an online faculty mentor program Context: The University of Central Oklahoma follows a benchmark approach for online faculty development and course design. Emphasis is placed on preparing faculty to teach online through a certification benchmark and equipping faculty to develop quality online courses through a design benchmark. Since 2008, the Center for eLearning and Continuing Education has facilitated workshops providing best practices for eLearning course design and teaching to more than 275 faculty members and assisted in the development of more than 400 courses achieving the UCOnline Quality Seal. While the benchmark approach is successful for participating faculty, it does not ensure continuous improvement in course development and facilitation over a span of time and individuals. The Distance Education Mentoring Program developed at Purdue University Calumet used a mentor approach to prepare faculty for the new wave of innovation. Hixon, Buckenmeyer, Barczyk, Feldman, and Zamojski (2011) examined this systematic, collaborative approach to training and support to ensure academic integrity and align conditions for learning with technology. Thompson (2006) emphasized the importance of informal faculty mentoring as a tool to support effective online teaching practices. Mentoring is often an informal process (Thompson, 2006) and the challenge is replicating the authenticity that comes with informal mentoring in a supported and institutional program. This session will explore the development of an online mentor program focused on promoting innovation with a focus on continued online course quality and development of facilitation skills. Problem: The benchmark approach presents two fundamental challenges…   The eLearning Facilitation benchmark is a one-time requirement that certifies faculty to teach online and hybrid courses. It does not take into account the need for continuous training to remain fluent with the dynamic nature of online teaching tools. The eLearning Course Design benchmark produces a peer reviewed, high-quality online course and the course is reevaluated every three years. The benchmark approach does not ensure continued quality within the three years with multiple instructors teaching the approved courses. Further, constraints on budget and resources restrict the formal training opportunities. The emerging questions include: 1. How can the continued quality of online or hybrid courses be maintained over time? 2. How can instructors continue to develop online teaching skills? 3. Can mentor networks be used to provide additional support not easily offered by more formal types of training and development. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 60 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Approach: Development of the Online Faculty Mentorship Program began in the spring of 2013 with a pilot scheduled for fall of 2013. The resulting project will provide a consultative resource for faculty teaching online or hybrid courses and support consistent design quality in online courses between terms. The program also assists with facilitating the continued quality of online and hybrid courses for required reevaluation. Mentor Responsibilities:      Serve as a point of contact for online and hybrid courses that are up for reevaluation within assigned academic departments. Inform faculty members and department chairs of procedures and serve as guide during this process. Conduct collaborative workshops for faculty teaching online or hybrid courses to ensure continued quality of course shells. A review checklist is used to document alignment with design guidelines. Deliver a summary report to CeCE for distribution to academic departments. Provide support for faculty who are teaching and/or designing online or hybrid courses. This support includes, but is not limited to: technical assistance with using the learning management system (Desire2Learn), teaching and facilitation guidance, recommendations for accessing support services and resources, addressing studentrelated concerns or situations. Provide guidance and mentoring for faculty new to online or hybrid course delivery. Contact faculty members teaching online or hybrid courses in their areas of responsibility to offer assistance. Projected Results: The online mentor program at the University of Central Oklahoma will provide a faculty-centered, continuous online course improvement program. The outcomes will include:  Continuous Quality Review  Checklist  Online mentor workshop  Mentor handbook with guidelines and expectations  Continuous quality workshop References: Thompson, D. (2006). Informal faculty mentoring as a component of learning to teach online: An exploratory study. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 9(3). Retrieved from http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall93/thompson93.htm Hixon, E., Buckenmeyer, J., Barczyk, C., Feldman, L., & Zamojski, H. (2012). Beyond the early adopters of online instruction: Motivating the reluctant majority. The Internet and Higher Education, 15(2), 102-107. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 61 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Can They Flip? Teaching Instructors to Flip the Classroom Through a Flipped Approach Rena Palloff (Fielding Graduate University, USA) Frequently, in doing training with faculty around the country, I have found that both novices and seasoned instructors struggle with successfully transforming a course that has been taught for years in the face-to-face classroom into one that will work well online. Simply putting lecture material online is not the answer. Indeed, instead of looking for ways to convert a course that has been successful in the face-to-face classroom, instructors are better served by approaching a course to be taught online as if it were a course to be taught for the first time (which in essence it is) while drawing on content knowledge and best practices for online teaching. This allows a sense of freedom in the development of the course, without a tendency to adhere to tried-and-true methods that may not work online. Another issue with which faculty struggle is how far to jump in when considering online delivery of a course. Is technology enhancement of a face-to-face course sufficient? Should a hybrid or blended model be considered where 30% or more of the course is offered online? Or should the instructor take the plunge and work to deliver the course completely online? Many authors suggest that the most successful and satisfying course outcomes are being seen in classes that are small and combine face-to-face with online interaction with these classes. This combines the best of both worlds in terms of using both face-to-face and online delivery (Albrecht, 2006; Bonk & Graham, 2006; Bourne & Seaman, 2005; Garrison & Vaughan, 2008; Marquis, 2004). Consequently, an important consideration in the development of an online class should be the degree to which technology can and should be used in course delivery. Three questions form the foundation of good instructional design: Who are my students? What do I want my students to know, to feel, or to be able to do as a result of this course or experience? And where, when, and with what resources will my students be learning? Once objectives are established, instructors are then able to move on and determine appropriate reading material and assignments to enable students to achieve those objectives. A phenomenon that has emerged from K-12 teaching that can be considered in the delivery of hybrid classes is "the flipped classroom." Attributed to two teachers from Colorado, Jonathan Bergman and Aaron Sams, the method began with recording PowerPoint supported lectures and putting them online so that students could access them at any time. Using this model, lectures are presented online and are supported by online discussion while classroom time is used for active engagement with the content, other students, and the instructor. But how can instructors learn to do this and do it well? Recent experiences in conducting faculty training using a flipped approach are showing good results in sparking creativity and effectiveness in using a flipped classroom approach in higher education. This brief session will review some of the principles involved with flipping the classroom and in using this approach to train instructors to do it well. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 62 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Faculty Development for Online Course Design and Delivery: A Tale of Two Courses Denille Williams (Johns Hopkins University, USA) Edward Queen, Jr. (Johns Hopkins University, USA) It is quite challenging to convince faculty who almost always have multiple concurrent professional demands to spend precious time developing quality materials for online instruction and to actively facilitate an online course. This session examines the approach that Johns Hopkins University Engineering for Professionals (JHU-EP) has adopted to guide faculty as online participants in a series of two courses in Blackboard through the stages of the design, development, and delivery of a quality online course. First, we discuss the JHU-EP Online Course Design & Development (OCD&D) course. This course is targeted at faculty who will be developing their first online course and introduces them to the online development process, Quality Matters, and the various necessary pedagogical considerations for developing online instruction. We explore the topics presented in this course and explain the expected outcomes. We also share our challenges in the design of this course and how we've modified it over several offerings to better meet the needs of our faculty. Next, we look at the JHU-EP Online Teaching Strategies (OTS) course. This is a fairly new course that was designed to help faculty transition to teaching in the online environment. We guide you through the topics of OTS and discuss how this course works to prepare JHU-EP firsttime online instructors to deliver an engaging online learning experience. The syllabus and course outline for both courses are shared with participants. We conclude the session with an open discussion. Audience members are engaged through Q&A and idea sharing. Continuing the Momentum for Online Course Development on a Small Campus: Reflections and Rationales Chérie Dodd (Indiana University Kokomo, USA) Candy Thompson (Indiana University Kokomo, USA) Small regional campuses can make an impact on their students and faculty by developing online courses. In 2011 Chérie Dodd presented "On the Move to Online: Going from zero to thirty in twelve" at the 17th Annual Sloan Consortium International Conference explaining how we strived to get thirty courses fully online in a twelve month timeline with limited resources. Since then we have refined the process and made several changes. We are "continuing the momentum" and wanted to share our experiences and resources with others who are contemplating this journey. In this presentation we will… • Share our reflections, revisions, and lessons learned in online course development. • We will report back on our processes and results including the impact that going online has had on the campus, faculty, and students. The "Online Course Developers Certificate" training program has given faculty the opportunity to re-evaluate how they teach not only online but also in the classroom. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 63 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support • Listen to comments from faculty and administration on how this process has had a positive impact. Participants will use small group discussion to create a table of possible technologies to use for course structure, course content, and student interaction and engagement. Handouts of our Online Course Developers Certificate overview, contract, and review process will be provided. Developing an Effective e-Learning Infrastructure: Ends, Means, and Processes Anthony Chow (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA) Rebecca Croxton (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA) A mid-sized university in the southeastern US is preparing its faculty for increased e-Learning opportunities. Following a systematic process utilizing systems thinking, the existing needs of its six departments were assessed through a combination of chair interviews (n=6), chair surveys, two faculty surveys (n=35, n=32), and a student survey (n=50). With a survey response rate of approximately 50% of the School of Education faculty, interesting differences emerged between faculty and chair perspectives. While both faculty (M=4.9 out of 7.0) and department chairs (M=5.3) felt online learning was somewhat relevant in delivering their courses, faculty in general rated their readiness to teach online higher than how department chairs rated the faculty. Faculty felt somewhat prepared to teach online (M=4.8 vs. M=4.0), knew how to somewhat teach online (M=4.6 vs. M=3.7), felt some confidence in using technology to teach online (M=4.5 vs. M=3.7), and felt they had modest support to teach online (M=4.5 v. M=3.3) while their chairs rated each factor lower. Mirroring recent findings in the literature (Allen & Seaman, 2013; Gaytan, 2009; Ulmer, Watson, & Derby, 2007), both groups disagreed that online learning was of equal quality to face-to-face instruction (M=3.13, M=3.0) and strongly disagreed that they had enough time for designing and developing online courses (M=2.7, M=2.3). Both faculty and chairs agreed that multimedia development (M=5.6, 5.3) and real-time help desk support (M=5.3, M=6.0) were among the highest priorities. Strong differences emerged on several potential support services. Faculty rated higher than chairs the need for student technology training (M=5.0 vs. M=3.0) and assistance with delivering online lectures (M=4.3, M=3.5). Chairs rated higher than faculty assistance with course design (M=6.0, M=4.7), marketing and recruitment (M=6.3, M=4.5), and enrollment management (M=5.5, M=4.5). Aligning with findings reported in the literature (Allen & Seaman, 2013; Gaytan, 2009), all six School of Education department chairs felt online learning was a strategic priority for their departments. Chairs believed faculty interest in online learning remained lukewarm compared to students. They believed online learning was gaining popularity in their respective fields and the existence of online degree programs would not reduce the overall quality of their face-to-face programs. To increase online offerings, they stressed the need for program evaluation and assessment, technology support, faculty incentives, and professional development. Each chair completed a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis regarding online learning. Strengths emphasized existing expertise, content that works nicely, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 64 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support and overall demand for online learning. Weaknesses focused on lack of interest, concerns over quality of online learning, capacity, and capability. Opportunities include new programs that can leverage online format and meeting the needs and genuine interest from school districts and students. Threats include time and funds, competition from others, and concerns over high faculty-to-student ratio. Three out of every four faculty members reported some experience with teaching online. Practically everyone expressed interest in teaching online and believed students would like an online option. They felt somewhat prepared to teach online and predicted increased enrollment with online courses. However, similar to findings reported by Allen and Seaman (2013), they did not feel online courses were of equal quality to face-to-face courses. Consequently, faculty preferred to teach a blended combination of face-to-face sessions with online sessions. They believed online learning took more time and effort than traditional instruction. Despite viewing face-to-face courses as being superior in quality to online classes, students strongly wanted the option to take online courses in their degree programs. Aligning with trends across the nation (Allen & Seaman, 2013), students preferred online options because they believed this format was more convenient. However, students wanted to have adequate technology support through a help desk, real-time support services, and real-time faculty office hours. Faculty members lack the necessary expertise but expressed strong interest in teaching online because the potential to meet students' needs and interests. Students expressed caution about making the transition from traditional classroom to online instruction. To move forward with online instruction, the solution appears to call for the development of hybrid courses where faceto-face meetings exist alongside online sessions. Underlying everyone's concerns is the need for critical support structures: faculty need ongoing professional development and program evaluation and students request access to immediate assistance and support. The preliminary e-Learning support infrastructure was designed around four core areas: 1. Marketing and recruitment 2. Student services 3. Faculty and technology support 4. Assessment Marketing and recruitment is supported by the larger University e-learning unit, while internal capacity within the School is being enhanced. An online learning help desk has been created to address student services and faculty and technology support. This help desk both provides services to prospective students as well as real-time technology support. Additionally, a clearer process for how faculty can seek support for online learning continues to evolve. Assessment remains a big gap in support of the four major identified areas but specific instruments are currently being identified so that they can be brought to the faculty for consideration. Our presentation will deliver additional results from our School's emerging e-Learning programs and how well the infrastructure and support systems designed for our faculty are properly addressing their needs. Audience engagement will be encouraged via online interactive polling. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 65 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Managing the Stress of the Online Classroom: Finding Your Teaching Zen Ted Cross (Grand Canyon University, USA) Description and Goals: As online education continues to expand and evolve it has created new opportunities and tensions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in lives of those faculty members that dare to teach in the online classroom. The paradigm shift from traditional ground instruction to hybrid, and more recently 100% online teaching loads presents new problems from a human capital perspective. These problems include: increased rates of burnout lack of work/life balance, and wavering job satisfaction (Mandernach, 2006a). These problems are not just bad for faculty but also for students, as current research indicates the importance of passionate and engaged online instructors (Greenberger, 2013). Having worked in the world of online education for a number of years and listened carefully to online faculty, we have come to realize that a new set of skills is necessary for being an effective online teacher and that many of these skills are not grounded in traditional pedagogical or andragogical approaches, but rather in the mixture of performance psychology and self-leadership. "Finding Your Teaching Zen" is about focusing our attention as faculty where it will create the biggest gains for students while allowing us to remain engaged and energized in our work. In order to achieve this type of focused instruction we must confront the barriers to great online teaching. The first and most prevalent barrier to effective online teaching is a result of the online teaching environment. We term this barrier the ubiquity of the online classroom. By ubiquity we mean the ever present and sometimes consuming aspects of online teaching. This presentation will present both theoretical and practical ideas with the aims of creating an online environment that is conducive to learning and teaching. By providing research based ideas and tools to overcome the ubiquity of the online classroom, online faculty can remain engaged and productive in their online teaching assignments. The Barriers: To begin, the ubiquity of the online classroom creates stress for instructors and thus students. For instructors this generally plays out in two detrimental ways. First, is the overwhelming possibilities of the online classroom that creates a paralyzing sense of not knowing what is most important, and even more, what to do first. Next, is the lack of boundaries within the virtual classroom that can create problems of focus and time management. Taken together the lack of boundaries and the information overload of the virtual classroom can become demotivating. Focusing on What Matters (Create Clear Priorities): In a traditional classroom setting physical space and time can limit many of our interactions with students. Conversely, in the virtual classroom, while physical distance does present challenges, the technology enhanced learning environment creates a new and sometimes strange world. This new environment requires that we as instructors carefully prioritize teaching tasks. Our experience and research suggest the following priorities that follow the principle of putting "teaching activities" before "administrative tasks": • Teaching activities Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 66 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support - - - Posting in the discussion forums (Mandernach, Forrest, Babuzke, & Manaker, 2009; Mandernach, Hebert-Dailey, & Donnelli-Sallee, 2007; Mandernach, Gonzales, & Garrett, 2006) Adding new content to the discussion forums (Mandernach, 2010; Mandernach, 2009b) Creating course materials, especially videos (Mandernach, Dailey, & Donnelli, 2008; Donnelli, Dailey, & Mandernach, 2009; Mandernach & Taylor, 2011; Mandernach, 2009a) Grading (Mandernach, Dailey, & Donnelli, 2007; Mandernach, 2006b) Administrative Tasks Emails Announcements Grade book Calls After creating clear priorities it is now possible to create a time management plan and use time saving tools to make sure that we can give the appropriate time and energy to those things that matter most while reducing the amount of time spent on the necessary, but less important items. Lack of Boundaries (Manage Time): In the traditional classroom there are built-in limits and stops. For example, classes last for only a specified amount of time. In the online classroom, especially in asynchronous classes, class is in session whenever we are at the computer. This lost sense of boundaries can cause problems for focus and time management. To overcome this barrier we suggest the following that follows the principle of "manage energy, focus, then time": • • • • • Mange your energy (spiritual- purpose, physical- exercise, mental- intervals) (Loehr & Schwartz, 2005; Schwartz, 2007) Focus (environment & computer- ear phones, timers, apps that block distractions) (Babauta, 2011) Creating time management structures that put priorities first- Parkinsons Law (i.e., weekly to-do's, calendar time, Evernote) (Covey, 1990; Ferriss, 2009) Create hard stops and starts and manage transitions (when will you check email, when won't you? When will you start and stop, what ritual will you use to transition?)(Freidman, 2008; Loehr & Schwartz, 2005). Use technology to make administrative tasks efficient and meaningful to free up time for teaching (i.e., Animoto, TedTalks, Screencast o'Matic, TypeItIn, Presto, Skype, Email Templates, auto-respond IFTTT, Evernote etc.) In short, this presentation will present practical tools and ideas, based in research, that will help online faculty to prioritize what matters most in the online classroom as well as develop a plan and toolbox for managing time and energy to focus on their teaching priorities. References Available on Full Version Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 67 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support CRAfT: An Innovative Approach to Supporting Faculty for Student Success Cassandre Alvarado (The University of Texas at Austin, USA) There has never been a more exciting time than the present in the history of online education, or education at all for that matter. At no point in time have so many educators, policymakers, or students and parents worldwide been so united or focused on the potential for online and Blended Learning initiatives to radically transform the education multiplex. The need for a radical transformation of higher education is critical, especially in higher education where approximately half of the students who enter do not complete a bachelor's degree (Tinto, 1994 & 2012). As thousands of educational and governmental leaders continue to shore up and direct extensive resources to scaling the uptake online and blended initiatives, tens of thousands of faculty are turning online for content in their courses. And as new initiatives for online and Blended Learning transform our delivery of education, the need to prepare students to be successful is critical. How we prepare students to be successful requires new approaches to supporting faculty in the acquisition and use of online materials. With increased demands on their time, teachers, for the most part, do not have time to either curate or create their own online content. The need for teacher access to vetted, high-quality content proven to improve student success has reached a crescendo. As such, we are engaged in a major initiative to improve college student success by targeting curricular and pedagogical interventions for educators who work with seniors in high school and introductory students at Community Colleges. Specifically, teams of subject-matter experts, instructional designers, educational technologists, college readiness scholars, and national Experts in research-based pedagogies have developed a set of college readiness assignments that cross the core subjects of science, math, English/ language arts, and social sciences. The assignments incorporate the most current science about how students' learn best and promote both traditional and online learning activities and academic behaviors and specific content expectations students need to be successful in post-secondary institutions. In this interactive session, we will introduce participants to a major initiative to improve college readiness in the State of Texas. This initiative - College Readiness Assignments for Texas (CRAfT) - leverages multiple aspects of online and Blended Learning: systematically field-tested readiness assignments for teachers; online assignments for students; a web-based community for educators and online training resources. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the college readiness assignment and the pedagogical and technological innovations featured in a select set of the assignments designed specifically to promote the college-level task of sustained engagement in subject matter. Participants will understand the nature of the assignments, including the integration of pedagogical content knowledge with curriculum. Our innovative approach to faculty development will be highlighted including our blended and online training resource. Ongoing support for educators working in new environments will also be shared via our web-based community for educators. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 68 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Finally, we will present early results of a statewide testing of the assignments and faculty perceptions of the tools for promoting student success. Matching Training to Experience: A Phased Approach to Faculty Development That Can Be Delivered on a Shoestring Rena Palloff (Fielding Graduate University, USA) With the continued growth of online learning has come increased focus on what constitutes best practices in online teaching. The training of online instructors has not kept pace with the demand for excellence in the online environment, however. The result has been poorly constructed courses, high levels of student attrition from online courses, and continued allegations that online education is simply not as rigorous as its face-to-face counterpart. Furthermore, faculty are often left on their own to find appropriate training or to create their own approach to online teaching based on conversations with colleagues or information they find online or in journals. Faculty development for online teaching is a thorny problem that is considered important by administrators, faculty developers, and faculty themselves. With the decrease in funding for professional development, the problem has gotten worse rather than better. To add to this problem, often faculty development programs are presented using a "one size fits all" approach, with little regard to whether a faculty member is a novice in teaching online or has taught online for many years. This presentation addresses this problem by presenting, and allowing participants to explore, a phased approach to faculty development along with suggestions and strategies for the development of an effective training approach leading to excellence in online teaching.Through this session, participants will:    Explore a model of faculty development that allows for individualization based on level of experience and that can be delivered with minimal expense Develop strategies for training programs with the goal of achieving effectiveness and excellence in online teaching Develop strategies faculty can employ for self-development over and above what their institutions might offer. Managing Change Without Mangling It: Professional Development in an Age of Infinite Technologies Colin J. Marlaire (National University, USA) As the number, variety and complexity of technologies associated with education both in the United States and across the globe has increased, institutions are left with a seeming paradox. They are asked, on the one hand, to foster an openness that allows for experimentation with and use of a seemingly infinite number of tools, platforms, and modalities across their faculty, students, and classrooms. On the other, those same institutions are nonetheless tasked with ensuring an experience that is, in the end, supported, stable, and of a high quality. The drive to innovate through innovation and experimentation can, at times, stand in direct opposition to an instinctual institutional desire for consistency and scalability. In an educational environment that Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 69 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support mixes online and onsite, physical plants and the cloud, synchronous and asynchronous, a viable model for professional development proves ever more difficult to conceptualize and enact. The Faculty Center at National University has adopted several important strategies that ensure that it not only survives but thrives in that fast-paced environment. The purpose of the presentation is to discuss those strategies and the way they ensure both quality and innovation at an institutional scale. Collaboration: The Faculty Center works closely with other institutional entities concerning students' educational experience and faculty work life. One of the most important innovations at National University concerns the close working relationship between IT and Academics. Such a relationship is tremendously important when one consider the historical tendency- one where those bodies tended to operate in silos. The reality is that, increasingly, the line between IT's absolute ownership of technology & equipment and Academia's omnipotence concerning educational pedagogy and delivery, is blurring. The Faculty Center has collaborated with IT on mobile implementations (iPads), wireless infrastructure in the classroom and office, various cloud applications and platforms, video and video collaboration, systems integration and analytics. Coordination and Communication: There needs to be a serious and ongoing discussion amongst key institutional stakeholders, including faculty, administrators, and others, as practices matriculate up the levels of our institution- what innovations should be formalized and then disseminated as a more general practice that might advantage our entire faculty and student body. The all-too-swift institutionalization of certain practices, approaches, and educational technologies can prove dangerous. While early innovators embrace the limits, faults, and ambiguities of new technologies for the potential they promise, the majority of both faculty and student are significantly less open to unfamiliar and ineffable technologies. The Faculty Center oversees the Faculty Communities and individual communities of practice and pedagogy. These are virtual spaces where those dedicated to the ongoing technological and pedagogical evolution of National University and its courses can identify innovations in delivering content online, onsite, or both. These communities provide support to innovators and work to find opportunities for scale when innovations are stable and impactful and represent new tools and approaches that simplify and strengthen (not complicate) the student and faculty experience. Connectivity: Students understand the vast implications of the mobile world because they have been brought up within it. While all faculty are of course aware of mobile tools, the extent of the impact mobile has, and will continue to have, means that the Faculty Center must emphasize mobile as an important part of faculty development. To that end, it uses the Faculty Community to foster peer contact and discussion around research of innovative technologies and practices connected to educational delivery. The online space provides regularly updated information concerning relevant apps, as well as a discussion space for faculty participating in the pilot. The results of this pilot will then be shared with other faculty and programs using other spaces and tools within the Faculty Community and will influence future activities surrounding mobile Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 70 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support technologies. It also conducts in person and virtual training concerning mobile app and iPad initiatives, and regularly surveys faculty and students to capture behaviors as they concern technologies and. By centralizing such efforts within the Faculty Community website, National University can capture, assess, and improve pedagogical and technological practices within and across its programs more effectively. Consistency & Customization: The Faculty Center has been working with faculty, administration and others concerning course delivery. These interactions have resulted in a set of guidelines governing the development of courses for delivery in a variety of modalities. The purpose of these guidelines is to carefully balance the various expectations and desires concerning course content, context, and experience. The guidelines are developed to ensure consistency in the type of experience students have, while still allowing space for the ongoing improvement, expansion and innovation of that experience. The purpose of the presentation is to provide attendees with an institutional approach that is at once stable and fluid, scalable and local, macroscopic and microscopic; more importantly, attendees will leave with an understanding that it is through a mixing these seemingly incongruous concepts, that institutions can find the greatest success. Teaching Military Learners in a Global Context: A Case Study in Institutional Innovation Richard Schumaker (University of Maryland University College, USA) For the last four years, the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) has offered an online faculty development workshop entitled "Working with Military Learners." This workshop addresses the complex needs of UMUC's large military student population. Its approach is holistic: it involves administrative, pedagogical, conceptual, and technological elements. Originally, this course was created as a collaboration between UMUC's Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and the Undergraduate School. Over the last 14 months, the UMUC CTL has systematically involved other key stakeholders at UMUC including units responsible for veterans, active duty military in all services, disabilities, the UMUC Media Lab, and the satellite offices of UMUC in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area and beyond. This presentation is the story of giving a pedagogically rigorous workshop a much wider dimension and importance for UMUC's global student and faculty population. The University of Maryland University College has a very special place in the world of military education. First, from its inception in 1947, the University of Maryland University College has had a strong, idealistic commitment to bringing the highest quality education to the US military community. Second, UMUC currently enrolls around 55,000 active duty military, reservists, dependents and veterans in courses offered at more than 150 military installations and operating locations on four continents. These students make up approximately 50% of UMUC total student enrollments, which currently stand at just over 92,000 worldwide. (UMUC-at-glance). UMUC has more than 5,000 faculty, most of whom are likely to encounter military students in their online, hybrid, or face-to-face classrooms. To meet the challenges involved in teaching this diverse, dispersed audience of learners, UMUC's award winning Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) has developed an online workshop for faculty, "Teaching Military Learners." Originally suggested by the (then) dean of UMUC's Undergraduate School, Dr. Marie Cini, and Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 71 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support her director of Psychology, Dr. Thomas Bailey, the course was originally conceptualized, designed, and written by a team from CTL in fall 2009. Since then, the workshop has been taken by hundreds of faculty and some staff; it has been offered many times and consistently "splits" when offered. This workshop has a very… Practical Application: Overall goal is to adequately prepare UMUC faculty to effectively teach service members in all services and in a tremendous variety of environments, from service members and veterans living in the suburbs of Washington DC to military stationed in Forward Operating Bases in Afghanistan. The workshop offers faculty essential information, resources, and guidelines for working effectively with this complex learner population. Key Aspects of Workshop Include the Following:    Basic orientation to US military culture and protocols Best practices for working with military learners strategies for addressing special issues such as situational, medical, and psychological challenges the use of realistic case studies and testimonials written by experienced faculty about their experiences working with military learnersfacilitated peer learning and problem solving opportunities links to relevant Social Networking websites and other resources (Vogel) The heart of this workshop articulates, in considerable detail, important best practices for working with military students. From developing an awareness of military culture to responding to military learners' special issues and needs, and remaining flexible enough to address them while maintaining academic standards, these best practices will serve as an invaluable addition to any faculty member's existing teaching practices. (Baker) Although this has been one of UMUC's most successful faculty development workshops, it has been systematically upgraded over the last 14 months owing to the inclusion of stakeholders who were to some extent not fully integrated into the academic training and development programs. These stakeholders included the UMUC units responsible for veterans, active duty military members, and for onsite operations. The inclusion of these units made this workshop a more inconclusive and useful training and develop vehicle. This process also improved intra-unit understanding and communication. Finally, the UMUC Media Lab and Course Development teams also participated, improving their understanding of how UMUC serves and supports its global military learners. This presentation provides an systematic reflection on how UMUC's Center for Teaching improved an already popular and rigorous faculty training workshop and made it more representative of the needs of a large academic community. Above all, this presentation will identify and evaluate the stages by which the full expertise and experience of a complex organization is progressively integrated into one of the main focal points of the entire global university of 95,000 students continually improving the educational rigor and organizational services to its military students. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 72 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support References: Baker, A., (2008), Life in the U.S. Armed Forces: Not just another job, Westport, Connecticut, London: Praeger Security International Vogel, S., (2012) Army probing PTSD diagnoses at all of its medical facilities, The Washington Post - Stars and stripes articles, http://www.stripes.com/news/army-probing-ptsd-diagnoses-at-all-of-its-medicalfacilities-1.177418 UMUC, (2012) UMUC At-a-glance, UMUC Intranet, http://www.umuc.edu/visitors/about/ipra/glance.cfm. Our Seven Month Start-Up: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Best Practices So We Didn't Bomb Donna Gardner Liljegren (Elmhurst College, USA) Chartered on 07/01/13, the School for Professional Studies (SPS) at Elmhurst College was charged with opening the Elmhurst College Online Center for programs beginning in Spring 2013. With just seven months before courses opening, SPS was challenged by limited time, financial, and staffing resources but dedicated to program quality. What components of orientation and development would be required to support faculty? What policies and processes would need to be developed to support the new online center? In an effort to streamline development and implementation, SPS selected models from bestpractices to serve as the basis for the development of online center training and development. This included development of a four-week orientation course for new faculty to address College history, mission, and values, faculty expectations, technology support, and online learning pedagogy; development of a 10-week course development seminar to guide faculty through use of the learning environment (Brunk-Chavez & Palsole, 2011), course mapping using backwards design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), and pedagogy (Fink, 2003); and the development of policies and processes to set performance expectations for online faculty members (Blignaut & Trollip, 2010), and establish assessment and feedback processes (Fink, 2008). Agenda: 1. Discussion of the problem and timeframe; 2. Description of the research, rationale, and solutions; 3. Discussion of best practices to consider when resources are limited; 4. Review of preliminary assessment data; 5. Recommendations for improvements and considerations for others faced with similar challenges. Outcomes: Participants will leave this session with actionable ideas for using best-practices for time- and resource-limited program design and implementation. Connection to Conference Theme: The School for Professional Studies was challenged to build connections with faculty members, help them learn new technologies in new programs that were outside of their comfort zones, and trust that, despite moving forward in an incredibly short Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 73 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support amount of time, the leadership demonstrated expertise, commitment to quality, and adherence to the tenets of an Elmhurst College educational experience. This presentation demonstrates how actions rooted in the best practices and research of others provided the School with the opportunity to make those connections, manage the risk, and engage faculty with new technology, pedagogy, content, and processes. References: Blignaut, A. S., & Trollip, S. R. (2003). Measuring faculty participation in asynchronous discussion forums. Journal of Education for Business. Vol 78 (6) (pp. 347-353). Brunk-Chavez, B., & Palsole, S.V. (2011). The digital academy: Preparing faculty for digital course development. To Improve the Academy. Vol 30 (pp. 17-30). Fink, L.D. (2003) Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Fink, L.D. (2008). Evaluating teaching: A new approach to an old problem. To Improve the Academy. Vol 26 (pp. 3-21). Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. (2006). Understanding by design. Upper Saddle, NJ: ASCD. The 100 Instructor Dash: Leading the Race Toward Meaningful Faculty Support and Development Joshua Cohen (Ashford University, USA) Molly Molnar (Ashford University, USA) This session will describe the development, implementation, and outcomes of a dashboard that measures data from Ashford's learning management system in order to depict faculty behaviors in online classrooms. It is intended for four-year institutions (serving adult students), which strive to support a large population of online adjunct faculty in an effective, efficient, and meaningful way. Session attendees will have a first-hand experience of Ashford University's instructional support team's processes before and after dashboard development by completing an observation and analysis activity. Additionally, they will learn about and brainstorm practical ways to turn classroom data into valuable instructor support resources and initiatives. The need for a support role for online faculty is a common topic of conversation among higher education professionals. According to a study in the journal, Mentoring & Tutoring: A Partnership in Learning, successful faculty support systems, "focus on specific behaviors such as the open sharing of information, establishment of good rapport, development of trust, use of effective interpersonal skills, and clarification of expectations," (Barczyk et al., 20). Waltman, Bergom, and Hollingshead echo these behaviors in their discussion of the role of welcoming, sincere, and respectful communication in job satisfaction among adjunct faculty (425). Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 74 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support At Ashford University, a large, proprietary institution, a team of Instructional Specialists (IS) fulfills the faculty support role. IS regularly observe instructors' online classrooms to compare their activity against the university's prescribed course requirements. We use this information to identify areas in which faculty need support and development regarding the learning management system, educational technology, institutional policies, and general instructional best practices. The faculty-to-IS ratio is large; IS support up to 100 faculty at once. Consequently, the process of thoroughly observing each online classroom is time-consuming. These factors create challenges to IS ability to maintain the focused support and sincere communication that Barczyk et al. and Waltman et al. describe:   Putting out Fires - The time IS spend observing courses tends to marginalize our effort to develop rapport and trusting relationships with faculty, leading to support that is more reactive to issues than proactive toward development. Cookie Cutter Support - IS observation responsibilities and time allocation also lead to impersonal, template communication to the faculty we support, as well as to blanket resources that we believe are important but might not address what faculty feel they need. The development and implementation of the IS Dashboard has addressed the aforementioned challenges and reshaped the Ashford IS team's approach to faculty support and development by: 1. Creating efficiencies in the classroom observation process;Targeting individual instructors' support needs 2. Facilitating collaboration between IS and the leadership of Ashford's Colleges 3. Optimizing IS capacity for building rapport with faculty. Through use of the dashboard, IS are able to see instructor activity in specific functional areas, such as discussion forum participation behaviors, speed of responsiveness, timeliness of grade posts, and total time in-course. By providing clear visuals of this quantitative data, the dashboard allows IS to reallocate their time to focusing on qualitative observations, like content of responses and feedback. IS Analyze Data to: (1) Prioritize opportunities to coach faculty;Identify opportunities to create meaningful development materials for all faculty; and (2) Initiate personal communication with faculty. Since the implementation of the IS Dashboard, Ashford's IS team has initiated a number of successful relationship-building and development programs, such as: Kudos - IS use dashboard data to identify faculty whose classroom activity surpasses contractual requirements. IS personally contact these faculty via phone or email to commend their work and, as a result, open lines of communication with instructors who initially might not have reached out for support. Video Library - Dashboard data tells IS where information and/or training gaps might lie with faculty. Based on this information, the team has created a library of screen casts that walk faculty through various learning management system functionalities, instructional technology tools, and university procedures. IS easily link these videos to emails and other related resource documents as their observations or instructor need dictates. Faculty have reacted positively to the personal Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 75 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support attention, relevant topics, and easily-accessible support and development opportunities the IS Dashboard has facilitated. References: Barczyk, Casimir, et al. "Assessment of a University-Based Distance Educatino Mentoring Program from a Quality Management Perspective" Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning. 19.1 (2011): 5-24. Web. 13 Jul. 2012. Waltman, Jean, et al. "Factors Contributing to Job Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction among NonTenure-Track Faculty." Journal of Higher Education. 83.3 (2012): 411-434. Academic Search Premier. 13 July 2012. "Extend Your Impact": An Online Faculty Development Resource for Adjunct (And Full Time!) Instructors Lynn Foord (MGH Institute of Health Professions, USA) Context: In a partnership between a non-profit institution, and a for-profit business, the MGH Institute for Health Professions (MGH IHP or "Institute") and Six Red Marbles (an ed tech and media production company) partnered to design an unusual and innovative standalone resource for a faculty of adjunct professors who have a much deeper background in practice than in teaching, especially online. Our presentation will describe the challenge MGH IHP was facing: a tension between the needs of adjunct faculty and the other institutional stakeholders. To meet this challenge, a team from the IHP worked in collaboration with Six Red Marbles (SRM) to create a highly engaging resource with personality and substance. It's playful, and also very professional. It integrates the nuances of personal teaching style with current research and best practices for effective teaching in an online environment. To avoid a session-long "show and tell" our presentation will be told as a story with a challenge, action toward a goal, and resolution. Participants will identify their own challenge with respect to faculty development at the outset of the presentation. As we move through the story, participants will have multiple opportunities to interact with the presenters and with each other as they relate to our narrative and reflect on their own immediate needs and possible solutions. Slides will "tell the story" by recounting the actions taken, challenges faced and solutions developed. In the process, we will showcase the program as a whole and show some of the finished animations. We will also record the challenges of the participants and can include these in an updated version of slides post-conference. This presentation will benefit academic administrators, instructional designers and technologists and full, part time, or adjunct faculty. It is primarily directed toward higher education, and specifically professional education; however the basic principles followed in the creation of the program are applicable for faculty development at all levels. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 76 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Problem: In many professional education programs, adjunct instructors provide an essential link between the educational institution and authentic practice of the profession. At the same time, preparing adjunct faculty to be effective instructors presents challenges to program administrators, instructional designers and technology support staff, as well as the faculty themselves. What sort of program could be developed that would engage the faculty, inform them in a reasonable way and prepare them for teaching while still meeting the needs of the institutional stakeholders? Approach: The project began with two old friends with new jobs catching up together and sharing stories. It soon developed into a partnership between the academic institution and a media production company. In order to meld the two worlds, we established objectives and the initial program plan with a daylong brainstorming session, which included stakeholders from the MGH IHP and SRM. The program was initially intended for adjunct faculty who would be teaching fully online. However, as the work proceeded, it became apparent that by focusing on adult learning theory and applying basic principles of pedagogy to design and instruction in the online environment, the program could be useful to faculty teaching in blended and web-enhanced formats as well as fully online. As we worked with the objectives, which had been established by the collaborative team, we continued to alter and expand our initial design to create a learning environment that addressed the needs of adjunct faculty. Unlike full-time academics, many adjunct instructors are most accustomed to learning through presentation, example, and discussion with colleagues. Adjunct faculty also often feel left out of the community of the institution, so we created a learning environment that would literally place them on campus at the MGH IHP. Though we had a strong sense of the core of what we were doing, we were working in unfamiliar territory. We had plenty of creative thrashing to do early, which extended well into the middle phases of the project. We challenged ourselves to balance the program by also addressing the needs and interests of the academic stakeholders, including academic administrators (time commitment by instructors and assessment of the instructors' progress in the program); instructional designers (pedagogy and basic principles of design); and technology support staff (efficient use of LMS Help site). Managing this balance was tricky, and required us to work well beyond our initial deadlines. Twice we had to appeal to academic administrators to allow us to continue rather than forcing premature completion of the project. Because they did not understand the multimedia creation and development process, we needed to educate them while defending the progress we had made, and predicting as accurately as possible the outcome of the program. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 77 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Outcome: We now have a modular resource that can be added to and expanded as needed. Busy adjunct (or full time) faculty can access these resources at any time and can complete the entire program in a matter of hours. All of the resources have been specifically designed to create a sense of "place," which we believe helps faculty feel a greater sense of connection with the community of the Institute. The site can be used as a "flipped" resource for faculty work with an instructional designer, and includes guidance for faculty in accessing and navigating the help provided through the LMS. Driving faculty to the site remains a challenge; however, initial feedback from both adjunct and full time faculty has been very positive. We believe that the solution resides in a paradigm shift for all parties, as well as encouragement both from "bottom-up" (other faculty) and "top-down" (administrators, IDs, Tech support). This will take time, as does all sustainable change. Developing Comprehensive Evaluation Systems for Online and Blended Learning Facilitation Stacy Southerland (University of Central Oklahoma, USA) Bucky Dodd (University of Central Oklahoma, USA) Tracy Fairless (University of Central Oklahoma, USA) Overview: The evaluation of eLearning has strategic impact for designers, faculty, and administrators in online education. The ever-increasing reliance on data-driven decision making renders it essential to connect data to actionable results reflected in increased enrollment, improved retention, and accountability with regard to the instructional effectiveness of facilitation practices. This session will equip participants with the knowledge, skills, and resources needed to implement a comprehensive, multi-faceted evaluation system for online and blended contexts. Participants will review templates and examples that can be customized for their particular needs. Small group discussions, interactive questioning, case studies, and demonstrations will engage the audience. At the conclusion of the presentation, participants will be able to:  Differentiate between the quality of eLearning offerings before and during delivery  Examine institutional evaluation procedures for facilitating eLearning  Develop an evaluation plan that reflects strategic and operational considerations  Design an evaluation strategy for eLearning facilitation that promotes effective teaching and values innovation  Customize evaluation tools and processes for unique contexts and needs  Support the adoption of effective, institution-wide facilitation evaluation practices Context: Evaluating eLearning facilitation proves challenging for many higher education institutions. Moore and Kearsley (2005) acknowledged that the evaluation of eLearning teaching involves multiple perspectives and should focus on course design issues, teaching activities, and institutional attitudes. While a multidimensional approach to assessing eLearning facilitation may provide the most comprehensive and balanced method, practical challenges are frequently Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 78 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support encountered in the effort to implement objective, flexible, and sustainable evaluation systems (Irele, 2013). This session explores an on-going research and development project undertaken at the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO) that focused on promoting and evaluating effective eLearning facilitation. To support quality instruction in this emerging and popular environment, a committee was convened in 2008 to create policies and procedures for ensuring institution-wide quality eLearning. This group determined that: 1) All eLearning facilitators must complete certification training; 2) All eLearning courses must undergo review by a faculty panel and meet a minimum of 90% of the UCOnline Quality criteria to be offered for enrollment; and, 3) All eLearning courses must be reevaluated every three years to ensure continued alignment with quality design principles. Problem: While these guidelines provided a valuable foundation for supporting quality eLearning by addressing design quality, they did not assess post-design facilitation techniques evidenced during course delivery. In addition, reviewing and revising courses every three years created the need for perpetually increasing personnel and monetary resources, which ultimately limited the sustainability of a quality assurance process. Evaluation systems that fail to address ongoing eLearning facilitation practices create a gap that renders it difficult to identify the need for and develop performance solutions and provide relevant faculty enhancement opportunities. This gap also makes it challenging to identify and share successful and innovative teaching because there are few formal structures in place to support this effort. Often, evaluation is viewed as a tool for measuring performance and success; however, the assessment process also allows designers, faculty, and administrators to determine evidence-based strategies for improving learning and fostering innovation. Not conducting facilitation reviews during eLearning delivery limits the long-range quality of courses and programs both from accountability and innovation perspectives. The questions that emerged from the adoption and growth of eLearning at UCO were: 1. How can outcomes of eLearning facilitation evaluation support quality practices for individuals and the institution-wide community? 2. How and why does the quality of eLearning change over time from the moment of design to the moment of and during delivery? 3. How can the quality "gap" between course design approval and course delivery (facilitation) be closed? 4. How can a comprehensive eLearning evaluation system, i.e., one that encompasses predelivery design, active course facilitation, and post-delivery faculty enhancement-promote effective facilitation, innovation, and sustainability? Approach: In 2012, UCO began a project to develop a comprehensive system for assessing the effectiveness of eLearning facilitation to complement and round out existing processes for assessing eLearning. The goal was to equip faculty supervisors, often unfamiliar with eLearning best practices yet charged with reviewing facilitators, with the skills and tools necessary for conducting effective and consist evaluations of eLearning facilitation and to further empower them to facilitate ongoing professional development. As such, the project focused on the key weakness in the existing evaluation framework, which was the concentration on course design Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 79 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support quality without follow through in the form of reviewing course delivery practices and recommending continuing faculty development. A significant challenge in constructing such a system was the need for departments to be able to customize the assessment indicators and variables. To address this issue, a modular approach that pivoted around a common foundational instrument that allowed reviewers to tailor both the evaluation instrument and the review process to their department's particular needs was developed. The potential for many versions of the instrument being used university-wide could be viewed as a disadvantage, but the overarching goal was to promote and support effective facilitation rather than to create a formal, standardized performance review. Results: This research and development project resulted in a unified and comprehensive framework that included initial quality course assurance, continuous evaluation of facilitation techniques, and a sustainable reevaluation process for eLearning course designs at UCO. It also produced an online dashboard portal, a customizable evaluation instrument template, a consulting guide, and a training workshop for reviewers. The development team also recommended a flexible core process that could be modified according to specific departmental needs. The implementation of these procedures complemented previously existing strategies to ensure quality course design and certify eLearning faculty with a process to ensure continuous and enduring course quality. References: Irele, M. E. (2013). Evaluating distance education in the era of internationalization. In M. G. Moore (Ed), The handbook of distance education (Third Edition) (pp. 493-506). New York, NY: Routledge. Moore, M. & Kearsley, G. (2005). Distance education: A systems view (Second Edition). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Servant Leadership, Innovation and Collaboration: Faculty Development for a Nationally Ranked Online Program Chery Takkunen (The College of St. Scholastica, USA) The current online higher education landscape requires highly skilled faculty who are committed to best practices in the online environment, who can embrace change and navigate an increasingly complex technological environment. Program leaders are often challenged with how to best provide support for faculty as they move to online teaching. We believe in order to move towards and maintain effective online teaching, faculty need support, guidance and opportunities for dialogue and collaboration. This presentation will address how providing faculty the professional development and resources necessary to be successful in the online environment through cultivating a transparent process and developing a commitment to continuous improvement can enhance faculty engagement, confidence and professional development for teaching online. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 80 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support The presenters, the M.Ed. program director and graduate program chair, will share their process for providing professional development and support for faculty who teach in a nationally ranked online graduate program. Specific frameworks and strategies were employed to create a faculty development environment that leveraged community building and creativity, utilized and embraced collaborative tools, and created a safe community of practice for faculty members. In addition, the presenters will share their philosophy and strategies used to engage program faculty in an open and transparent curriculum development process. This process has been essential in creating a culture of innovation, continuous improvement and improved faculty instruction in the online environment. Essential components to the process involved ongoing program data analysis, dialogue regarding best practice online teaching strategies, opportunities to practice with technologies in low-stakes environments, and student work sampling. Presentation Format: Participants will be actively involved throughout the presentation through dialogue and collaboration. We will offer participants an opportunity to review our process and strategies. We will also provide opportunities for participants to collaborate in small groups and share their own effective strategies for overcoming professional development challenges. Participants will be also be given opportunities to review program data and student work samples with the goal of thinking about how they might use data to make program improvement decisions. They will be asked to share their own experiences with faculty development and the barriers and challenges facing their programs. Presentation Goals: Participants will be able to: • • • • Identify key components for supporting and guiding faculty who teach in the online environment. Compare different types of approaches for faculty engagement who teach in an online program. Analyze program data and student samples for continuous program improvement. Analyze and evaluate how a model of continuous improvement can promote and sustain faculty engagement and development. Materials: Handouts and digital resources will be available for session participants. The Faculty View of Technology-Enabled Education: a Survey Doug Lederman (Inside Higher Ed, USA) Michael Feldstein (eLiterate, USA) A common meme is that "the faculty" acts as an impediment to innovation and progress in implementing online education and technology-infused instruction in higher education. Nearly every campus's faculty ranks includes highly visible critics of technology and distance education, but do they represent the faculty as a whole? Inside Higher Ed's second annual Study of Faculty Attitudes on Technology-Enabled Education surveys a representative national sample of faculty members (and a parallel group of campus technology administrators) on their views of and experiences with technology and distance education. Among the topics: professors' views on the Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 81 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support quality and rigor of digital scholarship, online (as opposed to classroom-based) learning, the adequacy of training in new forms of instruction, and the impact of digital communication on work-life balance. The survey's results inject real data into the often myth-based rhetoric about the pros and cons of technology-enabled learning and the digital era of higher education. The goal is to give college faculty members a national context for their own views and provide administrators with a clearer understanding of how professors on their own campuses may look at technology issues facing their institutions. The Quality Transformation Faculty Development Assessment Framework Lawrence Ragan (Penn State, USA) Higher education is experiencing rapid and profound changes due to economic and social forces. Institution and faculty a like face increased demands for accountability, fiscal responsibility and evidence of impact (Plank & Kalish, 2010). In these uncertain economic times, there is an increased need to provide evidence of the worth and impact of faculty development programming (Hines, 2009; Plank & Kalish). The assessment and analysis of outcomes of faculty professional development activities could provide meaningful information to use in making decisions about future professional development events in a feedback loop that informs new programming, provides guidance for continuing or changing current programs, determines whether programming is achieving its purpose (Brancato, 2003; Guskey, 2002), and justifies the very existence of faculty development centers by providing evidence of their programming impact on faculty, departments, and the institution (Sorcinelli & Stanley, 2011). These reasons provide a need for a more systematic evaluation of the effectiveness and impact of faculty professional development (Chism & Szabo, 1997; Hines). Program assessment informs decision-making and improves practice, measures impact, helps others understand and value the work, and provides useful information for improvement (Plank & Kalish). Online learning, in all of its many disruptive variations, contributes to the increased pressure faculty feel to keep current in evolving teaching practices and new technologies. Student expectations for the seamless integration of technologies as a part of their learning system, and the redefinition and expansion of learning throughout a lifetime creates new pressures on historically slow-to-change higher education systems to adjust to the times (Lawler & King, 2001). How to decipher the many professional development options and assess where to invest their limited time and energy is of constant concern for faculty. Some hold their breath and hope they can ride out a few more years without getting caught up in this tsunami of change. Others, experienced and novice alike, embrace the challenges presented by this new and emerging teaching and learning landscape and actively seek ways to find their place. From all of these dynamics comes one constant message: "This is not your grandparent's classroom!" Improved and better-appreciated theories of learning, coupled with complex communication systems and services, are fundamentally changing the skills and competencies required for teaching and learning success. Today, maybe more so than any time in the history of education, the role of faculty preparation for success in a variety of teaching formats appears more critical than ever. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 82 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Understanding and addressing the various skills and competencies necessary for teaching success in today's classroom, virtual or face-to-face alike, returns dividends far greater than the investment of faculty time and energy. Designing, developing, delivering, and evaluating faculty development opportunities serves the needs of today's instructors by building a foundation of knowledge, philosophy and approach that can ultimately lead to online student success. The challenges of teaching with new pedagogies and technologies are many. The solutions are also rapidly evolving and need to be communicated and transferred through effective programming of professional development. There should be a deliberate use of theory and education principles in the design and development of faculty professional development programs (Steinert et al, 2006), taking advantage of the advances from research in these areas. Training and support of faculty is consistently cited as a critical component of the successful implementation of online teaching programs (Ali et al., 2005; Covington, Petherbridge, & Warren, 2005; Dalziel, 2003; Phipps & Merisotis, 2000; Yang & Cornelius, 2005). The increased focus on serving the faculty professional development needs calls for a renewed attention on quality standards in the design, development and delivery of faculty development programming. This includes both the evaluation, "judging the effectiveness of various services to determine value and improvements," and assessment, the "determination of the level to which the center achieved its specific outcomes - similar to academic program assessment" (Hines, 2011, p. 1). Although "quality assurance" may be defined in multiple ways, in this context it is the method by which a unit or organization assesses faculty development program impact on teaching behaviors in order to improve student success. The presenters propose to share a recently developed method for assuring quality in the design, development and delivery of faculty development programming for online instruction. The Quality Transformation Faculty Development Assessment Framework was recently authored to be included in an upcoming book release on topics of quality in distance learning. This model includes a scaled framework to asses varies levels of program impact. Additionally, various dimensions will be included addressing understanding the characteristics of the faculty audience, the definition of desired skills and competencies, strategies to measure change in teaching behaviors and achievement of student learning outcomes, and an alignment of the faculty development programs' assessment activities with institutional mission and goals. Designing Self-Paced Training Modules as the Foundation of Online Faculty Certification Jason Rhode (Northern Illinois University, USA) Problem: Unlike the face-to-face classroom in which educators typically have the luxury of being able to connect with students in a synchronous manner, the online learning environment presents many challenges and barriers in facilitation which can be jarring for those new to teaching online. For instance, rather than relying on a teacher-centered classroom, educators need to design their online experiences around a stronger focus on their students and allowing them to sustain a high level of engagement through active communication with each other. While many educators with experience in the brick-and-mortar classrooms are eager to tap into the successes of online teaching and learning, very few know where to begin. A gap exists between the intricacies of online learning and how educators can teach and facilitate effectively in this Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 83 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support environment in order to enable student-centered teaching methods. Thus, a structured online teaching certification program will assist in bridging the loose ends and allow educators to teach and communicate effectively in the online learning environment. Before faculty can begin to hone their pedagogical and technical skills necessary to teach online, they need to possess foundational understanding of the tenets of online teaching and learning, including topics such as: overview of online teaching and learning, models of online course delivery, designing an online course, encouraging communication, technology tools for online teaching, and assessing student learning online. In addition, faculty need to be introduced to quality standards as well as available campus resources and services available. In order to meet the Strategic Planning and Vision 2020 goals of Northern Illinois University (NIU) to offer significantly more online courses and online degree programs, many more faculty members will need to be trained quickly on online teaching, ultimately so that academic departments are able to schedule more course sections online. As new faculty are hired by the institution, including adjunct instructors who may be bi-vocational and working other full-time jobs, faculty training efforts need to be flexible and customizable to meet the individualized needs of the faculty. Approach: NIU set out to design and develop an online teaching certification program offered by the NIU Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center targeting NIU faculty interested in gaining more experience in the principles and practices of online teaching. While previous online teaching experience is not necessary, it is recognized that some faculty will have had some past exposure to online learning environments. It is envisioned that prospective candidates should be able to achieve certification by accomplishing a structured set of highly interactive and engaging activities that will expose them to various instructional strategies for successful teaching in the online environment. This project resulted in a set of interactive self-paced learning modules on online teaching, structured and offered in the form of a self-paced course, that NIU faculty can use to learn at their own pace and schedule. The self-paced model for offering introductory information accommodates faculty who can't attend in-person or commit to specific a specific timeframe for participation. Also, faculty who want to get started quickly can accelerate their learning. Furthermore, those with different teaching and technology expertise can begin with the selfpaced training and then receive follow-up assistance for course-specific needs. The modules, collectively referred to as, "Preparing to Teach Online" are structured as a selfpaced online course and based on the current online teaching training offered by Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center. This self-paced online faculty development course and will serve as the first of 3-step approach online teaching certification for NIU faculty. Core Topics (participants complete all 6 in sequence): 1. Introduction to Online Teaching and Learning 2. Models of Online Course Delivery 3. Designing an Online Course Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 84 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support 4. Encouraging Communication in Online Courses 5. Technology Tools for Online Teaching 6. Assessing Student Learning Online Elective Topics (participants choose 3 after completing course sequence): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Social Networking Advanced Content (eBooks, OER) Presentation Tools Blogs, Wikis, Journals Mobile Learning Groups Web Conferencing Technical Characteristics: 1. Modules are structured as a self-paced online course in Blackboard 2. Presentations are viewable online as well as via mobile devices 3. Course is accessible and mobile-friendly so faculty can choose to experience on a mobile device Components: 1. Initial synchronous online orientation via Blackboard Collaborate, archived and distributed as mobile mp4 2. Self-paced presentations viewable online in Blackboard or as mobile mp4 3. Self-test quiz at end of each topic to check for understanding and indicate completion 4. Journal activity after Modules 3 and 6 to reflect on takeaways 5. Optional discussion board for ongoing discussion 6. Culminating assessment: Design document for an online course (completed in segments throughout modules or at end) 7. Synchronous wrap-up session via Blackboard Collaborate, archived and distributed as mobile mp4 Results: The project will result in significant benefits to NIU and some of them are listed below. • • • • More faculty members will be trained quickly on online teaching than the current approach to train them through fixed training programs or spending funds to get them trained outside Self-paced learning modules will help faculty understand the time, effort and planning necessary to develop and deliver courses online compared to face-to-face delivery, and be better prepared. Academic departments will be able to recruit more faculty members to teach online as a result of the self-paced learning modules on online teaching. Academic support units such as Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center with limited resources will be able to use their resources more efficiently by focusing on course-specific online teaching needs of faculty and help them meet their needs better. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 85 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support During this session, learn about Northern Illinois University's innovative faculty development initiative to offer introductory online teaching training via self-paced modules as an initial phase of comprehensive online faculty certification. An overview of the program will be shared as well as the design, development, and implementation phases of the project, highlighting lessons learned and tips for other institutions interested in pursuing a similar self-paced model for scaling their faculty development efforts. The IDZone: Adapting a Learning Management System as a Project Management Tool Piti Kanjanapongpaisal (Florida State College at Jacksonville, USA) Goal: This presentation will discuss how a Learning Management System could be adapted as a project management tool to help a lead instructional designer (ID) collaborate with a large group of contract instructional designers. To expedite the online course development process while managing several projects at once, the IDZone made it possible to centralize the communication and information distribution throughout a project life cycle. Background: The Center for e-Learning (CeL), Florida State College at Jacksonville (FSCJ), was established in January, 2012. The CeL is a team of three instructional designers, one multimedia designer, and one web developer. The primary mission of the CeL is to design and develop online courses, as well as to establish quality online course standards for the college. With rapid growth in demand for online courses, the CeL was tasked with completing four online Baccalaureate programs, or eighty-two courses, within one year. Due to limited resources, the CeL decided to strategize the course development process by working collaboratively with contract instructional designers outside the college. Working and managing projects that involved several contractors and subject-matter experts became a challenging task for the CeL instructional designers who led the course development. The lead instructional designers were responsible for maintaining the quality and consistency of courses throughout the analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation processes. Keeping communication with all stakeholders became chaotic at times since contractors and subject matter experts (SMEs) worked remotely and lived in different time zones. Thus, the IDZone was developed and implemented to help the lead designers communicate with contractors more effectively, to more easily manage multiple projects, to utilize the existing and reusable resources more efficiently, and to support and provide the contractors with guidance. The IDZone: The idea behind the IDZone was to adapt the existing learning management system (LMS) as a project management tool to assist the lead designers in better managing multiple projects while dealing with several contractors at the same time. It was important for the lead designers to distribute information and provide guidance to the contractors concisely and appropriately. Communicating via emails and telephone calls was insufficient and ineffective when the lead designers had to manage twenty-five courses and deal with fifteen contractors. The IDZone utilized the basic tools inside the LMS to help the lead designers strengthen their project management skills. The fundamental LMS tools included announcement, course content, assignment drop box, discussion forum, communication and learning tools (e.g. e-mail message, live chat, videoconference, blog). With the IDZone, the lead designers were able to centralize the Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 86 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support communication channel and information distribution. In addition, the lead designers were able to promote social interaction among the contractors. Implementation of the IDZone: The IDZone was created as a regular online course in Blackboard, but could be created in any LMS. The CeL implemented the standards and specific requirements for online courses developed for FSCJ. All of the online courses were to be developed within a 12-week time frame. It was critical for the lead designers to ensure there was no delay in course development due to time constraints and expectations from administrators. Utilizing tools and features within the LMS helped the lead designers optimize the LMS as project management tool. The IDZone adapted the following main components in the LMS: Announcement: Announcement is a great tool to recap project activities during a week. This would make sure all the contractors were on the correct path. Using the Announcement tool would help the lead designer convey the important information at one time, in one place, in the IDZone. Course Content: Individual contractors had differences in instructional design experience and educational background. Creating weekly guidelines helped the contractors pay additional attention to specific project activities, timelines, or requirements. Weekly guidance was provided as a checkpoint or project milestone that the contractors should have reached in each week. Assignment Drop Box: All the contractors were required to submit a weekly report through the IDZone using the assignment drop box. With this LMS assignment tool, the lead designers were able to easily organize and manage the weekly reports from the contractors. Discussion Forum: Utilizing the discussion forums saved the lead designers from answering the same questions repetitively. The contractors could share their issues, questions, and concerns related to the course development with others by posting them on the discussion forum. Communication and Learning Tools: Some of the most important components in any LMS are the communication and learning tools. As an alternative way to communicate with the contractors, the lead designers were able to centralize and maintain all the email messages within the IDZone. Videoconferencing tools within the LMS allowed lead designers and contractors to communicate with each other. Tools and Resources: The lead designers created a section called "Tools and Resources" in which all the required documents, guidelines, and examples were shared and distributed to the contractors. It saved time for both the lead designers and contractors to maintain documents when they were stored in only one place. Summary: The IDZone proved to be an effective and efficient project management tool when the lead designers utilized all the LMS functions consistently to manage his or her team of contractors. It took considerable time and effort to design and develop the IDZone, but it was worthwhile when collaborating with a large group of contractors working on developing several courses at once. Adapting the LMS tools, such as announcement, course content, assignment drop box, discussion forum, communication and learning tools, made it possible to decrease the significant amount of time spent in Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 87 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support project management while increasing the effectiveness in team communication and consistency in course development. Redesigning, Rethinking, and reVisioning: The Power of Faculty-Driven Course Improvement Plans Sarah Schroeder (University of Cincinnati, USA) Julie Breen (University of Cincinnati, USA) Annie Bauer (University of Cincinnati, USA) Carlee Escue (University of Cincinnati, USA) Todd Haydon (University of Cincinnati, USA) At the end of this session, participants will be able to: 1. Craft a successful message that improves faculty buy-in for completing formal course redesigns 2. Incentivize faculty to participate in a course improvement process 3. Explain the importance of faculty-driven, collaborative course redesigns 4. Consider resources available, sustainability, and scope to determine key elements of their own course improvement plans 5. Say online learning and many faculty cringe. Others cheer! Redpath found in 2012 that “On-line” has become synonymous with “lower quality” regardless of research evidence to the contrary. And yet, experience affects attitude. In 2009, Allen & Seaman found that 67% of those who had not taught online believe online learning was inferior to face-to-face (80% in public universities), while a majority of those who had taught online believed online outcomes could be as good or better than online. But whether a cheerleader or naysayer of online learning, Seaman in a 2009 Sloan-C Report also found that faculty perceptions of online learning were typically that online courses took more time and more effort with less support and fewer incentives. And while faculty understand the benefits of online options for students, busy schedules and the lack of incentives can stall both attitude toward and actions related to continuous improvement of online courses. And so the challenge continues. We know we have to stay current and continue improving the usability, active learning, authentic assessments and student engagement in our online offerings. But how do we motivate faculty who may feel under-supported to do so? We found success through our reVisioning Process, a combination of peer feedback, facultydriven action planning, collaboration, simple planning documents, and the right incentives. In this session, we will share with you the reVisioning Process we use with faculty to create Master Courses including keys to successful messaging and communication, planning documents used, incentives offered, and the value of faculty collaboration. We will also share several success stories from our reVisioning Process and what we have learned from our first six months. Finally, we will include "survivor stories" from those who completed the course reVisioning Process and lived to teach another class! At the end of the session, participants will evaluate their current methods of motivating faculty course owners to Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 88 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support revise online courses and determine the best use of their time and resources to improvement faculty buy-in to the course redesign process. Beauty and the Beast: Maintaining Online Course Quality in a High Production Environment Dina Meunier (University of Waterloo, Canada) Pia Marks (University of Waterloo, Canada) The demand for online learning in higher education continues to grow as academic departments seek to reach new cohorts of students, offer a flexible alternative to existing students, and capitalize on increasingly pervasive and popular e-learning opportunities and trends. Added to the challenges of meeting increasing demand is the certainty of change in the online space as new technologies, devices and approaches continue to emerge. In the face of these challenges, how can academic institutions keep pace with the demand for online learning while at the same time delivering learning that is consistently engaging, relevant, and valuable to learners? Can demand and quality co-exist? This presentation explores that question by offering a course design and development process used by the Centre for Extended Learning (CEL) at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. CEL has developed over 300 online courses, including six Masters programs with six more in the offing, and has ramped up production to approximately 60 courses per year. Quality is foregrounded in the design and development process through the development of a set of evidence-based quality guidelines, a backwards design process, and the collection of student feedback through regular usability testing and end-of-term surveys. This process is supported by the use of cross-functional teams that include instructional designers, instructional digital media developers, quality assurance / learning management system specialists, and technology experts working within a project management framework. Participants will be introduced to CEL's design and development process through case examples which highlight the process as it unfolded in a number of our course projects. Copies of CEL's quality guidelines will be made available. This session will appeal to online course designers and developers as well as administrators managing these processes. Higher education instructors and faculty interested in online learning design and development will also benefit. References: Allen, E. & Seaman, J. (2013). Changing course: Ten years of tracking online education in the United States. Retrieved May 15, 2013, from http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/changingcourse.pdf Online learning: How effective is the virtual classroom? (2011). The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.texterity.com/onlinelearning/20111111b/?sub_id=B2HNSHyoS0Yxv#pg1; Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 89 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support 300 Years of Distance Learning Evolution. Retrieved May 8, 2013, from http://www.learndash.com/300-years-of-distance-learning-evolution-infographic/ Faculty Online Readiness Carol McQuiggan (Penn State University - Harrisburg, USA) Lisa Byrnes (Pennsylvania State University, USA) Melissa Hicks (Pennsylvania State University, USA) Amy Roche (Penn State University, USA) In the 10th annual survey, Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States, (see hyperlink provided below) http://sloanconsortium.org/publications/survey/changing_course_2012), almost 70% of the higher education institutions who responded reported that online education is critical to their long-term strategy. It also reported that the number of students taking at least one online course is 6.7 million, or 32%, an all-time high. The number of online programs and courses also grows every year resulting in an increasing number of faculty who are entering the online classroom for the first time. This is true at Penn State where we are planning to significantly increase our online enrollments. Teaching in an online environment can be considerably different in nature than teaching face-to-face. As faculty members initially consider teaching online, what skills are required and how can they best prepare themselves for online success? How do we learn of their needs and provide them adequate support? The original Faculty Self-Assessment for Online Teaching Tool was developed in 2007 in collaboration with the University of Central Florida and has been shared with a number of colleges and universities through its Creative Commons licensing. It was presented at the 2008 Sloan-C Conference, along with the survey results on which the tool was based. Its twenty-two questions were grouped into four categories: Organization & Time Management, Communicating Online, Teaching & Online Experience, and Technical Skills. The tool needed to be updated to align with Penn State's Competencies for Online Teaching Success (see COTS at https://www.e-education.psu.edu/files/OnlineTeachingCompetencies_FacEnga...), developed through an exploratory Research Study, literature review, and interviews with experienced faculty and staff, documenting their best practices for online teaching, and published in The Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks (see JALN hyperlink provided below) http://sloanconsortium.org/jaln/v16n1/identification-competencies-online...). In order to provide our faculty with the appropriate training and resources to be successful online educators, our redesigned readiness tool provides a baseline of pedagogical, technical, and administrative skills to prepare them for the online teaching environment. The thirty competencies are intended to provide faculty and administrators with a better understanding of the instructional requirements of online teaching. Faculty's use of this tool will allow them to self-assess their online readiness, identify any skill gaps, and link to appropriate resources, including guidelines, examples, workshop opportunities, and best practices. The revised tool is being unveiled and shared at this conference, once again with a Creative Commons license. Faculty, administrators, instructional designers, and faculty developers will Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 90 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support benefit from this session because they will gain first access to the tool. A QR code and link will be provided to use the tool, and a downloadable file will be available to install the tool on their own institution's server where they will be able to edit the text to fit their specific context. Small group discussion will be used to review the tool, provide feedback, and reflect on how they might integrate the tool into their online efforts. Strategies to use the tool will be shared, based on its past and current use at Penn State. Goals: At this presentation attendees will… • • • • Gain access to the newly updated Faculty Self-Assessment Tool Provide feedback on the tool's design, questions, and responses Discuss how this tool might help to shape their faculty's preparation for online teaching Receive suggestions on integrating the tool into their faculty development initiatives. Faculty Peer Mentoring Program for New Online Instructors: Design, Implementation and Assessment Susan Ko (CUNY School of Professional Studies, USA) This presentation examines a formal faculty peer mentoring program for new online instructors and also shares preliminary findings from a small Research Study based on our pilot of this program in 2012-13 at City University of New York's (CUNY) School of Professional Studies. Faculty mentoring has been recognized as an effective means for new faculty to learn about an institution or academic program and its values, and to develop the knowledge, skills and approaches needed to be successful in a particular teaching and learning environment. However, the traditional mentoring model may not effectively meet the needs of new faculty in an online learning environment that presents challenges that go beyond the usual adjustment issues for faculty. A more formal, structured mentoring program can ensure that problems are identified and addressed in a timely fashion and the faculty member is provided with the practical and emotional support needed. Additionally, peer mentoring serves to bridge the gap between initial foundational training in online teaching and the experience of actually managing one's own online course for the first time. The faculty peer mentoring program at CUNY's School of Professional Studies features a relationship extending over one semester between a more experienced faculty member and a newer faculty member, generally both in the same or related field. However, the more experienced faculty member is one who does not have a supervisory role over the newer faculty member. Mentors and mentees are enrolled in each other's online courses so as to provide access for assistance by the mentor and to enable the mentee to see a model class in action. There are six required interaction points during the semester, although mentees are encouraged to contact their mentors whenever needed. A mentoring manual was created to guide both the mentors and the mentees, while mentoring commitment forms and final reports by mentor and mentee bookend the mentoring experience. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 91 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support The mentoring manual provides detailed information on procedures, expectations, provides a set of design and interaction guidelines for online courses, and establishes a schedule for each stage of the semester along with suggestions for fostering a rewarding mentoring relationship. All forms and guidelines in the manual focus on best practices for online teaching and the process of self-reflection to improve one's teaching. While anecdotal comments, final reports from mentors and mentees, and feedback from academic administrators have shown that the program is effective in helping new online faculty adjust to the demands of online teaching, our Research Study seeks to answer two main questions--"What are the long-term effects of formal faculty peer mentoring on the performance of new online faculty? Does participation in a formal peer mentoring program increase the likelihood of effectiveness and satisfaction in new faculty, in particular, those teaching online?" Using outcome indicators like student course evaluation data, along with failure and retention rates, combined with faculty satisfaction surveys administered to all new faculty during the pilot period, our Research Study attempts to assess the performance and satisfaction of mentored new faculty in comparison to non-mentored new faculty, over a period of three teaching semesters. This presentation will provide some practical insights into setting up a peer mentoring program as part of faculty development for online faculty and discuss the lessons learned in designing and implementing a program. We will also share some of the findings from our Research Study and engage the audience in a discussion of the challenges in trying to assess the outcomes of such a program. The presenter will further engage the audience by inviting questions and feedback about the potential and limitations of faculty peer mentoring as part of a greater faculty development plan for online teaching. If You Build It They Will Come: Encouraging Voluntary Participation in Strategic Faculty Development Programs Steven Simpson (Baker College Online and The Center For Graduate Studies, USA) This session is a narrative of the presenter's experience in creating a faculty development program for close to 1000 online faculty where there did not exist one previously. Through an examination of these experiences and perhaps most importantly some epic failures, the narrative takes participants on a journey arriving at a place where there once was nothing, now there is a robust, diverse, data-driven, and strategic faculty development program in place. A tale where some, not all, but many faculty regularly participate in voluntary faculty development with direct, mapped, and assessable ties back to institutional outcomes, faculty evaluations, and student evaluations. The relevance of this story has implications for faculty, faculty development coordinators and specialists, program leadership, deans, institutional effectiveness personnel, and campus leadership. This story is one that works across all levels of an institution. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 92 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Session Goals: Through their participation in this session, participants will… • • • • • Have a clear framework and process presented for the development of strategic faculty development programs Understand the need and importance of mapping development outcomes to institutional goals and evaluation tools Understand the importance of creating assessment mechanisms for development programs Discuss and analyze the importance of creating programs that meet both institutional needs and the needs of faculty with common purpose and materials Be presented with one tracking and analysis tool built through access that could be employed on any campus Presentation and Engagement: This session utilizes the following… • Interactive "lecture" style presentation using PowerPoint with embedded interactive activities o Polleverywhere.com engages participants in an interactive survey using their phones and responding to two primary prompts • • • • Is there value in providing faculty development? What is the most important reason to provide faculty development? The responses to the brief surveys are used to focus the group, stimulate prior knowledge, and provide a consensus of relevance (hopefully) for the discussions and presentation to follow This conversation lends itself to the discussion of accreditation, current research on faculty development, faculty engagement, and a faculty community of inquiry o The lecture opens with a brief explanation of the background of this project but then quickly transitions to a larger group discussion about the nature of the faculty development programs and assessments in place among the campuses represented in the group o This component of the presentation moves through the narrative continuing with the large group exchange to present and evaluate the faculty development model offered The process presented includes analysis of: • • • • The importance of a faculty Voice of the Customer survey Mapping development opportunities and outcomes to institutional goals and evaluation tools Assessing and revising the development offered based on the data gained through assessment of program efficacy Small group collaboration- applying this process Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 93 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support o The session then breaks into small groups where each group engages in the creation, mapping, and assessment process for one potential outcome, student engagement Small groups of three-five participants: Each group must create three development opportunities 1. Content summary 2. Delivery mode 3. Rationale for how each development supports faculty in promoting student engagement Each group must also provide a summary of how they will assess the efficacy of their development program: 1. 2. 3. 4. Tools Level of assessment Analytics Deliverables Each group presents their model to their peers in the session for critical evaluation and discussion : • Interactive "lecture" style presentation using PowerPoint with embedded interactive activities o Upon the conclusion of the group activity, the presenter reconvenes the large group and discusses implementation and analysis Delivery: • The session presents the following modes of delivery and considerations for encouraging voluntary participation o The presenter discusses results from the VOC survey and faculty input into delivery and materials o WebEx interactive conference for thirty people or less (live sessions with a facilitator) o eRoundtable using WebEx to facilitate small group collaboration (live sessions with a facilitator) o Recorded development through Adobe Presenter (asynchronous and self-paced) o Faculty presenters and recognition through WebEx (live sessions with a faculty presenter and a moderator) o Asynchronous "mini courses" in online format through Blackboard o Assessment and Evaluation • The presenter offers and reviews the evaluation and assessment tools currently in place on their campus Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 94 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • The school has developed a single database and tracking tool for all faculty in Access that contains A record of all faculty development Performance evaluation summaries Professional growth action plan goals and summary Classroom/course observation summaries Student evaluations The session offers a review of how the school uses the tracking tool, data, and development for performance and efficacy and: Presents reporting and analytics samples Shares the existing faculty development mapping of competencies and outcomes Shares the Access database and corresponding Excel pivot tables The good, the bad, and the ugly The session concludes with the sharing of the strengths, challenges, and opportunities for growth for this model A blank copy of the Access database is available to all participants through an external Google drive that they can subscribe to The session shares a forward-looking summary of the program, its participation, faculty feedback, and plans for the 2013/2014 year Question and answer The true goal of this session is to provide a perspective where faculty development is something that is planned and assessed to ensure that it not only meets accreditation requirements to do so, but also so that it has real and measurable impacts on teaching in learning. A perspective where accreditation demands, institutional goals, faculty needs, student feedback, and realistic delivery intersect to the benefit of all parties involved. Session Materials: A copy of the PowerPoint notes pages, access to the Google shared drive for database templates https://drive.google.com/?tab=mo&authuser=0#my-drive (Conferencesharingsite@gmail.com) , handout for execution of the group activity, and sample reporting from the existing database are available to all participants in this session. If You Build It, Will They Come? Evaluating an Online Faculty Support Program Heather Carter (Brigham Young University-Idaho, USA) Joel Galbraith (Brigham Young University-Idaho, USA) How well can online Communities of Practice (CoPs) perform in meeting both the management and mentorship needs of remote, adjunct faculty? This presentation communicates the results of a program evaluation on the Communities of Practice used by BYU-Idaho in mentoring their remote faculty. BYU-Idaho online CoPs are called teaching groups. The research gathered for the program evaluation contains qualitative data on online faculty satisfaction with teaching groups. The online program at BYU-Idaho, a small, private university in the eastern end of the state, currently employs 520 remote, adjunct faculty, with numbers increasing steadily each semester. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 95 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support In Fall 2009, when BYU-Idaho first developed a separate online program, 67 remote adjunct faculty were hired to teach within 35 different online courses. Since 2009, the university's offerings have increased to 139 online courses, spread across 732 sections, and delivered to over 18,000 students. Increased online enrollments mean more remote adjunct faculty to be hired, managed, and mentored. From Fall 2011 to Fall 2012 alone, the number of remote adjunct faculty members grew from 230 to 355, a 54% increase in just one year. This rapid growth has caused the university to consider the most efficient and productive method of managing and developing their part-time teachers. After an examination of mentoring programs at other universities, BYU-Idaho online administrators developed the teaching group model, a program designed with the objective of pushing management to lower organizational levels and of providing consistent and personal mentors for remote faculty. The teaching group model contracts one remote adjunct instructor out of every ten to act as Teaching Group Leader. The Teaching Group Leader (TGL) manages, evaluates, and mentors their peers within the teaching group. Each TGL reports to an Assistant Instructor Manager (AIM), also a remote instructor peer who manages groups of up to ten TGLs. In theory, each AIM may have up to 100 remote faculty under their charge. Through the teaching group model, BYU-Idaho offers a unique approach to faculty support and professional development, but this presentation questions the value and effectiveness, as well as the relative costs of implementing such a program. Because the teaching group model is used nearly exclusively as the means of professional development and supervision of online faculty, the program holds significant consequences for online students. The program evaluation asks if teaching groups are the right model for large and fast-growing online programs. Too often programs are developed out of necessity and become institutionalized before the value of the program can be adequately assessed. A formative evaluation of teaching groups as Communities of Practice identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the teaching group program. Evaluation results include suggestions the university might adopt to enhance the program's quality and effectiveness as well as data on what teaching groups do well This presentation will give a brief overview of the teaching group model and evaluation design. The audience will then break into groups to generate additional questions that might have been asked in the program evaluation. As the presenters and audience regroup to discuss the program evaluation, a handout outlining major evaluation results will be distributed. Audience feedback will be sought for additional insight into the objectives and ramifications--both positive and negative--of the teaching group model. A Q&A session will follow the presentation. Administrators of online learning programs would best benefit from this presentation, as well as managers and supervisors over online faculty. Building a Culture of Critical Thinking: A Multi-modal Approach Andrew Shean (Ashford University, USA) Jeffrey Hall (Ashford University, USA) Debra Hailwood (Ashford University, USA) This interactive workshop will focus on developing a culture of critical thinking through multimodal learning activities, rich discussion, and Practical Applications in face-to-face, blended, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 96 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support and/or online learning environments. In applying five specific criteria to curriculum and instruction, we have observed livelier discourse, more robust student engagement, and more clearly-achieved learning outcomes. An analysis of the impact on student learning and teaching is explored. Participants will: 1. Receive a Developers Guide to Creating Critical Thinking Prompts 2. See specific examples of critical thinking through the use of multimedia (learning modules, interactive rubrics, etc) 3. Be asked to engage in rich dialogue on current practices that could be enhanced through the use of critical thinking. Through a substantial evaluation of our academic process, Ashford University initiated a Critical Thinking Taskforce, whose goal was to enhance critical thinking across all areas of the academic process, especially as it applies to instructional design, course development, and teaching. Our first step was to bring experts in the field of critical thinking to help inform our approach and inspire a deeper engagement with our academic culture and curriculum. We Identified an Immediate Actionable Item: An infusion of critical thinking within our discussion board prompts, which resulted in a job-aid for course developers. In Defining the Needs of our Discussion Forums: We proposed five criteria for critical thinkingdriven prompts. In applying these criteria to new course developments, we have observed livelier discourse, more robust student engagement, and more clearly-achieved learning outcomes in online, blended, and face-to-face formats. Goals: 1. Describe the efforts of Ashford University to integrate critical thinking strategies into curriculum development and course facilitation 2. Explain the purpose and tasks of a diverse group of constituents who came together to form a Critical Thinking Taskforce 3. Facilitate dialogue among participants for integrating more critical thinking strategies into blended and online learning environments Cyber-bullying of Faculty in the Online Classroom Michael Eskey (Park University, USA The number of students enrolled in online courses in increasing on an annual basis. With the growth, online learning is experiencing an increase in cyber-assaults, written & verbal assaults, and cyber-bullying. There is an increasing amount of student and faculty data on the topic. Additionally, there are a number of related definitions and strategies in the process of development to combat this growing problem. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 97 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support In the fall of 2011, of the 17.7 million college students, only 15 percent were attending traditional 4-year colleges and living on campus. Experiences with Online learning have noted increases in verbal assaults and cyber bullying (and online learning increases the potential for cyber-bullying). This changes many "classroom" philosophies. Students are becoming the "customer" and higher education is increasing expressing a shifting of focus on the student, more-so as a customer than traditional student. There is an increased reliance on adjunct faculty, often working in isolation, without as much structured supervision. Informality of text message-type interactions and the expectation of expectation of immediate response, and the distribution effects of the high-speed internet process have contributed to an isolated, albeit high speed communication method of learning. Much current research has focused on workplace bullying; student to student bullying; and faceto-face student on faculty bullying; and. Students now have the capability to spread their personal disgust and disdain, whether warranted or not (whether factual or not) to any number of recipients at multi-gigahertz speed. There is an expectation of a reward for reward based on expectation vs. product. Failure is not an expectation or option and often results in cyberretaliation, often resulting in false accusations, name-calling, un-based high-speed rumors, and unabashed cyber-speed hate. Personal attacks and slander are common. These are directed to peers, other instructors, and college administrators. Based on today's college communications, social media, and personal e-mails, hundreds, even thousands of recipients can be reached in a short period of time. As noted by a number of researchers), e-mails, text-messaging, chat rooms, cellular phones, camera phones, websites, blogs, and the like, contribute to the spread of derogatory and ostracizing comments about other students, teachers, and other individuals. Researchers have noted such formatting for bullying as messaging and blogs containing defamatory bullying, harassment transmitted through offensive, vulgar, and derogatory comments. Likewise, the use of intimidation, malicious, and insulting comments and messages are utilized. Current Law & Policy: Currently forty-six states have Department of Education (DOE) harassment polices (which is normally how bullying is handled). Thirty-six states include cyberbullying in their policies. Most colleges have student conduct policies and faculty human resources policies. Enforcement is sometimes problematic and coverage can often take on protection of the student first. There are three issues that lead to a concern of perceived faculty bullying, especially by adjunct faculty members. They are often encouraged to take on a "thick skin" strategy, an "ignore it" philosophy, or a "pacify and acquiesce" approach. This certainly does not solve the problems and often contributes to making the problem worse. The paper/presentation will address: 1. Scope of Problem - survey of adjunct faculty to determine how many are actually victims, type, and extent of student bullying, particularly cyber-bullying 2. A baseline of policies will be provided concerning bullying, to include policies and protections to prevent faculty and student cyber-bullying - to include sanctions and safeguards Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 98 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support 3. Presentation will address a plan for professional development in this area to train faculty (full and part-time) in recognition and responding to cyber-bullying to control it, and stop the growth. Research to be addressed will ask online adjunct faculty questions related to bullying by students online. Questions will include perceptions frequencies, comparisons, and reactions. Results will address the scope the problem and future professional development needs. Preparing Faculty to Teach in Blended Environments: From 0-140 in 50 (Weeks) Henrietta Siemens (Fresno Pacific University, USA) Today's colleges and universities are increasingly under pressure to demonstrate to their accreditation agencies that they are complying with Carnegie Hour requirements, especially when it comes to comparing degree completion programs with traditional undergraduate programs. Some institutions look to online and blended options to meet this challenge. When Fresno Pacific University implemented the Blended Learning Initiative for nine of its Degree Completion programs, the Center for Online Learning staff was faced with the task of training and supporting approximately 140 faculty and adjunct faculty to effectively teach in blended learning environments. This presentation shares strategies for developing and implementing a faculty development program that trains and supports faculty to teach in blended environments. The goal of this session is to share best practices and tips with conference participants who are planning to implement blended teaching faculty development programs at their institutions. The presenter will highlight program implementation strategies, keys to faculty participation, institutional challenges, and training resource issues. Upon completion of this presentation participants will be able to: 1. Locate resources and materials for developing a blended training program 2. Identify key resources and expertise from within their own institution 3. Adapt logistics of program implementation to their setting; (4) Recognize criteria for success in blended course development and delivery. Creating Professional Development Opportunities by Implementing a Course Quality Assurance System Casey Price (Capella University, USA) Creating an effective and engaging professional development program presents unique challenges in an online environment. Busy workloads and distance can lead to a feeling of isolation among online faculty and staff. In this presentation we will address the implementation of a course quality system through a community of practice model that allowed us provide unique professional development opportunities to faculty. The implementation of this course quality assurance program has repeatedly reinforced two particular needs: Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 99 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support 1. The need to respect faculty time and interest-level 2. Recognition that professional development is not limited to training opportunities At Capella University the process of developing a university-wide course quality assurance system grew organically over a multi-year period. In 2007, Capella launched a pilot course review of two undergraduate general education courses utilizing Quality Matters (QM). This pilot created expertise and advocacy within our undergraduate general education department. The second pilot group, a series of graduate-level public safety programs, was launched in 2008. The public safety team was interested in implementing QM at the program level in addition to the course level. Since there was no existing structure at QM to support program-level implementation, Capella leadership began to work with QM leadership to define the parameters of a QM program-level implementation and recognition program. Consequently, Capella was the first institution to be recognized through the new program-level recognition program. Through these initial efforts, a growing community of interested faculty, staff, and leaders emerged. With such diverse individuals interested in QM we were able to come together to form a community of practice around course quality by forming the Course Quality Committee (CQC). The CQC has worked to implement QM at Capella and has designed various outreach initiatives to train Capella faculty and staff about Quality Matters and the collaboration needed among various departments to ensure quality in course design and professional training that extends beyond a course review. Capella's course development philosophy is rooted in the understanding that ownership for the quality of courses at Capella belongs to faculty and faculty chairs. The QM commitment to developing expertise throughout the academic community through professional development supports this philosophy by providing a variety of formal training opportunities for faculty members, once they enter the quality community. As part of our institutional commitment to QM, we established resources and processes to support faculty who are interested in these formal QM professional development opportunities. We also created our own entry-level introduction to QM principles, practices, and expectations to provide a less time-intensive entry point to Capella's institutional implementation commitment. However, we have found that making this opportunity available is not what draws our faculty into QM professional development. Our faculty are drawn to QM training through other QM-related experiences such as having a course reviewed informally, serving as a Faculty Developer on a formal review, or being part of a conversation that created an interest in QM. This workshop will share our most successful efforts related to QM professional development. These efforts include: stakeholder meetings, review experience, and training. In addition, our development of a one-hour training course and the recurring facilitation of the QM APPQMR course, in house, have increased knowledge of quality, desire to delve deeper into QM's role in our university, and a higher participation rate in professional development. Based on the positive results of creating a community to implement course quality at Capella, we would strongly recommend that other institutions look for ways to utilize the expertise at their institution to create communities of practices, particularly when instituting new initiatives such as QM. Thus, inviting perspectives from analytics, course design, technology, SME insights, and program developers allows this give and take to include a multi-dimensional reinforcing strategy from a Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 100 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support community of practice model to support development. We hope that our experience will prompt other institutions to consider the benefit such an endeavor brings. The goals of this workshop are to engage participants in: • • • • Identifying their school's use of a course quality assurance system and its relationship to multiple segments of their institution Exploring ideas that expand professional development in their university Increasing options for expanding professional development through discussion Through group discussion we will be able to share our professional development options and discuss challenges that have been overcome in creating these opportunities. Faculty on the Fast Track: Efficient Effective Development and Design for Faculty Creating and Teaching Online Courses Lujean Baab (Virginia Tech, USA) As institutions respond to the call to move to or expand online course offerings, ensuring highquality courses and online learning experiences remains a challenge as well as an imperative. It is even more difficulty to respond to that challenge within limitations of staffing and faculty time, particularly when the availability of instructional designers and technologists is limited. The desire to empower faculty as developers often leads to lengthy, time-consuming and indepth instruction in instructional design that faculty justifiably tune out or reject, bogging down or derailing the process of faculty development of online courses. In response to these challenges, the Institute for Distance and Distributed Learning (IDDL) at VA Tech employs a scalable process resulting in successful faculty who are comfortable teaching online and are empowered to continue to revise and develop their online courses. Faculty developers are also offered the opportunity to become mentors and reviewers for others developing online courses, thereby expanding and strengthening the community of practice for online teaching and learning across disciplines. In an institution in which the cultural inclination is distrust of online learning and resistance to faculty investment of time and effort in changing teaching practices, this process moves faculty from reluctant participants in online learning to champions of the benefits of strong preparation and quality construction of online teaching and learning experiences. The Provost Office supports this process by providing the funds to release a faculty member from one course in a semester, thereby providing the time faculty need to focus on learning how to develop and teach an online course. The funding process is competitive and has very clearly described requirements and parameters to which the faculty developer, Department Head and Dean agree through the signing of a proposal agreement. In this session, participants will learn how the process is structured including the initial professional development, online short course preparing faculty to develop and teach an online course, and the instructional designer facilitation of faculty development of online courses. This cohort approach to project-based online learning allows for a highly interactive experience, the modeling of best practices, a collaborative approach to faculty issues and concerns, and the Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 101 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support opportunity for faculty to experience online teaching and learning including large and small group work online. The process results in the development of an online course, the consideration and adoption of teaching strategies for that online course, and both a peer and departmental review for quality assurance. Faculty have the opportunity to learn from each other as well as from instructional designers and facilitators, resulting in new and creative approaches and innovative uses of available technology in their online course. Based on research, strategies and best practices from experience, the process begins with an initial workshop, followed by an online short course, and continues with instructional designer facilitated faculty development of online courses. The process culminates in a quality assurance peer review by a fellow faculty developer in the cohort, an instructional designer and a subject matter expert chosen by the developer. Finally, the course is presented to the Department Head for review and approval. The process is successful both in terms of high quality courses and faculty satisfaction. Data collected supports the claim of an effective and efficient process and faculty response to open ended survey questions indicate empowerment and confidence in ability to teach and mentor others who develop and teach online courses. The cultural shift from distrust of online learning to mastery of the design, teaching strategies and technology applications is both remarkable and replicable. Goals for Session and Participants: 1. Develop an understanding of the structured and efficient process used at VA Tech for faculty development of online courses 2. Discuss the opportunities and challenges of applying and/or participating in this approach at their institution 3. Have the opportunity to share in data collection and research on the effectiveness of this approach. Online Instructional Self-Efficacy & Acceptance: Aligning Self-Efficacy, Attitudes, & Needs with Institutional Goals Rebecca Croxton (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA) Anthony Chow (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA) University administrators across the United States recognize that in order to stay competitive and meet the demands of their students, they must offer online learning opportunities (Allen & Seaman, 2013; Gayton, 2009). Survey findings by Allen & Seaman (2013) indicated that 69.1% of chief academic leaders believed online learning is critical to their long-term strategy. Further, the 10% growth rate in students enrolling in online courses has surpassed the 2% growth rate of students going to college (Allen & Seaman, 2011). Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 102 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Empirical evidence published in the online learning literature suggests that when online courses are built and taught using sound pedagogical principles, student learning and cognition can meet or exceed that which occurs in face-to-face courses (Aykol & Garrison, 2011; Block, Udermann, Felix, Reineke, & Murray, 2008). Despite this, there is a great deal of skepticism among university administrators and faculty members about the quality of instruction that can occur online (Graham & Jones, 2011; Ulmer, Watson, & Derby, 2007). Further, many faculty members feel they lack the confidence or skills to be effective in the online context. Because of this skepticism and lack of instructional self-efficacy, defined as personal beliefs about one's capabilities to help students learn (Schunk, 2012), faculty members' willingness to teach online courses may lag behind the online course demand. Throughout the theoretical and empirical research literature, instructional self-efficacy has been found to directly correlate to student achievement and motivation (Pajares, 1996; Schunk, 2012). Further, study findings by Ulmer, Watson, and Derby (2007), suggest that experienced online teaching faculty perceived that students performed better in distance courses versus traditional courses when compared to faculty online teaching experience. Therefore, as instructional selfefficacy in the online context increases, one may anticipate an increase in positive attitudes relating to the educational value of online learning and a willingness to teach online. In an effort to determine the attitudes, instructional self-efficacy, and needs of faculty about online learning, a pilot study was conducted with faculty members (N = 32) in the School of Education at a mid-sized public university in the southeastern United States. Preliminary results suggest that over half of faculty survey respondents in the School of Education (56%, n = 19) believe online learning is, or will soon be, highly relevant in delivering courses that they teach. However, 78% of the survey respondents either disagreed with (n = 19) or gave a neutral response (n = 6) to the statement, "The quality of online learning is equal to face-to-face instruction." Further, while 56% of the faculty survey respondents (n = 18) agreed with the statement, "I feel that I know how to teach online," the remaining respondents either disagreed with (38%, n = 12) or gave a neutral response (6%, n = 2) to this statement. These preliminary data suggest that while faculty members believe online learning is a highly relevant way to teach, there is a perception among many that the quality of online teaching is inferior to that which occurs face-to-face. Further, the data suggest that the online instructional self-efficacy among many faculty members is low. During the Summer and Fall 2013, this study will be expanded to assess the attitudes, instructional self-efficacy, and needs relating to online learning of faculty across the entire university. Data collection methods include a survey of a randomly selected sample of both university faculty and instructional technology consultants. Variables that influence online instructional self-efficacy will be identified through regression and path analyses. The findings will be shared and discussed with session attendees. Depending upon the findings, a tentative model will be developed and discussed that will allow for an individual's instructional selfefficacy and acceptance of online teaching and learning to be determined based upon key indicators identified in the study. Institutions must be able to align the demand for online courses with the willingness of highly qualified instructors to teach online. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 103 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Session attendees will develop an understanding of how online instructional self-efficacy relates to the acceptance of online teaching as an effective teaching medium. Further, using principles founded upon motivational and social cognitive principles, attendees will learn meaningful and useful ways to build online instructional self-efficacy of faculty and instructors who are reluctant or lack the confidence or skills to embrace online teaching. Attendees will learn about efficacy building sources for instructors that include utilizing actual performances, vicarious experiences, modeling, persuasion, and physiological indexes. Audience engagement will be encouraged through online polling, interactive questioning and responses, and audience contribution. References: Allen, I. E., & Seaman, J. (2011). Going the distance: Online education in the United States. 2011 (Report) [PDF]. Retrieved from http://sloanconsortium.org/publications/survey/going_distance_2011 Allen, I. E., & Seaman, J. (2013, January). Changing course: Ten years of tracking online education in the United States (Report) [PDF]. Retrieved from http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/changingcourse.pdf Aykol, Z., & Garrison, D. R. (2011). Understanding cognitive presence in an online and blended community of inquiry: Assessing outcomes and processes for deep approaches to learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 42, 233-250. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.01029.x Block, A., Udermann, B., Felix, M., Reineke, D., & Murray, S. R. (2008). Achievement and satisfaction in an online versus a traditional health and wellness course. Journal of Online Learning & Teaching, 4(1), 57-66. Gaytan, J. (2009). Analyzing online education through the lens of institutional theory and practice: The need for research-based and -validated frameworks for planning, designing, delivering, and assessing online instruction. Delta Pi Epsilon Journal, 51(2), 62-75. Graham, C. M., & Jones, N. (2011). Cognitive dissonance theory and distance education: Faculty perceptions on the efficacy of and resistance to distance education. International Journal of Business, Humanities and Technology, 1(2), 212-227. Pajares, F. (1996). Self-efficacy beliefs in achievement settings. Review of Educational Research, 66, 543-578. Schunk, D. H. (2012). Learning Theories: An Educational Perspective (6th ed). Boston, MA: Pearson. Ulmer, L. W., Watson, L. W., & Derby, D. (2007). Perceptions of higher education faculty members on the value of distance education. The Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 8(1), 59-70. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 104 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Seeing with Other Lenses: Implementing Virtual Supervision in Student Teaching Eva St. Arnauld (Grand Canyon University, USA) Universities across the country are now providing online teacher preparation programs. Students are able to attend classes, do their practicums, and their student teaching in their own cities while attending the colleges and universities of their choice, regardless of location. The student teaching portion of their teacher preparation programs are the culminating evidence of their preparation and the efforts are supported and evaluated by a university supervisor. But what happens when the supporting university is across the country from the student and their school site? How can universities provide their oversight and support? Traditionally, professional teacher preparation programs require student teaching to be supervised by a university representative. While in the full-time role, the student teacher works closely with the GCU supervisor, to collect feedback on their performance and instructional competence. Frequent opportunities for feedback and reflection are provided with targeted feedback designed around standards and the COE collaborative student teaching evaluation form. Whether students attend class online or in a face-to-face environment, student teachers must have access to critical feedback by experienced supervisors in the field. The opportunity for virtual supervising was introduced by the College of Education to service a need for providing quality coaching and feedback to students in rural or remote areas. Grand Canyon University introduced a pilot project studying a virtual method for site supervision using real time software, videoconferencing and recorded videos during the fall 2012 and spring 2013 semesters. Impact: Preliminary findings demonstrate a positive impact on clinical supervision for online student teachers. One positive impact of this method is the immediacy and accessibility to high quality supervision. The university is able to provide swift, ongoing, and high quality coaching and performance evaluation to student teachers in remote areas that may otherwise be unattainable. Another positive impact to this method is that it forces student teachers to become familiar with technology and will carry these newly acquired skills into their own classrooms. Thirdly, there is an increase in communication between the student teacher and the site supervisor as the student teacher feels more comfortable communicating via phone and email. Not only is this the primary mode of communicating, but virtual supervising requires an increase in voice to voice contact as involved parties set up their individual evaluation plan. This method encourages professional reflective practice as the candidate can view it at a later time, allowing for self-reflection and improvement to their practice as well as fosters a greater accountability through critical guided reflections. By watching the recording, the teacher candidate can use their own professional knowledge to critically analyze the methods and climate supported in the classroom. Evidence: Critical analysis of the data acquired from this pilot project, over a period of two semesters, supports continuous improvement of the process for ongoing implementation. The clinical practice department collected and analyzed qualitative data obtained through virtual interviews as well as online surveys. The College of Education surveyed all supervisors, cooperating teachers and student teachers that utilized this method in fall 2013 as well as spring 2013. The surveys requested feedback on the quality, effectiveness, levels of communication, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 105 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support and support, when using videoconferencing. The college also collected and compared the overall evaluation scores of students with face-to-face supervisors to that of students who receive virtual supervision. In addition we reviewed the four site evaluation tools, which included the INTASC standards and provided both numeric and qualitative data on the video conferencing student teachers. Additionally, the clinical practice department filtered through students who were underperforming to look for trends associated with video conferencing, and the coaching provided by video conferencing supervisors in these instances. Finally, through online webinar interviews with lead site supervisors we obtained qualitative feedback that we used to guide our site supervisor trainings and support documents. Scope: Through analysis of the virtual supervising pilot over one year and exploring this option, we continue to examine what further opportunities might exist from using this method of supervising. Trends suggest that these added skills will become the model for supervising at GCU and all supervisors must incorporate some video in their coaching and feedback. Supervisors and student teachers will exercise good practice in reflection and building needed skills for their future professions. In this model, each teacher candidate might be required to video a lesson and submit a critical reflection to the site supervisor or faculty member. Another benefit to this model is that those who video record their lessons may use the recordings to share best practices with peers/colleagues. Additionally, supervisors or college faculty can provide immediate feedback if challenges arise and there is a need for remediation. If presented early, these skills can enrich field experiences extending beyond student teaching. Examine the Relationship between Virtual Supervisors and Achievement: The mission of the College of Education at Grand Canyon University states that the professional education programs are designed to support the University's mission to prepare learners to become global citizens, critical thinkers, effective communicators and responsible leaders from the context of its Christian heritage. In the College of Education these are embodied through the mission of our conceptual framework of "learning, leading, and serving" which is what we expect of our programs, staff, faculty and students. The relationship between a supervisor, the student teacher and the cooperating teacher becomes the path by where the student grows and develops their teaching skills. The supervisor is not only responsible for helping to build that relationship but also is the bridge between the school and the university program. This project was introduced to serve the needs of our online candidates in rural and remote student teaching locations in providing high quality feedback and instruction. Further research is needed to identify how this model for supervising student teachers impacts success throughout the clinical experience. Proactively Guiding Instructor Performance Through the Use of Performance Dashboard and Real-Time Data Jennifer Shreckengost (Grantham University, USA) To become truly student-centered, institutions must realize the power of their faculty. Instructors have more frequent and personal contact with students than any other office in the institution. However, making sure that instructors follow best practices in online teaching is a challenge on various levels. Many adjunct instructors work for multiple institutions or still work in their Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 106 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support current professional field, leaving little time for them to keep up to speed with any one particular institution's Learning Management System (LMS), policy, or procedural updates. How do institutions earn full dedication from these part-time, multi-tasking professionals? Grantham University employs an internal faculty performance dashboard created by the Office of Institutional Research. This dashboard evaluates instructor engagement, student learning, and student progression while providing an in-depth look into classroom activity, instructor presence, and curriculum effectiveness. Each Dean and Chair takes a proactive approach by coaching instructors for further student engagement in the course based upon the data reviewed. All measurement structures through the reports reviewed on a daily and weekly basis support Grantham University's Strategic Plan to provide a student centric approach to a quality educational product with high standards in all aspects of its academic programs, learning outcomes, instructor engagement and student support services. The benefiting result of using a performance dashboard such as this is that it allows for the usage of real-time data to measure instructor performance during the course rather than relying on end of course data. Trends can be identified, in turn driving the development of relevant faculty development and training opportunities, curricular changes, as well as policy and procedural review. Attendees of this session will: 1. Explore how to develop and employ a faculty performance dashboard 2. Critically analyze the implications of using a faculty performance dashboard Developing Faculty Capacity to Support Student Success: The First Year Learning Initiative Michelle Miller (Northern Arizona University, USA) Student success in foundational courses has become a critical priority for institutions nationwide. Many institutional initiatives aim to improve course completion rates in the early college career, yet a major challenge for such initiatives is that many students arrive at college without the preparation and mindset needed to succeed. Student success initiatives also face substantial barriers with respect to faculty participation and buy-in, as many faculty subscribe to the belief that promoting student success necessarily means lowering academic standards. Additionally, many faculty believe that they do not possess additional capacity to address change in this resource-constrained environment. The First Year Learning Initiative (FYLI) is a university-wide program for transforming pedagogy and design in courses with high proportions of first-year students, using an approach to developing faculty capacity that deliberately targets these typical barriers to participation. The FYLI framework, described in detail below, accommodates a variety of course delivery modes including blended, fully online, and face-toface courses enhanced with technology (e.g., flipped classrooms). FYLI is grounded in the principle that students need - and want - high standards in first-year coursework, and that students benefit when those standards are clearly communicated from the Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 107 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support very beginning of a course. But to meet high standards, students need support, guidance, highly engaging pedagogy, and frequent formative feedback. A second guiding principle is that appealing to traditional academic values of rigor and accountability increases the appeal of the initiative to faculty. Through the FYLI development process, course coordinators reshape the course (all sections) in order to meet these needs, focusing on three broad areas: course features that deliberately socialize students for success in the university setting, best practices in course pedagogy and design, and coordinated delivery across multiple sections of the same course. A third guiding principle is that curriculum work can be self-empowering for faculty and a way to again reassert agency. The FYLI course redesign process is primarily face-to-face and peer-to-peer, modeled on the community organizing approach to promoting grass-roots change (Boyte & Scarnati, 2012; Coles & Scarnati, 2011). Courses earn FYLI certification by participating in a series of structured development meetings in which course coordinators and FYLI development facilitators discuss how the redesigned course will meet criteria in each of the three key areas (socialization, design, and coordination). Coordinators also prepare a "syllabus of practice" that documents how instructional goals are accomplished across multiple sections of the course. Once certified, courses receive support for undergraduate peer teaching assistants to help implement features such as in-class active learning exercises. FYLI has produced a high level of voluntary faculty participation in the two years since its inception. There are over 47 currently certified courses, including "gateway" courses in mathematics, engineering natural sciences and English composition. Together, these certified courses reach a headcount exceeding 12,000 students per semester. Qualitative and quantitative assessment efforts have revealed that FYLI participation is associated with substantive changes to course pedagogy and design. Furthermore, FYLI certification is statistically associated with increased course completion rates. At this information session, participants will learn how to use the FYLI methodology to develop faculty capacity to build student success, including a detailed understanding FYLI course features and the development process. They will understand key "do's and don'ts" about how to promote this type of redesign initiative among the faculty, especially with respect to using faculty value systems to build buy-in for change. They will also gain a conceptual understanding of the research foundation for FYLI. That Course Gets a Gold Star! Peer Mentoring for Exemplary Online Course Development Using the Quality Matters Rubric Laura Ballard (Mesa Community College, USA) In this presentation, the participants will learn about the Gold Star Program at Mesa Community College, how it was developed via a shared governance model, how it was adopted and implemented, and how it is continuously assessed and improved. The Gold Star Program serves as a basic foundation in a comprehensive approach to create an exemplary eLearning program at Mesa Community College (MCC) that has the five Sloan Quality Pillars as its framework. While MCC embraces the uniqueness and many advantages of Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 108 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support faculty developed courses, there has been a push to create some quality standards and consistency. The Gold Star Program was developed to address this challenge. It is a facultycentered training and peer-review process based on self-assessment, professional development, mentoring and peer review for continuous improvement of quality teaching and learning. It is built upon the Quality Matters philosophy, approach and rubric standards, leading to nationally certified courses and an institutional showcase of quality courses that can be modeled. Unique to this program is the use of faculty teams within departments who participate in the program together and collaborate on the course development. The Gold Star Program recently received the Innovation of the Year 2012 Award at Mesa Community College for its unique approach and institutional impact. The Best Four Days in the Hot Summer Ever! Lynn Wietecha (Lawrence Technological University, USA) Like all of us, faculty are busy people. They have a great deal to manage and getting them to devote their valuable time to professional development is often a challenge. Our faculty development programs struggle to engage faulty on a consistent basis in spite of incentives. When the PD stresses technology, faculty interest tends to fall even further. Yet, research shows the value faculty PD has on student learning. So how do you engage them? LTU blended the best aspects of "top-down" and "bottom up" approaches to PD when we implemented the Summer Symposium for our faculty. We worked with Deans and Department Chairs to identify priorities for faculty PD. We also surveyed faculty on the skills they deemed important. We then built an intense 4-day workshop from this data, but "hid" the technology within the pedagogy. It was a huge success and we now offer it three times each year to accommodate the growing interest. This presentation will share our efforts to assess faculty skill, the final design of the workshop, the results that we achieved and the impact faculty were able to have on their own classes. It will showcase short videos from our faculty sharing how the workshop influenced changes in their teaching skills. Upon completion of this presentation, participants will . . . • • • • • Identify strategies to facility support from key stake holders, Build a list of strategies to assess faculty skills, Have a blueprint (design plan) for our 4-day workshop, Observe our lessons-learned from this initiative, See how to design a technology-based training program without emphasizing the technology. Participants will be engaged in this presentation early by completing a Poll-Everywhere survey on their own faculty development initiatives. Their data will be compared to our Summer Symposium design. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 109 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Join the Sloan- C Faculty Ranks Sandra Coswatte (Sloan Consortium, USA) Zeren Eder (Sloan Consortium, USA) Kathleen Ives (Sloan Consortium, USA) This conference workshop session is a great opportunity to learn more about how to showcase your talents and skills while helping to continue and develop the online education field. The Sloan-C Institute is the premier online development program. Have you ever thought about submitting a workshop or webinar proposal for the Sloan-C Institute but don’t know what topics or areas are in demand? Do you have a passion for facilitating and mentoring other faculty? This workshop highlights: 1. Ways you can design, develop, and facilitate an online workshop/webinar 2. Ways you can serve as a Sloan-C Institute adjunct faculty member by facilitating additional sections of our more popular workshops. 3. Professional development trends in online higher education will be reviewed. 4. Steps detailing how to submit a workshop/webinar proposal or apply for an adjunct faculty position will be presented. 5. Additionally, Sloan-C Institute support and resources provided for learning events will also be covered. 6. Training on our processes, technology, and tracks will be reviewed enabling you to better understand the learning environment should you be selected to serve in either capacity. Sloan-C is committed to building and developing a diverse environment where a variety of ideas, cultures and perspectives can thrive. Reflective Practice: Significance in Teaching Marjaneh Gilpatrick (Grand Canyon University, USA) The College's conceptual framework emphasizes learning, leading and serving. A critical aspect related to all of these, we believe, is reflection. Does reflection play a role in effective teaching? A number of research studies have affirmed the value of reflection in one's teaching practice (Gibbs 1988; Schon 1990). Stallions, Murrill, & Earp (2012) used those findings to develop the Reflective Practitioner Phases (RPP) Model that is used as a framework by instructors to reflect on diverse aspects of their teaching practice that, in turn would lead to improved and energized pedagogy. In addition, according to Lord (2009), self-evaluation has always existed in education. In the late 1960s, it was often used as a formal assessment of college faculty. Some examples of selfevaluation as experienced by the instructors include: Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 110 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support • • • University instructors focus their attention on areas that they could showcase for effective teaching in the next school year. Professors would submit artifacts, which verified their commitment to scholarship, service to the community/university/college, and teaching effectiveness (Lord, 2009). Self-evaluation was overseen by the master instructor and a peer-review task force With the desire to better define and assess the effective online instructional practices in higher education at GCU, the College of Education (COE) created a formative faculty evaluation instrument. This Five by Five (5x5) instrument was established using the following 5 criteria: • • • • • Communication (Announcements) Engagement (Discussion Forums) Effective Instruction and Teaching Responsiveness (Questions for Instructor) Content Area Expertise (Quality Feedback). The foundation for the creation of this instrument was based on the work of Carolyn Downey, et al (2004) as well as literature review of current recommended best practices in online instruction (LaPrade, et al, 2010). To assist in defining the levels within each criterion, a rubric was developed within the 5x5 instrument. In addition, the form has an area that allows the evaluator to list two qualitative comments from a comment bank provided by COE. The first comment affirmed any behaviors that aligned with effective instructional practice, and the second one provided constructive feedback for improving instruction (LaPrade, et al, 2010). It is important to note that the original validation process occurred in 2010. Since then, the instrument has been adopted university wide. To validate the instrument, fifty instructors, teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses in COE were randomly selected for review. There were ten evaluators comprised of program chairs, deans and directors in COE. The instrument was designed to provide formative and frequent assessment and feedback information. Therefore the evaluators assessed each faculty member three times during an 8-week course session: weeks two, five, and eight. During weeks three, six, and nine, a Faculty Development Team member reviewed the assessment to ensure there were no conflicts of interest relating to the instructor. If there were no conflicts, the comments were shared with the instructor/faculty via e-mail. The fifty instructors in the initial trial were cross-indexed against several outside data points, including End of Course Survey averages, average instructor failure rates, and level of preparation (LaPrade, et al, 2010). The purpose of a follow-up mixed methods study was to test, using 5X5 form, whether allowing fifty (50) online instructors to do a self-evaluation and reflection on their online instruction capabilities will result in improved scores reflected in subsequent online classroom observations. During the summer of 2012, the College of Education (COE) conducted over 80 5x5s on COE online faculty. Of those, 67 were considered to be at L1 or L2 levels. The University utilizes a rating scale of L1-L3, where and L1 is outstanding, L2 is satisfactory and L3 needs coaching. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 111 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support The College collaborated with the executives in the department that oversees faculty development and scheduling to further eliminate any instructors who were at the time undergoing coaching. The research team selected 50 eligible instructors from those remaining from the list of 67, and divided them into two groups of 25. The reflective group of 25 received an email from the College that introduced the 5x5, explained its purpose as a qualitative tool, and asked the instructor to reflect on the tool and complete a self-evaluation based on the instrument. Instructors were asked to email back the College with a confirmation that the reflection / self-evaluation were completed. They were also asked to list two areas that they liked from the instrument, and two ways that they believed it could be improved. Those responding back affirmatively were sent a COE t-shirt as a token of appreciation for their participation. Participants from the study group were asked to respond within one week. The control group of 25 did not receive the 5x5 instrument, nor were they contacted directly during the project. After the close of the study group's responses, COE conducted another round of 5x5s during winter 2012, on both the control and study groups. To the extent possible, COE used sections taught by the instructor that were as close to the summer 5x5 as possible. The analysis of the total scores of the 5X5s (Pre and Post) for the control as well as the reflective group revealed that: • • • • For the reflective group, 15 of the instructors improved their score post-reflection, 5 remained the same, and 5 went down. For the control group, 9 improved their post-reflective scores, 8 remained the same, and 8 went down - which is what we should have hoped for from the control group. 80 percent of the instructors either improved or remained the same on their evaluation. It also appeared that reflection had a very positive impact on improving instructional techniques. The participants will leave the session with the understanding that reflection has a positive influence on one's teaching practice. Additionally, they will learn about the 5x5 tool that can serve as a model to measure an online course instructor's qualitative performance. Finally, participants will be able to share their own strategies on how reflection and reflective practice is incorporated in their teacher education programs. Online Instructor Training & Certification: Comparing and Contrasting Three Institutional Approaches Jean-Marc Wise (The Florida State University, USA) Cristi Ford (University of the District of Columbia, USA) Marwin Britto (University of Saskatchewan, Canada) Background: The quality of instruction is a critical factor in the success of online students. Professors who are experienced teaching in classrooms cannot necessarily apply the same skills Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 112 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support in online teaching assignments. In order to ensure that institutions adequately prepare their instructors to meet the challenges of delivering effective online instruction, accreditation agencies have added specific requirements for online instructor training and certification. Purpose and Goals: This presentation aims at highlighting and comparing the approaches of three different institutions of higher education to meet these requirements. The goal is to provide participants with a selection of strategies to address online instructor training and certification, along with an analysis if their strengths and weaknesses, specific examples, and lessons learned. Dimensions: For the purpose of this study, the presenters compared their institution's training and certification efforts along the following dimensions… 1. Requirements for training and certification - including mandatory participation, synchronous and asynchronous instruction, core and elective topics, and re-certification 2. Levels - such as Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced levels of certification 3. Motivation and incentives - including compensation, promotion, and recognition 4. Delivery mode of instructor training - such as online, classroom based, hybrid 5. Assessments and evaluation criteria - including self-assessments, formal assessments, practical components, course reviews, as well as expert, peer, and student evaluations. Session Format: In the first part of the session, the presenters will each introduce one case by describing it along the above mentioned dimensions. These presentations will be followed by a systematic comparison of the three cases, discussing their relative advantages and challenges, and summarizing strategies and approaches. During the last part of the session, participants are invited to ask questions and share their own experiences and ideas. Meet and Beat Accreditation Standards with Convergent Curriculum Mapping Jack Yensen (University of West Georgia, USA) Curriculum mapping can be complex and difficult to interpret. We will present two distinct and complementary approaches of curricular mapping that make map gap analysis self-evident and lead to a continuous loop of improvement. Both methods use spatial, temporal and logical connections between national standards, learning outcomes, programs, courses and syllabi. One approach called the Curriculum Mapping Initiative (CMI) is designed to engage a multitude of senses (sight, sound and kinesthetic movement) in assessment. By incorporating color, shape, proximity and sound CMI makes trends become apparent, facilitating new insights in order to continuously improve teaching and learning. Faculty at Samuel Merritt University use CMI as "dip stick" to assess educational effectiveness. They can literally "see"" in a glance gaps and duplications in curriculum as it is grouped by shapes, colors, and sounds. In addition, they can dig deeper and critically analyze authentic examples of student work attached to each learning outcome to see if their claims are backed up with evidence of student learning. In addition, we added a game element by adding musical notes to learning outcomes. We often begin assessment meetings with a game-involving faculty in interacting with their curricular maps through sight, sound and movement. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 113 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support The other approach is done with freely available concept mapping software, CmapTools applied to course syllabi. Once a visual map exists for a specified curriculum, maps are created for benchmark credentialing curriculum documents as a comparison. Visual comparisons between such maps are easy and form the basis of a gap analysis, with more granular analytic detail provided by advanced searching of all maps which are fully indexed by the software. This results in a clear picture of the type and extent of gaps in an existing curriculum compared with the benchmark documents. In turn this leads to suggested clusters of concept that are missing and indicates where they might be placed in the existing curriculum, either to enhance existing course syllabi without bloat, or to suggest the addition of new courses to remedy the identified gaps. The presenters will demonstrate how to map a curriculum using both approaches and will demonstrate how to conduct a gap analysis between the maps. The results of the gap analysis will be used to refine the existing curriculum by modifying existing course syllabi or by creating new courses to bring the existing curriculum into conformance with accreditation benchmark documents. As session outcomes, participants will leave with the experience of applying these curriculum mapping techniques to their own curricula since they are entirely generalizable across disciplines, and with strategies for generating evidence based syllabi and for engaging faculty in the assessment process, while provoking the insights needed to continuously improve teaching and learning. This format will provide an exciting and engaging experience for participants and leave them with the tools and strategies to return home and apply to their own curricula and faculty. Potentially, this will be a positive contribution both to the conference and to multiple disciplines. Increasing the Impact of Cognitive Presence in the Online Classroom Courtney Moke (Deltak, USA) Lauren Wright (Deltak, USA) As the popularity of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework continues to grow in online learning, instructional designers and faculty trainers must adapt their strategies to educate faculty on the best ways to implement the social, teaching, and cognitive presences into the online classroom. While the social and teaching presences are relatively easy to explain to faculty and subject matter experts (SME's) in order to include in course design and instructor training, the cognitive presence is often overlooked and referred to simply as "the content of the course." This tactic ignores a very important aspect of the framework and weakens the impact of the online learning experience. Upon examination and research of the cognitive aspect of the CoI framework, we have developed several strategies that incorporate the four stages of cognitive presence into both the instructional design and the faculty facilitation of an online course. It is through the triggering point, exploration, integration, and resolution stages of the cognitive presence that students have the full opportunity to absorb the course content and benefit from the entirety of the CoI framework. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 114 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support An example of one of our strategies applies to course projects during the instructional design process of an online course. Instead of the entirety of a project being assigned at the beginning of the course and collected at the end for final grading, segments of the project are assigned periodically and reviewed by the instructor in a way that prompts the students to proceed through the different stages of cognitive presence. Designing a course in this manner also lends itself well to building complexity into the learning objectives, as students progress from comprehension to application to evaluation of the course material. An instructional design example can be as follows: The Triggering Event: A problem/situation/case study is presented early in the course. A few prompts for additional student inquiry are provided, but no further work is assigned.Exploration: In the next module, students explore possibilities for potential solutions for the problem. This portion of the assignment may be submitted for grading so the instructor can guide students. Integration: After receiving feedback on their exploration, students are prompted to create solutions that directly relate to their problem. Resolution: By the end of the course, students select and apply the solution that best solves the problem presented. This work is submitted for grading and feedback from the instructor. This same concept can be taught to those teaching a course. The instructor must be trained on how to keep the four stages of cognitive presence in mind when facilitating the course and recognize how the stages are loosely tied to the timing of the course. Students should evolve from exploring content in the early period of the course to applying it by the end and instructor interactions with the material should correspond accordingly. An example of one of our strategies is the facilitation of a discussion forum. Typically, instructors directly communicate to the discussion or they take a passive approach by simply agree with the sentiments of the students. A more efficient use of faculty time and energy is to pair their discussion interaction with the four stages of cognitive presence and make an even greater impact on the educational experience in the forum. The revelation of the discussion question for the week serves as the triggering event.In the early stages of the discussion, instructors can prompt students to explore the question further. The instructor can make a much more powerful impact in the middle-to-end of the discussion by using the integration and resolution stages of cognitive presence to model their contributions. Students, particularly adult students, want solutions and application-based knowledge from the classroom. Instructors can take a more active role in prompting the students to make conclusions on the situation and create ways to implement and apply. Instructors can also incorporate their social and cognitive presences into a single effort. As instructors add social presence to the course in the form of videos, podcasts, and weekly summaries, the information being delivered can directly relate to the stage of the content presented in the course. Instead of posting a fast video that only summarizes the weekly content; the video can also prompt students to start to think about the next phase of how the content will apply to creating solutions. Podcasts and written announcements can also follow the same pattern. Instructors can break up the material Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 115 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support and inspire students to think about it in stages, instead of taking the myopic position of teaching the material as a whole. Goals: Evaluate the importance for emphasizing the inclusion of cognitive presence in the design of an online classroom.Explain different processes instructional designers and faculty members can follow for including the four stages of cognitive presence in the design and delivery of an online course.Investigate methodologies that instructors can use to increase cognitive presence in the live online classroom. References: Arbaugh, J. B. (2013). Does academic discipline moderate CoI-course outcomes relationships in online MBA courses?. Internet & Higher Education, 1716-28. Arbaugh, J. B., Bangert, A., & Cleveland-Innes, M. (2010). Subject matter effects and the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework: An exploratory study. Internet & Higher Education, 13(1/2), 37-44. Garrison, D., & Arbaugh, J. B. (2007). Researching the community of inquiry framework: Review, issues, and future directions. Internet & Higher Education, 10(3), 157-172. Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. Internet & Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. Shea, P., Sau Li, C., & Pickett, A. (2006). A study of teaching presence and student sense of learning community in fully online and web-enhanced college courses. Internet & Higher Education, 9(3), 175-190. The Art of Facilitating Asynchronous Discussion Boards Using the Four Course Model Richard Fuller (Robert Morris University, USA) This research based presentation will explore the instructor facilitated asynchronous discussion boards to discover what has worked in the four different types of courses identified. This qualitative research study interviewed twelve online faculty subjects and conducted a Delphi study with 30 additional key online instructor informants from 6 major universities. The research identified that there are four categories of courses: 1. Foundational courses, skills based courses analysis/synthesis courses and hybrid courses. Foundational courses are those courses that provide the basic professional or discipline based knowledge and skills such as anatomy courses where the information becomes the basis for other courses and practice within the profession. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 116 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support 2. Skills based courses are those courses that provide either mental or physical skills that need to be learned and applied such as Research, instructional design or Accounting for example. 3. Analysis/Synthesis courses are those that deal with professional issues that require dialogue and discussion to understand all sides of concepts and matters such as Issues classes or management that rely heavily on discussion to flesh out ideas. 4. Hybrid courses represent a combination of the other 3 types. Each course type has different goals and objectives and requires a different type of discussion board facilitation to achieve student learning success. The key focus of this research and presentation is how instructors foster interactions in discussion boards given the different online instructional situations and the four course model through discussion board facilitation. Based upon the objectives in each of the 4 course types, instructors can achieve positive student outcomes through discussion boards which can assist students to develop knowledge, skills and to explore the application of the online content, knowledge and skills. The presentation will address the following areas: 1. What are the 4 types of online courses (the 4 course model) being offered and what are the unique needs of each in establishing collaborative learning? 2. What are the different pedagogical approaches and goals that successful online instructors have taken in designing asynchronous discussion boards in the 4 course types? 3. How involved should the instructor get in the discussion boards of each of the four course types? 4. When should the instructor fully dialogue and provide feedback and when is instructor restraint a better option in facilitating dialogue and ideas? 5. How can the online instructor foster greater dialogue in courses that have not developed the interactive utopia and what has been learned to accomplish this? 6. How is the wording of discussion boards and the format important to meet the situational course needs, objectives and student outcomes? 7. When is the use of a synchronous chat necessary to provide clarity? 8. How often should synchronous options be incorporated into a predominantly asynchronous learning environment? Participants will explore their own courses and see how each of the four courses provide learning opportunities through instructor facilitation in the discussion boards to generate interaction between instructor and student and in student to student facilitated collaboration as well as interaction with different areas of the content. The participants will begin to explore through their own online course offerings and understand the differing dynamics and overall goals that are unique to the different types of courses they teach . For learning to occur in a predominantly asynchronous online course it is essential that appropriate online discussion board pedagogies be developed given the four course model. Through a review of the qualitative research methods employed, what the current literature says and the research findings this presentation will utilize PowerPoint graphics slides, online case study examples and open discussion throughout the Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 117 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support presentation to focus on the key findings and practical applications to participant online courses through an interactive presentation. Assessing Impact: Developing Quality Online Courses Andrea Adams (James Madison University, USA) Based on best practices and sound pedagogy, the Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) at a higher education institution in Virginia provides immersive programs, called "Institutes", for faculty to be competent with online course development. One outcome of this program is to help faculty develop quality online courses that challenge and engage students. During an Institute, faculty develop strategies for teaching and learning in an online environment, design learning activities, and select and apply appropriate instructional technologies that support the course objectives. To continually offer quality immersion programs like these and initiate new programs to address emerging needs in teaching with technologies, a sustainable assessment model is essential. This presentation describes how CIT uses an assessment model to measure learning outcomes of faculty after they participate in an institute and teach an online course. In previous institutes, the CIT only assessed the satisfaction and reflections of the faculty related to their participation. While anecdotal evidence is valuable, it does not provide evidence of faculty professional growth in online teaching. To better inform the CIT about the impact of these Institutes on faculty learning, the center now implements an assessment model adapted from Erwin's assessment cycle (1991). Based on the model, the iterations of assessment begin with specifying established Institute objectives and mapping Institute learning activities with the objectives. The objectives and institute activities, which are regularly updated based on the Quality Matters Rubric (Maryland Online, 2010; Maryland Online, 2013), allow the CIT Institute Assessment Team to develop assessment instruments with a selection, adaptation, and design process. In the first iteration, a pilot survey was sent to faculty who participated in prior Institutes. Results of this pilot study indicated the need to include diverse assessment methods and regularly update the survey. Through analysis of the pilot results and further adaptation, the CIT uses a set of redesigned instruments to collect data regarding the program objectives. After the data are analyzed and interpreted, results from the assessment cycle will be used to improve the programs and enhance faculty growth with evidence-based practice. This sustainable assessment model enables the center to report program effectiveness results to various stakeholders and provide foundation for continual program improvement. This presentation will be interactive and incorporate several opportunities to involve the audience in both reflection and discussion activities. In addition to sharing our experiences, participants will be invited to share their experiences and challenges related to assessment in faculty development opportunities for online learning. By attending this session, participants will take away key points that they can apply at their own institution. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 118 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Key procedures of immersion programs for faculty development for teaching online courses: The context introduction of this presentation will provide key procedures and components about the CIT's Institutes for Online Course Development. This will provide valuable takeaways for those who are new to these types of programs, and opportunities to critique and reflect for those who have experience in similar programs. Implementation of an Assessment Cycle-Interactive opportunities will allow for participants to identify the major components of planning and implementing an assessment cycle in the context of a faculty development program. The presenters will unveil details about the logistics and timeline involved in creating and implementing an assessment plan. Participants will leave the presentation with ideas about how they might begin at their own institutions. Value of Assessment: Conducting assessment of faculty learning outcomes can be challenging, however, the results are beneficial. An effective assessment cycle allows one to improve what has already been achieved and provides a mechanism to show results of program effectiveness. Various stakeholders can use the evidence of effectiveness when justifying resources spent on faculty development. Participants will discuss and reflect with presenters about their perspectives on the value of assessment. References: Erwin, T.D. (1991). Assessing student learning and development: a guide to the principles, goals, and methods of determining college outcomes. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. MarylandOnline. (2013). Quality Matters Rubric. Retrieved from http://www.qmprogram.org/files/QM_Standards_2011-2013.pdf. MarylandOnline. (2010). Quality Matters Rubric. Retrieved from http://www.qmprogram.org/ Business Communication Using Online Publisher Content or Open Education Resources: Impact on Faculty and Students Joseph Rosendale (Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA) Business Communication at Indiana University of PA (IUP), a required course in the business curriculum core, has recently been taught using a blended instruction model with publisher content with LMS-like functionality as the primary content provider for the online components or additional resources required. The presenters of this session have redesigned the course using Open Educational Resources (OERs) within the university supported learning management system, D2L in an attempt to offer a Blended Learning option for students choosing not to purchase the online publisher content. Since adopting Desire2Learn (D2L) as the supported LMS, IUP's functional support for Moodle, which was the primary LMS prior to D2L implementation, stopped and usage has started to switch toward D2L. However, as D2L usage increases, faculty members teaching the Business Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 119 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Communication course have been unable to integrate the digital publisher content into the LMS. Students and faculty are left with a fragmented teaching and learning experience beyond the Business Communication class. With all of their other classes potentially utilizing the university LMS (D2L, or in some cases Moodle) faculty and students need to visit multiple sites using multiple usernames and passwords foraAll of their material. In order to continue a blended approach to the course, but provide for a more cohesive experience for the students and instructor, a decision was made to use open education resources that can be integrated with the university-supported D2L LMS. An extensive search was conducted to identify potential OERs that supported the student learning outcomes for the course. The OERs went through a second round of screening to ensure their ability to work within the D2L environment to provide the cohesive experience desired. Research findings presented will be based on a multi-semester standardized test comparison from business communications classes utilizing either: 1. Online book-publisher content, or 2. Freeware-based Open Educational Resources. The challenges, opportunities, lessons learned and the impact & perspectives of the instructor and students will be presented. Goals: As a result of this session, participants will be able to… 1. Identify effective OER resources and where to locate them. 2. Embed and integrate OER resources into an existing Learning Management System such as D2L. 3. Provide students with strategies for success by giving detailed explanations of how to utilize the OER modules effectively. 4. Participate in a discussion of case-study data. 5. Gain an understanding of publisher vs. free-learning modules for business communications and the accompanying benefits / drawbacks of each. Interactive questions and answers will be encouraged from audience members throughout the session. The presenters will recommend best practices to ensure high-level student learning outcomes, while allowing for attendees to share their own experiences with similar course designs. Yikes! My Institution Adopted a LMS! Lea Gates (Florida State University, USA) Larger institutions have employed learning management systems for many years now, but what about the smaller institutions that are now jumping on the bandwagon? With online learning technology becoming ubiquitous, the initial fears and anxieties of learning a new technology can be overlooked. Faculty members need the proper training and support in the process of the adoption of the LMS. In this session, you will learn about the perceptions regarding usability Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 120 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support and support of instructors at a community college that recently adopted a LMS. The presentation is based on a study conducted this year to explore influential factors for the technology adoption. The survey questions are based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) originally developed by Bagozzi, Davis and Warshaw (1992) that focused on five factors: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Perceived Usefulness (value) Perceived Ease of Use (simplicity) Attitude toward Using (perceptions about using the technology) Behavioral Intention to Use (intent to use technology) Actual System Use (technology adoption) The results from this study should provide more insight about technology adoption for institutions recently adopting a learning management system. This research can serve as a basis for further exploration into the adoption of technology of smaller educational institutions with limited resources to facilitate technology use. Engaging the Techno-phobic Professor (Without Their Awareness) Amber Henry (Missouri Baptist University, USA Join us as we present an innovative approach for reducing faculty anxiety and reluctance to use technology. This exciting and unanticipated result was a byproduct of preparing for a NCATE (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education) review related to diversity. In an effort to bring cohesiveness to our full time and adjunct faculty spread over a large geographic area, a book study was developed and carefully deployed using Blackboard LMS (Learning Management System). Many of the faculty, seventy-five percent of whom fall into the fifty-five and above age bracket, demonstrated significant resistant to advances in technology. To our surprise, faculty members immediately engaged through discussions and resource sharing. This great breakthrough resulted in faculty becoming comfortable with a LMS while recognizing the value and importance of using a LMS to engage students. Keeping the importance of adult learning principles in mind, we will share design tips for success and pitfalls to avoid; along with faculty insights and results from a survey conducted at the conclusion of the book study. We are looking forward to your participation through sharing your memories of the evolution of classroom technology and its acceptance and interactive real- time quiz results. Throughout the presentation, you will be invited to design and develop a plan for your institution to cultivate collaboration while reducing anxiety and reluctance towards using technology. The New UGC: University-Generated Content Gigi Johnson (Maremel Institute, USA) UGC used to mean "User Generated Content," like videos of cats flushing toilets. The newer UGC has become University-Generated Content. In the move to flip and blend classrooms, universities have become multimedia producers. A course now can "take a village" to produce. Beyond wrestling with the Learning Management System rubrics and norms, the course designer and instructor need to understand video production, editing, animation and callouts, intellectual property clearances, subtitles, content management systems and metadata, and more. This Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 121 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Information Session will explore key questions as universities -- versus publishing companies -invest in this new multimedia content: • • • • • • • Who owns the compiled rights? Who measures and rewards the time involved of both faculty? What is the real cost to product these with hourly and non-exempt staff? Who validates the quality of the content and effectiveness of the production choices? What is the new economics of this video-enhanced course creation? Does it make sense to produce just for your own institution? What are the Buy-Build-Share decisions? Are MOOCs -- a "freemium" business model -- just the starting point of intriguing syndication models between universities? What is the lifecycle of this production content? How will these libraries be measured, refreshed and monitored? Should Universities be financing these just for their own use? Session Objectives and Expected Outcomes: The structure of the session will be a set of examples and challenges - with slides and web links to be available before and after on the Sloan-C website - faced by faculty and program designers in this increasingly video-driven environment. We'll look at several small case studies in our short time together, asking the questions of what to consider in your own Buy/Build/Share decisions on course creation, iteration, and planning. Participants will leave the session with: • • A framing of the instructional video economics and things to think about when building your own blended courses beyond "just a webcam." Considerations to discuss with your own course development teams on ongoing trends that could be pushing up both your costs and expectations. Is It Working? Assessing Hybrid Faculty Development and the Hybrid Classroom Andreas Brockhaus (University of Washington Bothell, USA) Carol Leppa (University of Washington Bothell, USA) Inspired by research that shows that hybrid (or blended) courses can produce better learning outcomes than traditional face-to-face classrooms or fully online courses, the University of Washington Bothell (UWB) developed an intensive Hybrid Course Development Institute (HCDI) to prepare faculty to teach hybrid courses. Initially ten-weeks long, the Institute is now six-weeks long and offered in a fully hybrid manner. There were few hybrid courses being offered at UWB when the HCDI started in 2010, but the number of courses being offered has steadily increased as more faculty complete the HCDI. We have focused our assessment efforts on three main areas. First, we have assessed the effectiveness of the HCDI. Faculty who participate in the HCDI fill out a pre- and post-survey rating their experience and expertise on a variety of hybrid teaching topics.. For instance, faculty are asked about their level of expertise with developing/building a hybrid class and assessing Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 122 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support online student work. By measuring self-perceptions, we are able to see changes in confidence with teaching hybrid courses. Although we appreciate when faculty exhibit greater confidence in their knowledge and skills after the Institute, it has been illuminating to see confidence occasionally go down. We attribute this to greater self-awareness about one's knowledge and skills (or lack thereof). Further, we have qualitatively evaluated the narrative comments for common themes or concerns. Because the structure of the Institute has changed from 10 weeks to 6 weeks, we've also compared the results between the two structures to look at the relative effectiveness of the current six-week structure. Our second strand of assessment involves looking at the hybrid format as taught by HCDI alums. Specifically, we are comparing student evaluations of courses previously taught in a face-to-face format with courses taught in a hybrid format using standard university and adapted hybrid course evaluation tools. We also interview the instructor teaching the class to enrich our qualitative data on best practices for hybrid teaching and to investigate how to improve the HCDI in the future. In the interview, we ask them about affordances and limitations of the hybrid format; how the HCDI prepared them for teaching hybrid and how it might have better prepared them; and we discuss one of their effective hybrid assignments that is then added to our hybrid assignment repository. We will be sharing these results and examples at the conference. Finally, because the University of Washington has no student evaluation forms specifically designed for hybrid learning, we are exploring ways to use a standard student evaluation form designed for face-to-face classes to capture assessment data that are pertinent to a hybrid-format class. In the past, we have surveyed a number of students in classes taught by HCDI alums, focusing in on the quantity and quality of interactions since we believe that effective communication and social presence can lead to better academic outcomes. As a next step, we are examining and testing current University student evaluation forms to identify existing questions which correlate with Community of Inquiry hybrid course evaluation questions, and identify question sets that allow assessment of the effectiveness in terms of student satisfaction with the hybrid format. During this session, we will provide an overview of the Hybrid Course Development Institute structure and the data we've collected on its effectiveness. A goal for session participants will be that they can identify some of the successes and challenges of the Institute as highlighted by the assessment data. We will also present the results of our efforts to determine how student evaluations can more effectively be used to evaluate hybrid courses. Another goal for participants is that they will find our assessment strategies useful for helping them assess hybrid courses at their own institutions. Finally, we would like to leverage the expertise in the audience by including a discussion on hybrid learning evaluation initiatives going on at other campuses and encourage sharing ideas and tools. Our tools will be available for participants. The Development and Implementation of an Online Faculty Peer Mentoring Program Roger Pao (New England College of Business and Finance, USA) Context: The New England College of Business and Finance is the only college accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges' Commission on Institutions of Higher Education that is fully online. Integration of new faculty into the college community is a priority Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 123 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support stated in the college's Strategic Plan. The college holds itself responsible for affording support for faculty members in their roles in the classroom and in their professional development, and the implementation of an online faculty peer-mentoring program is an essential part of these efforts. Problem: During recent growth in enrollment in 2010 and 2011, the college experienced an increase in adjunct faculty and identified the need to more formally integrate new full-time and adjunct faculty into the academic community. Approach: In January 2012, the college initiated an online faculty peer mentoring program. Under this program, a program chair or full-time faculty member guides new faculty through a combination of one-on-one training, class shadowing, and peer review and guidance. The online teaching environment offers a unique ability for class shadowing. New faculty members are enrolled in courses where they observe experienced faculty in their teaching and assessment practices prior to beginning their own teaching responsibilities in a course of their own. Ongoing meetings with Deans, Program Chairs, peer faculty, and the eLearning Team complement individual mentoring and provide new faculty with a holistic view of their roles, responsibilities and academic operations. In addition, faculty members have access to an online faculty community with shared documents and resources and an open forum conducive to peer discussion. In addition, the peer mentoring system has provided academic administration and faculty alike with the opportunity to convey the policies and procedures of the college as well as teaching. Description of Method of Presentation: While the initial focus of this 35-minute presentation will be on best practices in online faculty peer mentoring of new faculty as experienced at the New England College of Business and Finance, we definitely plan to fully engage the audience. We plan to have small groups, an interactive question and answer session, and audience contribution. Through these techniques, we will invite audience members to share their own experiences with the onboarding process for new online faculty members and online faculty peer mentoring, if any, and to think more profoundly about the ways in which they might engage new faculty members in the online context at their respective institutions. Materials: We plan to have a PowerPoint presentation and will provide hard copy or electronic copies of the PowerPoint presentation to anyone who would like a copy. TechHarmony: Matching Faculty with the Right Tools Heather Zamojski (Purdue University Calumet, USA) Description & Goal: Numerous studies have investigated the barriers to technology integration by higher education faculty. Consistently noted among the top barriers are "faculty members' lack of time, training, and interest" (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2007, p. 10]. The TechHarmony approach and Speed Dating model seek to overcome these barriers by using timeefficient methods of introducing faculty to potentially relevant technology tools and providing them with just-in-time instruction specific to their context and goals. The goal for this approach is to provide a safe and flexible method for encouraging faculty [especially resistant faculty) to give technology a chance. TechHarmony is an adaptation of the approach to online dating which emphasizes the role of instructional technologists as technology matchmakers. TechHarmony Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 124 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support encapsulates that perspective and is used to market the services of the Office of Instructional Technology (OIT]. "Technology Speed Dating" mimicks the Speed Dating approach used by today's singles. Participants travel around to different stations, each of which showcases a technology tool for 4 minutes. Within a half hour, participants are exposed to 7 different technology tools and can follow-up on those of interest. Originality: As the idea of technology matchmakers evolved into the "TechHarmony" approach, our brainstorming led to the ultimate creation of Technology Speed Dating. Using the online dating approach as a context and adapting the practice of "Speed Dating" for an entirely new setting has been a fun and creative venture. Scope & Results: The TechHarmony approach has been used to market the OIT for the past year. A brochure was distributed to all faculty, and the OIT website highlights our services within the TechHarmony context. Technology Speed Dating has been implemented with two cohorts of faculty participating in a semester-long faculty development program as well as at a school-level retreat. Informal feedback has been very positive and speed dating facilitators report faculty members following up on technologies highlighted in the session. In an evaluation of two programs which included a speed dating session, 94% of respondents [17/18) indicated the session was an effective way to introduce new technologies (one respondent was undecided]. Several participants also commented in an open-ended response that speed dating was their favorite part of the program. Transferability: The TechHarmony perspective and Technology Speed Dating could easily be implemented at any institution of higher education. One challenge with the Technology Speed Dating is that it requires several individual's efforts (1 person is needed for each technology showcased). While many institutions may not have enough staff to assist, we have found that other faculty members are very effective in this role and are typically eager to participate. Effectiveness: There is very little cost associated with TechHarmony and Technology Speed Dating. As noted above, the Speed Dating approach is people-intensive, but since each person only needs to prepare a 4 minute presentation, there is little preparation required and the timerequirement for each presenter is kept to a minimum. The minimal amount of time required makes it easier to find faculty and other technology-savy individuals who are willing to participate. Reference: National Center for Education Statistics [2007). Educational technology in teacher education programs for initial licensure. [NCES 2008-040). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. Online Math Course: Challenges for Math Students, Instructors, and Administrators Fitzroy Farquharson (Valencia College, USA) The flexibility, convenience and growing acceptance of online distance education is creating a new trend in how college students attend classes and earn their degrees. More and more students Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 125 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support are gravitating not just towards blended courses where they attend class lectures and participate in online learning activities, but are selecting to enroll in fully online course programs or courses where more than 80 percent of all content is delivered online, and there are typically no face-toface meetings with instructors. According figures from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Sloan Consortium, an advocacy group for online education, the number of students enrolled in at least one distance education course increased significantly between 2002 and 2007, from 1.1 million to 12.2 million--and the growth spurt doesn't seem to be slowing down. The study, "Going the Distance: Online Education in the United States, 2011," also reports that more than 6.1 million students took at least one online class during fall 2010” a 10.1 percent increase over the year before. In fact, by next year, ambient predicts that the number of students taking all of their classes online will increase to 3.55 million, while the number of students taking all of their courses in on-campus classrooms will drop to 5.14 million. This is definitely a paradigm shift in the way students are being and will continue to be educated in America. But, with countless studies showing success rates in online courses of only 50 per cent” as opposed to 70-to-75 percent for comparable face-to-face classes” isn't it time we asked ourselves some serious questions? Such as: Are students online ready? And, if not, what can we do to assure that students are ready to take an online course? This session will explore the rapid growth, prevalence, concerns, student demands, and solutions to the success rates of online math courses. During this session, participants will engage also in a discussion of factors that contribute to students not successfully completing an online course. The session also will explore the characteristics of a good online math student and strategies to improve online math course success. The session will explore the use of a Student Online Math Readiness Survey to determine the degree to which they possess attributes, skills and knowledge that contribute to success as online learners. And, in cases where students do not possess the attributes, skills and knowledge, the session will also explore what can be done to provide them with the necessary remediation/support in areas of deficiencies to promote effective online learning. The session will conclude with inputs from participants on what they are currently doing at their institution to make sure students are online ready. During the session, participants will be provided with a summary report on students' success rates, some comments by students about the web-based support program, along with other supporting materials. Quality Matters Standards for Competency-Based Courses: A Case Study and Future Prospects Ron Legon (The Quality Matters Program, USA) George Cooke (Broward College, USA) Yaping Gao (Broward College, USA) While Competency-Based education is not new, courses and programs are becoming more common, as colleges seek ways to accelerate students' advancement, place greater emphasis on applied knowledge, and control costs. Many institutions rely on the Quality Matters course design standards in developing online courses, and, predictably, they are exploring whether these Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 126 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support standards can guide the development of competency-based courses and programs. In this session, Broward College reports its development process for the creation of a complete online competency-based Computer Systems Specialist Associate in Science Program in Information Technology. The competency-based model developed by Broward and the stages of the course and program development process will be described, with an emphasis on Broward's use of the Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric as a guideline for course development. While the Broward team found that many of the QM standards were applicable to their competency-based model, the process uncovered standards that would not apply, particularly in addressing the instructor's role and student-to-student interaction. At the other end of the spectrum, they found that issues related to the unique aspects of assessment in competency-based courses were not addressed in the current QM Rubric.The Broward project has, in fact, set the stage for the fit/gap analysis that typically precedes the development of specialized QM design rubrics. The QM representative on the panel will discuss the implications of the Broward experience for the development of a version of the QM Higher Education Rubric focused on the issues in competency based courses. Audience input will be sought on issues that might arise from competency-based courses built on different assumptions than those reflected in the Broward model. The goals of the session are: 1. Provide attendees with an understanding of the competency-based course model used by Broward and other institutions, such as the Western Governors University. 2. Sensitize attendees to the ways in which competency-based courses differ from traditional online courses in format, organization, entrance requirements, and standards for student success, including unique ways to assess student learning outcomes. 3. Assess the usefulness of the QM Higher Education Rubric for the design of competencybased courses. 4. Launch the QM effort to produce a specialized rubric for competency-based courses, with attendee input. Information Overload! How to manage all the good stuff you’re learning at ALN! Bethany Bovard (The Sloan Consortium, USA) Explore different ways of capturing and managing key information from your conference experience, including the information in ALN social media streams. This session is a group collaborative exploration activity. Bring your ideas and be prepared to share. Take ALN Home With You! Cathy Arreguin (The Sloan Consortium, USA) Bethany Bovard (The Sloan Consortium, USA) Sandra Coswatte (The Sloan Consortium, USA) Zeren Eder (The Sloan Consortium, USA) Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 127 Track 1: Faculty and Professional Development & Support Recorded sessions, blog posts and Tweets - how to continue learning way into 2014. Things to do at the airport, next week, next month. Your suggestions are welcome. This session is a group collaborative exploration activity. Bring your ideas and be prepared to share. 2014 Sloan-C Institite Workshop Overview Bethany Bovard (The Sloan Consortium, USA) Sandra Coswatte (The Sloan Consortium, USA) Come learn all about the recently released catalog of offerings for 2014. New workshops and formats are discussed. Questions and comments welcome! Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 128 Track 2: K-12 Online Education Best in Track Award We Can Work Together: Managing Group Work Online for Collaboration, Assessment, and Life-Long Learning Skills Lujean Baab (Virginia Tech, USA) Introduction: While important, requiring students to collaborate on project based learning in small groups online impedes flexibility and raises issues of level of contribution, grading, etc. These projects are difficult to design, manage, and assess. Additionally, group work can arguably be the best response to those skeptical of distance learning because cheating and authentication of student contribution. This session offers strategies and practices to address the challenges of student collaboration and group work online and provides the results of over two years of implementing group projects in online education for K-12 teachers. The purpose is was to share proven techniques for the use of collaborative group work as an option for teaching online so as to address the issues of reduced student-student interaction, collaboration and group knowledge creation in online learning. Also, the research investigated the value of project-based, collaborative group work as a response to the challenge of academic integrity, verification of test-taker, and the potential for cheating on assessments in online learning. Background: Students choose online courses for convenience and flexibility and are often told that online students must be responsible for their own learning online. This can translate into a solitary learning experience consisting primarily of reading, responding to discussions and writing papers. We know that collaborative, project-based group work is an effective and desirable learning experience but managing online group work not only impedes flexibility but also raises questions of just how to accomplish this, which tools to use, and how to use them. This is in addition to the traditional challenges to group work such as how to assemble groups, determining individual levels of contribution, project management, and grading. While projectbased learning is desirable, challenges often deter its use in online courses. Successful projectbased learning is dependent upon well-designed instructional activities. To put this to the test, research-based strategies were employed to design a collaborative, projectbased assignment for groups of three to five students that accounted for 50% of the grade for an online teacher education course focused on the analysis of emerging technologies. Students used collaborative technology tools to complete a joint paper and presentation on an emerging technology and to teach one lesson on that emergence. Students reported their concerns and responded to discussions on the experience. They were also completed peer assessments and self-assessments of their contribution to the group project and the experience overall. A unique approach to grading not only the project but also the level and quality of participation was designed and implemented over two years in courses taught to over 40 graduate students in a teacher education program. Data Collection: Qualitative data was collected through student discussion and assignment submissions. In addition to assignment elements, team members submitted a peer-review of the contributions and attitudes of team members in a confidential submission to be compared with a self-evaluation. Students participated in discussions about the process and the assignment elements and could choose to do so anonymously. Discussions were conducted both in small Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 129 Track 2: K-12 Online Education groups and with the full class. Emails to the instructor were encouraged and utilized to comment on the project and process. Several web conference sessions were held and observations of those also contributed data. Two surveys were also utilized to collect data, one issued just after assignment was made and directions were reviewed and one after the completion of the project. The group work assignment was utilized in a graduate level teacher education course focusing on distance education and emerging technology. Student groups were assigned randomly and students could not change groups once assigned. In order for the group to function, roles and responsibilities must be determined. It is important that these were not assigned but negotiated by group members. Before starting group work, students were required to determine the role of each member within the group as defined in the assignment. Analysis and Results: Thematic analysis of qualitative data was categorized and analyzed in the areas student attitudes prior to, during, and after the activities, the concerns raised by students, evidence of response to or resolution of those concerns, changes in attitudes, perceived value of the activities, perceived value of the approach and design of activities and indications of perceived personal growth in skills and ability to work collaboratively online in the future. Results show students had high levels of anxiety over the concept of group activity based upon concerns about member contribution, ability to resolve conflicts, personal responsibility, time management and sharing of graded work. Member contribution was graded negatively not only for lack of participation but also for a level of participation that did not allow others to contribute equally. This was a difficult concept for many who preferred to take charge, do the work and not rely on others' to contribute. This indicated a lack of understanding of what it means to collaborate. There was also concern over the negotiation of roles and responsibilities. However, negotiation of resolution to conflicts required instructor intervention only three times over the period of this study. Results show attitudes and perceptions changed as students learned to work together, to support and prod each other to contribute and participate, and to view the outcome as jointly owned. Students were candid and honest in their evaluation of their participation as they knew other members would submit an evaluation of that participation as well. Most importantly, students indicated that the collaborative project-based approach was a valuable learning experience and that they felt better prepared for collaborative online work. Goals: Project-based learning allows students to develop and apply collaborative online learning skills for life-long learning. The goal of this session is to share strategies and design of this project-based small group collaborative assignment that was successful both in student achievement of learning objectives and in developing skills for online collaborative work. The design principles and assessment strategies utilized can be adopted for other courses K-12 online learning. Participants will obtain the details, research results and have the opportunity to discuss the process and collaborate to data from further practice and research. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 130 Track 2: K-12 Online Education You Don't Need to Be in Hollywood to Learn Video: An Exercise to Reinforce Learning Christian Rogers (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), USA) While many tools exist to help reinforce learning in a blended environment, one tool already sits in the hands of many students; mobile technology. They can do more than just text on their phones. They can use it to reinforce their own learning and teach their classmates as well. From iOS and Android apps, to services such as YouTube or Vimeo, it is now easier than ever to have students preplan, shoot, edit and upload their videos for others to see (and all from one device). During this session we will discuss research-based evidence on how teaching others can often enhance learning. We will then get practical and hands-on, walking you through the video production process from preplanning to final creation and output. When finished, you will know the tools and techniques to have your students create training videos that will enhance their learning and make it fun in the process. And you will realize you don't even need to be a Hollywood director to teach it! 20 Tech Tools for Teachers: Student Tested, Teacher Approved! Michele Gill (PLS 3rd Learning, USA) It can be a daunting task for teachers to find the time to stay current on all of the emerging technologies much less parse out the practical application for education. Beginners can see how other schools handle the challenge and be inspired to join the tech revolution themselves. They will have access to a reference guide and resource list along with presenter contact info so they can ask questions as needed. Today's learners are digital natives who connect to each other and to areas of interest via technology. Historically technology has been an external component of education, much like music, PE, art, or any number of other electives, however, technology is not a stand-alone elective to be trotted out weekly; it can and should be a part of the fabric of every student's educational experience. Participants in the session will: • • • Experience multiple collaborative online tools for audio, video, mind mapping, and more. Classify tools based on specific requirements (e.g., need for personal email, age, access). Examine examples and implementation samples from teachers and students. Where do we start? Mind mapping is a great entry point into online tech tools. Maps can be used by individuals or as collaborative tools for students and teachers: 1. Individual: bubbl.us 2. Collaborative: Coggle.it, Slatebox 3. Collaborative and Presentable: Popplet How technology is critical for success in secondary education and beyond. Collaborative tools will be essential in the workplace, school and even at home: Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 131 Track 2: K-12 Online Education 1. Google Docs 2. Oneeko 3. Social Media: Twitter With the ability to incorporate text, images, video, audio, and more… Collaborative boards provide a place for students to store, organize, and present online content: 1. Basic collaborative boards: Padlet, LinoIt 2. Presentable collaborative boards: Realtimeboard, Murally 3. Not your Ordinary Timelines: MyHistro, MeoGraph Audio and video tools used to only be available to those who could afford expensive camcorders, cameras and multi-media software packages. Not so anymore! Once-expensive technology has reached a tipping point and is now available to the masses, some even for free: 1. Audio: Voicethread,mp3cut, Vocaroo 2. Video: VyClone, WeVideo Resources for Participants: http://linkyy.com/techtoolsdoc - compilation of links to dozens of tools. Crowd-sourcing this Google Doc will ensure up-to-date resources for years to come. We Can Work Together: Managing Group Work Online for Collaboration, Assessment, and Life-Long Learning Skills Lujean Baab (Virginia Tech, USA) Introduction: While important, requiring students to collaborate on project based learning in small groups online impedes flexibility and raises issues of level of contribution, grading, etc. These projects are difficult to design, manage, and assess. Additionally, group work can arguably be the best response to those skeptical of distance learning because cheating and authentication of student contribution. This session offers strategies and practices to address the challenges of student collaboration and group work online and provides the results of over two years of implementing group projects in online education for K-12 teachers. The purpose is was to share proven techniques for the use of collaborative group work as an option for teaching online so as to address the issues of reduced student-student interaction, collaboration and group knowledge creation in online learning. Also, the research investigated the value of project-based, collaborative group work as a response to the challenge of academic integrity, verification of test-taker, and the potential for cheating on assessments in online learning. Background: Students choose online courses for convenience and flexibility and are often told that online students must be responsible for their own learning online. This can translate into a solitary learning experience consisting primarily of reading, responding to discussions and Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 132 Track 2: K-12 Online Education writing papers. We know that collaborative, project-based group work is an effective and desirable learning experience but managing online group work not only impedes flexibility but also raises questions of just how to accomplish this, which tools to use, and how to use them. This is in addition to the traditional challenges to group work such as how to assemble groups, determining individual levels of contribution, project management, and grading. While project-based learning is desirable, challenges often deter its use in online courses. Successful project-based learning is dependent upon well-designed instructional activities. To put this to the test, research-based strategies were employed to design a collaborative, projectbased assignment for groups of three to five students that accounted for 50% of the grade for an online teacher education course focused on the analysis of emerging technologies. Students used collaborative technology tools to complete a joint paper and presentation on an emerging technology and to teach one lesson on that emergence. Students reported their concerns and responded to discussions on the experience. They were also completed peer assessments and self-assessments of their contribution to the group project and the experience overall. A unique approach to grading not only the project but also the level and quality of participation was designed and implemented over two years in courses taught to over 40 graduate students in a teacher education program. Data Collection: Qualitative data was collected through student discussion and assignment submissions. In addition to assignment elements, team members submitted a peer-review of the contributions and attitudes of team members in a confidential submission to be compared with a self-evaluation. Students participated in discussions about the process and the assignment elements and could choose to do so anonymously. Discussions were conducted both in small groups and with the full class. Emails to the instructor were encouraged and utilized to comment on the project and process. Several web conference sessions were held and observations of those also contributed data. Two surveys were also utilized to collect data, one issued just after assignment was made and directions were reviewed and one after the completion of the project. The group work assignment was utilized in a graduate level teacher education course focusing on distance education and emerging technology. Student groups were assigned randomly and students could not change groups once assigned. In order for the group to function, roles and responsibilities must be determined. It is important that these were not assigned but negotiated by group members. Before starting group work, students were required to determine the role of each member within the group as defined in the assignment. Analysis and Results: Thematic analysis of qualitative data was categorized and analyzed in the areas student attitudes prior to, during, and after the activities, the concerns raised by students, evidence of response to or resolution of those concerns, changes in attitudes, perceived value of the activities, perceived value of the approach and design of activities and indications of perceived personal growth in skills and ability to work collaboratively online in the future. Results show students had high levels of anxiety over the concept of group activity based upon concerns about member contribution, ability to resolve conflicts, personal responsibility, time management and sharing of graded work. Member contribution was graded negatively not only for lack of participation but also for a level of participation that did not allow others to contribute equally. This was a difficult concept for many who preferred to take charge, do the work and not Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 133 Track 2: K-12 Online Education rely on others' to contribute. This indicated a lack of understanding of what it means to collaborate. There was also concern over the negotiation of roles and responsibilities. However, negotiation of resolution to conflicts required instructor intervention only three times over the period of this study. Results show attitudes and perceptions changed as students learned to work together, to support and prod each other to contribute and participate, and to view the outcome as jointly owned. Students were candid and honest in their evaluation of their participation, as they knew other members would submit an evaluation of that participation as well. Most importantly, students indicated that the collaborative project-based approach was a valuable learning experience and that they felt better prepared for collaborative online work. Goals: Project-based learning allows students to develop and apply collaborative online learning skills for life-long learning. The goal of this session is to share strategies and design of this project-based small group collaborative assignment that was successful both in student achievement of learning objectives and in developing skills for online collaborative work. The design principles and assessment strategies utilized can be adopted for other courses K-12 online learning. Participants will obtain the details, research results and have the opportunity to discuss the process and collaborate to data from further practice and research. Design Principles for Competency Based Components in a Blended Learning Model Emily Z. Rukobo (RMC Research, USA) Anushka Paul (RMC Research, USA) The Design Framework we are introducing, supports the ideals of online education and is closely aligned to the the Five Pillars of Quality conceptualized by Sloan-C. We will introduce the Bridgeport Public Schools (BPS) Online secondary pilot project which involves competency based components deployed in any Blended Learning model, as defined in Classifying K-12 Blended Learning. We will also share the RMC Design Principles for Personalized Learning Rubric, High School Core Components (HSCC) Framework,Open Educational Resources (OER) and Accessing the Professional Learning Community (PLC). Our model ensures that faculty work closely with students to help them achieve success in a Blended Learning model that focuses on faculty and student satisfaction with demonstrated success of personalized learning. The Professional Learning Community provides faculty with an opportunity to share experiences and learn from one and other. The use of OERs within the curriculum framework plans for a cost-effectiveness model that ensures sustainability while meeting institutional goals. Our Personalized Learning Rubric is used to design a program that helps institutions demonstrate that online learning outcomes meet or exceed institutional standards. This framework as a whole is designed so that it can be made available to any learner who wishes to learn in a Blended Learning environment to achieve success. HSCC Design and Implementation: A core component, as conceptualized by BPS Superintendent Paul Vallas, is an additional instructional resource to differentiate student learning of a specific topic or module within any course in real time through a blended learning model. Each of the four components (Competency Recovery, Reteach, Honors, Acceleration) Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 134 Track 2: K-12 Online Education will be explained through structured activities, using OER resources. The discussion section will provide participants with a mechanism to share ideas and best practices with each other. HSCC Evaluation: Participants will learn about appropriate evaluation tools for collecting data on student learning and experiences. We will also explain how participants should use that data to assess student learning growth and outcomes. Next Steps: We will use this time to introduce the role of the PLC which will be designed expressly for participants in this session and hosted on our RMC Center for Excellence & Innovation in Education platform. Participants will have access to free HSCC consultation through the platform until April. Goals: Participants will be able to…  Design components that support the four levels of Webb's Depth of Knowledge: (1) Recall; (2) Skill/concept; (3) Strategic thinking, and (4) Extended thinking- which support and differentiate instruction.  Implement components that involve 45 minutes to 2 hours or more of expanded learning time using blended learning during double-periods, study halls, or out of school.  Evaluate and analyze performance data to provide students with the right learning opportunities at the right time. Agenda:  We will introduce ourselves and the Bridgeport Public Schools Online project, Facilitators and Participant Introduction.  Project Overview  Session Goals and Objectives  Session learning outcomes  Resources to support the session learning outcomes  RMC Design Principles for Personalized Learning RubricHigh School Core Components  Open Source Resources  Accessing the PLCWorksheets and session activities which will be shared through the PLC High School Core Components: Design and Implementation: We will provide an overview of each of the four components. Through structured activities, using open source resources,we will guide participants as they design component plans within the High School Core Component Framework using the Design Principles of Personalized Learning Rubric. The discussion section will provide participants with a way to share ideas and best practices with each other.       Competency Recovery Sample Math component plan Activity to design a Math component plan Discussion Reteach Sample ELA component plan Activity to design an ELA component plan Discussion Honors Sample Science component plan Activity to design a Science component plan Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 135 Track 2: K-12 Online Education    Discussion Acceleration Sample Social Studies component plan Activity to design a Social Studies component plan Discussion High School Core Components: Evaluation: We will use this time to introduce participants to mechanisms for collecting data on student learning and experiences. We will also explain how data can be used to assess student learning growth and outcomes, and what participants should do with that data.  Data Collection  Data Analysis  Revising component plans to reflect feedback Conclusion and Next Steps: We will use this time to introduce the role of the PLC which will be designed expressly for participants in this session. This PLC will be hosted on our RMC Center for Excellence and Innovation in Education platform and participants will have access to free High School Core Components  Consultation from October to December  Professional Learning Community logistics  Sustainability and Scalability Questions that will be covered by each speaker: Emily Rukobo (speaker): 1. What are components and how do they relate to the high school core online? outcomes? 2. How does one design and implement the Competency Recovery and Honors Components? 3. How do you revise your component plan based on student feedback and overall course evaluation? 4. What is a professional learning community (PLC) and how can workshop participants use these communities to share their experiences and receive feedback? Anushka Paul (speaker): 1. Why are core components necessary to improve student outcomes? 2. What can participants take away from the session? 3. How does one design and implement the Reteach and Acceleration Components? 4. How does one evaluate the success of the component planning and delivery? 5. How does one create a sustainable and scalable model of introducing personalized learning? Audience, teachers or administrators who have been implementing online and blended learning in their classrooms or online course designers and evaluators will benefit from this session. This presentation will introduce high school core components in ELA, Science, Math, Social Studies. Activities will pertain to curriculum covered in grades 9-12; however the personalized learning model can be implemented in any grade past early childhood. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 136 Track 2: K-12 Online Education References: Staker, H. "Classifying K-12 Blended Learning - Innosight Institute." 2012. "The 5 Pillars | The Sloan Consortium." 2009. 6 May. 2013 Unlocking Gifts by Using the Keys of Technology Jessica Schneble (University of Wisconsin - Madison, USA) At the Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth (WCATY) middle school students have the opportunity to interact and learn through our blended education program in the Academy. Students collaborate with other middle school thinkers to push themselves for optimal growth. With a visually pleasing online environment, layers of activities for in-depth learners, peer-response activities, and web-based learning tools, the Academy encourages motivation. Students are encouraged to consider how they interact with the world around them through explorative questioning and other techniques. In this program, participants will explore the research-based tools that have been used to guide students to success through a blended program. Each stage from design to reflection will be explored and applied to use in a variety of K-12 environments. Some topics included are: • • • • Modes of Engagement - our solution to celebrate the variety of gifts and needs of our diverse population. Communication Strategies - our toolkit for cultivating the skills necessary to express and define one's self online. Thinking Strategies - means for refining existing skills and methods for cultivating new thinking styles. Reflections - the key to connecting each course to Common Core standards in reading, writing, and communication. Our agenda will include: • • • • • An overview of the Academy Our design process and the research upon which it is based Comparison and contrast of courses designed and taught with differing philosophies Student feedback The next steps Participants will work with real and relevant examples of student work and recorded interaction. Examples of successes as well as failures can help create a complete picture of using the blended education format to serve students in any population. While this presentation is based on data from the gifted population, the lessons learned can benefit any population in a K-12 educational setting. Users of all levels of experience are welcome to attend. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 137 Track 2: K-12 Online Education What's Happening in K-12: Trends in Blended and Online Learning Christopher Harrington (Bridges Virtual Education Services, USA) Thomas Ryan (eLearn Institute, USA) This session will focus on the various trends of blended and online learning that have recently emerged within the K-12 environment. Specifically, data will be drawn from leading research organizations (International Association for K-12 Online Learning and the Evergreen Education Group) and interpreted for attendees in a manner which clearly articulates the rapid growth of blended and online learning in public school districts across the United States. Additional discussion will also center on the highly-regarded work of the Innosight Institute regarding blended learning at the K-12 level. "The Rise of K-12 Blended Learning: Profiles of Emerging Models" (white paper written by Innosight Institute) will be referenced, while the Institute's more recent white paper, “Classifying K-12 Blended Learning" will be discussed in more depth. Two pioneers of blended and online learning who are cited by the Innosight Institute in the whitepaper will lead the session and engage attendees in exciting conversation as they give first-hand accounts of the philosophies, successes, and challenges of their blended and online learning programs. Dr. Christopher Harrington from the Quakertown Community School District (referenced in the Innosight Institute white paper) will provide an in-depth description of how the Pennsylvania school district offers students in grades 6-12 the option of taking one or more online courses. All students complete a cyber orientation course prior to enrollment. Courses are asynchronous and students can work on them any time during the day. QCSD has created "cyber lounges" where students can work on their online courses at school, but they are also free to complete the courses remotely if they prefer. The teachers-of-record for the courses are the online teachers, most of whom also teach face-toface courses for QCSD" (Staker & Horn, 2012, p. 14). Dr. Thomas Ryan from the Albuquerque Public Schools (also referenced in the Innosight Institute white paper) will discuss the progressive work at the Albuquerque eCADEMY, where students in grades 8-12 meet face-toface with teachers for their first course meeting at a brick-and mortar location. They can complete the rest of their coursework remotely, if they prefer, as long as they maintain at least a "C" grade point average in the program" (Staker & Horn, 2012, p. 15). Together, Dr. Harrington and Dr. Ryan will lead an interactive conversation with all attendees to discuss the implications of these blended and online learning trends and how the trends at the K12 level will impact higher education. Electronic versions of the session presentation will be made available for download to all attendees. Reference: Staker, H. & Horn, M. B. (2012). Classifying K-12 Blended Learning. Innosight Institute. Retrieved from http://www.innosightinstitute.org/media-room/publications/education-publ... Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 138 Track 2: K-12 Online Education Observing Teachers in the Cloud: High-Stakes Evaluation of Online Educators David Hamilton (Penn Yan Central School District, USA) With the collision of high-stakes evaluation and online learning the field has an urgent need to ask fundamental questions about the tools, process, and preparation necessary to reliably evaluate online teachers. Online learning has the potential to radically change learning and teaching at a time when the stakes are higher and the rhetoric more heated than perhaps any other time in education's history. Solving the evaluation issue requires answering fundamental questions about what quality online teaching and learning will look like, what methods we might use to know in an ever-changing context of technological change whether the core educational mission is being fulfilled for students, and making personal and professional shifts in our own perception and experiences as online learners. This session will be grounded in a 2013 concurrent mixed methods study which examined the applicability of New York State's recently amended observation and evaluation requirements to online teachers. Quantitative data was collected from experienced certified administrators including survey responses and ratings using the Danielson FFT rubric of an online high-school credit-recovery course taken by students in a rural upstate NY school district. Qualitative data were collected from a purposively selected maximum variation sample. A threestep quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods analysis was conducted. The overall analysis revealed a divide between online-centric and classroom-centric rubrics, methods, and administrator stance which accounted for both low inter-rater agreement and a wide variation in evaluator perceptions of the task. This study suggests that effective observations of online teachers will require online-centric rubrics, online-centric evaluation methods, and administrative evaluators with formal training in these rubrics and methods as well as personal experience as online students and teachers. With the rapid increase of online learning, further research is needed for educators and policy makers to understand the intersection of new high-stakes evaluation laws and the unique environment of technology-driven online learning. This study indicates that we are not prepared for what evaluation of online teaching will require and yet, despite this lack of preparation, online teaching is becoming a growing fact for students throughout the state and the nation. Perhaps with your help, we can work together to find a path forward for high-stakes online teacher evaluation. Join Dr. David Hamilton for an interactive session where attendees will help identify promising practices, methods, and policy issues necessary to ensure that high-stakes evaluations of online teachers are fair, accurate, and reflective of high-quality online instruction. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 139 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society Best in Track Award Three Institutions, Three Approaches, One Goal: Addressing Quality Assurance in Online Learning Marwin Britto (University of Saskatchewan, Canada) Jean-Marc Wise (The Florida State University, USA) Cristi Ford (University of the District of Columbia, USA) Background: As online student enrollment growth in higher ed. institutions around the world continues to increase and set new records, questions and concerns emerge regarding the scalability of quality in online environments. Institutions of all types, shapes and sizes grapple with the issue of quality assurance in online learning. Although there is no "one-size-fits-all" solution, institutions are employing a range of approaches to address this persistent issue with varying degrees of success. At this session, you will have the opportunity to learn how three distinctly different institutions have attempted to address this ongoing challenge of ensuring quality control in online learning environments. In particular, each of the three institutions will respond to these questions: 1. How does your institution define quality? 2. Who is responsible for quality assurance? 3. What model(s) or approaches do you use or plan to use? 4. What are your short-term and long-term goals? 5. What have been your successes? 6. What are some of your challenges? 7. What are some of the lessons learned? Toward the end of the session, we will compare and contrast these three approaches, and engage audience participants to comment and discuss the utility and limitations of each. In addition, audience participants will be invited to contribute to the session by sharing their own experiences, challenges and successes. This session will benefit individuals from a variety of institutional types and at differing stages of developing and implementing approaches to address issues of quality assurance in online learning. Organizational Considerations for Implementing or Maintaining a Social Media Presence Mark Hart (University of Florida, USA) Shalewa Noel-Thomas (University of Florida, USA As Facebook recently surpassed one billion users, many organizations are still weighing the potential benefits of social media usage, along with implementation challenges. Newer sites like Twitter, show great promise for connecting professionals around the world, but come with less research and examples to observe. Organizations considering these social media platforms, and others, need to balance the potential marketing and collaborative opportunities Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 140 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society with privacy and technical concerns. In shaping the decision to manage a social media platform, organizations must further consider the demand, resources required, intended functions, as well as which platform to invest their time and efforts. This presentation will highlight the culmination of research documenting a case of a large university-based, grant funded program that is considering social media implementation. In this presentation, attendees will have the opportunity to go behind the scenes and see the cumulative thoughts of fifteen distinguished leaders who serve as higher education administrators, professors, state employees, and community leaders as they outline their thoughts on the positive and negative aspects of social media implementation. These discussions highlight potential uses, applications for formal and informal learning, safeguards, and potential concerns for privacy. Using the diffusion of innovations model as a framework, the session will examine the elements of the social media tools themselves, and how they can be beneficial, or detrimental, in various environments. The decision making process, for the case study, will also be detailed so the comments made by the stakeholders can also be placed in the proper context for different work environments. A focused examination of different proposals of how to incorporate social media tools will allow attendees the opportunity to understand different examples of the process of implementation. Finally, an overview of the potential consumers, and their habits, of social media will better prepare organizations to provide their content in the most appealing and understood way. Ultimately, those who attend this session will be given an overview of social media implementation. This case study of higher education professionals will allow participants the opportunity to witness aspects of a robust discussion on the topic and explore perspectives previously not considered. In addition to the case study, other examples will be discussed in the presentation, to give more recent and further depth on situations, which have occurred during social media implementation. While the focus of the session will use Facebook and Twitter as primary examples, other and newer formats will also be discussed. Tangential topics, which were also discussed with the case's stakeholders, include viewing social media sites at work, as well as the role of the Smartphone in today's workplace. Finally, deep conversation on the role social media can play for organizations, whether just as a marketing tool, or as a real agent for formal and informal academic discussion will be covered. Disrupting From the Top, Innovating At the Margins: The University of Florida Goes Online Daniel McCoy (University of Florida, USA) In April of 2013, the Florida legislature bestowed the title of preeminence on the University of Florida and the Florida State University. With this prestigious distinction, the University of Florida was also afforded the opportunity to develop fully online baccalaureate degrees as the exclusive public institution in the state to do so. With a stroke of a pen, the Governor of Florida set forth in statute the imperative to foster two counter currents in the growth of the modern land grant institution. The preeminence distinction encumbered the fiscal commitment to the enhancement of the research status of the University, with $15 million set Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 141 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society aside to recruit renowned scholars and to develop the supporting institutional apparatuses they require in order to generate academic knowledge. Ostensibly, these resources are to be applied for the overall enhancement of institutional status with stated goal of achieving a "top 10" ranking among public, research universities. This same bill that bears the Governor's mark, also confers upon the University of Florida a mission to return to the spirit of its Morrill Act roots, and provide access to the rarefied intellectual engine of research through low cost, online four-year degrees. An additional $15 million was appropriated for the formation of an online institute with the same rigorous admissions requirements of the in-residence programs but with tuition set at 75% of the standard rate. In this single bill, the legislature committed equal resources to structural changes at the University that represent institutional and cultural shifts that are at once at odds and dependent on each other for success. The tension between the invigorated emphasis on research and the increased electronic access to curriculum, is perhaps a product of elite purveyors of specialized knowledge being put in the somewhat awkward position of providing instruction to a student population seeking practical knowledge and career advancement outside of the academy. Research faculty are generally most comfortable with teaching graduate students and advanced undergraduates who share an intrinsic interest in their field. The student population who would most benefit from an online degree are historically non-traditional students such as working adults: those who cannot afford to leave their jobs for four years to enjoy the student life on the University campus. Thus, these students are not likely to be enamored with a world-famous scholar of particle physics as much as they are appreciative of a well-structured course that has a transparent connection to their academic goals. This tension, between these structural countercurrents, will have an impact on how the University bureaucracy adapts to the fundamental disruption of distributed learning. This presentation will cover some the institutional challenges that the University of Florida will face as it attempts to adjust to meet its new mandate. Attendees will get sense of how the mandate came to be as a prerogative of the political leadership of the state government and University administration. Ongoing efforts within the University to adjust to technological disruption in education will be framed as the foundation on which the university can rise to the challenge. Participants will be given the chance to consider the possibilities for large public institutions to adapt to a rapidly evolving landscape in higher education. Academic Freedom in the Digital Age Frank McCluskey (American Public University System, USA) For a thousand years the university was a place where the physical classroom was the only space where certified instruction could take place. For many classes this meant the lecture was sole domain of the professor who worked alone. In this way the university professor was like an old time craftsman who produced a single product with no outside help or interference. But just as the industrial age made the production of physical goods a group effort, so the digital classroom creates a new opportunity where a number of people can help design and assess a college class. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 142 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society What does this mean for the academic freedom of the college professor? How important is the privacy of the lecturer and how can this be reconciled with new digital technologies? How has this threatened faculty governance in traditional universities? This paper will address these issues using examples from contemporary universities from around the world. There's No Place Like Home: Enhancing Educational Access by Discovering and Leveraging Existing Online Learning Data Thomas Cavanagh (University of Central Florida, USA) Overview: The University of Central Florida (UCF) is one of the fastest-growing universities in the country, currently ranked as the second-largest institution in the nation. This growth has placed enormous pressures on the academic delivery infrastructure and online learning is a key strategy to meet student demand. While design/creation of online courses is managed centrally, actual scheduling/delivery is the responsibility of individual colleges and departments. What this structure creates is a potential scenario where the development/delivery of online courses may "outrun" a college's strategic planning at the program level. When courses are developed individually to meet student growth demands, over time, colleges may create de facto online programs, albeit undeclared or possibly even unbeknownst to administrators ("shadow programs"). These programs may already be 100% online or very close to that 100% threshold. To manage oversight and reporting of online course activity, UCF developed a proprietary Executive Information System (EIS). The system was constructed using open-source mySQL. The EIS tracks and reports a plethora of data about online learning at UCF including demographics, growth by modality/college/campus, faculty development records, and historical course offering schedules. However, when asked to report on available online programs, the Center for Distributed Learning (CDL) used to resort to manual analysis to provide required information to state governing and regional accreditation bodies. Therefore, a development initiative was implemented to programmatically mine the EIS data to identify critical paths through degree programs to determine online percentages. This new data analysis capability has become a key strategic tool in the university's strategic planning, reporting, and accreditation compliance. Learning Objectives: Attendees will learn… • • • How online course development can "outrun" online program development and how a large institution (UCF) manages this issue through the advanced application of open source technologies The methodology used to programmatically mine a mySQL database to identify programs either online or close to being online How the resultant data analysis can be applied to provide additional access for students The presentation format will permit the use of potential system demonstration, as well as text and images, to provide a complete story, while offering interaction between both attendees and the presenters and between the attendees themselves. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 143 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society Relevance: UCF's experience is not unique, especially as online learning continues to grow at a double digit rate nationwide. In fact the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools' reporting guidelines are designed to reflect the challenge of keeping track of online course delivery in an extremely dynamic, rapidly growing environment. UCF's experience managing the oversight and reporting of these data has allowed the institution to develop an innovative methodology and open-source technology solution to be more proactive in identifying potentially online programs. This methodology and technological solution could be applied elsewhere for other institutions to address the same issue on their own campuses. Global Citizens Educating Future Global Citizens: Using Social Media for Environmental and Social Justice Linda Ralston (University of Utah, USA) Prior to the session beginning, attendees will receive a handout with a link to a Canvas website with all materials related to the session and instructions how to tweet questions for the Tweet Feed for the session. Questions will be addressed periodically during the session. If we do not respond to all questions during the session, we will tweet responses after the session. During the final five minutes of the session, we will encourage attendees to tweet their own ideas for learning activities to promote global citizenship. Additionally, participants will be encouraged to continue the dialogue after the session to share their own ideas and seek advice regarding their own efforts to design learning activities related to global citizenship. Session Agenda: Introduce the concept and need for global citizenship Tweet Question: 1. How many attendees currently teach a course on global citizenship? If yes, what is the grade level for whom the course is targeted? (Review the university initiative for international awareness.) 2. Do you have a core requirement requiring international awareness, global citizenship, or related values? Introduce the 2 courses: Global Citizen, and International Tourism. (Review the learning activities designed to fulfill the learning outcomes) Blogging: 1. The Clean Water Initiative 2. Responsible Travel & Fair Trade (Check out the links for free blog hosts for education) TweetChat: 1. Tweeting for Human Rights and World Peace 2. Involving guests in your Tweet Chats Pinterest: 1. Pinning for Endangered Species Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 144 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Infographics for education Climate Change Fair Trade Endangered Species Places Free web software for designing infographics TweetChat: Tweet your ideas for global citizenship learning activities. Overview: Education for global citizenship has received increased attention over the past decade but it is certainly not a new concept. Andrzejewski (1996) defined global citizenship as knowledge and skills for social and environmental justice. This resonates with the "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights" adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. Article 1 of this declaration stated that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." The globalization of the economy and the increasingly interconnected world has stressed the urgency for the education of students of all ages in preparation for a role in this new world. Study abroad programs have long embraced the concept by grounding education for global citizenship in a student's personal experience in an international community setting. Unfortunately, not all students can afford traveling aboard but this does not lessen the need for learning and engaging in activities that help forge an active global citizen. Core competencies in global citizenship have been adopted by educational institutions in United States, Canada, Great Britain, Norway, Ireland, and Slovenia are a few of the leaders in this effort. Oxfam and the Asia Society are just two of the non-profit, non-governmental organizations that have become active in supporting academic organizations with the distribution of resources to educate our future leaders and global citizens. The University of Utah has established the Upper Division International Course Requirement to ensure that each undergraduate student with a broad base of knowledge about global issues and about global perspectives in a comparative context. The purpose of the requirement is intended to introduce students to international frames of reference so that they may think critically about long-standing and newly emerging issues. Each course that is approved for the International designation must have as its primary focus an international, transnational, or comparative focus that includes a variety of perspectives. Further the courses must focus on cross-border phenomena (borders conceived in the broadest sense: language, cultural, economic, political, etc.) and on contemporary issues, or show how historical approaches are relevant to contemporary issues. This session will provide a case study as to how two courses fulfill these standards and incorporate the use of social media to empower the students to reach out to a broader community to educate others on these issues. The online Global Citizen course targets the general student body whereas the hybrid International Tourism course targets students studying in the parks, recreation and tourism industry. The Global Citizen course serves as a guide for international travelers and those desiring a career in the global marketplace. Students learn to make responsible choices when planning and engaging in travel experiences regardless of the purpose of the international trip. The course fosters ongoing connections that build understanding and Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 145 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society bridge culture differences, compassionate listening, conflict resolution and other skills necessary to promote cross-culture communication and responsible travel. The International Tourism course investigates current trends and issues in international tourism. The course utilizes the case study method to examine issues from the perspective of the international tourist, the business manager, host community members, and government officials. Global tourism is a dynamic phenomenon influenced by global events and the demand for tourism, therefore the topics may vary from year to year. This session we will highlight the resources available to support the topics of climate change, world peace, human rights, endangered species, intercultural respect, fair trade, sustainable and responsible travel, among others. Each example will illustrate how the students achieved the learning outcome through a variety of learning activities, such as, blogging for clean water in South Africa, pinning images to increase awareness of endangered species, tweet-chats to promote human rights, and "infographics" to advocate for fair trade practices and human rights. Participants will receive examples of assignment instructions, guidelines for student use of social media, and evaluation rubrics for the assignments. At the conclusion of this workshop, participants will able to: 1. Define global citizenship 2. Identify two new uses of social media for increasing awareness for global issues, such as, climate change, fair trade, and human rights 3. Identify 2 free online resources for designing infographics. 4. Describe the effectiveness of social media to actively engage students in global citizenship. MOOC's Can Be Our Friends! Eric Fredericksen (University of Rochester, USA) Andrew Wall (University of Rochester, USA) MOOC's have received a great deal of attention over the past year. While some faculty and administrators across the country have promoted this phenomenon as a new way to reach significant numbers of new students, many others have expressed concerns about the ability to teach so many students, and the challenges MOOCs have for academic freedom. The University of Rochester, a highly regarded research institution, has a long tradition and embrace for residential education. However, during the spring 2013 semester, the University of Rochester suddenly broke new ground and partnered with Coursera to offer MOOCs. Despite little experience, this initiative was also a catalyst for significant growth and development of new "traditional" online courses and programs. How did this happen? How did this research university with such a strong emphasis with on campus instruction, and very little experience with distance education make such a dramatic shift? Aren't MOOCs a competitive alternative to traditional online learning? And why would this institution so centered on the residential experience make such a bold move into online learning? Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 146 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society This presentation will share how this MOOC activity was a supportive catalyst for traditional online learning efforts. The presenters will ground the discussion with higher education organizational theory to reveal the rationale behind this situation. For many, the methods of decision making in colleges and universities seem to be a mystery. Are the choices rational or just the adoption of random options? How do administrators work, how do faculty work and how do they compare and contrast? The presenters will review theoretical concepts that will include organized anarchy, loosely couple systems, and professional bureaucracy. They will discuss these theories and how they were applied at the University of Rochester. They will guide this discussion of how Universities work and make decisions and help attendees consider the implications at their own campuses. The presentation will also share key findings from aResearch Study of the Coursera students in the MOOC courses offered by the University of Rochester. In just a couple months, online enrollment in the first four courses on Coursera exceeded 80,000 students. But, who are these Courserians? Where are they from? And what do they expect? The authors will present key demographic data about these students and review their analysis of this information and the implications for these type of "courses". The presenters will compare and contrast this with a study of the new online courses from the Warner School, the University of Rochester's Graduate School of Education. In the Spring 2013the Warner opened a new building on campus dedicated to the school. In the same semester, the Dean and the faculty embraced online education as a strategic initiative and moved with great expediency to create and offer online courses and programs. How is it possible for these potentially conflicting strategies to happen at the same time? The presenters will highlight what led to these moves and how they reconcile with each other. Compliance and Accreditation: Developing a Framework for Institutional Success Roberta Ross-Fisher (Western Governors University, USA) Compliance and Accreditation are processes that assure state and educational communities, as well as the public, that a college or university and its programs possess clearly defined and appropriate components; that it maintains processes and procedures that are conducive to candidate success; that it continuously evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of programs as well as administrative functions and services using input from a variety of sources; and that it makes data-driven programmatic and policy decisions. Given the importance of such an endeavor, it is essential that the institution have appropriate steps in place to ensure the highest level of success. Having participated in multiple successful state, regional and national accreditation and compliance processes, we have developed a framework that other institutions may find helpful when seeking initial or ongoing compliance and accreditation status. Western Governors University was the first online university to earn National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) accreditation for its Teachers College, and at its most recent site visit was awarded full ongoing accreditation with no areas for improvement Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 147 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society cited. In addition, the University in past years has held simultaneous accreditation by four different regional bodies and is currently seeking approval to operate in all 50 states and US territories. The University has a full-time Compliance and Accreditation department dedicated to such endeavors and will share important strategies and tips with participants that team members have found particularly helpful. This is intended to be an interactive session with active participant dialogue. As a result of attending this session, participants should be able to: 1. Compare and contrast compliance and accreditation. 2. Articulate various types of projects associated with compliance and accreditation work. 3. Generate a list of resources available in their institution when initiating preparation for a compliance or accreditation project. 4. Develop a framework for successful completion of a compliance or accreditation report, self-study, or site visit. This session will address the following questions: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • What is the difference between accreditation and compliance projects? What is the difference between an initial accreditation or compliance project, and one that is ongoing? What are annual reports, compliance audits, program approval applications, and SPA reports? How do we begin preparing for an accreditation or compliance project? What resources are available to help us prepare? What are essential roles that must be filled, and how do we know how many personnel will be needed? What is the role of our executive administrators? Should we hire outside consultants to help? What is a self-study and how do we go about writing one? How should we prepare for the evidence needed to demonstrate compliance to standards? How do we prepare for data needs? How should we involve faculty and staff in the process? What is the site visit and how should we prepare for one? What are some essential logistical details that cannot be overlooked? Who are the compliance and accreditation evaluators and what is their role? What happens after a site visit? What decisions can/should come from this process? Twenty Things You Should Know About Online Education but Might Not Brian Udermann (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, USA) Description: I serve as the Director of Online Education at my institution and recently realized how little I know about a variety of topics related to online education! Those topics include but are not limited to: Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 148 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society                    The percentage of students who drop online courses compared to face-to-face courses. Retention rates of students in online programs compared to face-to-face programs. If taking more online courses decreases time to graduation. Faculty perception related to learning outcomes for online and face-to-face courses. The number of academic leaders who believe online learning is vital to their institution's long-term strategy. The percentage of colleges and universities that offer fully online degree programs. The percentage of faculty who report their institution is pushing too much online education. If teaching strategies to improve learning are different for online compared to face-toface courses. If there really are courses that shouldn't be taught online. If students are more likely to cheat in online courses compared to face-to-face courses. The percentage of institutions that are currently offering MOOCS or report that they have a MOOC in the planning stages. The number of students that can effectively be taught in an online course. Overall enrollment statistics for higher education as well as enrollment statistics specific to online courses and programs. Employer perception of online education programs. Trends in faculty pessimism related to online education. The time and effort required to develop and teach online compared to face-to-face courses. Student satisfaction rates for online courses compared to face-to-face courses. Whether teaching more online courses decreases the need for faculty - as many believe to be the case. Academic achievement in online compared to face-to-face courses and programs. I think at times we get so wrapped up in our jobs that we sometimes forget to pay attention to the overall trends that are occurring in our field of work - online education. I've spent the last 6 months reading about and researching the various topics above and feel confident conference attendees will find this session informative and useful. Overall Goal: The overall goal for this session will be to share current research related to the topics I've described. I don't think I was alone in my limited knowledge in some of these areas. I think many individuals who work in the area of online education, whether they are faculty members, instructional designers or administrators would struggle to accurately respond to questions about the percentage of employers that perceive online programs to be legitimate, if research supports the idea that developing and teaching online courses is more time and work intensive, and if offering more online courses positively impacts time to graduation for students. The more we can intelligently respond to such questions, the greater proponents we can be for online education. Who Would Benefit from This Session? I think anyone who works in the area of online education, whether they are instructors, faculty support specialists, program directors or central administrators would benefit from this session. I also think the session would be of interest to Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 149 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society those who are new to online education as well as individuals who have years of experience in this field. What Participants Will Learn from This Session: Participants will be exposed to and learn about the current research related to the topics I've described. What Materials Will Be Provided to Participants: I will make my entire presentation available to conference participants. The presentation will include all of the research sources I used to discuss the various topics previously described. Format of Presentation: It is my goal that this session would be very engaging for attendees. My plan is to present this information in a test/quiz format. After asking either a true/false or multiple-choice question I will give the answer and a brief summary of the research to support the answer. I will also frequently solicit audience involvement on topics where there might be high levels of misinformation circulating on a given topic. I will try and have participants briefly work in small groups 3 or 4 times during the session to keep them engaged with each other. Why Session Will Be Unique, Valuable, and Engaging: I am confident conference attendees will be interested in this session and will find the quiz format unique and engaging. Far too often conference participants simply sit and listen to presenters share information, this can get to be dull and boring. I will also work hard to incorporate a fair amount of appropriate humor (e.g., pictures, videos, personal stories) into the presentation. I also feel confident attendees will find this information of value and will be able to use it when they return to their institutions. Online Learners: Shoppers, Swirlers, Stoppers, and Succeeders as a Function of Demographic Characteristics Wallace Boston (American Public University System, USA) Phil Ice (American Public University System, USA) The presenters of this session will share with participants the results of their longitudinal study whereby they:  Identified significant student demographic predictors among students who dis-enroll ("stoppers"), reenroll ("swirlers" and/or "shoppers"), and/or complete their online program of study ("succeeders")  Calculated variance among the significant predictors, and finally  Determined if the resulting predictors change over time--and if so, linked these predictors to personal, institutional, and/or circumstantial explanations. During the past decade, the convenience of online learning has afforded postsecondary students of all ages the opportunity to attend and complete online programs - especially to those students who have full and/or part-time employment, dependents, and those maintaining busy schedules. The benefits of taking online courses include flexibility, convenience, and cost-effective educational opportunities anywhere and anytime. Despite these well-known affordances, postsecondary institutions offering online courses are also fully aware of the challenges concomitant with this learning environment - most notably, student retention. Numerous studies have approached the retention, progression, and completion issue from a variety of angles Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 150 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society attempting to predict, classify, identify, and increase opportunities for students to reach their personal academic goals. Rather than repositioning and assuming a new angle, the authors of this study chose to fuse these well-established approaches toward providing a more comprehensive model to address student retention, progression, and completion. The Distance Education Leader: Critical Leadership Strategies for a Complex Environment Nancy Coleman (Boston University, USA) The rapidly evolving technological world in which as online educators live is not only affecting the way that education is delivered, but also the way that it is managed. Many institutions of higher learning are still stuck in an old administrative model in which the integration of technology, governance of distance education, virtual learners and associated support issues cause confusion and distress. This old view affects the institutional view of distance education and how leadership in this area is understood and defined. The leadership of distance education programs differs greatly from traditional educational leadership models, as the distance learning organization within a higher educational institution has a business model that is heavily reliant on emerging and evolving technology. This technology drives the innovation process, and demands that DE units move more quickly and be more entrepreneurial than a traditional academic administrative department. There is an added element of complexity in the distance learning model, which demands yet another type of leadership approach. Many units are moving from an independent model in which the online units operates at the edges of the academic enterprise and may report in through a continuing education or extension unit with little connection to the mainstream university; to a more integrated model which centralizes the DE services and helps maximize quality and university-wide standards. Leadership in distance education, as defined by Beaudoin, is "a set of attitudes and behaviors that create conditions for innovative change that enable individuals and organizations to share a vision and move in its direction, and that contribute to the management and operationalization of ideas." Distance education leaders are in an evolutionary position that oversees practices and has the potential to drive change throughout the organization. They must navigate faculty relationship development, technology concerns, customer issues in a 24/7 setting, legal, regulatory and other complex matters in a quickly moving dynamic environment. This complexity demands new sets of skills for the leader to be successful. Effective distance education leadership is critical in order to influence the future direction of the field (Beaudoin, 2004). In previous generations of DE, its success has largely depended on the role of technology and reaction of the faculty. However, with technology mediated learning moving into the mainstream and becoming a critical asset in many universities' strategic plans, understanding leadership issues in distance education and how leaders can successfully navigate the permanent whitewater of change is critical knowledge, and is the focus of this problem statement. Goals: 1. Share insights about leadership approaches for DE leader Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 151 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society 2. Provoke conversation and provide some answers about the role of leadership in a distance learning 3. Determine what type of leadership style is most appropriate for distance learning organizations? 4. Discuss how the complex environments of both technology and higher education factor into leadership success? Reference: Beaudoin, M. F. (2004). Distance education leadership: Appraising theory and advancing practice. In Reflections on research, faculty and leadership in distance education (ASF Series, Vol. 8, pp. 91-101). Oldenburg, Germany: Oldenburg University Press. Best Practices for Online Program Market Research and Marketing Marina Brauch (Northeastern University, USA) As student demand for online learning has grown, it has become a key component of many institutional strategies. These strategic goals impact the work and roles of faculty and staff across departments. To act effectively on institutional strategy, data-driven decision-making and collaboration across functions is vital. Market research plays a key role (or arguably should play a key role) in supporting new online program development decisions. Once senior leadership has made a go-to-market decision, these program feasibility assessments can help support staff in meeting enrollment targets to ensure a return on investment is realized. This information session will highlight how Northeastern University has developed a systematic market research process for understanding the potential of new online graduate programs, how various institutional stakeholders play a role in the program investment decisions, and how best to market these new programs upon approval. Key questions that this session will address include: • • • • • • • What institutional stakeholders are involved in new program development and deployment, and how are they connected? When an idea for a new online program surfaces, how can market research play an effective role in institutional decision-making to ensure a sustainable ROI? In considering a new online program, what metrics should be included in the market research to understand potential demand? What are effective research tools and sources to gather information on various supply/demand metrics? Once a new online program decision has been made, what are best practices in marketing to ensure enrollment targets are met? How is a marketing plan developed? How is the impact of particular marketing tactics measured? Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 152 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society Organizing for Online Distance Learning -- Preliminary Research on Comparative Models Jay Halfond (Boston University, USA) Over the course of this calendar year, I will be interviewing key leaders in an array of academic institutions on how their universities are structuring their efforts to design and deliver online, where responsibilities lie within the organizational structure, how these models developed and align with faculty culture and institutional priorities, and what challenges this has or is likely to create. My hypothesis going into this research is that universities do not have an obvious place or position within the organizational chart for where this responsibility should reside -- and that solutions tend to be based on unique circumstances and regard for particular individuals or units, and likely to be rife with compromises and potential controversies that could lead to tensions between centralized and decentralized authority within these schools. This conference session will allow me to share this work in progress and garner feedback on my tentative conclusions and institutional types that I will be formulating and evaluating. The goal of my research is to be able to share various models and their strengths and weaknesses -- to better inform the many universities that are exploring their own structures and means for mobilizing. By way of background, I am transitioning from dean of Boston University's Metropolitan College, which I oversaw for the past dozen years, to a full-time faculty role, by way of a sabbatical. During this sabbatical, one of my affiliations will be as the first Wiley Deltak Faculty Fellow, under whose auspices I will be conducting this independent research. At BU, I helped create and expand BU's distance learning capacity over more than a decade. We generate over forty million dollars of tuition revenue through online degree programs, on behalf of the university as a whole. Operational Excellence in Higher Education: A Lean Initiative Within Penn State's World Campus John Piccolo (Penn State University, USA) Why is Penn State World Campus implementing the Lean philosophy? Academic institutions in today's competitive environment must produce programs and services that deliver value to students while maintaining a positive Return on Investment (ROI). As higher education institutions move toward a business model and begin to take a closer look at the assets available, they quickly realize that only one - people - has the ability to appreciate in value over time. Developing our most valuable asset must be a key part of what we do as leaders. The challenge and core of leading any transformation is learning how to develop people through the very processes in which they work. In essence, we must empower everyone with the tools to improve not just themselves but also the work that they do every day. This is why employee development is the central philosophy and motivation behind the Operational Excellence in Higher Education program. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 153 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society What is Operational Excellence in Higher Education? The program is based on years of research, education in workforce development and experience. It is designed to utilize tools from the Toyota Production System (TPS) in a higher education environment. The process can also be referred to as "Lean." Lean allows us to map our current processes through the eyes of our students and/or customers (both internal and external), providing insight into our current systems, practices, and procedures. Operational Excellence in Higher Education provides the tools needed to help employees at all levels uncover areas where improved efficiencies can be realized by eliminating non-value added activities, thus reducing costs. This is a new way to view and improve the work we do in higher education, one that requires patience and an enlightened leadership team. For those organizations willing to take the journey, the process over time becomes part of the culture -- a culture that on a daily basis identifies and solves problems at every level and evolves to a world class organization. Examples where this process has been used at Penn State: The Operational Excellence in Higher Education Program is the first steps towards helping employees develop a problem identification and problem solving perspective. We are using projects to provide a real world understanding of how to apply Lean in a higher education environment. With that in mind, participants can be asked to map a complicated and cross-functional process. Mapping the process is a real eye-opener and becomes a valuable tool for future projects. For the purpose of this program, participants are encouraged to select problems from their map that they have the control and authority to improve (this becomes their detailed project which is tracked on an A3 problem solving form). We continue to improve the larger and more complicated projects associated with the Value Stream Map outside of the learning environment. For example, participants can be asked to map a complicated course approval process, but their A3 project will only be as big in scope as their authority and time allows for the program. Examples of former projects include… • • • • • • • • • • • • • • The Proctor Approval Process IT Project Prioritization Deferred Payment Process Advising and Learner Success Email Workflow iMBA Deposit Process Access Account Process Filing System in the Associate Vice President's Office Improving the Comings and Goings Process Improving the On-Boarding Process The Early Progress Report Communication Process Faculty Development Course Authoring Process The Award Letters and Thank You Notes Process Reporting a Video Learning Network Equipment Issue Campus Proctor Approval Process Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 154 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society • • • Improving the Main Phone Menu Course Approval Process Exam Deferment Process What are the preliminary results of this program? The participant's time spent in the program is paying dividends to their units as they begin to view their work with a Lean perspective. We are all busy, and it's easy to say we don't have time to participate in a program such as this, but as participants see the productivity and efficiency gains that can be made to their everyday work by using these basic Lean tools, they become believers. Though we are only six months into implementation, we are beginning to see impressive results, which include time saved, money saved, increased revenue, employee satisfaction, and most importantly, student satisfaction. On a 5 point scale the last class surveyed rated the program as follows: • • • On the question, "I would recommend this program to others working in higher education". On the statement, "This program was a good use of my time". On the statement, "I intend to use what I learned in this program immediately". * The length of time we have for our presentation will determine how much detail we provide on the projects as case studies. Enhancing On-Line Orientation Through the Use of Departmental Course Templates Mary McGlamery (Angelo State University, USA) Kim Livengood (Angelo State University, USA) Objectives:  To facilitate curriculum planning in online settings.  To assist students in navigating online courses and resources through predictable structure.  To meet the standards and criteria for Quality Matters and Best Practices Description of Content: Distance education can be quite daunting for students and faculty, particularly those who are new to the online learning and higher education environments. To compound this problem, courses within departments many times have multiple on-line designs, which can be quite confusing to users. On line learners can spend many hours at the beginning of each session learning an individual professor's approach and course format. In an on-line format, students may not realize which questions to ask to facilitate course progress. If they do not understand course structure, they may inadvertently miss content or assignments. In addition, professors with little prior on-line experience, who are assigned to develop courses, may be quite overwhelmed by the multiple options available. In an effort to minimize confusion and streamline the transition process, we created a template for use by all professors in the College of Education. The template was designed to aid students in navigating courses and instill some sense of continuity in all courses throughout their Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 155 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society programs. The template adheres to Quality Matters standards and Best Practices criteria. This template is currently implemented in all on-line courses within the College of Education. During this interactive session, presenters will discuss the surveyed benefits of template modules for students and faculty and present a foundation or guide for the creation of an effective template that meets Quality Matters standards. Further, the participants will be introduced to the process used in developing the template; the justification for the structure of the template; issues encountered (including academic freedom concerns) and lessons learned in both developing and implementing a template. Experiences and comments from participants will be solicited. Leveraging the Skepticism: Responding to Cultural Resistance of Distance Learning Via Strategic Efforts Peter Macedo (Virginia Tech, USA) Though over one-third of public university faculty have taught an online class, many readily acknowledge that there is still significant resistance to online courses by faculty and senior administrators (Association of Public and Land-grant Universities-Sloan National Commission on Online Learning, 2009). Additionally, 23 percent of academic leaders continue to believe the learning outcomes for online education are inferior to those of face-to-face instruction and only 30.2 percent of chief academic officers believe their faculty accept the legitimacy of online education (Sloan National Commission on Online Learning, 2013). This concept of inferiority is driven by questions regarding the quality of an online class. It is important not to dismiss these questions but instead see each as an opportunity to enact a sound solution that will strengthen and legitimize the learning experience for the students. It is through this that the skepticism of distance learning becomes a catalyst for the implementation of institutional best practices, quality assurance initiatives, and comprehensive faculty development. This presentation will describe how distance-learning efforts at Virginia Tech meet contentious issues head on to influence cultural change that benefits all aspects of online education. Many of the issues that cause some to question the validity of online education, are not unique to distance learning classes. However because of a cultural bias faculty are more apt to accept criticism of their online courses than their face-to-face classes. Faculty and administration are more willing to seek guidance and in some cases adhere to rules or expectations that are forced on them in an effort to "prove" that the online educational experience is legitimate. Distrust of the value of online courses allows for quality assurance measures to be more easily implemented. As a part the Provost Course Development program, faculty members designing online courses at Virginia Tech are required to adhere to quality standards based on the Quality Matters rubric. Additionally each class must undergo peer review process and be presented to departmental leadership for final approval. Implementing this quality assurance measure has met with little resistance and overall has led to improved quality for online courses. Faculty members that have participated in this process have stated that it has allowed them to improve their face-to-face courses as well. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 156 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society Course evaluation is key to ensuring quality. Traditionally classes are reviewed through an end of course evaluation allowing the students to share perceptions of the course as well as the instructor. Initially only available as a paper based document, online classes created a need for students to submit feedback digitally. In order to create a more actionable tool, Virginia Tech adapted the end of course evaluation to be delivered to students taking online classes in three phases over the course of the semester. The phased approach allowed for the collection of both formative and summative data. Proceeding in this fashion helps to ensure that student responses are representative of their opinions of key events while it is fresh in their minds. The data can then be reported to corresponding stakeholders enabling each group to resolve any identified issues in a timely fashion. The methods for survey revision and implementation may serve as a model for course evaluation regardless of delivery mode in garnering useful information about student perceptions of their learning experience. Institutions of higher education are an interesting operation in that many of the employees are not required to be formally educated for the duties of their jobs. In many cases, faculty members do not have any formal training in how to teach. Instead they are left to rely on mirroring the experiences that they had in the role of a student. For the case of an online instructor a statement is brought up time and again. "I need to learn how to teach online". Responding to a selfidentified need provides an opportunity to grow a level of trust and community that is not always present between faculty and support staff. It is a benefit that will strengthen the impact of any interactions that take place. Using targeted professional development workshops meant to enhance instructional strategies for instructors engaged in distance learning it is possible to improve teaching practices and the overall online course experience. During the process of building professional development opportunities, faculty developers at Virginia tech worked with administrators and faculty from across campus to identify specific needs. Using needs-based planning strategies, professional development opportunities have become more meaningful and relevant for participants. Through this process a community of eLearning faculty developed. This community has helped to improve distance learning instructional practices across many departments on campus and is driving the creation of new strategic goals for future consideration. When debating the inherent quality of online learning it is easy to avoid the conversation all together by pointing to the endless media comparison studies citing "no significant difference". It can be more effective however to address the issues boldly instead. This session will examine the process of leveraging the skepticism of online courses to guide campus wide initiatives, offer examples of quality assurance measures, and provide research-based strategies for improving faculty professional development. References: Association of Public and Land-grant Universities-Sloan National Commission on Online Learning (2009). Online Learning as a Strategic Asset. Retrieved November 4, 2009 http://www.sloanc.org/APLU_Reports Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 157 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society Sloan National Commission on Online Learning (2013). Changing course: Ten years of tracking online education in the United States. Babson Park, MA: Babson Survey Research Group. Got Leadership? IELOL Graduates Share Insights Into Development of Leadership in Online Learning (Panel Presentation) Andrea S. Jensen (Weber State University, USA) The Institute for Emerging Leadership in Online Learning (IELOL) is a blended-learning professional development program targeted to leaders in the field of online learning. This unique program, co-sponsored by the Sloan Consortium and Penn State, is comprised of two extended online sessions interspersed by two face-to-face experiences. The final result of participating in this leadership development program is the selection of an online leadership "project" that can be carried out at the individual participants' respective institutions. This panel presentation is led by four of last year's IELOL graduates. Join them for a discussion of the projects identified as a result of the IELOL program. They will address the selection and implementation of their projects, tools and skills acquired through the program that have assisted in the deployment of these projects, and leadership lessons learned in the IELOL program, in the deployment of their projects, and in their leadership roles at their respective institutions. The narratives will be interspersed with data collected about the leadership experience in IELOL from other participants to show what experiences were typical of those who participate in IELOL. The presenters will also answer questions about IELOL for those interested. Presenters will engage audience members throughout the presentation using polling and small group discussion. Project Descriptions: Michael Wilder: Evaluation of UNLV's Hybrid Learning Program Hybrid (or blended) learning is an instruction mode that provides some combination of face-toface and online instruction. To what degree instruction is divided between these two modes is often determined by each institution. Thoughtful consideration must be made regarding how this method of instruction is developed and delivered. Instructors and support staff need to be aware of institutional policies and procedures in order to be effective. This program evaluation examined the hybrid-learning program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in light of these issues. Katie Jacobson: Starting Online Courses at PLNU Point Loma Nazarene University is a small private nonprofit Christian college with a strong liberal arts tradition. On this faculty-governed campus there has been a great deal of reticence about compromising any part of this tradition or the residential Christian community by offering courses online. Due to changes in the landscape of higher education and at the direction of the Board of Trustees, PLNU has recently begun an online course initiative. Hear about how we are wooing and educating faculty, benefiting from established effective practices for online instruction, creating infrastructure for our online initiative, and reorganizing work teams to accommodate this new endeavor. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 158 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society Tamara Powell: Beyond Quality Matters: What Facilitates College Success (and Future Employment)? This project compares the instructional effectiveness of the Kennesaw State University (KSU) African and African Diaspora Studies (AADS) face-to-face minor with the AADS online minor. Outcomes measured will be critical thinking skills and the progression, retention, and graduation of students. Six faculty members, who are part of an interdisciplinary degree program in AADS, have designed and created the courses that make up the online minor. After consulting the latest research in how to design courses and programs that foster support for at-risk students, the online minor was designed with research-based elements that would: • • • • Support at-risk students throughout the program Implement program-level and course-level strategies to increase retention Design the program to foster movement toward graduation and gainful employment Prepare the student at every level in the program for successful performance in job application endeavors, and repeatedly link the program and course content to the demands of the job market so as to foster graduates who can successfully market themselves Students in the online and f2f version of the minor will be tracked for four years: throughout their time in the minor (two to three years) and one year after graduation. The researchers postulate that compared to KSU students in the AADS-f2f minor, the KSU AADS-online minors will show: • • • • Hypothesis 1: higher evaluations by outside reviewers on the critical thinking assignment Hypothesis 2: higher completion rates in the minor Hypothesis 3: higher graduation rates from KSU within four years Hypothesis 4: higher employment rates one-year post graduation Andrea Sandry Jensen: Strategic growth of online programs at Weber State University Weber State University (WSU) has a relatively long history of offering online courses. In the past 15 years, the number of online courses offered at the institution has consistently grown. It is now almost 20% of the total number of courses offered each semester. The institution paid faculty well for developing and teaching online courses, resulting in a variety of random courses. This works great for traditional students who appreciate an online class or two each semester to provide flexibility in their schedules. However, it does not address the online program needs of WSU's truly distant students. The selection of online courses offered at WSU is dependent on individual departments. However, there are other motivating factors that can be influenced by those controlling the dissemination of funds for overload teaching as well as student demand. The focus of this project is to strategically grow the online programs at Weber State University so truly distance students have more fully online degree program choices. The unique challenge of this project is coordinating the attention and efforts of all parties involved to move forward in a meaningful way. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 159 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society Change Factors Within a University System Adapting to Online Delivery David E. Stone (Southern Polytechnic State University, USA) Leadership within higher education faces many challenges as traditional universities seek to adapt to offering more online programs and courses. Challenges that administrators face include intellectual property policies, organizational culture, quality of programs, customer services for learners, technical support, pedagogical support, training, resource assessment, organizational structure and technology integration issues. (Albrecht & Bardsley, 1994; Brokoske, 2000; Laird, 2004; Freitas, 2005; Zawacki-Richter, 2005). While the need to change has become increasingly apparent, there are substantial barriers to implementation of online programs and courses within universities. Most studies to date have been focused on implementations at the department, program, or institutional level. However, implementation of online programs requires a broad range of support for learners and faculty. Some of these challenges identified in a 2008 study included: 1. Support staff needed for training and technical assistance 2. Adequate student services for distance education students 3. Operating and equipment budgets 4. Adequate administrative authority 5. Faculty acceptance 6. Adequate training and technical assistance 7. Organizational acceptance 8. Student acceptance (Lokken, 2009). When viewing organizations through an organizational development lens, the factors related to a strategic change in direction can be viewed as change resisting and change enabling factors. Identifying the key change resisting and enabling factors allows for a change agent to focus efforts in areas that support the strategic direction for the organization. Applying organizational change methodology to higher education provides insight into the factors that are contributing to organizational inertia with respect to online learning. A bounded case study was conducted during 2012 within a Southeastern State University System. The study was comprised of three phases: quantitative survey, structured interviews, and a qualitative phase. A survey based on the Burke-Litwin causal model of organizational performance and change was used for the quantitative survey. Each of the institutional distance education representatives (appointed by the institution's chief academic officer) as well as the university system appointed learning management system administrators (appointed by the chief academic officer), were invited to participate in the study. A second, structure interview phase was included due to a low participation in the survey. A third phase made use of verbatim transcripts to provide a rich view of senior administrator's perceptions of the university system's efforts in online learning. While there have been criticisms of studying the phenomenon of organizations as a whole, and the inherent generalizations, there is tremendous value for leadership when determining where to focus change efforts within the organization. Hofstead e. al has described efforts in the review of Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 160 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society organizational cultures as: We do not want to deny that organizational cultures are gestalts, wholes whose flavor can only be completely experienced by insiders and which demand empathy in order to be appreciated by outsiders. However, in a world of hardware and bottomline figures, a framework allowing one to describe the structure in these gestalts is an asset (Hofstede et. al 1990, p. 313)". The results of the study within the Southeastern State University System reveal that there was not sufficient data to determine if the university system had a transformational or transactional orientation. However, the interviews in the third phase of the study indicated that there was a transactional orientation, with a lack of a centrally driven mission, strategy, and leadership. Three change enabling factors were identified in the survey phase of the study: motivation to change, job/task requirements, and organizational culture supportive of change. The key change resisting factors were: 1. Change related systems 2. Emotional impact of change 3. Change mission and strategy. Other findings of the study included: A disconnect between the institutional distance education representatives and the learning management system administrators on four factors: 1. Flexibility of the business structure for change 2. Decision making across all levels of the business 3. Ease of change of work procedures. Each of the change resisting and change enabling factors were discussed with senior administrators in the third phase of the study. These administrators (each from different institutions within the university system) included a chief academic officer, chief information officer, as well as a teaching and learning center director. The value of this study for leaders of higher education is that it demonstrates a method by which change agents (external or internal to the institution) can approach change initiatives. The methodology used can inform future practitioners who seek to support the adaptation of higher education institutions in a changing environment. This particular case focuses on online learning as the phenomenon within higher education, but this methodology could be generalized for other changes driven by the external environment. Supporting Economic Development with an Accessible, Affordable, Quality 100% Online Masters in Applied Computer Science Adel Abunawass (University of West Georgia, USA) The Department of Computer Science at the University of West Georgia offers a 100% online professional Master of Science in Applied Computer Science program that is designed to provide individuals holding a bachelor degree in any discipline with applied knowledge and skills in Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 161 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society computer science and information technology that are integrated and delivered in a comprehensive and practical pedagogy that prepares them to enter the information technology job market upon graduation. This program has been in existence since 2002 (originally offered as a traditional face-to-face program), was transitioned to a fully online program in 2011, and utilizes a primarily asynchronous delivery format. While the main goal of the program is preparing individuals for careers in IT regardless of their prior undergraduate backgrounds has not changed since its inception, the transition to a 100% online offering mobilized a complete realignment of the program toward delivering a consistent and focused educational experience that would be both accessible to a wider population of potential students and exceptionally affordable, while not sacrificing academic quality. This realignment was driven not only by our own interest in enhancing the viability of the program through the potential for increased enrollment, but also as a result of… • • • Institutional, community, state, and national priorities and initiatives that are increasingly focusing on the role of higher education In particular, publicly supported institutions, in contributing to economic development, especially in the STEM disciplines Increasing demand for skilled information technology professionals. As a state-supported, regional comprehensive University, accessibility of education is paramount. In order to maximize the benefit of our program toward advancing economic development, we needed to make it as accessible as possible. From the outset, we had already designed the program to address the needs of individuals who do not have an undergraduate background in computer science and who seek to re-train and re-equip for a new or advanced career in information technology. Moving the program to 100% online with a primarily asynchronous delivery format further increased the accessibility of the program to be available to individuals regardless of their physical location or work schedules. Finally, we adopted a holistic application review process for admission to the program where various factors, including professional recommendations and prior work experience, are more heavily factored into admission decisions. In doing so, we have made the program more accessible to students who may not necessarily perform well on standardized tests or who, for whatever reason, did not perform highly in their undergraduate studies. It has thus far been our experience that students who perform well in the first two courses of their first semester and who remain committed to the program are likely to complete the program successfully regardless of their undergraduate backgrounds and/or performance on tests such as the GRE. Affordability has also been key in our effort to make the program as accessible as possible. Through innovative tuition policy designed to promote distance education, we were able to establish a tuition structure for the program that is only slightly higher than the base in-state resident graduate tuition rate and that is the same for all students regardless of the actual residence of the student. This makes the program exceptionally affordable when compared to the cost of graduate education using a traditional two-tiered model where out-of-state tuition is significantly higher than in-state tuition. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 162 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society To maintain quality in the program, we have focused on providing both exceptional instruction as well as student support. The curriculum itself is specifically focused on preparing students to enter software development careers upon graduation by integrating core software design and programming concepts with medium- to large-scale collaborative group project experiences. Tenure-track faculty, all of whom hold a Ph.D. in computer science or a closely related area, are responsible for the development and delivery of all courses in the program. These are the same faculty who are responsible for delivering an ABET-accredited Bachelor of Science in Computer Science program that is also offered by the department. To support students as well as the faculty, the department operates a robust peer-tutoring and support function, staffed by upper-level computer science students, that provides specialized online assistance and support to students in the program. This tutoring support is offered at a variety of times, including nights and weekends, to accommodate various student schedules and needs. Finally, to promote students' sense of community, engagement, and retention, the program is structured around a yearly cohort matriculation model where the students begin and progress through the program (six semesters) taking the same classes as a group. Our goals for this presentation are to share our approach and experience in designing, delivering, and supporting an affordable, accessible, and high quality 100% online professional Master of Science in Applied Computer Science that supports economic development in the region by preparing students to seek employment in the high-demand information technology job market. We seek input and feedback from session participants on our ideas and practices, and will provide opportunities for participants to share their own experience and suggestions. Curricular Leadership Through Online Curriculum Network Governance Pam Carter (Northcentral University, USA) In the universe of online education, the processes of curriculum development and the people involved in those processes can vary on multiple scales. Curriculum development can be highly centralized or decentralized, with few or large numbers of people involved in the development of a single course or program. However, in all cases a network of people - who may have differing values and priorities - are involved in the design, creation, and approval of curricula. The composition of this curriculum network, along with the characteristics of the network's curriculum development work processes, is likely to have an effect on important curriculum development outcomes. The question addressed in this research is "How can curriculum network governance significantly influence curriculum development outcomes?" Curriculum network governance includes how curriculum development responsibilities are divided among network participants, the structures employed to coordinate curriculum development activities, and where decision-making control resides in the network. Drawing from the curriculum design, learning theory, and network governance literature domains, a theory is developed that relates the: 1. Size and diversity of a curriculum network 2. Decentralization of the network's curriculum development processes 3. Type of governance structures employed to coordinate the work of the network Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 163 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society 4. Outcomes of the curriculum development effort. A major conclusion drawn in the research is that effective curricular leadership must include purposeful governance of the curriculum network. Practical applications of the theory will be highlighted, including implications for highly diverse curriculum development teams and the outsourcing of curriculum development to adjunct faculty or third party developers. Suggestions for future research in this under-researched area will also be addressed. Throughout the session, participants will interactively explore the theoretical framework and engage in a very brief, research-based case study through partner exercises and small group moments. Handouts will include the framework, case study, and accompanying reflection questions to prompt participants' application of session concepts to their own online education environments. By the end of the session, participants will be able to recognize various models of online curriculum development, define and identify curriculum network governance structures, and assess the potential influence of curriculum network governance strategies in their own curriculum development work. This session is ideal for anyone who currently is, or wants to be, involved in online curriculum development. Building a Circular Bridge: Innovative Approaches to Forming Instructional Development Teams Karla Jones (Harrison College, USA) In spring 2002, Harrison College began offering online courses in response to social change and the evolving student expectations for higher education. By fall 2004, fully online programs were available. Harrison College continues moving forward by maximizing course development opportunities. Spring 2013 revealed the beginning of a successful new course development process. This success, documented by the on-time completion of a course development timeline, outperformed the completion rate of the preceding quarters. The session’s primary focus is on employing a circular model for online course development that incorporates other teams not formerly included in the process. You will examine how to restructure course development teams. Restructuring the team brings together and bridges gaps within the: • • • • Administration Faculty Librarian team Instructional development (ID) team Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 164 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society Lujiazui Circular Pedestrian Bridge, China The session’s secondary focus recognizes the value of each team member. Harrison College’s philosophy is that all employees are respected leaders who bring talent, strengths, and abilities to the process independent of a role or title. In a traditional or linear course development process, subject matter experts (SMEs) are the giants of information on whose shoulders the whole team stands. Harrison College employs a different model that increases both the efficiency of course development, as well as, the quality. The “wisdom of crowds” (Surowiecki, 2005) recognizes that knowledge is accurately drawn from groups of individuals each bringing unique perspectives. During this session, you will discover tools to: • • • Re-examine the groups involved in the instructional development process Build constructive processes that bridge groups Redesign current course development processes Innovation Question: Does your course development process include IDs and SMEs? Does it also involve registrars, curriculum committees, national deans, and librarians to name a few? Innovative approaches employ new methods rather than improving existing ones. Build constructive processes that bridge groups rather than create gaps. One new method is by combining the librarian and ID teams under the same leadership umbrella. There are many benefits in this arrangement… 1. The umbrella leadership for the librarian and ID teams reduces competing agendas. Librarians, who are expert content gathers, are now part of the course development team. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 165 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society 2. Focusing on strengths and minimizing weaknesses was a key lesson learned in the process. We connected Harrison’s College’s concept of the “everybody is a leader” concept with the Strengths Finder 2.0 (Rath, 2007) assessment. 3. Additionally, shared leadership is encouraged throughout course development teams. At this level, shared leadership encourages shared ownership and results in team buy-in. 4. Finally, this method models diversity and reduces silos across the enterprise. Replicability: Combining teams is only one avenue for building a circular process… 1. We will also share how to re-examine the groups involved in the instructional development process. This may challenge the idea of when instructional development begins. The examination begins with the question – what is at the core? Harrison College’s approach to student learning is “career focused, success driven” - that is the core. Instructional development begins with a national dean who matches student interest and employer needs. 2. Next, revamped curriculum committees formed with faculty along with instructional development managers discuss proposed curriculum changes and textbook updates. How can you replicate the process without having all of the same elements? We will discuss this by diagramming key touch points in the course development and delivery timeline. Use this diagram to formulate your own circular course development plan. Impact: We have seen a huge impact from this process. In this session, we will share how the team has contributed to the positive morale of the organization. 1. Harrison College president, Jason Konesco, spread the word through his president’s blog. Faculty development facilitators have also collaborated with the development team. 2. Faculty is now sharing wisdom through discussion boards built for the course development team. 3. Finally, the internal business development group is utilizing the team to expand Harrison’s reach instead of contracting with outside instructional developers. Evidence: Picture this – a new staff, using new software, and developing courses on unfamiliar ground. Does it sound challenging? It was. Yet, all course development was completed prior to the beginning of the quarter. The former process saw courses still in development while deploying. Again, the process effectiveness was evidenced by on-time course development while incorporating: • • • • New instructional development staff New software (eLearning rapid development and project management tools) Learning management system (LMS) (unfamiliar to most) Previously undocumented processes We learned a few things along the way. First, the success of development teams is not solely dependent on time in a position. Second, teams must speak the same language. Next, identifying and implementing new quality touch points ensure product and development consistency. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 166 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society Process: This session will be highly interactive and attendees will leave with not only ideas on how to replicate the process, but also a diagram to map changes. A trailer will let attendees know about the twitter account, which will be set up prior to and monitored throughout the session. Attendees are encouraged to tweet questions during the session. This trailer will be posted before the conference. During the session, attendees will: 1. View a coming attractions trailer featuring the name of the session and the take-away(s) from the session. 2. Complete an opening poll. 3. View a presentation. 4. Use Twitter to post questions and tweet about the session. 5. Complete diagramming activities and report out as a group. (Virtual attendees are encouraged to access a screen sharing system such as Google Hangouts to complete this portion. Attendees will get a link for the hangout during the session.) NOTE: Please set up a Gmail account prior to the session. You must use a Google Gmail account to access the hangout. Best Practices to Manage Online and Blended Programs in Graduate School: The Adler School's Journey Sarah Fornero (Adler School of Professional Psyschology, USA) Depending on the culture of an institute, there are different strategies to launch and manage online and blended programs. The Adler School had an interesting journey in launching, managing and monitoring both the administration and academic side of the programs, where shared-governance, collaboration, quality control, and training were the key components in instilling the success and growth of the programs. In this session, participants will hear from the Chair of Department of Leadership and Public Service, Program Director, and the Director of Online: 1. How the Adler School moved from face-to-face to online and blended courses, and then finally online and blended programs 2. Strategic online retention plan and current practices 3. Quality control and assurance; and 4. The stages, challenges and successes inherent in moving to an online and blended format, which includes: administrative buy-in and the faculty approval process, selecting a model, developing training, partnering Adler Online with a specific academic department, and eventually piloting Quality Matters. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 167 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society Public Perceptions of Online Education in the United States Trevor Belcher (Ashford University, USA) Patricia Neely (Higher Learning Institute, USA) Online education has grown exponentially over the past 10 years (Waller, 2008; Allen & Seaman, 2011; Lytle, 2012). In 2009 some 5.6 million students reported being enrolled in at least one online course (Allen & Seaman, 2011), a number which continues to climb. E-learning is forecasted to be a $49.6 billion dollar industry by 2014 (Nagel, 2010). A number of studies have been conducted on the growth of online programs and the quality of instruction in online and distance education programs. Researchers have collected data from administrators, faculty, students, and hiring managers on their thoughts, experiences, and perceptions of online education (Adams & DeFleur, 2005; Adams & DeFleur 2006; Adams, DeFleur, & Heald, 2007; Carnevale, 2007). Faculty have expressed some apprehension concerning the growth of distance learning and the necessity to acquire new skills to teach online (Kolowich, 2012), but they also see the value that distance education programs can bring in staying competitive and maintaining student enrollment (Mills, Yanes, & Casebeer, 2009). More than half of university administrators see online education as equivalent to traditional teaching when it comes to achieving learning outcomes (Dykman & Davis, 2008). Students seem to be drawn to online education because of the flexibility and accessibility. Even with such overwhelming success and support as noted above, a review of the literature shows some administrators and faculty have voiced concerns of the quality of online education (Allen, Seaman, Lederman, & Jaschik, 2012). Perceptions have ranged from online education being slightly beneficial to the more negative view of online education being the equivalent of a false gold rush (Malone, 2011). Further, a 2011 Pew Foundation study reports that "just three-in-ten American adults (29%) say a course taken online provides an equal educational value to one taken in a classroom" (p. 3). A somewhat shocking number when we consider that three-quarters of the nation's institutions are offering some type of online courses (Pew Research Center, 2011). Given the rapid and expected continued growth of online education, we contend that there is a shift taking place with the public's perception becoming more accepting of online education. This is an important consideration for higher education institutions and leadership alike as we know ones subjective perception will indeed play a part in influencing behavior, including education related behavior such as school selection, enrollment, and retention. Comparatively, little research has been done around the general public's perception of online education. This presentation helps to address a gap in the literature and contributes to the body of knowledge by sharing our findings of a recent baseline research project on public perception of online education in 2013. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 168 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society References: Adams, J., & DeFleur, M. (2005). The acceptability of a doctoral degree earned online as a credential for obtaining a faculty position. The American Journal of Distance Education, 19(2), 71-85. Adams, J., & DeFleur, M. (2006). The acceptability of online degrees earned as a credential for obtaining employment. Communication Education, 55(1), 32-45. Adams, J., DeFleur, M., & Heald, G. (2007). The acceptability of a doctoral degree earned online as a credential for health professionals. Communication Education, 56(3), 292-307. Allen, I., & Seaman, J. (2007, October). Online nation: Five years of growth in online learning, 2007. Sloan Consortium. Allen, I., & Seaman, J. (2011, November). Going the distance: Online education in the United States, 2011. Sloan Consortium. Allen, I., Seaman, J., Lederman D., & Jaschik, S. (2012, June). Conflicted: Faculty and online education, 2012. The Babson Survey Research Group & Inside Higher Education. Carnevale, D. (2007). Employers often distrust online degrees: Some say they prefer job applicants who earned diplomas the old-fashioned way. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 53(18), A28. Dash, E. (2000). The virtual MBA: A work in progress. Business Week, 37(10), p. 96 Dolezalek, H. (2003). Online degrees. Training, 40(5), 26. Drago, W., Peltier, J., Hay, A., & Hodgkinson, M. (2005). Dispelling the myths of online education: Learning via the information superhighway. Management Research News, 28(6/7), 117. Dykman & Davis (2008). Teaching online is an exercise in continual incremental improvements. Presentation workshop Mira Costa College. Guendoo, L. (2007). Credibility challenges to online doctoral graduates seeking faculty positions: A community college perspective. Doctoral dissertation, Capella University, Jaschik, S. (2006, May 31). New approaches to faculty hiring. Inside Higher Education. Retrieved http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/05/31/hiring Kolowich, S. (2012, June 5). Who takes MOOCs? Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/05/early-demographic-data-hin... Lytle, R. (2012, College professors fearful of online education growth. U.S.News & World Report, 1. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1034718098?accountid=32521 Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 169 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society McClenney, K. (2013). No average student. The University of Texas at Austin Feature Story. Retrieved February 5, 2013 http://www.utexas.edu/features/2005/college/index.html Malone, K. (2010). The future of distance learning. Intelliworks - CRM for Higher Education. Retrieved from http://www.intelliworks.com/blog/ Mills, S.J., Yanes, M.J., & Casebeer, C.M. (2009). Perceptions of distance learning among faculty of college of education. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 5(1). Nagel, D. (2010). The future of E-learning is more growth. Campus Technology, Retrieved February 11, 2013 from http://campustechnology.com/articles/2010/03/03/the-future-of-elearning... Nagel, D. (2011). Online learning set for explosive growth as traditional classrooms decline. Campus Technology, Retrieved February 11, 2013 from http://campustechnology.com/articles/2011/01/26/online-learning-set-for-... Pew Research Center. (2011). The digital revolution and higher education. Retrieved February 17, 2013 from http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2011/08/online-learning.pdf U.S. Census (2012. Educational attainment. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov Waller, A. D. (2008). Perceptions of emotional intelligence preparation and industry expectations for utah state university MBA graduates. Utah State University). ProQuest Dissertations and Theses,, 159-n/a. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/304433141? accountid=32521 (304433141) Wyner, J. (2012, Oct. 14).Community Colleges for the student they actually have. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Yick, A. G., Patrick, P., & Costin, A. (2005). Navigating distance and traditional higher education: Online faculty experiences. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 6(2). Retrieved January 12, 2012, from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/235/853 Choose Your Own Adventure: Millenials and the Post-Traditional Credit Hour Sean Traigle (StraighterLine, USA) The Post-traditional student is coming to a school near you and they are coming with posttraditional learning experiences. They have credits by exam, classes provided by the office, MOOCs, badges from Mozilla, classes from organizations like StraighterLine. What does a credit hour represent in today's educational world? Is your own organization a credit importer or a credit exporter and what is the overall impact for higher education and for your institution? This presentation will look at prior learning assessment from both the perspective of the institution and the perspective of the student. Adult students in particular are coming to Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 170 Track 3: Leadership, Values and Society traditional institutions of higher learning with a strong learning background, if not a strong higher education background. They expect colleges and universities to honor learning that has taken place outside of traditional learning areas. We will look at how, or if, that changes the value of a degree and how it changes degree plans. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 171 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Best in Track Award Are We Who We Think We Are?: ePortfolios as a Tool for Curriculum Redesign Gail Matthews-DeNatale (Northeastern University, USA) Goals for Session Participants: (1) To identify ePortfolios as a rich source of data about student perceptions and program level learning outcomes; (2) To recognize the value of student ePortfolios for program assessment, development of program-level competencies, and program redesign; (3) To see a model for using ePortfolios in online program redesign; (4) To consider the opportunities for adapting this model for use within one's own institution. Overview: This Effective Practice focuses on the use of ePortfolios for formative assessment in the redesign of online degree programs. In 2011 Northeastern instituted an ePortfolio requirement for students enrolled in the University's Master of Education programs. Systematic review of student ePortfolios, as a collection, informed the 2012-13 Masters program redesign. This redesign included the articulation of program-level competencies, integrated program course map, shared foundational courses across four concentrations, and signature assignments for experiential learning within each of the program's courses. The redesigned program increases ePortfolio integration across the curriculum, supporting student metacognition, clarifying outcome expectations, and improving the capacity of students to demonstrate accomplishments. This model for program redesign process exemplifies the five pillars of effective practice because it : (1) Improves the pedagogical integrity, transparency, and linkages within the program (Learning Effectiveness); (2) Increases faculty understanding of the student population, involvement in curriculum redesign, and shared investment in student growth toward a common goal (Faculty Satisfaction); (3) Provides an integrated curriculum in which students can see how their learning is "adding up" and graduates have concrete evidence to showcase their accomplishments (Student Satisfaction); (4) Creates a viable system of evidence-gathering for the assessment of program impact, including program-level signature assignments (Scale); (5)Increases program capacity to support experiential learning and prior learning assessment (Access) Context: Northeastern's Graduate Programs in Education (GPE) include Masters-level concentrations in Learning and Instruction, Higher Education Administration, and Special Education, as well as an MAT licensure degree. In fall 2013 the Masters program will be expanded to include a concentration in Learning Design that focuses on mobile and online learning. Most of the concentrations are fully online, with some available in blended format, and about 500 students are enrolled in the programs. The GPE instituted a masters-wide ePortfolio requirement in 2011. Students were directed to include at least one artifact of work from each course in their ePortfolios. The ePortfolio template also included space for students to introduce themselves and articulate professional goals. Because both the faculty and students are virtual, ePortfolios also provide an important opportunity for faculty to learn about their students as individuals. Problem: Institutions, programs, and class cohorts are cultural entities. They are groups of people who, over time, develop a mythos about their identity and accomplishments, a shared narrative Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 172 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness that is often unspoken. This includes ingrained beliefs about students: their backgrounds, hopes for the future, the quality of their work, metacognition about what they have learned, and how they intend to use that learning in the future. These beliefs often interfere with faculty motivation and ability to articulate program level competencies, make informed decisions about the curriculum, and align signature assignments with desired program outcomes. Student ePortfolios provide evidence about who our students really are and the meaning they are making of our programs. When viewed as a collection, as a rich set of qualitative data, ePortfolios depict a community of learners. ePortfolio sampling makes it possible to spot patterns that are not readily apparent in enrollment statistics. They provide a unique view of existing program-level outcomes and illuminate avenues for program improvement. Approach: In summer 2012 a group of faculty at Northeastern University embarked upon the redesign of Master of Education degree programs. The MA program includes four concentrations (Learning and Instruction, Higher Education Administration, Special Education, and a new concentration in Learning Design that is under development) and an MAT for the licensure of people entering the field of K12 education. Faculty and Academic Administrators held a day-long retreat in August 2012 to kick off the program redesign process. Prior to the retreat the faculty member who serves as the programs' ePortfolio liaison conducted a preliminary analysis of all student ePortfolios; other faculty were each given a random subset of fifteen ePortfolios to review. The retreat began with a review and discussion about ePortfolio observations and surprises. Results: We anticipated that the process would help us base program revisions on patterns of need in student academic performance. We had no idea that the process would challenge our fundamental beliefs about who we are as a program. The ePortfolios provided a fine-grain view of student interests, motivations, and background that could not be discerned through statistical analysis of student data. With the exception of the MAT, Graduate Programs in Education are oriented toward mid-career professionals. But GPE ePortfolios revealed that many students were transitioning from one position into another business, becoming novices in a new profession. The ePortfolios also indicated that students were not approaching their program of study as a coherent learning experience, making cognitive connections between courses and non-academic experience, and integrating program accomplishments into their presentation of self as professionals. This analysis served as the driver for a process of program redesign, a series of intense and fruitful conversations about the purpose of each concentration, and our shared vision for all Masters-level graduates. The new curriculum weaves ePortfolios throughout the program, within the context of a newly formed required course sequence. The goal is to make competencies explicit and transparent, for both faculty and students, and to scaffold student learning through ongoing engagement with ePortfolio development. NOTE: Presentation attendees will receive a booklet of exemplars: ePortfolio samples, a schedule of questions for consideration in ePortfolio review, program- and concentration-level competencies, course map, ePortfolio template, and sample signature assignments. Northeastern University is a member of the FPISE-funded Connect to Learning (C2L) project, a consortium of twenty-three institutions dedicated to the use of ePortfolios for improving student Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 173 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness engagement, success, and retention. The program redesign process described in this proposal has benefited from the funding and collegial support of C2L project colleagues. Perks of Being a Wallflower in an Online Course: Engaged Without Engaging in Discussion Forums Angelique C. Hamane (Pepperdine University, USA) Research has shown that student engagement is linked to a variety of positive student outcomes, such as higher-order thinking, improved grades, and increased retention and graduation rates. Student engagement is the amount of time and effort a student puts forth in academically purposeful activities both in and out of the classroom. A big part of being engaged is the studentto-instructor and student-to-student interactions that occur in the classroom. Interactions can range from a slight head nod, a raised hand, or physically working on a group project. In a traditional face-to-face course, it is easy to determine whether a student is engaged by the subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, behaviors displayed in the classroom. In an online course, these behaviors are not readily apparent. The instructor and students are logged on at different times and situated at different locations. The only evidence of interaction typically occurs in the discussion forums where students write an initial response or reply to a previous post. But not all students feel comfortable posting on discussion boards, yet they benefit from reading student discussions. Through peripheral observations, students become acquainted with the online practice, behavior, and learning material from other members in the course. Research has shown that students who gradually become familiar with online customs will eventually become fully involved and participate more in the discussion forums; thus, increasing engagement levels. Administrators and educators have long understood the importance of student success and its relationship to student interaction and engagement. In this study, student success was determined by calculating students’ final percentage scores; total points earned divided by total points possible. Student interaction was measured by tracking the number of times a student viewed, posted, and replied to discussion forums in a Learning Management System (LMS). Student engagement was quantified by using Marcia Dixson’s (2010) Online Student Engagement Survey (OSES). This session explores the relationships between student success and student interactions as measured by an LMS, and between student success and students’ perceived level of engagement in an online course. Correlation and regression analyses suggest moderate to strong positive relationships. If you are an educator who teaches online or plans to teach online, this session is for you. By the end of this session, participants will be able to extract, analyze, and make sense of the vast amount of discussion forum data that is readily available on LMSs. Educators will learn how to use real-time data so that teaching methods can be modified to increase the likelihood of student success. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 174 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Learning Outcomes as Your Design GPS Linda Ralston (University of Utah, USA) Designing an effective online course begins with integrating learning outcomes throughout the course design. This workshop will provide a road map for seamlessly incorporating learning outcomes into the course design beginning with the design phase and continuing through the evaluation phase. The GPS we will use in this workshop is a course design model that has four phases: (1) Design, (2) Build, (3) Teach, and (4) Revise. The model aligns the learning outcomes with the course learning activities, facilitating the community of learners, technology assisted tools, and assessment. The model is a "backwards design" in the sense that it starts with identifying the desired learning outcomes first and then identifies the course components conducive to the attainment of these outcomes. This model also focuses on student-centered principles (Weimer, 2002) as well as integrative (Huber & Hutchings, 2004) and transformational learning (King, 2005). After an introduction, participants will actively engage among their peers according to age groups or subjects taught to complete a sequence of learning activities designed to allow participants to experience each phase of the course design model. The following learning outcomes will provide a framework for the workshop outline. At the conclusion of this workshop, participants will have: • • • • • • • • Draft a minimum of one learning outcome to focus on a desired destination. Demonstrated the application of Bloom's Digital Taxonomy incorporating active verbs to establish learning destinations. Identified a new source for course design inspiration. Identified two activities that can be adopted for their course to foster a community of learners. Designed an evaluation rubric for a minimum of one learning activity associated with their learning outcome. Identified how this process can be applied for a variety of learners and subjects. Evaluated a peer's learning outcome alignment/design matrix. Applied the backward course design model to a course they are developing or revitalizing. Design Step 1 - Identifying a new destination: The workshop will begin by challenging the participants to consider how they might design or redesign their approach to curriculum development, course design, and delivery to center around the needs and learning styles of their students? How might we re-energize or re-imagine the learning destination to engage and sustain our students? We begin with several brief illustrations from a variety of different subjects and level of learning to provide inspiration for the drafting of a learning outcome for a new or reengineered destination. Activity 1- Destination Targeting: Each member of the group will draft a new or revised learning outcome and share it with another member of their group. The group will utilize a learning outcome rubric to determine the effectiveness of the outcome. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 175 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Build Step 2 - Designing alternative routes: During this portion of the workshop we will challenge the participants to seek alternative learning activities. How might we deliver course content to focus on the needs of the students? We will propose strategies for design and development of learning activities/experiences (curriculum), learning communities (fostering collaboration), processes and tools (technology assisted strategies), and educational system strategies (accreditation or national standards). We will illustrate how these strategies might be realized and provide several resources for design inspiration. Before devising specific activities, we will challenge the participants to answer the following questions: • • How much do you want your learner to actually learn? How complex do you want their comprehension to be? How proficient should the learner be at the end of the course? (Design for how learners learn) Activity 2 - Building the Experience: Each group will brainstorm different learning activities for each of the learning outcomes identified in Step 1. The Alignment Matrix will be utilized as a roadmap for identifying the appropriate activities that are foster on 4 key characteristics: • • • • student-centered learning sound pedagogical practices facilitate a community of learners where students collaborate and assume responsibility for their own learning incorporating emerging technology tools/enhancements Revise Step 3 - Evaluating Destination Arrival: Selecting Assessments/Rubrics The participants will conclude by integrating the learning outcomes in the evaluation rubrics for the learning activities. It is essential that the students are made aware of the learning outcomes for the course and how these learning outcomes will be assessed during the evaluation of the assignments and quizzes/tests. Several sample rubrics will be provided to the appropriate groups, such as the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU) Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) Rubrics to Communicate Effective Assessment of General Education. Activity 3: Participants will design an evaluation rubric for a learning activity identified in step 2. Instructors typically evaluate learning outcomes through one or more graded items (i.e., assignments, discussions, projects, student presentations, papers, quizzes, exams, etc.). The use of a rubric allows the students to pre-evaluate their submissions and reinforce the learning outcomes. Guidelines for the development of rubrics will be reviewed. The process related to this evaluation element looks for evidence of different types of formative and summative assessment measures, a thoughtful and continuous improvement approach to assessment, as well as student opportunities for identifying areas for course improvement (American Association for Higher Education, 1991; Anderson & Elloumi (Eds), 2009; Sewell, Frith & Colvin, 2010). Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 176 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness After the workshop concludes, participants will be encouraged to utilize the Course Design process reviewed in this workshop to design a minimum of one learning outcome for a course, identify learning activities targeting the desired learning outcome and complete the Alignment Matrix. These will be posted on the Workshop Canvas Instructure course page where the session leaders and workshop participants will provide feedback and recommendations for improvement. This peer review exchange will be helpful to workshop participants to provide an alternative source of feedback to effectively measure the quality and organization of the course design, the engagement of the learning activities, and the sense of community. What the Learning Tendencies of New College Students Can Tell Us About Their Academic Achievement Jeffrey Hall (Ashford University, USA) This session will discuss utilization of the Let Me Learn Process, an advanced learning system, on the persistence of conditionally admitted, first-year college students at the University of South Florida. Through the facilitation of a 2-credit hour Strategic Learning course the summer before matriculation, students were instructed to develop personalized, metacognitive strategies in order to increase academic efficiency and success. The development of self-awareness as a learner is achieved through an in-depth examination of individual learning preferences. After one year of university matriculation, the learning patterns of individual students were compared with academic success as determined by first year GPA. The data revealed that students with certain learning pattern combinations were more successful than others. This has helped faculty at USF identify the learning profiles of students that are more likely to be successful and also for those who may be more at-risk. This research has been extended to a faculty member's work at Ashford University where a 5week online course built around Let Me Learn has been developed and utilized with adult students in a fully online learning environment. As of this writing, the course is still under development and is set to launch on September 3, 2013. Approximately 20,000 students per year will complete this curriculum. The goal is to develop the learning profile of an adult, online student and determine if certain combinations of learning patterns put some students at greater risk. Goals of Presentation:  Provide an overview of one institution's efforts to increase persistence rates of conditionally admitted, first-year students.  Discuss the foundational elements of the Let Me Learn Process, an advanced learning system.  Analyze the integration of Let Me Learn into a 2-credit hour Strategic Learning course.  Describe the benefits of utilizing an advanced learning system to teach college success strategies.  Share ideas for best practices for at-risk and first-year student success.  Compare persistence rates of students who completed Strategic Learning during the summer program a previous group who did not. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 177 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness  Discuss the implementation of Let Me Learn in a fully online environment with an adult population. Exploring Perceptions of Faculty and Students’ Use of Social Media in Higher Education: A Multiple Case Study Analysis Ghania Zgheib (George Mason University, USA) The use of social media or Web 2.0 tools has become widespread and has impacted the way people learn and interact with each other in general and in the classroom in particular. Faculty in the 2.0 era can no longer represent the only source of information (Siemens, 2005), rather they are more co-learners and co-designers surrounded by a 2.0 generation that have anywhere anytime access to information. Hence a closer look at how faculty are using the technological and pedagogical affordances of social media in their classroom is essential to inform best practices and design considerations. Several studies have been conducted on the use of social media tools in higher education contexts however they were limited to an individual course or tool (Heibergert & Loken, 2011; Kelm, 2011; Yang & Chang, 2012; Cain & Policastri, 2011; Oskoz & Elola, 2011; Churchill, 2009). These studies describe limited pedagogical practices of social media tools and do not present a framework or guidelines of how faculty can use different social media tools for different learning activities. This study examined faculty use of social media tools across five courses to examine how learning activities were supported. The specific research question was: How are faculty using social media in higher education to support learning activities? This study was conducted in a higher education institution in Northern Virginia. The institution is known for its innovation and has been selected as number one up and coming national universities in 2012. The participants were five faculty members who were purposefully selected because they are using social media in their courses. To find participants, the manager of the Wiki platform at that institution was contacted and asked for names of faculty members who are using social media in their teaching. Faculty from different disciplines were contacted to establish heterogeneity and to explore how social media is used across disciplines. However, the responses were few and three of the participants ended up being faculty members in the same college; two of which were co-teaching a course and using almost the same social media learning strategies, but each was also teaching another course individually. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzing learning activities as listed in courses syllabi. The participants were interviewed to explore how they use social media in their courses. Interviews consisted of open-ended questions which asked faculty to describe the tools that they use in their respective courses, the learning activities that their students are required to complete through the social software, their experiences teaching with and without social media, and their evaluation of their students' learning as a result of using social media. The interview asked eleven questions and one of them had three follow up questions. Learning activities as listed in the course syllabi were also examined to triangulate data collected from interviews and to gather exact details about course requirements. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 178 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Data from course syllabi that describe the specific learning activities that students are required to complete through social media was analyzed based on three conceptual frameworks, instructional design principles and online learning phases, key elements of pedagogy 2.0, and a framework for using social media to support self-regulated learning in Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) as proposed by Cigognini, Pettenati, and Edirisingha (2011), McLoughlin and Lee (2011), and Dabbagh and Kitsantas (2012) respectively. While Cigognini et al. and Dabbagh and Kitsantas present a hierarchical framework that faculty could use to help students become lifelong learners and make sense of the profuse knowledge that social media offers, McLoughlin and Lee present a non-linear framework that supports education in the Web 2.0 era. All three frameworks or diagrams highlight the affordances of social media that reflect the learning strategies that could be applied to an educational setting. Data from interviews were cross-tabulated with the main topics that were covered in my interviews: course titles, social media tools used, purpose for selecting these tools, description of learning activities, impact of social media on students' learning, professor's experience teaching with and without social media, and challenges. Each of the faculty responses were included based on the common themes creating a comparative cases analysis of their responses. Common themes and strands emerged as a result of this analysis. Results revealed that faculty mostly used Wikis, Twitter, and Blogs in their courses to support classroom discussions, share resources with their students, engage the students in collaborative activities. Furthermore, faculty perceived social media and the learning activities combined as important tools and strategies in (a) extending learning beyond the classroom, (b) triggering students to use new technology, (c) giving the students an opportunity to create personal learning environments, and most importantly (d) facilitating and enhancing students' learning. This presentation will introduce educators to the different ways that social media can be used in higher education based on best practices suggested by experienced faculty members. It also reveals students' perceptions about social media in an educational setting and what they think is effective learning. Faculty and students' perceptions show different and common perspectives on how social media can be used effectively to promote student learning. A Longitudinal Look At the Impact of Web Modalities on Students' Perceptions of Instruction Patsy Moskal (University of Central Florida, USA) This proposal reports on a Research Study that longitudinally examined the impact various Web modalities (fully online, blended, and lecture capture) have had on the end-of-course Student Perception of Instruction (SPoI). Few traditions in higher education evoke more controversy, ambivalence, criticism and, at the same time, support than SPoI. Results from these end-of-course survey instruments serve two main functions: they provide instructors with formative input for improving their teaching, and they serve as the basis for summative profiles of professors' effectiveness through the eyes of their students. In the academy, instructor evaluations also can play out in the high-stakes environments of tenure, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 179 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness promotion, and merit salary increases, making this information particularly important to the professional lives of faculty members. At the research level, the volume of the literature for student ratings impresses even the most casual observer with well over 2,000 studies referenced in the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) alone (Centra, 2003) and an untold number of additional studies published in educational, psychological, psychometric, and discipline-related journals. During recent decades, the emerging Internet has impacted students' evaluations of their instructors. This phenomenon is interacting with a generation of millennial students. For them, the Web, with its sharing, communicating, blogging, text messaging, Social Networking, group writing though wikis, and interactive social opportunities is a seamless and continuous communication medium. These developments present a learning model far different from one directional, teacher-to-student techniques that served as the prototype for most SPoI research of the past decades. Today's students experience education though online and blended courses as well as mobile devices, podcasts, chat rooms, and other instructional media. These educational technologies have implications for students and their instructors. One example of emerging issues is the website http://www.ratemyprofessors.com where students formed a worldwide community to share their perceptions about their instructors' teaching abilities. Further, they share their impressions on Social Networking tools, such as Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) or Twitter (http://www.twitter.com), or post videos of their instructors in the act of teaching on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com). On most campuses students rate their professors online rather than using the paper-and-pencil scantron sheets of old. Students respond, not only to their face-to-face courses, but evaluate any number of technology-mediated classes in which they might be involved. These emerging trends make it even more important to explore elements that underpin effective teaching in the eyes of students. In order to do this, the author and researchers at UCF explored the use of data-mining techniques to develop rule-based models that best predict what students consider excellent and poor teaching in the academy. A Faculty Concern Regarding Web Courses In 2010 the Faculty Senate at the University of Central Florida passed a resolution criticizing the SPoI instrument that had been in place for the past three decades. That resolution came from a majority of senators whose faculty constituencies expressed concern to them that the traditional items on the instruments were invalid or inappropriate for Web-based courses because of the modality mismatch. Faculty members argued that their student ratings were being adversely affected, thereby penalizing them for promotion, tenure and teaching awards. As a result, research was conducted on the existing form, as well as new "modality specific" forms in an effort to determine whether these new items could better capture the nuances of Web teaching. The current study examines over 1.5 million student perceptions of instruction (SPoI) forms over the course of the past 8 years, specifically looking at the impact of varied course modalities, increases in class size, and changes in both learning management system and SPoI forms on students' ratings of their instructors. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 180 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Data was examined using Classification and Regression Tree analysis incorporating course college, department, modality, and class size along with the SPoI elements and findings were consistent with the prior work of Moskal and Dziuban and others (Wang, Dziuban, Cook, & Moskal, 2009; Dziuban, & Moskal, 2011; Dziuban, Moskal, Kramer & Thompson, 2013). Elements that students perceive are indicative of "excellent" overall teaching were identified, and found to be independent of class mode or size. Results indicate that students have a clear view of what they perceive is good teaching' and translate this to whatever format the class takes. The Q&A discussion will center on these results and what faculty can do to help improve their SPoI ratings in their Web and F2F courses. References: Centra, J. A. (2003). Will teachers receive higher student evaluations by giving higher grades and less course work? Research in Higher Education, 44, 496-518. Dziuban, C., Moskal, P., Kramer, L., & Thompson, J. (2013). Student satisfaction with online learning in the presence of ambivalence: Looking for the will-o'-the-wisp. Internet and Higher Education, 17, 1-8. Dziuban, C. & Moskal P. (2011). A course is a course is a course: Factor invariance in student evaluation of online, blended, and face-to-face learning environments. Internet and Higher Education, 14, 236-241. Wang, M.C., Dziuban, C.D., Cook, I.J., Moskal, P.D. (2009). Dr. Fox Rocks: Using data-mining techniques to examine student ratings of instruction. M.C. Shelley, L.D. Yore, B. Hand, Eds. Quality Research in Literacy and Science Education: International Perspectives and Gold Standards, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 383-398. Simulating the Experience of Online Learning for a Student with Physical and/or Sensory Disabilities Lisa Webb (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA) Yin Kreher (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA) Teachers are responsible for selecting media and creating interactive opportunities for their students; however, the experiences of students with disabilities can be constrained by these instructional choices (Carnevale, 1999). In the transition from classroom-based to hybrid and/or fully-online modes of teaching, the accessibility-related tensions these choices create can be exacerbated. Many teachers may not have the lived experience of encountering inaccessibility in their own learning, experiences which might otherwise have sensitized them to issues of (in)equitable access for learners with disabilities. As a result, teachers routinely decide to deploy (in)accessible platforms (i.e., learning management systems), (in)accessible practices (e.g., (lack of) verbal descriptions of visual representations during recorded lectures), and (in)accessible content (e.g., (lack of) captioned video and transcripts). Whether these instructional choices are shaped by a lack of awareness of relevant adaptations ("I did not know that my course content Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 181 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness was unable to be recognized by screen-reader software"), by active denial ("There are not going to be many students with disabilities in my courses"), or by sheer indifference ("It is a student's responsibility to seek out accommodations"), it has become increasingly likely that teachers will be compelled to provide comparable access to online courses for students regardless of specific disability characteristics. The regulatory, economic, and moral arguments for enhancing accessibility in online learning environments continue to evolve, introducing additional responsibilities for institutions and individual teachers to navigate in this changing landscape. The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Guidelines from the Center for Applied Special Technology (2011) recommend that teachers provide multiple means of representation, action and expression, and engagement to help their students become resourceful, knowledgeable, strategic, goal-directed, purposeful, and motivated learners. UDL approaches are complementary to long-standing practices of providing accommodations for students with disabilities in that both perspectives attempt to ensure that educational experiences are comparable for all learners regardless of ability. While proponents of UDL adopt a broad, proactive, and emancipatory stance toward accessibility, the discourse around the "reasonableness" of particular accommodations, stemming from individualized assessments of students, is often a far more reactive, compliance-driven approach grounded in the physicality of classroom and campus spaces. To draw attention to the (in)accessibility of online courses, this proposed interactive session strives to meet the following objectives: (1) To simulate some of the typical challenges that students with physical and/or sensory disabilities encounter in online courses; (2) To present examples of teachers who, when reacting to the needs of students with disabilities enrolled in their courses, made accessibility-related modifications which had a positive impact on students' experiences; and (3) To demonstrate a suite of tools that teachers may use to proactively design more accessible courses. To address these objectives, session facilitators will introduce cases in which teachers have redesigned aspects of their online courses to align with UDL principles; examples include reactive changes with regard to access to video content and the use of Wimba/Collaborate within Blackboard. Participants will be exposed to a variety of existing and freely-available tools which could be used to gain a better understanding of how students with physical and/or sensory disabilities may be experiencing their online courses; selected tools may include ATbar (https://www.atbar.org/), WebAnywhere (http://webanywhere.cs.washington.edu/), WebbIE (http://www.webbie.org.uk/), Amara (http://www.amara.org/), and the UDL Curriculum Toolkit (Center for Applied Special Technology, 2011-2012). Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 182 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Transforming Social Presence Through Course Design: Authentic Implementation of Discussion Tools Richard Pierce (Shenandoah University, USA) This study investigated course design factors influencing social presence and the development of (ICT) self-efficacy. Instructional design factors that promoted authentic uses of threaded discussions as a vehicle to establish social presence, self-directed learning and cooperative learning resulted in 900 posts in a semester, when no posts were required. Authentic uses of the threaded discussion tool provided an important dimension to the socially constructed knowledge for students with lower (ICT) self-efficacy in an online class. Research on asynchronous threaded discussion structure and discussion protocols continues to inform instructional designers. Assuming the discussion post area is the equivalent of an online community commons; instructional designers should promote the authentic use of the discussion tool to address individual academic needs. Instructional designers that are aware of the factors influencing social presence in online courses may include in their course design allowances for organic adaptation and use of tools such as threaded discussions. Allowing for, but not requiring, interaction with the peers and faculty in an environment that features voluntary group discourse, web-based curricular content and artifact may promote socio-cognitive practices. This study suggests that instructional design that affords flexibility for how individuals represent their progress, knowledge, or struggles, promotes social presence for some learners in a community of inquiry. Predicting Dropout and Plagiarism for Starting Students of a Master’s in Management Online Program Leslie Klieb (Laureate Education, Inc., The Netherlands, and Webster University, Thailand) A PRESCRIPTION FOR FAILURE: Predicting dropout and plagiarism for starting students of a Master's in Management Online Program. The Research Presentation will consist of the following elements: 1. A short interactive session in which the presenter will ask the audience what kind of reasons they have seen for students to drop out in the beginning of management online studies, and if they have any suggestions why students plagiarize. (5 minutes) 2. Presentation supported by PowerPoint slides 3. Question and Answer session (5 minutes). Summary of the Presentation. Context: Online higher education programs aimed at adult working professionals have proliferated recently. Dropout because of failing is high in those programs, especially when the students start. We explore in this work if it is possible to predict whether a student will fail when starting at an online Master's in Management program at a major European university. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 183 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Students completed a survey (required) of about 50 items before starting. In total, 103 students participated. Forty-five failed to submit the final work at the end of the first module, 44 submitted the final assignment and passed, two students submitted enough work but failed, and 12 plagiarized and failed for that reason. We compare the group who passed with the group who failed to submit work, and with the plagiarizers. Questions: The idea behind the survey was the "Anna Karenina" principle, which describes an undertaking in which a deficiency in any one of a number of factors dooms it to failure. Good students do most things well. They pay tuition, log in regularly, have no significant internet connection problems, have sufficient academic skills, have time to study, and have personality traits that fit the academic program. If too many of those factors are lacking, it will become more and more improbable that the student is going to make it. The goal of this work is to find survey items that can function as flags that highlight at-risk students. Methods: We culled items from a large number of published surveys in many areas, and developed our own items if we could not find suitable published surveys. The following areas were covered: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Academic skills (the TOOLS toolkit by Kerr et al) Internet reliability Computer proficiency Professional and personal risk-taking behavior Openness and conscientiousness ( Big Five personality model) Resilience (the CD-2 scale and an additional question from CD-10) Internal and external locus of control Number of children at home under 18 Personal support network Fit in their environment as a consequence of studying (identity: Tajfel & Turner, 1979 and Akerlof & Kranton) Acculturation to Western culture Hofstede Power Distance and Long Term Orientation Motivation Learning styles Inspired by Bloom's taxonomy: self-efficacy relating abstract concepts in an original way, and good in finding errors in someone's reasoning Self-efficacy in logic and mathematics, and in English writing Self-reported grades at previous education Familiarity with studying: how many people do they know with Master's degrees; how many of those are role models Amount of time expecting to need for study Financial issues were considered too sensitive. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 184 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Results: We found significant correlations between the following items and passing/failing (p< 0.05). Those items (and only those) have also significant and meaningful differences for their averages in a T-test: • • • • • Internet is reliable, correlation 0.264 Feel I have a lot of influence (internal locus of control), correlation 0.218 Good in relating abstract concepts in an original way, correlation 0.240 Good in finding errors in someone's reasoning, correlation 0.331 Number of people under the age of 18 in the household, correlation -0.289 We did a logistic regression calculation with those five items as independent variables and pass/fail as dichotomous binary dependent. All five variables contributed significantly, but backward conditional removal indicated that the following two items were essential: • • My Internet access is reliable I am very good in finding the errors in someone's reasoning Those two items lead to a 62.2% correct classification for failing and a 77.3% passing (Nagelkerke's pseudo-R2 0.276 and 50%/50% a priori odds). Because both independents contribute nearly equally, the following extremely simple "prescription for failure" follows: 1) Score the two items on a Likert scale of 1 to 5 2) Add the scores 3) Read the odds in the following table: summed score odds of success 2 0.03 3 0.16 4 0.55 5 0.88 6 0.98 71 81 91 10 1 Conclusion and Discussion: Low and high-scoring students face daunting odds against passing or are nearly certain to pass. This result is certainly depending on the population and on the offered program. For instance, in a population from regions with reliable internet access, the Internet question will not be predictive. Note that the Internet item can also be a proxy/marker for other issues, like financial Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 185 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness problems. Other institutions can develop their own tool this way that fits their own student population and program characteristics. Plagiarism Results: The following items had significant correlations: • • • • • • My Internet access is reliable I expect to have difficulties fitting in with the people in my community (borderline significant). Tend to take risks in my professional life Able to adapt when changes occur Under pressure I stay focused and clear Fluency in writing Logistic regression showed that all those items contributed to odds of plagiarizing. Odds are 33.3%, four students out of 12 were correctly identified in this model with no false positives (pseudo-R2 0.30). Removing "under pressure I stay focused" does not change the prediction, and additionally removing "tend to take risks in my professional life" fitted three plagiarizers correctly with no false positives. Discussion and Conclusion - Plagiarism: The results suggest a new and interesting model for the occurrence of plagiarism: a subgroup of plagiarizing students exhibit a combination of stress, a willingness to take more risk, less resilience, and is less apt to express themselves in writing. This model is, as far as we know, new. MOOC Cartography - Mapping the Massive Learning Model Across Theory, Pedagogy & History Rolin Moe (Pepperdine University, USA) Few phenomena in higher education have generated as widespread and quick an interest as the Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC (Downes, 2013; Waldrop, 2013; Daniel, 2012). At a time when the higher education system faces questions regarding increasing enrollments, ascending costs and declining governmental support, MOOCs purport the potential of universityaligned, university-level coursework available to a greater audience at a financial cost much lower for the institution and potentially nonexistent for students (Friedman, 2013; Vanderbilt, 2012). It is this potential that has led to rapid MOOC-based changes within the higher education landscape: the creation of inter- and intra-university organizations to facilitate courses (Watters, 2012a), partnerships between these organizations and non-elite universities to offer credit-based courses at a fraction of traditional cost (Little Hoover Commission, 2013), and governmental policy proposed to both fund the development of these courses as well as identify potential avenues for MOOCs to provide college credit or alter the landscape of course accreditation altogether (California SB 520, 2013; Florida SB 904, 2013). Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 186 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness The notion of MOOCs as a potential savior of higher education is not a sentiment shared across the institutional landscape. Viewing modern education as embroiled in a media narrative where the system is broken (Parr, 2012; Barber, Donnelly & Rizvi, 2013), a number of researchers and faculty are skeptical of the fixes MOOCs promise to provide in terms of educational quality (Daniel, 2012) and access (Bady, 2013). In early literature, MOOC developers focused their message on elements of scale and access rather than pedagogy and quality (Koller, 2012). More recently, developers have tied discussion of the model to the term pedagogy as well as a sample of research (Rivard, 2013), and promoted the potential for the MOOC to provide ample quantities of user data that can be mined to determine effective learning measures (Waldrop, 2013). Those who exercised caution in adopting the MOOC model have seen serious consequences, most notably University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan, who was removed from her position in 2012 by the Board of Trustees for failing to act on MOOCs in a manner they deemed sufficient (Vaidhyanathan, 2012), only to have her termination rescinded after an outcry at her campus and beyond. The purpose of this conceptual framework is to identify the cultural, political and historical elements that define the concept of MOOC learning as viewed in popular society. Without establishing a foundation of history, theory and pedagogy for the MOOC, scholarship designed to analyze its successes and failures cannot emerge, as comparison along established metrics using established instruments would be impossible without application across the field's definitions and history. Left unscrutinized, the MOOC will continue to be a phrase of promise and hype (Vaidhyanathan, 2012), all things to all men. Weaving theory and pedagogy into the MOOC definition Allows foundational assessment through the establishment of scholarly terminology and concepts, as well as apparatuses to apply such theory. This paper will provide a foundational definition of the MOOC by juxtaposing the theoretical and pedagogical framework offered by its developers with historical comparisons. The paper will utilize critical theory as a framework for viewing the dominant ideology of the MOOC developers in conjunction with historical precedents. This will happen in a two-part literature review; first, the paper will cite pedagogical descriptions as offered from MOOC developers and scholars, after which the paper will note pedagogical and theoretical similarities between the MOOC and other initiatives or movements throughout history, as well as inconsistencies between developers' assumptions and historical precedent. The paper then will define MOOC using established theoretical and pedagogical terminology, and note opportunities for developers to incorporate other theoretical and pedagogical elements into their model through the study of existing and potential distance and online learning models. Promoting Critical Thinking in Online Discussions Amy Bergstrom (The College of St. Scholastica, USA) Brenda Fischer (The College of St. Scholastica, USA) This session will describe strategies used in a graduate online course, for promoting and assessing critical thinking in discussion groups. Students taking a graduate online assessment course participated in the investigation will share how specific strategies were developed, how they were integrated into the course and how effective they were for engaging online learners in Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 187 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness deeper level discussions. Participants will analyze selected strategies and will be able to evaluate specific student discussion responses. The presentation will build upon research based strategies for developing academic and critical think skills in the online environment. Participants will be able to: • • • • identify different types of communication important for building and sustaining elearning communities. identify specific strategies for promoting and assessing critical thinking in discussion groups. compare different approaches and strategies for promoting critical thinking in discussion groups. analyze and evaluate specific student responses that illustrate critical and higher level thinking. The focus of this presentation will be on how to enhance students' critical thinking skills in asynchronous discussion groups in a graduate education online course. The research examined two specific areas; the use of core questions, statements and specific examples in promoting critical thinking in asynchronous discussions and the development of a coding system based on Bloom, for assessing those discussions. Students taking a graduate online assessment course participated in the investigation. A requirement of the course was to engage in asynchronous discussions that centered around selected readings on the topic of classroom assessment. Students were provided information on the use of core questions and core statements. The directions for the discussions emphasized the importance of critical thinking and used Bloom's Taxonomy as a model. Students were provided with specific examples of critical thinking and discussions were evaluated using a checklist that addressed the level of the response. Data was gathered and evaluated to determine how successful the strategies were for promoting critical thinking. Presenters will describe the strategies that were used to promote and assess critical thinking in e-discussion groups, such as providing specific examples of critical response, the use of a discussion checklist that specifically addresses critical and higher order thinking, and the use of a coding system to evaluate student responses. The presenters will share a common concern that participation in e-discussion lacks substantive contributions from students and that those discussions often reflect lower level thinking. Finally, presenters will share a model for evaluating e-discussions and for promoting critical thinking by students, based on the work of Kim, Wah & Lee (2007), Stein, Haynes & Unterstein (2003) and MacKinnon (2000). The model uses a coding system based on Bloom that encourages students to develop more critical discussion patterns as they participate in e-discussions. Students' discussions are evaluated and graded using this coding system and students are assigned points for discussions that reflect higher levels of Bloom. Participants will be asked to share their experiences with online learning particularly with respect to developing e-discussion topics. They will be presented with a sample of student data from an actual course and will work in small groups to analyze and evaluate. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 188 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Knowledge Transfer in Online Learning Environments: Fact or Fallacy? Jaclyn Krause (Ashford University, USA) The question of quality and comparability of online education as compared to its traditional counterpart is a topic that has been well researched. A recent study suggests that 66% of academic leaders rate the learning outcomes of online courses the same as or superior than faceto-face courses (Allen & Seaman, 2010). In addition, student satisfaction and learning effectiveness have not varied much between different modalities of learning such as online, blended or face-to-face (Picciano, 2006; Prendergast, 2004; Dave, 2010). These results would indicate that online learning has become an effective educational medium for non-traditional students seeking higher education. The discussion forum serves as a backbone for the online learning class in terms of providing a method of fostering faculty-to-student and student-to-student connections. The structure of the online classroom is designed to facilitate collaborative learning opportunities for students (Fisher & Baird, 2005). Online learning environments may provide advantages over face to face classrooms by promoting collaboration and problem solving which may aid in the student learning process (Clark, 2001). Studies demonstrating the performance of students in the online classroom have indicated that online courses are useful in transferring the application of classroom knowledge to real-world projects (Hansen, 2008). Additionally, research has shown that there is no significant differences between work submitted by online students and their face to face counterparts (Dell, Low, & Wilker, 2010; Bernard et al, 2004; Herman & Banister, 2007). However, it remains to be determined if the online classroom, specifically the discussion forum, provides an effective means of transferring knowledge among students. Problem/Position Statement Discussion forums provide the main mechanism for significant time on task measures that drive student connection time metrics. Therefore it is important to understand the impact of this mechanism on successful student learning outcomes. At present, there is little research that examines the role of the online discussion forum in knowledge transfer, which is considered an accepted learning outcome (Chrite, 1998). The authors take the position that authentic knowledge transfer may be possible in online discussion forums, but there is currently not enough empirical evidence to support this assertion. One goal of higher education is to ensure that students are able to apply the knowledge they learn in the classroom to the work place. President Barrack Obama's administration has challenged higher education institutions to establish standards and assessments that prepare students for success in the workplace (U.S. Department, 2011). Higher education institutions focus efforts on developing assessments and tasks which evaluate the knowledge of students. However, there is little evidence that suggests that experiential story telling in an online classroom aids in transferring useful knowledge beyond the confines of the classroom. Hansen (2008) found that online courses may be better at transferring knowledge than traditional course delivery. However, this research indicates that there may be a number of factors that impact this ability to transfer knowledge. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 189 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Discussion: Based on previous research and observations, the authors conclude that currently there is not enough evidence to support authentic knowledge transfer in the online discussion forums. This is due in part because of the following: 1. Discussion questions are often not worded to encourage either critical thinking or authentic knowledge transfer. We see evidence that students simply read and regurgitate material from the sources provided in the class. 2. As written, discussion questions are often not developed to encourage the internalization/externalization of knowledge, or the demonstration of applied knowledge. 3. Students do not always use critical thinking skills to respond to discussion prompts. 4. Faculty does not always exercise the needed prompts within discussions to encourage authentic knowledge transfer. Model: Based on our review and observations, we have developed a model to help facilitate knowledge transfer via the discussion forums in the online classroom. The new model, which focuses on knowledge enablers as defined by meta-analysis, will be explained using examples to demonstrate the facilitation and exchange of knowledge in the online classroom. Digital Engagement Strategies for Assessment in Online Learning Jacqueline P. Candido (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Kristine Rabberman (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Goals: To share our process for assessing student learning in two very different types of online courses • • • Identify important characteristics of the Penn Arts & Sciences Online Learning Program o Program Overview o Why we use asynchronous and synchronous learning  Bloom's taxonomy for online learning  Strategies for participation and social learning as assessment o Pedagogical aspects of engaging students in learning  Peer modeling  Building confidence in group work, peer editing, improved writing, Describe the key aspects of engagement & assessment in our Human Sexuality class including writing reflections using primary sources, discussion threads and the importance of peer modeling o Discussion Threads o Writing reflection blogs o Library involvement and using primary sources o Peer modeling Describe the key aspects of student assessment for a free, open World Music course (MOOC) for mass consumption o Quizzes & discussions o Modeling responses to discussions and musical description o Crowd Sourcing Discussion Forum o Peer review Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 190 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness The Online Learning & Digital Engagement program at Penn's School of Arts & Sciences is a small but growing program and team. There are no online degree programs at this time. Online courses are offered for credit and are taught by professors and lecturers associated with academic departments within the School of Arts & Sciences at Penn. In Summer 2012, the team supported some of the first MOOCs offered by Penn. Penn presenters consist of faculty and administrators who will discuss their strategies of preparing for online learning for credit classes as well as the MOOCs, and how they integrated online assessment and student engagement into each type of course. The GSWS class "History of Sexuality" has been offered for four years in the online summer program on the Penn Learning Commons. The instructor leads advanced undergraduate and graduate students through a highly interactive seminar class in which they learn how to analyze critically works in the history of sexuality, exploring sexual identities, roles and norms from Ancient Greece and Rome, to the United States in the 21st century. Students are required to demonstrate their critical engagement and understanding of central debates and themes, methodological challenges, and issues of change versus continuity. Much success in assessment has been achieved through threaded discussions, reflective blog posts, and comments in the class chatterbox, as well as through more traditional written assignments and synchronous class discussions. The class instructor will share lessons learned from the experiences with these various assessment types, with a special focus on how combining synchronous and asynchronous assessments created a vibrant learning atmosphere in which students engaged in critical discussion, debate, and analysis, learning from each other as well as from the instructor. Listening to World Music has also been offered as an online course for the past nine years on three platforms (Blackboard, ECollege and the Penn Learning Commons). Listening to World Music has also been offered as an online course for the past nine years on three platforms (Blackboard, ECollege and the Penn Learning Commons). 2012 was the year for new directions for this course as a free and open course on Coursera. The Coursera course launched at the end of July and incorporated a series of assessments for the masses! Over 37,000 people have registered for the course. A relatively small percentage actually achieved the certificate if they completed all course requirements. Nevertheless, the Listening to World Music class actually had one of the highest rates of retention i.e., people who downloaded/watched the videos and completed the embedded quizzes. This suggests that people may have participated in the course for larger humanistic understanding. Join this session to learn about the challenges of engaging students in online social learning activities for assessment in a standard online credit course as well as in a massive open online course (MOOC). The team will also share analytics and results from these experiences. What is Social Presence? Why Do I Want It? and How Do I Create It? Alexandra Pickett (SUNY Learning Network, USA) There is evidence to suggest that a strong sense of community in the classroom helps reduce student feelings of isolation and "burnout" associated with higher attrition levels in both Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 191 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness classroom-based and distance learning. A positive sense of community also promotes the likelihood of student support and information flow, commitment to group goals, cooperation among members and satisfaction with group processes and efforts [e.g. Rovai (2002)]. “Classroom community” is comprised of various elements of community including trust, spirit, connectedness, belonging, membership, various forms of support, and the rich, and productive milieu that communities of practice can engender for teaching and learning. If as, we believe, learning is a social process, then it is essential to develop the ability to effectively design and facilitate effective online social presence and class community in online teaching and learning environments and the faculty that teach in them. What is social presence as defined by the Community of Inquiry model (Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W., 2000) and how can it be used to enhance the online or blended learner experience and to create a more effective and engaging online or blended teaching and learning environment? This presentation will provide an overview and some practical examples of how the indicators of social presence can be expressed in an online or blended course. Specifically, we will discuss how you can effectively cultivate online group cohesion, and incorporate affective elements, and promote positive interaction in your online or blended instruction. Online resources will be provided and an online space will be established to continue the conversation beyond the end of the session: What is Social Presence? (1) Affective Expression; (2) Interaction (3) Group Cohesion. 1. Affective Expression; “Why Do I Want It?”:  To support and facilitate social interaction in an online web-based teaching and learning environment:So students can get to know each other.  So students will feel a sense of belonging in the course.  To establish a sense of class community.  So students will establish trust with you and their classmates - so you can move on to teaching and cognitive presences.  So students can form distinct impressions of others in the course – (“feel those they interact with are "real." “How Do I Create It?”  Use emotions, humor, self-disclosure (appropriately - based on who you are.)  This is NOT the same as being "chummy" with your students.  Model it in your welcome, introductions, interactions, discussions.  Use your interactions (in "voice", "tone", with images) to convey your personality to help students form distinct impressions of you and to encourage them to do the same.Leverage course profiles - photos, interests, etc.  Create spaces for social interaction in the course.  Create opportunities for non-course related interactions. Examples: a bulletin board (virtual coffee house), a suggestion box, etc. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 192 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness  Create an introductory discussion/interaction to give students a chance to get to know each other - give the introductory discussion more depth by framing it with questions about prior knowledge of the course and expectations. Examples: http://voicethread.com/share/3084120/ - Icebreaking/Introductions (an introduction to the instructor through the eyes of her young daughter) http://etap640.edublogs.org/2012/06/26/love-letter-to-my-students/ voice/trust/community  http://bit.ly/iM4P5z - Voki speaking avatar welcome. (a personalized welcome, with the instructor's actual voice.) 2. Interaction: “Why Do I Want It?” To support a sense of open communication in your online teaching and learning environment…  So that students feel comfort conversing online.  So that students feel comfortable participating in discussion  So that students feel comfortable interacting with you and their classmates “How Do I Create It?” Start the course with an introductory discussion at the beginning of the course…  Provide models and timely feedback.  Provide explicit expectations about interaction. Example, http://etap640.edublogs.org/2009/12/17/my-discussion-post-grading-rubric  Ask questions. End each post in your discussions with a question, so that the conversation continues and so that you can get the students to dig deeper. As the instructor you risk halting discussions when you contribute. By asking a probing question at the end of your posts you can continue a thread of discussion to promote and create additional depth in the interaction.  Quote directly from a previous post in a discussion.  Refer explicitly to others by name in the discussion.  Express compliments and appreciation.  Never underestimate your power. If you have high expectations, your student will rise to them.  Express agreement. 3. Group Cohesion: “Why Do I Want It?” To create a sense of class community in your online teaching and learning environment…  So students will feel comfortable disagreeing with you and with classmates in the course. This requires a sense of trust, which requires that students understand what is expected and permitted in the class.  Where their point of view is acknowleged by others in the course.  Where discussion is used to help students build a sense of collaboration in the course where they feel they are positively contributing to the sense-making in the course for themselves and their classmates. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 193 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness “How Do I Create It?” Provide expectations for interactions, including netiqutte…  Provide examples and models to insure understanding.  Give students permission to disagree and show the how to do that.Model the behaviors yourself."Speak" to them.  Use salutations in your posts. Refer to students by name in your posts.  Use inclusive pronouns.  Give students ample opportunities to interact with you, the content, and each other.Let students do the work.  Let students help each other. Example Create an ask a question area - where students can help each other.  Let students peer evaluate each others' work. References: Communities of Inquiry - the CoI model - http://communitiesofinquiry.com/model Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. Rovai, A. P. (2002). Development of an instrument to measure classroom community. Internet and Higher Education, 5(3), 197 - 211. Using Social Media to Increase Community in an International Online Course Patrice Prusko Torcivia (SUN Empire State College, USA) Goals for Presentation We will share lessons learned using social media as a way to connect with students in Lebanon, Panama and the US. Participants will brainstorm effective ways to use these tools as a way to create a greater sense of community among students. Participants will learn: • • • • • • • Best practices when using social media How to use social media to create a community of inquiry (reference here-Peter Shea) How to use social media to increase critical thinking skills among International online learners Key items to consider before implementing social media in a course How to use social media when collaborating across cultures How Social media can create a virtual small college classroom environment in an online course. Why interaction is higher in social media than online discussions in the LMS Context In a virtual learning environment (VLE) there is no classroom in which to meet at a designated Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 194 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness time and have face to face discussions. How do you engage students, keep them interested, get them to want to interact with their peers and develop a sense of community? Many may have experienced these issues within our own culture. How do you use social media to overcome these problems? What types of resistance and obstacles are unique to high context cultures such as Latin America and Lebanon? State University of New York (SUNY) Empire State College (ESC) works with university partners in multiple countries across the globe. One presenter teaches in the Panama program and the other the Lebanon program. Students come into our programs with little to no experience with online learning. A common issue with online courses is a lack of students and faculty feeling as connected as compared to a face to face classroom. Maybe some discussion of this here? Problem Students in Panama and Lebanon come from a high context culture and feedback indicated a need for more personal interactions in our online courses. As faculty there was also a need to picture the students, and overcome issues related to miscommunication and a lack of response in e-mail communications. Students frequently said they "didn't see the announcement" or "didn't receive the e-mail". There was also a sense of a lack of community within the online course. Students were not forming relationships or making connections with other students like they do in face to face classrooms. We tried to replicate a face to face small college classroom social learning environment with through the use of social media. We will discuss what factors increase social cohesion and a sense of community. Approach Recent studies (Shea, Hayes, Smith, Vickers, Bidjerano, Gozza-Cohen, Wilde and Jian 2012; Shea, Hayes, & Vickers, 2010) found critical factors for successful interaction between student and teacher beyond the Community of Inquiry (COI) model (Garrison, Anderson, Archer, 2000) include interactions that take place outside of the discussion thread. Shea et al found that a large part of teaching presence (TP) took place in asynchronous places such as e-mail, private folders, etc. In the Lebanon courses one faculty member decided to try Facebook as a way to create a sense of community and higher connectivity with online students. Almost immediately the following trends were observed: 1) social media provides a more competitive learning environment which motivates many students to work harder, 2) an increase in social cohesion and community, and 3) a correlation between instructor-student interaction in social media and student confidence. In Panama one faculty member had begun researching cloud computing and web 2.0 tools and began think about how they were being used in everyday life and how that strong sense of community, engagement and interaction could be replicated in an online course. Facebook groups were used in several courses resulting in an increase in engagement and interaction, as well as greater timeliness on assignments. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 195 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness This presentation will discuss the reasons we've noted for the trends in social cohesion & competitiveness, along with examples and tips for creating student engagement using social media tools. This would be especially beneficial to those who teach online classes to students who are traditionally college-aged, or who teach in a large lecture hall and wish to add an online element to the course. While both adult and young students can benefit from a social cohesive learning environment online, the younger generation, who has mostly grown up in a digital environment, has become dependent upon social media and communication technologies for social connection with others (Mishna, McLuckie & Sainie, 2008). People who are working on MOOCs (Legon, 2013), online courses and blended courses will benefit from reflection on these trends and discussion of ways to include course components which can duplicate the social cohesion and connection created by social media, and increase student retention rates. Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, pp. 87-105. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1096-7516(00)00016Legon, R. (2013) MOOCs and the Quality Question. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/04/25/moocs-do-not-represent-best-online-learningessay. Mishna, F., McLuckie, A.,& Saini, M. (2009). Real-World Dangers in an Online Reality: A Qualitative Study Examining Online Relationships and Cyber Abuse. Social Work Research,33(2), 107-118. Shea, P., Hayes, S., Smith, S., Vickers, J., Bidjerano, T., Pickett, A., Gozza-Cohen, M. Wilde, J. & Jian, S. (2012). Learning presence: Additional research on a new conceptual element within the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework. Internet & Higher Education, 15(2), 89-95. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2011.08.002. Shea, P., Hayes, S., & Vickers, J. (2010). Online Instructional Effort Measured through the Lens of Teaching Presence in the Community of Inquiry Framework: A Re-Examination of Measures and Approach. International Review Of Research In Open And Distance Learning, 11(3), 127154. To Proctor or Not to Proctor: An Evaluation of Exam Formats for the Online Classroom Jennifer Lewis (Madison Area Technical College, USA) As the online teaching fellow at my college, I have been asked many times how to best assess students in the online format. Many of these inquiries come from other science instructors with concerns ranging from assessment of understanding to academic integrity. I started teaching online in Fall 2011 and have used a variety of assessment methods in my courses, including proctored and online exams. Using data from my own classes, I set out to determine whether a difference existed when using online or proctored exams in the online classroom. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 196 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Preliminary data were collected from five general geology, seven earth science and three survey of oceanography online courses between Fall 2011 through Fall 2012. These data were used to compare how students performed on different exam formats. The data include students who took two proctored exams for their course, students who took one proctored exam and one online exam and students who took two online exams for their course. The data were used to correlate how a student faired from their first exam to the second exam to see if the exam's format (proctored or online) factored in to the student's score. The preliminary data show exam scores are highly correlated regardless of the exam's format (online or proctored). These data also show a slight difference in how students fair when taking a proctored exam first and then an online exam. Specifically, students who did poorly on the proctored exam do slightly better on the online exam while students who did well on the proctored do slightly worse on the online exam. Finally, when comparing the exam types, there is a tighter spread in score distribution when online exams are used versus proctored exams. In order to scale this study up, data from other online classes at Madison Area Technical College were collected and analyzed. This session will present the findings and include a discussion of best practices for both proctored and online exams. Building Collaborative Learning Communities: The Benefits of Peer-to-Peer Mentoring in Online Doctoral Programs Jodine Burchell (Northcentral University, USA) William Quisenberry (Mid-Continent University, USA) Mentoring programs have traditionally been used by adults to help guide and intervene with children or youth and these programs have achieved tremendous success (Dappen & Isernhagen, 2005). However, these models have also achieved great success in peer-to-peer settings as well. In graduate programs, especially doctoral programs, faculty mentor relationships with students are a significant piece of the educational experience. Faculty mentors have a significant impact on the performance of graduate students (Lechuga, 2011). Despite the impact and importance of faculty mentors in graduate programs, many faculty members are often over-worked, inundated with multiple students and responsibilities, and thus find it fairly difficult to provide the support required to keep students in online programs engaged and informed about how to navigate the graduate learning experience. Peer mentoring programs can potentially fill this increasing void. A study that explored the impact of peer mentoring models in nursing programs at Northern Ontario University found that it was a viable solution for increasing budget cuts in universities, reduced faculty, increased standards by accrediting bodies,All in the midst of ever-increasing student enrollment rates (Dennison, 2010). Doctoral programs usually are geared towards preparing candidates for leadership positions and thus do not focus on coursework alone. A significant portion of doctoral programs involve interacting with peers, conducting research, presenting ideas and problem-solving. As such, these valuable skills are not fully ascertained through coursework alone and doctoral programs should involve opportunities to interact, engage, and develop relevant problem-solving and leadership Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 197 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness skills (Noonan, Ballinger & Black, 2007). Many doctoral programs have turned to peer mentoring models to increase the level of interaction, leadership ability and communication skills required to succeed. As a result, research shows that students typically emerge from such programs with increased job placement, skill-sets, publications, self-efficacy, student retention, degree completion and research productivity (Noonan, Ballinger & Black, 2007). Peer mentoring programs also contributed to students having the opportunity to vent, express concerns and ask questions freely with peers and peer mentors, without fear of being judged, deemed incompetent or receiving other ramifications or repercussions that may result after speaking with a faculty member. Essentially, these programs provide more guided, tailor-made learning experiences for students that are authentic and collaborative. The purpose of this interactive group presentation is to share the experiences and results of a participative case study project that was conducted by the presenters. The presenters facilitated and participated in an online doctoral peer mentoring program and will share their experiences, both as mentees and peer mentors. The presenters are also conducting on-going empirical research on peer mentoring in graduate programs and may share some of the early findings from their on-going phenomenological research project. Attendees will benefit from practical, first-hand experiences from the presenters along with ongoing research that is being performed on the topic. This will contribute to the opportunity to replicate peer mentoring models in other online graduate programs, which can increase performance, student retention, student engagement, knowledge sharing and professional development. In doing so, universities can increase graduation rates, prepare students for the professional or academic workforce, while reducing workloads and stress levels for faculty members. The presenters will provide storytelling on the topic, perform group breakout sessions and collaborative debrief opportunities so that attendees remain engaged, contribute to the learning experience, and gain a practical understanding on how they can implement peer mentoring programs within their university programs. The session will mirror a seminar or workshop model instead of a traditional presentation to improve the knowledge sharing experience for attendees. Re-mapping the Curricula: Design Solutions for Blended Undergraduate Courses Pinar Arpaci (Iowa State University, USA) Koray Celik (Iowa State University, USA) Introduction: Blended Learning is an evolving pedagogical model for online delivery of courses. Online teaching and learning specialists speak enthusiastically about online education in that it caters to a wide kaleidoscope of learning styles. However, developers of online-learning resources neither explore nor exploit the unique differences in learning styles. Faculty members also struggle with the design process of blended courses. They oftentimes ask about "the formula" for a blended course. For example, the ratio of what is maintained online versus that of kept in the classroom time is treated as if a mathematical constant, whereas that ratio should be determined taking into account the individual learning styles of the particular body of students. And the impact of the course on students is calculated in a deterministic fashion, before the Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 198 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness course begins and student feedback is obtained. Such open-loop approach to Blended Learning can lead to an ineffective teaching strategy. Solutions and Impact: In this novel study of blended teaching philosophy we have applied Fink's taxonomy of significant learning and the six course components that Fink (2003) proposed to an undergraduate blended course. Application of Fink's taxonomy to a blended course is an innovative way of designing a course by using a backward design process. Moreover, this practice can be implemented in a variety of learning environments. Furthermore, such a practice is necessary and in line with the current educational research that altered previous conceptions about learning and has shifted the instructional focus to the importance of learning with understanding. It urges faculty to create learning-centered courses, as opposed to contentcentered courses. Presentation and Audience: Our presentation will show how to implement successful blended course strategies, factors impacting design and decision points in the design and why they succeeded. We will interactively engage into a discussion on the early design failures and how to avoid them in your course. We will also show and share how to fully exploit online resources in a blended course. While a universal answer to perennial questions of blended course design does not exist, the faculty, advisers, curriculum development teams, and instructional designers can learn from strategies we incorporated into a successful blended course. Session Outcomes: (1) Application of Fink's taxonomy to a blended course design (2) How to obtain high student-faculty engagement in a blended course (3) How to apply real-life problems to a blended course (4) How to create an effective online learning environment (5) Immediate applicability of learning strategies to any blended course. References: Fink, L. D. (2003). Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated approach to Designing College Courses. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Focusing the Course Design Process on Alignment Colleen Fleming (Adler School of Professional Psychology, USA) Sarah Fornero (Adler School of Professional Psychology, USA) In order to ensure the development of high quality online courses, the Instructional Design team at the Adler School of Professional Psychology created a new course design process that places the focus on alignment. The development process starts with making sure that learning objectives are specific, attainable, measurable, and at the correct level of learning according to Bloom's revised taxonomy. Courses are developed directly from the course learning objectives using design documents that require course authors to identify the alignment between learning objectives and the instructional materials, learning activities, and assessments that will be used in the course. The syllabus is not developed until the end of the design process to prevent the alignment gaps that can occur when the syllabus is created prior to the weekly objectives. This presentation will share the evolution of the course design process at the Adler School of Professional Psychology and the reasoning behind the choices that were made to update the Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 199 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness design process and related resources. Then, the team will take attendees through the course design process from start to finish and share the resources that they use. Addressing and Implementing Effective Methods for Online Teaching and Training Carol Edwards (Kaplan University, USA) Allison Selby (Kaplan University, USA) The greatest implication for adult online learning is the theory of Andragogy (Knowles et. al., 1998; Fidishun, 2000, Zmeyov, 1998). The theory of Andragogy is based upon six principles for the adult learning experience. The six principles of adult learning are: 1) "the learner's need to know; 2) the learner's self-concept; 3) the role of the learner's experiences; 4) the learner's readiness to learn; 4) the learner's orientation to learning and 6) the learner's motivation to learn" (Knowles et. al., 1998; Fidishun, 2000). The increased use of Web 2.0 technological tools in the learning experience has changed the ways in which adult learners view the learning experience. In mentoring or facilitating an online course, teachers and trainers should consider the six principles of adult learning. The learners' need to know: adult learners need to know why the training or learning experience is important. Mentors and facilitators need to be aware of the need to explain how the Web 2.0 technological tool could be utilized in real life situations. Adult learners need to know what they will gain from the learning and how this learning experience or Web 2.0 technology would enhance their job skills or their personal lives (Fidishun, 2000). The online instructor needs to answer the unasked question of how the learning experience will benefit the e-learner. If the elearner cannot perceive any significant benefit, there will be no motivation to learn and the adult learner would resist the learning experience (Knowles, et. al., 1998, Conrad and Donaldson, 2011). An effective guideline for addressing the learners need to know is to ask the following questions: What is the benefit to the learner? Would the tool be beneficially personally, professionally or academically? Would there be opportunities for collaboration or shared experiences both in and out of the course? At the beginning of the course the instructor could issue a questionnaire to determine the needs and expectations of the learners. Innovative approaches to motivating the elearner includes: sharing a Web 2.0 collaborative learning tool early in the course. Guide the elearners to self-discovery as they utilize the Web 2.0 technology to share information and knowledge with their class mates and instructor (Conrad and Donaldson, 2011). Some tools to share could include Facebook, Twitter, Wikis or blogs (Sinclaire, 2012; Burke, 2009). In the quest of self-discovery, allow the e-learners to experience and discuss how the innovations could be used personally, professionally and academically. The online instructor should also introduce a reflective activity in the classroom, allowing the learner to thoughtfully reflect on the benefits of the learning experience (Broadbent, 2002; Palloff and Pratt, 2003; Fidishun, 2000; Conrad and Donaldson, 2011). The learners' self-Concept: Adult learners are very concerned with the way in which they are viewed. The adult learner has a need to be viewed as a self-directed individual who is in control of his/her own destiny. When placed in a situation where the adult learner feels the imposition of another's will, the learner will respond with resentment and resistance to the learning. The Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 200 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness pedagogical method of learning will cause the adult learner to disengage from the learning experience (Knowles et. al., 1998, Fidishun, 2000). Adult learners have also been faced with many years of instructor led and dependent learning. The traditional roles of learning are changing and learners will at times experience a learning curve or challenge with learning the new materials (Gibbons and Wentworth, 2001). The role of the mentor or facilitator is to encourage the adult learner to participate in the online activities, guiding the adult learner to self-discovery (Queiroz, 2003; Smith, 2005; Conrad and Donaldson, 2011; Levine, 2005). An effective strategy would be to have a hands-on activity in which the facilitator and the learners participate fully in the learning. The facilitator will act as a coach while encouraging the online learner in new discovery (Conrad and Donaldson, 2011). The use of the technological tools in the e-learning classroom will enable the adult learner to mature from a dependent learner to becoming more self-directed (Kurt and Shain-Izmirli, 2011). The role of learner's experiences: adult learners have a wealth of experiences when they return to the classroom setting. It is important for the mentor to understand the need for the learner to share his/her experiences as the learners want to be recognized for what they know (Fidishun, 2000). Mentors need to create a good balance in the classroom setting by encouraging participation fromAll the learners. However, adult learners also have preconceived notions and mental biases which may cause them to struggle with other concepts and innovative ways of learning (Fidishun, 2000). The synchronous and asynchronous discussions in the class can be used as a forum for innovative approaches to teaching. Some effective methods for allowing learners to be recognized and to share information and knowledge are in the team setting or in the creation of chat rooms in the class. Innovative rich applications and tools should be included in the e-classrooms (Sadaf et. al., 2012). E-learners should be recognized by name and their contributions acknowledged (Broadbent, 2002; Conrad and Donaldson, 2011). The learners' readiness to learn: When an adult learner is faced with a work or life situation the learner becomes ready to learn. The learner believes the new learning will enable them to cope more effectively with the work of life task faced (Knowles et. a., 1998). The challenge faced by the online mentor is to create a learning environment of collaboration and open communication. The challenge faced by the adult learner is how to use the knowledge gained in the course in their personal and professional lives. An innovative approach to mentoring will bridge the gap encouraging the learner to an enriched online experience (Conrad and Donaldson, 2011). The learners will be motivated and oriented to learning. A Second Look at Research on Online and Classroom Based Learning: Emergent Concerns and Potential Solutions Shanna Jaggars (Teachers College, Columbia Universeity, USA) Based on several decades of research, most scholars have concluded that there are no significant differences between student performance in college courses that are taught fully-online versus face-to-face. Much of that research, however, has been conducted with relatively well-prepared university students. This presentation synthesizes the results of several new large-scale quantitative and in-depth qualitative studies which suggest that for a less-prepared student, he or she is substantially less likely to perform well in an online course compared to a face-to-face Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 201 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness course. I explore some of the reasons that underlie these students' poor performance in online courses, and provide research-based suggestions in terms of how individual faculty and the larger institution can help these students succeed at higher levels. Online Mentoring: Strategies for Mentoring Dissertations At A Distance Swapna Kumar (University of Florida, USA) In online doctoral programs, the supervision of dissertations at a distance presents challenges for both students and faculty, even in cases where faculty have prior experience mentoring doctoral students on-campus. This presentation will focus on the experiences of faculty and students at a brick and mortar research institution when they attempted to develop online supervisory relationships, mentor online students, and maintain research rigor and the quality of student dissertations in an online doctoral program. We will engage the audience with initial questions and present online mentoring strategies based on our qualitative research with students and faculty in an online doctoral program. Our discussion of online technologies and online mentoring strategies that worked for students and faculty in our research will be useful to other faculty mentoring online doctoral students. Mining for Success Denise Nadasen (University of Maryland University College, USA) Marie Cini (University of Maryland University College, USA) Cheoleon Lee (University of Maryland University College, USA) Kathleen Wessman (Montgomery College, USA) This research study was initiated by UMUC and Prince Georges Community College and Montgomery College, and is funded by the Kresge Foundation for the purpose of developing collaborative, data-sharing partnerships between community colleges and four-year institutions to support the use of data and educational data mining research to improve student success. One goal of the grant is to build a large dataset with detailed information on students' prior academic work, demographics, online classroom behavior, and post-transfer academic work. A second goal is to conduct data mining to identify relationships between variables and determine predictors of student success. A third goal is to use statistical modeling to predict student success. This presentation will review the goals of the study, the results to date and plans for the future. Lessons will be shared from the process of forming the multi-institutional dataset. Research so far has included survival analysis, several predictive models and clustering analysis. The results of this research will help this collaborative team to identify student success initiatives. These initiatives will be piloted and evaluated in fall 2013. Overall, this research will lead to an analytical model of studying student success. The research team will build a path analysis to examine predictors and outcomes at various points along the continuum of the student's progression towards a degree. This analytical model will inform the higher education and research community of the value of prior academic work on predicting student success. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 202 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness The audience for this presentation will have the opportunity to discuss data/variable issues at their institutions, possible collaboration opportunities, and student success initiatives. Specifically, the following phases of the project will be reviewed Phase 1 During the first two years of this research project, UMUC was able to secure a partnership with Montgomery College and Prince George's Community College. From this partnership, we established an MOU and guidelines for sharing data. Resulting from the partnership, UMUC and the two community colleges jointly put together datasets that were merged and evaluated for use in this research study. The population of interest was identified at the two community colleges and transcript data were collected, federated, and merged with performance and classroom activity data and performance data from UMUC. The final dataset is called the Kresge Data Mart (KDM) and serves and the primary source of data for this study. A research roadmap was developed with specific research goals. Literature reviews were conducted; predictor and outcome variables were identified and defined. The data base was developed to create close mappings to the desired variables. Data were transformed, and numerous datasets were developed for different aspects of the research. The initial research results examined online activity and success. Activity in the online classroom prior to the first day of class was found to be a strong predictor of successful course completion. Prior academic work showed that specific courses lead to successful course completion. Also, the more credits a student completed at the community college, the more likely they achieved success at UMUC. Phase 2 The current research activity involves conducting data mining and statistical modeling to study and model student achievement, re-enrollment rates, persistence in the program, and graduation rates. The focus will be to identify factors that are related to student success. 1. Evaluate classroom behavior as a predictor of successful course completion. 2. Evaluate prior academic work and classroom behavior as a predictor of re-enrollment. 3. Conduct a "kitchen-sink" regression, where all predictor variables are used to predict successful course completion and re-enrollment. This is a method that has been employed by other researchers in online education. While there is statistical error due to inter-correlation of factors, a comparison of the results with more statistically rigorous methods can validate the method and the results. 4. In an effort to define the outcome, student level data and course level data will be integrated to generate a student success index. 5. Evaluate classroom behavior and prior academic work as a predictor of the student success index. Phase 3 An important aspect of this research is to inform the institutions in order to better serve the Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 203 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness students who will be affected by the results of this research and to create meaningful relationships between institutions. To this end, UMUC will also provide reports to the community colleges on their cohorts of students with the following information. 1. Calculate the first term GPA at UMUC and the transfer GPA for each community college. 2. Map transfer courses with first term GPA for each community college. 3. Map successful transfer courses with first term GPA. 4. Map unsuccessful transfer courses with first term GPA. The reporting activities are ad hoc and will evolve based on communication between UMUC and the Community Colleges. Phase 4 The partner institutions will work together collaboratively to define, design, and implement specific interventions that may lead to improved student success. Each intervention will be tracked and evaluated. Based on the results of the evaluation and feedback from the institutions, the interventions will be revised or new interventions will be developed. Phase 5 During the phase of implementing and evaluating interventions, UMUC will find and identify other community colleges to partner with to expand the study. At the same time, the community colleges will identify other four-year institutions that receive their students. The community colleges will seek a similar partnership to expand the research and further solidify the results. Success! Case Studies in an Online, Asynchronous World Brigham Taylor (Brigham Young University, USA) A little over a year ago, a radical idea was implemented in an attempt to effectively design and teach classes that rely on the case study method for an asynchronous, online delivery. We now have four semester's worth of experience and data based on trial, error, student feedback, and faculty feedback. In this practical presentation, we will discuss: • • • • • • How we used innovative technology made by YouSeeU to capture spontaneous responses and facilitate peer interaction The seven critical design concepts that were used to successfully achieve the learning goals The student process for completing the case study assignments The instructor's responsibilities and the process for their timely involvement and feedback Comparisons between using YouSeeU video interaction and text heavy discussion boards Feedback from students and faculty We will focus specifically on how a business department was charged with putting a bachelor of Business Management degree fully online where the face-to-face case method was critical to the degree. How do you teach the case method online without losing the face-to-face effectiveness of Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 204 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness discussions, decisions, and instant feedback? How do you meet the same outcomes? How do you ensure authentic assessment? Seven critical design concepts were used to successfully achieve the learning goals: preparation, decision-making, immediate response, asynchronous video discussion, feedback, timely instructor engagement, and peer evaluation. These design methods in combination with the needed tools - Harvard Business School cases, YouSeeU technology, Qualtrics polls, and an LMS - brought the solution to life. The final product is summed up by one professor's exclamation, "This will be more effective than my face-to-face class!" Students likewise experienced great learning gains. Here is a sampling of what they said: "YouSeeU has definitely made the case studies more meaningful and effective. It is so much better to have the impromptu questions, because it forced me to be more prepared and to understand the material. Also, I really enjoyed my classmates' comments and their insights. I think YouSeeU should be in place inAll my classes." "I really enjoy the YouSeeU. It is a great tool to help learn from each other. I would much rather use YouSeeU than the discussion board. I feel that it is a lot more effective. I felt I have learned more from my classmates this way. "KEEP YOUSEEU! It is way better than discussion boards!" "I like YouSeeU a lot. I think that it is more effective for me. You get the interaction with others as much as possible, which I think is critical with the online learning. Out ofAll the classes that I have taken online, this is far more effective. With the YouSeeU concept you have to carefully study out the case you're not sure what you will be asked. I also believe that you get emotions in a video as opposed to blogging. Don't change the YouSeeU. I like it." "This is by far the most exciting and fun online class that I have taken thus far in school." "It's way more effective than any discussion board. Everybody just [bluffs] their way through discussion boards and copy what other people say. Plus, it's a lot of wasted time. On here you have to actually study your material to vocalize it on the spot AND you have to actually listen to what others say to respond. The amount you learn is way more substantial and sticks in your mind better. I think every class should do something similar." Creating Flipped Classes for Faculty AND Students Using Easy and Inexpensive Technologies Sheri Stover (Wright State University, USA) Research has shown that concentration begins to decline after 10-15 minutes (Stuart & Rutherford, 1978), so extended lectures can be a tough teaching methodology to maintain student attention (Bligh, 2000). Flipped Classes are a form of blended learning where the instructor creates content such as videos for students to watch outside the live classroom (Pink, 2010) and then class time is spent applying the concepts using active learning which results in higher Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 205 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness student achievement (Knight & Wood, 2005). Teachers use assessment technique such as interactive quizzes or projects to verify student viewing of the home video and measure student understanding of the topic (Barseghian, 2011). The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (2011) has recognized the importance of students learning how to create digital projects such as Flipped Classes. For these types of projects to be successfully implemented as student assignments, the process and technologies used to create the Flipped Class assignments needs to be easy to use and inexpensive to purchase. The technologies used needs to be ubiquitously available so that all students have ready access. The goals for this presentation are to review the five step process of creating Flipped Classes. This presentation will focus on technologies that are inexpensive and ubiquitously available on either a PC or Mac environment. The five step process would be easy for instructors to implement in the face-to-face, blended, or online classroom environment. The five step process would also be easy to implement as a student assignment. Participants will leave this presentation with an understanding how to implement the five step process to create Flipped Classes. A summary of the five step process includes: Step #1 Create Content:The first step in creating the Flipped Class is to create the content using PowerPoint. Content should not be created using the traditional 6X6 "Death by Bullet Point" design. Participants will learn how to create PowerPoint slides using a research based design to minimize cognitive overload. Participants will also learn how to add the audio script to the notes pane of PowerPoint. The PowerPoint slides are then saved as JPG images to be imported into a Video Editor. Step #2 Adding Audio: Participants will learn how to add audio to the flipped class. Audio is added to the project through a video editor. Instead of using expensive video editors, participants will learn how to use free video editors such as iMovie (Mac) or Sound Recording & MovieMaker (PC). Since these video editors are ubiquitously available and simple to use, this makes this project easy to use for instructors and also makes it easy to implement as a student assignment. The PowerPoint content JPG slides are imported into the video editor and the audio is recorded using an inexpensive headset that is under $50. Step #3 Post Digital Video: Participants will learn how to post the completed videos to a cloud based service such as YouTube that is available at no change and makes content available for access through the internet. Participants will learn how to make videos private to YouTube to ensure intellectual property is available only to your desired audience. Participants will also learn how override the default 15 minute video length restriction to enable virtually no limits on video uploads. Step #4 Assessing Knowledge: Many faculty report being dissatisfied with flipped classes because they are finding students are not reviewing the material outside of class which results in them not being ready to participate in subsequent classroom discussions and activities. To ensure students have reviewed the digital video, instructors should create a quiz that students can Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 206 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness complete. If instructors have access to a learning management system, they can use this to create self-grading quizzes. Participants will learn how to use Google Drive Forms to create free online quiz assessments if they do not have access to a learning management system. Step #5 Adding Context: Up to this point, the project has a separate video link and a separate link to the quiz. It is important to create a single location where all the links and context information can be put together. Participants will learn how to create a Weebly web site that can be used to build a web site where the instructor can create one location where the link to the video, the link to the quiz, instructions for the students and any other context information can be added that will help clarify the Flipped Class lesson assignment. Weebly is a web hosting service that includes an easy-to-use drag-and -drop web site builder. Participants will learn how to create an educator account that allows instructors (and students) to create up to two web sites at no charge. Step #6 Applying Knowledge: By watching the video content outside of class, the instructor can spend class time having students work problems, discuss the topics or conduct other active learning strategies to allow students to apply their knowledge at higher levels of learning. Participants will learn how to utilize Poll Everywhere to implement active learning strategies. Poll Everywhere is a polling system where students can use their cell phone to respond to questions. Participants will learn how to implement Poll Everywhere with an educator account where instructors (and students) can utilize for free in the classroom for up to 40 accounts. Resources: Barseghian, T. (2011, February 5). Three trends that define the future of teaching and learning. Bligh, D. A. (2000). What's the use of lectures? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Knight, J. K. & Wood, W. B. (2005, Winter). Teaching more by lecturing less. Cell Biology Education, 4,(4): 298-310. Partnership for 21st Century Skills. (2011). Partnership for 21rst Century Skills web site @ http://www.p21.org/overview/skills-framework Pink, D. (2012, September 12). Think tank: Flip-thinking- the new buzz word sweeping the US. The Telegraph. Stuart, J. & Rutherford, R. J. (1978). Medical student concentration during lectures. The Lancet, 514-516. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 207 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Building Teacher Online Best Practices Through Evidence-based Research Analysis Robert Ianacone (George Washington University, USA) Michael Corry (George Washington University, USA) Introduction The use of teacher best practices to enhance and specialize a teacher's pedagogical strategy have long been encouraged in brick and mortar education. However, teacher best practices in online education are less developed. Although, the modes of delivery are different, teacher best practice recommendations from evidence-based research studies of brick-and-mortar education can be considered as a starting point when developing teacher best practices in online education. Additionally, evidence-based research involving teacher best practices from online education will add value to this important area for practitioners, policy makers and researchers. Methodology To advance the knowledge base of K-12 teacher best practices, a thematic analysis was undertaken to derive underlying, socially-constructed themes from best practices in both brick and mortar and online education. The themes derived from the analysis may provide a foundation for the construction of online teacher best practices because those that begin with a valid foundational support are more likely to be successful. Thematic analysis is a variant of discourse analysis, which seeks to understand the social foundation of a related group of texts or dialog called a corpus. Implementing a meaningful thematic analysis of this kind can be challenging for many reasons; however, central to the challenge is delimiting a corpus of text for analysis. In the study, a theory-based analytic process, Synthesized Thematic Analysis Criteria (STAC), was employed to overcome this issue. STAC operated as a series of sieves to minimize intervention from inapplicable texts and allow the researchers to define the study as follows: 1. The case studies were narrowed by research method using an existing definition of best practices from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). 2. The remaining case studies narrowed using criteria from the theory-based Best Practice Research Theory Methodology. 3. The Education Benchmarking Methodology parameters were applied to select a set of similar peer-reviewed case studies. The STAC analytic process may be used for any best practice thematic analysis, from best practices for managing bullying in schools to best practices for preparing women and minority students for education and careers in STEM fields. Analysis In this research analysis, six teacher best practice case studies were examined, and the emergent themes of teacher flexibility, clear communication, relationship building, and personalized learning surfaced. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 208 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Teacher Flexibility In general, a flexible teacher finds ways to supplement and support learner understanding by reacting to a learner's progress, emotions, and motivation. Teacher flexibility can be manifest in teacher innovation where teachers create and modify curriculum to fit their needs. Indeed, innovation as a component of flexibility managed with trust and constrained within reasonable parameters of strategic school/district goals can positively affect an entire school. If parameters are developed from field-tested best practices, they may not be seen as limitations, but as guidance. Clear Communication Clear communication is vital to providing stability in our ever-changing world because it builds trust, which is the commodity that makes transparency possible. Empowering a school community through transparent communication can take the form of promoting family participation in school life, encouraging pedagogical coordination among teachers, and creating a safe and positive learning environment Communication expectations can be managed in online education from course preparation through assessment. During course preparation, a teacher can publish rubrics of assignments, provide examples of acceptable assignments to guide learners, and/or clarify expectations of student conduct in public virtual spaces of the course. Assessment through a variety of strategies to accommodate the strengths of different learners and providing immediate feedback to students are other best practices that reflect the clear communication theme. Relationship Building Building supportive relationships between teachers and students allows the teacher to shape the online experience through a variety of pedagogical strategies and classroom activities. The vast physical distance that separates teacher and student in online education can confound even the best student; however, frequent communication in a supportive teacher-student relationship may help students know they are not alone in the pursuit of their education, and they have someone to rely on. A student may work harder and remain a healthy, positive learner in an online class where they are held accountable to someone they know and trust. The discovery of relationship building as a best practice theme may be a reflection of our increasingly global world where teachers need to prepare students for maintaining productive virtual relationships with colleagues and collaborators. Personalized Learning The discovery of personalized learning as an emergent theme in this teacher best practice analysis may signal that the field of online education is nearing one of its most ambitious goals. For decades, education technology researchers have worked to create adaptive educational software, which personalizes curriculum to the education needs of the user. In combination with this software, the emergent teacher best practice of personalized learning may help develop online education to the next level and realize benefits for all learners. For now, however, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 209 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness personalized learning is primarily manifest in the planning and pedagogical strategies of online education teachers. Personalized learning is made possible by other emergent teacher best practice themes in this analysis--teacher flexibility and managing relationships. Combining teacher flexibility and innovation with adaptive educational software would be a powerful addition to the current education paradigm. Conclusion The STAC analytic process was used to facilitate a thematic analysis of teacher best practices from which the recurring themes of teacher flexibility, clear communication, relationship building, and personalized learning emerged in both brick and mortar and online education modes. These best practice themes reveal larger cultural themes such as innovation and globalization while providing a foundation upon which teachers might build their own specialized practice. Outcomes Attendees will leave the session with theoretically derived, evidence-based foundational best practice themes for online teachers, an understanding of how to apply the best practices in their work and an understanding of STAC and how to apply it to their own research. During the session, attendees will engage in a facilitated discussion and the session will be tweeted live using the Sloan-C hashtag. Assessing Student Interaction and Changes in Views of the Nature of Science Using Asynchronous Discussion Forums Hannah Scherer (Virginia Tech, USA) M. Aaron Bond (Virginia Tech, USA) Courtney Vengrin (Virginia Tech, USA) Reform efforts in science education emphasize the importance of engaging students in scientific inquiry to foster understanding. Understanding of the nature of science, which includes such ideas as the meaning and role of scientific theories and the role of imagination and creativity in generating scientific knowledge, is a critical learning outcome in this type of science education. Agricultural education has the potential to support reformed science teaching through laboratory instruction, non-formal and school-based programming, and student participation in independent agriscience research. Unfortunately, it is common for the general public, including teachers, to have misconceptions about the nature of science. These misconceptions (such as the idea that there is a single, linear "scientific method") can influence how science is portrayed in the classroom and have the potential to negatively impact student learning even when teachers have good intentions. Previous authors have demonstrated that an effective way to help teachers develop more informed views of the nature of science is to combine formal instruction with scientific research experiences and reflection (see Lederman, 2007). In the online environment, it has been shown Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 210 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness that learning experiences that are designed to promote purposeful collaboration between students and those that utilize multiple methods to deliver content are more likely to see increased gains in student learning (Moore, 2008). These findings were applied to the design of a new, asynchronous, online, graduate level course, titled "STEM Integration in Agricultural Education," which was designed to help agriculture teachers and non-formal educators in their efforts to integrate more STEM content and practices into their programs. Students were primarily working professionals and were geographically dispersed across the state; this prohibited any synchronous or face-to-face meetings from occurring. A primary goal of this course was to change students' perceptions and attitudes concerning science though independent work, collaboration and discourse. The instructor utilized the discussion forum on the course management system and a cloud-based interactive collaboration tool (Voicethread) to foster both personal reflection and peer interaction. Course design was conducted in cooperation with Virginia Tech's Office of Distance Learning. The purpose of this study was to assess (1) changes in student conceptions of the nature of science (if any) throughout the course and (2) the significance of instructional design strategies that promote interaction and collaboration. Course activities that were designed to address the nature of science include: targeted readings about the nature of science, completion of an individual agriscience research project, participation in guided asynchronous discussions with peers, and personal reflection. Sources of qualitative data utilized in this study are discussion forum transcripts, Voicethread transcripts, and pre- and post-tests based on a published openended questionnaire (VNOS, Form C; Lederman et al., 2002). VNOS-C questionnaires were administered during the first and last weeks of the semester to measure any change in student conceptions and attitudes of science. Discussion forums were guided by an initial prompt from the instructor and participation, including responding to other posts, was a graded course activity. Qualitative analysis was conducted to track the evolution of student attitudes toward science and conceptions of the nature of science throughout the course. Results indicate that students initially held more naive views of the nature of science and, through the intervention, gained a deeper understanding of the role of creativity in the work of scientists, the importance of community analysis and feedback in the development of scientific ideas, and theDiversity of approaches to scientific investigations. The use of the discussion forum and Voicethread added to students' sense of community, exposed them to the unique viewpoints of their peers, and allowed some students to engage in extensive peer learning. Data taken from pre- and post-testing, along with an analysis of the online discussions reveals that interaction and discourse made a significant impact on student learning and engagement. This study provides support for the use of interactive communication tools in asynchronous online courses. Not only did these tools foster engagement and build a sense of community in an asynchronous online environment, but they helped some students meet learning objectives through peer learning. These findings inform the practice of the instructor and also have implications for instruction on the nature of science and online teaching in general. Limitations Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 211 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness of this study stem primarily from the fact that the intervention was designed for a specific instructional context and, therefore, findings may not be transferrable to other environments. Participants in this research session will learn about the results of this study and the course design strategies employed through a formal presentation. They will see course examples, including a demonstration of the use of Voicethread. Participants will then participate in an interactive discussion in which they explore strategies for implementing similar tools in their courses. Assessing Metacognition in Asynchronous Student-led Discussions: A Qualitative Inquiry Martha Snyder (Nova Southeastern University, USA) Laurie Dringus (Nova Southeastern University, USA) Context Metacognition is generally defined as how we monitor and control our own cognition (Flavell, 1979). Akyol and Garrison (2011) defined metacognition in an online community of inquiry (CoI) as "a set of higher knowledge and skills to monitor and regulate manifest cognitive processes of self and others" (p. 184). This definition implies that metacognition is not necessarily developed individually but rather it can be co-constructed within an online social context. Phenomenon of Interest Our study was based on Akyol and Garrison's (2011) work that there is awareness of one's learning and the ability to control and construct meaning in a CoI, but little is actually known about this phenomenon in online discussions specifically. We examined Akyol and Garrison's (2001) metacognition construct and its dimensional scale for its theoretical and practical significance in online discussions. The scale includes three dimensions: knowledge of cognition (KC), monitoring of cognition (MC), and regulation of cognition (RC) along with indicators associated with each dimension. In concurrence, we employed student-led discussions (Baran & Correia, 2009) as an instructional strategy to determine whether it is an effective means of facilitating metacognition. Each student in the course was assigned a specific timeframe to facilitate discussion with the rest of the class about a specific topic. Goal and Research Questions The goal was to determine the effectiveness of student-led online discussion activities by capturing students' described experiences and how those experiences reflected metacognition processes. Our inquiry includes four research questions: RQ1. What indicators of metacognition in a community of inquiry (CoI) are evident in studentled online discussions? Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 212 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness RQ2. How do students experience their participation in student-led online discussions? RQ3. How do students' meanings of their participation in student-led online discussions reflect metacognitive processes? RQ4. What are the implications on the design of online student-led discussions activities in a community of inquiry (CoI)? Methods Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) (Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009) guided the exploration of the meaning and essences of metacognition from responses to a student-led discussion questionnaire that included open-ended questions about the students' experiences as facilitators and participants in the student-led discussion activity. Data analysis methods included content analysis (Smith, 2000) and IPA (Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009). A typical case (Miles & Huberman, as cited in Marshall & Rossman, 2011) was used to select three cases for content analysis. These cases were three distinct two-week-long student-led discussions that represented the beginning, middle, and end of the 14-week term. Content analysis was used to evaluate Akyol and Garrison's (2011) metacognition construct and its dimensional scale for its theoretical and practical significance in online discussions. Akyol and Garrison's (2011) metacognition construct and the items from Garrison and Akyol's (2013) metacognition questionnaire were used to develop the coding guide. Preliminary Results To date, a content analysis was performed on the first of three cases (Case A: Julie) and an interpretative phenomenological analysis of the student-led questionnaire responses was completed by the principal investigator. Preliminary results of the content analysis indicate that all three indicators identified by Akyol and Garrison (2011, p. 185) were evident. In fact, there were three instances of KC, eight instances of RC, and 27 instances of MC. While students did not seem to respond much to each other's posts, the student-facilitator acknowledged various students by posting follow-up comments and questions. There was also an indication that students were reading each other's posts and using them to formulate ideas. Almost half of the posts (6 out of 13) contained instances of MC only. In addition, the majority of these statements (13 out of 18) were declarative/judging statements. Preliminary results of the analysis of students' responses to the questionnaire revealed the following emergent themes and sub-themes pertaining to how students experience their participation in student-led discussions. Given the word limit of this proposal, sample statements that reflect how students' participation reflect metacognitive processes and discussion about each theme are not provided here but will be shared during the presentation. 1. Preparation Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 213 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness 2. Perceived role as facilitator (sub-themes: discussion forum guide, content expert, content guide, discussion prompter, and motivator) 3. Perceived responsibilities as facilitator (sub-themes: preparing, reading, brainstorming, crafting questions, monitoring, motivating others, and trying to keep the discussion going) 4. Effects of facilitator role 5. Perceived role as participant 6. Perceived helpfulness of student-led discussions 7. Difficulties in shifting roles 8. General perceptions about student-led discussion activity 9. Logistics - student-led discussion activity design Discussion/Preliminary Interpretations The results of the content analysis of discussion forum posts indicated that students' abilities to monitor and regulate cognitive processes of self and others were apparent yet limited as evidenced by the majority of declarative and judging statements. While metacognition can be coregulated, there was little evidence that students used the full range of metacognitive skills to help them co-construct meaning. Instruction and guidance may be needed not only to help students become aware of metacognitive skills but also to learn how to use them effectively in an online discussion. Additionally, in a CoI, there is an expectation that aspects of teaching presence, such as facilitation of discourse, are shared among instructors and students. However, students have limited instruction and experience in these aspects. These results imply the need to teach students how to be effective facilitators and how to use metacognitive strategies effectively in to facilitate discourse in online discussions. References Akyol, Z., & Garrison, D.R. (2011). Assessing metacognition in an online community of inquiry. The Internet and Higher Education, 14, 183-190. Baran, E., & Correia, A. P. (2009). Student-led facilitation strategies in online discussions. Distance Education, 30(3), 339-361. Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitivedevelopmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906-911. Marshall, C., & Rossman, G.G. (2011). Designing qualitative research. (5th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 214 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Smith, C.P. (2000). Chapter twelve: Content analysis and narrative analysis. In Reis, H.T. and Judd, C.M. (Eds.). Handbook of research methods in social and personality psychology (pp. 313335). Smith, J.A., Flowers, Pl, & Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: Theory, method, and research. London, UK: Sage. Beginners Guide to Using Data to Improve Course Quality and Student Success Gail Krovitz (Pearson eCollege, USA) Are you using data from your LMS and/or SIS to improve the quality of your courses and your student learning experience? Did you just break out in cold sweat after reading that previous question? If so, then this session is for you. Through learning management systems and other information systems on campus, schools have access to an enormous amount of data that can be used to identify areas for improvement within course design and inform faculty training. However, some are stuck and not leveraging data as well as they could be (or at all), and this may be due to the difficulty in getting started, prioritizing, or making the results actionable. This session will present examples of analyses we've done with schools utilizing course completion rates, enrollment counts, LMS activity data, and a qualitative course review rubric, which led to targeted discussions on areas to improve in course design or faculty training. Participants will analyze examples, propose follow up questions they would want to explore, and discuss how these topics are currently addressed (or could be addressed in the future) on their campus. We will emphasize that data alone isn't the magic bullet, but instead it's using the data to create an actionable (and realistic) plan for your campus that's important. "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" (Lao-tzu)... so let's get started! Accessible Video Captioning for Online Learning Barry Link (Education Service Center Region 13, USA) Tole Khesin (3PlayMedia, USA) The utilization of video for distance education has become imperative in online learning programs. Video is an engaging medium creating conversation and community, but disabled students are shut out as accessibility issues arise. Captions are required for the deaf to follow spoken content of a video. Knowing this, institutions of higher education face legal, functional, and ethical challenges when providing accessible video accommodations. For accessibility administrators and online technology implementers this means figuring out the most streamlined and cost-effective solution for accessible video captioning. In this information session, Education Service Center Region 13 will discuss their accessibility strategies and the solutions they implemented. We will discuss the costs and benefits derived, as Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 215 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness well as best practices and tips for implementing accessibility technologies. We will also discuss the impact of federal and state accessibility laws pertaining to students with hearing disabilities, impact of HTML5, mobile devices, and emerging standards, as well as considerations for hosting, managing, and publishing, which has become increasingly important in today's videoheavy learning environment. Measuring Online Students' Contact Hours: The Online Learning Contact Hour Calculator Karan Powell (American Public University System, USA) Jennifer Stephens Helm (American Public University System, USA) The presenters of this session will introduce the Online Contact Hour Calculator, a tool developed by the American Public University System to assist faculty with the assessment of total course contact hours. Technological and pedagogical advances in distance education have accentuated the necessity for higher education to keep pace regarding institutional infrastructures. Each infrastructure is driven by a common mission to provide quality learning interprets quality according to standards established by various governmental and accrediting entities. Staying ahead of the technological and pedagogical changes have been challenging for many public higher education institutions, which are continuing to struggle with online course design and delivery modes (Suttle, 2010). Online universities, however, have aggressively and strategically responded to technological and pedagogical shifts across institutional, departmental, program, and course levels according to their institutional mission, vision, and core values. The American Public University System (APUS), a leader in postsecondary online learning, continues to align these foundational components through systematic program and course assessment. Demonstrating commitment to quality, APUS leaders developed the APUS Online Contact Hours Calculator to assist faculty and program directors with the assessment of total course contact hours. Core learning management system tools used to complete in-class and homework projects were apportioned time requirements toward contact hour calculations, thus streamlining the course review process, adhering to governmental and accreditation standards, and ensuring the overall quality and rigor of each online course. Using the How People Learn Framework in Online Course Design Lisa Bloom (Western Carolina University, USA) Sharon Dole (Western Carolina University, USA) This session will be an interactive session that will engage participants in discussion of and application of the How People Learn (HPL) framework for online course design. Goals • • • Present a rationale for using the HPL framework in design of online courses. Demonstrate the HPL framework and the STAR legacy template. Present a course module that uses the STAR legacy template. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 216 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness • • Present data with regard to student satisfaction and learning outcomes from two graduate courses that used the framework. Engage participants in applying the HPL framework in course design. Rationale Online course design can range from self-paced instruction with little or no interaction with other students to one that has a highly interactive environment with extensive student-student and instructor-student contact. In teacher education, as with other disciplines, our goal is to prepare learners for professional rather than technical roles. For teacher educators, standards for professional preparation are now higher than ever. Many education reformers advise putting teachers in a professional role as problems solvers and collaborators, as well as, both producers and consumers of research (Liston, Whitcomb, & Borko, 2007). Not only do teachers need the knowledge and skills of their craft, they need to be learners in the classroom. They need to be able to improve their teaching through reflection and evaluation (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005). Online course designs are needed that can prepare teachers for professional reflection, collaboration, problem solving, and evaluation. Reflection is one aspect that distinguishes the role of a professional from that of a technician. While the role of a technician is applying a known solution to a fixed set of problems, the role of a professional is applying reflection and judgment to predicaments within unique circumstances. Anyone who has been in a classroom recognizes that the problems and predicaments encountered by teachers and schools do not present themselves in clear-cut technical fashion, rather as messy situations and predicaments. Collaboration can further increase the professional status of teachers. Teachers today are more likely to be expected to be active participants in decisions that affect the entire school. No longer are teachers relegated to their individual classrooms, isolated from their colleagues and disengaged from school-based management. Applying the HPL framework to teacher education courses has allowed us to put teachers in a professional role and engage them in dealing with authentic challenges that promote and require collaboration and reflection. HPL framework and Course Design The HPL framework represents a synthesis of the scientific basis of learning published in National Academy of Sciences reports (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; National Research Council, 2000). The HPL framework focuses on the learning environment and indicates that effective learning takes place to the extent that the learning environment is: • learner-centered; learners use their existing knowledge to construct new knowledge and what they know and who they are affects how they interpret new knowledge. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 217 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness • knowledge-centered; concepts must be presented in ways that link students' existing knowledge to new understandings and build higher level thinking skills. • assessment-centered; assessment strategies guide students' learning and give them feedback to improve their achievement. • community-centered; instructors need to create psychologically safe environments in which communities of learners can thrive. We use the STAR.Legacy or Legacy template (Brophy, 2000) in the design of our courses. The template is based on the principles of the How People Learn (HPL) framework. The Legacy template is problem-based and presented as a "learning cycle," with the learner progressing through a series of phases in exploring a multifaceted challenge (see http://www.vanth.org/white_papers.html). Following the Legacy template, our courses are divided into modules, with each module having a challenge based on an important concept of the course. This modular design helps the instructional designer prioritize the concepts and skills of the course, set objectives for what the students should understand by the end of the course, and arrange activities to help develop the students' understanding (Brophy, 2000). In each module, the students progress through all phases of the learning cycle. Brophy describes the six phases of the learning cycle as follows: • • • • • • The Challenge - presents a statement or scenario that poses a complex objective for the students. The challenge should be related to a major concept of the course that students should come to understand in order to meet the objective. € Generate Ideas - provides students an outlet for showing what they know about the challenge. It can serve as a baseline or pre-assessment. Multiple Perspectives - provide insights on the challenge. These statements or comments from experts do not provide a solution but should help the students see the many dimensions to the challenge. Research and Revise - engages students in learning activities linked to the challenge. These can be readings, homework problems, simulations, or other activities. Test Your Mettle - application of what students have learned and evaluation of what they need to know more about. This step helps students reflect on and synthesize what they know. Go Public - provides students an outlet to demonstrate what they know at the end of the module. Going public may involve a presentation to their classmates and/or an audience outside the course. Evidence of Student Satisfaction and High Level Learning We will present the following evidence of the effects of the HPL Framework on Student satisfaction and Student learning: • • quantitative and qualitative summaries from student course evaluations; results of a Student Satisfaction Survey; Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 218 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness • analysis of student work that demonstrates higher levels of thinking and learning as well as examples of course challenges and student work that demonstrate accomplishment of the challenges. References Bransford, J., Brown, A., & Cocking. (Eds.). (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. Brophy, S. (2000). Guidelines for modular design. Retrieved December 19, 2005, from http://www.vanth.org/white_papers.html Cochran-Smith, M. and Fries, M. K. (2001). Sticks, stones and ideology: The discourse of reform in teacher education. Educational Researcher, 30(8), 3-15. Liston, D., Whitcomb, J., & Borko, H. (2007). NCLB and scientifically-based research. Journal of Teacher Education, 58(2), 99-107. Why Do Online Students Fail Accounting? Eskew & Faley Model of Student Performance Revisited Kathy Decker (Grand Canyon University, USA) Doula Zaharopoulos (Grand Canyon University, USA) Why do so many online students fail their first accounting class? What makes some students succeed while others languish and ultimately fail? For face-to-face accounting classes, Eskew and Faley’s (1988) model of determinants of student performance found that academic aptitude, preparation, and motivation explain 54% of variance in student performance. Though the Eskew and Faley (1988) model has been validated repeatedly (Grover, Heck, & Heck, 2009; Kalbers & Wienstein, 1999; Koh & Koh, 1999; Kruck & lending, 2003; Ramadan & Quraan, 1994) it has only been tested in the face-to-face modality. This study sought to replicate the Eskew and Faley (1988) model to the extent possible to test its validity in the online modality. In extending the Eskew and Faley (1988) model into the online environment fundamental differences between face-to-face learning and online learning, including differences in student population and modality, were also addressed. Given that students in online classes tend to be older, are more likely to hold jobs and work more hours, and are more likely to have child care responsibilities (Dutton, Dutton, & Perry, 2002), this study tested the effect of age, work responsibilities, and family role in further explaining variance in student performance in online accounting. This study also addressed the differences in online learning compared to face-to-face learning. Of particular interest was the Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) Community of Inquiry model. The Community of Inquiry model holds that learning takes place in the interaction of students and teachers through three core elements: Cognitive presence, teaching presence, and social presence. Quantity and quality of participation in discussion forums is a measure of cognitive presence, the ability to construct meaning through communication (Arbaugh, 2008). Accordingly, this study tested the effect of the number of student discussion posts. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 219 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Goals This study adds to the body of knowledge by testing the validity of the Eskew and Faley (1988) model with respect to the different student population found in online in the online environment. New understanding of the determinants of student performance in the online environment provides instructors, curriculum designers, and administrators with new insights into instructional and course design changes that could improve student performance. This is of critical importance to accounting programs in that performance in first-level accounting classes has been shown to be a strong predictor of student success in subsequent accounting courses (Bernardi & Bean, 2006). Methods Based on the review of literature the following research questions and hypotheses guided this study. R1 Does the Eskew and Faley (1998) model of determinants of student performance in first college-level accounting class explain the same percentage of variance when applied in the online modality? R2 Does student age explain variance in student performance in first college-level accounting classes in the online modality? R3 Do student work responsibilities explain variance in student performance in first college-level accounting classes in the online modality? R4 Does student family role explain variance in student performance in first college-level accounting classes in the online modality? The population under study was online students at a private university in the southwestern United States who completed the first college-level accounting course between 2009 and 2012. The final sample of 94 students included only students who consented to participate and who had completed the first college-level accounting class. Compared to non-participants, study participants tended to be better students who did well in the first college-level accounting course. Curriculum at this institution was centrally controlled, so class structure was identical across all sections, but the study did not control for instructor proficiency, time of year, or individual class dynamics. Given the limitations of the sample, results cannot be generalized to the entire population. Results and Recommendations for Future Study With regard to the first research question, does the Eskew and Faley (1988) model of determinants of student performance explain the same percentage of variance the online modality, only three variables were found to correlate directly to course grade with a significance of .05 or better: Discussion posts (Motivation), previous accounting classes (Preparation), and college GPA (Academic Ability). Although this result mirrors the results of Eskew and Faley (1988), Cohn (1972), and Bellico (1972), the regression explained just 30.7% of variance in student performance. This result is not statistically significant, so the null hypothesis is not supported. Results were similar for the other research questions. In all cases the null hypothesis was not supported. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 220 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Though the regression analysis yielded no significant findings, this study found that correlations among individual pairs of variables formed a pattern that mirrors findings of previous studies. This suggests the possible existence of a more complex model of student performance determinants with multiple levels of mediating variables that should be explored in future research. Of particular interest is an expanded study to that takes into account approach to learning (Duff, 2004) or that incorporates the Community of Inquiry Model (Gorsky, Caspi, Antonovsky, Blau, & Mansur, 2010). LX Design: Using Evidence to Ignite the Experience Jeff Bergin (Pearson, USA) One aspect of emerging learning design is learner experience (LX) design, which functions at the intersection of instructional systems design (ISD) and learning science (LS), as differentiated by Christopher Hoadley. More specifically, LX design applies learning design theories and methodologies to educational product design. We will present an evidence framework that proposes a practitioner model of applied learning design that delineates nine distinct types of research, research-based design, and evaluation that designers may apply to educational product design in the consumer sector. In particular, our evidence framework builds upon Piers MacLean and Bernard Scott's theory of learning design, Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer's principles of instructional design, and Charlie Cox, Steve Harrison, and Christopher Hoadley's proposal of studio-based learning design. This framework can be applied to any iterative, learner experience design process, to ensure that the experience is efficacious for learners, instructors, and institutions. The session will also explore emerging forms of evaluation, including advanced usability testing and physiological testing. Finally, the presenters will demonstrate the utility of the framework; apply the framework to educational technology design processes; and conclude by providing recommendations for implementing an evidence-based LX design approach. Questions Session Will Explore:  What is LX design and evaluation?  What types of evidence support the design process?  What types of evidence are important to different stakeholders in the design process?  What next-generation' forms of evaluation and evidence collection are informing learning design?  How can participants adopt or adapt the evidence framework? Using the Canvas LMS to Create a Highly Interactive Online Learning Environment Amber L. Vaill (Bay Path College, USA) Chris Edwards (Canvas by Instructure, USA) Peter Testori (Bay Path College, USA) The field of online education has changed rapidly over the past two decades with the many changes and advancements in technology that have occurred. Just a decade ago, many online Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 221 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness distance education programs relied on a read/discuss instructional model, primarily using the LMS to deliver course content. Today, with the major increases in broadband accessibility and Internet connection speeds, the Internet has become more interactive and multimedia is much more common in online courses. This allows instructors to provide richer instructional connect, to interact with students using audio and/or video both synchronously and asynchronously. The tools used to deliver online course content have also been changing in recent years. Previously, self-hosted learning management systems were the dominant delivery tool. Faculty and instructional designers began noticing limitations within traditional LMSs as they began to experiment with integrating interactivity and multimedia. Course developers began using tools outside of the LMS for creating video libraries, wikis and blogs, and synchronous chat rooms. LMSs have begun to evolve to better integrate these types of functionality to again try to become the central hub for all content within the online course. At Bay Path College we adopted the Canvas LMS from Instructure during the summer of 2011 and spent the next academic year transitioning from our old LMS. We found that the tools for interactivity and integrating multimedia made it easier for our faculty to design and teach their courses. Video and audio can be recorded directly within Canvas or uploaded to the LMS. Instructors can also make use of YouTube and other online videos by easily embedding them within a page in their Canvas course. Using these tools, faculty could easily make enhancements to their online courses to make them more interactive and engaging. Faculty and students can connect external tools like Facebook and Google Docs with Canvas to improve their course experience, and an interactive whiteboard conference feature is also available within the LMS. In addition to improving content delivery and interaction within the LMS, students and faculty can interact in asynchronous discussions by posting audio or video responses, and faculty can provide feedback on student work by posting video or audio comments, in addition to using the built-in rubric tool and integrated tool for annotating students' papers directly within the LMS. The tools within Canvas make it easier for faculty to provide feedback in a number of ways to help students improve their understanding of the course content and how they can improve their work. With the new technological capabilities available to online faculty and course designers today, educational institutions are faced with the challenge of finding ways to prepare faculty with the skills they need to utilize these new instructional methodologies. The adoption of a new LMS, especially one that offers a number of new tools that can help faculty improve their courses, requires that professional development opportunities and additional resources be made available to faculty to assist them in making the most of the LMS and in making sure they know how to use the tools available to them to help them reach the pedagogical goals within their online courses. In this presentation, we will share some of the interactive and multimedia tools in Canvas, provide examples of how our faculty are using these tools in their classes, and testimonials from our faculty on the benefits of these tools. We will also share our strategies for training faculty on these tools and our efforts to work with academic programs to redesign courses with the new tools that are now available to us through Canvas. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 222 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness PARTNR: A New Model for Course Development Christine Fleming (Regis University, USA) Struggling with course development that takes forever and produces inconsistent results? Join us for a glimpse at how we're solving those problems. Regis University's College for Professional Studies struggled to design and develop an online course in less than 40 weeks until a task force of instructional designers and faculty put their heads together and invented PARTNR (yes, we know the spelling is a tad creative). The charge was primarily around speed of development, but other issues involved a dysfunctional relationship between Learning Design and faculty, confusing and inconsistent course structures, and at times, a lack of alignment between an individual course and its program. PARTNR addresses all of these without increasing expense. The first two PARTNR courses were completed in 12 and 10 weeks, respectively, and passed QM with 100% and 98% scores. Participants will see our process and the actual structure of our courses. THE PARTNR MODEL PARTNR stands for:  P Plan (planning or design document, comprising entire course)  A Author/Assemble (development of content)  R1 Review (content review by subject matter expert in School)  T Turn [into a course] (moving content into LMS)  N N-Hance (adding visual and interactive elements)  R2 Rubric (review of finished course using Quality Matters-Plus Rubric) What Remained Unchanged As We Moved to PARTNR? 1. The College for Professional Studies (CPS) had and has a centralized model of course development. 2. Faculty work with Learning Design (LD) instructional designers (IDs) and e-learning technologists (ELTs) to create a single course shell to which all faculty teaching that course adhere. 3. LD staffing remained at five IDs and 3.5 ELTs, despite the uptick in number of courses to be developed. 4. Our LMS remained Desire2Learn. Key Differences for College for Professional Studies (CPS) in Moving to PARTNR include: 1. Due to the time required to develop a given course, the pipeline in LD was very narrow, limiting the number of courses a School could submit to 12 per year. This meant that many of our courses were years out of date. 2. With PARTNR, there is no limit, although we work hard at forecasting and balancing workloads. 3. Significant work is now done by department chairs and faculty before a course comes to LD for development. 4. Prior, little or no thought had been expected, or given, to course design until the course "arrived." Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 223 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness 5. The prior process emphasized writing of content by the faculty and an iterative review process by instructional designers. 6. In PARTNR, the ID guides the design and alignment of content, assignments, and assessments and does not serve as an editor. 7. The addition of the first "R," content review, places control of the content back in the hands of the School's department chair, who was previously not involved at all in overseeing course development. 8. Before, faculty were designated "course developers" which begged the questions of "who is in charge," "who owns the course or the content," and "what does LD do, anyhow, if I'm developing the course?" 9. With PARTNR, faculty are designated "content authors," better defining their role. While that may sound like nothing more than word-smithing, the significance of this change has been critical. 10. The PARTNR process differentiated the roles of content authors (CAs) and instructional designers (IDs) more directly, by defining "content" as that material for which the CA had educational and experiential background, and "structure" as "everything else." 11. CAs are responsible for content while IDs are responsible for structure, although collaboration on both is expected. 12. The goal is to free each party to focus on that part of the course most clearly aligned with his/her strengths and knowledge. Finally, the "owner" of the course is the university! The creation of a standard "course skeleton" was one of the most important elements of PARTNR. This both simplifies the work of development and clarifies the process of teaching and learning for facilitators and students.As part of the templated PARTNR approach to course structure, a great deal of information was standardized and made into boilerplate text, relieving everyone of the need to repeatedly reinvent the wheel. In addition, a streamlined look-and-feel was developed, so that visual elements could be created more rapidly and as appropriate, be easily reused or repurposed for other courses. A resource repository, created as a model of the new course structure, guides CAs through the first three steps; we call it "PAR-for-the-Course." All the templates, plus supporting information, writing guides, and much more is available to CAs as they progress through Plan and Author/Assemble. While PARTNR may appear to be a linear process, the process actually includes strong emphasis on a division of labor and parallel development. Concurrently with PARTNR, we also implemented Quality Matters (our second "R"), plus a few Jesuit-specific items. Results of PARTNR Model - Very Promising:  The first two pure-PARTNR courses were developed in 12 and 10 weeks, respectively, and passed the final QM+ review (second "R") with flying colors.  Within three months of launching PARTNR, we had 40 courses in progress.  The previous year, using our old model, we had developed a total of 60 courses in 12 months. We project completing 102 courses this year.  Preparation work involving program outcomes and the appropriate "fit" of the proposed course within the program have helped with alignment. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 224 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness     The improvement in the intentionality of course development is amazing. CAs arrive for their first brainstorm session with concrete ideas and are excited to engage in the process. Prior, the first meeting sometimes included a CA's question: "What is this course, again?" The use of a templated structure enables much faster, easier revisions since content pages can be changed out, one for one, as needed. Plan for Presentation:  (5 minutes) Welcome, Introductions, Setting expectations Back-story of where we were How we went about researching possible answers  (5 minutes) Explaining PARTNR - acronym and meaning  (5 minutes) Explaining concept of "content" vs "structure"  (5 minutes) Showing templated "course skeleton"  (5 minutes) "The faculty's side" - faculty/content author describes his experience with PARTNR  (10 minutes) Q/A The EASyR Way to Get Students Thinking Critically Kay Lehmann (University of Wisconsin-Stout, USA) Goals of this session: Participants will understand the EASyR method to develop lessons which require critical thinking Participants will discuss in small groups how the method might be applied in their own content Educators want their students to think critically about the content but often the lesson planning and assessment of learning don't require students to actually do any critical thinking. This can be solved by using a method known as EASyR when designing learning activities. EASyR stands for Evaluate, Analyze, Synthesize, and Reflect. The terms are derived from a taxonomy of critical thinking by Benjamin Bloom but have been re-arranged. Bloom's original taxonomy begins with lower levels of thinking such as Knowledge and Comprehension and many courses and lessons often unwittingly limit students to the lower levels. Real engagement with the content and creation of new work requires students to work at the upper levels of critical thinking. The levels will be briefly described and examples of re-worked lessons using the EASyR method will be shown. Participants will then work in small groups to discuss how some of their own lessons might be re-worked using this method. A few groups will be asked to share their before and after lesson ideas. Let's face it, lesson planning isn't a sexy topic but it is a very important part of online learning! This was a standing room only session at the Teaching Professor conference in 2010 when it was Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 225 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness just the EASy method! The Sloan-C attendees will find out why if they attend this session on the newly improved EASyR method! A Blended Social Work Clinical Practice Course Shelley Levin (University of Southern California, USA) Although the use of computer mediated technology as an instructional medium has been rapidly increasing in the field of social work education, the profession has lagged behind in incorporating technology in the teaching of clinical practice, under the assumption that these courses should be taught face-to-face only. In a national study that examined the perceptions of social work faculty concerning the effectiveness of web-based instruction, clinical practice courses received the lowest scores for effectiveness of web-based instruction. In October 2010, the University of Southern California School of Social Work developed a nation-wide complete MSW-degree consisting of a blended curriculum content, in conjunction with a traditional (although geographically dispersed) field internship. This presentation describes the development of the foundation year clinical practice course of the program. An important early decision of the school was that courses would be conducted such that 50% of the students' class time would be in synchronous meetings with instructors and other students, and the remaining time spent working through pre-produced asynchronous learning activities. This "fifty-fifty split" fostered the benefits of asynchronous content (e.g. time and place access flexibility, standardization of content) while also promoting traditional small group learning that is a hallmark of many social work programs, and especially clinical practice classes. Practice classes require an environment of mutual trust among students and instructor, as discussions and role plays often necessitate a degree of risk on the part of students. The asynchronous component of the course work is comprised of learning activities that faculty design for students to complete each week prior to attending their live class session. By definition, asynchronous content is done individually by students. The range of learning activities include viewing faculty presentations, observing filmed case vignettes, watching standard videos that would be typically be shown in campus classrooms, participating in threaded forum discussions (sometimes called discussion boards), and taking self-check quizzes. Each week's asynchronous content provides the foundation for that week's synchronous session. For instance a filmed case vignette may provide the springboard for discussion about how best to approach such a situation, or might even lead to role playing various approaches. Each week students have a live class time meeting for each class they are taking. Class times are scheduled as they would be on campus, and each student adjusts for time zone. The class sessions are conducted via the Internet and have real-time audio and video connections. Classes are comprised of a maximum of 12 students and an instructor. All students and the instructor can see and hear one another. Instructors and students report that these live classes can feel more intimate than an on campus class - there are no back rows, everyone sees one another and everyone has a front row seat. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 226 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Social presence refers to students' sense of community, or connection to others, in their classes, and has been an elusive quality in many social work online courses. Because of the use of realtime audio and video, students and instructor are able to hear and see emotional expression, vocal inflection, and a full range of verbal and nonverbal communication; social presence has been greatly increased as a result. The underlying principle of the course design was the concept of andragogy. Andragogy is a specific theoretical and practical approach. It is based on the humanistic conception of selfdirection and autonomous learners, with teachers as facilitators of learning. It consists of six principles: Need to Know, Foundation, Self Concept, Readiness, Orientation and Motivation. A short survey was conducted to assure that the material taught in the Blended Learning environment was the same as the material taught on the ground. Faculty reported several notable observations about teaching in the Blended Learning environment compared to teaching on the ground. Of particular concern to the faculty was the formation of the relationship in a Blended Learning environment as the relationship is seen as vital to the transmission of knowledge and skills in clinical social work practice. Although faculty report it took longer to form the initial relationship, perhaps because face-to-face time was ½ of the time it was on ground, once the relationship was formed it appeared stronger. This was attributed to the fact that Faculty became more creative and assertive in reaching out to students such as connecting with them through email between classes and having discussion questions posted on the LMS to which all students had to respond. Although many instructors noted the lag time in building a relationship, they also expressed that the relationship was often more intimate than on the ground. They noted the number of students in each section was approximately half of what it was on the ground (10-12 vs. 18-20). The experience at the University of Southern California shows that it is possible to successfully teach direct practice in a blended online environment, with several important caveats. The first is that the choice of a Blended Learning environment allows a large variety of learning experiences that need to be carefully placed in the most effective medium (synchronous versus asynchronous). Second, it is vitally important to have a Learning Management System that supports the faculty's choice of the placement of activities. Third, the choice of placement of material must be theory-driven. Finally, faculty must approach teaching online in a thoughtful manner, recognizing the differences in teaching on line and on the ground. The goals of this presentation are to: 1. Explore the reasons the social work profession has been reluctant to teach clinical practice in an online environment 2. Discuss the reasons a Blended Learning environment was chosen 3. Describe the theory underlying the placement of content in asynchronous versus synchronous portions of the class 4. Review the experiences of faculty who have taught the blended class as well as teaching the class on the ground. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 227 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Are We Who We Think We Are?: ePortfolios as a Tool for Curriculum Redesign Gail Matthews-DeNatale (Northeastern University, USA) Goals for Session Participants: - To identify ePortfolios as a rich source of data about student perceptions and program-level learning outcomes - To recognize the value of student ePortfolios for program assessment, development of program-level competencies, and program redesign - To see a model for using ePortfolios in online program redesign - To consider the opportunities for adapting this model for use within one's own institution Overview: This Effective Practice focuses on the use of ePortfolios for formative assessment in the redesign of online degree programs. In 2011 Northeastern instituted an ePortfolio requirement for students enrolled in the University's Master of Education programs. Systematic review of student ePortfolios, as a collection, informed the 2012-13 Master’s program redesign. This redesign included the articulation of program-level competencies, integrated program course map, shared foundational courses across four concentrations, and signature assignments for experiential learning within each of the program's courses. The redesigned program increases ePortfolio integration across the curriculum, supporting student metacognition, clarifying outcome expectations, and improving the capacity of students to demonstrate accomplishments. This model for program redesign process exemplifies the five pillars of effective practice because it: - Improves the pedagogical integrity, transparency, and linkages within the program (Learning Effectiveness) - Increases faculty understanding of the student population, involvement in curriculum redesign, and shared investment in student growth toward a common goal (Faculty Satisfaction) - Provides an integrated curriculum in which students can see how their learning is "adding up" and graduates have concrete evidence to showcase their accomplishments (Student Satisfaction) - Creates a viable system of evidence-gathering for the assessment of program impact, including program-level signature assignments (Scale) - Increases program capacity to support experiential learning and prior learning assessment (Access) Context: Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 228 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Northeastern's Graduate Programs in Education (GPE) include Masters-level concentrations in Learning and Instruction, Higher Education Administration, and Special Education, as well as an MAT licensure degree. In fall 2013 the Master’s program will be expanded to include a concentration in Learning Design that focuses on mobile and online learning. Most of the concentrations are fully online, with some available in blended format, and about 500 students are enrolled in the programs. The GPE instituted a masters-wide ePortfolio requirement in 2011. Students were directed to include at least one artifact of work from each course in their ePortfolios. The ePortfolio template also included space for students to introduce themselves and articulate professional goals. Because both the faculty and students are virtual, ePortfolios also provide an important opportunity for faculty to learn about their students as individuals. Problem: Institutions, programs, and class cohorts are cultural entities. They are groups of people who, over time, develop a mythos about their identity and accomplishments, a shared narrative that is often unspoken. This includes ingrained beliefs about students: their backgrounds, hopes for the future, the quality of their work, metacognition about what they have learned, and how they intend to use that learning in the future. These beliefs often interfere with faculty motivation and ability to articulate program level competencies, make informed decisions about the curriculum, and align signature assignments with desired program outcomes. Student ePortfolios provide evidence about who our students really are and the meaning they are making of our programs. When viewed as a collection, as a rich set of qualitative data, ePortfolios depict a community of learners. ePortfolio sampling makes it possible to spot patterns that are not readily apparent in enrollment statistics. They provide a unique view of existing program-level outcomes and illuminate avenues for program improvement. Approach: In summer 2012 a group of faculty at Northeastern University embarked upon the redesign of Master of Education degree programs. The MA program includes four concentrations (Learning and Instruction, Higher Education Administration, Special Education, and a new concentration in Learning Design that is under development) and an MAT for the licensure of people entering the field of K12 education. Faculty and Academic Administrators held a day-long retreat in August 2012 to kick off the program redesign process. Prior to the retreat the faculty member who serves as the programs' ePortfolio liaison conducted a preliminary analysis of all student ePortfolios; other faculty were each given a random subset of fifteen ePortfolios to review. The retreat began with a review and discussion about ePortfolio observations and surprises. Results: Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 229 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness We anticipated that the process would help us base program revisions on patterns of need in student academic performance. We had no idea that the process would challenge our fundamental beliefs about who we are as a program. The ePortfolios provided a fine-grain view of student interests, motivations, and background that could not be discerned through statistical analysis of student data. With the exception of the MAT, Graduate Programs in Education are oriented toward mid-career professionals. But GPE ePortfolios revealed that many students were transitioning from one position into another business, becoming novices in a new profession. The ePortfolios also indicated that students were not approaching their program of study as a coherent learning experience, making cognitive connections between courses and non-academic experience, and integrating program accomplishments into their presentation of self as professionals. This analysis served as the driver for a process of program redesign, a series of intense and fruitful conversations about the purpose of each concentration, and our shared vision for all Masters-level graduates. The new curriculum weaves ePortfolios throughout the program, within the context of a newly formed required course sequence. The goal is to make competencies explicit and transparent, for both faculty and students, and to scaffold student learning through ongoing engagement with ePortfolio development. NOTE: Presentation attendees will receive a booklet of exemplars: ePortfolio samples, a schedule of questions for consideration in ePortfolio review, program- and concentration-level competencies, course map, ePortfolio template, and sample signature assignments. Northeastern University is a member of the FPISE-funded Connect to Learning (C2L) project, a consortium of twenty-three institutions dedicated to the use of ePortfolios for improving student engagement, success, and retention. The program redesign process described in this proposal has benefited from the funding and collegial support of C2L project colleagues. Increasing Instructor and Student Social Presence: Making Our Virtual Selves Visible in the Online Classroom Jessica Gordon (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA) In my recently completed 35-page paper called "Making our Virtual Selves Visible: How to be Present in the Online Classroom", I synthesize the findings of four decades worth of studies pertaining to social presence and suggest a multitude of ways to apply the findings of these studies in the online classroom. Through an in-depth review of the literature, I show that instructor and student social presence is correlated with student satisfaction and student success in online courses, and I provide a synthesis of published methods for increasing social presence for both faculty and students in the virtual classroom. In this presentation, I will.. 1. Briefly share the highlights of my research in order to show that devoting time and effort to increasing social presence is a worthwhile pedagogical endeavor. However, after this 8-10 minute lecture that is the premise for my session, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 230 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness 2. Engage the audience in three specific discussions/activities that will allow them to consider ways to assess and increase social presence in their own online classes. First, I will introduce participants to two methods for interpreting and assessing social presence in their own classes.   The first method stems from The Community of Inquiry framework and what Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000) call "social presence indicators" and "teaching presence indicators". According to the Community of Inquiry Coding Template, indicators of social presence include expression of emotions, instances of risk free expression, and examples of collaboration; examples of teaching presence include defining and initiating discussion topics, sharing personal meaning and focusing discussions. The second method for evaluating social presence in our classes is through the use of the Immediacy Behavior Scale (Richmond, Gorham, McCroskey, 1987). Although developed for the face-to-face classroom, this survey which includes statements describing teacher verbal and nonverbal immediacy behaviors yields interesting findings about socially present behaviors when applied to the online classroom. I will ask participants to discuss in small groups how they might encourage and avoid similar behaviors in their own classes. Second, many studies indicate that the use of emoticons and paralanguage (yuk, sooooo, Hmmm) increase student presence in online courses. (Gunawardena and Zittle (1997); Garrison, Anderson & Archer (2000); Whip and Lorentz (2009); Wei, Chen and Kinshuck (2012). I will share a very condensed version of these findings, just enough to substantiate the claim, and I will invite the audience to participate in a short discussion of the advantages and consequences of using such non-academic language in their own classes. Third, I will show a short series of screen captures that illustrate how various content and learning management systems have the potential to severely hinder or increase social presence in online courses. These snapshots will illustrate how Blackboard, which is a product of the topdown Web 1.0 world, severely limits both instructor and student ability to exhibit high social presence behaviors; similarly, I will show how alternate learning management systems allow and encourage creation, distribution and marketing of our own materials’ activities which have the potential to increase social presence. My claim that learning management systems have the potential to both limit and encourage socially present behaviors is substantiated by much research; in fact, just last year, Wei, Chen and Kinshuk (2012), in "A model for social presence in online classrooms", studied whether user interface (an example of which is a content management system or learner platform) and social cues affect learner's perceived social presence. They found that user interface is an important factor in online learning since social interaction is facilitated through it and that "user interface and social cues have significant influences on social presence". In Blackboard, unlike Google and Facebook in which social presence is high, student comments are not accompanied by an image of themselves that they can alter at any time, and when other students do reply to their discussion board postings, Blackboard offers no method for notifying Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 231 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness the student that s/he has received a response; thus, it is rare that students check the discussion board and even rarer that real conversations, and thus learning, occurs. Open-source learning platforms such as Moodle and Sakai have become increasingly popular. In addition, faculty have also begun using free platforms such as blogs, wikis and Google Sites for students to collaborate and present final work. Chrisopher Thacker (2012) suggests that faculty have successfully utilized user-created Social Networking sites such as Ning, Grouply and Social Go which allow faculty to "experiment and become familiar with dozens of applications that best serve their needs (Thacker, 2012, n.p.). The screen captures that I show of these various learning platforms will quickly and effectively illuminate the vast opportunities that are available for creating social presence once we step outside of Bb. There are two additional take-aways from my presentation:  First, research indicates that faculty who teach online courses must understand that their own social presence and social cues are arguably the most important predictors of social presence in the virtual classroom.  Second, faculty must accept that our students are new to online classes, and while they may have high online social presence online in Facebook, this does not mean that they know how to transfer these behaviors to the online classroom. Thus, we must teach students how to be socially present in an online course and give them ample opportunities to practice. References: Garrison , D., Anderson, T., Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education. Gorham, J. (1988). The relationship between verbal teacher immediacy behaviors and student learning. Communication Education. Gunawarden, C., Zittle, F. (2009). Social presence as a predictor of satisfaction within a computer mediated conferencing environment. Short, J., Williams, E. & Christie, B. (1976). The Social Psychology of Telecommuncations. Thacker, C. (2012). Moving beyond Blackboard: Using a social network as a learning management system. Metropolitan Universities. Wei, C., Chen, N., Kinshuk. (2012). A model for social presence in online classrooms. Educational Technology Research and Development. Whipp, J.L., Lorentz, R.A. (2008). Cognitive and social help giving in online teaching: an exploratory study. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 232 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Online Student Readiness and Satisfaction within Subpopulations Julie Bryant (Noel-Levitz, USA) Mac Adkins (SmarterServices, USA) In an effort to determine whether online student readiness, as measured by the SmarterMeasure™ Learning Readiness Indicator, is predictive of satisfaction as measured by the Noel-Levitz Priorities Survey for Online Learners™ (PSOL), research was originally conducted in 2011 to compare the readiness measure with satisfaction measures at five institutions and the data were analyzed on an individual student level for students who had completed both assessment tools. The major findings of this study were that the student readiness constructs of Individual Attributes and Life Factors as measured by the SmarterMeasure Readiness Indicator were statistically significant predictors of online student satisfaction as measured by the PSOL. In 2013, a follow up study will be conducted with current data sets to compare online student readiness and online student satisfaction by comparing national data sets segmented by demographic variables. The priority variables for analysis will be the students' age and their previous online enrollment. The data will be viewed at the cumulative level and will include several thousand student responses at dozens of institutions over a one-year time period. Not all students will have completed both instruments, but the observations will be based on the trends that are being identified based on the online learners' age and previous enrollment. The results of this study will reflect the summary satisfaction and likelihood to re-enroll for each subpopulation, as well as the priority issues for improvement, with an identification of unique issues for particular subpopulations. The results will also summarize the readiness for these same populations for online programs. While the study is currently in progress, it is expected that the combination of these data will highlight areas where institutions can target their resources to best serve their online students based on the students' ages and how much experience they have with online enrollment. There will be recommendations for action and session participants will be able to consider the students they are currently serving with online courses and how these students can best be assisted to be successful. Targeted action steps will help institutions to improve student success and completion. Noel-Levitz and SmarterServices are respected providers of online learning assessment tools and have access to large national databases that provide insight into the trends within the higher education online learning environment. Goals of the session: 1. Learn the results of the study to identify unique satisfaction and readiness indicators for students based on their age and previous enrollment in online programs. 2. Explore the variables that can be used to measure online student readiness and online student satisfaction. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 233 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness 3. Receive recommendations for action steps and good practice when targeting initiatives for particular demographic subpopulations. The Teaching of Doers Janel Mitchell (Utah Valley University, USA) This presentation is for faculty, instructional designers, and course developers who want meaningful learning experiences for their online students. The best way to learn something new is to experience it - to learn by doing. Have you experienced course assessments that demanded large amounts of your time or your students' time without a big return on investment? Do you opt for the standard auto-grade exams to assess your high-enrollment courses simply because that is the most efficient use of your time? If you answered yes to either of these two questions, this presentation is for you. Moving students from theory to application in meaningful ways in an online class requires creativity. Learn about some creative assessments that Utah Valley University successfully uses to give students valuable and transferrable experiences. For the purpose of this presentation, assessments will be referred to in a variety of ways including learning experiences, activities, assignments, etc. We will first discuss what makes an assessment meaningful followed by a brief showcase of examples to stimulate creative idea generation. Open dialog will be encouraged, allowing for small group breakouts and the sharing of specific ideas. Participants will leave this presentation with relevant, creative, real-world assessment solutions that can be implemented in their own online learning courses. High Tech and High Touch in Service-learning: Using Technology in Reflection Activities Javier Leung (Fort Hays State University, USA) Presentation Description Technological innovations provide society with 24-hour access to information from anywhere in the world. Our vision has been augmented through devices and apps that host a variety of services to better understand the world around us. Not only instant access to information, but also communication has been greatly enhanced by video conferencing tools to communicate with family, friends, or business partners. Although today's technology is pervasive, how can faculty, students, and community agencies take advantage of devices and apps in stimulating student reflection and collaboration? Before we answer this question, it is always a good reminder to understand that reflection is the key to service-learning. In the words of Janet Eyler (2001) in Creating Your Reflection Map, reflection is "the hyphen in service-learning; it is the process that helps students connect what they observe and experience in the community with their academic study." (p. 35) Presentation Goal Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 234 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Based on Eyler's reflection examples, I will provide an overview of the technologies and how users interact with apps and devices for reflection, collaboration among classmates or agencies, and presenting results. In Eyler's reflection map, students may perform reflection activities alone or with classmates and/or community partners before, during and after service-learning. The aim of the presentation is provide practical uses of technology in service-learning. Presentation Strategies The presentation consists of three key sections: 1) Key definitions (2-3 minutes) - In this section, I will provide a brief overview of servicelearning and how it can enhance learning and reflection when students apply what they learned in the classroom to the field of service. 2) Overview of technologies (3-5 minutes) - Before I provide any specifics on how to use certain tools, the audience will learn about features and pricing (most tools are free) of technologies such as concept mapping using Mind42, interactive audio/video discussions and dashboards with VoiceThread and Lino, podcasting with SoundCloud, immersive apps such as GoPano, and eportfolio using Pathbrite. 3) Technology showcase in reflection exercises (20-25 minutes) - In order to showcase the use of the technologies, I will be using AirServer with an iPad to demonstrate how students, faculty, and community agencies interact in reflection and collaboration exercises before, during and after the service-learning activity. If AirServer fails, I will rely on web services located at quicktool.com/screenfly. I will showcase the technologies based on three types of reflection exercises indicated below: 3.1 Reflection alone Before service activity - Write assumptions about the service-learning activity using video blogging and online trigger services. Tool demos include: Mind 42 concept mapping and VoiceThread. During service activity - Record self-reports on activities using podcasting tools. Tool demos include: SoundCloud and GoPano. After service activity - Produce a detail recollection of events using a concept map using Mind42 concept map. 3.2 Reflection with classmates Before service activity: Post sticky notes, pictures, and multimedia to gather assumptions, expectations and challenges using an interactive dashboard called Lino. During service activity: Use interactive dashboard to collect journal notes and discuss artifacts students may encounter during the activity: Tool demos include: Lino and VoiceThread mobile. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 235 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness 3.3 Reflection with community partners Before service activity - Have video discussions with community partners about planning service-learning activities using VoiceThread and Lino. During service activity - Develop strengths and weaknesses using a concept map. After service activity - Showcase service-learning outcomes to partners using e-portfolios and websites using Pathbrite portfolios. 4) Resources and Q&A (5 minutes) - I will prompt the audience to take advantage of free tools and to think creatively about the existing technologies that their home institutions might have purchased. Habit or Incentives: Which is Stronger in Curbing Procrastinations in e-Exams? Yair Levy (Nova Southeastern University, USA) The role of habit in the context of social science has been well studies over the past several decades. However, studies for the role of habit in e-learning in general, and effectiveness of elearning in particular, are lacking. In general, people create habits in order to reduce cognitive load so their short-term working memory can be freed for processing other current issues. While some habits are helpful in reducing such cognitive load, other habits, such as procrastination, are not as beneficial. Procrastination is an inevitable part of daily life, especially when it comes to activities that are bounded by deadlines. Specifically, as we reported last year using data analytics of over 1,600 records, procrastination in online exams had significant scale both in volume as well as negative impact on task performance. In this presentation, we will report the follow-up results of a quasi-experimental study that included data from over 2,100 online exams. As our prior data analytics revealed that students who procrastinated had significantly lower task performances (i.e. scores) compared to those who didn't, thus, incentives to alter procrastination were considered. Given that students over the years have been requesting time extensions during online exams, our current study evaluated the role of time incentives on curbing procrastination. Our study was set as a quasi-experiment that included an experimental group of nearly 500 and a control group of over 1,600 online exams. Time incentives were provided to the experimental group in an effort to measure their effects on procrastination, task performance, and task completion time in online exams. Statistical analysis was conducted to assess such differences between the experimental and control groups. Our results indicated a significant effect of time incentives on procrastination, while task performance and task completion time documented no significant effect. This presentation will conclude with an open discussion session encouraging audience to interact in a Q&A and collaborative discussion with the presenters on the data collection, data preparation, results, and techniques used to perform the research. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 236 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Social Presence: Creating Online Learning Communities that Empower Student Learning Lauren Cummins (Youngstown State University, USA) Presentation Description "Throughout the history of human communication, advances in technology have powered paradigmatic shifts in education (Frick, 1991)... For communication to take place, at a bare minimum, there must be a sender, a receiver, and a message. If this message is intended as an instruction, then besides student, teacher, and content, we must consider the environment (Berg & Collins, 1995). Nasseh, B. (1997). Ball State University, Adult Education in the News. A paradigm shift has been happening in higher education for the past twenty-plus years. Countless faculty and instructional designers have gathered around a computer to design and provide learning experiences through learning management systems (LMS) and countless students have gathered around a computer to journey through these experiences to learn information through a variety of distance education courses. However, not all distance-learning courses are "created equal." Expertise in content does not guarantee expertise in helping others learn the content. Understanding effective pedagogy is critical for the design of a course, since delivering information (teacher-centered) is not the same as how students will learn the information (student-centered). Effective pedagogy linked to an online environment that builds social presence is essential. This presentation focuses on the critical importance of building learning communities within distance education courses to engage learners in meaningful experiences that promote effective learning. It begins by discussing a graduate, survey used to identify candidates' wants and needs related to distance education. The results from this survey were analyzed and used to design early childhood education, distance education graduate courses. One of the most prominent needs identified by the candidates from this survey was the need for an online learning community, where students could share their learning experiences with others in the course. This presentation will; • • • demonstrate the 2.0 technology used to build a learning community, discuss the data linking learning outcomes with this 2.0 technology, share the results from a course satisfaction survey, which can be linked to course retention. Opportunities for dialogue during the session are provided, as well as a question and answer period at the end. The presentation will utilize Prezi. Goals After this presentation participates will be able to: 1. identify 2.0 technologies that support social presence and engage learners; 2. understand the importance of a learning community in distance education; 3. understand the link between social presence, learning communities and positive learning outcomes. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 237 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness References Allen, J.E., & Seaman, J. (2010). Learning on demand: Online education in the United States, Needham, MA. The Sloan Consortium. Arbaugh, J.B., Cleveland-Innes, M., Diaz, S.R., Garrison, R., Ice, P., Richardson, J.C., & Swan, K.P. (2008). Developing a community of inquiry instrument: Testing a measure of the community of inquiry framework using a multi-institutional sample. The Internet and Higher Education, 11(3-4), 133-136. Berg Z. & Collins, M. (1995). Computer-mediated: Communication and the online classroom in distance education. Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine, (2)4, 6. Bork, A. (1995). Distance learning and interaction: Toward a virtual learning institution. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 4(3), 227-244. Burg, L. (2008). Crafting the future: Pioneer lessons and concerns for today. Distance Education,1, 5-17. DiRamio, D. & Wolverton, M. (July 2006). Integrating learning communities and distance education: Possibility or pipedream? Innovative Higher Education, (31)2, 99-113 Edge, D.W. & Loegering, J.P. (2000). Distance education: Expanding learning opportunities. Wildlife Society Bulletin, 28(3), 522-533. Frick, T. W. (1991). Restructuring Education Through Technology. Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation: Bloomington, Indiana Leong, P. (2011). Role of social presence and cognitive absorption in online learning environments. Distance Education, 32(1), 5-28. Liu, O.L. (2011). Student evaluation of instruction: In the new paradigm of distance education. Res High Education, 53, 471-486. Moore, M. G. (1990). Background and overview of contemporary American Distance education. In M. Moore (Ed.), Contemporary issues in American Distance Education. Pergamon, New York, 12-26. Nasseh, B. (1997). A brief history of distance education. Adult Education in the News. Retrieved December 5, 2012, from http://www.seniornet.org/edu/art/history.html Price, D.V. (2005). Learning communities and student success in postsecondary education. MDRC, 1-24. Richardson, J. C. & Swan K. (Sept. 2003). Examining social presence in online courses in relation to students' perceived learning and satisfaction. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 7(1), 68-88. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 238 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Shattuck, K. (2007). Quality matters: Collaborative planning on a state level. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, (X)III, University of West Georgia, Distance Education Center. Retrieved, December 8, 2012, from http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall103/shattuck103.htm Smith, B. L., MacGregor, J., Matthews, R., & Gabelnick, F. (2004). Learning Communities: Reforming Undergraduate Education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Sung E. & Mayer R. (Sept. 2012). Five facets of social presence in online distance education. Computers in Human Behavior, (28)5, 1738-1747. Watts, M.M. (2003). Taking the distance out of education. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 94, 97-103. COI + UDL = Designing Utopia for Online Learning Lisa Webb (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA) Yin Kreher (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA) Disability Studies as a field of inquiry has shifted the conversation about disability from a medical to a social model. Over the last thirty years, the field of disability studies has developed a narrative of inclusion and sought to define disability as cultural identity rather than as deficit or deviance. Proponents of this reframing of disability contend that it is societies and systems that are disabled, rather than the person. Education systems are mandated to operate under the federal guidelines of the Americans with Disabilities Act. These systems tend to focus on compliance with the law regarding access, and therefore persons with disabilities are viewed through the lens of the medical model of disability. Individuals with disabilities in an educational context are often perceived as a minority group. They are required to disclose their disability in order to receive equal access to their academic programs. In an online learning environment, Randy Garrison's Community of Inquiry (COI) theoretical framework for educational experiences (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000) is a process model that seeks to explain in an elegant way the complexity of elements that create and sustain effective online learning. This model has been referenced in numerous publications (Garrison, 2011). It highlights three constituting elements of e-learning: social, cognitive and teaching presence. Each component is dependent upon the other to create a meaningful educational experience. The COI framework assumes that learning takes place when community, leading to interactions, is present. However, without access to information, there can be no interactions and hence, either limited or no community if learners cannot access the information. The dynamic relationships in a COI depend on access and equity to information. Every individual contributes to the richness of the educational experience in a COI. The COI framework also raises certain challenges about learning effectiveness in cases where learners with disabilities choose not to self-identify their Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 239 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness conditions. Also, if course designers fail to implement UDL principles from the beginning, learners with disabilities may be unintentionally excluded from the online community. Presentation Seeks to Foster Discussion On: 1. Some challenges that may arise in using the COI framework alone as a guide for course design 2. How using it with the UDL guidelines will ensure greater accessibility in online learning 3. The significance of using the COI framework together with the UDL framework as a more thorough heuristic for the design and development of accessible online courses 4. Suggestions for further analysis and research using the COI and UDL frameworks. The COI framework provides a way for students and teachers with disabilities to engage fully in the online educational experience. It shifts the dialogue about access from the medical model of disability (i.e., "I am a student with a disability who needs ... ) to inclusion in the COI based on a social model of disability. Through the lens of the COI framework, a learner can assume a participatory stance through opportunities to interact effectively within a learning community. The premise of the COI framework (Garrison, 2011) is that a community of learners is critical in fostering a meaningful educational experience where higher-order learning is a goal. The three constituting elements (three types of presence) of the COI framework provide a way of thinking about and designing online instruction that parallels the three primary principles of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework. The COI framework is thus significant as a conceptual tool for use together with the UDL framework to craft meaningful educational experiences that support an inclusive online learning environment. Generating social, cognitive and teaching presence that support dialogic interactions and meaningful reflection invites both the learner and instructor to negotiate and co-construct their online identities and meaning-making. This involves the learner (and vice versa, the instructor) to consider various means of representing ideas (namely, the first UDL principle) in order to select the most appropriate way to display information about self and others. It also implies that thoughtful consideration must be made to offer the learner multiple means to take action, express himself/herself and to engage with others (second and third UDL principles). For instance, in the co-construction of knowledge:  How will participants (not just the instructor) in a COI craft their teaching presence, direct, design and facilitate instruction to optimize learning outcomes and shape constructive conversations?  What learning design options offer the best ways for learners to navigate and access information for critical engagement in a largely non-verbal learning community?  What technologies will support collaboration in such a way that learners can co-create and sustain meaning (cognitive presence) and also experience a sense of self-expression and camaraderie (social presence)? Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 240 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Presenters will use the COI categories and indicators (Table 3.1, Garrison, 2011, p. 25) and pose design/research questions for inclusive and accessible instruction that aligns with UDL principles. Participants will engage in activities that simulate some of the typical challenges that students with physical and/or sensory disabilities encounter in online courses and reflect on these experiences in the context of the COI framework. Effective Online Teaching with Working Groups and Peer Mentoring Cheri Crabb (Elon University, USA) With increased demand to supplement standard curriculum course offerings, disciplines across campus discussed methods to best serve student needs online. We initially offered training that centered on teaching strategies and logistics of navigating delivery technologies. Now with approximately 45 courses offered each summer, feedback and assessment tell us that faculty benefit most from the infrastructure we provide that enables opportunities for mentoring and assisting each other with course development and design. To support faculty with varying technology skills and comfort levels as they learn to teach online, acquiring enhanced pedagogical skills for online learning environments through a supportive infrastructure is important. Our department (Teaching and Learning Technologies) provides extensive technical and supportive resources along with a continuous consultation and evaluation process conducted by instructional designers to ensure mastery of skills required for effective online teaching. Instructional designers also facilitate continuing conversation between and among faculty and academic support personnel. This collaborative conversational course development process evolved into what we now call Online Course Design Working Groups (OCDWG). The most important aspect of the design working groups is the peer-to-peer conversations that occur. These collaborative cross-discipline conversations provide faculty with continuing opportunities to learn from each other. The partnerships transcend all aspects of pedagogy. The evolution of Teaching and Learning Technologies support model provides valuable information on how to structure activities to ensure faculty success in online pedagogy. OCDWGs meet several times over spring term to discuss these themes: syllabus construction and organization, best practices, course innovations, communication and community, concluding with a course showcase. Discussion among colleagues increases faculty awareness about successful online teaching strategies and methods. This peer-to-peer support expands their willingness to risk and experiment with new ways of teaching and communicating with students. Faculty have indicated that learning to organize and parse their content along with supportive mentoring contributed to decreased anxiety and increased teaching effectiveness. The program began in 2002 with 15 courses. The effectiveness of the support model is indicated by the ninety per cent return rate of instructors to the summer online program. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 241 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness As a result of participating in this session attendees will be able to modify our conversational support model for faculty at their institution with the information shared. Session outcomes include: 1. Discuss programs being used by colleagues 2. Develop practical training and support solutions for their university 3. Adapt the OCDWG model to meet their faculty needs 4. Discuss ways to apply Best Practices for online course development Building a Stronger Online Course/Program: Implementing a Six Step Collaborative Development Model Linda Phillips (Baker College, USA) Donna DiMatteo Gibson (Baker College, USA) Developing strong course/program development processes is critical to help elevate the rigor of online programs and establish solid curriculum that accurately and consistently measures relevant student learning outcomes. When courses are designed by individual course developers, the results can be a course that seems to have been designed in a "bubble." Other instructors who teach the course may not understand some elements of the curriculum, and there is a risk that key content areas may be missed due to an individual course developer's preferences, strengths, and weaknesses. Collaborative course development (CCD) has been shown to be effective (Hixon, 2008; Knowles & Kalata, 2008; Xu, & Morris, 2007), and a six step method for CCD will be shared and demonstrated during this information session. The following research will be reviewed briefly during the presentation to provide a foundation for the Practical Applications and strategies shared in this session. Knowles and Kalata (2008) found that using collaborative process to review course curriculum for quality standards increased evidence of critical thinking, as well as breadth and depth of topic material covered in courses. Xu and Morris (2007) analyzed team roles when collaboratively developing online courses, identified benefits and potential issues to be aware of when implementing a CCD process. Additionally Hixon (2008) also explored and discussed benefits and limitations of a collaborative development model. This informational session will include discussion of the CCD model employed at Baker College to develop new courses, to revise existing courses, to develop new programs, and to develop assessments for program and institutional outcomes. Multiple examples from courses of curriculum before and after implementation of this model. The audience will be polled throughout the session to determine who is in attendance, types of disciplines, job titles (faculty, course designers, administrators), the course development process at their institutions, and their level of familiarity with collaborative course development. This will allow for the discussion to be personalized to best fit the needs of the audience. During Session: The Following Items Will be Discussed and Examples Given 1. Discussion of the collaborative course development process Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 242 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness 2. Assemble CCD Team and Establish Ground Rules 3. Building the Foundation:  Collaborative SLO development  Constructing the Content  Develop Rubrics  Ensure SLOs are assessed 4. Feedback from faculty who teach the CCD course is collected and course is reviewed after it launches 5. Benefits of the CCD model 6. Develop student learning outcomes/program outcomes as a collaborative group. This sets the stage for the collaborative development model and provides a solid foundation on which to develop the curriculum/elements of the course/program. Collaboration results can result in more global, diverse, and applicable learning outcomes than one can come up with individually. Assignments and course work allow for more consistent assessment of student learning outcomes across multiple sections and multiple instructors. Group collaboration helps focus development back to student learning outcomes, rather than what is interesting to the individual course developer; prevents individuals from getting "stuck" during the development process; and encourages a more well rounded course. Content of course includes more engaging assignments per instructor and student feedback. Courses can more easily be linked to larger program and institutional outcomes. Dos, Don'ts, and Lessons Learned: (To increase success when implementing a CCD model. Session Objectives) Attendees who attend this informational session will: 1. Gain an understanding of a Collaborative Course Development (CCD) process, including the benefits of using this approach. 2. Know how to implement a Collaborative Course Development process 3. Identify key players (subject matter expert, instructional designer(s), CCD Team members) 4. Apply the six step CCD model within the context of their institution 5. Leave session with tips and information on how to maximize benefits of the CCD model, while avoiding potential pitfalls when initiating implementation of the CCD model. 6. Participate in polls and small group activities to explore and practice how they can apply what is covered to their particular courses and departments. 7. Administrators, instructors, and course designers will benefit from this session, and leave with knowledge and a model to implement a collaborative course development process at their institution. Handouts will be provided that include an overview of the model, relevant website resources, and key references related to session. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 243 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness References: Hixon, E. (2008, Winter). Team-based online course development: A case study of collaboration models. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration XI(IV). Knowles, E., & Kalata, K. (2008, January/2007, December). A model for enhancing online course development. Innovate: Journal of Online Education, 4 (2). Xu, H., & Morris, L. (2007). Collaborative course development for online courses. Innovative Higher Education, 32(1), 35-47. doi: 10.1007/s10755-006-9033-5 Synchronous and Asynchronous Video Conferencing Tools in an Online Course: Supporting a Community of Inquiry David Wicks (Seattle Pacific University, USA) Janiess Sallee (Seattle Pacific University, USA) The maturation of free ubiquitous video conferencing tools provides an opportunity for faculty members to experiment with alternatives to conventional asynchronous discussion forums commonly used in online courses. However, there continues to be debate about whether synchronous video conferencing has a meaningful role to play in an online course environment. Although the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework's influence in asynchronous discussion is well documented in the literature, it is less clear what role synchronous conferencing has in a Community of Inquiry (CoI). It is also unclear whether synchronous modes of inquiry provide worthwhile benefits for an online instructor. This study explores how the use of innovative video conferencing tools in an online course attends to the elements of the CoI. In this mixed methods study, we observed weekly teacher and student inquiry by examining Google Hangout transcripts, Vialogue threaded discussions, and student reflective WordPress blog posts through the lens of CoI. The course used for this study was an online graduate course focused on the use of technology for teaching. We hypothesized that those students who participated in more synchronous conferencing sessions would perceive significantly higher levels of all three CoI elements and would engage in richer discourse supporting learning of the course content. We also analyzed student perceptions of the social, teaching, and cognitive presence through the CoI survey (Swan, 2008). In order to examine the CoI related discourse, a corpus of text was utilized in this study which included Google Hangout transcripts, Vialogue threaded discussions, and student reflective WordPress blog posts. Text content analysis of this corpus represented a form of learning analytics. The text corpus was compiled and key themes were noted via qualitative constantcomparative analyses. The themes were analyzed using analytic induction to test hypotheses connecting discourse to CoI element. A form of text analytics was then applied to the text corpus in order to analyze the content of the student and teacher discourse. All text was compiled and analyzed using the Semantria (www.semantria.com) semantic linguistic program. Based on semantic algorithms from http://www.lexalytics.com/,All compiled text was analyzed for themes and sentiment. After compiling the linguistic components, statistical models were developed to Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 244 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness compare discourse between synchronous and asynchronous environments and to predict the level of community of inquiry. We used the Sloan Consortium's Five Pillars to reflect on how the course's interactive activities addressed quality. Learning effectiveness was demonstrated by increased opportunities for meaning making students had through discourse with each other and with the instructor. They were able to discuss courses readings in either a real-time Google Hangout or an asynchronous Vialogue threaded discussion. The use of freely available and ubiquitous tools makes it possible to scale the tools to multiple courses and programs. The tools provide access and flexibility for students who prefer face-to-face but need to take online courses because of work schedule or physical location. Faculty are satisfied to be able to provide options that address student discourse preferences. Finally, students report being satisfied with options to use synchronous conferencing for discussions which increases student voice. Our presentation will share the results of our findings. Participants will learn how both synchronous and asynchronous video conferencing tools may be used for meaning making in an online course. We will engage the audience by web polling their preferences and promising practices pertaining to uses of synchronous technologies in primarily asynchronous online environments. Embedding Formative Assessment in Your Online Learning Environment: An Opportunity for Improved Student Learning Tracey Trottier (Indiana University South Bend, USA) Michelle Bakerson (Indiana University South Bend, USA) Practical Application Presentation Goals: 1. Describe the purpose of embedded formative assessment in online learning environments 2. Demonstrate technologies that can be used within online courses to assess students' learning 3. Provide detail of when and how these technologies could be used 4. Discuss issues of reliability and validity with using technology to assess student learning 5. Provide attendees with table of online assessment tools which they can use in their online classes. Formative assessment plays a critical role in learning environments, specifically embedded formative assessment. Recognizing the value of embedded formative assessment and its role in increasing student learning as essential in not only meeting the objectives of the course, but also in closing the feedback loop is important in quality online courses. Instruction and assessment are an integral part of each other; thus, assessment should be viewed as a process which instructors must use throughout the course, not just as an afterthought or for summative purposes at the end. With accountability in mind and the explosion of online learning environments the need for best assessment practices in online learning environments surges. There is research on assessment and student learning especially in this age of accountability and there is priority given to educational achievement of students at all levels, however what worked in the past in face-to- Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 245 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness face settings does not necessarily work in online environments (Goldstein & Behuniak, 2012). The pedagogical theory is the same, however the implementation varies. There are several types of embedded formative assessment which need to take place, one of which is early detection. Not only does assessment need to be an integral part of designing the course, assessment needs to begin even before the course begins or at the very latest within the first couple of weeks of class. Students need to be able to demonstrate their ability to complete tasks in an online environment, prior to learning the content which can later be assessed. As such, formative assessment needs to be done early in an online or blended course to make sure that technological obstacles are not preventing students from succeeding in this environment. Since instructors that teach online courses are missing cues that might be used to gauge understanding, such as nonverbal communication, online instructors need to take extra care to assess students from the beginning. In other words, formative assessment needs to be used as an "early detection" device. If students feel frustrated or lost during the early part of an online course, they will most likely continue to feel lost for the remainder of the course and miss out on important learning opportunities. Assessment for early detection allows the instructor to make immediate, needed changes to the course so that students can then work at mastering the subject material and meeting the objectives of the course. In addition, the delivery method in online learning environments allows for opportunities in student learning that are unique to this type of learning environment. Technology plays a positive roll on student learning (Bakerson and Rodriquez- Campos, 2006), and provides an opportunity for closing the feedback loop. If done correctly, online learning environments can "provide student and instructor with richer, more immediate feedback" (Bajzek, D., Brooks, J., Jerome, W., Lovett, Rinderle, Rule & Thille, 2008, p. 1) which, in turn, will increase productivity andlearning. Assessment in this type of environment benefits students and instructors (Dewald, Scholz-Crane, Booth & Levine, 2000). At all levels of education from Pre-K all the way to higher education, accountability has a firm grip that is not going to loosen anytime soon. Reliability and validity issues surmount in online assessments, however interactive, formative embedded feedback address these threats to reliability and validity. This presentation is designed to provide a practical overview, specific examples and resources regarding design and use of formative embedded assessment in online learning environments. For all aspects of embedded formative assessment technology can be used for implementing and fostering enhanced student engagement through learning experiences. Building on an approach developed by Leahy, Lyon, Thompson, and Wiliam (2005), the authors will present how technology can be used in online classes to determine whether students have achieved class goals and outcomes. Several technologies will be highlighted which can be adapted to online learning environments. These technologies will include online authoring tools, rubrics, discussion/collaboration tools, online responses systems, and feedback tools. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 246 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness References: Bajzek, D., Brooks, J., Jerome, W., Lovett, M., Rinderle, J., Rule, G. & Thille, C. (2008). Assessment and Instruction: Two Sides of the Same Coin. In C. Bonk et al. (Eds.) Proceedings of World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2008 (pp. 560-565). Chesapeake, VA: AACE. Retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/p/29661. Bakerson, M. & Rodriguez-Campos, L. (2006). The evaluation of internet usage within the graduate-level classroom. The International Journal of Learning, 13, 15-72. Dewald, N., Scholz-Crane, N., Booth, A., & Levine, C. (2000). Information literacy at a distance: Instructional design issues. Journal of Academic Librarianship 26(1), 33-45. Goldstein, J., & Behuniak, P. (2012). Can Assessment Drive Instruction? Understanding the Impact of One State's Alternate Assessment. Research & Practice for Persons With Severe Disabilities, 37(3), 199-209. Leahy, S., Lyon, C., Thompson, M., & Wiliam, D. (2005). Classroom assessment: Minute by minute, day by day. Educational Leadership, 63(3), 18-24). Unfortunately, No One Can Be Told What the Course Design Matrix Is: An Opportunity for Improved Student Learning Edward Queen, Jr. (Johns Hopkins University, USA) Denille Williams (Johns Hopkins University, USA) Let's face it: we are all constantly looking for ways to improve the design of our online courses. It's no different for the instructional design staff and (mostly) adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University, Engineering for Professionals (JHU-EP). In 2011, we came to terms with the fact that the way we were developing online courses was simply not meeting our expectations for high quality, meaningful learning experiences for our students. In this presentation, we begin by discussing our pre-2011 technique for designing online courses. Participants share their institution's strategy for developing online courses. We then introduce the birth of the Course Design Matrix (CDM), a tool that has boosted the faculty satisfaction of the course design process and substantially improved the consistency and quality of JHU-EP online courses. The purpose of the CDM is to establish the design foundation of a course. The document guides course planning, design, and development. Best of All: The CDM can easily be integrated into any course design process, no matter the delivery modality - online, face-to-face, or blended. The CDM Word document template is provided to the participants. We conclude the presentation by discussing the pitfalls of the current CDM implementation and future direction of the CDM as an interactive, Web-based tool. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 247 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Does Online Learning Help Community College Students Attain a Degree? Peter Shea (State University of New York at Albany, USA) Using recent data from the US Department of Education's 2009 Beginning Post-Secondary Student Survey this study initially concludes that students enrolled in internet-based distance education courses and programs completed associate degrees at significantly higher rates than those who were not enrolled in such courses. Students who enrolled in other forms of distance education did not see the same benefits in terms of degree completion. Numerous recent reports have complained that the United States is not producing sufficient numbers of college graduates and is thereby losing competitive advantage in the global economy (Hebel, 2006; Kelderman, 2013). These worries are magnified when the subject of investigation is the community college where completion rates are historically lower than in baccalaureate institutions (Goldrick-Rabb, 2009). With six year national completion rates of less than 20%, justifiably or not, community colleges have been the target of a great deal of criticism. This is particularly concerning given that national policy commentators have concluded that community colleges are crucial to supporting the US economy (College Board, 2008). Furthermore, spending on community college students has had a particularly poor return with regard to degree attainment. For example, the Delta project (Kirshtein & Wellman, 2012)) concluded that "nearly half of instructional spending in community colleges goes to students (and credits) that do not attach to a degree or certificate (p. 16)." While MOOCs have gained tremendous media attention recently, what can now be referred to as "traditional" online education has never really taken center stage to the same extent. This is somewhat curious given the growing concerns about the decline in college attendance and completion in the US and the benefits that college completion confers. Although MOOCs do often feature the faculty of Ivy League colleges, and have reached an audience in the millions, their existence has done little to generate college credit that might begin to ameliorate the problems of shrinking US degree attainment. But what about traditional online learning, has this alternative path to higher education made a difference? Growth in Traditional Online Education The Babson Survey research group has tracked traditional online education for a decade and recently contrasted it with other forms (Allen & Seaman, 2013). Compared with MOOCs, traditional online education utilizes much smaller class sizes and thus can support more direct student-instructor interaction. It is typically and increasingly asynchronous (National Center for Education Statistics), meaning that while conducted online during an academic term, regular synchronous class meeting days and times are not scheduled. Discussion and interaction unfold through discussion boards and other asynchronous tools. Course assignments typically have due dates and courses schedules frequently follow the academic terms of the classroom. This form of traditional credit bearing online education has seen tremendous growth in the last decade. Current estimates indicate that one in three of every college student in the US is enrolled in at least one online course (Allen & Seaman, 2013). This equates to a more than six million college students yearly nationwide. The growth rate of credit-bearing online course enrollments has been roughly ten times the growth rate of US higher education generally (ref). In the most Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 248 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness recent year for which data is available online learning grew at over 9% while higher education generally saw a decline in enrollments (Allen & Seaman, 2013). The relatively recent rise of internet-based forms of distance education has generated concerns that mirror those that have long attended distance education more generally. Before critics of MOOCs have complained about attrition rates of 90% and the difficulty of learning in online courses of 100,000 students, concerns about learning in the absence of face-to-face interaction more generally were prominent. While large scale research into learning in MOOCs has not yet occurred, several meta-analytic and traditional reviews of the literature have concluded that learning outcomes between classroom-based and traditional credit-bearing online environments are equivalent (Bernard et. al, 2004; Bernard et. al. 2009; Means et. al. 2009). In fact, more recent reviews have begun to suggest that credit-bearing online college courses, with typical class sizes of 20-40 may actually produce slightly better outcomes (Means et. al, 2009; Zhao et. al. 2005). Bernard and his colleagues (2010 ALN conference) suggest that a number of recent metaanalyses of traditional online learning conclude that the direction of the advantage is the same (online learning is better) and the small effect size is highly stable (ES .12-.15 across four metaanalyses). Recent research on perceptions of higher education nationwide support these findings with approximately 70% of US Academic Vice Presidents reporting that learning outcomes in online courses are as good or better than equivalent classroom based courses (Allen & Seaman, 2013). So, it would seem that at least some of the concerns about the quality of traditional, credit bearing online education have been addressed. A crucial question, one that is not addressed in these reviews of the literature on online learning is: has online education made a difference in degree attainment? One could argue that the rapid growth rates alone in this modality indicate that more learners are gaining access to credit bearing higher education, but does this access produce a more productive outcome in terms of degree attainment? Do online community college students persist in college at higher rates? Do they complete degrees at higher rates or more quickly? Using recent data from the US Department of Education's 2009 Beginning Post- Secondary Student Survey this study initially concludes that students enrolled in internet-based distance education courses and programs completed associate degrees at significantly higher rates than those who were not enrolled in such courses. Students who enrolled in other forms of distance education did not see the same benefits in terms of degree completion. Data analysis on these questions will be completed in July 2013 and this presentation will be an early release of findings, conclusions, and recommendations. This is the first national study on these questions and this presentation will provide new insights on the relationship between traditional online learning and community college attrition, persistence, and degree attainment. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 249 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Creative Solutions for Engaging Undergraduate Students in Large Online Courses Vera Polyakova-Norwood (University of South Carolina, USA) Beverly Baliko (University of South Carolina, USA) Increasing challenges of educating large numbers of traditional undergraduate students on college campuses with limited resources prompt the administrators to explore the feasibility of delivering more courses online, even when the class size exceeds 200 students. Despite the success of online education as a course delivery mode for non-traditional students pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees, the faculty members remain concerned about the quality of the learning experience in online environments and heavy workloads associated with teaching large online classes. Based on positive experiences of several faculty members at the College of Nursing in a large southeastern research university, this presentation will discuss strategies for designing, teaching and managing interactive online courses for large cohorts of undergraduate students. A successful online teaching experience begins with a well-designed course site, which offers a very structured and supportive learning environment. Using multimedia technologies widely available to educators on college campuses, an instructor can build a course that captures the feeling of being in the classroom and at the same time offers the advantages of asynchronous, flexible online learning. By employing a variety of learning tools within course management systems - discussion boards, surveys, blogs and wikis - it is possible to create authentic and engaging learning activities imitating complex real-life situations even for very large classes. Designing learning activities to foster reflection and critical thinking skills for large numbers of undergraduate students requires imagination, creativity and careful attention to detail. Is it possible to have ongoing discussions in an online class with more than 200 students? Yes, but not through discussion boards that can easily create an unmanageable volume of postings. This situation calls for a more creative approach and a different set of tools. For example, an instructor can direct students to read a case study, reflect on it and fill out a short survey asking about their assessment of the situation, their position on related issues and their own course of action in similar circumstances. After the review of the survey results, the instructor can post a summary/analysis of student responses and offer her own interpretation modeling an expert's approach. This activity is similar to discussing a case study in the classroom setting but has an additional benefit of extending the opportunity to speak up to every member of the class. If the faculty member chooses to deliver her feedback in a video recording, she can provide more detailed explanations and enhance her social presence in the course at the same time. We found that posting short videos about the upcoming or completed course events is a very effective teaching and time management strategy. These videos are very easy to record with now ubiquitous personal digital devices, and they are well received by the students, who are used to media-rich environments and want to be able to see and hear their instructors. Although it may initially sound like an additional task for an online instructor to do, posting short weekly videos is an effective strategy to have online students pay more attention to instructions and suggestions, ask fewer questions about course logistics, and perceive their instructor as a caring individual. In the end, short weekly videos are a time saver and a social presence enhancer for the instructor. They can also support social learning. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 250 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness The need to limit and tightly structure instructor-student interaction in large online courses does not mean that students are doomed to learn in isolation. Communication and assessment tools within course management systems can be combined in creative ways to support complex interactive activities for large and small groups. An example of a collaborative activity that we would like to share with the audience comes from an undergraduate course on evidence-based nursing practice, in which the instructor was able to engage about 230 nursing students in a series of debates on current issues in the profession. Besides debating their own topic, each student team participated in and evaluated three other debates. The exercise concluded with student teams posting recommendations for practice based on their debate topics to a class wiki. Obviously, steering more than 200 students through an intense activity mediated by multiple technologies takes impeccable organization and communication skills. Over four iterations of the course, this exercise designed to demonstrate to students how to base their future practice on research evidence, was perceived by them as highly effective. Through the integration of learning theories, empirical evidence and trial and error, we have found ways to make very large online courses manageable for faculty and rewarding for the students. We plan to support our presentation with data and student comments from learning effectiveness surveys and formative and summative course evaluations from multiple semesters. Many of the strategies that we use to design and teach online courses for large groups of undergraduate nursing students can be applied in other disciplines and replicated at other institutions. We believe that this content will be of interest to faculty who teach online and hybrid courses, instructional designers, and administrators who manage undergraduate programs. To visualize the presentation, we will use PowerPoint slides with images, screen captures and video clips and we will upload the file to the conference web site. Our objectives for this session are to provide the audience with practical and creative approaches to designing interactive learning activities for large groups of online learners using widely available technological tools, and to share tips for enhancing social presence and saving faculty time. Attendees will be able to implement discussed strategies in a variety of online teaching/learning contexts. We are very interested in other perspectives for teaching large enrollment courses and we plan to invite participants to ask questions, offer comments, share their success stories, and discuss the application of the described practices to other disciplines and institutions. Data Analytics: Using Real-Time Assessment Data to Assist At-Risk Students Michael Berger (Grand Canyon University, USA) Ronald Berman (Grand Canyon University, USA) As the number of online classes increase at both private and public institutions, there are increasing concerns about the ability to monitor and manage students within that modality. Students attending college, whether face-to-face or online, can end up distant from faculty members and advisors. Many can continue to earn passing grades while struggling with specific undetected academic fundamentals. Grand Canyon University is piloting a method of at-risk student assessment and reporting in their doctoral programs that collects and aggregates rubricbased evaluation data from the faculty. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 251 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness This process not only catches online students displaying weakness in foundational writing skills but also provides an intervention by directly contacting students and directing them toward selfdirected resources and tutoring. Developing strong writing skills is an essential step in the educational journey of any student. Online education in particular makes extensive use of writing skills through forum conversation as well as paper-based assessments. Without the ability to organize and convey ideas and concepts effectively, a student will struggle to express to faculty what they know on a topic. Ensuring that students have a strong foundation in writing basics early on is can be a key stepping stone to success. GCU's writing at-risk assessment strategy leverages a number of tools: 1. The first is the use of analytic rubrics for major writing assignments in the doctoral program. These assignment-specific rubrics help to norm student evaluations across faculty members. They also contain identical criteria for writing fundamental across a number of courses that provide consistent longitudinal data. 2. The second is an online Learning Management System (LMS) that has a strong database back-end. GCU uses the LoudCloud learning management system. The ability to store and retrieve the faculty member's rubric evaluations is essential. 3. The third is a data collection tool that allows the extraction of the rubric evaluations done by many different adjuncts. 4. Finally, the information is combined and consolidated using Excel to provide an assessment of a student's writing foundational skills in multiple assignments across multiple initial classes. 5. Once the assessment data is pulled and evaluated, students who consistently display weakness in writing foundations are contacted and provided with remediation tools and resources. These tools work together to provide a one-page real-time review of a student's performance on the writing mechanics of all their papers across the first several courses in the program. Functioning much like Business Intelligence, this data-driven academic analytics is a powerful tool to assist students. Looking at student performance across multiple assignments and courses can provide additional insight into why they are struggling. Faculty can and do work with students who struggle in their classes, but often do not have access to this kind of longitudinal data which can help them to customize the remedial work necessary for the students to succeed. In April of 2013 an initial pilot of this process was run at GCU's College of Doctoral Studies, involving 14 students. In May of 2013 a second phase of the pilot was started involving 100 students. Academic counseling staff reached out to the students who were struggling. These students were walked through the writing resources available from the University: a self-directed grammar and mechanics course, resource website, and the writing tutoring services. Initial contact results as well as follow-ups two weeks later were logged and recorded. Participants' performance on writing assessment was then tracked in the following class to determine if there was any improvement. The students contacted in the initial pilot reacted positively to the offers Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 252 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness of assistance. Additional data on the reactions of the second phase as well as the impact on student performance will be available by the time of the conference. In this session the details and results of the pilot study, the resources available to the student through the intervention, and format of the one-page longitudinal assessment summary will be presented. In addition, helpful writing assessment strategies that do not require the specific technologies (such as the use of rubrics with certain standardized elements) and the impact of reviewing longitudinal student performance data will be discussed, as well as possible applications to wider practice for these assessment and data collection strategies that may be applied to other at-risk learners who are enrolled in introductory, Intermediate, and advanced programs of study. Fostering Interaction Through Formative Feedback in Asynchronous Discussions B. Jean Mandernach (Grand Canyon University, USA) Kelly Sanderson (Grand Canyon University, USA) Ted Cross (Grand Canyon University, USA) Asynchronous discussion boards in the online classroom maximize the benefits of studentteacher and student-student interaction in an environment that encourages planned, meaningful, prepared discussion. While active-learning, constructivist theories would support any classroom interactions (synchronous or asynchronous) that encourage students to actively engage with course material, online threaded discussions may have increased advantages above and beyond the benefits fostered by traditional classroom discussions as they provide an asynchronous avenue for facilitating a more reflective form of critical thinking than can be produced through spontaneous interactions. There are two keys to the effectiveness of asynchronous discussions: 1) students are posting substantial, meaningful contributions; and 2) interactions are frequent enough to produce ongoing discussion. Effective discussions are based on an interactive dialogue between participants in which each posting produces sufficient thought to warrant a reaction (question, comment, rebuttal, etc.). As such, it is not simply an issue of the quantity of postings (necessary but not sufficient), but demands a level of quality in the student contributions as well. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of identifying (and publicly marking) substantial asynchronous discussion postings within the context of the ongoing weekly discussion (as compared to evaluating and identifying the substantive contributions of the post as a function of the grading process at the completion of the discussion period). A between groups comparison will examine the frequency and quality of interactions when integrating formative (mark postings as substantive during the discussion period) or summative (mark postings as substantive as a component of the grading process after the discussion period has ended) evaluation of students' contributions to the asynchronous discussion. Presentation will highlight instructional strategies for fostering effective asynchronous discussions in the online classroom. Participants are encouraged to share strategies and discussion technological approaches for more effective management of asynchronous discussions. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 253 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Data Driven Instruction for Online Teaching and Learning Phylise Banner (Union Graduate College, USA) As online institutions move towards more data informed personalized learning, we are suddenly tasked with analyzing a plethora of numeric results and adapting instructional approaches. Where do we turn for direction? This session will highlight strengths and weaknesses in a data driven instruction approach, and focus on how these methods can inform effective design and delivery of online courses, faculty development initiatives, and institutional decision-making processes. Post-Communist Authoritarian Traditions as a Barrier to Collaborative Online Patrice Prusko Torcivia (SUNY Empire State College, USA) Katarina Pisultova (SUNY Empire State College, USA) Goals for presentation We will share lessons learned and results of a three year study related to the use of collaborative activities in online courses in Slovakia. Participants will brainstorm effective ways to have students who are used to an authoritarian style of learning better engage in collaborative activities and critical thinking in an online environment. Participants will learn: • • • • • Best practices when collaborating in cultures where authoritarian teaching is the tradition how to create a successful online community how to incorporate critical thinking into online or blended courses how to internationalize an online course through cross cultural collaboration lessons learned when faculty from different cultures collaborate to create a course Context An authoritarian approach to teaching and learning is not unique to former communist regimes, and is still the predominant method of university teaching in North America, especially in science and engineering (Bates, 2007). In Slovakia constructivist and collaborative approaches to teaching are rare even in post-graduate studies and in the humanities. Traditions of authoritarian teaching, a teaching approach that is unilateral in nature, in which students are passive receivers of information from a teacher, existAll over the world (Bates, 2007). An authoritarian approach does not encourage independent thought or self-guidance on the part of students; it makes only limited use of discussion in the classroom and does not employ group or collaborative activities. Baker (1994) describes the basic difference between authoritarian and critical thinking approaches as a moral and spiritual dilemma. He ascribes the "spiritual" approach - one that encourages independent and critical thinking in students, to Socrates, and the "moralist" approach - according to which independent thinking in a student is not desirable, to early Victorian Thomas Arnold. For Arnold, there was no need to search for knowledge since Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 254 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness everything was already known. Faith, authority and order were the utmost priority at schools in the early nineteenth century. Baker (ibid) cites British schools as adherents to Arnold's principles, through the 1960s, when movements for more freedom in thinking and values initiated changes in education. There are claims that there was similar pressure on curricula changes due to the changes in society in the 1970s and 80s in Western Germany and other West European countries (Weiler,1990) as well as in the United States (Rogoff et al., 2003). It resulted in the recent mixed-use of teacher-centered and student-centered teaching styles with many teachers incorporating an increasing amount of student-centered practices into their teaching routine (Cuban, 2006). The cultures of East-Central Europe (a region comprised today of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech and Slovak Republics), have historically been associated with Western European civilization. This came to be about a thousand years ago when the kingdoms in the region accepted Roman Catholic (western) as opposed to Byzantine (eastern) Christianity (Szebenyi, 1992). For an entire millennium since that time these countries were part of a common cultural sphere with the West, and for the last few centuries in particular, under the Hapsburg and AustroHungarian empires, were considered an integral part of Western Europe. However, when communist regimes took over following World War II, the traditional authoritarian teaching style became not only common practice, but also a rigid paradigm that together with the active suppression of independent thought, relegated the region's pedagogy to a political tool for sedating society. In the words of Hannah Arendt (1968, p. 168): "The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill conviction, but to destroy capacity to form any". While Western Europe and North America went through student revolts and structural changes in the 1960s and 1970s, and their education systems opened up accordingly, higher education systems in the East were not liberalized at all (Rozsnyai, 2003). Problem In Slovakia, undergraduate and master-level university courses very often still consist mainly of conventional lectures and exams. In December 2007, a Slovak journalist interviewed four Slovak students and two professors studying and teaching at universities in Western Europe and the United States. They all asserted that the main difference between Slovak higher education and their international experience was the use of project work, collaboration, and encouragement of creative and independent thinking (Horakova, 2008). We will discuss our experiences introducing online learning in Slovakia, the use of technology, and issues related to pedagogy. For example, strategies we used applying sound and visual media in the virtual classroom and issues related to authoritarian teaching style in an online environment. Approach We will examine a study conducted from 2009-2012 of collaborative activities used in online courses in Slovakia, and student and teacher perceptions of these methods. The following two case studies will be discussed: Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 255 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness • • Course Information and Communication Technologies for Teachers is a blended course with regular face-to-face sessions supplemented by online information and discussions. Internet Marketing course was a collaboration between University of Economics in Bratislava, Slovakia and SUNY Empire State College - International program in Panama. References Arendt, H. (1968) Totalitarianism, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Baker, B. (1994) Professionals and moralists, Cambridge Journal of Education, Nov94, Vol. 24, Issue 3, pp. 361-369 Bates, T. (2007) Technology as a force for change, Presentation at SCBEWC International Conference, May 16-19, 2007, Beijing, China Cuban, L. (2006) Getting Past Futile Pedagogical Wars, Phi Delta Kappan, 87 (10), June 2006, pp. 793-795 Horakova, J. (2008) V com su zahranicne univerzity lepsie? (What are foreign universities better in?) SME, January, 4, 2008. [online] http://www.sme.sk/c/3661043/V-com-su-zahranicneuniverzity-lepsie.html (accessed 9 September 2011) Rogoff, B., Paradise,R., Arauz, R. M.. Correa-Ch´avez, M. and Angelillo C. (2003) Firsthand Learning Through Internet Participation, Annual Review Psychology, 54, pp. 175-203 Rozsnyai, C. (2003) Quality Assurance Before and After â Region of the European Higher Education Area with a Focus on Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, European Journal of Education, Vol. 38, No. 3, 2003, pp. 271-284 Weiler, H.N. (1990) Curriculum reform and the legitimation of educational Objective: The Case of the federal Republic of Germany, Oxford Review of Education, Mar90, Vol. 16, Issue 1, pp. 15-38 Student Inquiry Using Real-Time Data: ESSEA Curriculum Modules Stan Schmidt (Western Governors University, USA) ESSEA (Earth System Science Education Alliance), a consortium of 40 universities and organizations has and continues to develop a series of curriculum modules that combine inquiry investigations with real-time NASA and NOAA data to provide K-16 students and pre-service educators with significant experiences in inquiry and problem based learning. Modules are available free of charge to all educators and address a range of current and significant science/societal topics. These modules are adaptable to on-line and traditional settings. Educators have long been challenged by the National Science Education Standards (NSES) to create learning environments in which students learn through:  Inquiry  Multifaceted activity that involves making observations Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 256 €˜Bologna' in t Track 4: Learning Effectiveness       Posing questions Examining sources of information to see what is already known Planning investigations Reviewing what is known in light of experimental evidence Using tools to analyze data Proposing answers, explanations, predictions, and communicating results. (NSES, 23). For educators, the tools were the catch - finding time to identify data sources that students can access to obtain current and relevant data. ESSEA modules embed real-time data sources at a click that students can explore and use to focus on key questions. This focus on inquiry and problem based learning continues in the New Generation Science Standards (NGSS). In place this summer, these standards urge educators to provide instruction that reflect the interconnectedness of science and real world, is performance based, builds on previous learning, provides deeper understanding of content and its application, and is designed to prepare students for college, career and citizenship. ESSEA curriculum models address these new points of emphasis, and allow teachers to focus, not on the logistics of lesson preparation, but on the flow and effectiveness of learning. The availability of real-time data is a unique and compelling feature of ESSEA's instructional design, and is engaging to students seeking current, visually appealing and significant information to use in addressing a challenging task. The free availability, teacher friendly format, wide range of topics and adaptability of these modules make them a valuable tool for every educator's toolbox. During this poster session attendees will interactively explore a chosen ESSEA modules, examining the real-time resources linked within this chosen module, receive a free link to access and use all current ESSEA modules, and discuss this teaching tool with me and other participants. This poster session will be an ideal setting for 1 to 1 discussion and examination of a selected module. This session invites all educators interested in using real-time data to support student learning activities. Written from a science perspective, these modules may be used in any subject area that is impacted by natural world events. This session will also benefit educators teaching in pre service teacher preparation programs, managing in service teacher preparation programs, and educators/administrators interested in meeting the demands of the NGSS. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 257 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Online Learning from the Student’s Perspective: Three Successful Online Students Share Their Knowledge Michael Feldman (Students for Service, USA) Michelle Covert (The Pennsylvania State University) Stormy Stark (The Pennsylvania State University) Context The three presenters were all students in Drexel University's fully online Master’s Degree program for Higher Education. Two of us, Stormy Stark and Michael Feldman, were elected to be leaders of the program's innovative mentor program, which matched brand new students in the program with students who had already successfully completed a year in the program, and Michelle Covert also served as a mentor in the same program. Michael was asked to be a research assistant to the head of the program and was a student representative during the program's first ever, five-year accreditation review. During the two years that we were in the program, we had the opportunity to experience positive and negative aspects of a typical student experience in an online graduate school, engage with the faculty and staff on behind-the-scenes issues and programming, assist in reworking curriculum, and conduct extensive research into online higher education. Michael attended last year's Sloan-C conference and shared his experiences with Stormy and Michelle. We realized that many of the presentations were from the perspective of faculty and administrators and believe that there is a need for more information about distance education based on the first-hand experience of students. Problem We started to gather this information by identifying some of the major themes and issues related to online learning from the student's perspective. For instance, completing a degree in an online environment is a very different endeavor than the traditional brick and mortar classroom. Online students find themselves interacting with peers and professors primarily via email and discussion boards. This interaction can be isolating and confusing, as it is difficult to determine the "tone" behind written words and electronic communication sometimes lends itself to subjective interpretation. The online learner lacks the ability to have face to face social meetings with classmates. The chance to grab a cup of coffee after class and continue a discussion or get guidance on course topics is one that online learners forgo in exchange for the flexibility to learn anytime and anywhere. Online learning has many rewards and is an incredibly viable option for many students. However, there is a learning curve for online students that involves navigating new technology, learning how to communicate in different ways, and determining how to balance studies with the other pieces of their lives. With that in mind, online program developers and administrators must incorporate the student experience into their planning elements. One way to accomplish that is to learn from the students themselves. Approach Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 258 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Next, we conducted research into these problems and then examined how it applied to our own experiences as online students. For example, higher education administrators from traditional institutions are well-versed in the importance of social integration and academic engagement to student success and persistence, thanks to the work of researchers like Tinto, Kuh, and Astin. But what about students who pursue their educations remotely? Is social integration and academic engagement key to their persistence as well? If so, how can institutions promote these goals, and are they even possible in the online environment? In 2000, Garrison, Anderson, and Archer constructed the Community of Inquiry (CoI) theoretical framework to address the relationship between social, cognitive, and teaching presence in online learning. The theory provides an excellent groundwork for understanding the dynamics between areas such as instructor quality, peer-to-peer interaction, classroom climate, course design, and meaning making from sustained reflection on course content. But how do students actually experience these concepts? Are they important to them personally? Do they believe these concepts are integral to their own success? Are there other aspects of online education that are just as, or more, important to students in online programs that frameworks such as the CoI theoretical framework overlook? Based on these concepts, we have created a list of important points regarding our personal experiences as online students at Drexel University and also connected these points to what existing research in online learning tells us about social and academic engagement in online courses. Our presentation will consist of presenting this list, proposing viable and practicable strategies and best practices towards achieving a successful online student experience, and encouraging dialogue and audience feedback in order to gain different perspectives. Results Some of our conclusions include: - Not every part of a traditional class works well in an online environment and should be strongly considered before being part of a course. For example, from personal experience, group assignments are often extremely frustrating in an online environment. - Not all faculty are created equal; you can't throw a brick and mortar class and its instructor online and expect it to work. A faculty member with superior face-to-face teaching ability may not be able to translate that skill into online teaching. - Classes should not be full of complicated and tech-heavy features and try to incorporate many different concepts just because they're online. Simplicity can go a long way. - Frequent interaction between students, and between students and their instructors, is key to academic and social integration, not only in traditional settings, but online as well, which promotes persistence. This presentation is designed for online educators who may feel a disconnect with their students in terms of what the experience of being an online student is truly like, and who want to learn Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 259 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness and discuss strategies for student engagement, academic success, and high quality online education. We also welcome attendees who are new to the field of online education and want to understand how to use both research and practical, on-the-ground examples to be successful participants in the online higher education arena. We plan to conduct further research on this topic and will use ideas from attendees to inform that research. Creating an Instructor Presence in Online Learning Through the Use of Instructor Made Videos Kimberly Kenward (Grand Valley State University, USA) Sally Hipp (Grand Valley State University, USA) Presentation Description: Instructor presence is often used synonymously with teaching presence in the literature. Anderson, Rourke, Garrison and Archer (2001) have defined teaching presence as "the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the realization of personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes" (p.5). Anderson et al focus on these components of teaching presence, instructional design, directed instruction and facilitation of discourse. In addition Mandernack, Gonzales, & Garrell (2006) note that instructor visibility is of key importance for establishing instructor presence. Although our work underscores the importance of the factors noted above, we chose to narrow our focus to the use of personal videos as a way of enhancing instructor presence in online learning. Fully online classes usually are taught in an asynchronous environment, however with current technologies students and instructors can meet "face to face" online in real time, hence a synchronous online learning environment. Research (Ferre, 2012) indicates that one of the main reasons students choose to take online classes is that they can access the course at anytime. For this reason we use instructor made videos that can be accessed at anytime, rather than synchronous environments such as an online webinar where students must meet an instructor in real-time. Is it possible to establish a presence of being there without actually being there? To answer this question we inserted into totally online classes instructor made videos. Data collection was conducted using a survey administered online to graduate students enrolled in courses taught and designed by the presenters. The courses were College of Education courses offered at Grand Valley State University. Data will be presented which include responses from our students to the following questions:  Did you watch the instructor made videos?  Did you watch the instructor made videos more than once?  Did the instructor made videos help you feel more connected to the instructor because you could see her face and hear her voice?  Did the instructor made videos help you learn about course requirements and course expectations?  Did the instructor made videos help you learn how to navigate the course and the supports available to you? Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 260 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness We considered that our videos were effective in our online classes when students responded positively to our survey questions. At this time we have just begun our data collection. We found the following: 1. Students did in fact watch the introductory video. 2. Students valued having the opportunity to meet the instructor virtually by seeing their face as well as hearing the teacher's voice via a video introduction. 3. Students reported that they watched the video two or more times. 4. Students reported that the introductory video were indeed valuable to them because it allowed the student to learn about the course requirements and course expectations 5. The Blackboard Course orientation video was valuable because it allowed the students to learn how to navigate the online course, and the supports that were available to them. With these encouraging results, we will continue our data collection and are anxious to report our findings to the audience at the Sloan Conference - 2013. Session goals: At the conclusion of this session, participants will…  Learn the importance of the visibility of the instructor in online learning.  See examples of ways online instructors have brought presence into their online classes through the use of personal videos.  Review student response data to personal instructor videos.  Learn what equipment is needed to make the videos.  We will engage the audience by a reflective brainstorming exercise and large group discussion.  The audience will be asked to think about how they establish their presence on the first day of an "in-seat" class. Do they get to class early? Greet their students at the door? Play background music? Pass out copies of the syllabus? Bring a sample textbook? Require an ice-breaker exercise to build community?  The audience will share their responses in small group discussion.  Then, we will ask "how do you do these same things when your class is completely online?" and engage in a large-group discussion.  We will then show examples of our instructor-made videos and share student response data to those videos. A blackboard site filled with resources, samples and tutorials will be provided for the audience members to access with a guest account after the SLOAN conference ends. References: Crawford-Ferre, Glynn, H., & Wiest, L. (2012). Effective Online Instruction in Higher Education. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 13(1), 11-14. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 261 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Mandermach B., Gonzales R.M., & Garrett A. (2006). An Examination of Online Instructor Presence via Threaded Discussion Participation. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 2(4), 248-260. Rourke, L., Anderson, T. Garrison, D. R., & Archer, W. (2001). Assessing social presence in asynchronous, text-based computer conferencing. Journal of Distance Education, 14(3), 51-70. iPad-centric Instruction, Student Collaboration, Video Games, and a Hybrid Setting Jared Cootz (Lone Star College - Montgomery, USA) David Zimmermann (Lone Star College - Montgomery, USA) Instructors, students, distance learning advocates, and mobile learning supporters will benefit from the presentation. This presentation will provide a tangible, concrete approach to engaging students through iPads, online resources and current video games like Mass Effect 3 and Assassin's Creed 3. Goals: 1. Describe an effective approach to using mobile devices in hybrid instruction. 2. Illustrate examples of effective student collaboration. 3. Model an approach to integrating current video games into the classroom. 4. Attendees will leave with a bevy of ideas about how to make this work for their students. 5. Attendees will leave with a collection of apps that will assist them and their students with using iPads in an instructional setting. The presentation will follow this format. 1. A brief discussion wherein the attendees are engaged in a brief discussion regarding the use of mobile devices in the hybrid classroom and classrooms in general. Good? Bad? Necessary? 2. To show how well it works for instructors, iPads will be used to present. 3. The idea for a futuristic linked class with an emphasis on gaming is explored. 4. Description of the development and implementation process. 5. Discussion of the feedback that the students provided throughout the semester. 6. Discussion of the challenges and triumphs in the creative process and in implementation. Success and completion rates are also provided. This is compared to similar courses at the institution. 7. To show how well iPads work in the hands of students, examples of student work are displayed. 8. Examples of student work are also distributed to the audience. 9. Attendees receive a list of apps that are useful when using iPads in the classroom. 10. The presentation closes with an examination of what is coming next. Overall feedback from the attendees is encouraged throughout the presentation. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 262 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness The Continuous Improvement Model: Approaches to Course Revision Melanie Kasparian (Southern New Hampshire University, USA) Adam Rourke (Southern New Hampshire University, USA) Description: In this session, SNHU Instructional Designers will identify a strategic approach to course revision and maintenance. This presentation will examine revision and describe some best practices and shared experiences based on making both "agile" fixes and full revisions to a variety of content enhanced courses. This session will focus on the importance of identifying approaches to maintaining and updating courses that are compatible with your own institutional strategy. Statement of Problem/Issue: As Southern New Hampshire University continues to grow, the need to maintain curated content has also grown. In order to meet the needs of our students and faculty, we have had to maintain and revise an increasing number of courses over the past year while working strategically in moving forward the curriculum. While academia is constantly progressing, a content enhanced course is a snapshot in time. For example, a course may require a textbook edition update, a discussion prompt may be outdated, data is now readily available via the internet for students to find and use, or the drive to increase competencies by implementing authentic or objective assessment has led to curriculum changes. Hence, courses may need to evolve term by term or on a yearly basis so that they remain contemporary. These issues have led to the question: How do you approach revision as a dynamic process that demonstrates the same outcomes, when a course itself is a snapshot in time? Description of Context, Approach, and Results: This session examines the need to create a revision and maintenance process after a course is initially developed and launched. We will focus our attention on four items associated with revision: (1) the driving forces, (2) the various levels, (3) working with Subject Matter Experts, and (4) integrating new technologies for the enhancement of learning. 1. Driving Forces: In this session we will first examine the various driving forces that lead to a revision, such as student success rates, audience demographic, scalability concerns, institutional assessment philosophy changes, or current events in the world that ultimately influence a change in content. As a result of these forces, many courses have been touched by Instructional Designers and have changed drastically. Thus, the use of audits to determine the course revision queue is important and has been implemented to identify exactly what courses need to be changed and when. 2. Various Levels of Revision: (After it has been determined that a course is in the queue) There have been several attempts to define "agile fixes" as opposed to a "half revision, or "full revision." This session attempts to take a hard look at these terms and definitions and try to categorize them as needed. 3. Subject Matter Experts: In addition, it needs to be determined if a Subject Matter Expert is required as part of the revision versus having the internal team conduct the alignment and changes. Some questions to be considered include: Are there differences in working with Subject Matter Experts on revisions versus new development? Should the Subject Matter Expert have experience with the current content in the course? Is there a revision design template that can be used, and what should it include? Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 263 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness 4. Integrating New Technologies for Enhancement of Learning: We will discuss specific items that help filter and apply feedback, such as the implementation of a ticketing system and a Course Maintenance Team that tracks, triages, and makes agile fixes as needed. This team combined with the ticketing system has allowed our faculty to contribute to improving our courses following the continuous improvement model. And, as an Instructional Designer, it is important to align content and marry the notion of objective assessment with authentic critical tasks. Implementing new technologies must be intentional and align with the appropriate pedagogical model for the course. These four items and the specific examples are to be used to inform and share experiences. Ultimately, however, as soon as the course has been launched, it stands as another snapshot, ready to be revised again in the future. Impact: These revision efforts have allowed Southern New Hampshire University to improve our courses and the overall student experience. With the use of revision audits, a ticketing system, and the implementation of a Course Maintenance Team, we can now implement feedback received from our faculty and Academic Deans in a timely manner. Session Interaction: This session will include an opportunity to share experiences with respect to maintaining courses that have been taught over one term or even several years. How does your institution determine when a course needs updates or revisions? What do you do to update a course while making sure student outcomes are consistent? Session Goals (Outcomes): Participants will learn the following… 1. Develop a process for examining your current courses in terms of maintenance and revision 2. Differentiate between course maintenance and revision 3. Identify effective ways to work with Subject Matter Experts on revising courses as opposed to new content 4. Coordinate the implementation of new technologies for the enhancement of learning Investigating Components of Effective Onilne Course Design Carol Johnson (The Virtual School of Music, USA) There are many activities and tools that can be used within an online course structure. However, not all activities and tools are rated equal in learning outcomes. The learning activities placed within an online course require not only the higher-level learning skills of “applying” and “creating” (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). Lower-level skills of remembering and understanding are also keys to developing firm foundations in conceptual learning. Furthermore, the learning activities used should be appropriately aligned to connect the student to the technology tools used for learning. As students are better able to concentrate on learning activities, rather than distraction of technology, the learning activity becomes a platform for students to fully engage with their learning through exploration, play and identification (Kim & Reeves, 2007). This session will focus on the following learning objectives: Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 264 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness - Describe opportunities and challenges of online course design - Identify three approaches to well-designed course components - Identify at least three tools for constructivist learning - Explore relevant research connected to effect online course components Measuring Motivation: What Drives Student and Faculty Participation in Online Education? Ruth Johnson (University of Houston-Downtown, USA) Description of Context: Although online student enrollment has shown double digit growth for almost a decade and academic leaders recognize that online education is necessary for enrollment growth, little is known about what motivates students to enroll in or faculty to teach face-to-face (F2F) versus online courses. Therefore, Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 1985, 2000) was used to investigate intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and educational outcomes in this study. However, a theoretically based, validated measure of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for online and F2F courses is not currently available, nor is it clearly understood whether intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in the two delivery formats are conceptually distinct. Questions and Hypotheses: The current study examined the psychometric properties of two newly developed motivation measurement scales based on a revised version of Deci and Ryan's (1985) Motivation Orientation measure (for review of the measures, see Stewart, Bachman, & Johnson, 2010a, 2010b). Based on SDT, it was hypothesized that: 1. The motivation measures would consist of four first-order factors (online intrinsic and extrinsic motivation; F2F intrinsic and extrinsic motivation) and the measures would be similarly constructed for students and faculty. 2. The student and faculty motivation measures would predict the number of online courses taken by students or taught by faculty, thereby externally validating the measures. Specifically, it was predicted that students with online intrinsic motivation would complete a greater number of online courses and faculty with online intrinsic motivation would teach a greater number of online courses. Methods: Two online surveys were conducted to examine online education motivation in university students (n = 235) and faculty (n = 104) at a large, public, urban university in the southeastern United States. Student participants completed a series of survey items that assessed demographic information, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to enroll in F2F and online courses, and previous experience with online courses (for review of the measures, see Stewart et al., 2010a). Faculty participants completed a series of survey items that assessed demographics, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to teach F2F and online courses, and previous online teaching experience (for review of the measures, see Stewart et al., 2010b). Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 265 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Results: A series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses on student and faculty data were performed, as well as an assessment of the motivation scales' criterion validity. Analyses revealed that the motivation scale was reliable, as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for online and F2F courses were similarly constructed for students and faculty; additionally, results revealed that motivations for online and F2F education are distinct concepts. Findings also demonstrated that online extrinsic motivation predicted the number of online courses students completed, while F2F intrinsic motivation negatively predicted the number of online courses a faculty member had taught. Conclusion: In the US, the majority of online courses are taught by brick and mortar universities (Allen & Seaman, 2011) and most students enrolled in online courses are simultaneously enrolled in F2F courses. However, the majority of past research in online education has relied on either invalidated measures of motivation or a single index of motivation; and subsequently, the validity of these results is questionable. Based on previous research, it was predicted that motivation would differ for online and F2F education and as expected, the recently developed motivation scales were comprised of four dimensions: online intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and F2F intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Moreover, the measure functioned similarly across two independent samples (university students and faculty), and results suggested that the online and F2F motivation dimensions are distinct constructs. To demonstrate the criterion validity of the measures, it was expected that online and F2F motivation would differentially predict the number of online courses taken by students or taught by faculty. We expected that online intrinsic motivation would be associated with greater numbers of online courses completed by students and taught by faculty. However, our findings did not support this hypothesis, which could be partly related to the failure of previous studies to simultaneously examine intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in both online and F2F educational platforms. Inconsistent with past research in F2F and online learning modalities, the current study found that online extrinsic motivation in students, in comparison to other motivation orientations, was related to a greater number of online courses completed. In addition, although we expected that online intrinsic motivation would predict the total number of online courses taught, our results demonstrated that the faculty with greater F2F intrinsic motivation had taught the fewest online courses in the past. Discussion and Interpretation: In sum, a theoretically based, validated measure of online and F2F motivation was identified for student and faculty assessment. These results address several limitations with existing motivation measures and enhance the ability to predict student and faculty outcomes in online education. This validated measure of motivation will prove useful in improving our understanding of how online and F2F motivation influence both initiation and persistence in online education for university students and faculty. Future work needs to be conducted to understand the effects extrinsic motivation has on sustained behaviors in online education. The current study suggests that students who exhibit online extrinsic motivation complete greater numbers of online courses; however, that is not Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 266 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness necessarily true for professors. Thus, future research needs to investigate the forces that will enable faculty to remain actively engaged in online education. I Jing, You Jing, We All Jing! Lori Braunstein (Central Washington University, USA) Laura Portolese Dias (Central Washington University, USA) Context At some point in every academician’s career, one wonders how much attention students pay to written feedback on papers. Am I writing too much? Am I writing too little? Is the student even reading the feedback? - These are all questions we ask ourselves. And of course the BIG question we sometimes ask ourselves: "Why am I writing more comments on the paper than what the student wrote in the first place?" Problem Criticism has long been made concerning online learning relying too heavily on text while providing minimal opportunities to learn from visuals, audios, and hands-on activities (Bonk & Shang, 2008). As reported by Muir (2001), students learn 10 percent of what they read, 20 percent of what they hear, and 50 percent of what they see and hear. With the advancement of Internet technologies, many methods of content delivery and online communication beyond simple text are now a reality. Listening to video streamed lectures and educational podcasts are popular trends favored by auditory online learners (Hartsell & Yuen, 2006; Copley, 2007). Recently online instructors started experimenting with audio technologies for improving online grading and assessment of student work. However, few studies have reported on the effect of auditory versus written assessment of student work. This presentation thus aims to begin to fill the research gap by providing insights and evidence of the perceived benefits of using an innovative auditory assessment - Jing - to improve student success in online learning environments. Approach In designing an effective approach to provide better and/or additional feedback to online students, the presenters looked at three fundamental issues: 1. How to increase instructor presence and interactivity 2. How to provide a higher degree of grading clarity 3. How to increase student focus and/or attention to feedback Instructor presence and interactivity. As pointed out by Sheridan and Kelly (2010), to highly engage in and ensure a strong presence in the online course, instructors need to provide students with in-depth feedback for growth and development. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 267 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Grading clarity. According to Klass (2003), auditory components bring courses alive by allowing online learners to use their auditory senses to comprehend complex concepts and procedures that are difficult to explain with simply text and graphics. Student focus and/or attention to feedback. Empirical evidence (Copley, 2007; Oishi, 2007) indicates that listening to the instructor can easily grab student attention and is generally considered easier, faster, more interactive, and less cognitive-effort-consuming than reading and comprehending long written text. Because of its ease of use, no (or low) cost, 5-minute time limit, and built-in privacy safeguards, Jing was chosen as the audio technology to use in several Business Communication and Report Writing courses, Professional Selling, and Advanced Spreadsheets. Results The questions (using a 5-point Likert-type-scale with Strongly Agree = 5 and Strongly Disagree = 1 asked on a survey, given at the end of the quarter, and corresponding results follow. 1. Do you feel using Jing to provide you feedback on your assignments increased instructor presence and interactivity? Mean = 4.10; Standard Deviation = .875 2. Do you feel using Jing gave you a higher degree of clarity in my feedback to you? Mean = 3.84; Standard Deviation = 1.067 3. Do you feel you paid more attention, and were more focused on feedback, given to you by Jing versus written comments? Mean = 4.05; Standard Deviation = .911 4. Overall, do you feel the assignments returned to you using Jing versus written comments provided a better learning experience for you? Mean = 4.00; Standard Deviation = .816 While this exploratory study might not provide empirical proof that audio comments provided to students should be continued, anecdotally, based on student comments, the researchers will continue to use auditory feedback for student work, in addition to exploring other uses of Jing in the online classroom. Disadvantages of Using Jing The researchers identified three possible disadvantages of Jing, all three easily surmountable: 1. The learning curve of using the new technology; 1-2 hours-time for downloading, practicing, and determining a file save system is needed. 2. Increased grading time and effort; it can take up to 50 percent more time to provide both written and audio feedback to students. 3. Additional security and privacy issues; while Jing provided security and privacy, it is a 3rdparty software that can be vulnerable to attacks. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 268 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness What Makes the Biggest Impact on Student Learning with Online Classes? David Mamorella (State University of New York at Albany, USA) Goals: Attendees will be able to understand…  The most important factors that impact and motivate students to learn online .  The biggest advantages and challenges/disadvantages students found taking online classes.  The online assignments students found most beneficial to their learning.  The most effective ways professors can measure student learning online.  How social presence impacted student learning online.  The activities students found most effective in building community online.  The Blackboard communication tools students found most and least effective.  The impact participating in required online discussions had on student learning.  How students compared online and face-to-face classes in terms of overall learning, satisfaction, and workload. Description: Online classes are ever growing and are often viewed as convenient and flexible. Instructors should strive to provide the highest quality online education. However, we all know that what is taught is not the same as what is learned. The grade a student receives in a class does not necessarily reflect what they have learned. The purpose of this presentation is to take a closer look at student learning outcomes and overall satisfaction with online classes at the University at Albany. Findings are based on student feedback from a survey that will be sent out to University at Albany students in about 10-15 online classes in the summer of 2013. I expect to receive feedback from 100+ students by the end of the summer. I will share survey results, findings, and student comments focusing on the aforementioned goals. What are the most important factors that impact student learning with online classes? What motivates students to learn online? What do students find to be the biggest advantages and challenges/disadvantages to taking online classes? Assignment/Assessment Strategies: Assignments/Assessments should focus on student learning rather than assessing for grading purposes. We should strive for students to develop higher level cognitive thinking skills, rather than memorization and regurgitation of facts which just leads to superficial retention of information. I will share the assignments students found most beneficial to their learning and the most effective ways students felt professors can measure their learning online. Online Community: Having a social presence online is important but does it impact student learning? I will discuss what teaching strategies made the biggest impact on students taking online classes and what activities students thought were most effective in building community online. Impact of Technology/Blackboard:What Blackboard communication tools do students find the most and least effective? How does participating in required online discussions impact student Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 269 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness learning? Online classes at the University at Albany are asynchronous; however, would adding synchronous components improve student learning and the overall quality of online classes? Rethinking Office Hours in the Online University Daniel Born (Kaplan University, USA) Meegan Zickus (Kaplan University, USA) Direct one-on-one contact between a student and professor is as desirable in the online university as in traditional brick and mortar campus settings. The research literature on office hours suggests that students who take advantage of more contact with their professors benefit, with improved academic performance and greater confidence about their learning. And yet time and again our experience shows that students most in need of this contact and encouragement are the least likely to take advantage of it. Posted office hours all too often go unused. How do we choose to address this problem? This presentation offers a variety of hypotheses for students' relative passivity in pursuing office hour conversations with their professors. The proliferation of communication media, including texting and Facebook, has perhaps contributed to the sense that traditional "visiting" of the professor is obsolete. At the same time, this proliferation creates its own problems of time management for faculty who now must navigate a multitude of communication platforms. Finally, students online may have little concept of what "office hours" entail, since many of them have no experience in a traditional setting where visiting a professor in a physical office can serve as a special and valuable learning tutorial. In order to get a better understanding of actual office hours use and to develop an emerging set of best practices for office hours, the authors sent out a ten-question survey during fall 2012 to 300 faculty in Kaplan University's School of Legal Studies. Ninety-one faculty responded to the survey, which asked a variety of questions about actual student use of posted office hours: average number of student office hours visits per week; average number of one-on-one conversations with students per week; preferred method of the conversation (email, telephone, texting, other). The survey asked faculty how they make themselves available to students, as well as the faculty's perception of which communication channels work most effectively. Finally, the survey asked what kinds of issues or problems most frequently emerge in office hours conversation. The survey inquired whether faculty post office hours and wait for students to show up, or directly invite individual students to make an appointment for a meeting. The survey asked faculty what percentage of students actually respond to direct outreach by the professor. We summarize the results of this research in our article and, based on our findings, we reach five specific conclusions: (1) Students who participate in opportunities to interact with the professor outside of the assigned classroom clearly benefit. (2) This interaction should not be limited to the traditional concept of scheduled office hours. A more flexible approach in the online learning environment is highly recommended, including encouragement of students to reach out to their professors via email, texting, instant messaging, and phoning. The professor should set guidelines as to desired approaches, response time, and time constraints. (3) Many lagging students are reluctant to seek their professor's help. Professors need to be proactive in identifying students who need special assistance, and should initiate contact with these students with vigor, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 270 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness directness, and specificity. Telling an entire class that you have an "open door" policy for office hours is not as effective as reaching out to specific individuals and telling them you want to make an appointment for a one-on-one conversation. (4) Given that many students are reluctant to make contact with the professor, the onus for contact falls on the professor to initiate. (5) Written feedback is good but cannot replace a voice. In certain instances, a telephone conversation is still superior to email or texting. We conclude that outreach has largely supplanted office hours as they are traditionally understood. Still, if more student-professor conversations are going to bloom, it is incumbent on the professor to engage creatively the individuals in the class, seeking more one-on-one conversations outside of class in order to build stronger learners. In this sense, office hours are not obsolete, but they most definitely need to be reconceived. Online Asynchronous Team Based Learning: Challenges and Successes Jenna Hecker (State University of New York at Albany, USA) Team Based learning is an instruction strategy that fosters high performance and positive learning outcomes, incentivizing quality engagement with material, and among classmates – who become teammates, working together to parse through material, and develop a higher level of understanding. Team Based Learning can help capture the attention of the disinterested or hesitant learner, the middle of the road student who does not do their homework or readings is given focused application of the material they are meant to learn as an individual, and is required, by obligation to their peers, to come prepared to class. But how do you apply TBL's revolutionary engagement activities to the fully online classroom? A major element of Team Based Learning is the real-time discussion students have during their team meetings, the fast paced application activities students are given to complete while in class, and the face to face team time students get with the instructor as a resource to complete their culminating project. In particular, the vitally important element of individual and group assessment is a vital and challenging element of online asynchronous Team Based Learning. This session will discuss the challenges, and benefits of Team Based Learning in an online asynchronous environment with a focus on the instructional technology tools used to succeed in this venture. Through this session, attendees will learn about the instructional tools used to succesfully implement Team Based Learning fully online. There will be discussion of how others have implemented Team Based Learning in their classrooms, and the challenges it presents, as well as possible solutions. Syncing Your Online Classes with Your Face-to-Face Classes – Integrated Curriculum Brigham Taylor (Brigham Young University, USA) Brigham Young University - Idaho has a standard that their online courses need to meet the same objectives as their on-campus counterpart. This means integrated curriculum. This means professor's approval for every aspect of the course design and online delivery. How is that done? Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 271 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness In this presentation, we will discuss the design and development process for online courses and how we ensure that the curriculum is authentic and integrated. We will follow the process from conception through maturity. This includes our pre-development, development, review, and pilot phases. We will discuss how to engage the college, from the dean to the professors, in the design of the courses, the development in the LMS, the selection of instructors, and continual monitoring and updating of the course. Faculty Lessons Learned Teaching Adults in a Blended Program: Opportunities and Challenges Multiplied Karen Skibba (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA) As adult students demand more online courses, instructors and administrators struggle with what is the right blend of course formats within adult-degree programs and what are the challenges and opportunities. To discuss these issues, I will engage the audience through interactive questions and small group moments to share blended program experiences. Blended programs are defined the same as hybrid or blended courses, which is when between 30% and 79% of the course content is delivered online (Allen, Seaman, & Garrett , 2007). There are a number of ways to structure blended programs: Institutions mix online and face-to-face courses, offer all hybrid courses, or mix all three course delivery formats. As blended programs grow to meet the needs of adult learners, faculty members face many challenges and opportunities. Two research questions were investigated: 1. How do faculty members describe the process and implications of moving back and forth between teaching multiple course delivery formats within a blended program? 2. How do faculty members perceive teaching adults in a blended program influences their overall teaching practices? A basic qualitative interpretive approach was employed. Data collection instruments were indepth interviews, a faculty background questionnaire with reflective questions, and a teacher learning audit. Ten faculty members from two blended adult degree programs participated in this study. The theme that emerged was the "importance of choice." This theme was analyzed through three lenses:  How adult students learn  How to teach adult students  Challenges of multiple course delivery formats. How Adult Students Learn: Both blended programs were undergoing changes to include more online or hybrid courses to accommodate the needs of adult students. Despite being offered all three options, adult students were "voting with their feet" and registering for more online courses. They want convenience and flexibility and some think online learning will be easier. Important modifications the instructors needed to make included providing more flexible due Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 272 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness dates, clear guidelines, an organized course structure, and fast communication so the students would not feel isolated and would know what was expected. The instructors noted these are critical modifications to make in online or hybrid courses because more self-directed learning is required. Despite adult students' demand for online courses, the research participants said they believe that adult students should have a choice of course delivery formats. Offering choices allows students to take courses in a way that fits their lifestyles and abilities and helps them learn in new ways to be prepared for today's work world. How to Teach Adult Students: In a blended program, the instructors liked being able to choose the best course delivery format based on learning goals, preference, comfort level, content, learning activities, and for variety. Teaching in a blended program offered the most flexibility and success when teaching adults students. The instructors learned how to take elements of all course delivery formats to create the best learning environment for their students. Even though the research participants were experienced adult educators who used participatory learning methods previously, they needed to transform their teaching by incorporating online activities that encouraged students to become more engaged in their own learning. The instructors found that the more they experimented with and taught different course delivery formats, the more they learned new teaching and learning strategies that improved their overall teaching practice. By experimenting with various course delivery formats, instructors can unleash a "playground of pedagogical possibilities" that can lead to enhanced teaching and learning. Challenges of Multiple Course Delivery Formats: Teaching in a blended program was "like running a triathlon" because instructors have to "shift gears" when teaching three different course delivery formats at the same time. The instructors observed how challenging and "brutally time consuming" it was to keep up with the constant redesign and updating of content since they were required to teach the same course in two or three formats. Online learning "has to be excruciatingly well organized," otherwise, "students get lost." Teaching hybrid courses was the most difficult since they had to carefully plan and manage the activities and workload both faceto-face and online. The instructors relied on the course management system to keep track of all of the student activities in various courses; however, there is still a lot to manage and sometimes "balls get dropped." All said they were overwhelmed and overworked because teaching in a blended program requires expertise in organizing, designing, and teaching more than one course delivery format. This created concern for their students since faculty members who are not trained well to teach in these formats can "mess up" the learning experience. Conclusion and Discussion: Offering a choice of course delivery formats benefits both faculty members and adult learners. However, the challenges and benefits of choice of course delivery format may not always be clear to students or faculty. Therefore, it would be helpful to clearly communicate both the opportunities and challenges of the various course formats to both students and faculty. The research participants felt that a mix of course delivery formats was most effective; therefore, administrators may want to consider the implications of eliminating face-to-face courses and clearly explain the benefits of learning in a blended program. Also, it would be beneficial for administrators to provide instructors with the resources, training, and opportunities to teach different course formats so they can experiment with technology and discover the pedagogical benefits. However, it is important to not overburden faculty members to Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 273 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness teach all three course delivery formats at the same time. It is important to evaluate each instructor's ability to teach various course delivery formats instead of just assigning them to teach online or hybrid without training or time and resources to develop quality courses. While the instructors in this study were excited about the possibilities of using multiple course formats, they were also concerned whether they would have time, would be supported by their institution, and would know how to use technology to enhance learning. Teaching in a blended program multiplied the challenges and opportunities for education, student learning, and faculty success. Cross Institutional Data Sharing and Analysis to Support Student Success Beth Davis (PAR, USA) Karen Swan (University of Illinois-Springfield, USA) Denise Nadasen (UMUC, USA) Joel Hartman (University of Central Florida, USA) Analysis of very large data sets has become common practice to help organizations make predictions that assist performance and outcomes. From business to sports to police work “big data” is everywhere. The collection and analysis of large data sets is also increasingly common in higher education and learning analytics is becoming pervasive. This session will feature leaders in the field of learning analytics who will discuss their work on Gates and Kresge Foundation funded projects that seek to improve student success through large scale data analysis. The session will feature representatives from the national PAR project, and participants from the University of Illinois Springfield, the University of Maryland University College and the University of Central Florida who collectively serve more than 150,000 students. The panel will discuss how sharing data across institutions has led to better understanding of student needs and an emerging effort to develop inter-institutional intervention strategies that leverages this understanding to assist student performance and success. Getting Students to Do the Work David Lindrum (Soomo Publishing, USA) Great curriculum is useless if students aren't using it. This paper explores the reasons why students don't use provided curriculum and what can be done about it by faculty, course designers, and increasingly intelligent learning environments. Our conclusions are the result of working with faculty in online programs at a variety of schools. Some of our solutions are commonsensical but often overlooked such as noting that students do the things which receive both credit and attention. Other are largely unprecedented, such as analyzing a scatter graph of student time and success to find those most in need of help, and knowing how to address the outliers in each quadrant. In formal studies, we've helped instructors reach median participation rates as high as 98% that is half the class doing 98% or more of all assigned work - with simple changes in course design and how the instructor encourages students. High participation rates radically increase retention, grades and, somewhat surprisingly, student satisfaction. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 274 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness Our approach is one of fellow-practitioners. We'll be leading a structured discussion designed to extend our findings by including the problems, experience and solutions of everyone in the room. Attendees will leave with an actionable set of best practices enabling them to improve the structure of their courses, or other courses at their institution, in concrete ways, regardless of who publishes their resources or what LMS they're using. Think Small: The Effectiveness of Small Interactive Online Classes Margaret McCabe (GoodTeachingOnline.com, USA) Tisha Bender (Rutgers University, USA) (i) Understanding the connections between learning theory and online course models As online education gains momentum, the marks of progress seem to be measured in numbers reached rather than the quality of the experience offered or gains in learning achieved. Various models of Massive Open Online Courses boast 70,000 plus students in a single course. But how does scale change the relationship between the students and the instructor and among the students themselves? And how are instructors' practices impacted and even compromised by the new parameters? These questions point to concerns that draw resistance to online education among many faculty members and students. Much of faculty's resistance to online education is rooted in the idea that online courses tend to be impersonal, rigid and lacking in community. Teachers worry that the dynamic roles they fulfill in a live classroom become reduced to "information providers" online. They object to automated rather than personally responsive feedback. They are concerned that the open-ended nature of authentic inquiry is reduced to predictable patterns of information processing. In essence, teachers are concerned that the current trend in online education towards massive enrollment with limited teacher-student interaction dismisses the lessons learned from progressive education over the past 75 years. Responding directly to such concerns, this session is intended to help faculty, administrators, trainers and stakeholders in higher education to make informed decisions about scale and approach to online course development. Dr. Margaret Foley McCabe and Dr. Tisha Bender contend that learning occurs as a social process, enabling online interaction amongst all class participants. Our argument is for the focus to be on good teaching rather than on technology, and on effectiveness rather than efficiency. A smaller online class of 15 to 20 students has the potential to minimize the transactional distance, and promote interaction and personal engagement. Transactional distance is defined as the extent to which teachers meaningfully communicate with their students. (ii) Advocating Small, Interactive Courses that Support Constructivist Learning Theory We advocate a view of learning as a social process that is mediated through the subjective lens of the learner (Dewey, 1938). From this point of view, learners are not passive recipients of knowledge, but active participants in the process of meaning making and knowledge Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 275 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness construction (Vygotsky, 1978). Applying this Constructivist Learning Theory to online practice places emphasis on the students' engagement with the material. The students' exploration becomes the focus of online course design. From this perspective, classes need to be small, allowing for: • • • all participants to interact with one another individualized and responsive instruction and feedback the formation of a community of learners To create an online environment in which this can occur, the teacher needs to personalize instructional strategies so as to encourage each student to contribute his or her unique perspective to the collective learning community. Informed by the work of such educational philosophers as John Dewey, Wilbert McKeachie, Howard Gardner and Maxine Greene, we will discuss how the multiple roles and characteristics of online teachers and students impact learning outcomes. It is only through small online class size that the teacher can get to know his or her students, and customize the teaching accordingly to help all students increase their potential for learning. In addition, we will look at how the learning theories of Berge and Muilenburg (2000), Bloom's Taxonomy (1956) and the National Research Council's 2001 findings can be applied to online pedagogy to increase students' critical thinking, creative problem solving, and distributive thinking skills. (iii) Assessment of Student Learning in the Small-Scale Online Class as a Measure of Learning Effectiveness We believe that the optimal way in which to measure the effectiveness of small-scale online classes is to develop a criteria-referenced study in which assessment is determined by calculating the degree to which course goals and learning outcomes have been achieved. We will discuss how this can be done by an application of the Seven Principles of Good Practice (Chickering and Ehrmann, 1996). In addition, the Assessment Triangle (National Research Council, 2001) that studies the interrelationship between Observation, Interpretation and Cognition, will also be discussed. (iv) Matching Institutional Goals and Online Course Development Strategy Since 1994, we have worked with many universities and thousands of faculty members designing and teaching online courses. It is imperative that institutions identify and promote the key characteristics that distinguish their courses. If the campus-based courses have high ratios of interaction between professors and students, then it may be appropriate to offer the same opportunity to the online students. The teaching model does not need to shift simply because a course goes online. As the late Stephen Anspacher often said, "It is teaching and learning - not technology - that should drive our decisions." (v) Goals of Presentation Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 276 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness True to their espoused learning theory, Dr. Bender and Dr. McCabe will lead this presentation as an interactive session with audience members contributing to the dialogue throughout. Slides will provide visual support for the content. Participants will leave with: 1. A framework to understand the implied learning theories imbedded in online course models. 2. An understanding of how Constructivist Learning Theory informs online practice. 3. A schematic approach to assessing online students' learning. 4. Strategic questions to help institutions plan online course development. It's time to shine the spotlight on small interactive online courses so that institutions, faculty and students who value these kinds of learning experiences are invited to participate in reinventing online education. Developing and Sustaining Critical Discussions in the Online Learning Environment Rohan Jowallah (University of Central Florida, USA) The proliferation of online degree programs and courses has found many academics questioning the quality of online discussions. Subsequently, there is a need for universities to ensure that courses are designed to accommodate discussions that will enhance social presence, teaching presence and cognitive presence within online environment. This paper reports on a study aimed at evaluating strategies used within the online learning environment to increase students' participation in online weekly discussions. The four strategies employed were: 1. The redesigning of the discussion activity within a graduate program course 2. The consistent managing of course tutors online 3. Posting of weekly announcements by course tutors 4. Implementation of sustained feedback to students within the online learning environment in relation to students' discussions. Participants were students (n=79) and their group facilitators (n=4). The students involved were required to complete an online questionnaire. Data were also collected from postings in the online weekly discussion forums. Generally, the data showed that there are tremendous benefits to be derived when discussion activities are appropriately designed and tutors have a sustained presence within the online environment. Session Outcomes: The outcomes for this session are to…    Disseminate some key principles that can be used to enhance critical discussions in the learning exchange. Accentuate the need for critical engagement in online collaborative engagement. 3. Discuss with fellow academics the issues/factors affecting students' discussion in the online learning environment. Contribution to the conference and to the field Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 277 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness The ongoing debate regarding the quality of discussion within the online learning environment continues to be a dominant issue. Many academics have suggested that quality interaction cannot take place in the online environment. The presentation seeks to solidify the view that online learning environments can be designed to increase interaction within the online environment. In addition, this presentation will disseminate information that can be used by online designers and online tutors to help develop and maintain critical discussions in the learning exchange. Theoretical Framework: The research has been influenced by Moore's Theory of Transactional Distance. This framework is suitable based on the consideration the model gives to the learners, teachers, students and conduct displayed in the learning exchange. Session Plan for Interaction and Engagement: The researcher will use a Power Point Presentation with a variety of hyperlinks (videos/images). Time will be given throughout the presentation for the audience to ask questions. Reference: Moore, M. G., & Kearsley, G. (1996). Distance education: a systems view. Belmont: Wadsworth Evidence-based Initiatives: From Exploratory to Developmental Research of Online Education Tools David Kephart (University of South Florida, USA) The author(s) have presented to this conference in the past an initial study into the effectiveness of online tutoring for math students at the University of South Florida. Our move today toward a larger-scale, developmental study holds encouraging implications for institutions look for ways to establish evidence-based practice. With the specific goal of establishing a practical standard for the investigation of online tutoring, we can address the general issue of how to test out user manuals, how to ramp up a pilot investigation of your favorite online tool to developmental studies, and how to find the resources to accomplish research goals. It is fundamental that educators must submit their ideas and techniques for peer review. After all, nowhere else do the researchers themselves advocate more strongly or the scientific method, for evidence-based conclusions, and for the social importance of inquiry. Yet nowhere are the standards of measurement more controversial. Case in point: there are diverse separate confirmations of the benefits of tutoring; its academic value is anecdotally unquestionable. Still, there are very few investigations into the use of online tutoring, even as a complement to teaching mathematics, a subject as central to current educational questions. Our presentation is an inquiry into how the "everyday" researcher and his or her work in testing claims regarding online learning can take on the big theoretical questions. We show how we put together an expansion of our own exploratory study into the effectiveness of online tutoring. This Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 278 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness builds on our original findings that suggested a 25% increase in persistence in math could be associated with the offer of online tutoring. Our initial study was with a control group and over three hundred students at the University of South Florida. The study of tomorrow will require full document-based standardization ofAll research procedures. Consequently, we are developing the manuals, the metrics, and the procedures through a study involving thousands of students and a collaboration of a software developer and multiple campuses. In this presentation, we discuss the unique problems of designing a developmental study. As in our case, the research validation of many tools inspiring tools of online education is still in the exploratory stage. Significant among these are MOOCs, social media, and mobile devices. Our effort to follow exploration with developmental study is a model for institutions that, like the David Anchin Center of the USF School of Education, seek to place evidence-based practice at the top of the agenda. We discuss the search for funding sources (a handout), the creation of public-private collaborations to carry out different phases of the work (a live demonstration), and the publication of final results. We will present results and studies in process. We will open the floor to other ways to motivate research initiatives in education. A Universe of Opportunities: Case-based Design Patterns for Blended Learning Courses Linda S. Futch (University of Central Florida, USA) Kelvin Thompson (University of Central Florida, USA) Wendy Howard (University of Central Florida, USA) Goals: 1. Discover how faculty transform their courses from the face-to-face to the online learning environment 2. Identify pedagogical strategies used by faculty successfully teaching blended courses 3. Identify the decision-making process of faculty as they design blended courses Discover how the integration works between the face-to-face and online learning environments Blended learning is an evolving pedagogical model for online course delivery. However, many faculty struggle with the design. What is "the formula" for a blended course? How much should I put online? What should I keep in my classroom?" How does the course design impact students and learning? These are the perennial questions faculty ask as they conceptualize a blended course. While we don't have a universal answer to these questions, you can learn from strategies incorporated into successful blended courses and why the course was successful. Using a case study model, a team interviewed faculty from various institutions delivering blended courses. Last year, we presented the initial research uncovered by our team. This year, we will reveal findings from three faculty members successfully teaching blended courses. All three faculty work at institutions focusing on teaching and learning. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 279 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness This presentation reviews successful blended strategies, factors impacting design and decision points in the design and why they succeeded. Furthermore, we will explore early design failures and how to avoid them in your course. Beyond Internships: Developing Career Mindedness and Infusing Career Topics Throughout the Curriculum Joanna Palmer (Baker College & Center for Graduate Studies, USA) Tammy Mattison (Baker College, USA) Problem: Students often do not think mindfully about their future career or career options during their individual courses within their programs. Most secondary and higher education systems around the country do not instill activities that help students make educated career decisions within their curriculum (Life Development Institute, 2010). There is concern that the lack of career readiness being incorporated into curriculum decreases students likelihood of being career ready when they graduate (Massachusetts Department of Education, 2012). Rather than wait until the end of a degree plan to start refining career goals and options, schools have the opportunity to infuse career components and career mindfulness within the curriculum of their programs. Doing this will allow students to become more well-rounded and aware of career options throughout their courses. In addition to learning the knowledge within the courses, they are also thinking beyond the courses to how they will apply and use this knowledge within their future careers. Session Information: This session will focus on demonstrating examples of how programs and courses can include career components with the goal of creating students who are more career minded, and making connections between what they are learning in class and what they will be doing in their careers. This session will provide practical examples of how this has been done at Baker College, and how this career minded focus throughout the curriculum results in 99.7% of our recent graduates being employed with over 91% of graduates being employed in a position related to their degree. Specific examples will be explored and demonstrated including use of informational interviews, job shadowing, networking, incorporating career service staff within course discussions, developing elevator speeches, joining professional associations, creating a professional online presence, having students analyze job listings, and creating authentic assessments within courses that will provide information regarding common job tasks within the career field. Specific attention will be made to discuss how these activities can be integrated into course curriculum and become a natural part of the courses and programs. Session Objectives: Attendees who attend this informational session will: • • Review the importance of infusing career components within course curriculum to help develop well rounded, career ready students. Examine practices that allow students to be career minded throughout their degree program. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 280 Track 4: Learning Effectiveness • Discuss examples of how career components can be integrated and interwoven into course curriculum. Attendees will participate in polls and small group activities to explore how they can apply and infuse career components and career mindedness within their particular courses and departments. Initial polls will assess how familiar they believe their students to be with career options and the overall level of career mindedness they see in their students. Instructors, administrators, program developers, and course designers will all benefit from this session, and leave with an understanding of how to enhance their current curriculum and programs by adding elements that focus student attention and thought to how they can connect what they are learning to what they will be doing in their career after graduation. Resources will be provided that include websites and key resources related to the session. Slides will be used to guide the presentation. During the session, an online polling feature will be used to increase attendee participation and interaction. Websites will be visited and demonstrated during the session. Handouts will be provided to attendees with information and resources on key strategies, methods, and research discussed during the session. All items will be provided for inclusion on the conference web site. Supporting Literature: Life Development Institute. (2010). Failure to launch: Lack of career preparation forces graduates to "go it alone. Retrieved from http://lifedevelopmentinstitute.org/assessment/failureto-launch-lack-of... Massachusetts Department of Elementary & Secondary Education. (2012). From cradle to career: Educating our students for lifelong success. Retrieved from http://www.doe.mass.edu/boe/docs/2012-06/item1_report.pdf Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 281 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile Best in Track Award Global Learning Qualifications Framework - Assessing University-Level Learning Anytime, Anywhere Amy McQuigge (SUNY Empire State College, USA) The Global Learning Qualifications Framework (GLQF) is designed to assess university-level learning regardless of where, when or how it was acquired. The GLQF is the result of extensive research and builds on the progress of qualification frameworks from over 90 countries, the Lumina Degree Qualifications Profile, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Essential Learning Outcomes and VALUE Rubrics, and other emerging work in the assessment field. As colleges/universities and students continue to search for and use nontraditional modes of education, learning has become increasingly untethered to time, place, and modality. While this work is tied to a history of face-to-face instruction and classroom assessments, it also provides a structure for assessing non-traditional modes: online learning, open education resources (OER), MOOCs, and experiential/prior learning. The Global Learning Qualifications Framework is part of Open SUNY, under the SUNY REAL (Recognition of Experiential and Academic Learning) initiative. This project has been funded through two grants provided by the Lumina Foundation and the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA), to develop a comprehensive framework to assess university-level learning and to pilot the framework by assessing six OER courses from the Saylor Foundation. The project will also assess additional learning modalities, such as experiential learning and classroom experiences, outside of the funding requirements. In 2012-2013, an academic team of faculty and academics withExpertise in open education, prior learning assessment and outcomes assessment was formed to study the core components of student knowledge and the learning process and to conduct a meta-analysis of qualification frameworks from around the world to create a holistic framework to assess university-level learning. The resulting GLQF has been designed to be content area agnostic as courses and open learning range from liberal arts and sciences, to technologies, to applied studies. An additional panel of nationalExperts reviewed the framework prior to entering the pilot phase of the project. The second phase of the project (2013-2014) will pilot the GLQF using a range of open courses, prior learning experiences, and some on-line and face-to-face courses. The initial assessments will focus on the OER courses identified in the grants. Throughout the pilot process, additional tethered and untethered learning will also be assessed. all pilot results will be used to refine the GLQF. In the summer of 2014, an institute will gather key global leaders in OER, prior learning and learning assessments to learn about the GLQF, provide more feedback, and discuss ways to distribute the framework internationally. The research background and summary, final results, and the Global Learning Qualifications Framework will be licensed through open resources by Creative Commons and available for everyone on-line after the Summer Institute. This presentation will discuss the research process, the resulting framework, the initial steps in assessing the first set of Saylor Foundation OER courses, and future implications in assessment, course development, non-traditional student learning, and Open Educational Resources. Participants will work in small groups (10-15 minutes) to discuss how they could use the framework at their college/university. Particular focus of the discussion will be on how the Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 282 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile framework could be used to asses all learning deliveries provided by their institution. The full group will expand the discussion to look at how the framework can be used to assess all forms of university level learning, regardless if it is tethered or untethered, pre-determined or emergent, or academic or experiential. The participants will be provided with a copy of the framework with feedback forms to contribute to the refinement of the framework. Participants will leave with an understanding of emerging assessment practices as well as practical applications to use the framework. Why Settle for One, When You Can Have Many? Melanie Morgan-Jackson (South Florida State College, USA) Erik N. Christensen (South Florida State College, USA) Why saddle your students with a single, expensive textbook that they rarely read? Instead, infuse your class with a mashup of free, virtual OER resources that address a range of learning styles. Many OER resources exist on the web. The challenge may be finding quality resources that have been vetted and proven successful. Join us to learn more about Florida's digital repository (the Orange Grove) and how to pull OER resources from this system. We will also discuss the Creative Commons resource, OER textbooks and complementary resources as well as licensing these resources. This presentation will showcase the dramatic benefits to improving student access and success through the integration of a variety of OER Web 2.0 resources into your class. The dramatic cost reduction achieved by replacing traditional textbooks with virtual OER materials, coupled with the ability to integrate a wide variety of other learning resources that can address a range of learning styles, are keys to improving student success. The recent redesign of AST 1002 Descriptive Astronomy at South Florida State College will provide a case study backdrop that will enable participants to get a first-hand view of the effectiveness of each. These tools are all student-friendly, mobile- and BYOD-capable, and many are already familiar with students. The projects to be discussed include: Online OER eBooks (Astropedia - which is available as a pdf or a Wikimap) Online Simulations (Nebraska Astronomy Applet Project) YouTube videos (TEDEd) Social Media (Twitter) Photo voice (Flickr). Participants will be encouraged to consider integrating at least one virtual OER resource into their own classes in the upcoming year. Online polling will be used during the session to actively engage participants in the discussion. Participants will be provided a blank implementation planning worksheet to assist in their planning for implementation upon their return to their institution. To help build confidence in their ability to implement an OER resource, participants will then engage in several sets of 30-second rapid rendezvous dialogue discussions with another participant where they will discuss their proposed implementation plan one-on-one. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 283 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile Distinguished Online Programs: Six Design Features of the New Generation of eLearning Stephen Ehrmann (George Washington University, USA) Liesl Riddle (George Washington University, USA) Julie DeLoia (George Washington University, USA) Many prominent research universities are striving to become leading online learning institutions, sometimes because they need to present programs that further build their campus reputation and can, if need be, charge comparable tuition while providing value for money. The most common strategies for building such a program usually taking advantage of a campus brand name that is already distinguished, finding a major cash infusion, and/or taking a leading role in offering free, massive enrollment courses. The drive to find ways to be distinguished is compelling in the online marketplace potential university students have, or soon will have, dozens or hundreds of options for almost any degree or certificate. An increasing number of institutions, fortunately, are going beyond marketing sizzle to establish quality instruction. The challenge is that learners may not be in a good position to assess their claims, even they don't already trust the institution's reputation. The kinds of behavior emphasized by Quality Matters or the Sloan-C Pillars aren't always easy for a potential student (or the student's employer) to appreciate. For example, one criterion asks whether the offering is comparable in quality to what the institution offers on campus. The learner may have no real sense of how good the campus itself is and only the program's own claim that “we're as good as the campus” to go on. In such a market, students and employers are likely to choose options based on affordability and the “sizzle” of the sales pitch. In other words, the offerings of most institutions will tend to become commodities, almost as indistinguishable as different suppliers of oil or wheat. If an institution is committed to offering the very best online program, and to do so in a way that the marketplace is likely to value, what should its program look like? We will suggest six design elements that meet this criterion and that are also enabled by the program's reliance on technology. Each of these elements is actually easier to implement because the degree program is mainly online: 1. A dream team of local and distant experts who develop, teach and/or assess student work. 2. Hybrid features (mix of online and face-to-face interaction) that are used to enhance educational quality and to engage appropriate students across space and time. 3. Collaborating organizations/sites that provide research problems, faculty and staff, students, sites for applying skills, additional courses, and sometimes a distinctive identity for the program. 4. Options, tracks and customization that help meet varied student career needs, abilities, and disabilities. 5. Online structures and practices that help everyone feel exceptionally connected and supported. 6. The online or hybrid setting of the program used to help students learn to excel in a modern workplace. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 284 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile Each of those six elements enable a program to be: a) Distinctively more valuable and attractive than commodity online programs; and Distinctively more valuable and attractive, in some ways, than most campus-bound programs. Now for the bad news and the good news. It's the same news. Each of these elements depends on sophisticated human capital (e.g., assembling the best, most attractive faculty in the world; creating a network of unique sites for study and resources) as well as on technology. That's not easy and in some cases may be expensive. To build and maintain such a program will take time and probably some money. There are no short cuts to becoming distinguished. As we've said, that's the bad news, but it is also the good news. Once an online program or institution becomes distinguished in these ways, the advantage over its competitors is likely to be a lasting one. You can't make good friends in a week. And it isn't easy to assemble a program with many, problem-free tracks and options for learners. And while competitors are taking years trying to catch up, truly distinguished programs will be investing in further development of their strengths. Our Sloan-C session will draw its examples primarily from two master's programs of the George Washington University. Each in its own way is putting these design elements into practice: the GW School of Business' Digital Community of online masters programs and the GW School of Public Health and Health Sciences' Online Master's of Public Health. The audience will get a sense of what's already possible and how far we can still go to make programs that are even more distinguished. Our goals and schedule: Our program will be divided into three segments:  (10 Minutes) - Summarize the idea of “distinguished programs” and relate these ideas to other goals for quality, e.g., Sloan-C Pillars.  (45 Minutes) - Provide real world examples of how each principle can be implemented, and then ask the audience for its own examples of each principle in action. Following this discussion, if there is time, we will ask the audience if they have suggestions for any additional design elements.  (15 Minutes) - Discuss the hurdles that stand in the way of implementing distinguished programs. Here too we will ask the audience to share examples from their own experience. Anticipated Audience: Higher education, especially program leaders, senior administrators, and scholars of online learning strategy. Now I Know My XYZs: Addressing the Needs of Today's Untethered Learners Kevin Kelly (Wiley Learning Institute, USA) As student-centered learning becomes increasingly mobile and technology-enabled, individual faculty and entire educational institutions seek to provide more avenues for sharing, engagement, and assessment. The environment and everyone in it seem to be changing constantly, requiring higher education professionals to change as well--ranging from making needs-based technology Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 285 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile decisions to providing greater levels of flexibility for students. Drawing from experience with faculty development, academic technology management, teaching a large-scale online class, and editing a collaborative book about online teaching and learning, Dr. Kevin Kelly will synthesize different stakeholder perspectives; emerging technologies to consider; strategies at the institutional, program, and course levels; and effective practices around innovations for education. In this presentation we will explore drivers for teaching and technology decisions. Namely, those drivers stem from key changes to the age-old trio of people, places, and things. People: Students are mobile and untethered, are increasingly diverse, and need support with learning, technology, and creating a formal identity for academic and career bridging purposes. Instructors need support with teaching, technology, and adapting to changes like larger class sizes and increased responsibilities. Administrators need to address increased demands for technology used for teaching/ learning, research, and community service. Simultaneously, they face decreased budgets, infrastructure challenges, and increased accountability. Places: Why does "untethered learning" describe today's learning environment better than "online education?" First, there is a common misconception that "online education" means all learning takes place behind a computer screen. It's just as easy to assign students to a) interact with the world in meaningful, discipline-specific ways; and then b) go online to share the results or demonstrate new competencies. We'll look at the changes to teaching and learning in physical, virtual and mixed environments. Second, "untethered learning" works better as an overarching term due to the growing use of mobile devices. As evidence, tablet sales are expected to exceed desktop and laptop sales in 2015. Things: Forget the ABCs. We'll look at the XYZs of technology for instructional purposes to answer, "Who uses What, When, and Where?" In addition to the proliferation of devices and apps, trends to watch include learner analytics, flipped learning, and that word everyone loves to say... MOOCs! In this session, we'll dig into what's real, what's hype, and what's worth your time. Finally, let's not forget - it's not all about coursework. Untethered learners also will need remote services. Low completion and retention rates in distance education environments may stem from lack of social integration. Join us for a presentation designed to look at the teaching as much as the tools and trends. Inside MOOCs: Student Expectations and Achievement Clark Shah-Nelson (Johns Hopkins University, USA) Since 2005, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH) has, by providing freely available Open CourseWare (OCW), contributed to the "shared intellectual commons" in academia. This fosters collaboration across JHSPH and among scholars across disciplines around the world. JHSPH considers OCW an important component of the School's mission (Protecting Health, Saving Lives - Millions at a Time). In 2012, JHSPH began furthering this mission by participating in a partnership to provide Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 286 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile Coursera.org. As of May, 2013, our 8 courses (9 offerings) have had 294,146 students enrolled at the time of final grade calculation and we have issued 23,350 statements of accomplishment for students who have successfully completed the courses. Many papers, articles and reports about MOOCs seem to center on either philosophical and/or business aspects or on the dropout rate: on average, 10% or less complete entire courses and/or gain certificates of completion. But the story goes deeper. We'll take a look at data analysis from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health courses on Coursera.org based on thousands of student pre- and post-course surveys and actual participation in the courses. We'll take at look at what the data says about the following questions: 1. How many students go into the experience expecting to complete the course? 2. How many actually do? 3. Are there students who didn't expect to gain a certificate of completion, but who do? 4. What are some of the factors motivating student participation in our MOOCs? 5. How does student participation in quizzes, assignments, and/or discussion forums match up to their own expectations? 6. Is there anything that we can do to help more students complete courses? 7. What are some of the primary reasons students did not complete the course? 8. What would have made students more likely to complete the course? 9. Did they find the course useful, even if they didn't complete it? 10. How valuable were various factors in helping students complete the course? Here's what “We Will Not Do” in this session:  Discuss whether or not MOOCs are disruptive to higher education or the wave of the future  Explore the differences between constructivist MOOCs (cMOOCs) and xMOOCs (Coursera, Udacity, EDx)  Discuss whether MOOCs provide equivalent education to traditional courses What we will do is delve into actual data from thousands of student pre-course and post-course surveys as well as performance and participation in JHU's Coursera courses in order to provide participants an overview of student motivation, participation, and achievement. Meet the Students Where They Are: Using Technology to Reach Beyond Borders and Grant Experiential College Credit Jalane Meloun (Barry University, USA) Joanne Longo (Barry University, USA) Outcome: At the conclusion of the highly interactive Information Session, attendees will have learned how to set up an e-portfolio process -through a Learning Management System (LMS). They will have been shown the data-driven and anecdotal successes as well as the trials and tribulations of the process as undergone by Barry University. Attendees will leave the session with contact information for the presenters, who may be reached by those interested in pursuing their own online portfolio programs. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 287 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile Stakeholders: This session is suitable to those who do or are considering granting college credit for learning outside of the traditional university framework. It also may be relevant to those introducing a Learning Management System and need to train students, faculty, and administrators. Problem: Barry University, ranked 16th in the nation for Campus Ethic Diversity, according to U.S. News and World Report, also has a substantive non-traditional population. Students may be domestic or international, but many are not located at the main campus in Miami. With-the increasing number of online courses and fully online degrees, allowing distantly located students to submit traditionally huge binders full of portfolio material posed a problem. Solution: Offer an e-portfolio option through an LMS, in this case, Moodle. The following will be covered in an interactive session during which questions are encouraged: • • • Administrators and Intake Personnel o Partnering with an online learning management system (LMS) o Training personnel to provide guidance and review student work in the LMS. o Ensuring validation and privacy issues for sensitive documents contained in a portfolio o Determining fee structure for online submission o Maintaining consistency across the various formats Students o Training students in the online LMS environment o Explaining the sections of the portfolio to optimize credit award for experiential learning o Motivating students to complete their portfolios o Allowing creativity within a structured online format Faculty o Training faculty in use of the LMS o Determining the authenticity of scanned documents that verify learning o Presenting portfolio evaluation to peer reviewers o Relation to Sloan - C pillars for E-learning Success: 1. learning effectiveness - data from pre- and post-test proficiency-levels of the LMS will be shared with attendees as will student feedback and suggestions 2. scale - past data collected on the paper-based portfolio program has demonstrated much student satisfaction and perceived learning, and the online portfolio opens the option to distantly located and/or online students 3. access - any online student who either chooses to complete a portfolio or must do so as a degree requirement may be availed the online portfolio option; global access is enabled 4. faculty, intake staff, and student satisfaction - data from pre- and post-test perception of the online portfolio process will be shared with attendees Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 288 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile Open SUNY: Transforming Open and Online Education Within a Comprehensive Public University System Alexandra Pickett (SUNY Learning Network, USA) Thomas P. Mackey (SUNY Empire State College, USA) Carey Hatch (State University of New York, USA) Kim Scalzo (State University of New York, USA) Open SUNY is an ambitious system-wide collaborative initiative that is expanding access to online learning throughout the State University of New York (SUNY). As the largest comprehensive public university system in the United States, and with a global reach that includes international partners from around the world, SUNY is uniquely positioned to deliver innovative open and online learning on a large scale. Open SUNY has several key components that will identify high needs within distinct curricular areas and leverage "systemness" to promote campus partnerships in the creation and delivery of online courses and programs. This bold initiative builds on the successes of the SUNY Learning Network, Empire State College and existing online programs at SUNY campuses and within regions of the state while expanding to new areas and inviting greater participation. As part of this initiative, Open SUNY provides a vision for developing system-wide Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for both content creation and use. In addition, one of participating colleges has developed a grant-funded collaboration to create a framework for credentialing Open Educational Resources (OERs) and MOOCs. In other partnerships with SUNY colleges and universities, system administration is promoting innovative approaches to degree completion and student mobility, accelerating time to degree. Further, a system-wide Innovative Instruction Technology Grant (IITG) program encourages Open SUNY collaborations among partner institutions to enhance faculty development efforts and to encourage innovation in emerging technologies and pedagogy. This presentation will outline the key components associated with Open SUNY, discuss some of the challenges with establishing a large-scale open and online initiative, and invite participation from the audience about future directions. We will encourage participants to respond to Open SUNY planning, and share their own experiences and expertise with open and online learning. Supporting Documentation/Links: SUNY Strategic Plan, "The Power of SUNY", 2010 http://www.suny.edu/powerofsuny/pdf/SUNY_StrategicPlan.pdf Associated Press‚ "SUNY seeks to establish a “cradle to career future for its graduates", April 13, 2010 http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2010/04/suny_seeks_to_establish_a_crad.html Empire State College, "Open SUNY Final Proposal" from 2012 http://www8.esc.edu/esconline/cdlrev2.nsf/7ee05c19c4623d128525767800520634/581ad7d9e2c cc8f7852579fb006695d0/$FILE/OpenSUNYFinal.pdf Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 289 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile "Getting Down to Business: Interim Report of the Chancellor's Online Education Advisory Team" released in December 2012 [updated]. http://www.suny.edu/powerofsuny/framework/goals_ideas_teams/gettingdowntobusiness8_team/ OpenSUNY_InterimReport_20121231_DRAFT.pdf CNY Central, "SUNY Chancellor reveals ambitious agenda", Jan 15, 2013 http://www.cnycentral.com/news/story.aspx?id=848047#.UVm1E6sjppJ USA Today, "State University of New York pushing online classes", Jan 15, 2013 http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/15/higher-education-online-coursessuny/1566376/ Education News, "Open SUNY Will Mark New York's Push into Online Education", Jan 22, 2013 http://www.educationnews.org/online-schools/open-suny-will-mark-new-yorks-push-into-onlineeducation/ Open SUNY Press Release, "SUNY Board Outlines Implementation of Open SUNY", March 19, 2013 http://www.suny.edu/sunynews/News.cfm?filname=2013-03-19-OpenSUNYRelease.htm Buffalo Business First, "Online courses to be available across SUNY system", March 20, 2013 http://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/blog/miner-business/2013/03/online-courses-to-beavailable-across.html Chronicle of Higher Education, "SUNY Signals Major Push Toward MOOCs and Other New Educational Models", March 20, 2013 http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/suny-signals-major-push-toward-moocs-and-other-neweducational-models/43079 Online Colleges, "State University of New York Embraces Online Learning with Open SUNY Initiative", March 22, 2013 http://www.onlinecolleges.com/educational-trends/e-learning/open-suny-online-learninginitiative.html e-Literate, "SUNY and the Expansion of Prior Learning Assessments", March 26, 2013 http://mfeldstein.com/suny-and-the-expansion-of-prior-learning-assessments/ Inside Higher Education "Economies of Online Scale", March 27, 2013 http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/27/florida-and-new-york-look-centralize-andexpand-online-education Coursera Partnership To Aid Implementation Of Open SUNY, May 30, 2013 http://www.suny.edu/sunynews/News.cfm?filname=2013-05-30-CourseraRelease.htm, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 290 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile Seven Experiments in Designing a Mildly Massive Open Online Course on How to Cheat in an Online Course Bernard Bull (Concordia University Wisconsin, USA) Thomas P. Mackey (SUNY Empire State College, USA) Carey Hatch (State University of New York, USA) Kim Scalzo (State University of New York, USA) This paper analyzes seven specific goals and design strategies of a mildly massive open online course that focused upon the topic of promoting a culture of academic honesty and integrity. These goals collectively serve to draw from a diverse body of research and learning theory, ranging from game-based learning to connectivism, self-directed learning to paragogy. Following are the seven central deign goals and strategies. 1. Gamification - Use a weekly badge system and the ability to earn experience points in order to reward participant contributions to the course, to address the retention problem in many MOOCs and to provide a spirit of fun and playfulness to the course. 2. Co-creation and Crowdsourcing - Leverage participant experiences in order to generate original and central course content that will be used to increase individual and collective understanding of the topic. 3. Emerging and Smorgasbord Schedule - Provide participants with ample opportunity for selfdirection and choice amid a structured but emergent schedule that is shaped around weekly "driving questions" and one or more proposed learning objectives. 4. Suggested but Agile Resources - Provide rich, relevant and current content that relates to the weekly driving question, is continually adapted based upon participant suggestions and contributions, and is used to promote dialogue as much as to provide new information. 5. Participant-led Live Sessions - Leverage the expertise of participants and select guest speakers in order to provide high-quality, high-interest live sessions that are also recorded and made available to the public. 6. Blend Cloistered and Uncloistered Learning - Blend activities and communication with a learning management system and various open and public social media outlets in order to benefit from the sense of safety that comes from more protected conversations with the benefits of more open and public communication. 7. Knowledge Creation and Dissemination - Provide opportunities and incentives for users to create visual and narrative analyses and syntheses of course content with the course of disseminating these resources to co-learners within the course and to serve as resources and discussion starters in broader digital world and in one's place of work or community. Specific strategies were implemented in the pursuit of these seven goals over an eight-week period, with mixed results. This paper analyzes each of these strategies and provides a summary of key lessons from the project. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 291 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile MOOC2Degree - Making It a Reality Beth Mancini (University of Texas at Arlington, USA) Cynthia Koomey (Academic Partnerships LLC, USA) Nelson Hsu (Academic Partnerships LLC, USA) The New York Times declared 2012 The Year of the MOOC (Pappano, 2012). However there are few examples of MOOCs being targeted directly to the education of healthcare professionals. To address the Institute of Medicine's (2011) call to action on advancing nurses' education in new and innovative ways as well as respond to calls for interdisciplinary teamwork, UTACON wanted to create its first MOOC entitled Enhancing Patient Safety through Interprofessional Collaborative Practice (ICPC). The course was conceived to appeal specifically to registered nurses but also to be of interest to other healthcare professionals. As 50% of the approximate 2.7 million registered nurses in the United States hold an associate's degree as their highest educational credential, UTACON was interested in using the MOOC as an opportunity to draw associate degree prepared nurses back to school to earn a baccalaureate degree through its accelerated online RN to BSN program. MOOC creation is a team sport and to build theirs the UT Arlington College of Nursing worked with Academic Partnerships (AP), a private company that helps universities build quality, scalable, accelerated programs. The instructional strategies were designed to be modular and employ opportunities for self-directed learning while promoting engagement through social media for connectivist learning. Recognizing that some MOOCs have 90% international audience, the course design and delivery had to be constructed for streamlined accessibility. The UTACON MOOC is part of Academic Partnership's MOOC2Degree program where qualified students can earn credit as part of a free test drive of the program and gain experience to acclimate to the online format. In addition to academic credit, recognizing that registered nurses are often required to earn continuing education units, the UTA-AP team designed the MOOC to offer nationally approved continuing education credit as an alternative end-point for the course. Taking a MOOC for personal edification is also a possibility and the UTA-AP team designed the course so in the future "Badges" could be awarded. The UT Arlington College of Nursing course is AP's inaugural MOOC2Degree program and therefore new relationships, processes, and products were needed. A development team from the University included content experts from the College of Nursing, along with experts from UT Arlington's Center for Distance Education, and representatives from involved campus services such as the Registrar's Office, Admissions, etc. Academic Partnerships provided experts in electronic media, instructional design, and large-scale learning platforms. There were a number of challenges associated with developing a single MOOC for a professional healthcare audience and allowing for multiple outcomes based on the learners' need and level of participation. Instructional materials need to be identified that were readily available at no cost. Creating a MOOC for-credit required overcoming challenges such as designing terms and conditions and monitoring progress without anonymity. The course is offered on the new Canvas Network platform posing opportunities to extend social outreach. UT Arlington used another Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 292 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile learning management system so the partners learned together. Mid-way through development, a course redesign was performed to respond to data obtained from earlier MOOCs that experienced massive drop-offs in participation. Additional multimedia elements were sought to increase engagement. Development challenges had to be overcome as dynamic schedules had to be accommodated among distributed and new team members. MOOC facilitator coaches were employed through the College of Nursing and trained to prepare for the new format. In This Session… 1. Participants will hear about the challenges faced and the lessons learned in designing a MOOC with multiple end-points including academic credit in a degree-granting program. 2. Participants will step through the elements of the MOOC and engage in discussion to explore opportunities for design improvement based on findings from the first run conducted in July-August. 3. Data will be shared on demographics, success, retention, satisfaction, and engagement dimensions. 4. Poll Anywhere will be used to gauge attendees' experience in MOOCs and awareness of emerging pedagogy. 5. Best practices will be summarized. 6. Vision for next steps will be shared for how the MOOC can help UT Arlington build a nursing network to support access and quality of experiences across other AP nursing programs at large. 7. Research initiatives will also be shared for these emerging learning initiatives. Previously, UT Arlington's College of Nursing teamed with Academic Partnerships in fall 2008 to build a 13 month RN to BSN program. To be responsive to student needs, applicants were accepted eight times a year. UT Arlington's emphasis on a student-centered approach to teaching and learning quickly scaled from 1,900 to 7,000 students. Learning effectiveness was addressed to grow with quality. The AP RN-to-BSN cohort graduation rates were 87.1% to 100% between fall 2008 and spring 2010 compared to on campus RN-to-BSN rates of 90% to 94.5%. In 2012, The UT Arlington College of Nursing and Academic Partnerships received the Texas Higher Education Star Award for exceptional contributions to its Close the Gap by 2015 initiative. In four years, more than 2,300 students have graduated from the AP RN-to-BSN program. An AP BSN program as well as AP MSN programs have been developed. Supplemental opportunities to use of the educational materials designed for these programs are being explored. In 2013, courses developed for the AP-RN-to-BSN program were convert into certificate-granting online programs being delivered in partnership with university network in Latin America. These courses are now being delivered in seven Latin American countries. Disruptive innovation is leading to new ways to provide accessible and affordable education around the globe. We believe by working in partnership and leveraging the strength of each Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 293 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile partner, the MOOC2Degree option is a disruptive innovation whose time has come. This presentation will share the disruptive energy with others. Open Source Content in the Online Classroom: A Cost-Benefit Analysis Trevor Belcher (Ashford University, USA) Patricia Neely (Higher Learning Institute, USA) The cost of a college degree in the United States continues to rise and has increased over 1000% in the past 30 years (Jamrisko & Kolet, 2012), the student loan debt is currently over $1 trillion dollars (Kavoussi, 2012) and there is a continued focus on tighter regulations, accountability and scrutiny (especially in the for-profit higher education sector). As colleges and universities are searching for new ways to increase accessibility to their programs while also decreasing their costs, many have turned to open source content to enrich the learning experience while minimizing costs. Proponents of using open source content as an educational medium suggest that some open source tools such as social media promote collaboration and critical thinking and enhance student engagement (Leder, 2012). Open Educational Resources (OER) such as learning management systems (for example Moodle), free or in expensive online text books (bookboon, Flat World Knowledge), supplemental study materials or courses (MIT Open Courseware, Coursera, Khan Academy), word processing tools such as AbiWord , as well as full productivity suites such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice (Giza, 2009) reduce out of pocket expenses. OER also allows instructors to collaborate and share ideas with other instructors all over the globe by accessing and utilizing sites such as sharemylesson.com, Jing, Camstudio, personal web pages, blogs, facebook, and youtube. Not everyone is singing the praises of OER. Many OER repositories (such as Wiki sites) allow any user to post information so material and resources may not be accurate. Those who contribute to OER sites are not usually compensated so there is little incentive to keep the information updated, current, or even active. Since there are no contractual agreements to keep OER open for a specific period of time, there are no guarantees that a resource available today will be there tomorrow. One option is to pay a relatively small fee for some open resources such as textbooks or learning objects where there is typically more stability. That said, there can still be issues with accuracy, personalization, dated materials and/or technology. Technical and access issues can also be a problem since there is no standard for development of these resources. Analyzing and evaluating open education sources can consume a tremendous amount of a university's resources as they try to align these resources with their current curriculum. Some OER resources may not be in compliance with ADA or meet curriculum standards/requirements set by departments and accreditation bodies. This presentation will provide a balanced discussion around the use of open source content, and seek to provide participants with a realistic cost-benefit analysis concerning implementation in the online college classroom. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 294 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile References: Giza, B. (2009). The use of free, open-source, and web-based tools in education. In I. Gibson et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2009 (pp. 1838-1842). Chesapeake, VA: AACE. Jamrisko, M, & Kolet, I. (2012, Aug 15). Cost of college degree in U.S. Soars 12 fold: Chart of the day. http://www.bloomberg.com Kavoussi, B. (2012 Mar 22) Student loan debt hits $1 trillion, deemed “too big to fail” by one Federal agency. http:/www.huffingtonpost.com Lederer, K. (2012, Jan 19). Pros and cons of social media in the classroom. Campus Technology DIY Ebooks Using Open Source Tools John Raible (University of Central Florida, USA) Amy Sugar (University of Central Florida, USA) The goals of this session are as follows: -Identify the benefits of creating an ebook for students -Discuss design and technical considerations for creating an ebook -Identify strategies to create an accessible ebook -Locate Open Educational Resources (OER) that can be utilized when creating an ebook This session introduces several resources and tools that can be used to design and develop engaging and accessible ebooks. Many faculty develop their own supplementary materials for students which may include chapter summaries and outlines or a reference guide that will be used throughout the course, in the field, and possibly after the course. By creating an ebook or digital content package to compile resources, faculty provide students flexibility in how and where they access the content. Students may access this content on a mobile device or computer with or without internet access. Additionally, providing content in a mobile native format allows student to leverage the .epub functionality such as keyword searching, glossaries, and zooming. These specific features were rated "important" or "very important" by 78% of the 933 respondents in a 2012 survey conducted at the University of Central Florida. In this session, we will demonstrate how to create a section of an ebook using free open source products while engaging attendees in a discussion regarding design, technical, and accessibility considerations. Design considerations begin with determining the goal/objective of the ebook. Other design considerations include the following: -How to create and organize content -Where to locate Open Educational Resources to use in the content -How to format content for accessibility Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 295 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile Additionally, we will discuss logistical issues to consider during the design process such as time needed to create and how the ebook will relate to the institution's Learning Management System (LMS). We will facilitate a technical consideration discussion for creating an ebook. There are several steps and decisions to make before assembling, including the following: -Choosing a publishing format -Identifying which tools are best suited for each format -How students will access the ebook (e.g., through the LMS, a password protected site, or a public webpage) -Identifying technology options for student consumption (e.g., device, application). Participants will leave with a variety of resources, including a list of free and open source tools available to create ebooks, design guidelines, and access to our Diigo social bookmarking page that contains links to a variety of Open Educational Resources such as images, videos, and more. Global Learning Qualifications Framework – Assessing University-level Learning Anytime, Anywhere Amy McQuigge (SUNY Empire State College, USA) The Global Learning Qualifications Framework (GLQF) is designed to assess university-level learning regardless of where, when or how it was acquired. The GLQF is the result of extensive research and builds on the progress of qualification frameworks from over 90 countries, the Lumina Degree Qualifications Profile, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Essential Learning Outcomes and VALUE Rubrics, and other emerging work in the assessment field. As colleges/universities and students continue to search for and use nontraditional modes of education, learning has become increasingly untethered to time, place, and modality. While this work is tied to a history of face-to-face instruction and classroom assessments, it also provides a structure for assessing non-traditional modes: online learning, open education resources (OER), MOOCs, and experiential/prior learning. The Global Learning Qualifications Framework is part of Open SUNY, under the SUNY REAL (Recognition of Experiential and Academic Learning) initiative. This project has been funded through two grants provided by the Lumina Foundation and the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA), to develop a comprehensive framework to assess university-level learning and to pilot the framework by assessing six OER courses from the Saylor Foundation. The project will also assess additional learning modalities, such as experiential learning and classroom experiences, outside of the funding requirements. In 2012-2013, an academic team of faculty and academics with expertise in open education, prior learning assessment and outcomes assessment was formed to study the core components of student knowledge and the learning process and to conduct a meta-analysis of qualification frameworks from around the world to create a holistic framework to assess university-level learning. The resulting GLQF has been designed to be content area agnostic as courses and open learning range from liberal arts and sciences, to technologies, to applied studies. An additional panel of national experts reviewed the framework prior to entering the pilot phase of the project. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 296 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile The second phase of the project (2013-2014) will pilot the GLQF using a range of open courses, prior learning experiences, and some on-line and face-to-face courses. The initial assessments will focus on the OER courses identified in the grants. Throughout the pilot process, additional tethered and untethered learning will also be assessed. All pilot results will be used to refine the GLQF. In the summer of 2014, an institute will gather key global leaders in OER, prior learning and learning assessments to learn about the GLQF, provide more feedback, and discuss ways to distribute the framework internationally. The research background and summary, final results, and the Global Learning Qualifications Framework will be licensed through open resources by Creative Commons and available for everyone on-line after the Summer Institute. This presentation will discuss the research process, the resulting framework, the initial steps in assessing the first set of Saylor Foundation OER courses, and future implications in assessment, course development, non-traditional student learning, and Open Educational Resources. Participants will work in small groups (10-15 minutes) to discuss how they could use the framework at their college/university. Particular focus of the discussion will be on how the framework could be used to assess all learning deliveries provided by their institution. The full group will expand the discussion to look at how the framework can be used to assess all forms of university level learning, regardless if it is tethered or untethered, pre-determined or emergent, or academic or experiential. The participants will be provided with a copy of the framework with feedback forms to contribute to the refinement of the framework. Participants will leave with an understanding of emerging assessment practices as well as practical applications to use the framework. Effects of Self-regulatory Status and Practice Type on Student Performance in the Mobile Learning Environment Jeremy I. Tutty (Rio Salado College, USA) The next generation of computer-based learning environments has arrived. This generation of technology is characterized by such mobile and portable devices as smartphones and tablet computers with wireless broadband access. With these devices comes the promise of extending the online learning revolution, by placing ubiquitous learning in the hands of students. Yet, "If education is to have any place in this niche, we must acknowledge that the research must constantly evolve with the technology" (Pollara & Broussard, 2011, p. 7.). Empirical data is needed to determine the framework for and optimal characteristics of mobile instruction for learning, particularly in the higher education environment. The problem is the impact of instructional design considerations and other factors in mobile learning on student performance has yet to be quantified (Pollara & Broussard, 2011; Rushby, 2012; Solvberg & Rismark, 2012). The vast majority of literature addressing mobile learning has focused on student perception. "These studies do not move us significantly beyond what is already known and widely published in the field" (Rushby, 2012, p. 355). Further, even among studies that considered factors such as motivation (Karim, 2008; Millard 2007), they were not empirically linked to performance. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 297 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile The purpose of this quantitative, quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest, factorial design study was to investigate the effects of three levels of practice type (assessment aligned, reflective, none), and two levels of self-regulatory status (high and low) on student performance and attitude within the context of mobile instruction. Participant performance data were analyzed using ANCOVA. Participant attitude data were analyzed using MANOVA. Results indicated that the inclusion of practice activities in mobile instruction has a positive effect on student performance. Study participants who received either assessment aligned or reflective practice significantly outperformed participants who did not receive practice. While not significant, participants who received aligned practice performed better on the posttest than participants receiving a reflective practice activity. Further, the results indicated that self-regulatory status does not have a significant effect on performance in mobile instruction. The study results also indicated that the inclusion of practice activities in mobile instruction have a positive effect on student attitude. Study participants who received assessment aligned practice reported significantly more positive attitudes than participants who did not receive practice. Participants who received aligned practice also reported nonsignificantly more positive attitudes than participants receiving a reflective practice activity. The results indicated that self-regulatory status does not have a significant effect on student attitude toward mobile instruction. This presentation will further discuss the study findings and the implications for designing instruction for mobile learning with the potential to facilitate: (a) learning on demand, (b) multitasking and increased productivity, and (c) the translation of all environments into sites of learning. Pursuing International Academic Partnerships Phil Ice (American Public University System, USA) Sharon Van Wyk (American Public University System, USA) Karan Powell (American Public University System, USA) Jeff McCafferty (American Public University System, USA) The presenters of this case study share the planning and development strategies used to pursue the internationalization of online education. Specifically, this session will provide participants with a model developed by the American Public University System to help guide institutions on: (a) initiating international links; (b) factors to consider when prioritizing international opportunities; and (c) developing and sustaining international partnerships. The current international market demonstrates an increasing vitality and expanding scope of international academic partnerships. A number of domestic and international non-profit and proprietary higher education providers are actively seeking partnerships in a myriad of ways that will yield growth and expansion of online learning across continental borders. Some examples demonstrating this growth and expansion is the: (1) inclusion of internationalization efforts in campus long-term strategic planning; (2) enhancement of global knowledge; (3) development of effective workforce skill training; (4) leveraging educational, corporate, governmental, and organizational collaborations; and (5) providing dual and joint degree opportunities for students, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 298 Track 5: Open, Global, Mobile just to name a few. At the current pace, it is not unreasonable to believe that many of these international opportunities will continue to grow in tandem with the development of new ideas for partnerships begin to emerge. UMUC: Innovation at Scale Karen Vignare (University of Maryland University College, USA) UMUC has tasked both its academic and workforce training divisions with creating the next generation learning models for working adult students using scalable innovation and competency based methods. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 299 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support Best in Track Award Don’t Drop the Baton! Building a Foundation for Success Through Student Services for Online Learners Ruth Newberry (Duquesne University, USA) Kate DeLuca (Duquesne University, USA) Retaining students in distance education programs requires institutions to field a strategically aligned, cross-unit relay team able to provide streamlined and effective services to online learners throughout the student's academic lifespan (applicant to alumni). If the baton pass fails at any one hand-off, the online learner becomes frustrated, distracted, or leaves, and the retention race is lost! In a highly competitive marketplace in which students have a "universe of opportunities" for how they obtain their education and advance their careers, the ability to retain students is one "race" traditional institutions like Duquesne University cannot afford to lose. As a private, Catholic, liberal arts, Doctoral Research and urban university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with a 10,000 FTE and ecumenical student-centric mission ("we serve God by serving students"), Duquesne University recently committed to formalizing its distance education offerings at the graduate level and online learning opportunities for undergraduates. Fully committed to student success for on-campus students, it initiated an examination of the services necessary for online students to be successful learners. As Duquesne found out, retaining distance students goes beyond offering "equivalent" services to online learners; it requires a holistic, networked and leveraged use of existing technologies, and institutional commitment by faculty and student support staff to what we call C.O.M.F.O.R.T.: C = a well-developed communication plan for students, faculty, and support staff; O = orientations (plural!) for students and faculty; M = the creation and maintenance of student centered policies for student's success; F = comprehensive feedback and assessment to improve advising, support and academic services; O = various outreach initiatives to students; R = easily accessible learner-focused academic and support resources; T = a team based approach. We will begin the session with a wireless or hand-held clicker poll (our vendor will provide 90 clickers). We will present five (5) critical, core services derived from Duquesne University's own assessment of support services, asking the audience to evaluate their own institution on these services. From this starting point, both for Duquesne and our audience, we will use these five services to describe how we prioritized, evaluated, targeted, and enhanced university, academic, advising, social - career, and program level "support services." We project the audience poll will reveal an "unevenness" in regard to effectiveness of student services similar to our initial Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 300 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support assessment at Duquesne. [We are considering making this "poll" available to conference participants via the conference twitter and Facebook.] Next, using Prezi we will display our "Start to Finish Student Roadmap" to visually relate the online learner's engagement with the various "support services" the institution and academic program require and/or might be needed for success. With input from many units across campus, this "student roadmap" highlights what "services" exist and in what form (only f2f?), what assumptions are made about the student's ability to receive "services" (they can call!), when the student is required and/or may need these services (must complete before enrolled), and most important, what happens to the student's progress and learning when the engagement is not timely, absent, or unsatisfactory (cannot begin / complete coursework). [We will poll the audience to see if they have developed a similar document tracing the student's progression from applicant to degree completion and their student service needs.] As we engage the audience in an analysis of the five (5) services, we will contextualize each within Duquesne's need to balance cost, risks, and scalability with requirements for quality, student and faculty satisfaction, and current resources, and value in efficiencies and focus on learning to the retained student and benefits, or the ROI, to the program and institution. Our analysis is informed by Sloan's 5 Pillars of Program Quality and our research on effective support services. Duquesne's constraints (e.g., budget, personnel, technology, and decentralized structure) will ring true for many in the audience. [We will add an annotated bibliography of the most helpful resources to presentation resources.] Included also will be short videos of student and faculty perspectives on the impact these services have on student success. As we share the lessons we learned in developing the C.O.M.F.O.R.T. model and the rubric used to evaluate it, we will identify who were major stakeholders, which units had the most difficulty (and why) servicing online students, what technologies were leveraged and how, and what "professional development" and /or "training" was needed. Our C.O.M.F.O.R.T. model involved changing institutional culture and perceptions, as much as it required changes in process and tasks. We will conclude by polling the audience to capture their perception of the feasibility of the implementation of our proposed model at their institution.The goals and outcomes for this session include, but are not limited to (1) elevating the issue and necessity of expanding the definition of "Student Support Services" given the impact these services (or lack of) have on the online learner's ability to be successful; (2) demonstrating how a networked, holistic team establishes better communication and a collaborative partnership between academic services and support services that is student-centric; (3) describing how the same demands for rigor and quality in academics can be applied to student services and how rubrics used to evaluate academic rigor and instructional quality and delivery can be adopted to student services; and most important; (4) providing the audience with a tool-kit (surveys, maps, approaches, strategies) they can take and adapt to their institutions, a model for decision making, and a rubric for assessment. By aligning retention efforts with the "services" online learners need to be successful from applicant to student to alumni, traditionally defined Student Services expands its "universe" to find new opportunities. Duquesne's holistic, team-based approach ensures the online learner's experience leads to successful degreecompletion (crossing the finish line) and establishes a long-term and valued relationship with the institution (the marathon) that results in improved ROI for both the student and the institution. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 301 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support NOTE: We believe this 35 minute informational session could easily become an 80 minute or a 3 hour Pre-Conference Workshop session. Penn State’s World Campus & Continuing Education HelpDesk: Providing World Class Support to Students Around the Globe Donald Randolph (Pennsylvania State University World Campus and Continuing Educaiton, USA) Gregory Shehan (Pennsylvania State University World Campus and Continuing Educaiton, USA) Steven Welshonse (Pennsylvania State University World Campus and Continuing Educaiton, USA) "Your HelpDesk staff is the best I have encountered in my 20-year career. Very unusual for me to say. They are knowledgeable, friendly, and patient. Overall, I can't say enough good things." "Everyone with whom I have had contact has been FANTASTIC!!! I cannot say enough positive things about the team. They have all resolved my issues in a timely, seemingly stress-free fashion." The preceding are some of the comments we've received from our students. We want to show you the journey we have taken to get this kind of praise, including the steps forward, the missteps, and the stumbles along the way to becoming a world class help desk. We are The Pennsylvania State University's World Campus and Continuing Education HelpDesk. As a University we have been offering education at a distance since 1892. The World Campus began offering online courses starting in 1998, and the World Campus HelpDesk was formed in 1999. The journey we have made from a 1-man, 1-phone operation with 483 enrollments to the 18member team, 53,000+ enrollments operation we are today has been an arduous one. We would like to show the things we have done right, the things we have done wrong, and the lessons we learned along the way. We would like to show the challenges both technological and logistical that we have had to overcome to provide support for a world class online learning institution. The things we have learned providing support at a distance to students in 50 states, more than 40 countries, and 7 continents may benefit others struggling with the same issues and concerns. Students learning at a distance are looking for the same sense of connection that they would feel if they were attending a traditional university. This is no truer than when it comes to technical support. People are coming to us at some of the most stressful and frustrating times of their lives. They need to feel that connection more so than if they were on campus. They need to know that they matter and that their problems are just as important as are the problems of students residing on campus. That is where the support team comes into play. We will show the methods and technologies we use and have used to stay connected to our students. We will tell how some failed and some excelled to improve our ability to support our customers at a distance. With the ever-evolving and expanding scope of software that Penn State University's World Campus and Continuing Education uses, we work very hard to keep our students online, provide a world-class experience, and maintain our 96% customer satisfaction rating. We will talk about what the World campus is using to interact with our students and what the HelpDesk is using to support such a wide array of hardware and software, including not only Windows and MACs but also Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 302 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support mobile devices such as iPads and Android devices. While the journey to the point we are now has been tough and full of obstacles, the rewards far outweigh the adversities. It is our hope that we can share what we have learned and show you how we have become a world-class HelpDesk. MyCDL App: Using Mobile Tools to Increase Accessibility to Resources and Create Stronger Sense of Community Audeliz Matias (SUNY Empire State College, USA) David Wolf II (SUNY Empire State College, USA) A recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project in the Unites States revealed 45% of adults 18 and older own a smartphone (Smith, 2012), up from 35% in 2011 (Smith, 2011). This overall increase in smartphone ownership is relative widespread globally and across age groups. It is also estimated that by 2015, 80% of people accessing the web will be doing so from cell phones, tablets, or similar always-connected devices (Johnson, Smith, Willis, Levine, & Haywood, 2011). The findings from the Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR) survey of undergraduate students reflect the rapid growing use of mobile web (Smith &Caruso, 2010). For example, tablets quickly rose in popularity during the last year (comScore, Inc., 2012) and tablet ownership among undergraduate students has more than tripled in the last year, with 25% of students now owning a tablet compared to 7% in 2011 (Pearson Foundation, 2012). A larger majority of these apps are made to provide their students with information such as upcoming events (e.g. athletics, performances, and lectures) or interactive map of campuses. The challenge we face at the Center for Distance Learning (CDL), SUNY Empire State College is that we serve nontraditional age learners in a distributed, fully online environment with students all across the globe. Therefore, advancing a strategy to support and recruit students through a mobile app needs to reflect the character and needs of our community. Initial data gathered indicated that a large number of our students own or have access to smartphones, tablet computers, and other mobile devices. As we all know, the majority of higher education institutions have created mobile apps or begun developing their web sites to be accessible by mobile. In an attempt to reach out to this students as well as perspective students, a CDL-specific mobile "service" application (or app) was created and launched in January 2012, "MyCDL," by members of the 2011-2012 Social Learning Tools Task Force. This session examines the design, development and analysis of this mobile app as a tool to provide another channel to support our students and to develop a stronger sense of community among them as well as a marketing tool for perspective students. We conducted research on the tool's use, or lack thereof, by current students, faculty and staff, as well as prospective students and alumni. The purpose of this research was to collect data about the MyCDL app in order to assess its effectiveness as a tool. Thus, allowing us to make stronger recommendations for the mobile application and other mobile approaches in the coming year. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 303 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support Importantly, the data will also allow us to refine the various components of the tool according to students' needs and requests. When developing MyCDL, we chose to harness cloud computing and host the tool virtually on the web using an HTML5 website. Thus, this mobile design structure allows various platforms, including iOS and Androids, to be able to access the same app, provided they have internet access. The MyCDL app offers Center-specific information that students can access through mobile channels, thus providing a new modality for student/center connections. At present, the MyCDL tool includes: News & Events (workshop announcements, center news, etc.), Calendar (center events, registration periods, etc.), Registration and Academics (links to college sites to register, retrieve grades, etc.), CDL on Twitter (direct link to the center Twitter feed), ESC Channel (the ESC YouTube channel), and Contact CDL (both links to the office contact information and an auto-dial feature student can activate with a touchscreen). In addition, in order to help students affected by storm Sandy this past October, a "Hurricane Sandy Assistance" tab was added with useful resources. During the length of the study, we collected data through a questionnaire. The subjects were recruited from among the MyCDL users. Users were invited to complete the questionnaire through an explanatory summary and an informed consent statement sent via email. In addition, we also collected and analyzed usage information provided by the hosting server. This information includes: visit dates, access location by country, system platform (i.e. Windows XP, Linux, iPhone, iPod, Android), what pages/links are visited, shares of the resources and how they were shared (e.g. SMS, Email). We found that the MyCDL tool that about half of the surveyed users access most of the information regarding the center through MyCDL and the app have exceeded 5,000 unique visitors to the tool accounting for more than 24,000 events (clicks on links, accessing the college calendar, etc). The app has also been installed in over 2,000 mobile devices and has been accessed from 21 different countries, besides the US, including Lebanon, Germany, Japan, and France. The ultimate goal of this session is to show participants the potential and effectiveness of mobile apps as a tool to increase information accessibility for learners and build a stronger sense of community among online students, staff, faculty and perspective students. This approach is in alignment with the criteria in the Sloan-C Effective Practices rubric and relates strongly to the Access pillar as well as the Student Satisfaction and Scale pillars of quality in online education. MyCDL was designed as a mobile-site rather than a native app (e.g. iOS or Android) for a scalable implementation. We have found students are generally satisfied with MyCDL and would like to see more features added, particularly those that could increase engagement in their online courses. This approach can be implemented by other institutions and organizations committed to online education. Participants will learn about our approach to develop the tool, the research conducted and the next steps as well as discuss how they could use our approach. Handouts with information and the link to the presentation will be provided. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 304 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support Connecting to Success: Innovating Student Services with Enterprise Social Media Matthew Thornton (Southern New Hampshire University, USA) Online learning in higher education is often described as an “isolating” student experience. While the conveniences of online learning are attractive, many students struggle to become socially integrated to their new environment. The research on retention is clear: students who acclimate academically and socially to their institution are far more likely to persist (Frydenberg, 2007; Tinto, 1993). Academic support in online learning requires quick identification of students-at-risk and the connection of that student to just-in-time support services to meet their needs. Social support in online learning requires providing students with a space to find other students with shared interests and connecting students – outside of the classroom – with a network of peers. Recognizing these challenges (and seeking a solution to provide scalable students services to a rapidly growing online student population,) Southern New Hampshire University leverages the strengths of Enterprise Social Media to develop a robust “Online Student Union” called SNHUconnect. The collective knowledge of an organization grows as it scales up, and yet the ability to collect, store, and share that knowledge and to find people with the right expertise becomes more challenging (Brzozowski, 2009). Enterprise social media tools are designed to help organizations with knowledge management, and higher education institutions and student services departments can benefit tremendously by adopting these technologies. There are many institutions that have adopted social media tools such as FaceBook and Twitter for connecting with students, and there are certainly a number of reasons for doing so: students are already on these tools every day, and they’re free to use. The use of enterprise social media has its own benefits: the social media network is internal and specific to the institution, allowing for the development of university-specific culture, and the data collected there is not “owned” by an outside entity, therefore being storable, searchable, and minable. Enterprise social media tools also provide a number of enhancements that create exciting opportunities for student services: robust tagging systems for content creating organizational hierarchy, question and answer systems that learn over time and provide instant responses to students, the ability to recommend experts, news feeds, or groups of interest, and badging systems to reward engagement and content creation. This presentation will demonstrate the online student union, SNHUconnect, and focus on the development of a career services department, SNHU Career, a new department serving the online population of SNHU. Both projects were born simultaneously, and the charge of the Career team was to create a suite of scalable services utilizing online technology tools and peerto-peer support. By embedding enterprise social media components into the SNHU Career website, students are able to engage and interact with career advisors in real-time from anywhere in the world. Students are also able to submit their own content such as articles, websites, videos, or images to the SNHU Career site, where it is automatically tagged and organized for other students to discover and apply on their own. When a new student registers for a course at SNHU, they are granted access to the student portal, mySNHU, which is used to access student email, courses in the learning management system, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 305 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support websites for all student service areas and departments, student forms, and self-service tools for registration, degree audits, financial aid, and billing. The mySNHU portal serves as the “gateway” to SNHU which students access every day, and as such, it is the logical location for building community. SNHUconnect, the social media platform, can be accessed through an external website or directly through mySNHU. When arriving at the SNHUconnect home page, students discover a newsfeed very similar to that of FaceBook, with recommendations on people, groups, and tags to follow. Students typically post an introduction, noting any feelings of insecurity or uncertainty as they embark on their online learning journey. Other students are quick to respond with messages such as, “you’re not alone,” or, “I was in the same situation as you.” Those initial feelings of isolation diminish when other students admit that they, too, have not written a paper in over 15 years, or have fears of being unable to juggle work, family, and school. When students have a question, they simply type that question in, and SNHUconnect searches for similar questions that have been previously asked, displaying those answers to students immediately. Asking, “how I do write a resume?” for instance, generates similar questions such as “what is a technical resume?” or, “what is an executive resume?” The answers with the most votes from the community jump to the top, and students get immediate access to resources such as resume writing guides, videos, sample resumes, or suggestions for using online resume building tools to get started. The system also identifies other users with expertise on “resumes,” whether they are staff members, faculty, or other students. Tagging content has become a particularly valuable tool. The “parent tag” of SNHU Career has several “child tags,” such as Internships, Interviewing, Networking, Resumes, and Career Events. Students can opt to follow individual child tags, or they can follow the parent tag and have all career-related content delivered directly to their newsfeed. This tag system mirrors the design of the SNHU Career website pages. On the Interviewing page of the website, students find the content you’d expect to see, such as FAQ sheets on interview strategies and links for accessing an online mock-interview tool. In addition, a feed from SNHUconnect displaying all content tagged Interviewing shows up, allowing students to quickly find additional resources or contribute their own. By posting in this space, content is automatically tagged “Interviewing,” thus sharing this knowledge with the broader community. Enterprise social media offers exciting, innovative possibilities for delivering scalable student services to online students. Coupling these tools with social media analytics, institutions also gain an insight into the level of social integration and engagement achieved by students. For future research, these analytics can be considered when developing prediction models for student persistence, as they are likely indicators of student retention. Enterprise social media creates benefits for students, faculty, and administrators – connecting to success. Brzozowski, M. J. (2009). WaterCooler: exploring an organization through enterprise social media. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. Frydenberg, J. (2007). Persistence in University Continuing Education Online Classes. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 8(3). Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 306 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support Tinto, V. (1993). Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition (2nd ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Online Orientation: Getting Students to Use It! Lynn Wietecha (Lawrence Technological University, USA) At last year's Sloan-C conference, I attended several sessions on Student Orientation programs. I was interested in how colleagues were building these support units. It soon became clear that many course developers and online programs had built rich orientations to prepare students for a successful online experience. Many presenters outlined the great deal of time and attention they spent to create these orientations, only to be disappointed to see how many students simply skip them. Audience members also voiced this frustration. AT LTU, we've found some creative ways to increase student participation in our orientation module and make it more relevant to student needs. Our orientation module has helped ensure students get off to a great start in their online courses. Lawrence Technological University's online bachelor's degree programs are ranked sixth in a national survey released Jan. 15 by U.S. News and World Report. The survey rated online programs on factors such as best practices, graduation rates, student indebtedness, and academic and career support services offered to students. LTU's online bachelor's degree programs scored highest in the entire country for student engagement. http://www.usnews.com/education/onlineeducation/bachelors/rankings. This presentation will share how eLearning Services at Lawrence Technological University, has redesigned its Module Zero, an integrated, orientation module, to be more targeted to specific degree programs and the unique needs of online students in an effort to engage them early in their program. It will present how we surveyed faulty and OL students to seek their input in this redesign and actually used them in creating short, embedded videos. It will also demonstrate how we've incorporated LMS feature, such as adaptive release to guide students through the orientation and ensure they have the information they need to be successful in our online program. Upon completion of this presentation, participants will:  Build a list of essential elements needed to orient students to a successful online course experience.  Gain strategies to incorporate into their LMS to promote completion of the orientation module.  Discover new ways to customize orientations to the unique needs of degree programs.  Have links to LTU orientation videos they can use in their own programs as needed. Participants will be engaged from the session opening, by completing a Poll Everywhere survey about common information found in Online orientations. Their results will be compared to the data from our surveys which were used to build our Module Zero. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 307 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support In Sync: Seamless Integration of Learning Resources BethMarie Goodling (Rasmussen College, USA) Jennifer Stoker (Rasmussen College, USA) Talia Richards (Rasmussen College, USA) Creating a presence for learning resources found in library, writing, and tutoring content is essential to support online and blended platform learners. Resources integration prior to this 2012 initiative was limited to a general link to the college student portal. By leveraging our course management system, learning assets are embedded in the courses themselves to create a convergence of resources at the point of need. This merging of content facilitates student growth and exploration of resources. The result of collaboration with our college instructional designers and vendors from multiple learning service providers has allowed unified access to bundled resources. These include a live chat widget, online course and subject-specific online guides, webinar calendars and registration, along with a grammar-checking tool and online tutoring access. Weaving these electronic resources and tools directly into courses encourages student participation and fosters a community of engagement; further, this allows instructors to create a dynamic learning environment (O'Connor, 2012). As Bowen (2012) emphasizes, "students broadly value access to library resources from a convenient and persistently visible link within their course shell (p.449)." We have sought to progress our courses to the next level of learning tools access by infusing Web 2.0 objects. These actively engage students and equip faculty with new ways to expand learning opportunities in the dynamic online course landscape. Through our focus on enhanced visibility and usability of our diverse online tools students and faculty usage has grown exponentially. Survey feedback from students when asked about our APA citation online guide includes: "This is a very helpful and influential tool to assisting all students reach their potential!" "Keep it up, you are very motivating." "I really like the video tutorials because I am dyslexic, being able to read and show helps me a great deal more than me trying to read it." Statistics on usage of our learning resources since incorporation into the course management system echo the enthusiasm from the survey results. What participants will learn: • • • Steps to creating seamless access to learning resources within a course management system Resources/products that work well in CMS resource integration Usage tracking and analysis of student use of integrated elements Who will benefit: • • Participants gain tools to enhance impact and connection to online learners Librarians, learning center coordinators, writing lab, and tutor managers discover approaches to incorporate enriched content into their CMS How we will engage audience: • Using a Prezi classroom to deliver presentation and show live access to resources through our LMS Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 308 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support • • Polls either online (polleverywhere.com or verbally) Integrate question and answer opportunities throughout presentation. List of materials: (Handouts, links, etc.) • • Online subject and course guides: http://guides.rasmussen.edu/index Answers (FAQ database): http://rasmussen.libanswers.com/ References Bowen, A. (2012). A LibGuides presence in a Blackboard environment. Reference Services Review, 40(3), 449-468. doi:10.1108/00907321211254698. O'Connor, E. (2012). Next generation online: Advancing learning through dynamic design, virtual and Web 2.0 technologies, and instructor attitude. Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 41(1), 3-24. A Path in the Wilderness: Helping Faculty and Students Overcome Isolation in Online Learning John Vivolo (NYU-Poly, USA) Description and Goals: Through technology, we are more connected as a society. However, we are also more isolated. The dirty secret of online learning is that both faculty and students can, and do, often become inflicted with feelings of isolation. It's okay to admit it. For thousands of years, we have had students and faculty together in the same room. They make eye contact, hear each other clearly, and talk to each other. As a species dependent on interaction and a desire to build communities, it is no wonder isolation appears when you strip away the "in-person" community. This feeling is not the sole infliction of students, but also faculty. Think about it for a moment. Both faculty and students have spent their academic and professional careers with a live audience. Suddenly, it is stripped away and they are left alone in their homes and/or offices. Do not lose heart or confidence in online learning. There is hope for both student and faculty. This presentation will offer methods for students (and faculty) to adjust to learning from a distance. Both the institution and faculty can assist students with this adjustment in the form of technical and pedagogical advice, and even lifestyle changes. Questions To Be Addressed:  What impact does this isolation have on the ability for the student to learn and the faculty to teach?  Is it possible to create peer-to-peer learning and create a learning community? (Even in a math-heavy course)  How do faculty and students adapt to the "lifestyle" of learning/working from home?  Can students work in groups online and still achieve the sense of learning community with their fellow remote students?  How can the faculty (and university) create a learning community with remote students? Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 309 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support  Can the "performance" aspect of teaching be captured in an online course? Goals Pre-Course Goal (students): Prepare students for learning in an online environment before taking their first online course. This will include information on orientation session (webinars), student orientation page, using social media to share "Tips for Online Learning", and other methods for creating a learning community of online students. (This will include examples and results from NYU-Poly student support and orientation efforts). Pre-Course Goal (faculty): Prepare faculty for teaching in an online environment, including the loss of the "performance" aspect of teaching. This will include advice for adding the "performance" of teaching back into online learning. (This will include examples and results from NYU-Poly online courses). During Course (students): Use multiple technology and pedagogy approaches to promote engagement between students, including peer-to-peer learning groups, group presentations, and synchronous (real time) tools. (This will include examples and results from NYU-Poly online courses). Engagement (during presentation): The last 10-15 minutes of the presentation will be reserved for Q&A; however, I would prefer audience members to share their experiences with online learning isolation (from their student's experience and their own experience teaching online). Materials Provided: Results of student and faculty survey on online isolation. Examples of social media "Tips for Online Learning" program. Tracking the Graduate Student: From Digital Footprint to Digital Identity Christina M. Dawson (American College of Education, USA) Kim Ochs (American College of Education, USA) This session reports on the use of ePortfolios in an online doctoral program for tracking students and the development of digital footprints and identities. The ePortfolio is used to help students identify who they are as online students, who they would like to be as scholars, and to track progress toward program outcomes. Additionally, the ePortfolio is used as a repository for versions of work products, as students collect, select, reflect and connect with a community of scholars. Problem The path to an online graduate degree is often a jagged one, with many ups and downs. Some students are inexperienced with online learning, while others are distracted by work or family commitments. Still others might lack research skills or exhibit weak scholarly writing skills. Few students are aware of their digital footprints and the trail they have made prior to beginning graduate school. Even fewer students are sure of who they are as scholar practitioners - their digital identities as graduate students - or where they want to go. Thus, tracking and monitoring these students can be a challenge. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 310 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support The technological background of an online student can fall anywhere on the spectrum of elearning experience – from novice to expert - which creates both an opportunity and challenge as students produce learning outputs using new technologies, including multimedia artifacts, in addition to more traditional written papers. Some students are re-learning how to learn, after years away from an academic environment, which requires developing strategies for organizing information and embracing new technologies. Among the solutions is the ePortfolio, which has multiple advantages for tracking students' growth and learning. Approach The EdD and EdS Leadership programs at the American College of Education aim to equip professionals with tools necessary to be confident, creative, collaborative leaders within their communities. The ePortfolio is critical to the design of the program. The ePortfolio is a developmental webspace that represents the student's professional "self" and identity as a graduate student. The portfolio includes selected examples (artifacts) of skills and achievements, as well as reflective elements. Context The ePortfolio includes evidence of a student's academic and professional growth, and has the potential to support a student's lifelong learning and pursuit of professional opportunities. Students create and maintain an ePortfolio in Taskstream, with the initial audience limited to peers in the program, their mentor, and faculty. The Portfolio serves as repository of drafts and final products as students move through the program. This gives both the student and the faculty mentor a place to track the work and progress. The student, mentor, and committee use the ePortfolio to assess achievement of program outcomes. General guides given to students are: • • • • COLLECT: Gather materials that represent your learning experiences. SELECT: Pick meaningful artifacts that serve to evidence growth as a learner and leader. REFLECT: Examine materials in the light of "critical incidents" and experiences and detail how these experiences influenced your transformation. CONNECT: Weave the evidence together to create a "story" of self as a leader who can address the program outcomes in theory and in practice. Each artifact (paper, presentation, media creation) should contain a caption, annotation, or short narrative to explain how the piece connects to student's learning. A secondary audience of the ePortfolio is potential employers, for whom the portfolio helps demonstrate a student has the knowledge, skills, and perspectives to be an effective leader within diverse communities. The introductory course in the program guides students to analyze their digital identity and to create a personal avatar. After this initial reflection on identity as an evolving scholar, academic and professional goals are developed and submitted to the portfolio. Throughout the coursework, students select multimedia artifacts to demonstrate accomplishment of program outcomes. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 311 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support Faculty can assess the competence and look for evidence of growth and achievement through the student-selected artifacts. Emphasis is on the journey and process, rather than only products. Program milestones are also documented within the ePortfolio. At the end of year one, faculty assess the students' research skills as demonstrated in an objective exam and work products in the portfolio. At the end of year two, students' abilities to synthesize literature and demonstrate scholarly writing are assessed. These milestones are used to track progress toward program completion and can catch issues along the way - rather than having students falter at the end. The design and tracking are intended to lower the number of students who fail to complete the graduate program (ABDs). Session Outcomes Attendees of this session - students, practitioners, researchers, and faculty - will learn about best practices and challenges from implementation of ePortfolios in an online program. The basic advantages of ePortfolios will be reviewed, with an emphasis on the reflection aspects and the development of students' identities as online scholar-practitioners. Presenters will engage participants in discussing how ePortfolios can be used to help students determine personal objectives to claim their education. Students can be guided toward taking an active rather than passive role throughout the educational journey, with appropriate feedback and guidance along the way. The presenters will compare traditional methods of student tracking (paper files, spreadsheets, multiple versions of documents) with the transformative potential of self-assessment and selftracking in the ePortfolio. We will display screenshots of structure that facilitates tracking. The role of each element will be discussed: program outcomes + artifacts + reflection. Examples of multimedia artifacts that demonstrate competency of program outcomes (such as graphics, videos, posters) will be shared. Participants will see how to track cohort and individuals using Taskstream analytics. One of our favorite features of the ePortfolio is tracking of versions, revisions, comments, and feedback for student products (including papers, drafts, questions). We will discuss how this feature is working for one cohort of doctoral students, as well as how the ePortfolio is being used for student advising. Throughout the presentation, we will illustrate the tracking of students, their progress on the journey, and our own interventions and interactions along the path. Fostering Dynamic Learning Communities Robert Stokes (Villanova University, USA) Judith Dwyer (Bisk Education, USA) This presentation, by Villanova University and its e-Learning partner Bisk Education, will provide an actual model of the development and enhancement of an e-learning Community from its inception to the current successful online graduate program of 600+ students. The goals of Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 312 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support this program are to understand the need of virtual students to be a part of a community, the foundation as well as the key elements and activities required to develop the community and the potential results that can occur from that active, engaging learning community. Participants will be able to understand the sequential steps as well as assessments needed to monitor the community development process. Topics will include the use of social media such as blogs, online orientations, instructional webinars, advisory councils, mentoring programs, and student support. Presentation Goals: 1. Show that it is possible to have dynamic learning communities onlin 2. Differentiate primary (foundational), secondary, and tertiary student services 3. Explain why student services need to be layered for the online environment 4. Show how a strategicAlliance between an e-Learning organization and university provides the most robust structure for serving online students Context: In a fully online environment both graduate and undergraduate students require support in ways that are different from traditional, on-ground students. Some services that online students need are unique and often may be unexpected. For example, enrollment specialists on campus need only be experts in using the enrollment technologies, whereas enrollment specialists for online students must also have knowledge of the program and courses to better guide students. Online students need essential services such as text book fulfillment and well-designed courses, as well as ways in which to build connections with the university such as building social profiles and access to the university's portal. Most importantly, it is essential to know when to provide students with each service so as not to overwhelm them. Problem: Providing student services online presents unique challenges with supporting students at a distance and building community online. Approach: Creating a strategic Alliance brings together partners that provide the expertise of an accredited academic institution with the infrastructure of an organization specializing in instructional design, customer service and marketing. With this combination of resources and expertise, students are bolstered with services ranging from program advising and enrollment to commencement and involvement in the alumni association. Results:  Students are fully integrated into the university community. This means that the relationship between the student and the university evolves from one in which the student receives services provided by the university to one in which the student is a supporting member of the university community.  Course/Program evaluations and satisfaction surveys show students' positive feedback and satisfaction.  Increased retention and graduation rates. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 313 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support We are…Penn Staters, Too! Building a Co-curricular Student Experience for Penn State Online Distance Learners Heather Chakiris (Penn State World Campus, USA) Connecting online distance learners to your institution, as well as to each other, outside of their course environment is a critical but frequently missing piece of the online student retention puzzle. One of the biggest misconceptions regarding online distance learners is, "They're never going to visit campus. They don't care what happens here." At Penn State, the data shows they care: World Campus students join the University's Alumni Association at a rate almost 20 percent higher than students attending classes at University Park and Commonwealth Campuses; membership in the World Campus chapter of the Blue & White Society ranks the second highest behind University Park. For the World Campus Student Engagement Team, it's a strategic imperative to capitalize on this momentum and develop creative ways to recreate the "Penn State student experience" for World Campus online distance learners. In this presentation, the World Campus will share strategies for the co-curricular engagement of online distance learners, including: -- knowing your students, -- being fearless about technology experimentation, -- building critical campus partnerships, -- setting metrics to gauge success, -- embracing lessons learned. Specific engagement initiatives the team will discuss include: -- live, streaming online events; -- integration with on-campus student traditions; -- national student networking events; -- clubs and organizations; -- social media. Post-event survey and needs-assessment data will also be shared. Time for audience Q&A will be incorporated into the discussion. Creating Actionable Pathways for Improving Student Success Through Academic Risk Identification Ellen D. Wagner (WICHE, USA) Mindy Sloan (Ashford University, USA) Karen Swan (University of Illinois- Springfield, USA) Despite high enrollment numbers, postsecondary education completion rates have generally remained unchanged for the past forty years. Of all students who enroll in postsecondary education, less than half (46.1%) attain a degree within 150 percent of "normal time" to degree. While online learning offers a legitimate path for pursuing a college education and provides students with a convenient alternative to face-to-face instruction, it, too, is laden with retentionrelated concerns. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 314 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support The Predictive Analytics Reporting (PAR) Framework has demonstrated that applying descriptive, inferential and predictive analyses to a federated, multi-institutional database can identify both universal and institutionally-specific barriers and opportunities for improving student success (Ice, et al, 2012). This session has been designed to share insight tools developed by the PAR Framework team that are being used to help PAR partners diagnosis risk at institution, program, course and student levels. Particular attention is paid to online and blended programs. We will focus on work that maps retention interventions to essential behaviors at various points in the student life cycle to help institutions implement interventions that have shown to support successful student progression toward a credential. The PAR Framework is a non-profit, multi-institutional data mining cooperative venture, whose participating members leverage a massive student-and-course-level dataset voluntarily created by a cross-section of U.S. colleges and universities to focus on academic risk identification. The PAR Framework uses common data definitions for core measures across institutions to seek patterns of student loss and success. Predictive analytics methodologies and data mining techniques are applied to anonymized and institutionally de-identified student information to identify the factors that directly and positively influence student success and momentum towards completing a high value postsecondary credential. The PAR Framework is predicated on identifying factors that affect success and loss among undergraduate students, with a focus on at-risk, first time, new and non-traditional students. Viewing these factors through a multi-institutional lens, using complete sets of undergraduate data, based on a common set of measures with common data definitions, provides insights that are not available when looking at records from a single institution. The PAR Framework is the only big data multi-institutional database in U.S. higher education. Furthermore, it is the only entity in US postsecondary education that is using common, open data definitions for student and course level records coming from 2 year, 4 year, public, private, proprietary, traditional and progressive institutions. Creating Connections: Establishing Online Learning Communities with Leadership and Strengths Erin Lasley (Rasmussen College, USA) Kailyn Helget (Rasmussen College, USA) Anyone who has worked with online learners understands the challenges of creating connections and communities without the benefit of a physical space. Even if students feel engaged within their online classrooms, how may we further develop the college experience in the virtual environment? Establishing opportunities for continued student development within a group that shares common goals is a great way to start building community. According to Lenning and Ebbers (1999), learning communities have the potential to benefit academic achievement, satisfaction with college life and retention rates, as well as improve quality of transferable skills. Educators want these benefits for all students, regardless of Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 315 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support modality, and it is a current focus for many higher education institutions who offer distance learning. A common question asked is, "How do we replicate what we do at the residential/physical campus level in an online environment?" The Rasmussen Leadership Academy (RLA) was created with the intention of meeting three needs: (1) establish a space for higher achieving students to further develop their student experience; (2) cultivate leadership skills of members in the group; and (3) strengthen the sense of connection to campus by providing networking opportunities with other students and staff. In its infancy, the Leadership Academy was an opportunity for solely online students who had no proximity to a physical campus. The success of this program over one year prompted the expansion of the program to include twelve physical campuses, serving students both online and in the classroom. Frequently, educators try to replicate a physical classroom activity in an online environment, resulting in inconsistent success. The unique value of RLA is that it was developed to meet the needs of an online population, and later was modified to work on a campus. Program Basics The Leadership Academy is co-led by two staff members and can be individuals in any position, but is best suited for those interested in a presenting role and enthusiastic about developing student leaders. Students are chosen for the Leadership Academy based on application information, grade history, and a personal statement about why they would like to participate in the group. The majority of the Leadership Academy curriculum is based on the Strengths Finders 2.0 book by Tom Rath. Students meet for a series of six meetings focusing on introductions and creating connections, leadership styles, strengths, and development, diversity awareness, and networking skills. Tools for Engagement One of the most significant factors in creating a cohesive community group is generating student excitement about the opportunity. We do this by inviting students to apply, and making very clear that the Leadership Academy is an honored place of attendance. Students submit applications with a mixture of a desire to be recognized and to develop leadership skills. Palloff and Pratt state that coalescence within an online group can be nearly instantaneous, particularly in instances when the group comes together with a stronger common interest (2007). We find that students are enthusiastic about the prospect of developing leadership skills within a prestigious group, and are eager to meet and work with each other. Students who are accepted into the Leadership Academy are made aware of the participation expectations. They are asked to make a commitment to attend meetings, and to submit a photo and bio page prior to the first meeting. The initial meeting is organized so that all students introduce themselves, giving them an immediate opportunity to speak and interact with each other. Students are encouraged to utilize the chat space to ask questions and continue interaction with the facilitators and other students. Every meeting is set up with the intention of interaction and is conducted in a discussion-type format to encourage participation from all members. Generally by the second meeting, the norm of a high level of interaction has been set and students become more comfortable engaging with each other. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 316 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support Students are also taken through a process of self-discovery by reading Strengths Finder 2.0. They are asked to share their insights and how they share their strengths and leadership qualities in their everyday life. An important aspect of the Academy is for students to feel empowered in whatever their leadership styles and strengths may be, even if it doesn't necessarily match what their ideal of what they think a leader is. We were most successful engaging students when they started to share personal strengths with each other because they found commonalities with other students in the group. An added benefit of the Leadership Academy is that the framework is transferable to both a blended and residential model. Distance learners may express the desire to connect with peers and the campus in a physical environment. Students who are unable to attend on campus are invited to complete meetings in a virtual meeting space. The facilitator then conducts the meetings from a physical room while logged into the virtual platform. This provides yet another option for students to create communities in the environment that fits them best. Rasmussen has found great success in creating online connections through the Leadership Academy over the past two years. Upon participation in this session, the audience will identify the tenants of the Leadership Academy program to use as a model at their own institutions. Additionally, participants will explore the tools and processes used to engage group members and increase the sense of community online. The data that we have collected indicates that providing learners with a program like RLA can enhance students' college experience. It is our goal to share our processes so that other students may benefit in this same way. Office of Educational Research and Improvement Association for the Study of Higher Education; ERIC Clearninghouse on Higher Education. (1999). The powerful potential of learning communities: Improving education for the future. (Research Report No. ED428606) (O. T. Lenning & L. H. Ebbers, Authors). Washington, DC: George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development. Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2007). Building Online Learning Communities Effective Strategies for the Virtual Classroom (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Wiley. Integrating Social Learning for Teaching Millennial Students Enoch Park (Pfeiffer University, USA) David Gannon (Bryant University, USA) For the new generation of students,Social Networking is part of their life and their identity. While the great majority of students actively use, join, create, and comment on Social Networking services, students feel hesitant to use their social network for academic purpose, and seek alternative spaces and channels to use to discuss topics, collaborate on class projects, organize works, or seek help for their study. As increasing number of students are joining and using social learning sites and services, colleges and faculty can find students' strength to bring synergy for effective teaching and learning. Focus of the Proposal: For the new generation of students, Social Networking is part of their life and their identity. A recent research reports that 75% of American teens have their own Social Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 317 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support Networking sites, and 51% of them check their site daily, and 34% check several times a day (Rideout, Laurice, & Wartella, 2011). While 62% of students consider their social network site intended for private communication with their friends, almost half-of students in grades 9-12 are using sites such as Facebook and YouTube to collaborate with each other on school projects. As the younger generation students are active in online social environment in creating contents (37%), and commenting and providing feedback (37%) (Di Gangi, 2010), it would be an important step for educational institutions and programs consider the ways to facilitate and support students' learning.In the similar context, while about 40% of students report that they would like to have tools and sites provided by their school to collaborate with their classmates, communicating with their teachers, and organize their school work (National Association of State Boards of Education, 2012), 57% of undergraduate students want to have their academic and social perspectives separate, and two-third of the students feel hesitant to use their personal profiles (e.g. Facebook, etc) for connecting with faculty and for class purpose (ECAR Study 2012). Social learning sites and services can offer alternative spaces and channels to facilitate the exchange of ideas, peer inquiries, and collaboration with other students beyond their own classes and campuses. Purpose and Goals: The purpose of this session is to introduce the current trends and views of the new generation of students on using social learning tools and resources for their study, review currently available social learning sites and tools, and discuss best practices and ideas to integrate social learning to facilitate students' learning.  First, the session will offer a summary of current research findings on the use of social learning among the Millennial students, their views on using Social Networking tools for learning purpose, and theoretical grounds of social learning.  A list of social learning sites that are popular among students, or services used at institutional level will be provided, along with a comparison of features and unique characteristics.  At this point, the audience will be encouraged to visit the sites for hands-on experience and make sample entries to try the interface and interaction first hand.  Collaboration in small groups will be encouraged, and the presenter will assist the groups developing an understanding of the services.The discussion will continue with summary of pilot cases and reports on using social learning in higher education environment, and suggested activities for integration in classes or in curriculum.  Feedback from students and faculty members will be shared to convey the voices of the users. Reflection and discussion of helpful ideas from the audience will continue, and the participants will be encouraged to form collaborative groups to further explorer services and tools suitable for implementing at their institutions, and to share implementation ideas. Participant Engagement: The audience will interact with online polls, collaborative document/ note taking (Google Docs), share ideas and resources through back channel communication, as well as participating to hands-on demonstration. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 318 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support If We Build It, Will They Come? The Impact of Voluntary Scholarly Community on Online Students Ronald Berman (Grand Canyon University, USA) Henry Radda (Grand Canyon University, USA) Ted Cross (Grand Canyon University, USA) The goal of this presentation is to report on new research examining the impact of a voluntary scholarly community on online students. Introduction & Context It is well documented that traditional doctoral student attrition is approximately 50% (Damrosch, 2006; Lovitts, 2001). In addition, some authors argue that online non-traditional programs have even higher attrition rates (Carr, 2000; Stover, 2005). While there are many causes for student doctoral attrition, some point to a lack of support systems coupled with factors of isolation as sources of attrition (Azad & Kohun, 2006; Sowell et al., 2009; Lovits, 2001; RockinsonSzapkiw, 2011; Terrell et al., 2009). In order to remedy these problems, it may be important to consider adult learning principles in designing interventions to help non-traditional doctoral students complete their programs of study (Knowles, 1977). Building on principles of adult learning theory, Grand Canyon University and the College of Doctoral Studies has created a voluntary virtual scholarly network, the Doctoral Community Network (DC Network). The DC Network provides a rich collaborative environment that includes resources, roadmaps, references, and tools to support students in becoming independent scholars, capable of producing and publishing high-quality research. While this online network is designed to help support students and is built on principles of adult learning theory, it was unknown how students value the community and interact with it. As such this study was aimed at understanding how graduating students valued the voluntary scholarly network, how and if it helped them complete their program, and whether or not there were differences in either of these areas according to student demographics. Further, the findings of this study provide informative and important constructs of-- how and what-- students find helpful in an optional online scholarly network. These constructs can be applied to the development or enhancement of new or existing optional virtual communities. Research Questions The following research questions framed this study: • Do graduating doctoral students value their use of a voluntary scholarly network (DC Network)? • To what extent do graduating doctoral students use a voluntary scholarly network (DC Network)? • What resources are graduating doctoral students using on a voluntary scholarly network (DC Network)? • Are there differences in usage and/or value for different student demographics? Methods Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 319 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support This study was designed from a quantitative perspective and utilized an online survey instrument to gather data from the target population of 48 graduating doctoral students. The online survey consisted of 14 questions. The survey was administered to the target population between the dates of 4.15.13 and 4.20.13 after which the survey was closed, resulting in a 50% response rate. The results of the survey were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results The data gathered from the survey revealed several important findings in relation to how graduating doctoral students valued and used the DC Network. Further, the data showed several other points on how digital natives and digital immigrants use the network In terms of how the respondents valued their participation in the voluntary on-line scholarly network: • • • • • 78% responded that their participation in the scholarly network helped them locate research resources 67% responded that their participation in the scholarly network helped them complete their doctoral program of study 58% responded that their participation in the scholarly network helped them feel connected to other learners 56% responded that their participation in the scholarly network helped them feel connected to faculty 38% responded that their participation in the scholarly network helped them feel less isolated In terms of how the respondents use the voluntary scholarly network: • • • 92% indicated that they used the scholarly network to find doctoral resources 63% indicated that they use the scholarly network to communicate with others 92% indicated that the scholarly network helped them locate dissertation resources Some differences were noted between digital natives and digital immigrants: • • • 60% of digital natives and 78% of digital immigrants reported logging on to the DC network at least once per week 10% of digital natives and 64% of the digital immigrants logon at least twice a week 20% of digital natives and 50% of digital immigrants reported that they somewhat agreed or agreed that the DC network help them feel less isolated Conclusion/ Discussion Overall, doctoral graduates who completed the study indicate that the scholarly network is perceived to be helpful in completing the doctoral program of study, foster communication between learners and each other as well as faculty, that the network may be helpful in reducing learner isolation, and that digital natives and digital immigrants interact with the network in Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 320 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support different ways. More specifically, students reported using the network to find academic resources to help them in their course work as well as to communicate and thus feel connected to both faculty and colleagues. In this way, the study indicates that providing communication channels as well as clearly defined and applicable resources are important to consider when designing a voluntary online community. Further, the study indicates that learners are motivated to use the network in ways that are congruent with adult learning theory. Learners use the community to connect with each other, share knowledge, and find resources that enable them to solve relevant problems (Knowles, 1977). These results have applications not only at the doctoral level, but at all levels of higher education and perhaps across discipline when attempting to create innovative ways to enhance the connectedness of learners to each other and to faculty. From Global Programs to a True Global Campus: One University's Experience Rebecca Van de Vord (Washington State University, USA) Upon completion of this presentation attendees will have… 1. Concrete ideas for events, outside of the course, that can be delivered to distance students and how to accomplish this. 2. Ideas for funding the delivery of these events. 3. A network of support for embarking on a similar journey. The explosion of new technologies has allowed educators to deliver high quality, rigorous courses and programs to students anywhere, anytime. But we can do much more:   We can move beyond program delivery to create true virtual campuses. On-campus students can tour museums, attend guest lectures and cultural events, or participate in a research showcase, to name just a few extracurricular activities. articipation in these types of events contributes to their educational environment, enhances their social and cultural experiences and increases their connection to the university, which in turn improves retention and aids recruitment. Online campuses should do the same. And they begin with a great advantage: They are not limited by geography; they can tap into experts across the world and bring their knowledge into a central and easily accessible online location. In July 2012, Washington State University's Global Campus met this challenge by launching its Global Connections program. The program creates and offers free activities that connect distance students to experts in a variety of fields, engage students with one another, and enhance the educational experience. Global Connections consists of…  eVents: Provide exposure to the cutting edge social and cultural experiences. These include live exhibitions of art, dramatic reading, music, and commentaries by distinguished speakers. Our students can ask questions, and in some cases, have special access to the speakers. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 321 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support       Webinars: Faculty across the university have presented more than 100 webinars, allowing students to engage with them on topics ranging from mushroom hunting and beekeeping to lithium batteries and pet nutrition. Undergraduate Research Showcase: For the first time, distance students were mentored by faculty and accepted into the Undergraduate Research Showcase on the Pullman campus. The students used webconferencing tools to present their research from their own homes. Global Case Competition: Global Campus students teamed up with students from other WSU campuses to compete by proposing solutions to a global issue, thereby strengthening the connections between students on all five WSU campuses. eCareer Fair: An opportunity for students to meet virtually and synchronously with potential employers from around the world. Common Reading: For the first time, Common Reading events and three keynote speakers were streamed live so that Global Campus students could participate in this activity. OrgSync: We have combined technology and personnel in a unique way to build a "campus engagement network" through OrgSync. The web-hosted platform creates an online community by providing a space where students can connect with programs, eVents and one another. During this presentation, I will discuss the variety of events streamed live to students, the scholarship activities opened up to Global Campus students, financial models, and the lessons we learned during the first year. We will cover, in detail, how we do this so that those attending the presentation can leave with a plan. I will also share survey and focus-group data and show video clips from our events. The audience will be invited to discuss activities on their campus and brainstorm how on-campus activities can be delivered to distance students. Accessibility, OER, and Improving Services for Students with Disabilities Gerry Hanley (California State University, USA) Despite the development of accessibility standards for IT products and an array of federal and state legislation requiring that accessibility status be a major factor in the adoption of IT products, accessibility support by most educational technology vendors remains weak. Specifically: • • Awareness of accessibility requirements or technical standards among educational technology vendors is uneven. While larger vendors often demonstrate some familiarity with the needs of users with disabilities, many small to mid-sized vendors have little or no knowledge in this area. Vendors cannot design accessible products if they are unfamiliar with technical standards and will not do so if they do not understand the accessibility requirements of educational institutions. The quality of accessibility documentation available from educational technology vendors, while improving, remains poor, making it difficult for universities to accurately gauge the nature of the product's accessibility. Many vendors do not offer any form of accessibility documentation including Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs) and the information provided is often incomplete, out-of-date, or inaccurate. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 322 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support • The overall level of commitment to technology accessibility by educational technology vendors is also uneven. Many vendors cite limited financial resources as an impediment to developing accessible products. Others suggest that there is limited customer demand for accessibility features. The accessibility barriers in the vendor marketplace become even more challenging in the Open Education Resources marketplace. Open Educational Resources (OER) are digital materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research. The authoring of OER is more a "cottage industry" where a variety of local academic technology craftsmen design and develop online instructional materials using a variety of software tools and quality assurance methods. As a result, there is a large collection of free online instructional materials that have quality content but typically have no information about the accessibility of the instructional materials or don't have accessibility requirements as part of the design. With the growth of OER and its integration into a variety of federal and state initiatives including the U.S. Department of Education's inclusion of OER requirements in their initiatives and grant programs (see "Free to Learn" by Hal Plotkin, senior policy adviser to the Under Secretary of Education), the accessibility of OER will have a significant impact on higher education. In addition, the 2007 U.S. Congressional Hearing and the 2008 California State Auditor Report on textbook affordability both recognized the importance of OER as an institutional and educational strategy to make course materials more affordable. Some Progress on Accessibility and Open Education Resources: There are examples of progress on improving the accessibility of OER. The California State University and MERLOT has made accessibility of OER a high priority and is implementing programs to raise the visibility and implementation of accessibility requirement in OER. The Open CourseWare Consortium (OCWC) is committed to making OER accessible to the widest audience possible and has been raising awareness of accessibility issues in OCW and OER through many of its communications and programs. The National Federation of the Blind has been instrumental in ensuring that higher education fulfills its responsibilities in delivering equally effective educational to persons with disabilities. These 4 organizations have created an open and online community of services, resources, and expert in the various areas of accessibility (http://oeraccess.merlot.org). The presentation will demonstrate how individuals and institutions in higher education can use these services, resources, and experts to support their own accessible technology initiative on their campus. The presentation will showcase: • • An open collection of online resources about accessibility training, policies, evaluation methodologies, assistive technologies and more. An open collection of about 100 open textbooks that have links to expert accessibility evaluation reports from College Open Textbooks, a partner of the Community College Consortium within OCW, providing users an assessment of the accessibility features of the resource and 230 other OER materials with accessibility information. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 323 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support • • • • Easy to use tools for accessibility experts and users of OER to contribute structured information about the accessibility of the OER; Guidance and tools on authoring accessible OER Directories of organizations and individuals who have interests and expertise in accessibility topics An online community forum people can join and discuss accessibility issues. The participants will be provided lessons learned about designing and deploying institutional accessibility strategies. Online Tutoring: Leveraging In-House Technologies to Supplement a Third-Party Solution Ryan Thompson (Texas A&M University-Central Texas, USA) Sara Dierk (Texas A&M University-Central Texas, USA) Objective: Outline a plan for partnering in-house technological solutions and third-party providers for online tutoring. Discuss methods for identifying existing technologies and key players for collaboration. Overview: As online enrollments increase across most university campuses, student support services must develop methods to assist success of the remote student. This has led to the use of a multitude of third-party Online Tutoring Providers (OTP) such as Smarthinking.com, Tutor.com, and TutorVista.com. For many, this service is viewed as an either/or decision: choose between outsourcing this vital student support service or find the resources needed to create an in-house service. This presentation will dispel that myth, as it will demonstrate the effectiveness and value of partnering the familiarity and control of an in-house online tutoring program with the availability and flexibility of an OTP. Presenters will demonstrate the creation process for an in-house online tutoring program, which utilizes existent university technological resources, and will outline the development of learning outcomes, buy-in from key departments and individuals, implementation schedules, and program assessment guidelines. The presentation will include a brief overview of the planned solution and an opportunity for participants to explore resources and partnerships on their own campus. For those administrators wanting to find that perfect balance between coverage and cost, this is a must-attend session! Categories of Disclosure: Understanding and Serving Students with Disabilities in the Online Environment Terry Watson (Penn State University, USA) Jorge Trevino (Penn State University, USA) Students with disabilities are finding online learning as a tool to achieve their education goals, with the expectation and belief that "online access = accessible." However, in time, these students often are presented with barriers that decrease their chances of retention. The reasons for disclosing their disability to receive accommodations are many. The Categories of Disclosure Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 324 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support looks as the phenomenon of disclosing and shows how an institution can take this information and be intentional on providing equal access to education. During this session, I will show you the many characteristics for each category; how to collect that information, and more importantly, how to use that information to improve relationships, enhance customer service, and provide the necessary programs for your students with disabilities. By attending this session you will be able to: 1. Identify the four Categories of Disclosure and their characteristics. - Inconclusive: This is the referral group that would disclose but not seek accommodations. - Proactive Group: This is the group that would disclose and seek accommodations shortly after admissions or directly after disability occurs. - Semi-proactive Group: This group discloses and seeks accommodation the first week to second week of classes. Different reasons for disclosure have been recorded. - Reactive Group: This group discloses and seeks accommodation after first exam/project. 2. Learn how to collect, analyze, and use this information I will show how I have collected and analyzed this information. I will then show how this information helps me understand the student comfort zone and mind set. 3. Identify ways to enhance your campus accessibility. I will give examples of programs that have been implemented because of these categories and how this will be useful for other online institutions. Transitioning Adults to College with an Online Transitions Course Richard Brungard (Penn State World Campus, USA) Adult students are often not well documented, frequently left out of discussions of higher education policy, and not fully understood by the colleges they attend. As a result, those students often have no clear, viable path to earning a college degree and establishing or advancing a career. A key flaw is the gap between noncredit study, like remedial education and degree programs. Many adults start in noncredit study but make no progress toward earning an associate or bachelor's degree (Lumina Foundation, 2007). A clear and intentional track needs to be developed to assist adult learners move from noncredit, remedial programing into degree programs. Many colleges and universities have struggled to adjust to the changing demographics on their campuses (The Council of Adult and Experiential Learning, 2000). If adult student are to be successful, colleges must strive to remove the barriers adult students face. These barriers fall into four categories, institutional, situational, psychological and educational (Hardin, 2008). Institutional barriers are the red tape policies in our institutions that hinder the progress of adult students. Situational barriers like role conflict, time management, family and work problems, economics and logistics cannot be removed by the college or university because they are unique to the individual. Psychological barriers include inadequate coping skills, lack of self-confidence Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 325 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support and poor self-image, anxiety about schooling based on prior experience, and negative beliefs about outcomes. Educational barriers refer to poor academic preparation for college (Hardin, 2008). A carefully designed transitions course may be able to address some of the psychological, educational and even situational barriers that hold adult learners back from success in the college classroom. While many prospective adult learners may have the motivation and need for further education, some lack the necessary academic skills, educational planning, time management, study strategies, technology competence and confidence, writing and research, college-level math, and familiarity with higher education, as well as confidence to be initially successful in postsecondary education (Zafft, Kallenback and Spohn, 2006). Penn State's investment in a transitions course is to create a pipeline of new adult learners into the university as well as better ensuring student success once they enter the institution, initially through Continuing Education and now in development through World Campus for online students. The first cohort of adult students will have completed the noncredit, online transitions course by the time of this presentation. Attendees at this session will learn, 1) why Penn State Continuing Education developed a transitions course for adult learners; 2) what we found to be the most successful components of a transitions course to better provide future success in a post-secondary classroom; and, 3) how Penn State World Campus is adapting this successful model for adult learners interested in studying online. By the time of this presentation we will have information from evaluations of our first online transitions course. Presentation participants will discuss how the transitions course may be modified to meet the needs of adult, online learners entering their institutions. Results From Orientation Implemented for Online Learners At Madison College Shawna Carter (Madison College, USA) Carly Brady (Madison Area Technical College, USA) Madison College serves approximately 40,000 students district-wide and delivers around 140 technical diplomas and associate degrees. A handful of diplomas and degrees are offered in a fully online format. In addition, the college has near 14,000 online student enrollments annually. Recently administration at the college has expressed an interest in growing online programming to increase access and flexibility for students and to better position our college for the changing educational landscape. Over the years, faculty and staff have encountered barriers to the development and growth of online, accelerated and other nontraditional programming. The School of Online & Accelerated Learning was formed less than two years ago. The staff in the School of Online & Accelerated Learning were tasked with working collaboratively with staff and faculty across the college to: (1) Identify and address the needs of online and accelerated students and faculty (2) Grow the online, accelerated and nontraditional program offerings at the college (3) Reconceive the systems and processes at the college to support programming efforts. Increasing the preparedness of students for online and accelerated classes Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 326 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support and programs was among one of the priorities for the staff in the School of Online & Accelerated Learning to begin working on. Over the past few months, staff in the School of Online & Accelerated Learning have made some immediate changes to better serve students that included:Implementing standard notes on all online classes to provide students with basic information about what they can expect and what will be expected of them in an online class. Instituting an admissions and financial aid process for online, accelerated and nontraditional programs to allow students to apply directly to online and other nontraditional programs at the college. Developing an online orientation required of all learners if they are applying to a fully-online or accelerated program or registering for an online or accelerated course for the first time at Madison College. Staff in the School of Online & Accelerated Learning built an online orientation that provides information about what is expected of online & accelerated learners and what students can expect in online and accelerated classes at Madison College. The orientation shares information about resources available at the college for online learners and introductory information on how to use the college's learning management system (Blackboard©). Finally, the orientation provides information about the benefits of online learning, advice from online students at Madison College, and the SmarterMeasure© self assessment. Students applying to online or accelerated programs or registering for their first online or accelerated class at Madison College are now required to take the online orientation prior to being accepted to the program or registering for their class. The orientation is delivered through our college's Blackboard© learning management system. The orientation uses tutorials, downloadable resource information, videos, and assessments to deliver and reinforce information. The orientation includes a required SmarterMeasure© self-assessment. The SmarterMeasure© assessment is a self-paced assessment tool that helps students assess their readiness for online or accelerated learning (it is an appropriate assessment for most nontraditional learning options). Upon completion of the assessment students immediately receive a score report that identifies their strengths and opportunities for improvement in several categories and provides resource information in areas where developmental needs were identified. The SmarterMeasure© assessment was customized for this orientation and assesses three of seven readiness categories (Individual Attributes, Life Factors, Learning Styles, Technical Competency, Technical Knowledge, Onscreen Reading Rate and Recall, and Typing Speed and Accuracy); The assessment for this orientation focuses on student readiness in areas including life factors, personal attributes, and technical competency. The life factors area measures the students':     Availability of time to study Availability of a dedicated place to study Reason for continuing in their education Support resources from family, friends and employers, and Perception of their academic skills. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 327 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support The personal attributes section assesses students' use of:  Procrastination  Time management  Persistence  Willingness to ask for help  Academic attributes  Locus of control. The technical competency section measures a students' skill level using the computer and internet. Students' score on the assessment will not be a barrier for them to be accepted to a program or register for classes. However, advisors in the School of Online and Accelerated Learning and faculty have access to student assessment score information and there are strategies in place to reach out to students who have not successfully completed portions of the assessment, yet applied to a program or registered for a course that is online. We are also able to share score results of students with faculty upon request. The orientation was developed in collaboration with faculty experts, technology services staff, PeopleSoft (Student) Administration staff, Blackboard© staff, and SmarterMeasure© staff in order to ensure that the experience is valuable and seamless for students. Last year we presented on the development of this orientation at the SLOAN-C Conference and it was well received by participants. There was interest by participants in learning about the results of the implementaion. The orientation requirement was implemented for summer 2013 and fall 2013 course registration. Therefore, we have data to share on the success of the implementation. We will be able to share data including: 1. How students faired on the self-assessment that registered for online and accelerated classes 2. If early withdrawal rates from online and accelerated classes changed 3. If students chose not to register for an online or accelerated class and if there is any correlation to assessment scores 4. If there was a change in student success rates in online or accelerated courses 5. Perception by faculty and students about the orientation 6. If this requirement impacted online and accelerated enrollments significantly 7. Other data we find A Student-driven Online Community of Practice: Facebook Friends Swapna Kumar (University of Florida, USA) Mark Hart (University of Florida, USA) This presentation focuses on an online doctoral cohorts’ use of Facebook as a means for building an educational community of practice. This presentation will be useful for anyone trying to builda sense of community amongst a group of learners, in an online or blended environment. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 328 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support Introduction A community of practice (CoP) refers to groups of learners who have similar goals, build a sense of personal and professional identity and develop a common purpose and collective responsibility (Lave & Wenger, 1991). To be successful CoPs require three elements: domain, community, and practice (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002). The domain is the common ground or common interest shared by the group’s members, such as a degree program. The community is formed through the active sharing of information and the subsequent building of trust. Finally, the practice evolves through the creation of new knowledge and the ensuing reexamination of the domain (Byington, 2011). Learner-developed and learner-run CoPs give students the opportunity to control their own identity and interactions, to use existing technologies that are familiar to the users, and to create a safe environment for authentic conversation. Social media that are free of cost and easily accessible present multiple opportunities for students to collaborate and build such communities of practice, especially at a distance. This presentation describes how students in an online doctoral program used Facebook to create an educational community of practice and achieve their common goals. Methodology Online students in a doctoral program to create a Facebook group to communicate, help recognize common challenges, lend each other support, and share goals. Sixteen of 18 students joined this group that was closed to faculty members and where students had the option of participating in any manner they pleased, i.e., peripheral, full, marginal, or contingent (Handley et al., 2006) based on their comfort level and specific contextual need. The question: ‘(In what ways) Did Facebook interactions contribute to the building of a community of practice among online doctoral students?’ was studied by a content analysis of interactions in the Facebook Group. Results The three main themes that emerged from the data were knowledge sharing, support, and problem solving. Assignment clarifications, grading questions, peer feedback and resource sharing for exam preparation and assignments, and administrative issues were found to fall under knowledge sharing. All posts that offered support and encouragement about work-life balance, shared frustration, social information, involved humor or commiseration were included under support. Problem-solving involved students’ collective solving of problems as a group where various members provided bits of information, solutions, or even applied the solution and reported to the group. Examples for each of these themes will be discussed during the presentation. Implications and conclusions Members of this Facebook group shared their individual knowledge with peers, leading to shared knowledge, distributed cognition, changes in perceptions, and a feeling of community. Each Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 329 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support member of the group was able to quickly and effortlessly interact with others and with the content thereby quickly moving the group from a social network to a CoP where new knowledge was created by the community. While most educators strive for faculty-created community, our research points to students’ use of Facebook to create community. We will engage the audience in a discussion about how faculty can help students create community on their own. Lessons Learned: A Mandatory Tutorial for Online Learning Prepares Students to 'Hit the Ground Running' Spence Tower (Ferris State University, USA) Deborah Thalner (Ferris State University, USA) Melissa Nuckles (Ferris State University, USA) Context: Previous studies on student readiness for online learning have suggested that technological skills are one factor that influences student success in online courses. Although Hall (2008) found that readiness survey instruments had little value for predicting final grades in online courses, Aragon and Johnson (2008) found that 18% of their students who did not complete an online course referenced technology or the WebCT tutorial as the reason for not completing. Song, Singleton, Hill, and Roh (2003) reported that students identified €˜comfort with online technologies' as one of the key factors influencing student satisfaction with online learning compared to traditional classroom learning. Dupin-Bryant (2010) found that students who had prior computer classes in areas such as operating systems and internet skills were linked to completion of online courses. In a 2011, a survey with faculty at a state university in Michigan found they were frustrated with the level of student preparation for online learning. In their responses, 81.8% of the faculty indicted that a student orientation should be required before students could begin an online course. Anecdotally, faculty reported that they were spending too much time instructing students in the skills needed to adequately function within the learning management system's (LMS) platform itself (uploading documents, posting discussion board replies, looking up grades). Pilot Response and Implementation: A cross-disciplinary team at the university responded to the survey results by developing a pilot program for an entirely online, self-paced student readiness orientation. This orientation included a student self-assessment of individual characteristics thought to be important to online learning (reading rate, technical competency, learning style, self-direction, and time management) as well as tutorials and authentic assessments of the use of the learning platform skills necessary to be an effective online learner. Invites went out to 812 students to participate as volunteers in the pilot program with 22% completing the various tasks within the orientation. A student survey was conducted at the conclusion of the pilot; 63 (35%) of those completing the orientation responded. 77 % of the students responded that the selfassessment of individual characteristics was helpful or very helpful. From 64% to 82% of the students found various aspects of the learning management system skills helpful or very helpful (81.96 % for uploading documents; 78.37 for discussion board skills, 63.93 email skills, 75.81 grade book skills, 78.95 browser version check). 87.30% of the students reported that they felt this type of orientation was important for students prior to their first online course. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 330 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support Based on pilot feedback from both students and staff, numerous modifications were implemented that focused the orientation primarily on the LMS's platform skills, with a self-assessment of individual characteristics provided as a survey instrument at the online website. This revised orientation was developed in a model that is transferable to other platforms and schools, but is specific to the learning management system in use. This revised orientation has recently become a mandatory prerequisite for students desiring to enroll in future online classes. Completion status is maintained in the student information system for the university. A survey of faculty and students after implementation of the revised orientation provided insight into its usefulness and included additional recommended changes. Participants attending this session will learn how the presenters overcame roadblocks encountered while making the orientation mandatory; what was learned in the pilot that influenced the final orientation design; and what the students and faculty provided as feedback and areas to improve for the future. References: Aragon, S. R., & Johnson E. S. (2008). Factors influencing completion and non completion of community college online courses. American Journal of Distance Education, 22(3), 146-158. Dupin-Bryant, D. A. (2004). Pre-entry variables related to retention in online distance education, American Journal of Distance Education, 18(4), 199-206. Hall, M. (2008). Predicting student performance in web-based distance education courses based on survey instruments measuring personality traits and technical skills. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, XI(III). Retrieved from http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall113/hall113.html. Song, L., Singleton, E.S., Hill, J. R., & Koh, M. H (2003). Improving online learning: student perceptions of useful and challenging characteristics. Internet and Higher Education, 7 (1), 5970. Ready, Set, Go! Designing and Operationalizing a One Stop Service/Call Center in 12 Months Juliette Punchello (Thomas Edison State College, USA) In this presentation, we will explore how Thomas Edison State College operationalized a OneStop Student Service / Call Center within one year. Attendees of this engaging and interactive presentation will gain invaluable operational knowledge of the creation of the College's OneStop Student Service / Call Center. Topics will include: establishing the vision, gaining administrative support, forming leadership accountability, determining staffing models, allocating internal resources, evaluating technological needs, tracking metrics to establish benchmarks and monitor areas for improvement, creating effective ongoing training programs, using customer service surveys to evaluate and improve efficiencies, and building a strong and resilient team of happy, helpful student affairs specialists. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 331 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support The benefits of establishing a One Stop Student / Call Center are vast. The ability for a student to have the majority of their administrative questions answered during one call removes their frustration of possibly being transferred. Additionally, having a trained team of generalists provides consistent responses regardless of the students' connection with the college. The generalists can respond to questions from undergraduate, graduate, continuing studies, military, nursing, and corporate sponsored students. The team of generalists also provides front line technical support. They are trained on our learning management system so they are able to respond to technical issues during the first phone call. The Virtual One-Stop Student Service Center's hours provide access to students regardless of their location across the country. The college benefits from increased efficiencies in the departments who are now supported by the One-Stop Student Service Center. Student calls are no longer transferred to offices that may not be staffed to manage high volumes of student interactions. Come and listen to our successes and learn from our mistakes as we examine how we built a One-Stop Student Service / Call Center that strives to make it easy for our students to "do business" with our college, so that they can focus on their academic journey. Online Tutoring and Supplemental Instruction Javier Reyes (University of Arkansas, USA) High enrollment online courses require different support systems that can enhance the likelihood of successful completion. The Supplemental Instruction model implemented at the University of Arkansas for face to face courses has proven to be a very successful mechanism for the support of students taking courses that are deemed difficulty courses (Stats, Math, Economics, and other science courses). The program has shown statistical improvement in subsequent cohorts in course participation, progress towards graduation and grades of the students involved in the program. The University of Arkansas is now implementing the same Supplemental Instruction Program for Online Courses and preliminary numbers look very promising and the online platform around it is now going 360 degrees and it is providing alternative delivery modes that are being applied back to the face to face courses. The University of Arkansas has identified several courses for which supplemental instruction can benefit the students. The supplemental instruction program provides additional support for students in these courses by providing them with the opportunity to work on problems and ask questions outside of the classroom. Students attend a one hour session where they can work on additional questions/exercises, with the help of supplemental instruction leader. The SI Leader is not a faculty or an instructor but a student who took the course in a previous. The ELC manages the program, trains the student and funds the payment of a stipend for the SI Leader. The extra time dedicated by the students to do more exercises and go over the material covered in class, is by itself a benefit of the SI sessions. But the data suggests that the ability to ask questions and interact with other students in these sessions builds up the confidence of the students. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 332 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support The University of Arkansas has all the intentions on mirroring all the support systems provided for students on campus and wants to offer them to the online students. The Enhanced Learning Center (ELC) has partnered with the Economics Department in order to develop the SI program for online students. The current platform used to facilitate and deliver the supplemental instruction online is Bb Collaborate and it has proven to be an effective way to lead the sessions and work closely with all the students in the class. The Economics course on which the system is being implemented currently has 60 students enrolled and the idea will be to roll out Online Supplemental Instruction Sessions for Biology courses in Fall of 2013 and Math courses for Spring 2014. The objective is to serve more than 600 students by Spring 2014. The University of Arkansas identified courses for which the Supplemental Instruction Model is needed but the current resources of the ELC are limited. The Bb collaborate platform allows for the expansion of the program and provides a way to scale it according to the needs of online students without taxing the ELC facilities and resources. It also provides a solution for on campus students as well. Current classroom capacity does not a allow for a wider expansion of the program but if the online model is successful then it would also provide an alternative for on campus courses where students could take their SI sessions online! This initiatives stands on the three pillars that the Global Campus put forward for the University of Arkansas: 1. Provide alternative solutions for dealing with support systems for students that applies for online courses but also provides options for face to face -on campus-courses. 2. Support programs such that the University can predicate comparable access to resources and support systems to online and face to face students. 3. Making sure that no mode of delivery is seen as superior because of the infrastructure and support systems around it. First Year in: Reducing Barriers, Supporting Academic and Personal Success of the Adult Online Learner Michele Forte (SUNY Empire State College, USA) Theresa Vamvalis (SUNY Empire State College, USA) Context and Rationale: SUNY Empire State College (ESC) delivers high quality, affordable undergraduate degree programs to learners across New York State and the country. The College serves over 10,000 non-traditional adult and military learners through its on-line program alone. ESC's student population is comprised of geographically and economically diverse, nontraditional adult learners. While NY has one of the highest retention rates in the US (http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/index.php?measure=92), still about one in four students will fail to continue and complete their degree. It is not because of poor academic performance, but other reasons (Cuseo and Farnum 2011: Kun, et al 2006 : Gardiner, 1994, ). This is particularly true for adult students - who are predominantly the students of ESC. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 333 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support As noted in Establishing a Learner-Centered Culture by Patricia Brown for the American Council on Higher Education, "Adult learners benefit when the institution is focused on the learner, prides itself in teaching excellence, and strives to ensure that appropriate academic support services are available and tailored to the needs of the student demographic served." (http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Documents/Degree-Attainment-for-Adult-Le...) While the asynchronous online environment offers relative access to this diverse body of learners, it cannot mitigate the challenges faced by students returning to college after a period of time, or by students who are new to the online environment. Students are often overwhelmed and frustrated not only by the demands of college level work, which requires solid academic skills and the ability of the learner to balance school work against the backdrop of complex lives, but also by the relative anonymity and lack of concrete routines that a fully online learning environment poses. Ironically, then, the same characteristics which attracted them to online courses impede their ability to persist. "First Year Experience (FYE)" programs, developed by brick and mortar campuses, serve to transition high school seniors to college. These programs serve to address the unique needs of this population with the goal of retaining and graduating these students. ESC's New Student program is broadly influenced by traditional FYE programs, as new or returning adult learners face similar challenges, with an added challenge, engaging in an online learning environment where face-to-face interaction does not exist. In the asynchronous environment, it can be challenging to create opportunities for busy adult learners to consistently engage in a supportive community space. This program seeks to transition new or returning adult learners to an online academic environment in which these learners feel connected and academically supported via proven strategies and approaches. Problem: Research shows that academic advising, social connectedness, involvement and engagement, and academic support services contribute to student persistence. (Pascarella, and Terenzini 2005). ESC's recognizes that for new and returning adult learners to be successful, these students need early and easy access and connection to academic support and resources, and require a sense of belonging and being part of a community in their first two terms to be successful. Retaining students in our asynchronous, online environment adds a layer of complexity. The benefits this environment offers, such as flexibly, can also inform disengagement from peers, the home institution, and from studies. With this in mind, ESC designed a dedicated, new student space in which adult learners are acclimated to their new online learning environment; academically supported by program facilitators, faculty, administrators, staff and peer academic coaches (trained ESC students); and socially connected to their peers in their cohort and the general ESC student and community population. Although the focus is support and community building, the ultimate goal of this project is to increase retention, and to support student persistence in their studies through a multi-pronged approach. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 334 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support Approach: The presentation will discuss implementation of the New Student pilot program, including initial findings, new student feedback and the perspectives of peer academic coaches who work closely coaching new students within the new student space. Our multi-pronged approach to providing resources and strategies used will also be reviewed, including: 1. OER - New Student Resources consisting of:  Recorded webinars, mobile friendly and Youtube accessible, that are easy to navigate and watch.  Access to a range of self-guided academic tutorials.  Original content including narration, music and video - mobile friendly.  Open for comments and discussion.  RSS feed of new tips for students.  Sample Rationales and Degree Plans Mobile friendly) that students can download, print (view on full screen) and consult.  Translation tool to help students/learners who speak English as a second language.  Review of free self-guided tour with samples and easy registration.  Auto-dialing (for mobile phones) and auto-email for contacting the college.  Smarthinking, an online tutoring service, video 2. Audio options with avatars offering an alternative to text - increasing accessibility. 3. Interactive flipbook on PLA - Interactive book, mobile friendly, downloadable PDF versions. 4. Embedded and accessible Google calendars of webinars, live chat sessions, and other events. 5. Optional Interactive Visual menus (support from Peers). 6. Real-time, virtual "office hours". 7. Discussion Spaces for peer academic coaches, new students and/or facilitators. 8. Feedback survey embedded in space (Rapid prototyping) References: Cuseo, J & T Farnum (2011) Seven Myths About Student Retention. TFA Gardiner, L. F. (1994). Redesigning higher education: Producing dramatic gains in student learning (ASHEERIC Higher Education Report No. 7). Washington, DC: ERIC. Clearinghouse on Higher Education, George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development Kun, G, Kinzie, J, Buckley, J, Bridges, B, Hayek, J (2006) What Matters to Student Success: A Review of the Literature, National Postsecondary Education Cooperative. Pascarella, E T & Terenzini P T (2005) How College Affects Students, Vol 2, A Third Decade of Research. San Francisco CA: Jossey-Base. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 335 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support Course Redesign: Experience from 2 Institutions – Motivations, Process, and Impact Sally Search (Tallahassee Community College, USA) Joseph Leopold (St. Petersburg College, USA) Course Redesign is a popular topic in higher education and a goal of many institutions. The process of redesigning an entire course, in particular large-enrollment core courses, can be a daunting task, but with great rewards for the student and institution. Course Redesign has many goals and often involves many different departments or groups on campus. It involves rethinking the way instruction is delivered utilizing evolving technologies and resources, reducing costs while increasing student success and retention, and developing a student centric solution for a diverse population. In this session, we will hear from two Florida State Colleges: Tallahassee Community College and St. Petersburg College. The panelists will discuss their experience in Course Redesign at their institution. Each campus will share their experiences followed by an interactive questions and answer period. Prior to audience engagement, each panelist will share: ~ Which courses are in the process of or have undergone Redesign and the motivations for the undertaking ~ Course cost reductions witnessed by those who have completed redesign, or cost reduction goals of those still in process ~ The steps involved in the process including those completed and those pending completion ~ Text and/or software program analysis ~ Student support services included in the redesign and the motivations for implementation ~ Lessons learned from successes (and mistakes) along the way ~ Institutional teams (including technical, instructional, and student support services) involved in the process and the challenges and benefits of a team effort ~ Redesign project funding ~ Resources used in the Course Redesign Project ~ Research data collected to represent program success Following the overview provided by each campus representative, an engaging discussion between the presenters and the audience will be encouraged. The goal is to provide the audience the opportunity to ask questions of the panelists or other audience members, or solicit input into their own redesign questions or challenges. This interaction opportunity will provide value to all participants and allow audience members the chance to engage with colleagues and gain valuable and actionable information to bring back to their own institutions. Tallahassee Community College (TCC) has redesigned a number of courses and has experienced great success. By balancing the desire to increase student success and achievement, reduce costs, and maximize the use of new student support services through the institution's Learning Commons, TCC has had a successful Course Redesign experience and will share useful information including data on improvements in success and retention. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 336 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support St. Petersburg College (SPC) is currently undergoing a Course Redesign project of its developmental education and college entry level mathematics, writing and reading courses. This project includes the customization of instructional technology materials and the full proactive integration of student support services within the course. Initial phases of the project suggest a successful launch of the program and current use of individual resources and support services have already proven to have a positive impact for students and results will be shared. Success in the Online Dissertation and Thesis Process: How One University Supports Their Students Amanda J. Rockinson-Szapkiw (Liberty University, USA) Fred Milacci (Liberty University, USA) With attrition rates ranging from 40 - 70% depending on the discipline, doctoral student attrition in the United States has been a persistent concern for decades (Berelson, 1960; Council of Graduate Schools Ph.D. Completion Project, 2007). Attrition is a multi-faceted problem and there are a range of student and institutional factors associated with attrition. Student factors include personal attributes such as intelligence, motivation, and ability to cope and manage stress (Lovitts, 2005), while institutional factors include economic integration (e.g., fellowships/assistantships), effective advising/mentoring, and program type (e.g., online vs. faceto-face). While online programs have grown in popularity and demand, attrition rates in these programs are significantly higher than traditional programs (Rovai, 2002a). Further, the literature suggests that completion rates for programs with larger entering cohorts (characteristic of many online programs) are lower than programs with smaller entering cohort sizes (Bair, 1999). While all stages of the doctoral journey are demanding, students consistently report that the dissertation phase presents the most challenges (Spaulding & Rockinson-Szapkiw, 2012). However, there is strong consensus that the level of expertise, advising, mentoring, and supervision chairs provide is integral to persistence (Earl-Novell, 2006; Wao & Onwuegbuzie, 2011). Furthermore, students are more likely to persist when they have positive relationships with their chair and expectations are clear (Hoskins & Goldberg, 2005). Assisting doctoral students to successfully navigate the dissertation process and produce a quality dissertation has always been challenging. This is compounded when students pursue their degree almost exclusively online. In this presentation, we provide an overview of the process developed for our Ed.D. program that not only services and mentors over 500 students in the dissertation phase, but strives to ensure that these students' dissertations are academically sound and methodologically correct. We describe the human and technological resources needed to provide oversight of this quality process. Based on program research and experience, we present strategies that administrators and educators can implement to foster effective mentorship, to ensure quality dissertations, and ultimately, increase doctoral persistence. Additionally, we review the benefits - and challenges of each of these strategies. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 337 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support Timely and Helpful Feedback… That is both personable and challenging is essential to doctoral candidates' satisfaction and persistence. Unfortunately, many technologies used in the online environment, such as e-mail and content management systems, pose challenges, such as lost emails and delayed documents which may result in feelings of dissatisfaction and isolation (Doherty, 2006). In an era of the collaborative web, a variety of software and technologies are available to better support file sharing, discussions, calendar sharing, task assignment, and collaborative editing. Using a collaborative workspace can help facilitate mentorship and increase connectedness. Prior to Implementation of Formal Schooling… Mentorship was the primary manner in which individuals learned new skills. Individuals would work alongside an expert and knowledge about the skill would be transmitted by the expert to the apprentice (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989). As programs move online, faculty can no longer sit in a local restaurant dialoging with students. Rather, they must develop a new model of mentorship that leverages information and communication technologies (ICTs) to mentor students. The use of e-conferencing systems is presented as a means for sharing and discussing documents. Connectedness and Community are Associated with Online Persistence (Rovai, 2002b; Terrell et al., 2009)… Implementing technology to support social and scholarly interaction, such as networking technologies (e.g., Facebook, Google Plus), can assist with building online community for doctoral students. Admissions Requirements… At entry assist in gauging whether students have the potential to complete a quality dissertation. GRE writing scores are recommended as an admissions requirement and integrating remedial writing course requirements for those with low writing scores is recommended as writing scores can predict time to dissertation completion (RockinsonSzapkiw, Bray, & Spaulding, 2012). Knowles (1980) Suggests Adult Learners Need to Engage in Relevant Learning… Implementation of doctoral research courses that are relevant and focused on the dissertation manuscript - and which emphasize research, writing, and prospectus development is recommended. Constructing Templates, Handbooks… and other relevant resources that demonstrate how to think critically about research and organize research can go a long way towards producing quality dissertations. Planning Scheduled Reviews… by research experts prior to major dissertation benchmarks (e.g., proposal defense, dissertation defense) is presented as a viable way to ensure quality in dissertation methodology. As a result, participants will be able to identify:  Specific practices that can support the mentoring of doctoral students in an online environment  Technologies and practices used to ensure quality dissertations in a large, online doctoral program  Practices and technologies related to persistence in the online doctoral process. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 338 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support As traditional higher education institutions increasingly engage in the intense competition of the rapidly growing global marketplace and put their doctoral programs online, the leaders within these institutions are challenged to identify technologies and practices to support the unique aspects of doctoral mentorship. They are further challenged to put policies and procedures into practice to ensure quality dissertations while seeking ways to foster doctoral persistence. The strategies and technologies presented have been found to improve communication, collaboration, faculty-student connectedness, and ultimately, foster persistence in a large, primarily online doctoral program. This presentation will also be applicable to faculty and universities in which the mentoring process is used for undergraduate honor theses and masters' theses. The Importance of Orientations in Preparing Online Learners for Success Amber L. Vaill (Bay Path College, USA) When students begin their first online course, they often are anxious about beginning the new experience. Research has proven that orientations are an important part of preparing new students with information they need to be successful; online learners are no exception to this. In order for online students to be ready for their online course experience, they need to be prepared with the technical and academic skills they need to succeed. Students benefit from learning to use the LMS and other systems they will use in their course. They also need to learn strategies that are beneficial in the online learning environment such as time management skills and understanding the importance of being a self-motivated learner. To meet the needs of online learners at Bay Path College, the Center for Online Learning developed a required student orientation in 2007. Over time the orientation has been revised to meet the changing needs of students and the technology used by the College in delivering online course content. Currently, the required EXT099 Introduction to Online Learning orientation course is an asynchronous, self-paced, facilitated, online orientation session delivered through the College's Canvas LMS. This orientation is facilitated by the College's Online Student Support Coordinator who also serves as the first point of contact on campus for online students, most of whom are adult learners, when they have questions about technology, online learning concerns, or where to go to obtain other assistance on campus. The Online Student Support Coordinator is available to all online students throughout their time at the College. She assists faculty in reaching out to students who are not fully participating in their course, offers LMSrelated technical support, and helps encourage students who may be encountering challenges with their level of motivation or confidence in their abilities as an online student. Surveys conducted throughout the past few years have demonstrated that the orientation has provided very positive results in helping students feel prepared for their online courses, and that students value the availability of the ongoing support that is provided for them. These services are especially beneficial to adult learners because many of them are returning to school after a number of years and in addition to learning how to be a student again, they are faced with learning the technologies used in online courses. The Center for Online Learning conducted a study in the fall 2012 semester in which students were given an option of participating in the current version of the EXT099 course or a Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 339 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support synchronous online version held through Adobe Connect and focusing on the same learning outcomes as the asynchronous session. The study sought to determine students' feelings of preparedness following their chosen orientation course, their feelings of success following their first online course, their perceptions of the value of various components of the orientation, and whether there was a difference in the level of preparedness and success between the two orientation groups. The study yielded results that indicated that students in both populations felt highly prepared for their online course, and that orientation components such as learning to use the LMS and the availability of assistance from their facilitator were important in helping the students feel prepared to be successful. This presentation will provide an overview of Bay Path's EXT099 orientation course and support services for online learners. Results from the study, including students' perceptions of what components of an orientation course they value and their thoughts on synchronous versus asynchronous orientation options, will be shared. Live-polls will be used to assess what attendees are doing at their own institutions to support and prepare online learners. Open discussion will encourage attendees to share their experiences of what has and has not worked well at their institutions. Attendees will have the opportunity to learn from the presenter's experience as well as from other attendees at the session. Online Near-Peer Helps Students Persevere Michelle Maus (Tiffin University, USA) Stacie Nowak (Tiffin University, USA) Steven Borawski, Jr. (Tiffin University, USA) Sami Mejri (Tiffin University, USA) John Majoy (Tiffin University, USA) Context: Supplemental Instruction (SI) was developed in 1973 by Dr. Deanna Martin at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. SI is an academic support program that uses peerfacilitated study sessions in an effort to promote student success in historically difficult courses. SI sessions are regularly-scheduled, informal study sessions in which students learn how to incorporate their knowledge of the course content. The sessions are facilitated by SI Leaders, students who have previously done well in the course (The supplemental instruction, 2006). Tiffin University began discussions concerning OSI in Fall of 2012. Tiffin University OSI session began in June of 2013, during the second summer term. Definition of Problem: Tiffin University has a full-time staff of professionally trained, nationally certified tutors that help new students in lower level classes cope and adapt to the online environment. Despite diligent efforts, several student needs were not being addressed. The most important need is in the upper level classes for which tutoring services are not available. In addition, much like other online programs Tiffin University faced challenges building interconnections and community amongst online students. These two problems have been addressed by adopting an Online Supplemental Instruction program (OSI). OSI was developed to support student success in upper level courses, as well as, enhance student engagement with one another in an online environment. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 340 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support Goals of Presentation/Objectives:    Provide a description and highlight the need for OSI. Present an online model of SI, with an actual experience of an OSI session, concerning both its contents and application. Evaluate and analyze successes achieved, obstacles discovered, and methods to mitigate gaps between actual and preferred status. Outcomes:  Participants will be able to distinguish the unique characteristics and need for OSI.  Participants will leave with the tools necessary to reconstruct the model of OSI concerning the elements of appointment, training, monitoring, and evaluation.  Training process and documents, methods of promoting OSI, in addition to, evaluation procedures will be available for download.  Gain insights on methodologies that can help improve student success and retention. Audience Involvement: The audience will observe a mock OSI session. Individuals will play the parts of students and will be led through a session by an OSI Leader. Questions will be addressed at the end of the information session. Theory: With the introduction of online learning as an option for higher learning, came a shift in the way that students are required to learn (McGuire, 2006). According to McGuire (2006), institutions of higher education began to transform themselves from teacher-centered to learnercentered institutions (p.4). As students enter into a learner-centered learning environment, their success is dependent upon their ability to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate. OSI can play a vital role in this process by using a near-peer model that teaches students how to enhance higher-level thinking skills. The value of OSI is supported by some of the most accepted learning theories including the Behavioral Learning Theory, Cognitive Developmental Theory, Social Interdependence Theory, and Interceptive/Critical Theory (The supplemental instruction, 2006). Approach: OSI Leaders meet with the faculty member, schedule and conduct OSI sessions, read through the material posted within the course, monitor a general questions forum, and connect with the OSI Supervisor for additional guidance and training. OSI is promoted throughout the online course via the use of class announcements, video, and emails. Tiffin University has developed a two week training course for OSI Leaders involving the use of technology, such as Adobe Connect, and an assortment of OSI session strategies. Detailed use of this technological tool will be highlighted for participants. The OSI Leader is evaluated both throughout and after the course. Evaluation processes depict the continual work-in-progress endeavor. A postmortem is performed concerning the entire OSI process, identifying successes, deficiencies, lessons learned, and plans for improvement. Results: To evaluate the effectiveness of this initiative, an array of descriptive and inferential statistics will be used to present a thorough analysis indicating the impact of OSI. Since online college students often face the issue of isolation from fellow students the hope is that this method of near peer interaction will increase student’s interconnectedness. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 341 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support References: McGuire, S. (2006). The impact of supplemental instruction on teaching students "how" to learn. New Directions For Teaching And Learning, (106), 3-10. The supplemental instruction: Supervisor manual. (2006). Kansas City, MO: The University of Missouri-Kansas City. Embedding Academic Support Within Online Courses: Creative Possibilities for Supporting Learners Theresa Vamvalis (SUNY Empire State College, USA) Context SUNY Empire State College delivers high quality, affordable undergraduate degree programs to learners across New York State and the country. The College serves over 10,000 non-traditional adult and military learners through its on-line program alone. The vast majority of the college's online courses are asynchronous, with class sizes limited to approximately 22 students to ensure high levels of interaction between the students and with the course instructor. Due to the nature of the student population served by SUNY Empire State College (ESC), many learners come to the college in need of academic skill development and/or refinement as they begin or continue their college career online. As with most non-traditional populations, the typical ESC student often benefits from some level of formal academic assistance in some/all of the following areas: primary academic skills (effective academic reading, writing, and quantitative literacy skills); secondary academic skills (time management, effective study habits and learning strategies, understanding learning styles, information literacy, computer literacy, critical thinking). These primary and secondary academic skills are especially critical for learners to possess as they engage in a self-directed educational environment like online learning. Problem Delivering effective academic support services to students most in need of such assistance can be challenging for many online learning programs. In many cases, online providers are left to depend on traditional structures and approaches for academic support service delivery to meet their online learners' needs. Moreover, online students are expected to leave their course space to take advantage of tutoring, skill improvement workshops, and other study skill building activities that directly influence progression and persistence in online studies. The detachment between the online course space and the academic support service contributes to many learners getting off pace with their courses, which decreases the likelihood of course completion. These traditional "stand-alone" models and approaches to academic support delivery are not serving the diverse needs of our online learners and new structures are needed to support the ever-evolving online learner population. Furthermore, online faculty is faced with additional challenges as they attempt to support those online students' with academic skills in need of refinement. Mechanisms that identify students in need of assistance as soon as problems arise AND resources built-in to the actual course space that allow faculty to provide timely, on-demand solutions may seem too costly or complicated to Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 342 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support create, even when such approaches to academic skill development have shown to increase online course outcome, persistence, and retention rates. Approach ESC has been experimenting with creative approaches for embedding what were once traditional academic support resources, material and services into the online course space. Three core approaches have shown tremendous promise thus far: embedding content tutors and skills coaches; embedding on-demand self-paced learning resources; and embedding academic support early alerts. Embedding content tutors and coaches - A tutor or skills coach is placed within high-need, low completion courses from the first day of the term. Students are able to build a rapport with their embedded tutor/coach, who is following along in the course, participating in course discussions, and engaging in course activities from the course outset. After establishing a rapport with the tutor/coach, students are more likely to ask for help when problems arise. The embedded tutor/coach is also available to assist with low level questions and concerns unrelated to the course content, as well as supplemental course materials (eResources, course software, etc.), freeing the instructor from these tasks. Embedding on-demand self-paced learning resources - In support of the college's commitment to Open Educational Resources, more and more studies are embedded with audio, video, and/or multimedia resources to help student with academic and non-academic aspects of their online course. For example, students struggling with time management have immediate access to a selfpaced tutorial from within the actual course space, rather than needing to engage with these resources external to the learning environment. Embedding academic support early alerts - Multiple channels have been created within the online course space that allow students to connect with the proper support service from within the LMS and course space. Both manual and automated alert functions have allowed ESC to more quickly respond to students who are struggling with course content or who are off pace from the rest of the students in the online study. Additionally, faculty can raise an alert within their online course that notifies entities outside the LMS of student issues, problems, and frequent absences. Results Initial data suggests that each of these embedded academic support approaches are improving course completion rates, including increases in studies known to have lower than average completion rates nationally (i.e. statistics, math, sciences, etc.). Student feedback indicates high satisfaction with the embedded services, materials and resources when they are made available within the actual course space. The feedback also suggests that students are more likely to utilize academic support materials, resources, or services when they are available within the course space, as opposed to accessing this same support outside the study. Additionally, student feedback suggests that the average student has a higher awareness of the wide range of academic support available to them during their online educational career, even if they are not accessing or utilizing these supports in the current term. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 343 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support Faculty feedback suggests that the embedded approaches are decreases their time spent on nonteaching activities and academic skill development activities (i.e. assisting students with time management). Faculty are also reporting decreases in the time between identifying a student with an issue and connecting them with a corresponding academic support activity. Further analysis is examining specific grade distributions, outcomes, persistence and reenrollment rates, and overall completion rates of students in courses with and without embedded academic supports. This presentation will explore the process ESC took in embedding its academic support services, resources, and structures into its online courses. Organizational, structural, and systems considerations will be discussed with participants, as well as best practices for initiating an embedded academic support will be shared as well. Measuring and Supporting Success with an Online Readiness Center Kathryn Green (Capella University, USA) Incoming students at Capella University participate in an integrated onboarding package that provides a coherent, effective, personalized, positive experience for new learners. This extensive onboarding ecosystem addresses problem areas before and during orientation, so that programspecific first courses can ensure a more focused first quarter. A balance of human intervention and technology-based personalization is the foundation for Capella's onboarding ecosystem, which includes creating relationships with enrollment and advising staff, a variety of assessments which creates multiple opportunities for measurement, and courseroom-based orientation. One aspect of Capella's onboarding process is the online Readiness Center. Here, users are evaluated on 4-9 specific areas of readiness. Upon completion of each assessment, users receive results, recommendations based on a user's "score," practice areas - featuring scaffolding knowledge - to work through the recommendations, and then a final self-assessment to measure perception of knowledge. The specific areas of readiness assessed in the Readiness Center include learning online, self-management, and academic strategies. Future topics include academic honesty, licensure requirements for specific degree programs, career development, APA use, and more. The Readiness Center allows Capella the opportunity to collect data from both incoming and current students. Resulting metrics - completion, status, outcomes, and recommendations - are made visible to support staff, orientation facilitators, and faculty. With this data, Capella is able to create an in-depth profile of its students. The university also has long-term goals for this data, and we hope to examine the relationships between the metrics to persistence and overall student success. The personalization offered through the Readiness Center is three-fold: one, users are presented with recommendations to build skills based on the results of the self-assessment; two, staff members view the analytics and are therefore better equipped to engage with students based on their levels of readiness and resources completed, plus offer more support if needed; and three, if prospective students assess themselves on our public-facing university website, once enrolled, they can have their data moved into the student-facing Readiness Center. Newly enrolled Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 344 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support students participate in the site as part of their orientation, so importing their scores can decrease their courseroom orientation time. This information session will include a demonstration of the two - public- and student-facing Readiness Center platforms. Participants in this session will understand how Capella measures readiness used in an online system, see differentiated displays of the platform, examine the data output and its utilization, and learn how assessments of readiness can be an essential part of an onboarding system based on successful student outcomes. Creating a Learner-centered Orientation to Support Success in Online Courses Marc Peretz (Saginaw Valley State University, USA) Poonam Kumar (Saginaw Valley State University, USA) Session Description: In United States student enrollment in online and hybrid courses has increased significantly in the past decade. A recent report by Sloan-C states that the number of students taking at least one online course continues to increase and currently there are approximately 6.7 million students taking at least one online course. While online education has provided increased access, flexibility and convenience to students enrolled in these courses, it has also raised a major concern about high drop out and failure rates. Completion and success rates of students enrolled in online courses continue to be lower than students enrolled in face-to-face courses. Therefore, student success and student retention in these courses has become an important initiative for many institutions that offer online courses. One of the biggest challenges that students face in an online or hybrid learning environment is that they lack an understanding of how this learning environment differs from a traditional faceto-face course. Not only they are not aware of the differences in the learning environments, they do not have the skills to learn effectively in online and hybrid courses. Research on student retention and success in online courses, suggests that students need to be prepared to learn in online and hybrid courses. Several years of research has identified skills that are critical for students to be successful in online and hybrid courses. This presentation describes the development and implementation of an orientation project to help prepare students for effectively learning in online and hybrid courses. The context is a regional mid-size university (Saginaw Valley State University) with an enrollment of more than 10,000 students. At Saginaw Valley State University we started offering online and hybrid courses in 2007 and did a survey of student and faculty satisfaction in 2010. The results of the survey indicated a need to better prepare our students for online and hybrid classes. The project planning started in Summer 2012 and the committee members decided to create an orientation that would be specifically tailored towards our student population. We decided to create an orientation that would be student-centered in which a student would present the orientation in an informal, peerto-peer conversational style. The committee felt that the students are more likely to listen to and connect with a peer rather than a faculty/ staff member. The orientation was developed based on current research and best practices on how to better prepare students for online/ hybrid learning. The video orientation included a basic overview of the learning management system and Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 345 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support provided tips on how to be an effective learner in an online and hybrid classroom. The orientation video was piloted in May, 2013 and will be implemented starting in Fall, 2013. The complete student orientation to online and hybrid learning includes three components: readiness survey, orientation video and preview of a demo online course. Student survey results will be shared with attendees as well as tools, tips and techniques used. Presenters will also share plans for implementing the orientation at different levels. Attendees will walk away with a variety of ideas on how to develop and implement student orientation at their own institution. Goals: To discuss evidence-based practices that support students' academic success in online and hybrid courses To share the experiences of developing and implementing a student-centered orientation to support student success in online and hybrid courses To share strategies for student success based on our implementation experience A Model for Applying Proactive Advising Strategies with Faculty and Staff Jennifer Varney (Southern New Hampshire University, USA) In this session the presenter will share a model of collaboration between academics and advising that is based on Proactive Advising theory. This advising theory is a highly interactive, high touch model that can be successfully used between academic leadership and academic advisors, resulting in improved student success and a comprehensive, multi-point support system for both students and adjunct faculty. Goals of this session include: 1. Demonstration of the model, including a description of how the typically student facing model has been successfully used between academics and advising. 2. Sharing examples of how the model has been successfully implemented, including course redesign, third party vendor integration and support for adjunct faculty. 3. Articulation of the results experienced through use of this model. Does an Online Orientation Impact Student Retention and Performance in Online Courses? Paul Koehnke (Central Piedmont Community College, USA) In spite of the tremendous growth and an option which allows greater flexibility for students to pursue a higher education, certain barriers contribute to higher attrition rates and lower student performance in the online environment. Poor or inefficient technology skills, a lack of student readiness, and misaligned course expectations are barriers that affect student success in online courses. It is critical that community college educators develop practices that seek to prepare Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 346 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support students for the challenges of online learning with a goal of improving online student retention and performance. Current research suggests that an online orientation may increase student success and course completion. This quantitative study used collaborative action research to plan and implement an intervention targeting a group of online students in six online course sections who were asked to complete an online orientation to determine the orientation's impact at the research site. Student grades and retention metrics of the sample group who were asked to complete the online orientation were compared to the data from a control group who did not complete the orientation. The presentation goals are: 1. To provide the context, problem and purpose of the research Study. 2. To introduce the action research methodology used to plan and implement an intervention targeting a group of online students. 3. To reveal the results and outcomes of the quantitative study. Additionally, participants will be able to make judgments about the similarity to their own situation so that the outcomes can be applied. Don’t Drop the Baton! Building a Foundation for Success Through Student Services for Online Learners Ruth Newberry (Duquesne University, USA) Kate DeLuca (Duquesne University, USA) Retaining students in distance education programs requires institutions to field a strategically aligned, cross-unit relay team able to provide streamlined and effective services to online learners throughout the student's academic lifespan (applicant to alumni). If the baton pass fails at any one hand-off, the online learner becomes frustrated, distracted, or leaves, and the retention race is lost! In a highly competitive marketplace in which students have a "universe of opportunities" for how they obtain their education and advance their careers, the ability to retain students is one "race" traditional institutions like Duquesne University cannot afford to lose. As a private, Catholic, liberal arts, doctoral research and urban university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with a 10,000 FTE and ecumenical student-centric mission ("we serve God by serving students"), Duquesne University recently committed to formalizing its distance education offerings at the graduate level and online learning opportunities for undergraduates. Fully committed to student success for on-campus students, it initiated an examination of the services necessary for online students to be successful learners. As Duquesne found out, retaining distance students goes beyond offering "equivalent" services to online learners; it requires a holistic, networked and leveraged use of existing technologies, and institutional commitment by faculty and student support staff to what we call C.O.M.F.O.R.T.: • • C = a well-developed communication plan for students, faculty, and support staff; O = orientations (plural!) for students and faculty; Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 347 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support • • • • • M = the creation and maintenance of student centered policies for student's success; F = comprehensive feedback and assessment to improve advising, support and academic services; O = various outreach initiatives to students; R = easily accessible learner-focused academic and support resources; T = a team based approach. We will begin the session with a wireless or hand-held clicker poll (our vendor will provide 90 clickers). We will present five (5) critical, core services derived from Duquesne University's own assessment of support services, asking the audience to evaluate their own institution on these services. From this starting point, both for Duquesne and our audience, we will use these five services to describe how we prioritized, evaluated, targeted, and enhanced university, academic, advising, social - career, and program level "support services." We project the audience poll will reveal an "unevenness" in regard to effectiveness of student services similar to our initial assessment at Duquesne. [We are considering making this "poll" available to conference participants via the conference twitter and Facebook.] Next, using Prezi we will display our "Start to Finish Student Roadmap" to visually relate the online learner's engagement with the various "support services" the institution and academic program require and/or might be needed for success. With input from many units across campus, this "student roadmap" highlights what "services" exist and in what form (only f2f?), what assumptions are made about the student's ability to receive "services" (they can call!), when the student is required and/or may need these services (must complete before enrolled), and most important, what happens to the student's progress and learning when the engagement is not timely, absent, or unsatisfactory (cannot begin / complete coursework). [We will poll the audience to see if they have developed a similar document tracing the student's progression from applicant to degree completion and their student service needs.] As we engage the audience in an analysis of the five (5) services, we will contextualize each within Duquesne's need to • • • • balance cost, risks, and scalability with requirements for quality, student and faculty satisfaction, and current resources, and value in efficiencies and focus on learning to the retained student and benefits, or the ROI, to the program and institution. Our analysis is informed by Sloan's 5 Pillars of Program Quality and our research on effective support services. Duquesne's constraints (e.g., budget, personnel, technology, and decentralized structure) will ring true for many in the audience. [We will add an annotated bibliography of the most helpful resources to presentation resources.] Included also will be short videos of student and faculty perspectives on the impact these services have on student success. As we share the lessons we learned in developing the C.O.M.F.O.R.T. model and the rubric used to evaluate it, we will identify • • who were major stakeholders, which units had the most difficulty (and why) servicing online students, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 348 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support • • what technologies were leveraged and how, and what "professional development" and /or "training" was needed. Our C.O.M.F.O.R.T. model involved changing institutional culture and perceptions, as much as it required changes in process and tasks. We will conclude by polling the audience to capture their perception of the feasibility of the implementation of our proposed model at their institution. The goals and outcomes for this session include, but are not limited to (1)elevating the issue and necessity of expanding the definition of "Student Support Services" given the impact these services (or lack of) have on the online learner's ability to be successful; (2) demonstrating how a networked, holistic team establishes better communication and a collaborative partnership between academic services and support services that is student-centric; (3) describing how the same demands for rigor and quality in academics can be applied to student services and how rubrics used to evaluate academic rigor and instructional quality and delivery can be adopted to student services; and most important, (4) providing the audience with a tool-kit (surveys, maps, approaches, strategies) they can take and adapt to their institutions, a model for decision-making, and a rubric for assessment. By aligning retention efforts with the "services" online learners need to be successful from applicant to student to alumni, traditionally defined Student Services expands its "universe" to find new opportunities. Duquesne's holistic, team-based approach ensures the online learner's experience leads to successful degree-completion (crossing the finish line) and establishes a long-term and valued relationship with the institution (the marathon) that results in improved ROI for both the student and the institution. Beyond Skin Deep: Diversity Awareness and Acceptance in Online Courses Angela Velez-Solic (Indiana University Northwest, USA) When instructors think about learner diversity, they might immediately think of country of origin or the race of the students. Rarely do people consider what they cannot see as part of a student's cultural and personal identity. Even though online courses provide anonymity of one's nationality or color, it does provide a venue for self-expression and exposure because of the lack of visual representation of the self. Instructors need to be keenly aware of issues that surround student diversity and the workshop will highlight areas of awareness such as:  Race  Ethnicity  Country of origin (and current residence)  Religion/faith  Sexual identity  Ability/disability Goals: Explore the ways in which instructors can show acceptance of and appreciation for Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 349 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support student diversity, provide opportunities for exposure and self-disclosure, and ensure that all students feel safe to express themselves. Attendees will leave with specific strategies to meet these goals in any type of online or blended classroom. Information Literacy Improves Student Achievement: Increasing GPAs, Making an Impact! Anita Norton (Johns Hopkins University and Excelsior College Library, USA) The role of librarians is always evolving while accountability and value continue to be paramount in the services offered by librarians. The study discusses the impact of information literacy skills on student achievement at an accredited online college. Introducing foundational information literacy skills to adult leaders through the use of multimedia, addressing a variety of learning styles and self-assessment has proven to increase academic achievement. Academic data from the college has linked cumulative and overall grade point average together, demonstrating that teaching students critical thinking skills leads to a higher GPA over students who are not exposed to this type of content. This evidence supports librarians' efforts to embed these skills throughout the curriculum and early in the student's academic career. This data affirms that this robust, in depth online information literacy course (INL102) has increased the grade point average of students who take this course created for Excelsior College; and take the course early in their academic careers. The grade point average of students shows an increase in both the cumulative and overall grade point average over a five year span. Students taking this course were compared to students who transferred the course from other institutions or had no formal training in these skills and each year the overall GPA for students taking the INL course was higher. The results indicated that students who take the Excelsior INL course graduate with a significantly higher Excelsior GPA than students who transfer in the requirement or did not complete an information literacy course. However, students who have had some formal information literacy training (course) had a higher GPA than those who did not. The data was compiled from the pattern analysis of three groups of students from a sample of graduates: those who had taken the INL course at Excelsior College: IL course transferred from other institutions; students who had no previous information literacy training. Datasets were compiled of graduates cumulative and overall GPA s from 2008-2012. Librarians at Johns Hopkins University created and maintain the, INL102 Information Literacy course at Excelsior College. This self-paced, online information literacy course delves in-depth to: defining information literacy; selecting information, evaluating information; searching for resources; and legal and ethical use. Course content is presented through various multimedia such as images, audio, and videos. The course was revised in 2010 to be less textual and more engaging. All of the course content is contained in the Blackboard learning management system. We concentrated on enriching the student experience by adding to the course with audio, such as reading of the course objectives as well as the having textual form and embedding videos to further explain the concepts. Exercises were integrated to apply the different skills. Selfassessments allow the student to determine their own level of understanding. There are formal Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 350 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support assessments in each module and a culminating final exam. Librarians are available to answer student questions about the course. Initially the librarians worked closely with the Assessment unit to insure reliability and validity of all assessments. The results also indicate students who completed the course early in the program are more likely to graduate with a higher GPA. Data suggests that graduates completing the Excelsior College course tend to have a higher GPA upon graduation and in three of those years difference was significant. The significant difference in the GPAs of the students taking the Excelsior information literacy course may be attributed to the revisions with the additions of more multimedia, exercises and the inclusion of Excelsior specific content, in some areas. Graduates in general who complete some type of information literacy, whether at Excelsior or elsewhere tend to graduate with a higher overall GPA than those who have not had this training. The data indicates that the skills that were covered in the course are crucial to online adult learners and likely enhance the ability of these students to do well in additional courses and be able to successfully complete their degree program. These finding provide an impetus that illustrate the integral role that librarians have in student success. Advocating the importance of information fluency and its role in education allows for integration across the curriculum. Demonstrating the value of linking information skills to curriculum sets the stage to have fresh conversations with faculty about ways to further embed curriculum in other courses and various points across curriculum that makes sense for student learning and life-long learning. Goals: Help participants think about how the value of librarians and information literacy programs can be demonstrated. Demonstrate how an improved GPA is linked to an information literacy course showing a profound impact on adult learner achievement. Mental Health Service Online in Higher Education Aaron Thomas (University of Florida, USA) One of the less obvious but essential components of student support in higher education is the offering of mental counseling and wellness services for students who have mental health issues often aggravated by academic life. Presently, colleges and universities are offering effective mental health services to on campus students but have not yet implemented online mental health services conducted by licensed professionals for either on campus or fully online students. Few schools have utilized licensed clinical mental health care professionals because of the stringent requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, frequently abbreviated as HIPAA. As is evident from the present state of affairs, there is a clear bifurcation of services with fully online students receiving far less support than the on campus counterparts in terms of mental health services. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 351 Track 6: Student Services and Learner Support To address this inequality and to provide greater access for all students, the University of Florida initiated the development of a fully online and clinician guided stress and anxiety therapy program. The purpose of this presentation is to discuss the challenges both legally and logistically associated with the implementation of this program. In addition, the presentation will outline the effectiveness of the program from a pilot from the summer of 2013. Topics will include HIPPA compliance, instructional design challenges, and security measures. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 352 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Best in Track Award Leveraging Mobile Devices to Engage Students and Improve Student Outcomes: Evidence From Hospitality Education Amy Gregory (University of Central Florida, USA) This presentation describes the use of a cloud-based student engagement platform that utilizes student-owned mobile devices in both traditional classrooms as well as large (100 enrollment) mixed-mode course offerings. Specifically, the presentation demonstrates integration of Bloom's Taxonomy for teaching, learning, and assessing. In addition, this presentation will discuss pedagogical practices and lessons-learned related to how to engage students both in and out of class on the mobile devices they love to use. The ubiquitous availability of student-owned mobile devices provides instructors with an opportunity to engage and assess students in ways that their predecessors could only imagine. Using a new generation of cloud-based student engagement platforms, mobile devices can be used to deliver assessments, verify content understanding, and provide analytics on progress towards student learning outcomes. When combined with the Internet, mobile devices have the potential to provide instructors with advanced instructional design capabilities for any class configuration - traditional, hybrid, online or remote learners. Despite the advantages mobile technology can bring in advancing instructional methodologies that engage today's digital-savvy students, many instructors fear the consequences of allowing student's to actively use their mobile devices in classroom settings. In this session, learn how Dr. Amy Gregory, from the University of Central Florida's (UCF) Rosen College of Hospitality Management, deployed Via Response in her classroom and transitioned from traditional instructional design practices to interactive student engagement methodologies using mobile devices. Via Response is a cloud-based student engagement platform that provides synchronous and asynchronous assessments capabilities, a suite of student engagement tools, as well as analytical data on overall student performance. She will share insights and best practices on how to be successful using mobile devices to increase student engagement and content retention to improve overall performance. UCF's Rosen College of Hospitality Management has over 3,000 students enrolled in classes that are held in a state-of-the-art campus located in the heart of Orlando's hospitality and tourism center. The Rosen School campus is a state-of-the-art facility - a 159,000 sq/ft campus that is the largest facility ever built for hospitality management education. Dr. Gregory has been a faculty member of the Rosen College of Hospitality Management since 2005. She implemented Via Response's cloud-based student engagement platform in her Resort Management and Principals of Timeshare courses. Both were live-lecture classes, with between 50-100 students in each course. In addition, UCF's College of Business Administration (10,000 enrolled students) utilizes Via Response in a variety of courses, including two very large hybrid courses with over 1,500 students participating simultaneously via either classroom-based live-lecture or through a video lecture-capture system. Dr. Gregory and her colleagues in the UCF College of Business Administration all found significant improvements in both student engagement and overall student performance as a result of the adoption of Via Response. Dr. Gregory will share: Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 353 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments • • • • Her approach to getting past the fear of allowing students to use devices in her classes was to use synchronous assessments and engagement tools to facilitate in-class discussions. Metrics on how homework assessments delivered to students on their own mobile devices helped improve content retention throughout the term. Her student's feedback to using Via's student response platform The improvements to overall student performance after integrating ViaCase studies and student performance improvements from her colleagues usage of Via Response in very large, hybrid configurations. Facebook Communities: Building Online Community and Increasing Retention Among Online Students Amanda Rockinson-Szapkiw (Liberty University, USA) In the online environment, researchers have documented that feelings of isolation and low levels of interaction with faculty and peers lead to the decision to drop out (Ali & Kohun, 2006; Golde, 2005; Hackman & Walker, 1990; Olgren, 2004; The New Media Consortium, 2006). Although the decision to withdrawal or persist is complex in nature, researchers have demonstrated that integration into the university and a sense of connectedness are key contributors to this decision. In the online environment, Rovai (2002) explained that sense of community is a foundational factor influencing retention. He stated, "Online learners who have a stronger sense of community ... should feel less isolated and have greater satisfaction with their academic programs, thereby resulting in fewer dropouts" (p. 328). Student satisfaction is one of the five pillars identified by the Sloan Consortium for effective online learning program development (Moore, 2005) and student satisfaction is undergirded by a sense of belonging to an academic community (Overbaugh & Nickel, 2011, p. 165). Early research defined a generalized sense of community as relating to relationships that reflect students' spirit, trust, safety, and interdependence (McMillan & Chavis, 1986). Hall (1996) noted that a sense of community might be very different from one setting to another suggesting that the construct of sense of community is setting specific. Overbaugh and Nickel (2011) concurred that, "underlying the purported need for academic community in online learning is the notion that traditional, or face-to-face, courses have inherent elements that will lead to some level of community, whereas online course do not" (p. 165). This suggests that there are inherent elements of the physical environment that foster community; however, opportunities to development a sense of community in an online setting need to be different from that implemented in the face-to-face environment and intentional, especially on the part of the faculty and university, to overcome the environment deficiencies (Overbaugh & Nickel, 2011; Rovai, Whiting, & Lucking, 2004, p. 267). Research is still needed to inform these intentional practices. What are the tools that facilitate community? How can these tools be used to facilitate community? are questions still being explored. With the increased adoption of computer mediated communication tools (Pempek, Yermolayeva, & Calvert, 2009), researchers have become interested in examining the use of computer mediated-communication technologies, specifically social Networking technologies, as a means Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 354 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments for supporting community and university integration among student outside of the classroom. Heiberger and Harper (2008) and HERI (2007) found positive relationships between undergraduate, residential students' social Networking use and university integration. The higher percentage of time a student spent social Networking, the more time the student spent engaging in on campus activities and organizations. Further, HERI (2007) reported that the higher frequent social networking users had stronger connections to their on campus peers offline. These studies have been limited and have primary focused on residential, undergraduate students. However, research has shown that online graduate students have a desire to occasionally engage in interactions outside the classroom environment with other students and faculty informally such as in online town hall meeting and electronic bulletin board (Grooms, 2003). Thus, more research is needed in this area. As such, this studied examined the use of university and student initiated communities hosted via social networking technology, Facebook, and their ability to support online graduate students' sense of connectedness to each other and the university faculty. Two two-way between groups analysis of variances (ANOVAs) were used to analyze the data. The goal of the first analysis was to determine if students (n = 136) sense of connectedness differed based on their self-reported interaction with the university provided Facebook page (yes, no) and their self- reported interaction with their peers outside of the classroom (yes, no). The second analysis focused on the students who reported interacting with their peers outside of the classroom (n = 92); the purpose of the analysis was to determine if the frequency of peer interaction (Daily/ Weekly or Monthly) and type of medium used for interaction (phone, e-mail, or web-based technologies) influenced students' sense of student-to-student connectedness. This presentation will review the results of this analysis and discuss its implications for universities with online programs. Participants will come away with strategies to encourage students to build their own communities via social networking sites apart from the university directed site. Participants will also watch a demonstration of how the university Facebook page for this study was set up and how it has used to create community among online graduate students. As a result, they will learn strategies for setting up and using social networking sites at their own universities to increase community and, ultimately, influence retention. The Power of xAPI Nick Washburn (Riptide Software, Inc., USA) Jhorlin DeArmas (Riptide Software, Inc., USA) Riptide will engage with a live demonstration of the latest technology around, the successor to SCORM, the Experience API (xAPI) and Learning Record Store (LRS). The practical application of delivering quizzes and getting immediate graded results in a live classroom will be a key highlight. Attendees are encouraged to use their tablet or smartphone during this presentation. Links to case studies of Riptide e-learning clients will be discussed and available including the ability to view live dashboard results. Presenters will discuss Riptide Elements product development lessons learned and roadmap, and briefly touch on Riptide involvement with the organizations and workgroups that are creating the next generation learning standards; Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) xAPI workgroup and Aviation Industry Computer Based Training (CBT) Committee (AICC aka CMI5) workgroup. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 355 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Virtualization vs. Simulation for Hands-on Lab in Online IT Courses: Student Satisfactions Survey Jeff Tjiputra (University of Maryland University College, USA) Many college level IT courses still depend on the students having hands-on experiences using certain systems or software. In a traditional face-to-face course, this means that the course will be offered in a computer lab. When offering the same course in an online format, some faculty depends on virtualization technology or simulation software to achieve the same results. The presenter is the Academic Director for Computer Networks & Security (CMIT) and Cyber security (CSIA) programs at University of Maryland University College (UMUC). Today, UMUC is the largest public university in the U.S. with over 90,000 students. Most of UMUC's courses are offered as web courses with students from All over the world. Many of UMUC students are also affiliated with the U.S. military. Some of them are taking courses while stationed at a military base which may complicate their access to computer equipment. Two types of courses will be in the study: CMIT and CSIA. CMIT courses help prepare students to take IT certifications while CSIA courses covers various cyber security-related topics. In most of these courses, the hands-on component plays a very critical role in student learning. In 2011, over 400 CMIT and CSIA online sections are offered. In early 2012, when Dr. Tjiputra is appointed the Academic Director for the Cyber security program (he was previously only overseeing the Computer Networks and Security program), he came across one CMIT and one CSIA courses that were covering the same content area. CMIT 320 and CSIA 454 were both covering the concepts that are aligned with the CompTIA Security+ certification. The courses were using two different Security+ certification textbooks. Both courses also have a software component to allow students some hands-on activities. CMIT 320 was using a simulation software called LabSim from Test Out Inc., while CSIA 454 was using a virtualization software called Lab Connections from Cengage Learning. Because of the structure of the UMUC's Cyber security program, there are subset of students who took just CMIT 320, who took just CSIA 454 or who took both courses. And for those taking both courses, half of them took CMIT 320 first before CSIA 454. In Fall 2012 a study was conducted to compare the student's experience in both courses. Students are asked their opinion on which technology worked better for them and provide a better learning experience. A total of 93 responses were received and the results of the analysis will be shared during this session. Developing an Open Badging Framework for Metaliteracy Jenna Hecker (University at Albany, NY) Michele Forte (SUNY Empire State College, NY) Context: With a rapidly shifting information landscape, teachers struggle to at once remediate students for who digital literacy is a struggle, and maintain the interest of students for whom this knowledge Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 356 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments more easily arises. Furthermore, higher education is under broad brush criticism for not preparing graduates for the 21st century workplace. "Employers say many of their newly graduated hires do not arrive with critical skills. In a 2011 survey of 1,000 employers in the United States, 39 per cent said higher education was doing an "only fair" or "poor" job of preparing students for the workplace. In particular, the employers said graduates underperformed in problem-solving and written skills, and abilities such as social intelligence and adaptive thinking," writes Erin Anderssen in The Learning Curve - Reinventing Higher Education, The Globe and Mail (10/6/2012). Badging is emerging as a method by which these gaps might be addressed. While the impetus for badging came from outside of traditional higher education, its engaging, social game-driven individual learning methods have proven to be groundbreaking for students at the K-12 and university levels. Badging allows educators to focus on specific skills as outcomes of educational endeavors. A concurrent interest in digital literacy is also emerging. As 21st century learners confront rapid shifts in the information landscape, educators must update and revise traditional information literacy. Metaliteracy offers a solution - its objectives address the changing cultural and educational landscape emphasizing the learner as both an information recipient and producer. Sponsored by the State University of New York (SUNY) an Innovative Instruction Technology Grant Grant brings these two ideas together. The Metaliteracy Learning Collaborative formed to develop a university, system-wide think tank and incubator for promoting metaliteracy and emerging frameworks for information literacy in open, adaptable, and collaborative learning environments. The Collaborative developed a system of badging to accommodate the learning needs of and engage students from a range of backgrounds and levels of understanding. Metaliteracy offers a skill set necessary in all walks of life, as it encompasses digital literacy, information literacy, visual literacy, social media literacy, and many other literacies vital to the success of the 21st century learner. The quests we create could extend to a variety of learners from cradle to career. This session will illustrate the steps we took to begin to develop a system of badging - and why we chose this innovative new method of presenting information to create a shared education resource across SUNY campuses. Because badge quests can be customized, students are engaged at their level of understanding and encouraged to advance on a self-chosen trajectory. The choices made by learners at various badging levels encourages metacognitive reflection, selfpaced, and scaled learning, and gives both teachers and students the tools to translate their knowledge from one setting to another Open source badging contributes to self-efficacy in both learners and educators alike, and prepares students for a global networked workplace. Problem: After researching various open frameworks for instruction and assessment, we chose to create a system of badging to track student achievement, and accommodate the individual needs of learners before, during, and after they attend our campuses. Badging systems, as learning environments, allow flexibility for delivering content across campuses, and provide positive curricular and pedagogic outcomes, while helping students to gain digital literacy skills. Using Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 357 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments BadgeOS and Mozilla open badging to create quests to engage students in lessons about being users, consumers, and creators of information we are collaboratively creating a system of badging. By using Mozilla Open Badging, we can create a system that allows students to begin earning badges in high school that can carry on to their college experience, and be presented to employers in a “badge briefcase” of skills and expertise. This gives students credit for prior knowledge, and allows them to work at their own pace to gain the skills to become successful learners, researchers, and employees. Students can choose badge quests to showcase particular skills, remediate a given portion of a lesson plan, or help them create a well-rounded educational identity on the web. The collaborative is working to create metaliteracy resources that will be available to all SUNY educators and students, creating a consistent, engaging, and outcomes-based training system. The system will benefit from its wide constituency. In this presentation, we will share resources and expertise, for creating significant components that will become self-sustaining. OERs will be provided and updated by interested librarians and faculty members, items in the repository can be tailored to particular purposes. We are engaging local high schools to develop badges to assist students before they ever enter University Halls. Our target audience for this session includes Instructional Developers, K-12 Teachers, Librarians, Transfer Coordinators, Academic Support Specialists, College Faculty, First year Experience Staff, and Writing Center Tutors. Approach: Through this presentation we hope to: • • • • Illustrate the use of badging in assisting learners from cradle to career Encourage and invite more contributions to Open Educational Resources and Badge Quests Create connections to help other University systems to create similar systems of badging to encourage outcomes-based assessment, and help learners develop metaliterate skills nationwide. Show an example of the badge quests we are developing through our grant collaborative, and allow learners to explore our developing badging project. Exploring MOOC Pedagogy Karen Swan (University of Illinois Springfield, USA) Scott Day (University of Illinois - Springfield, USA) Len Bogle (University of Illinois Springfield, USA) Daniel Matthews (University of Illinois Springfield, USA) It is widely acknowledged that the United States must better prepare students to compete in the knowledge economy and increase our nation's social and economic competitiveness. Complete to Compete: Common College Completion Metrics (National Governors Association, 2010) summarizes this national imperative calls for states to dramatically improve the number and rate of high school and college graduates. The report notes that 43 percent of the U.S. adult population has little or no post-secondary education, and that our nation has too many lowskilled adults unable to make a successful transition to the 21st-century workforce. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 358 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments On the other hand, Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce has predicted that there will be 46.8 million new jobs requiring some level of post-secondary education by 2018. At our current rate of producing individuals with post-secondary credentials, we will fall significantly short of meeting that need. Indeed, the U.S., which once ranked first in percentage of population with college degrees, now ranks 16th among industrialized countries (OECD Education at a Glance, 2011). To address the national imperative to increase the proportion of Americans with a postsecondary credential and help the nation remain globally competitive, it is essential that we grow the number of students who successfully pursue a post-secondary education. Yet cost and time are significant barriers to those segments of the population who typically have the lowest college attendance, namely first-generation and low-income students (Mortenson, 2009-2011) and working adults, some 37 million of whom have some college but no post-secondary credential (Lumina Foundation for Education, 2010). Moreover, a significant problem is scaling current institutional offerings to manage the delivery of the needed 50% more course offerings. One emerging technological solution to the problems of time, cost and scale is the Massively Open Online Course (MOOC). MOOCs have already proven that they can reach unprecedented numbers of informal learners by leveraging technology. Yet it remains to be seen whether and how those who could most benefit from open learning “such as young low-income adults” might best progress toward acquiring a post-secondary credential through this model. MOOCs are so new that they have not been subject to academic review for content, pedagogy, student engagement, and other variables that are the cornerstones of assuring quality. Currently, several institutions are experimenting with giving institutional credit for MOOC achievement (eg., Georgia Tech's MS in Computer Science and Jose State's partnership with Coursera) but these are not only still clearly experimental, but also institution specific. In a slightly more inclusive but still clearly experimental vein, the American Council on Education (ACE) is leveraging its leadership role in credit equivalency evaluation for assessing learning that has occurred outside the formal classroom to develop credit equivalencies for courses offered by multiple MOOC providers. With generous funding form the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, ACE is exploring the potential of MOOC credit for supporting the progression of at-risk adults toward post-secondary credential and degree completion. ACE will work with the University of Illinois Springfield's Center for Online Learning, Research, and Service (COLRS) the University and Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA) on this project which will include both research and implementation activities designed to identify and assess the potential and challenges of MOOCs. As part of this project, COLRS researchers have developed an instrument to characterize the pedagogy used in MOOCs so that they can then investigate the efficacy of varying pedagogical approaches in supporting both student engagement and learning in the short term, and progression toward credential and degree completion at traditional post-secondary institutions in the long terms, especially among at-risk populations. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 359 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments This presentation will review the MOOC Pedagogical Approaches instrument and share preliminary findings concerning pedagogical approaches and their efficacy. Audience interaction will be encouraged. Online Multi-media Branching Simulations to Promote Professional Learning Among PK12 Educational Leaders Eric Bernstein (University of Southern California, USA) The nature of the work principals and superintendents do is intricate and multi-faceted. They must be cognizant of restrictive budgets or adapt to the loss of resources while building and preserving relationships and trust with students, teachers, parents, and the community who rely on them. In this way, it is not just about the allocation of resources and organizational management, but it is also about the establishment of positive school climate and the development of people (Lytle, 2012; Morrison & Ecclestone, 2011; Wang & Bird, 2011). Beyond resources and relationships, school and district leaders are also faced with increasing demands for high quality instructional leadership and demonstrable outcomes under the scrutiny of government agencies, education advocates, and the general public. When considering all ofthese challenges, it becomes clear that educational leaders are often required "to do things they are largely unequipped to do" (Elmore, 2000, p. 2), raising key questions about how programs focused on pre-service and in-service development of principals and superintendents prepare them to deal with the complex nature of leading schools (Elmore, 2000; Lytle, 2012). The use of simulation as a mechanism for developing important skills has been effectively used for decades in medicine to train doctors to treat conditions and interact with patients in a safe, low-risk environment (Barrows, 1968). A review of current research indicates that simulations for educational purposes have largely been employed as a means to approaching problem-based learning and to hone decision-making skills under critical or challenging conditions. Similarly, others involved in the emerging field of "design-based research" (or the development of virtual learning environments or virtual worlds) have brought forth new considerations in learning science and situated learning through the use of simulations (Dede, 2005, p. 8). Within the last two years, a small amount of critical research has been published examining the impact of simulation use on critical thinking skills and cognitive processes. In the last twenty years, "many healthcare education programs use computer simulations as a supplement to their lectures to provide students with opportunities to apply their knowledge, skills, and critical thinking" (Rauen, 2001 as cited in Schüblová, 2008, p. 146). Gokhale (1996) suggested that integration of simulations into traditional teaching structures was a promising pedagogical approach to building students' ability to "transfer and apply the knowledge to real-world problems" (p. 6). Because of the multi-faceted nature of school leadership, there is a need for experiential approaches to preparing leaders that both build on research-based practices as well as the real-life experience and expertise of veteran principals and superintendents. Ackerman, Donaldson Jr., and Van Der Bogert (1996) "found that leaders who embrace open inquiry, the sharing of problems and solutions, and collective responsibility Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 360 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments foster creativity, resourcefulness, and collaboration in the work of staff and the learning of children" (p. 3). Despite the breadth of research focused on the development of leaders, there is a paucity of training approaches and opportunities that are able to provide relevant problem-solving experiences in real-world contexts. This project seeks to leverage the scalability of a virtual environment and the need for experiences that drill down to specific problems of practice (e.g., Dotger, Dotger, & Maher, 2010; Mann, Reardon, Becker, Shakeshaft, & Bacon, 2011). The instant project has two key areas of focus: 1) development and authorship trainings that teach experienced educational leaders to create simulations ("sims") in their areas of expertise and 2) the building of a growing library of modular, practitioner-created sims for use by school districts, educational services agencies, and universities in the professional development of new or less experienced educational leaders. All offerings will be designed to improve leaders' decision-making skills by teaching participants to anticipate how real-life scenarios might play out. The resulting micro-sims will be targeted for use by groups of educational leaders to: 1) encourage critical thinking about, and challenging discourse of, difficult issues in leadership for individuals and groups of leaders; 2) help make explicit and assess the rationale for why an individual might make certain decisions; and 3) serve as the basis for reflection on and analysis of decisions made in the face of complex challenges in school and district leadership. Used in these ways, the simulations will not only help to highlight and raise issues around hard, critical decisions (such as budgeting priorities and instructional leadership), but also on related, secondary issues (such as school culture and climate), especially as they relate to effective communication with diverse stakeholders and possibilities for shared leadership. Unlike other simulation work in near the field at this time, the instant project utilizes an inquirybased and reflective practice approach to authoring the simulations and the simulations are designed to be utilized by groups of school leaders to collaborate in the construction of new knowledge around leadership praxis. This encouragement of reflection and inquiry creates a space from which leaders are able to more thoughtfully and readily respond to the ongoing shifts and challenges inherent in educational reform (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). This presentation will share an overview of the project described and go through prototype simulations with participants. Participants will then be engaged in a multi-tiered dialogue about the simulation model and the prototypes presented. In the first tier, participants will share their feedback regarding the specific simulations demonstrated. In the second tier, the dialogue will shift to a discussion of the potential uses of these types of simulations. In the final tier, critical feedback will be sought regarding potential barriers to the successful scaling of this model of simulation authorship. After this presentation, participants will be able to define micro-sims and understand the socialauthoring model that this project embraces. Participants will also analyze the strengths and weaknesses of such a model being implemented in the field of educational leadership. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 361 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Using the Google Art Porject to Influence Critical Thinking Nicole Stedman (University of Florida, USA) Hope Kelly (University of Florida, USA) Critical thinking instruction has been long established as a key initiative for higher education. In today's educational environment, explicit instruction has become the most evidence- based means for enhancing and developing one's capacity for critical thinking. In an online environment, this has often resulted in guided discussion, peer-review, case studies, and other problem-based learning strategies. Current research on critical thinking in the online educational environment has focused heavily on methods to support critical thinking with less attention to the cognition behind critical thinking. Several studies examine a particular method or approach to fostering critical thinking in the online classroom and identified practical applications for professors and instructional designers (Barber, 2011, Carter & Rukholm, 2008, Chann-Ru, 2012, Frey, 2011, Kurubacak, 2007, Pena & Almaguer, 2012, Richardson & Ice, 2010, and Sharma & Hannafin, 2004). A synthesis by Maurino (2007) found contradictory findings in the literature on critical thinking skills in online discussions and listed alternative methods (e.g. group work, case studies, and problem based learning activities) to achieve these instructional goals. Participants will first be guided through a brief introduction to two theories underpinning this teaching method, Facione's (1990) skill-based development of critical thinking and Beyer's (1987) model for teaching thinking. These two works provide the foundation for ensuring that instructional methods used in classrooms - face-to-face and virtual - are grounded in the proper theoretical context. The method of instruction demonstrated in this presentation is the Google Art Project (GAP). GAP, launched in 2011 is an online art project sponsored by Google and 151 partners from across 40 countries. It is the most extensive online gallery featuring over 30,000 works representative of some of the most well-known art collections. The Google Art Project was designed to create an increase in access to art, re-engage citizens of the world with art, and enhance the real gallery experience. The technology supporting the project is what creates its innovative and novel approach to art education. With that, each piece in GAP is available for anytime viewing in a number of formats, from selecting an art collection, an artist or specific piece of artwork. Gallery guests may come face-to-face with the most intriguing, historical, and contemporary artwork, all through the same platform. Examples of galleries available for viewing include: The Art Institute of Chicago, British Council, the Tate Museum, the Center for Jewish History, and the White House. This is but a small sample of the 230 various collections available. Artwork has long been established as an educational tool. Stedman (2007) indicated that using artwork to communicate the role of leadership through history is a creative and engaging way to encourage students to see leadership beyond the text and beyond their experiences. Further, critical thinking is enhanced by the interpretative nature of artwork. The skills demonstrative of strong critical thinking include: interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 362 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments self-regulation. Through the use of art students can explore their own connection to particular piece. Moving through each of the critical thinking skills as they connect meaning to art. The context of the presentation will include a short demonstration of the Google Art Project, as well as discuss the many ways that this technology can be used to enhance critical thinking; although the curricular examples discussed is in an undergraduate leadership course. The assignment. Students are required to select a piece of artwork to analyze for connections (embedded or explicit) to leadership. Through the gallery, they may review the collections, by visually touring any one of the presented galleries. For example, a student may be familiar with a particular piece, like Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze, they can simply search for the image in the collection or know they want to view a piece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Once they have selected the piece, they can zoom-in to the artwork becoming closer to the artwork than ever possible in the museum. This feature allows them to be better acquainted with the work, seeing expressions, brush strokes, people, animals, symbols, never seen before. The students then must communicate to their classmates about the experience. Because this is taking place in a virtual community, students are required to create a VoiceThread presentation of their selected piece of artwork. By doing so, students have to elaborate on how they have defined a particular leadership theory through the piece of artwork. They are able to discuss and articulate through verbal expression their findings, the meaning, and the leadership. The VoiceThread file is connected through the MLS used for the course (currently Sakai) and students from the course, as well as instructional staff, can see the image, share in the experience, and develop their own meaning of the artwork. Through the use of a guided rubric, students know and recognize the critical thinking requirement and the instructional staff can consistently analyze the students' performance. The instructor's personal experience with the Google Art Project, as well as students' reactions to the assignment and experience will be shared with participants. Implications of Incorporating Synchronous Video Conferencing Into Blended Course Design Joseph Scott (Penn State University, USA) John Haubrick (Penn State University, USA) Penn State University is diving deeper into possible learning environments that incorporate a blending of video conferencing-based face-to-face class sessions with their online, out-of-class work. The Penn State Video Learning Network (VLN) has used robust Polycom classrooms and WebEx to deliver the "in-class" portions of its blended courses. This was due to the needs of the state's adult learner population, hesitant to enroll in completely online programs, but in need of furthering their education or finishing a degree. Adult learners seek a high quality learning experience within a flexible environment. Evidence in the form of student and faculty testimonials will show this delivery method's effectiveness. The VLN, in less than two years, has seen exponential enrollment growth, has united the 19 Penn State campuses actively participating, and brought new adult learners to the university. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 363 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments This session will present the impact on course development and implemented pedagogical principles associated with this type of blended course. While Polycom and WebEx have been used extensively, the ideas presented will be independent of the video conferencing tools used. Connectivity between all participants is incredibly important to consider when designing this type of course. Therefore, the focus of the presentation is primarily on how the video conferencing medium influences the in-class instruction and a greater need for student engagement during class and online. Ideas and tools for communication and collaboration will be presented, as well as best practices when using video conferencing technology to deliver synchronous class sessions within a blended format. Also, as our focus will be on blended courses, we will demonstrate methods of presenting content and establishing collaboration online that flow into and out from student-centered face-to-face class sessions. Attendees will be engaged in the presentation through use of polling and Q&A. Attendees of this session will come away with best practices and ideas for incorporating similar models at their own universities as they relate to blended courses, especially those incorporating video conferencing tools for delivering face-to-face class sessions. Road Map: It’s the Journey and the Destination Bili Zehner (Tifflin University, USA) Kristina Ambrosia Conn (Altius, USA) Christine Scott (Ivy Bridge College of Tifflin University, USA) John Kleinoeder (Ivy Bridge College of Tifflin University, USA) The presentation will detail the lifecycle of the development of one online course, outlining the contexts, challenges, and solutions to creating an effective e-Learning experience. This presentation will utilize the analogy of challenges on a road trip to drive home the key points of effective online course development. Each phase of the presentation will have a real world example depicting the challenge of that phase. During the presentation, the presenters will engage the audience by asking for their challenges in specific design phases, documenting those challenges on the presentation screen, and utilizing those examples to explain the solutions our team created. We will also ask for additional solutions that the audience created. Initial Engagement We will present a Gantt chart with steps of each process how they map out over the course of a few weeks. This serves as a GPS map for what we will be discussing in the presentation. Attendees will be asked to discuss with their neighbor their one biggest challenge with course design. Attendees who share with the entire group will receive candy bars (5th Avenue, Rocky Road, etc.). Phase 1: Identification and Planning Phase 1 included the identification of a course in need of development or revision. The planning process started with a kick-off call where the stakeholders (instructional designer (ID), subject matter expert (SME), program/division chair, library representative, learning management system (LMS) representative, etc.) discussed the following: Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 364 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments • • • • • • Role of the course in the program, and if applicable, how the course may inform other courses in the sequence (e.g. a prerequisite) Goals of revision/new development (how to define success) Resources and tools needed Textbooks, multimedia, unique LMS requirements, library, etc. Deadlines Assignments What were common obstacles? At beginning of the course design process, unclear design goals and standards led to varying products where, in some cases, lack of clarity and absence of effective instructional tools was detrimental to student learning. Also, in some cases, courses did not meet federal guidelines for time on task/seat hours. Conversely, without structure, instructors may include innovations that could not be supported by the learning management system. What was the solution? Without a map, one may have a difficult time reaching the correct destination. Templates and SME guidelines served as maps. Templates provided a guide for visual organization and standardization of content and ensured the fulfillment of federal guidelines for time on task. A SME guidelines document outlined the basic requirements for each course and technology limitations. It also included samples of best practice for common course elements such as lectures and discussion questions. Phase 2: Follow-up for Innovation and Collaboration In Phase 2, IDs and SMEs continued a more detailed conversation about the course development/revision, including thoughts about specific activities and development of multimedia pieces. In some cases, the original direction changed. We are always looking at the big picture, not just looking at our lane. What were common obstacles? Working in seclusion could affect innovation, creativity, and timing. What was the solution? Innovation: Take a ride off the beaten path. IDs nudge SMEs along by referring to SME guidelines doc and Quality Initiative shopping list -providing suggestions for innovation, and showing sample of innovative activities/resources, such as reading guides, SoftChalk activities, Captivate activities/presentation, think-alouds, narrated syllabi, course introductions, peer reviews, etc. Collaboration: Get in the car pool lane. The team collaborated by having more frequent conversations. Phase 3: Receive Content Once IDs received initial content from the SME, the collaboration continued as a cyclical process for finalization/standardization. ID provided comments/suggestions to ensure effective instructional design. This second review by the ID (non-SME) gave the development/revision a Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 365 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments fresh set of eyes. Conversations with other stakeholders (including LMS, publisher, library) continued until the ID and SME finalized the content. What were common obstacles? Working in seclusion could affect innovation, creativity, and timing. • • • Content may not be cohesive. SMEs may be defensive/protective of their work; they want to retain ownership (managing personalities) and may be sensitive to suggestions. Bottlenecks resulted when content was delivered all at once very close to the deadline. What was the solution? Protecting precious cargo: Put on your seat belt. • • • Templates provided set standards so there should be few doubts about the basic standards. Repository for up-to-date information (one person in charge of updating standards) traffic cops devoted to specific beats Back-seat driver? IDs can mediate SME sensitivity to suggestions by maintaining frequent contact and respecting the SMEs perspective. Timing and efficiency: Get in the car pool lane • • • • • • The team collaborated by having more frequent conversations. Ds set reasonable deadlines and staggered due dates to avoid bottlenecks in receiving content. Good cop/bad cop LMS needs content by such-and-such date Escalating to manager/reporting structure IDs communicated unexpected changes/requirements and explained the rationale behind them. Phase 4: Finalization and Quality Checks In Phase 4, the content was submitted to the LMS team for loading. IDs then reviewed the content once it was loaded. What were common obstacles? Car trouble: Translating the content into the technical environment does not always go as planned. The ID perspective is different from the LMS team perspective, and communication between the two was not always clear. Some surprises include functionalities not working, links breaking, gradebook issues, sections replicated in a course. What was the solution? Standardization of loading document Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 366 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Phase 5: Deployment and Assessment In Phase 5, the LMS team deployed the course. What were common obstacles? Instructors and students who are in the live environment may encounter issues or provide other Instructors and students who are in the live environment may encounter issues or provide other feedback. What was the solution? The ID and LMS teams collect and review the feedback and remove road blocks. Some fixes can be immediate, but some are long term construction projects that IDs must slate as a major project for the next roll. Moodle Committee test functionalities in pilot courses before deploying to all courses. Forum Session: Question and answer period. Students as Avatars - Pedagogy, Psychology, and Practice William Solomonson (Oakland University, USA) Marija Franetovic (Lawrence Technological University, USA) Context: In this presentation, the authors will summarize pedagogical as well as psychological considerations in applying a synchronous virtual world environment to an on-line course. In this type of environment, students and instructors participate as avatars in an open source 3D virtual world (OpenSimulator). This presentation will provide examples of a graduate-level seminar course where this 3D virtual world technology was used in innovative ways over multiple semesters. Specific pedagogical methods used to increase the quality of learning in a virtual 3D environment will be demonstrated (e.g. guided discussions, case studies, student peer review, evaluation of captured chat logs, etc.). Psychological theory around student engagement and learning using virtual world technologies will also be described. The effect of using a virtual 3D environment as a stand-alone course solution, or as part of a Blended Learning strategy will also be explored. Problem: Today's higher education landscape continues to change rapidly. New learning environments, such as virtual worlds, have been used for several years by educators. However, the authors argue that these and other new media must still be soberly considered in terms of their opportunities to contribute to student engagement and learning outcomes, as well as potential consequences from their use. How do instructors and instructional designers make sound decisions on the proper blending of the myriad instructional delivery modes? One of these modes is the virtual 3D environment, where both students and instructor can be psychologically immersed and "co-present" but in geographically dispersed real-world locations. What instructional strategies may fully utilize the 3-D virtual world advantages? Knowledge around the answers to these types of questions make the 21st century higher education instructor, course designer, or course developer more literate in new media and education. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 367 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Approach: The authors embrace a theory-based, research-driven approach toward effective practice with avatars in higher education on-line courses. The authors support an iterative approach to the practice of avatar usage by being informed through psychological and other theories, and the results of practice in turn informing those theories. Experiential examples are drawn from the authors' teaching and learning interactions with student avatars in the 3-D virtual world on-line environment. Student feedback is gathered through open-ended questions about their learning experience. Results: The authors will review the research around how the use of synchronous 3-D virtual world environments can enhance online course quality in appropriate situations. They will also explore the steps that are necessary to implement a 3D virtual world using open source software (OpenSimulator.org). Throughout the presentation the authors will share the results of an ongoing study that collected the feedback of students who participated in on-line courses as avatars. These qualitative data suggest support for theories and lend credence to key pedagogical considerations, for example, the importance of the role of the instructor as a guide and mentor during class sessions, as opposed to a "traditional lecturer". Participants will be able to more fully understand the use and technical functionality of using avatars in an on-line course. How Audience Will Be Engaged: The key focus of the presentation is the background, opportunities, and challenges of using avatars in higher education on-line settings. Throughout the presentation, participants will be actively engaged through solicitation of personal stories, feedback, and alternative views to support a social learning environment. A key moment of the session is a demonstration of the use of avatars in the classroom around a specific activity that includes:  Watching a YouTube video  Discussing the video in the 3D world through chat  Seeing how the use of avatars enhances the learning experience of the activity. Estimated Time Per Speaker Topic/Format/Method: (2 Minutes) - Solomonson Introduction Discussion (6 Minutes) - Audience Contribution (6 Minutes) - Franetovic Theory and Virtual Environments Discussion (4 Minutes) - Franetovic Psychology of Students as Avatars Lecture / Prezi (6 Minutes) - Solomonson Research in Cognitive Science Lecture / Prezi (8 Minutes) - Franetovic Avatar Pedagogy Lecture / Prezi (9 Minutes) - Solomonson Examples of Avatar Use Demonstration (5 Minutes) - Franetovic/Solomonson Q & A Discussion – “Who Will Benefit From This Session?”: The following participants will benefit from attending this presentation:  Faculty  Online Course Designers Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 368 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Administrators Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants will be able to:    Discuss the psychological theories and research findings that support the appropriate practices with student avatars in on-line settings. Describe key pedagogical considerations of using avatars in on-line settings. Relate best practices of instructors in avatar-based environments. Materials: The content will be delivered using Prezi as a visual aid to the presenter's discussions. Handouts will be distributed to participants at the conclusion of the presentation that will incorporate slides from the presentation. Summary: This presentation is unique and valuable in that it addresses many of the important questions that face higher educational institutions today in terms of technology and emerging learning environments. Specifically, it assists faculty and course designers/developers in understanding the theories, psychology, and pedagogy around the appropriate use of avatars in on-line courses. The authors will also explore aspects of blended strategies, new media literacy, offer real-world examples, and share qualitative student feedback and insight from avatar-based courses at Oakland University and Lawrence Technological University in Michigan. Tips and Strategies for Offering Your First Successful MOOC – As a Personal Endeavor Joseph Zisk (California University of Pennsylvania, USA) Session outcomes: Participants will: • • • • gain insights into the value of teaching a MOOC recognize steps in promoting and planning a MOOC recognize the importance of course structure and assessment procedures determine course participation through the assessment data You may have heard of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course) and know that many universities are offering free online courses. The thought of sharing information with thousands of students can be stimulating. The fact that it is free and open, means that anyone can enter the course and explore. Currently, there are hundreds of free courses being offered; from well know universities to small colleges, the MOOC phenomenon is growing. Some universities are partnering with MOOC organizations such as Coursera, Udacity, edX to offer free online courses. After attending a pre-conference workshop on MOOCs offered by Curtis Bonk and Ray Schroeder, I enrolled in two MOOCs and found the course content, interaction with participants and the overall process to be very rewarding. I have taught online courses for over 10 years, so I was confident that I would be able to teach a MOOC. I therefore, planned, promoted, developed, implemented and assessed my first MOOC. I learned several key processes that will help first time MOOC instructors. At this session I will share these processes. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 369 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments 1) Understand the true meaning of a MOOC and what it means to be "Open". One of the things I learned by teaching my first MOOC, is that the course is open and participants will come in a take what they want. Do not feel offended if they do not finish or just "lurk" on the sidelines. Some participants may have a lot of knowledge about the topic and they may share their expertise. Encourage the exchange of experiences and you, as the instructor, should be prepared to learn. 2) The advantages and disadvantages of offering a MOOC Why would anyone want to teach a course to hundreds (maybe thousands) of students? A free course usually means no pay. I was attracted to teaching a MOOC by: a) the numbers - A MOOC can reach a large number of students, being an educator that aspect is exciting to me, b) professional growth, C) a MOOC may be a recruiting tool. 3) How to promote the course if you are not a member of MOOC organizations. Depending on your MOOC goal, you may need to decide on the target population. You may use postal mailings, email, web site advertisements, and social media. However, be prepared to go beyond your target audience. Once the word is out, your MOOC may get advertised in areas beyond your expectations. Be prepared for a diverse group of participants. 4) Components of MOOC development (opportunities for learners to share and instruct. differentiating learning opportunities, determination of learners' successful completion) Even if you have taught online, a MOOC is more than just an online course. With larger numbers than a traditional online course, the population of the MOOC reaches a critical mass where new and exciting things happen. Differentiate the instruction to reach most of the people and be prepared for a diverse population. Chances are, there will be people from different countries and time zones in the course. 5) Assessment of participants' works (Assessment of student work -auto and some peer, selfchecking and mini quizzes, self-reflections) With large numbers of participants in the course, the course design has to be created in a way that promotes automatic checking of work along with peer evaluation/comments. With automatic grading of quizzes, peer review, and the reward of a "Badge of Completion", there is a system in place for the evaluation of work. In addition to discussion forum posts, I use Google forms and spreadsheets to create a method so that I can easily check participants' progress. 6) Course evaluation and reflective analysis via end of course survey and LMS analytics At the end of the course, the participants complete a modification of our regular online course evaluation. In addition, the LMS analytics show where the participants spent the majority of their efforts. We will discuss the aggregated data. The goal of the session is for participants to learn how to promote, plan and deliver a successful MOOC. At the session, I will provide MOOC course examples. In addition to the conference proceedings, I will provide a web site that contains written and video examples of tips and strategies. The session will include opportunities for participant discussion and questions and answers. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 370 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Learner Experiences with Open Courses and MOOCs George Veletsianos (Royal Roads University, Canada) Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have quickly become part of our daily discourse as potential solutions to the perils facing systems of higher education. One topic that has received little attention to date however, is the student experience in MOOCs. This is an important topic of research and practice because gaining a deep understanding of the learner experience, including the successes, challenges, obstacles, and opportunities learners face, is important in informing designers, researchers, and providers of open courses on how to refine and improve open courses. Goal of Presentation: Address this gap in literature surrounding MOOCs, and provide answers to the following basic research questions:   What are student experiences in a MOOC? What is it like to enroll in and attend a MOOC? To answer these questions, I asked students enrolled in one of my graduate-level courses to immerse themselves in online open courses and observe, journal, and reflect on their learning experience. This presentation reports on the common themes across this experience. Common Themes: Student reflections illuminate the messy realities of participating in open online courses. In particular, learners…  Questioned the commitment that institutions and platforms showed towards them, as they experienced drastic last-minute changes to courses that interested them (e.g., delayed and canceled courses and changes to the original curriculum)  Identified a need for improved instructional design as they experienced course materials/assessments of questionable relevance to course content, unclear expectations regarding background knowledge, and lecture videos that were long and monotonous. In addition, the courses were described as "traditional" with teaching defined as "giving structured and sequenced information" in a predictable format that included "a lesson cycle of information acquisition, practice, feedback, and eventually assessment." This led one learner to ask whether the delivery mechanism of current MOOCs is limiting the possibilities of open education.  Praised MOOC instructors who were responsive and active on the online course, while wishing that instructor presence was more pronounced in the cases in which the instructor wasn't active. The overwhelming amount of information in the discussion threads appeared to make the lack of instructor presence an even greater problem.  Valued the flexibility in the design of some courses (e.g., learner-defined participation), while denouncing the rigidity of other courses (e.g., deadlines for submitting assignments for peer review)  Appreciated and enjoyed the opportunities presented to them for open online learning. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 371 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments These themes highlight the fact that even though opportunities for learning are valued by learners, MOOC experiences are varied and multidimensional.References available at: http://pastebin.com/85r3N0Rq. Organizing for Success in Quality Online Education Robert Lytle (The Parthenon Group, USA) While the debate on the virtues and staying power of online education persist for many, the reality that online education is here to stay has finally reaching a tipping point. Almost all postsecondary enrollment growth between 2001-2010 came from online enrollments, and in 2011 over 70% of the ~3,600 institutes of U.S. higher education offer either online courses or more formal online/hybrid degree programs. Whether a MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) or a more formal online course or degree program, online education is the most disruptive force in today's U.S. higher education system. Institutions that have not embraced this reality will only continue to fall behind in a rapidly evolving landscape of online education. As is common with highly disruptive forces in any industry, the strategies and organizational approaches that universities and colleges are using to deliver quality online learning is highly varied, both within and across key organizational needs and considerations. Within the last year, Parthenon has conducted interviews with over 100 postsecondary institutions to better understand their online learning initiatives. Coupled with client engagements spanning the spectrum from Top 20 research universities to small liberal arts colleges, Parthenon has developed a unique vantage point into the development and implementation of online strategies that will position postsecondary institutions for success in this new world. While most organizations would acknowledge four common motivations for embracing online education - (1) to expand access, (2) to improve the student experience, (3) to enhance societal impact, and (4) to drive institutional sustainability - few postsecondary institutions have pursued a common path to the necessary planning, organization, and implementation related to online education. Now that online education has sufficient traction to assess "early adopter" efforts, there is tremendous value in articulating and communicating common considerations - including emerging best practices and lessons learned - for any organization that offers (or seeks to offer) quality online education. Ultimately, the right organizational approach - aligned to an institution's mission and student needs - is an imperative for success. Specifically, the pursuit of quality online offerings must address the following key issues: • • • • • What organizational structures and supports are required, and where within the institution should these reside? What student, faculty, and system supports are essential to guarantee quality access, delivery, and outcomes? To what extent should offerings be centralized vs. decentralized? What aspects of a quality online program should be developed/administered internally vs. externally? What partnerships will help achieve high quality access, delivery, and outcomes? Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 372 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments One of the greatest hallmarks of the U.S. postsecondary education system - still held as one of the greatest in the world - is its diversity of offerings, which includes great differentiation across many dimensions, including school and program models, pedagogy, student supports, etc. Likewise, the success of high quality online learning programs will be the ability to differentiate offerings to accommodate an increasingly diverse student population. Yet despite the premium placed on differentiation, there are - and will continue to be - concrete best practices and guiding principles related to the strategic planning, organizational structures, and operational models of successful, high-quality online offerings. The more an institution can take advantage of organizational and operational best practices and efficiencies, the better its outcomes will be for the institutions, its faculty and, most importantly, its students. Robert Lytle, Partner and co-head of The Parthenon Group's Education Practice, will share perspectives on different organizational strategies used by institutions of higher education in order to develop and deliver high quality online education Windows Into Teaching and Learning (WiTL) Through Online Clinical Experiences Teresa Petty (UNC-Charlotte, USA) Researchers at one southeastern university were experiencing difficulties with clinical placements during online summer coursework. In an effort to deliver meaningful, learning experiences and bridge the gap between theory and practice, Windows into Teaching and Learning (WiTL) was intellectualized and employed. WiTL offered online clinical observation experiences for preservice teachers in numerous grade levels and content areas.The WiTL process used a web-conferencing software supported by the university. Preservice teachers enrolled in content area methods courses were required to have access to a computer with Internet access, a headset, and a webcam to participate in WiTL activities. Preservice teachers observed the practices of classroom teachers both synchronously and asynchronously. Following synchronous observations, preservice teachers were given the chance to debrief with the practicing teachers. Discourse was exchanged regarding the pedagogical practices of the teachers and the rationale for using particular methodologies. Preservice teachers also watched videos of the practicing teachers. Following these viewings, they participated in an online threaded discussion with each other and the practicing teachers. This presentation focuses on the engagement of university students in an online methods course during clinical experiences. An analysis of the threaded discussion and synchronous text chatlogs revealing various levels of engagement between the practicing teacher and preservice teachers is presented. In this exploratory study, an examination of student-student interactions (Moore, 1989) in an asynchronous discussion forum for distance education graduate students in a summer online middle grades and secondary methods course was conducted. Students' level of engagement was coded using Perkins and Murphy's (2006) engagement framework. Data were collected from students (n=22) in an online methods course. The sample selected included all students enrolled in the online methods course at the researchers' university. Researchers utilized a middle school based on faculty connections in working within the school and community. The three middle grades teachers that were invited to participate in this project Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 373 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments were identified by their principal as exemplary teachers. The three grade levels were represented with one teacher being a sixth grade teacher, one a seventh grade teacher, and one an eighth grade teacher. Prior to the beginning of the summer methods course, the practicing teachers selected exemplary lessons to be videotaped. These lessons were captured using a laptop, wireless headset, webcam and Camtasia; a screen recording and video editing software. The preservice teachers viewed these six videos and participated in an online conversation regarding the practices they observed. These threaded discussions occurred over two week, allowing students to discuss instructional methods and pedagogical thinking with the three practicing teachers and their peers. The threaded discussions were analyzed to determine various levels of student engagement in this online clinical experience. Researchers used content analysis to quantify levels of engagement based on students' questions and comments. Students' levels of engagement were coded using Perkins and Murphy's (2006) engagement framework. Various levels of analysis occurred: individual analysis by the authors, comparison of author analyses to determine inconsistencies, discussion of inconsistencies until final consensus was reached. The data, although not conclusive, indicates varying levels of student engagement. All four categories of engagement were observed, but as noted above, engagement cannot be solely measured by frequency (doing time). Engagement Categories: Asynchronous and Synchronous Threaded Discussion Asynchronous and Synchronous Text /Chat Logs     Clarification: 61% Assessment: 17.5% Inference: 6.3% Strategies: 15.2% Total 100% 45.7% 35.3% 11.1% 7.9% 100% A critical examination of the actual content presented by students on the asynchronous discussion forum must also be considered when determining students' engagement level. Data from the middle grades methods course that presents examples of authentic engagement is presented below. For example, the following are distinct comments and statements posted by students on an asynchronous online discussion forum (NICENET) between preservice teachers and practicing teachers: Preservice Teacher: I really like how you make the association between slope and direct variation because that is a topic that my 9th grade algebra 1 students have a hard time with. Do you have any other suggestions on how to make it clearer? (strategies). Also why did they change the variable to "k" instead of leaving it as "m"? (clarification) I am a math major (not an education major) and I still am not sure why the variables in direct variation and slope intercept changed. Knowing that most students don't pick math as their favorite subject, what would you think their favorite topic in algebra 1 is? (assessment) What do you get the most enthusiastic about? (clarification) . Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 374 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Windows into Teaching and Learning proved to be a beneficial experience for preservice teachers. The process provided the not only the opportunity to view sound teaching practices, it also allowed them the chance to engage with practicing teachers to confirm their understandings of methodologies and pedagogical decision making. The WiTL process was also beneficial to the practicing teachers as it allowed them the opportunity to critically reflect on their teaching practices as they considered questions that the preservice teachers posed. Through WiTL, preservice teachers were able to engage in online clinical experiences at various levels with their peers. During this session, participants will hear details about WiTL and suggestions for implementing this process. Researchers will provide a more in-depth look at the findings of this research project and its impact on the preservice teachers and practicing teachers. Researchers will share more of the findings from the qualitative data (i.e. exchanges between students in the text chat, exchanges between students and practicing teachers in the threaded discussion). An interactive discussion will occur during the session. Detailed handouts with research findings and ideas for future research will be provided. An Initial Foray into the MOOC-isphere: The Good, Bad and Ugly Thomas Cavanagh (University of Central Florida, USA) John Raible (University of Central Florida, USA) Sue Bauer (University of Central Florida, USA) PANEL DISCUSSION UCF launched two MOOCs in Spring 2013 as experiments in online pedagogy and delivery. We have learned a lot, some positive, some negative. We have also learned that we still have a lot to learn. This session will be a panel of the two faculty involved, as well as two instructional designers who supported the initiative. All involved will share their opinions, which are not always positive, as well as lessons learned and suggestions for those embarking on the MOOC journey. UCF is delivering our MOOCs through the Canvas Network platform (Canvas.net). The first course is International Health Systems taught by Dr. Bernardo Ramirez. This course was capped at 500 enrollees. The second course was "Writing History" taught by Dr. Robert Cassanello. This course enrolled over 600 students. Interestingly, the vast majority of participants in both courses were from outside the United States. The panel will address questions such as: - What was positive about the experience? - What was negative about the experience? - What surprised you? - What was the biggest challenge? - How did you work with your instructional designer? - How did you modify your course to accommodate large numbers of students? Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 375 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments - What was the level of student engagement and what can you infer from that? - What assessment strategies did you employ? - What did you learn that could potentially be applied to your "for credit" classes at UCF? - Would you teach another MOOC? Why or why not? - What ideas do you have for future delivery of MOOCs? - What implications are there for future MOOC development at UCF or elsewhere? We know from faculty interviews that Dr. Cassanello would not be interested in teaching another MOOC. He discovered that the transition from teaching his usual number of student (approx. 40) to large numbers was much harder than he had anticipated. He now knows that he is probably "not a MOC guy." However, he did find value in the experience. For example, he was able to expand his concept of student engagement and the use of non-graded interactive tutorials that he previously might not have used. On the other hand, Dr. Ramirez had a very positive experience and was able to reach students all over the world for his International Health Systems course. He also has some very interesting suggestions about how the open delivery platform can be leveraged for more targeted interinstitutional collaboration. Our two instructional designers will be available to discuss how they worked with the faculty to revise their courses, adjusting assessments and engagement strategies, to support large numbers of students. The panel participants will be: - Dr. Bernardo Ramirez, Assistant Professor, Department of Health Management and Informatics, College of Health and Public Affairs - Dr. Robert Cassanello, Assistant Professor, History Department, College of Arts & Humanities - John Raible, Instructional Specialist, Center for Distributed Learning - Sue Bauer, Instructional Specialist, Center for Distributed Learning - Moderator: Dr. Thomas Cavanagh, Associate Vice President of Distributed Learning Integrating Professional Practice and Online Education Gregory W. Hislop (Drexel University, USA) Heidi Ellis (Western New England University, USA) Learning by observing and participating in professional practice is an old and widely used educational model. For example, the construction trades, among others, have long used an apprenticeship approach. Nursing and medicine use clinical experiences and education uses student teaching to provide students with the in-depth exposure to their disciplines. Law clerks, medical residents, and post-doctoral researchers are all early career positions where recent graduates learn directly from more experienced practitioners. In each case, this approach provides learning in a complex environment that is difficult to duplicate in the classroom. This presentation will explore how practice-based education is emerging as a type of online learning that can be superior to face-to-face learning or even bypass traditional education. The presentation will focus on the world of free and open source software (FOSS). FOSS is an example of a professional niche that is ahead of the pack in moving a wide range of business and Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 376 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments organizational activity online. In additional, the FOSS culture of radical transparency and openness to participation by volunteers creates opportunities for students to mingle with professionals in ways that are still unheard of in most disciplines. Over the last few decades open source software has become a significant segment of the software industry. Early FOSS pre-dates the Internet, but current FOSS activity is heavily centered online. These FOSS projects have a culture where all artifacts, communication and process for developing a large software project are public and accessible on the web. The number of these software projects is large (on the order of hundreds of thousands), providing an unprecedented source of materials for learning. These projects are developed by millions of professional developers who are potentially accessible for student learning. In addition, the Internet now supports multiple forms of online communication including synchronous (IRC, Skype) and asynchronous (email, forums) forms of communication. The combination of available artifacts, available professionals and variety of communication mechanisms allow a form of virtual apprenticeship where students can use online technologies to learn from practitioners. Much like other forms of practice-based learning, FOSS projects provide opportunity for students to experience professional practice in larger-scale, complex environments that are impossible to reproduce in a traditional classroom. Next, the presentation will discuss the results of an educational evaluation that focuses on student participation in a particular subset of FOSS comprised of humanitarian projects in areas such as healthcare. This evaluation indicates that practice-based student online learning in Humanitarian FOSS can provide both professional learning and also motivation for students to pursue careers in computing disciplines. As more and more of professional life across a range of disciplines moves online, the potential for online practice-based education will expand. This can have a variety of impacts on education as we know it. These impacts may include:  Online professional practice as an enrichment of education  Practice portfolios as a desired or required step to professional admittance  Practice as a means of bypassing credentialing organizations such as universities. FOSS provides examples of all these trends, and examples in other professions can also be found. Introducing MERLOT II: Next Generation Open Education Resource Tool for Onilne Teaching and Learning Barbra Bied Sperling (California State Universeity, Office of Chancellor, USA) MERLOT - the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching - is the CSU's internationally known community of teachers and learners who use the MERLOT digital library of 40,000+ free, peer-reviewed Open Education Resources (OER). After almost 15 years of use by more than a million users worldwide, a brand new MERLOT (MERLOT II) will be available in the coming months. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 377 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments This session will i) provide a look at the new system, highlighting its completely redesigned look and navigation interface, ii) demonstrate how MERLOT can be used to enhance online teaching and learning by accessing the repository of OER's, and iii) explain MERLOT II's enhanced set of social networking tools that can enable teachers and learners to share their thoughts and experiences regarding the use of MERLOT's OER repository. MERLOT II has been designed to foster communication among its users to foster communications about OER. At the completion of the session, participants will have an understanding of MERLOT II, an ability to locate OER's and understand how to communicate with others in the community to share and facilitate online learning and teaching strategies. Utilizing iBooks and iTunesU to Drive Innovation in the Flipped Classroom Jonathan Zemmer (University of Cincinnati, USA) Melanie M. Bauer (University of Cincinnati, USA) In today's higher education environment, mobile technology is quickly being integrated into almost every aspect of the learning experience. Effective online learning is quickly leveraging a continuum of learning spaces to create courses that promote significant learning experiences for students. This presentation will give participants a first hand view of how iBooks and iTunesU have been utilized effectively within the flipped classroom model. The University of Cincinnati College of Nursing ipad initiative has provided an opportunity to redesign the bachelorette courses to leverage the flipped classroom to significantly enhance the students' learning experience. The instructional designers working within this initiative have used a framework to help guide the redevelopment of each flipped course.The framework consists of wheel with five spokes (1. Faculty, 2. Instructional Design, 3. Institutional Goals, 4. Guiding Models, 5. Technology). At the center of the wheel is the goal, which is to design and deliver courses that create significant learning experiences for students. This goal is the driving element for each of the five spokes, which is based on the work of L. Dee Fink (2003). The first spoke, Faculty, is the initiating element in which faculty bring their subject matter expertise, career experience, research, and mentorship to approach design of online and hybrid courses. The second spoke, Instructional Design, provides an avenue of collaboration between the SME and instructional designers wherein the best practices of pedagogy are applied to the ADDIE process of designing and implementing effective learning environments. The third spoke, Institutional Goals, provides a layer that helps to maintain the focus on the students' experience by incorporating the institution's mission and vision, strategic properties, and aim for developing 21st century learners. The forth spoke, Guiding Models, provides practical tools that include Ruben Puentedura's SAMR model, TPACK developed by Mishra and Koehler (2006), Bloom's Taxonomy, and the ADDIE model. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 378 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments The fifth spoke, Technology, completes the wheel and takes into consideration what affordances technology provides each course. The primary model used with all flip classroom course design was Ruben Puentedura's SAMR model, which consists of four components: 1. 2. 3. 4. Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition. The first two components in this model are considered to be enhancements to the course. With substitution, new technology is simply used to substitute a task that was previously done without that technology. Within augmentation, technology is used to enhance a task by utilizing specific features that the technology now affords. In the third and fourth components, technology starts to be become transformative in the impact it has on the students learning experience. The third component, modification, allows for a significant redesign of previous tasks, so that the technology plays an active role in enhancing it. The final component, redefinition, allows for the creation of new tasks that leverage technology to help students accomplish things that were previously impossible within the scope of a single course. The two essential tools utilized within the flipped classroom were iBooks and iTunesU. As development began for each course, faculty met with instructional designers to structure the course for the flipped model. The SAMR model was used to identify areas within the course that were both enhancing and transformative. The augmentation component consisted of using iTunesU courses in conjunction with iBooks for the delivery of the didactic content. Each week, students would watch several short topical lectures within iTunesU and review each week's iBook before coming to class for learning activities. The development of the iBooks utilized PowerPoint as the content creation piece. For iBooks, development began with branded PowerPoint templates that matched the look and feel of an iBook. These templates served as working documents, allowing faculty and instructional designers to jointly edit and revise content before publishing it to its final form as an iBook. This workflow worked well, since the faculty do not have Apple computers and are experts at utilizing PowerPoint to develop content. The didactic content for iTunesU was developed with short 5-12 minute voice-over PowerPoints that were converted to MP4 and loaded into each iTunesU course. Chunking the course content into smaller pieces, allowed students to easily process each topic. The notes feature within iTunesU proved to be a powerful component, by automatically creating hyperlinks for each note tied to the didactic content. The supplemental information with each iBook also served to enhance the students' understanding of the material through the use of the study cards, interactive images, quizzing, and notes. The notes within each iBook also tied directly into each iTunesU course, which served as another layer to help students comprehend the material being presented. Several assignments Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 379 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments within the flipped classroom courses were redesigned with Redefinition component of SAMR in mind. The assignment utilized iOS apps to create iBooks, digital narratives, and video essays to further apply the material within each course. The flip model has given instructional designers and faculty an opportunity to deliver course content to students in a way that creates the best learning opportunities for students. Students can now take full advantage of a continuum of learning spaces, by accessing course material on demand. They can now utilize the study tools within iTunesU, iBooks and IOS apps to process and apply the knowledge gained throughout each course. References: Fink, L. Dee. (2003). Creating significant learning experiences: an integrated approach to designing college courses. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Punya Mishra & Matthew J. Koehler, "Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge". Teachers College Record, 108 (6). (2006) Online at: http://mkoehler.educ.msu.edu/OtherPages/Koehler_Pubs/TECH_BY_DESIGN/ TCRecord/mishra_koehler_tcr2006.pdf Ruben R. Puentedura, Transformation, Technology, and Education (2006) Online at: http://hippasus.com/resources/tte/ Blended Learning – the Interplay Between Hardware, Software, Underware (Pedagogy) and Didactic Domains Edda Johnson (Buskerud University College, Norway) This presentation is based on experiences from a Blended Learning course in a Norwegian University College. The postgraduate course recruits experienced nurses and occupational therapists from a geographically widespread area of Norway, with some having to travel by air typically two hours to access the course face-to-face. These clinicians work in a wide variety of complex and rapidly changing healthcare settings. It is of great value that they are able to problem-solve, learn-to-learn, demonstrate critical understanding and be information literate so that best evidence care can be provided. In its aim to achieve best educational practice this blended course has been continuously revised through an action research project. Blended learning, sometimes referred to as the combination of online and face-to-face learning offered in a pedagogically valuable manner (Picciano, 2009), can be effective in giving adult students access to lifelong learning. Conventional pedagogies favouring teacher and contentcentred learning have been common in higher education, an approach which does not necessary support lifelong learning effectively. In order to support effective lifelong learning, teacher and content- centred pedagogics should be reconsidered as the predominant underpinning of postgraduate education. It is argued by Ironside (2004) that it is equally as important to debate what should be taught as well as how it should be taught. Ironside (2005) also describes how interpretative pedagogies based on narratives might be favourable, as these encourage multi- Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 380 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments perspective thinking, (Ironside, 2005). This presentation will open for discussion on how multiple pedagogical approaches can support lifelong learning. Even though it is argued that computer based learning has three components: hardware, software and underware (pedagogical underpinning) (Adams, 2004), blended learning needs to consider a wide variety of didactical elements in order to succeed. The course used The Didactical Model of Relation, also referred to as the "Norwegian Diamond", based on a broad didactical understanding, where six interrelating elements are deemed important in planning, implementing, evaluating and changing educational practice: learning conditions, setting, goals, content, learning processes and assessments (Bjrndal & Lieberg, 1978; Hiim & Hippe, 1989). The presentation will share practical examples from both the online and face-to-face parts of the course, where online activities are combined with four face-to-face meetings and four academic assignments. The assignments encourage students to reflect on existing practice, whilst linking scientific knowledge and patient preferences to strive for best evidence practice and improved patient care. Online communication is partly made through peer assessments based on the assignments and partly through discussions established by students or teachers online. The presentation will give examples of how online material supports academic writing and information literacy, and knowledge acquired through the use of YouTube and a learning management system (LMS). The importance of looking at face-to-face and online learning as integrated learning arenas, rather than separated components, will be emphasised. How the online and face-to-face components are stitched together will be demonstrated. Limited knowledge exists on the value of continuing education for clinical practice and nurses' own contribution is lacking in existing studies (Griscti & Jaconto, 2006). Research has also showed that case and survey studies have characterised explorations into students` experiences in blended learning (Bliuc, Goodyear and Ellis, 2007). Therefore, this action research project took a qualitative approach to explore student experiences from both the online and face-to-face aspects of the course. A selection of important findings will be presented to the audience. By the end of this presentation participants will leave the session knowing: • • • • • That multiple pedagogical philosophies should be applied to ensure best educational practice. That by using the Norwegian Diamond, quality in blended learning might be facilitated. That online and face-to-face activity needs careful consideration and planning in order to support lifelong learning. That in order to succeed in postgraduate education, considerations on "how" is equally as important to "what" is taught. That blended learning involves considerations and decisions on the interplay of hardware, software, underwear (pedagogy) and didactic elements. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 381 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Distributed Flip Confidential: MOOC Use in the Blended Classroom At the University of Puerto Rico Rao Piedras Amy Collier (Stanford University, USA) Michael Caulfield (Washington State University Vancouver, USA) As the discussion about the future of higher education has quickly become a discussion about the future of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), MOOCs have alternately been presented as a replacement for a traditional campus-based education and rejected as an insufficient substitute for it. Yet a growing number of professors at a variety of colleges and universities are finding a middle way: using MOOCs to support traditional face-to-face experiences using a blended, flipped format. This approach, which we refer to as the "distributed flip," provides professors with curated "live" content and online activities for their flipped classes. This short session will focus on the realities of using MOOCs in such blended contexts. Focusing primarily on the example of a databases class taught at the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras using a Stanford MOOC, the presentation will take a look behind the hype of this emerging trend to show the "ground truth" of current practice. Dr. Ordonez, who taught the face-to-face portion of the databases course, will begin the presentation by describing the problems she was trying to address with the move to the distributed flip model, the manner in which she integrated the MOOC materials into her course, and the reaction the students had to the change. This will be followed by a frank assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, and how MOOCs might be better designed to support this method. Following this, Dr. Amy Collier and Michael Caulfield will detail research they have done that shows ways in which Dr. Ordonez's experience is fairly typical of other practitioners of this approach, as well as present a statistical analysis of student behavior in the UPRRP class which raises further questions about the use of MOOCs in this context. Among the key findings to be presented at this session are that MOOCs are predominantly being used as open (or semi-open) educational resources rather than as massive courses, and that there is a broadly perceived need to develop communities of practice around these resources to aid in the development and implementation of them for classroom use. Additionally, challenges around student expectations and behavior will be addressed. This session is perfect for instructors considering using MOOCs in a blended model, for administrators looking to understand current trends in the use of MOOCs and otherOpen Educational Resources, and for anyone looking to get beyond the press hype around these experiments and grapple with a slightly messier reality. Please note this is not an introductory session on MOOCs -- this session assumes some basic knowledge of what MOOCs are and of current trends in blended learning. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 382 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Integrating Interactive Technology to Promote Learner Autonomy: Challenges and Rewards Jaya Kannan (Sacred Heart University, USA) Marie Hulme (Sacred Heart University, USA) Maria Lizano-DiMare (Sacred Heart University, USA) Pilar Munday (Sacred Heart University, USA) In an increasingly complex and interconnected world, students and faculty must understand and harness the power of technology to synthesize, analyze, and communicate ideas and information. A multi-modal, multidisciplinary approach of teaching and learning is critical. This presentation will examine how to best leverage the technological strengths of 21st century learners in an interdisciplinary networked community, utilizing on-line tools such as Twitter and e-portfolios. This will be anchored within a context of a larger discussion of current education theories, including cognitive, social constructivism, and connectivism. Four presenters will address recent research on the impact of technology tools on teaching and learning . Section one will describe the dynamic process in which pedagogy, content, and technologies influence each other when designing online experiences. Section two we will discuss the pedagogical benefits of the University's new on-line, interdisciplinary networked community of learners, the Virtual Public Square project. Section three will show how Twitter has been used in a foreign language course to promote learner autonomy. The final section will discuss the high-impact practice of utilizing e-portfolios for both faculty and student assessment in a freshman course. Each of the four sections will address the wide range of student responses in terms of habits of mind and the gap between faculty and student perceptions in defining the characteristics of 21st century digital illiteracies. Key points will include:  How high impact interactive tools can promote a community of autonomous learners.  Four practical examples from diverse contexts that exemplify the use of specific applications to promote learner autonomy.  Complexities involved in applying current learning theories such as connectivism within the framework of 21st century digital literacies. The presenters will also discuss both successes and struggles related to their topics, and how outreach to the larger University community has helped them to sustain their projects and implement high-impact practices for increased student engagement and innovative pedagogy. Section 1: Connectivist learning theory for student teachers using interactive online tools Professors in higher education institutions face the challenge of embracing online teaching and developing high-quality blended and online courses in a rapidly changing world. This can be especially demanding for faculty who teach only face-to-face, have limited experience with technology, and have a heavy teaching load. The presentation will describe the dynamic ways in which pedagogy, content, and technologies influence each other in the design of online learning Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 383 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments experiences. Special attention will be given to pedagogy, including cognitive, social constructivism, and connectivism theories that define the learning experience. Various approaches to online learning course design will be described, which can benefit a college of education. Challenges faced by faculty making the jump into online learning will also be discussed. This focus on learning theories will set the tone for the rest of the discussion. Section 2: A Virtual Public Square for a networked community of learners… This portion will focus on Sacred Heart University's on-line platform, where students and faculty share ideas, work, and resources across disciplines. "SHUsquare" is a networked community of learners that supports the curriculum goals of Sacred Heart University's First Year Seminars. SHUsquare is designed to engage students in intellectual discourse beyond the artificial confines of a classroom or a discipline. SHUsquare facilitates the development of important 21st century fluencies, including collaboration, creativity, information, and media. The Director of SHUsquare will introduce the project, discuss its pedagogical rationale, share how various faculty have used the platform, and talk about the successes and pitfalls involved in introducing an innovative project to a broad range of disciplines and interests. Faculty and student buy-in, as well as the need for on-going training and support to sustain the project will be discussed. Section 3: Twitter as a tool for foreign language learners… In this section, we will see how Twitter can be used as a tool to foster autonomous learning of foreign languages through different means, and how this can be extended to other disciplines. Because this is a real-life tool, the acquisition of knowledge moves from the classroom to the students' own lives. Students are able to choose whom to follow (whom they read) based upon their own interests. They also can monitor how native speakers interact in informal ways and can try to emulate them. It is real language in real time, involving current topics that are relevant to them. In order to develop autonomous learning, a reflection element has to be added (in the form of class discussion, a journal, or in some other way). This helps students to understand how their learning is taking place and increases their motivation. Unless the reflective practices are already in place, Twitter itself can very easily become a meaningless exercise. Section 4: E-portfolios in a freshman Critical Thinking course… This section of the presentation will highlight the use of e-portfolios in a freshman course named "Art of Thinking." E-portfolios were integrated into this course with the objective of promoting self-directedness and self-awareness in student learning. This was in alignment with the institutional objectives of integrating and studying high-impact assessment practices in an undergraduate liberal arts context. Examples from student e-portfolio work will reveal simple truths about freshmen students' habits of learning, including the role of affect. A key discovery was that students who are digital natives do not necessarily demonstrate 21st century digital literacies. A description of lessons learned from this pilot will lead toward a formulation of best practices. The four faculty members, representing a diverse cross-section of the University's colleges and faculty, are working together to share ideas and best practices, and to provide a model for similar Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 384 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments inter-college and interdisciplinary partnerships that can foster innovation and collegiality in order to serve both the University and its students. We will demonstrate the need for a targeted partnership between the institution's administration and faculty for enhancing curricular planning through innovative practices that promote student engagement. The New Interactive Embedded Course Resource: A Living Text! Mary Jane Clerkin (Berkeley College, USA) Accessible from computers, laptops, and mobile devices such as the iPad, iPhone, Android, and Smartphones and available directly from within the course management system, the new embedded textbook allows professors to add rich learning materials into their embedded texts and allows students to engage and collaborate within the text. This presentation will show how a professor has used this embedded course resource in an actual online course and how the professor has added annotations, notes, bookmarks, discussions, videos, special folders (stacks) of information, and interactive links to enrich the text and to encourage the students, not only to read the text, but to engage and interact within it thus providing students with a robust online learning experience. Discussions may be held and questions asked and answered within the text. Students can take notes, share materials, work collaboratively, ask questions concerning a passage in the text and receive answers right within the text itself. They may add folders and stacks with study materials of their own. To judge the use of the embedded material, stats are available for professors so that they can see to what extent students are reading and to what extent they are engaging in activities. MOOCin' on Air: Establishing Instructor Presence in a MOOC Using Google Hangouts Lauren Neimeyer (University of Maryland, USA) When educating thousands of students in a MOOC it is often difficult to establish instructor presence. Google Hangouts On Air provide one way for instructors to be more accessible to students. A synchronous class session can be streamed to thousands around the world. Students can choose to watch live or view the recording of the session at a later point. A great deal of planning and prep work must be done for a Hangout On Air to run seamlessly. Instructors, teaching assistants, and university support must all work together to ensure success. In this session examples, best practices, and lessons learned from University of Maryland's Coursera course "Surviving Disruptive Technologies" will be discussed. By End of Session, Participants Will: 1. View examples of a University of Maryland MOOC that used Google Hangouts On Air 2. Leave with tips for running a successful Google Hangout On Air 3. Gain access to University of Maryland's Google Hangouts On Air Checklist Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 385 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Keep Moving Forward: Designing the Next Generation Classroom Space Jessica Vargas (Rollins College, USA) "Because...curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." - Walt Disney In learning, we are constantly evaluating teaching methodologies so that we can create highly engaged learning spaces. But who are our learners and how is the classroom learning environment changing? We will discuss what today's learners expect when they arrive in the classroom and how that's contributing to new design considerations in the online and blended classroom. By using Walt Disney's concept of an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, attendees can develop a mindset of "Keep Moving Forward" when incorporating synchronous and asynchronous learning tools. The presentation will provide a method of how to select new learning tools so they can be adopted seamlessly into the classroom. It also discusses the five types of interaction (i.e. teacher to learner, learner to learner, learner to content, learner to tools, and learner to environment) students encounter and which tools are best utilized according to the value of teaching and learning. The technology that will be explored is as follows: Presentation tools (e.g. clickers and wireless presenters) Blogs and Wikis (e.g. Wordpress, Mediawiki, Wikispaces) ePortfolio tools (e.g. FolioTek, Google Sites) Screencast (e.g. Jing, Kaltura) Video Conferencing (e.g. Google Hangouts, Skype, WebEx) Audio and Video Creation (e.g. Voice Over PowerPoint, iMovie, mobile devices) Learning Management System Enhancements Attendees will be also provided with a handout, which will allow them to write down any technologies they are interested in. The presentation will contain demos of how to use the tools and student examples so that attendees are aware that this is happening in today's classroom. The presentation will begin with a Poll Everywhere that will help guide what tools the attendees would like to see presented. This means that the presentation will be very dynamic as they have input in the construction of the final part of the presentation (meaning the tools they select will be discussed). It will also be discussion based so that participants can receive answers to the questions that are most pressing as they come up. This presentation will hopefully inspire attendees to incorporate a combination of low-tech and high-tech learning tools in their classroom. By incorporating these technologies, our students will gain life skills in the classroom while learning the curriculum at a higher engagement level. The session's goals are explicitly listed below: Identify today's learner and how the classroom learning space is evolving Develop a strategy to choose appropriate technologies and how to implement them Apply strategies and best practices that will help create a highly engaged learning environment Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 386 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Just Flip It: From the Front Lines of the Flipped Classroom Ralph Welsh (Clemson University, USA) It's easy to picture a traditional classroom - a lecturing professor with rows of students watching, listening and taking notes. But that age-old model is turning a cartwheel in some of the best classrooms in academia. And, chances are someone in your department is already flipping their classroom. Professor Ralph Welsh of Clemson University started experimenting with this technology-driven pedagogy three years ago, redesigning and refining his courses over time and putting the onus on the student to come to class already having watched the lectures and ready to engage in conversation. During that time he's met and overcome challenges and reset his teaching style to rave reviews from students. Join Ralph as he presents a how-to guide for introducing flipped instruction, and shares lessons learned along the way including:  How to overcome the biggest challenges of the flipped classroom, including managing student expectations  How to evolve a curriculum by taking in feedback, evaluating it and re-introducing new methods into the classroom  Tips on how to educate your colleagues on your new workload and get your department on board with what you're doing Web 2.0 Tools for Engaging, Connecting, Assessing, and Sharing Content with Students Jennifer Lewis (Madison Area Technical College, USA) Tina Rettler-Pagel (Madison Area Technical College, USA) How do students interact with the instructor, the content, and each other? What tools do instructors and students have at their disposal to accomplish this? How can instructors harness the power of various tools to provide opportunities for students to demonstrate what they know? While many colleges utilize enterprise learning management systems and resources, these systems do not meet every classroom, student, and instructor need. In many cases, the limitations of these systems force instructors to choose a more limiting path of engagement. Through the use of Web 2.0 tools, instructors can extend opportunities to engage and connect with each other and the content. This session will focus on specific tools that encourage meaningful and intentional dialogue and interaction in the classroom that supplements, enhances, and promotes engagement. We will specifically look at tools that have been used in online classes at Madison College, including (but not limited to) corkboards, back channels, curation tools, and infographics. In "speed geeking, rapid shootout style, for each tool shared, we will share specific examples of use in the classroom and key considerations. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 387 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Attendees will walk away with fresh ideas on how to use these tools to enliven their course content. Adopting a New Learning Management System: See What We did There? Yeah, Don’t Do That – Or Do! Cathleen McGreal (Michigan State University, USA) Jessica L. Knott ((Michigan State University, USA) Professors and instructional designers play very different, yet important roles in the successful conversion and launch of student-centered, media-rich online courses in a new Learning Management System (LMS). As a long-standing professor/instructional designer team, we thought there was nothing that being early, large-scale adopters in an institutional LMS conversion could throw at us that we would find surprising. We were wrong. Let us share the process we used, including where we were successful (course design, design of alternative learning activities that maximized the new LMS, conversion timeline and project management), and where we were less than successful (The conversion tool did WHAT? Where are my groups? Good plan - Ten groups of 25 each; so what is group 26? "Whoops.") In his book, E-Learning by Design, William Horton recommends that those designing online course ask, "How will the e-learning you design contribute to [your] goal"? This presentation outlines effective assignments for the online environment and how they change based on an LMS. Links between design and learning objectives will be discussed. Examples of Camtasia videos and Screencast features that were used to assist students will be shown. Rosemary Lehman and Simone Conceicao note the need for intentional decisions that will enhance the creation of an emotionally-engaged community of learners. In this presentation specific decisions made in order to create strong connections between students will be described. This presentation provides the perspectives of both faculty and support staff, instructor and project manager. Expect candor, humor, and no shortage of group conversation and story sharing. Horton, W. (2006). E-Learning by design. San Francisco: Pfeiffer - A Wiley Imprint. Page 10 Lehman, R. M. and Conceicao, S. C. O. (2010). Creating a sense of presence in online teaching: How to "be there" for distance learners. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Page 10. Web Based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE) for Enhanced Learning Shiladitya Chaudhury (Auburn University, USA) Abstract topics in science (both secondary and tertiary) are often difficult for learners to grasp because they operate at time or size scales that are either too small, too large, too slow or too fast for easy hands-on activities in the laboratory. The advent of sophisticated online tools provides support for both the cognitive aspects of learning relating to the use of simulations and visualizations to explicate scientific processes, and the affective aspects of working in teams, engaging in argumentation, receiving and utilizing rapid feedback. The Technology Enhanced Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 388 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Learning of Science (TELS) project (http://telscenter.org) has been engaging in curriculum building, research into student learning and supporting teacher professional development in the online Web Based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE - http://wise.berkeley.edu/). WISE is an online science-inquiry curricula that supports deep understanding through visualization of processes not directly observable, virtual experiments, graphing results, collaboration, and response to prompts for explanations. In this interactive session, we encourage participants to bring their laptops. The presenter will facilitate the exploration of specific science topics important to secondary science learning (e.g. concepts in high school chemistry, physics, biology) but that are also important in college level courses. Participants will learn about the design of the WISE system to support student inquiry learning using visualizations and simulations and the extensive teacher support tools that enable easy assessment of student work. The WISE resources are free and open source and existing curriculum modules can be modified by instructors to suit their particular needs. Mobile Media Authoring: How do Emerging Tech Tools Play a Role in Teacher’s Instructional Use and Practices? Whitney Kilgore (Academic Partnerships, USA) Outcomes • • Explore research regarding the relationship between teachers' beliefs on learning and their instructional practices, using mobile screencasting and qualitative formative assessment as lens. Examine the responses and artifacts of educators who took a professional development MOOC and completed "Try It Yourself" using mobile devices and tools. Cuban (1993) identified three goals for the use of technology in schools: to make schools more efficient, to transform learning and teaching into a process connected to real life, and to prepare young people for the future workplace. In this exploratory session about transforming teaching and learning, Richards of, Teachers College, Columbia University and the creator of Explain Everything for iPad, will share his research describing teachers from different independent schools who completed a series of short screencast authoring tasks in support of existing curricular goals and its effect on their beliefs and practices. Initial findings from the research reveal how screencasting as a process leverages opportunities for formative assessment, mediating a dialogue that can take place across distance and time. The research also reveals how the technology by itself does not create the dialogue. Instead, the intentions of the teacher combine with the flexibility of the tool to support and engage student learning. While his research takes place in face-to-face learning settings, the emergent theories are more than applicable to online environments. Kilgore and Bartoletti will demonstrate the responses of educators who took a professional development MOOC on Mobile Learning and completed "Try It Yourself" activities and how it changed their approach to the same types of activities with their Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 389 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments students. This session gives us a glimpse into what teachers think about media authoring and how that shapes what they "do" as educators. The brief session format will allow us to introduce the topic with resources provided for further exploration and invite the participants to try authoring tasks on their. During the conference, attendees will be able to download a mobile media authoring tool and share created artifacts via a designated web space. Data and information from case studies and media artifacts will be shared during the session. Questions, answers, and discussion with the audience will also take place. References Cuban, L. (1993). Computers meet classroom: Classroom wins. Teachers College Record, 95, 185-210. Leveraging the iPad to Capture Authentic Learning on the Fly Melanie M. Bauer (University of Cincinnati, USA) Jonathan Zemmer (University of Cincinnati, USA) Steve McKinney University of Cincinnati, USA) Jason Day University of Cincinnati, USA) Ensuring that students at a distance receive the same quality of education as students in a traditional classroom is a challenge that many institutions offering online programs and courses face. Research stresses the importance of establishing social presence and creating a sense of community to enhance student motivation in an online course (Baker & Taylor, 2010). A way to address this is to provide online students with video of the instructor and of the ad hoc classroom events that are difficult to anticipate and pre-record. The use of video in online courses can also improve topic understanding, increase student grades, enhance students' perceptions of ease of learning, and reduce course withdrawal rates (Brecht, 2012). Additionally, video is a powerful extension of course readings about procedures and techniques, as it can be viewed multiple times while simultaneously learning and practicing the technique (Brecht, 2012). Using pre-planned, pre-recorded voice-over lectures and screen recording demonstrations is one strategy to offer online students a more dynamic learning experience than just reading and writing reflections. However, there are often discussions, demonstrations, and guest presentations that take place in a traditional classroom environment that are not necessarily planned ahead of time. Due to the nature of asynchronous learning, students in the online equivalent of a traditional course may lose out on these powerful learning experiences. A solution to this is to record these classroom events and share the videos with online students. However, that solution may be easier said than done if faculty must rely on a technology team to assist them with capturing, editing, and sharing these events. There are a number of ways to capture video within the classroom; however, the editing and distribution can be a challenge. This is especially true when recorded content needs to be turned around quickly for viewing and classroom interaction. An alternative to this is placing an iPad in the hands of a faculty member. A faculty member who shared with us her experience using the recording capabilities of the iPad is the inspiration of our presentation. A guest lecturer in her face-to-face course was Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 390 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments demonstrating a nursing assessment procedure, and she quickly decided that her online students could benefit from viewing the demonstration as well. She grabbed her iPad and proceeded to capture this event all on her own. With some assistance, she was able to edit the video and post it in her online course in a very short period of time. Empowering faculty to leverage the iPad to capture, edit, and share videos of these kinds of classroom events and interactions has the potential to greatly enhance online students' learning experiences. Tools such as the iPad and its suite of apps have made ad hoc video recording and editing simple yet extremely effective. A faculty member can take a video with his or her iPad and export the movie into an app such as iMovie. The faculty member can then edit the content by cutting out unwanted footage, adding music and pictures, and applying transitional effects such as titles. iMovie allows the flexibility to not only edit video on the fly, but also to share content across many platforms, such as YouTube, Vimeo, iTunes, AirPlay, Kaltura, and many others. This technology is excellent for capturing classroom demonstrations and enhancing the social presence of an instructor in an online course. Additionally, technologies such as Swivl take the hassle out of finding someone to hold the iPad and record what is being displayed. This technology follows the presenter around the room, which keeps the iPad camera on the subject, and thus, no footage is lost. Swivl allows the faculty member to focus on teaching and not on camera controls, while in front of a classroom full of students. The goals for this presentation are for attendees to be able to describe how to leverage video to bring a traditional classroom experience to an online environment and explain the process of using app-based video capturing, editing and distribution to deliver an authentic classroom experience promptly. The presentation will begin with an overview of the benefits of including videos of authentic learning experiences in online courses, along with some examples. We will then demonstrate the process of capturing, editing, and sharing a video using the iPad. Finally, we will give participants the experience of being a student in an online course trying to learn a new skill. References Baker, C., & Taylor, S. L. (2010, February). The importance of teaching presence in an online course. Online Classroom, 6-8. Brecht, H. D. (2012). Learning from online video lectures. Journal of Information Technology Education, 11, 227-250. Das, S. (2010, July). Increasing instructor visibility in online courses through mini-videos and screencasting. Online Classroom, 7-8. Rose, R., & Ray, J. (2012). Design techniques for getting online courses done right. In P. Resta (Ed.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2012 (pp. 832-834). Chesapeake, VA: AACE. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 391 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Language Learning Through Captioning and Revoicing of Clips Stavroula Sokoli (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain) Vasilios Delis (Computer Technology Institute & Press, Diophantus,Greece) Target Audience: This session is expected to benefit language teachers and learners as it provides innovative tools and activities for language learning. Participants will be informed on what captioning and revoicing is, why they are valuable and fun and how to include such activities in their classroom, whether face-to-face or distance, K-12, college or university. In this session we will present:      The Conceptual Framework for language learning through captioning and revoicing activities The Studio which provides innovative, free, open-source tools for creating such activities (http://studio.clipflair.net) The Social Network (http://social.clipflair.net) The Gallery of materials including ready-to-use activities for various languages and levels, as well as clips (http://gallery.clipflair.net) The tools are open to all, so that teachers, learners and researchers from around the world are benefited, as they can freely access and use the material. Why Clips? Using audiovisual material in the language classroom is a common resource for teachers since it introduces variety, provides exposure to nonverbal cultural elements and, most importantly, presents linguistic and cultural aspects of communication in their context. However, teachers using this resource face the difficulty of finding active tasks that will engage learners and discourage passive viewing. Why Flair? We propose a productive and motivating way of working with AV material: by asking learners to flair a clip, i.e. to revoice or caption it. Revoicing is to add one's own voice recording onto the audio track of a clip, such as foreign film dubbing, free commentary, audio description for the blind and karaoke singing. Captioning is to add words by writing them on screen, such as foreign film subtitles, captions for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing, annotations and intertitles. Clips can be short video or audio files, including documentaries, film scenes, news pieces, animations and songs. This hands-on simulation of a professional environment (that of a subtitler or a dubber) has a tangible, shareable result: the captioned or revoiced clip. Background: According to the European barometer survey Europeans and Languages (2005) there are three main factors for discouraging language learning: time, motivation and expense of language classes. The project aims to counter these factors by providing a motivating, open and easily accessible application for language learning. Subtitling as a language learning activity was first introduced by the LeViS project. According its evaluation report, learners not only consolidated and improved their linguistic skills, they were also very enthusiastic because of the innovative nature of the subtitling activities. ClipFlair aims to build on the success of LeViS by: Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 392 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments • • • Finding new ways to interact with video-clips and by offering ready-to-use revoicing activities Promoting an ever growing library of activities Establishing a community of authors and learners. The Conceptual Framework and Pedagogical Methodology: This is a methodological framework for learning through the interaction of words (written and spoken), image (still or moving) and sound. It includes fundamental principles and factors involved in language learning and video awareness, including a synthesis of the latest specialized literature, definitions of terms, educational specifications for the revoicing and captioning tool of the web platform, as well as clip selection criteria. It can be accessed through the ClipFlair Social Network. The ClipFlair Studio: The Studio offers the captioning and revoicing tools needed by activity authors to create activities. It is also the space where learners can practice and learn languages by using these activities. It is basically a zoomable area, the Container, where activity parts are added, the Components. There are six types of components: 1. Clip component, for loading and reproducing clips 2. Text component, for viewing and editing text such as instructions or other information 3. Captions component, for adding and deleting captions, as well as editing timing and content of captions 4. Revoicing component, for recording voice, as well as saving and listening to saved recordings 5. Image and map component, for loading and viewing images and maps respectively. Each component is editable as far as size, zoom and features are concerned to suit the objectives of each activity, depending on the learner's level and needs. When the activity design is completed these options can be locked so that the learner can focus only on the content of the activity and forget about formatting. The ClipFlair Social Network: The network and content management system aims to enable users to: 1. Form online communities to collaborate, interact and share materials through Groups and Forums 2. Access revoicing and captioning activities, clips and other resources through the Gallery 3. Provide feedback to software developers of the web application 4. Watch and read tutorials on how to use or create activities 5. Study guidelines for activity creation and evaluation The ClipFlair Gallery: Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 393 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments This is the library of resources with activities for 15 languages, including Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Russian, as well as reusable material, namely clips, images and texts. In the long term, the project intends to develop materials that can potentially be used by any FL learner by expanding the community to include any language, level or age. Given the component-based nature of the ClipFlair Studio, the same material can be mixed differently for different activities in different languages. For example, the same clip may be exploited differently for other levels, or the same set of instructions can be used in similar activities. Each item in the Gallery is accompanied by relevant metadata which facilitates searching and identifying. The ClipFlair Online Community: A community of users of the ClipFlair Studio, including teachers, learners, activity authors and researchers interested in the field, collaborate, communicate and interact and form Groups at the Social Network. The consortium consists of ten institutions from eight European countries, with proven experience and competences to undertake the tasks in their field of expertise and to create material for 15 languages. There is a balance between experts in the three fields involved: Language Teaching, Audiovisual Translation and Accessibility, & ICT. Liberating Students: Harnessing the Power of Open Student-Generated Content Britt Watwood (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA) We are at a pivotal point in conceptualizing student learning on the web. Advances in the last decade have opened affordances that shift students from simply consuming content to the ability to create sophisticated content. These modern technological advances have radically shifted the way people access, manage, and distribute knowledge and information on a daily basis. Quite literally the expanse of all human knowledge is readily available to students from virtually any geographic location, simply by picking up their smartphones and asking Siri a question. Knowledge is no longer a book chained to the podium or the faculty member behind that podium. A multitude of digital tools allow educators to harness and activate students to bring relevant and unique information into class discussions and virtual learning environments. This pivotal point is occurring as many universities explore service learning - integrating authentic learning with community service. Applying open digital tools to service learning courses creates an empowering mechanism for student creation and ownership of meaningful content. Early iterations of online classes focused on closed systems in which students would submit papers, post discussions, or complete assessments - all of which would be lost to the student after the semester closed. Most work was routinely viewed by only two individuals, the student and the professor. New technologies have opened up numerous open pathways for students to share, locate meaningful information, and deliver it to classmates and the surrounding community. By freeing student Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 394 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments work from the LMS, it becomes possible to increase creativity and sense of ownership. The open, social and participatory web allows for increased feedback, larger audience, and a service life of student work long after the course is completed.In this session, we will showcase two courses where students created projects on the open web. One of the courses was an adult learning course on elearning which involved project work completed online. The second course involved a service-learning course, where students became empowered to advocate for different local communities. Both courses used aggregators such as Netvibes or Protopage so that student work could be posted on student-owned blogs and collected for course evaluation and viewing off campus. This presentation will show how activating students to be proactively involved in the curation of relevant course content has the potential to improve student engagement and learning in the class as well as to extend course discussions outside the brick and mortar of the university walls. Social Media for Teaching & Learning Jeff Borden (Pearson, USA) Hester Tinti-Kane (Pearson Learning Solutions, USA) Rob Kadel (Pearson, USA) Since the arrival of Internet-based education two decades ago, most online learning has revolved around students' passive consumption of largely text-based content. Students and their instructors are now surrounded by social media in just about every facet of their lives except education, wherein instructors still heel to a one-to-many pedagogical model that has outlived its efficacy. Social media now provides the opportunities and tools for students to move from being consumers of knowledge to producers of knowledge. This panel's participants are among those spearheading research in faculty and student use of social media for teaching and learning. This session will present current research findings on the usefulness of social media in learning, the most effective pedagogical methods for incorporating social media into learning, and the value of social media for meeting students' differentiated and multi-modal learning styles. Audience Q&A and discussion will be encouraged. Objectives: Learn about the major findings from recent research on the prevalence of online learning and the use of social media. Learn about pedagogical strategies that are most effective in engaging students in social media in online learning. Learn how social media can address the needs and learning styles of multi-modal learners. When Mom's Not Around: How to Prompt Students to Action Jalane Meloun (Barry University, USA) Outcome: At the conclusion of the highly interactive 50-minute Information Session, attendees, with Internet access, will have set up their own class reminder app, generated a step-by-step enrollment pdf, and experienced the student perspective by subscribing to a class and receiving at least one reminder Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 395 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Stakeholders: This reminder app is suitable to anyone who teaches online (or not). Reminders or information-rich texts may be set up for students, parents, or committees. Method: 1. In-person or online attendees will be shown how to sign up for a free teacher reminder account and those with Internet access will be encouraged to do so 2. Attendees will be shown how to generate a unique class code and will do so 3. Attendees will see how to distribute their class codes to enable students or parents to sign up to receive either text or email reminders 4. By texting, attendees will either register with another attendee's class or register for sample class 5. Attendees will see sample class populate with their names 6. Attendees will be shown how to generate a tweet-like reminder and they will do so, thus sending it out to those attendees registered in their respective classes 7. Attendees will be shown how to schedule reminders to be distributed throughout the term and how to utilize software shortcuts 8. Questions will be fielded throughout this hands-on demonstration Relation to Sloan - C pillars for E-learning Success:  Learning Effectiveness - This app can nudge students to complete their homework, attend synchronous sessions, or better understand assignments  Scale - By sending one reminder, all registered students can get a quick message via a mode of their own choosing (text or email)  Access - any student (domestic or international) who registers can gain access to the reminder  Faculty satisfaction - Dr. Meloun swears by this reminder app and the online testimonials are numerous (https://www.remind101.com/testimonials)  Student satisfaction - Dr. Meloun's students have used end-of-term surveys and verbal feedback to report appreciation for this online reminder tool that facilitates increased instructor to student interaction Advantages: 1. Privacy - is ensured as students do not see instructor's cell phone number and instructors do not see student or parent cell phone numbers. 2. Free choice - Registration to the reminder service is at the choice of the student or parent who may opt-out at any time. Teachers may also remove enrollees at any time. 3. Expense - Free application 4. Ease of use - Essentially one may start an account, set up several classes, distribute enrollment information and schedule a whole term's worth of foreseeable reminders within an hour. 5. Immediacy - If there is information that needs to be dispensed quickly, such as class being canceled or some homework clarification, enrollees receive that information within about 9 seconds of being sent. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 396 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Technophobe and Technophile “Buy-in”: A Scalable Workshop Series to Address Multiple Literacies Kathryn G. Shaughnessy (St. John’s University, USA) Gina Marandino (St. John’s University, USA) Given the changing nature of the information cycle, the St. John's University Libraries and the Center for Teaching and Learning recognize that lines of "literacy" are overlapping. The creation, dissemination, access, evaluation, use, and preservation of information are all impacted by the advent of each new technology, thus, we see the need for a flexible, scalable, multi-modal workshop series covering multiple literacies for all our local and global community members. Our initial implementation was aimed at helping faculty become more familiar with emerging Information and communication technologies (ICTs) while also integrating information literacy (IL) in their courses. During the initial phase, we encountered a range of techno-comfort levels, and noticed that even technophilic faculty were reluctant to introduce new IL and ICT literacies into their courses for fear being the sole person responsible for training and troubleshooting, especially in a purely online environment. In response to these concerns, we expanded the workshop audiences to include administrators, staff, graduate and undergraduate participants to encourage life-learning and professional development, as well as to offer support for faculty who wanted to integrate ICT literacies into student assignments. To address different levels of technocomfort, workshops are now offered in both Face-to-face and Online meeting environments, with the opportunity for one-on-one appointments in both environments. Workshop offerings grow or change each semester based on community requests and relevant emerging technologies. Prior to offering any new workshop, we create a Technology Tutorial Guide, following principles of the Universal Design for Learning (CAST). These guides allow us to appeal to multiple styles of learning (Gardner, 1985; Flemming,1995), to address varying levels of techno-comfort, to serve distance learners, to help meet ADA compliance, and to provide a resource that allows community members to offer just-in-time training to colleagues and students at point-of-need (Novak 1999; Gee 2003, Duffy 2013) . Finally, through the collaboration of the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Graduate Dean's office, our range of workshops were included in a program that allowed participants to earn a professional development certificate after attending a certain number of workshops; this enabled participants to improve at their own pace, and help to obtain buy-in from a wide range of audiences. For next year, we hope to expand undergraduate "buy-in" participation by working with Student Activities and Student Affairs on a collaborative certificate program. Attendees will: (1) learn strategies for developing a program to train faculty and students on new literacies using different approaches and appealing to different learning styles, (2) have the chance to learn about using CampusGuides and AdobeConnect platforms for delivering information and workshops, (3) have access to sample Technology guides in order to explore self-paced learning for their personal development, or to adapt to their institution, (4) identify potential partners for creating or adapting collaborative training/certification programs. Attendees will use polling software to interact with presenters and other attendees. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 397 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Maximize Student Potential in Online and Blended Environments - Lessons Learned and New Approaches Barbra Thoeming (Desire2Learn, USA) Melanie Morgan-Jackson (South Florida State College, USA) Looking to introduce or expand your online environment in the traditional classroom? Looking to build on the success of your current online program? Join us to learn how South Florida State College and other HE institutions use the Desire2Learn Learning Environment to provide a more effective, engaging, intuitive, collaborative, and personalized learning experience. We'll discuss how digital learning tools are bringing the power of analytics to HE institutions. Analytics boost student success rates by enabling personal learning, data-driven instruction and decision making. Outcomes: 1. Tested approaches to increasing engagement in an online environment 2. Real-world examples of integrating technology into the traditional classroom and tips on how to empower faculty to explore these options 3. Informed discussion around the role that data can play in bringing the educational community together to contribute to student success Innovation in Blended and Online Learning Systems: Applications to Management Education David Smith (Pepperdine University, USA) Globalization is bringing about a radical rethink regarding the content and delivery of management education. Today, hybrid and online learning are all playing an increasingly significant role throughout schools of business. The structural backbone for each of these modalities is the Learning Management System (LMS). These systems embrace many options for presenting flexible content to students in both individual and collaborative contexts. LMS are well-suited to meet the diverse needs of today's management students since they provide instructional content at a convenient time, flexible location and variable learning pace. This presentation is based on the following three learning paradigms: 1. E-learning quality assurance model (EQL) 2. Instructional Management System (IMS) cooperative initiative 3. E-learning Success (ELS) model. EQL provides a framework for ensuring that content must enhance learning and support learning goals and should never distract and/or detract from the learning process. The IMS initiative is designed to promote systematic thinking regarding the delivery of higher education, to improve learning outcomes, and to increase return on instructional investments. The ELS model suggests that the overall effectiveness of learning depends on the attainment of success at each of three stages: design, delivery, and outcomes. As business schools continued to Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 398 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments transition to hybrid and online programs the issue of learning assurance becomes an even more critical challenge. Fortunately, the problem of learning outcomes assessment can be addressed using the same innovative technology that is used to delivery program content. In this regard, conditional release technologies (CRT) represent a key feature of online learning assessment. CRT can be defined as systems that release content based on student performance and characteristics. As it is generally recognized that students entering a program of management education possess a wide range of experiences and capabilities, CRT allows customization of content based upon such differences. One of the advantages of CRT is that it provides a flexible learning platform that can be customized to meet the needs of a wide portfolio of management education programs. The functionality behind this capability is often provided by intelligent tutors. These systems can assist students in overcoming specific learning challenges by assessing their performance and providing customized content. The data shows that students tend to participate more in learning systems that are content rich and that feature extensive variety which is a hallmark of conditional release technologies. Furthermore, it has been found that students that are technologically ready are more likely to be interested in engaging in web-based learning programs. Additionally, our most recent evidence on the use of conditional release technologies found that:   Students consistently recognized that video lectures provided the highest degree of choice and control since students can select which portions to watch at any given time students found themselves generally more engaged in the tutorials that gave them the highest level of bandwidth and engagement without technological interference or latency. Students noted that on-line quizzes were the most challenging activity; this is not an unexpected finding given the lack of control, i.e., the students had a relatively fixed amount of time and were constrained to a fixed date and time Some specific characteristics of the new learning technologies as applied to management education that we have found to be particularly effective include:  Offers a high degree of learner support and interaction and collaboration that can be more effective than traditional classroom methods  Represents a long-sought solution to the ongoing challenges associated with management education by providing students with a dynamic, personal and scalable experience for continuous learning in a flexible environment  Provides the learner with a purposeful entry to the Internet and to online learning resources (e.g., digital library)  Connects learners and instructors on a 24/7 basis.  Underpins the development of new patterns of relationships between education and business through virtual learning arrangements  Provides an innovative way of connecting students based on common interests This presentation addresses how innovation in learning delivery can enhance the learning experience for management education students. Today, many management education students are requiring more flexibility due to increased economic pressures. Both hybrid and online mobile learning programs provide a vehicle for meeting these challenges. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 399 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments A copy of the slideshow will be made available via the Internet. A key aspect of this presentation is an audience interactive demonstration featuring a variety of innovative learning technologies. Specifically, the demonstration will feature Yawnbuster (interactive learning slideshows), interactive learning videos and conditional release technologies. Participants will be able to take a proactive role by responding to real time exercises featuring these new learning systems. The role of intelligent tutors in the learning process will be highlighted through an interactive demonstration. Turn Chaos Into Collaboration: Scaling Online Course Development and Media Production Rovy Branon (University of Wisconsin-Extension, USA) Ryan Anderson (University of Wisconsin-Extension, USA) Presentation Description: Disruptive forces in higher education require constant organizational innovation and reinvention. The explosion in online learning has created both opportunities and challenges for many institutions. Not the least of these is how to design and develop engaging, media-rich courses on a budget. Different models have evolved across institutions to support course design that include everything from centralized technical resources, departmental instructional consulting offices, and complete outsourcing to outside companies. The University of Wisconsin-Extension has created a unique partnership model that allows multiple UW campuses to work together to provide online programs. This approach allows investment in quality instructional design and media production that would be difficult to achieve at a single institution. Technologies for online learning are constantly changing and this requires nimble thinking and ways to keep up with emerging trends. One unique element to the University of WisconsinExtension structure is that it includes a research and development team called the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory (AADLC). The AADLC injects new thinking into institutional projects but also maintains external grant funding to allow a constant stream of learning technology innovation. Maintaining a collaborative environment with multiple teams can be challenging. Add to this working with faculty and systems from multiple campuses and the environment can sometimes seem chaotic. The presenters will share how the University of Wisconsin-Extension structures its instructional design, media, and research teams to turn chaos into collaboration with faculty from multiple campuses and with each other. Goals: Demonstrate how audience members can successfully design engaging, media-rich courses on a budget. Review how to use specific tools and strategies that can allow individuals to scale up their online programming. Explain how to successfully capitalize off of a collaborative design and development model. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 400 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Audience interaction: We will provide audience members with a chance to ask questions throughout. We'll also give them a chance to offer commentary on the various media samples that will be shown. If time permits, we'll engage the audience by asking them to reflect on a scenario individually and then share relevant commentary with the rest of the participants. Handouts: All audience members will be provided with a handout summarizing what was covered. Balancing Asynchronous and Synchronous Activities in Online Courses -- Faculty, Student, and Administrative Viewpoints Robert Zotti (Stevens Institute of Technology, USA) Allison Ruppino (Stevens Institute of Technology, USA) This session will cover the use of synchronous online course activities from three perspectives: the instructor, the student, and the administrators of online learning environments. When trying to decide, when to include synchronous online course activities a spectrum of considerations will be reviewed. They include…  Learning preferences  Teaching preferences,  Course characteristics  Administrative considerations Current theory, current practice, and survey data will illustrate the problems and promise of integrating these two diametrically opposed yet complimentary modes of running online courses. Experiences from a current accounting class will be used to illustrate approaches for integrating synchronous and asynchronous practices. Recommendations for such integrations will be proposed. What If We Started Over? A University’s Comprehensive Re-design of its Online Courses Steven Oxman (Western International University, USA) Barb Baderman (Western International University, USA) This presentation offers participants an opportunity to learn from one university’s experience in comprehensively re-designing its online courses as part of an institution-wide strategic initiative. The presentation focuses on the breadth and inter-relationships of considerations as the university set goals and researched alternatives for the re-design of its online courses, and the experiences of students and faculty following an execution of a pilot. Changes ultimately included: • working with faculty to create and deliver thousands of 10-minute videos Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 401 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments • working with its LMS vendor to simplify and focus the student learning environment • building test banks for formative and summative assessment • changing discussion forums while offering additional options • creating a feedback and grading certification program for faculty. Each change listed above could be the subject of its own presentation; however, the primary outcome of this broader view is to enable participants to see the integrated nature of instructional design, technology, faculty involvement, and university strategy, and how they must all align for major online improvements to succeed. Research used to establish guiding principles will be shared, as will pilot results and experiences related to student performance and satisfaction. Creating an Adaptive Learning Environment Jeannette Jones, RCC (American InterContinental University Main Campus, USA) Dr. Judy Bullock (American InterContinental University Main Campus, USA) American InterContinental University has begun a learning initiative that incorporates technology to create a customized learning experience. Begun in the undergraduate general education courses, the initiative is expanding into content specific areas. This engaging presentation will share the adaptive process, discuss design considerations, provide a glimpse into the technology used, and present real-time case study experiences for participant discussion. Discussion of case study, virtual tour of classroom using an adaptive learning experience, and the use of visual triggers during presentation will encourage engagement and information sharing. From a university perspective adaptive learning solutions enable a stronger graduate and therefore a better employee. From an implementation perspective, incorporating adaptive learning ideas and design suggestions will encourage efficiencies in the area of employee training using technologies. Workshop Learning Objectives: 1. Identify benefits of an adaptive learning technology experience. 2. Discuss key challenges and solutions for implementation of an adaptive learning initiative. 3. Interpret a real-time adaptive learning experience. How Incorporating Gaming Into an Online Language Course Engages Students & Creates a Sense of Belonging Corrie Emery (Liberty University, USA) Liberty University is one of the largest online schools, offering 166 online programs to students in all 50 states and over 95 countries. Our online professor to student ratio is 17:1, allowing for students to feel engaged and receive quality instructor feedback. In creating courses for Liberty University, it is our desire to implement the newest technologies and current theories to enhance Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 402 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments the learning experience for the students, as well as provide instructors with well-designed courses to teach. Learning a language is difficult; learning a language online can prove to be even more difficult. Without the practice of speaking and continually hearing the learned language, a student can become discouraged in his/her efforts. By incorporating specific gaming aspects such as objectives, achievement rewards, and social interaction into an online language course, we can aid these online learners not only in the retention of the material, but also in their desire to learn the language. By incorporating program "Captivate" with Blackboard, we have created an online German course that integrates leaderboards and gaming concepts, to create the ultimate online language learning class. Individually, students are required to complete a specific real life objective in a timed setting using that week's vocabulary concepts. Once the student has completed his/her individual task, he/she will receive a German phrase to submit to their Instructor. The student's completion time is then ranked on a "leaderboard". The purpose of the game is multiple: In playing the game, the students receive instant feedback on incorrect or correctly chosen answers, inadvertently fostering retention by creating a sense of belonging. Additionally, by using repetition throughout the game students achieve course outcomes, in addition to learning grammatical and vocabulary concepts. In our presentation, we will engage attendees by inviting them to play an electronic game (i.e., Words with Friends). This will then lead us into our concept of how people learn without recognizing it as the "tedious chore" normally associated with the word "learning." The language course and game will be presented during the session. We will then review students' survey response data, demonstrating the increased level of learning and sense of belonging perceived by learners of this language course. To conclude the session, attendees will be asked to participate in a Q & A session. How Personalized, Adaptive Learning Improved Our Student completion, Retention and Success Rates Dyan Lester (Southwest Virginia Community College, USA) Laura C. Brown (Southwest Virginia Community College, USA) Online education is rapidly changing with the introduction of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), social media integration, advanced multimedia, and many other factors. Online education has never been more accessible and flexible, yet many online courses today, even the most academically-sound ones, still have room for improvement when it comes to supporting student engagement, collaboration, motivation and performance, as well as measuring results. Many colleges today seek to increase student retention, measure learning outcomes, and promote best practices in eLearning. These, too, are strategic goals for Southwest Virginia Community College (SWCC), and a driving factor in the Adaptive Learning Research Program (ALRP) the school conducted during the Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 terms. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 403 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Led by SWCC's Director of Distance and Distributed Learning, Dyan Lester, and course instructor, Dr. Laura Brown, this session will highlight the methodology and research findings of the ALRP in which the institution utilized adaptive mastery learning techniques and other innovative technologies to improve student success and measure student knowledge. Ms. Lester and Dr. Brown will present learning outcomes based on an evaluation of separate online sections of Introduction to Psychology. In the adaptive learning sections, students completed course assignments whereby content would adapt based on their knowledge and skills, while students in the comparison sections used high quality, more traditional online course content that did not include adaptive features. In the adaptive learning sections, students were able to choose the method by which they accessed curriculum either by watching high quality 3-5 minute videos or reading e-books. Students were then required to complete activities, including multimedia interactives, of varying degrees of difficulty ranging from single-concept to multi-concept. Each student was challenged at their limit as content and assessments adapted to his or her own ability and needs. Each student's aptitude was measured against a pre-determined set of learning objectives. In the comparison sections, in which content did not adapt, students accessed traditional online curriculum, including instructional videos, and all students completed the same course assignments at the same pace. Both the adaptive and comparison sections were led by expert faculty members. As part of the adaptive courses, individual student mastery was measured against a comprehensive set of 218 learning topics and benchmarked against national standards for Introduction to Psychology. Ms. Lester and Dr. Brown will present results from the ALRP in terms of completion rates, course success rates, re-registration rates, and student satisfaction rates for both the control sections and the experimental sections, in addition to student learning performance scores based on a subsection of the College Board's CLEP exam. SWCC will also discuss its strategic goals; ALRP measures, purposes and roles; and examples of student success. Session Goals The goal of this session is to give audience members an introduction to the measures of success used for the ALRP, as well as a solid understanding of eLearning best practices. Audience members will gain insight into the adaptive learning model and the role it can play in delivering a personalized, effective experience that produces inspiring results. Specifically, they will witness how the adaptive learning experience delivered at SWCC allowed students to create their own learning strategies, which proved instrumental in relevancy, student satisfaction, and competency. Presenters will present the data and research findings in a PowerPoint presentation. They will also engage in an interactive question and answer session; show adaptive learning activities that range from memory recall to promoting critical thinking skills; and create a dialog consisting of audience contribution to assess who has employed adaptive learning strategies, to what degree, and any results. Audience members will learn about research-based best practices in eLearning and how SWCC has successfully applied them to drive measurable results. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 404 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Say What? Telling Your Classroom What You Need It to Do for You Mike Pitcher (The University of Texas at El Paso, USA) Oscar Perez (University of Texas at El Paso, USA) William Robertson (The University of Texas at El Paso, USA) Everyday many faculty will enter their technology-enhanced classroom, and be confined to the lecture-based layout most classrooms are designed for. What if the room could understand what they needed and react to their voice? What if we could move out from the lectern, without being restricted by the location of a control panel, a source switcher? What if we could switch presentations, videos, slides, and bring up interactive polling to engage students with just a word? Thanks to mobile devices, all of this is possible. Learning environments are changing through open source systems that utilize mobile technologies that "listen" to what an instructor says, and work as a mobile TA in the classroom. By attending this session, participants will: 1. Learn about the development and implementation process 2. Discuss the results of a pilot study, and how the classroom environment is impacted 3. Discuss the impact this change in the learning environment has on interaction in the classroom and accompanying instructional design 4. Create a needs/process/starting checklist to embark on a similar project 5. Create a tool and resource list needed to develop such a system in current infrastructures. Context: Academic Technologies (AT) at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) is utilizing mobile devices to "liberate" both faculty and students in the classroom environment through portable, voice-controlled applications. This presentation will inform participants on what to consider, what has worked, and what needs to be revised/revisited in launching such a technology. Problem: The design, layout, and location of technology in classrooms is fixed; thereby, restricting faculty from interacting and engaging with students, particularly in large lecture. halls. Approach: We are working to make the technology in a classroom mobile, not be relocating it, but rather by interacting with it through mobile devices and applications. This presentation will focus on the creation of such a system, and disseminate the results of a first semester pilot and implementation. Results: We have just completed a successful pilot of utilizing this technology, and have aggregated evaluation and feedback from both faculty and students who experienced it. Multi-dimensional Teaching for Maximum Learning: Incorporating Digital Projects in Required Classes Ellen Manning (Kaplan University, USA) Carrie Hannigan (Kaplan University, USA) Core college courses are now tasked with meeting student expectations of teaching skills that can be used beyond school--skills to secure careers after graduation. First-year writing courses must Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 405 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments adapt accordingly. As noted by the National Commission on Writing, writing skills are more than identifying parts of speech and grammar rules (2003). "Exercises in descriptive, creative, and narrative writing help develop students' skills, [and] writing is best understood as a complex intellectual activity that requires students to stretch their minds, sharpen their analytical capabilities, and make valid and accurate distinctions" (2003, p. 13). Building digital media assignments into writing courses will not only improve these vital skills, but will also compel students to think about audience and message differently than how they might with traditional essays. Digital media assignments typically require bringing together text with audio and/or visual components; yet, students need to self-edit content to avoid overwhelming the audience with too much information that obscures the message. Digital media assignments can range from creating a video to developing a blog. The assignment's goal is for students to use technology beyond word processing software. Ideally, the result will not only be instructive for the student, but will be a project the student is excited about sharing with their peers and community. Student, though, cannot successfully create these projects without support from writing course instructors. As with the writing process, the instructor must help the student see that there is a process for creating a digital media project: idea generation, objective identification, audience profiling, topic organization, fact researching, script writing, revising/editing, and project publication. While the instructors teach this process, they must also model digital media in the classroom and introduce students to available tutorials. Therefore, instructors must familiarize themselves with relevant technology, just as they would familiarize themselves with forms of rhetoric. An example of this assignment development can be seen with students taking the second term composition course at Kaplan University, where they develop a "big idea" that solves a problem in their community. In addition to writing a traditional academic essay on their topic, students create a presentation using digital media, such as a power point presentation, video, podcast, or other format that utilizes technology in some way. They must consider how they can pitch their ideas to an audience outside of the immediate classroom. As Lee Bessette notes, Students typically only write for two audiences: their teachers and their peers. Social Media opens up a whole new audience for students to be able to share their ideas and their passions. [ . . .] When students know that others outside of their peer group are reading what they are posting, it will send an important message about being cyber-responsible. (2010, p 8) Kaplan students' development and sharing of digital media responds to a shift in composition theory from the individual writer to "public writing" that relocates "the work of composition as a democratic enterprise" (Weisser, 2002, p. 90). These students who can share their ideas in the public sphere and generate debate realize that their voice gives them the power to make a difference. Kaplan's course encourages students to think about effective communication beyond the written word; how can images, words, and other media combine to create a persuasive message? The Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 406 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments technology presentation challenges students to imagine how they can circulate their idea to a wider audience, one beyond the classroom. In another version of a second term composition course for Kaplan's Health Sciences majors, curriculum designers included a required, but low stakes personal blog. Instructors provided full directions for setting up the blogs using Wordpress or Blogger, and required students to respond to a weekly prompt or topic of their choice. The idea seemed counter intuitive to the teaching of formal writing, but results proved otherwise. Once past the brief learning curve of setting up a blog, most students began to write copious paragraphs by the 3rd and 4th week. As Alex Halavais explained his experience with class blogs, "I wanted to push students to be much more self-directed in their work to find a place for that kind of informal learning that happens outside the academy and try to set up a space within the academy that allows that to happen" ("Blogs move student learning," 2004, p.7). Students become more motivated to take ownership of their learning ("Blogs move student learning," 2004). Using student-driven content also gives more value to the act of blogging, and thereby encourages student engagement. In the larger focus of learning, blogs improve student information literacy, build a learning community outside of the classroom, and improve students' writing skills (Baim, 2008). Indeed, not only blogs, but all forms of digital media provide today's students with the opportunity to share their work in a wide variety of formats, while improving their overall writing skills in the process. References Baim, S. (2008, September). Blogs help create learning community. Faculty Focus. Retrieved from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/blogs-help-create-learning-communit... Bessette, L.S. (2010, July 23). Can 21st century technology really help students become better writers? [Weblog post]. College Ready Writing. Retrieved from http://collegereadywriting.blogspot.com/2010/07/can-21st-century-technol... Blogs move student learning beyond the classroom: An interview with Alex Halavais. (2004, December) Online Classroom, 4-8. Retrieved from http://www.magnapubs.com/newsletter/story/2392/ Glei, J. (2011). 25 insights on becoming a better writer. The 99 Percent. Retrieved from http://the99percent.com/tips/7082/25-Insights-on-Becoming-a-Better-Writer National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges. (2003, April). The Neglected "R": The Needs for a Writing Revolution. Retrieved from http://www.californiawritingproject.org/uploads/1/3/6/0/13607033/neglect... Using writing to increase student engagement. (2009). Writing Across the Curriculum Newsletter, Issue 24. California State University, Sacramento. Retrieved from http://www.csus.edu/wac/newsletters/WAC_Newsletter24.pdf Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 407 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Weisser, C. R. (2002). Moving beyond academic discourse: Composition studies and the public sphere. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. E-book retrieved from Kaplan Library. Implementation of Cloud-Based Computing in a Blended Learning Multimedia Undergraduate Course Jamie Loizzo (Purdue University, USA) Description of Context: The use of cloud-based computing platforms and tools is growing rapidly among general Internet users as well as for instruction in education (Denton, 2012; Siegle, 2010; Sultan, 2010). Cloud computing is a networked structure in which a service is housed in a centralized location, which users can access from their Internet-connected computers and mobile devices (Furht 2010). Examples of cloud computing include Dropbox, Google documents, Blogger, and even YouTube. Working "in the cloud" appeals to many educators because it has the potential to eliminate several technology barriers. Along with the growth of cloud computing, the number of students participating in distance learning is increasing each year. According to the National Center of Education Statistics Learning at a Distance report (2011), the number of undergraduate college students enrolled in at least one distance education class increased from eight to 20% from 2000-2008. One form of distance learning is the “blendedlearning” or “flipped classroom” approach to instruction. This involves students participating in hands-on or project-based activities during face-to-face class meetings, while readings, lectures, and discussions take place online (Napier et al., 2011). A Purdue University course entitled, "Multimedia in Agricultural Communication," was pilot tested with six undergraduate college students in the Agricultural Communication degree program. The students used a cloud-based video-editing program called WeVideo (www.wevideo.com) within a blended-learning, project-based framework in order to develop 5to-7 minute professional quality videos on organic agricultural topics. Two functions of cloud computing were tested with participants: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as Service (SaaS) (Sultan, 2010). Simply stated, the video-editing cloud-based program provided the physical servers and storage infrastructure and the video editing software via a web browser. Meanwhile, the blended and project-based learning design used face-to-face course time for hands-on video production skill development and online course time for readings, discussions, blogs, wikis, and reflective journaling via Blackboard Learn. Research Questions: The research questions for this study were… 1. What are students' perspectives on using the technology and the blended learning format? 2. How does student use of the cloud-based video editing program translate to a finished video project? 3. How does the use of a cloud-based video editing program address common technical and logistical barriers? Methods: The data were collected in the form of course assignments, journal entries, final video projects, and on-camera post-interviews with 4/6 participants. Throughout the course, students Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 408 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments responded to reflective journal prompts and posted blog entries to capture ongoing progress and perceptions of the video editing tool and blended-learning structure. Four students participated in on-camera post-interviews in which they reflected ontheir experiences with and perceptions of the cloud-based computing program and blended-learning course structure. Researchers transcribed and open-coded post-interviews for common themes and compared interview data to course artifacts to provide deeper insight into students' experiences and perceptions using cloudbased video editing within a blended course. Results: Students described using WeVideo in a variety of settings and were able to effectively develop professional quality final video projects. However, participants expressed frustration with some of the functionality of the cloud such as waiting for video clips to render or publish. Another drawback was the video-editing program was not as advanced as this particular group of students, who were all majoring in communication, would have preferred. Students noted that this was the first time they had participated in a project-based blended learning course. They described key strategies that they adopted for navigating the course such as taking ownership of their learning and the importance of time management. In addition, students appreciated the need for hands-on practice for developing professional multimedia skills. Students also described challenges related to blended-learning including the dynamics of effectively engaging in online discussions and the importance of giving equal weight and attention to in-class and online learning assignments and activities. The cloud-based computing video-editing tool proved effective in eliminating logistical technology barriers including:  Physical logistics of accessing computer labs  Working across operating systems such as Mac versus PC  Collaboration across video editing software programs such as Windows Moviemaker, iMovie, Final Cut Pro, and so on  Collaboration with instructor and students on video projects  Storing and editing large video files Conclusions: Participants in this multimedia course were able to successfully develop and present professional videos covering organic agricultural topics through the use of a cloud-based, video-editing program. The IaaS cloud-based structure eliminated the technology challenges related to housing large video files, instructor and student collaboration logistics, and video editing platform discrepancies. However, SaaS video editing in the cloud proved to have some time and functionality delays. Students agreed that project-based and blended-learning educational frameworks were effective for developing multimedia skills. Course artifacts and post-interviews showed students were able to develop multimedia and video production skills through face-to-face project-based coursework, along with readings, discussions, journals, and blogs, which occurred online, outside of the classroom. Discussion/Interpretation: Overall, the results from this study provide future considerations for educators and instructors looking to incorporate similar cloud-based technologies and instructional practices into their courses. Educators and institutions across the country are Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 409 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments examining cloud-computing options for a number of reasons: content delivery, instructional development, cost savings, fostering teacher-student collaboration, and infrastructure support. While IaaS cloud computing offers physical and infrastructure support, this study showed it is important to consider and test SaaS cloud computing with target learners. Cloud computing is improving at a rapid pace, but as with traditional software, educators should consider their intended instructional uses based on the specific tool, educational outcomes, course structure, and learners' needs being targeted. Students in this study voiced positive views of the blended and project-based format for learning hands-on multimedia production skills along with communication development theories and concepts. Some courses such as the one in this study could be difficult to teach fully online, due to the need for hands-on time with video production equipment. The blended-learning format provides a viable option by employing distance learning strategies for content knowledge delivery, while benefitting from face-to-face interactions for projectbased skill development. Securely Assessing Student Learning in a Massively Open Online Course – Best Practices and Outcomes Don Kassner (ProctorU, USA) As Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) providers move toward accreditation in order to monetize their user bases, securely assessing student learning will be crucial to their success. Given the scope and nature of MOOCs, several challenges to effectively and securely assessing students become apparent. MOOCs offer unprecedented levels of access to learners worldwide at a cost significantly lower than matriculating at a college or university. Many educators express concern about whether such a large, dispersed student population can be effectively assessed for learning outcomes. We will describe the challenges of assessing student learning in MOOCs. Additionally, we will outline best practices in achieving this, and identify those practices that are most effective. We will consider and present practices that have been used in online and blended learning assessments and discuss their usefulness. Given the unique challenges presented by the size of MOOCs and the geographical dispersion of their students. Some approaches lend themselves better to the MOOC platform than others and some will contain limitations. Our goal is to dispel the uncertainty regarding the administering of secure learning assessments as MOOCs become more popular. After this presentation, educators will be better armed to incorporate MOOCinspired elements into their curricula and feel confident in assessing student learning. Important Outcomes: 1. Session attendees will leave equipped with a better knowledge and understanding of MOOCs. 2. The importance of, and distinct challenges in, assessing student learning in a secured environment will be emphasized with regard to the popular MOOC format. 3. Session attendees will be armed with an assortment of best practices. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 410 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments 4. Session attendees will engage with anExpert in the field through a question and answer session following the presentation. A PowerPoint presentation will be used to focus on the topic. MOOCs and Copyrights: Navigating the Terrain Linda Enghagen (University of Massachusetts, USA) At the same time that many educators are continuing to develop a working understanding of the copyright issues associated with traditional online education, along come Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with their additional complications. Given their nature, from a copyright standpoint, MOOCs are more like unsecure web sites than traditional online courses. MOOCs are available to anyone with an internet connection so they are not secured environments restricted to enrolled students at an academic institution. And, they do not automatically carry academic credit. This presentation will examine two of the biggest copyright issues raised by virtue of these differences.: 1. First, it will explore an issue of concern to many faculty members which is whether they own the copyright to content they create for MOOCs. 2. Second, it will examine the challenges associated with designing a MOOC that is copyright compliant. For example, while utilizing copyright protected materials under fair use is more difficult in a MOOC, the use of Open Access materials or those otherwise published under applicable Creative Commons licenses are increasingly viable options as these methods of publication increase in popularity. Leveraging Mobile Devices to Engage Students and Improve Student Outcomes: Evidence From Hospitality Education Amy Gregory (University of Central Florida, USA) This presentation describes the use of a cloud-based student engagement platform that utilizes student-owned mobile devices in both traditional classrooms as well as large (100 enrollment) mixed-mode course offerings. Specifically, the presentation demonstrates integration of Bloom's Taxonomy for teaching, learning, and assessing. In addition, this presentation will discuss pedagogical practices and lessons-learned related to how to engage students both in and out of class on the mobile devices they love to use. The ubiquitous availability of student-owned mobile devices provides instructors with an opportunity to engage and assess students in ways that their predecessors could only imagine. Using a new generation of cloud-based student engagement platforms, mobile devices can be used to deliver assessments, verify content understanding, and provide analytics on progress towards student learning outcomes. When combined with the Internet, mobile devices have the potential to provide instructors with advanced instructional design capabilities for any class configuration - traditional, hybrid, online or remote learners. Despite the advantages mobile technology can bring in advancing instructional methodologies that engage today's digital-savvy students, many instructors fear the consequences of allowing students to actively use their mobile devices in classroom settings. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 411 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments In this session, learn how Dr. Amy Gregory, from the University of Central Florida's (UCF) Rosen College of Hospitality Management, deployed Via Response in her classroom and transitioned from traditional instructional design practices to interactive student engagement methodologies using mobile devices. Via Response is a cloud-based student engagement platform that provides synchronous and asynchronous assessments capabilities, a suite of student engagement tools, as well as analytical data on overall student performance. She will share insights and best practices on how to be successful using mobile devices to increase student engagement and content retention to improve overall performance. UCF's Rosen College of Hospitality Management has over 3,000 students enrolled in classes that are held in a state-of-the-art campus located in the heart of Orlando's hospitality and tourism center. The Rosen School campus is a state-of-the-art facility - a 159,000 sq/ft campus that is the largest facility ever built for hospitality management education. Dr. Gregory has been a faculty member of the Rosen College of Hospitality Management since 2005. She implemented Via Response's cloud-based student engagement platform in her Resort Management and Principals of Timeshare courses. Both were live-lecture classes, with between 50-100 students in each course. In addition, UCF's College of Business Administration (10,000 enrolled students) utilizes Via Response in a variety of courses, including two very large hybrid courses with over 1,500 students participating simultaneously via either classroom-based live-lecture or through a video lecture-capture system. Dr. Gregory and her colleagues in the UCF College of Business Administration all found significant improvements in both student engagement and overall student performance as a result of the adoption of Via Response. Dr. Gregory will share: • • • • • • Her approach to getting past the fear of allowing students to use devices in her classes Ways to use synchronous assessments and engagement tools to facilitate in-class discussions Metrics on how homework assessments delivered to students on their own mobile devices helped improve content retention throughout the term Her student's feedback to using Via's student response platform The improvements to overall student performance after integrating Via Case studies and student performance improvements from her colleagues usage of Via Response in very large, hybrid configurations MOOC, schMOOC: A Collaborative, Participatory, Improvisational Course Offering John Sener (Founder/CKO, Sener Knowledge LLC, USA) This presentation will describe a course offered by the TLT Group and Sener Knowledge in May/June 2013. Alternatively called a schMOOC (= somewhat connectivist, hypothetically Massive Open Online Course) or MOOCOW (Massive Open Online Course Or Whatever), the focus of this offering was to explore the ideas of John Sener's book The Seven Futures of American Education. The goals of the presentation are to: - Describe how the course facilitators created an offering using a highly collaborative, participatory, and improvisational approach to designing the learning experience. - Report the results of the learning experience based on the perspectives of several of the course facilitators and participants. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 412 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments The course design was essentially a mashup of several parallel events which reflected the goals of several different facilitators, including: learn how to use the Seven Futures process for quality improvement; learn more about how to offer a MOOC(-like) course; find out what Seven Futures ideas resonate with readers; and learn how to apply a particular design approach to a MOOC-like course. The "somewhat connectivist" design aspect was intended to enable a more structured course through the learning experience, but the design also included a "do-it-yourself" option which allowed participants to define their own objectives and create their own user-defined learning experience. The design process was an open, collaborative, participatory, and improvisational process, featuring "fishbowl" planning sessions where participants showed up for live synchronous online events (using Adobe Connect) to watch the main facilitators plan, offer suggestions, and join the process spontaneously, taking on particular roles in the course design process. Another interesting aspect of the course was its rapid development and deployment; most elements of the course were created literally within a 48-hour period. The resulting product was a bit of an experiment; sometimes messy, often engaging, always intriguing, and never a dull moment. The presentation will also discuss various key elements of the learning design and experience, including the use of live synchronous events to anchor the structure of the learning experience; the emphasis on learner-generated content as the heart of the learning experience; the use of open learning resources; and the use of Google+ to enable discussion, interaction, user-defined learning among the participants. Best Practices in Using Interactive Web Conferencing for Online and Hybrid Courses Linda Macaulay (Elizabethtown College, USA) In 2009, a WebEx pilot was initiated by the request of several faculty members for a technology with capabilities similar to Skype to incorporate into their online and hybrid courses. After investigating several technologies, WebEx was selected and the pilot involving both academic and non-academic departments began. Although many benefits of using a web conferencing solution for teaching and learning were reported by users, other factors were also deemed critical to the success of online learning. Benefits of IWC via WebEx Include: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Meeting individual students' learning styles and learning needs Freeing up physical classroom space on campus Increasing student-to-student and student-to-teacher interaction during class meetings Promoting more collaborative and active learning Adding variety to the modes of information/content sharing Eliminating the need for students to commute (and park) on campus Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 413 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments 7. Providing pre-service teachers with experience learning and teaching in a IWC environment. WebEx Best Practices Under Discussion Will Include:     Troubleshooting the technology Providing effective professional development and training for faculty and students Strategies for conducting more effective and successful meetings by implementing IWC etiquette Planning instruction to meet learning goals, and ways to promote consistent student-tostudent and student-to-faculty interaction. Throughthe use of a survey instrument, the study investigated the impact of the use of such synchronous web conferencing solutions as WebEx on undergraduate and graduate student learning in fully online and hybrid course environments. The study aimed to look at how WebEx is being used by faculty that impacts student learning. This is a mixed methods research project with two data sets: 1. Quantitative survey data with Likert scale responses and student demographic data. 2. Qualitative survey data with open-ended responses. The survey questions were adapted from a survey created and validated by Kay and Knaak (2007) that evaluated student learning via online learning objects. This instrument was chosen because it moved the focus of study away from the technology tool itself and focuses more on student learning. This study differs from previous research as it aims to fill the gaps in the literature by focusing on how synchronous web conferencing impacts student learning. This study is novel, as it compares hybrid and online groups with regard to how WebEx, a synchronous web conferencing tool, impacts their learning. This research will help to determine if the use of WebEx in collaborative ways enhances the education of students enrolled in hybrid or online courses. Specifically we are interested in how faculty use WebEx in their online and hybrid courses and how this use is positively impacting student learning. The questions that guide this research are:   How does using web-conferencing (WebEx) in an online/hybrid course impact student learning? Is there a difference in how undergraduate and graduate students perceive synchronous learning? Though this technology has been in existence for several years, the research on its impact on student learning is very limited. Ross, Morrison, and Lowther (2010) stated sharing Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 414 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments achievements with synchronous tools will increase the effective use of tools like WebEx and hopefully provide guidance to faculty. Towson University has many diverse programs and as the flagship institution in Maryland for teacher preparation and also the goal of being one of the best institutions in the nation, it is imperative that we study and explore the use of innovative instructional tools and determine if using this tool for the purposes listed above actually impacts student learning in positive ways. References: Kay, R. H. & Knaack, L. (2007). Evaluating the learning in learning objects. Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, 22(1), 5-28. Ross, S. M., Morrison, G. R., & Lowther, D. L. (2010). Educational technology research past and present: Balancing rigor and relevance to impact school learning. Contemporary Educational Technology, 17-35. Avoid Pinocchio Syndrome: A “go to” Multimedia Guide to Enhance and Personalize Instructor Presence Online Judy Halliday (Baker College & Center for Graduate Studies, USA) Joanna Palmer (Baker College & Center for Graduate Studies, USA) John Christopher (Baker College & Center for Graduate Studies, USA) Problem: Online instructors can face many challenges when connecting and engaging with students in an online environment. Much of the communication between instructors and students is often text based, and can lack a personal level of interaction. Instructors and students may not feel as connected to each other within an online environment, or even perceive their instructor as real person with human characteristics and a personality, like they would if they saw and heard their instructor in a face to face setting. Instructors may want to make changes within their courses to increase engagement and connection, but do not know how, feel they may not possess the skill level needed to try various multimedia options, nor seek out the resources they have readily available to them. See brief video at following link: http://goanimate.com/videos/0Trex1w-F_58 Approach: This session will focus on putting research findings into action. Research indicates how types of interactions students have with online instructors can influence their level of engagement and learning. This session will provide practical applications of strategies, tools, and methods to increase engagement within an online learning environment. Specific tools will be explored and demonstrated including: avatar programs (i.e. GoAnimate, Voki, etc.), audio/video applications for introductions, announcements, lectures, and feedback (Animoto, Norpix, podcasts, etc.), audio/video screen capture programs to provide directions and give feedback (i.e. ScreenChomp, Screencast-o-matic, etc.), animated presentation programs (i.e. Prezi, Audacity, Screeny, etc.). Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 415 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments This session will include how tools and various multimedia options can be applied to various parts of a class including introductions, announcements, lectures, discussion, and feedback processes. Discussion of free versus paid programs will be covered. Suggestions will be made on how to utilize the programs across multiple disciplines. Session Objectives - Attendees who attend this informational session will: • • • • • Gain an understanding of how instructor interactions and how instructors choose to interact with students can impact student engagement and learning. Examine strategies and tools that can be used to increase student engagement, instructor immediacy, and instructor efficiency. Explore where these strategies can be used within courses and across disciplines. Leave the session with a set of practical applications they can start to use in their classes immediately. Possess information needed to improve faculty training and course design to increase instructor presence and student engagement. Attendees will participate in polls and small group activities to explore how they can apply what is covered to their particular courses and departments. Instructors, faculty developers, and course designers will all benefit from this session, and leave with the tools needed to increase teacherstudent engagement and student learning. Handouts will be provided that include website resources and key references related to session. Conference Materials: Slides will be used to guide the presentation. During the session, an online polling feature will be used to increase attendee participation and interaction. Websites will be visited and demonstrated during the session. Handouts will be provided to attendees with information and web links on key strategies, methods, and research discussed during the session, providing a "go to" guide to implement new strategies in their courses immediately. All items will be provided for inclusion on the conference web site. Context: The following research provides a foundation for the practical applications and strategies shared in this session. • • • Teaching presence is related to student learning, including how the instructor facilitates discourse, direct instruction, and shares information (Shea, et al., 2003). o This session will examine how an instructor can improve teaching presence and connection through the use of various multimedia options. The frequency and characteristics of instructor interactions is associated with student learning (Jiang & Ting, 2000). Instructor immediacy is the method of communicating to foster student perceptions of a personable, engaged connection. (Melrose & Bergeron, 2007). o This session will provide suggestions and strategies to increase instructor use of personable and engaged interactions with students. Learning is enhanced when narration and animation are presented concurrently and in a way that is conversational (Mayer, 2001; Crook, et. al., 2012). Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 416 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments This session will demonstrate multiple ways instructors can incorporate narration and animation into their course. Research has found interactions with course interfaces affect learning. More specifically, if students have negative or difficult interactions with interfaces, it decreases learning (Hillman, et al., 1994; Hewett, 2003). o The methods demonstrated in this session will help instructors interact with students in a way that allows students to more easily access and interact with information. o • Supporting Literature: Crook, A., Mauchline, A., Stephen, M., Lawson, C., Drinkwater, R., Lundqvist, K., Orsmond, P., Gomez, S., & Park, J. (2012). The use of video technology for providing feedback to students: Can it enhance the feedback experience for staff and students? Computers & Education, 58(1): 386-396. Hewitt, J. (2003). How habitual online practices affect the development of asynchronous discussion threads. Journal of Educational Computing Research 28(1): 31-45. Hillman, D. C., Willis, D. J. & Gunawardena, C. N. (1994). Learner-interface interaction in distance education: An extension of contemporary models and strategies for practitioners. The American Journal of Distance Education 8(2): 30-42. Jiang, M. & Ting, E. (2000). A study of factors influencing students' perceived learning in a web- based course environment. International Journal of Educational Telecommunications 6(4): 317-338. Mayer, R. E. (2001). Multimedia Learning. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Melrose, S. & Bergeron, K. (2007) Instructor immediacy strategies to facilitate group work in online graduate study. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 23(1): 132-148. Shea, P. J., Pickett, A. M., & Pelz, W. E. (2003). A follow-up investigation of "teaching presence" in the SUNY Learning Network. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks 7(2): 61-80. Connecting Students to Their Professional Communities and Each Other Tracy Galuski (SUNY Empire State College, USA) Rebecca Bonanno (SUNY Empire State College, USA) Thalia MacMillan (SUNY Empire State College, USA) There is a great need for students to combine the many benefits of online learning with practical, community based career experiences and professional development. At Empire State College we are integrating online study in the areas of early childhood, disabilities, and human services with community based professional learning opportunities. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 417 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments This presentation will discuss the experiences and challenges of the faculty as they develop the course. They will share the varied ways in which students can connect with one another and with professionals in their field. As the majority of students at Empire State College are adult learners, the discussion will also review the unique challenges and benefits of working with this population. Objectives: 1. Participants will learn about the advantages of learning opportunities that combine online study with real-world learning experiences 2. Participants will understand and find strategies to meet the challenges of combining online study with community based experiences. Edutainment: Using Media and Video Instruction as Methods of STEM Content Dissemination William Robertson (The University of Texas at El Paso, USA) Edutainment has recently been a major growing area of education, showing great promise to motivate students with relevant activities. The importance of using relevant and practical methods of instruction and curriculum delivery that build on student interests and increase enjoyment in the learning process is critical at the middle school level, especially in the STEM fields. The use of edutainment in this manner is meant to inspire broader interest in mathematics and science for middle school students and to develop a culture of education that makes learning more accessible to all students. This presentation surveys the use of such immersive modalities to involve middle school students actively with concepts and suggests further directions for the use of demonstrations and videos in educational settings. The purpose of this presentation is to focus on edutainment in the context of STEM education, chronicling large-scale interactions (as opposed to digital games individuals can play) with students, teachers and community members involving relevant content in student-centered contexts. The focus on edutainment is restricted to examples where the entertainment value is significant, but not overshadowing the educational content. This presentation will focus on the use of media and video instruction as methods of content dissemination in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Specifically, this area, dubbed "edutainment", will chronicle three separate large scale interactions with students, teachers and community members that utilized live action to video as methods of capturing relevant content in student-centered contexts. This presentation session will focus on the planning, development and implementation process used by educators to create and deliver hands-on mini-lessons in this unique forum. Additionally, there will be a discussion of how aspects of this type of engaging education connect to the teaching they more commonly do. Tips and lessons learned will be shared for attendees interested in exploring the potential for outreach and informal education to inspire broader interest in mathematics, science, reading, learning and other subjects, and to develop a culture of education that extends democratically in making higher education accessible to all students. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 418 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments In the first segment, the use of video instruction for physical science topics for Middle School students will be explored. Dr. Skateboard's Action Science, a science curriculum supplement that consists of video instruction and classroom activities. This product is an example that focuses on the physical science concepts found in the areas of forces, motion, Newton's Laws of Motion, and simple machines. The use of familiar activities, situations and objects, such as skateboarding and bicycle motocross (BMX), around which students can explore and explain scientific concepts can be defined as Action Science. Action Science is designed to teach fundamental science concepts in physics in an approach that utilizes transformative educational strategies, which help students move from memorizing facts and content to constructing knowledge in meaningful and useful manners. The activities associated with Action Science address both the objectives and enduring knowledge of physical science in content and process skills for both the United States of America (USA) National Science Standards and the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) State Standards. In the second segment, two examples will be presented in which large scale live demonstrations were utilized to engage students in multimedia enhanced stadium settings, which produced video content that could be utilized for in class instruction and motivation in STEM related topics. These two examples were both done in conjunction with GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs), which is a five-year program funded by the Department of Education. The first example will cover an effort in which over 3500 Eighth graders from the Ysleta Independent School District (YISD) in attendance learned more about basic scientific theories tested by several professional skateboarders, BMX riders and an inline skater during GEAR UP National Day on September 17, 2009 in the Don Haskins Center at UTEP. The second example in this segment will focus on an event help on May 3, 2012, at which Dr. Robertson and a team of professional action sports athletes in both the disciplines of BMX and skateboarding will perform a live demonstration, which will be done in order to engage local students in explorations of mathematics and science in the context of Action Science. The largescale demonstration utilizing professional BMX and skateboarding athletes was done for approximately 8,000 area elementary and middle school students in El Paso, Texas conjunction with Opportunity Nation festivities to be held on the campus of the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). The third segment of the presentation will focus on the delivery of STEM content in a children's television show. In mid-September 2011, El Paso PBS-affiliate KCOS-TV began airing a locally-produced children's educational show (Blast Beyond) that includes a seasoned television host, a three-piece rock band, and a live on-stage audience of children ages 6-9 from a local school. The show airs on weekdays to a broadcast area of 2 million people spanning three states, and past episodes are accessible on the KCOS-TV website (http://www.kcostv.org/blastbeyond.html). Sample video of the educational aspects from the show will be included in the presentation and used to emphasize the types of interactions done within an educational television show designed to actively engage young students. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 419 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments The use of educational materials contextualized in the form of entertainment has a long history, and has been certainly gaining momentum as delivery methods of content have grown to utilize multimedia and video. The connection of STEM education to real world topics is vital in order to effectively engage students and to provide them with a reason to delve into deeper conceptual understandings. Edutainment, and its implied synthesis of elements of education and entertainment have great potential at the Middle School level in order to serve as a primary motivational and engagement strategy for STEM efforts. Additionally, the potential to reach wider audiences in STEM utilizing edutainment strategies, can help to transform STEM education by integrating both informal and formal learning in ways that increase student interest and provide pathways to learning. The Wolfram Online Course Platform Andre Kuzniarek (Wolfram Research, USA) For over 2 decades, Wolfram Research has been bringing technological innovation to the classroom, with products and services such as Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, the Wolfram Demonstration Project, the Wolfram Education Portal, CDF, and most recently Mathematica Online. With all the excitement surrounding online education, blended learning, and MOOCs, it's become obvious that technology will play an even more important role in education than ever before. Wolfram's offerings are a natural fit for a technology-driven learning environment, particularly in STEM subject areas. This presentation will demonstrate new tools for authoring lecture materials with Mathematica, streamlining the video capture process, and deploying interactive course material to a unified web framework based on the Wolfram Cloud. Wolfram brings unique elements to a student's learning experience with a knowledge-based natural language programming system underlying pedagogical presentations. Computation is displayed as an integral part of a lecture, and students interact with the material in parallel to the presentation or at their own pace. Come and see an important piece of the future of technical education! Badging System to Document Competency-Based Learning in Online Geospatial Learning Lab Stephen McElroy (American Sentinel University, USA) Description: Over the past decade, educators and students continue to realize the benefits of online education. The online delivery of undergraduate and graduate degrees in geospatial information systems (GIS) allows students to learn GIS skills while providing a flexible pathway by which to do so. As part of our online geographic and geospatial information degree programs, we developed an online Geospatial Learning Lab. The concept of a Geospatial Learning Lab is similar to a learning commons that brings together people, resources and materials in a way that facilitates the development of an active learning community. The Geospatial Learning Lab is a Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 420 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments one-stop shop that allows students to explore a given topic in greater depth well beyond the classroom environment. It includes a dynamic list of online GIS content, data downloads, tutorials, case studies, and exercises. A critical part of the Geospatial Learning Lab is the creation of a learning environment that allows for discussions among students and between students and professors. We deployed a number of educational technologies, such as VoiceThread, Yammer and other interactive, multimedia resources to facilitate the interaction and exchange of ideas and information. Competency-based learning, such as that emphasized in the Geospatial Learning Lab, entails skill acquisition through mastery of content. To track student achievement, we implemented an online badging system in which students are issued a skill-level badge (basic, intermediate, or advanced) upon the demonstration of specific geospatial competencies in one of six concept groups: basic calculations, geospatial data management, geoprocessing tasks, raster modeling and 3D analysis, remote sensing and imagery, and spatial statistics. Students incorporate their badges into an ePortfolio that documents student learning throughout their studies. Goal: The goal of this presentation is to share the process by which we implemented a badging system to document competency-based learning within our geospatial information system degree programs. Audience Engagement: Throughout the presentation several interactive polls will be used togauge audience feedback. Audience participation is encouraged and there will be 10-15 minutes reserved for questions and discussion. Benefits of Attendance: Educators with an interest in competency-based learning and the application of a badging system to document extra-curricular online learning will benefit from attending this presentation. Attendees will learn the ways in which the online geospatial learning lab fits into the context of the university and explore the online learning material content. They will also understand the ways in which the badge system functions and is deployed to document student learning. The topic of the presentation fits well into the session track of emerging learning environments. The badging concept within the context of an online geospatial learning lab provides a new and different environment in which students can explore geospatial topics in a self-paced, on-demand venue. During the presentation, handouts will include content samples for each of the three badge levels. The PowerPoint presentation will be posted on the conference website and the presentation Abstract and description will be included in the conference proceedings. From Massive Open Online Courses to Meaningful Open Online Communities in Immersive Humanities MOOCs Richard Edwards (Ball State University, USA) In Spring 2013, Ball State University offered two Humanities MOOCs through the Canvas Network: Investigating Film Noir and Gender through Comic Books. This presentation will examine and assess the challenges and opportunities of teaching Humanities courses in a massive Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 421 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments open online environment, especially when one of the main instructional design goals is to minimize machine-graded assignments and multiple choice testing. Ball State's iLearn Research Group brought together a team of instructors, learning technology developers, and course designers to create and support social and creative media projects that leveraged Ball State's existing expertise in online education with new tools, platforms, and learning theories. Since the MOOCs were a research project for the Integrated Learning Institute at Ball State, these courses were an opportunity to explore existing online tools at larger scale, create highly immersive teachable moments, and test out new learning applications build by Ball State's internal web developers. The goal was to create a MOOC that stimulated student connection, collaboration, and curation as key learning modalities. Among the tools and media strategies used in these two MOOCs: (1) Social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook (2) Social media curation of course content through Storify and Pinterest (3) Video annotation assignment of films noir through the Open Text Tool for Online video (Film Noir MOOC) (4) Green screen studio interviews with major comic book writers with live Twitter integration (Comic Book MOOC) (5) On location shooting at a classic movie theater (Film Noir MOOC) (6) "Create your own comic book" assignment (Comic Book MOOC) This presentation will conclude with an analysis of how these various tools and platforms came together to support a meaningful online community of learners. These MOOCs sought to bring together a massive number of students who could share and curate the knowledge they were learning in unique ways. For example, the Film Noir MOOC created a new open online repository of video annotations of key public domain films noir. The MOOC, in essence, due to its scale, could begin to leave behind a newly created knowledge archive that could benefit other online learners and even film scholars. Ball State also put a lot of effort into considering how to make their video lectures more engaging and immersive, including shooting on location at a classic movie theater for the Film Noir MOOC and using motion graphic techniques to create a "detective's notebook" that posed questions to viewers of the lecture. Creating a massive community of online learners also generated new learning opportunities in these MOOCs. For the Comic Book MOOC, the size of the MOOC was an incentive for major comic book writers to visit the course and share their knowledge with the students. And by integrating Twitter, the Comic Book MOOC created a network of learners connected through the live tweeting of the guest lectures and the resulting Q&A sessions. For the Film Noir MOOC, students were able to collaboratively analyze online videos and leave their comments in a new open annotation environment which simultaneously also supported the students writing about film noir in a public forum. Ultimately, instead of seeing these two courses as just large online classes, the wider lens and educational philosophy of seeing these MOOCs as open online communities of frequently highly skilled learners with advanced degrees can influence how MOOCs develop into the future. A Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 422 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments MOOC can bring together a diverse, global body of students in a connected, collaborative, and curation-based new culture of learning. Increasing Learner Engagement Via Video and Other LMS Tools Sarah Fornero (Adler School of Professional Psychology, USA) The goal of every learning experience is to keep the learner engaged and connected with the content. This was our main goal when we set out to rework an older online course to increase the amount of interaction and engagement students had with both the content and the instructor. The course we started with was Research Methods. Research Methods is already considered a difficult course to teach in person, due to the rigor and complexity of the content, tied with minimal prior exposure to research on the part of students. Offering this course online only increases those difficulties, since you lose the ability to gauge student understanding in real time via body language. The original version of the course was almost entirely text based, with lots of student readings, discussion boards and papers, there was little to no interaction between students and the content or students and the instructor. To increase learner engagement we looked at all of the different modalities with which content could be presented, from there we started adding as much audio and visual content as possible to support the readings. The course author had a number of PowerPoint slides she had used in an on-campus section of the course and those served as the foundation for our additional content. Depending on what was covered in each presentation, we chose one of the following options: an html version of the slides, with graphics, to share the content with students without the need for downloading; narrated slideshow videos; or lecture capture videos which include annotations on the slides by the course author, along with audio content. To take the use of video one step further, the course author used video messages to communicate with students throughout the course. Aside from just audio and visual content we utilized other tools and features in the LMS. We used completion tracking within the LMS to guide the students through the activities in the recommended order. We developed interactive rubrics for each assignment, to provide clear and specific feedback. Check-point activities were created with instant feedback to allow students to check their own understanding. Finally, we added in private wikis where students could draft their research proposals and get private feedback from the instructor. In our presentation we will go over all of the design and development decisions that were made, discuss the student reaction to these decisions, and the improvements we plan to incorporate for the next iteration of the course. iTunes Course Manager: The Power of an iPad in Online Learning Russ Dively (Ellucian, USA) Colleen L. Bielitz, M.S. (Becker College, USA) The Becker College Center for Accelerated and Professional Studies has adopted iPads as a requirement for their online students in their Bachelor of Business Administration program. An Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 423 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments iPad has tremendous rich media capability, and to take full advantage of this powerful tool for online students Becker College partnered with Ellucian to develop online courses using Apple's iTunes U Course Manager as the primary tool for course content delivery. This presentation will showcase one of the courses and how the course integrates with Voicethread. iTunesU Course Manager is freely available to any faculty, and the presentation will also provide guidance on how to begin using this powerful tool. What is iTunes U Course Manager? It is a LMS-lite tool that enables instructors to bring together multimedia lectures, iBooks, podcasts, documents, and even Apple discipline specific apps into one integrated tool . From the iTunes U app, students view video or audio lectures and take notes that are synchronized with the lecture. They can read iBooks and access content specific iPad apps. They can see a list of all the assignments for the course and check them off as they're completed, and when a new assignment is added students receive instant notification via the iPad. But wait, there's more! These courses also utilize Voicethread, which provides for audio and video asynchronous verbal class discussion. Instructors can create powerful video presentations and students can add their comments directly onto the video presentation with their own video and audio comments. Students are also able to create their own presentations and share it with the class - and again students can add their audio and video comments. This technology provides for a richer interactivity between faculty and students -all via the Voicethread mobile app - and easily accessed from links within the Course Manager. This presentation will engage the attendees with open discussions about iTunes Course Manager, its integration with other tools, and the process involved the course development. This presentation is valuable to any educator contemplating iPads as a tool for either online or blended learning environments. Let's Get Active: Increasing Interactivity in Online Courses with Webex Brittany Coursey (Liberty University, USA) Corrie Emery (Liberty University, USA) The Center for Curriculum Development at Liberty University provides the University with quality curriculum and multiple types of course development processes. Liberty offers 166 online programs to students in all 50 states and over 95 countries, our department is responsible to provide the newest educational technologies and course designs. Our online professor to student ratio is 17:1, allowing for students to feel engaged and receive quality instructor feedback. In designing these courses for Liberty University, it is our desire to implement the newest technologies and current theories to enhance the learning experience for the students, as well as provide instructors with well-designed courses to teach. Online courses are growing in demand, but so is the concern that these courses cannot match the success of traditional classroom. Educators, institutions, and accreditation agencies want to ensure that the online degree programs are as effective as conventional face-to-face settings. The use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) allows students to engage socially with the support to plan and collaborate as one would in person. Computer-mediated communication has Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 424 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments also made the reconciliation of synchronous and asynchronous learning environments possible while improving the outcome of cognitive development in online courses. Research has shown that "learning is enhanced when it is more like a team effort than a solo race, and that, compared to learning alone, learning in small groups improves critical thinking" (Chan et. al, 2005). Though evidence supports the success of synchronous learning environments in an online setting most universities are resistant to implement them. The generalization is that learning environments must be completely synchronous or completely asynchronous. Research shows that each has its place in online learning. However, we find that, in our experience, the two are complementary instead of contradictory. Each contributes separate strengths that fill the weaknesses of its counterpart. We believe that online learning would be most effective by incorporating both. As technology advances, the lines designating "synchronous" and "asynchronous" are blurring, and we as educators, students, and designers must reevaluate the way in which education is delivered. We have determined a way to utilize WebEx as a tool to bridge this gap. Once a WebEx license is obtained, the instructor would send an announcement inviting students to a voluntary synchronous meeting. Then, he/she would create the meeting, share the link, and begin the meeting at the scheduled time. During the meeting, the instructor could share resources, collaborate, and conference with students as he/she would in a traditional classroom. Additionally, the instructor can record the meeting as it occurs. This would allow students who were unable to attend to access the meeting after the fact. This process was recently implemented in one of Liberty's online courses to test WebEx's ability to showcase the strengths of both synchronous and asynchronous learning environments. The results of the implementation and best practices determined by the testing will be presented during the session. Online classes have changed the face of education considerably. As a result, various synchronous teaching tools such as WebEx are becoming quite popular. The tools provide a digital solution for e-learning and also provide a platform for training and accessibility that can be used from anywhere with virtually any device. When using tools like WebEx in an online classroom, the instructor's creativity and interactivity is limited only by his or her imagination. WebEx has many features that allow students and professionals to access important information from the "meeting rooms" within the synchronous tool. Additional functionality built into WebEx includes audio and video conferencing; collaboration with chat, polls, and whiteboard; screen and file shares. With WebEx, instructors can enhance the learning experience. Thus, learning how to use this tool is vital for any educator who wants to master the art of online instruction. We want to expound upon WebEx's features and includes tips and best practices for its use by faculty in the online environment. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 425 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments A New Kind of Online Writing Lab: Using Multimedia and Video Game Resources to Support Beginning Writers Crystal Sands (Excelsior College, USA) Michael Winters (Valencia College, USA) Michelle Healy (Excelsior College, USA) The Excelsior College Online Writing Lab (Excelsior College OWL) provides writing and research support services to adult learners, community college students, and struggling writers. Initial planning for Excelsior College OWL began in spring 2007. An assessment of English Composition at Excelsior College disclosed an unacceptably-high dropout rate. Approximately 15% of students either failed the course or failed to complete the course on time. Excelsior College was not unique in this struggle. National research indicates that writing continues to be a significant struggle for both college students and even college graduates. Research indicates a need for better support for writers as they enter college and as they work to make the transition to writing in different disciplines. Developing an online writing lab as a student support system, one that would help emerging writers as they worked to adjust to college-level writing became one major tool in addressing the needs of student writers. Survey findings disclosed that most existing online writing centers were features of four-year colleges or major university centers. The online writing centers were primarily text based and resembled a print based lab transferred to an online environment. Consequently, our challenge has been to turn the text-based environment of a traditional OWL into a truly web-based environment that features interactive design and easy user navigation. In 2012, Excelsior College applied for and received a $639,000 grant from the Kresge Foundation to revise curriculum and fully integrate multimedia activities to support student learning. As a part of this grant, a project director from the field of Rhetoric and Composition was hired (presenter, Crystal Sands) to ensure quality and consistency with the writing content and to lead a team of writing, instructional technology, and gaming experts to complete the Excelsior College OWL and assess it during a pilot study that will be underway during Fall 2013. This pilot study involves developmental writing courses and college-level writing courses at six colleges across the United States, including fiveCommunity Colleges. This presentation will showcase this new, highly-interactive, media-rich online writing lab, which is the first of its kind and designed to serve the needs of struggling writers as they make the transition to college writing and then writing in the disciplines. The presentation will provide audience members with an opportunity to interact with the main areas of the Excelsior College Online Writing Lab: the Writing Process, Locating Information & Writing with Sources, Grammar Essentials, the Essay Zone, and an exciting new Digital Writing area. Audience members will also have an opportunity to play a writing process video game, which is included in the OWL. The presentation will also cover plans to assess the effectiveness of the Excelsior College OWL, which will be underway during the Fall 2013 semester. The pilot study involves six colleges: Excelsior College, Valencia College, Howard Community College, Broome Community College, Union County College, and San Diego Mesa College. The assessment project, led by Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 426 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments the Evaluation Consortium at the University at Albany involves usability studies of the Excelsior College OWL, surveys, writing assessment, and writing about writing assessment. The presentation will also include advice on how other institutions, high schools, colleges, and universities, can take advantage of this open-source resource and integrate it into courses that require writing. A discussion of how the curriculum was developed for the pilot study will provide audience members with a specific model, but audience members will also be invited to ask questions about how the Excelsior College OWL can provide media-rich writing support for both writing courses and courses across the disciplines which require writing assignments. From Binders to iPads: Transforming a Medical School Curriculum for the Digital/Interactive Age Catherine Delia (University of Rochester, USA) When we think about the materials we use to teach, do we see a huge stack of papers? Here, memorize this; keep this to look up later; make sure you've got it all written down so that nothing gets lost. Traditionally, you give a student the learning objectives, the readings, the PowerPoint slides and tell them this is the material you have to learn. But what if you give them an interactive device that lets them see animations and videos of actual demonstrations, or provides the capability for instant feedback when studying through flashcards, or the ability to search their notes? That's what we are trying to do at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. We want to utilize interactive technology in the curriculum in the places that make sense to enhance the learning process for medical students. To that end, we've issued iPads to each medical school incoming class for the last 2 years and will continue for each future class. Participants will learn about the 4 phases of this effort and what it takes to accomplish a major technological shift in thinking and practice for a medical school curriculum. The phases: including where we need to work through the logistics and deployment of the iPads to the students. You can't just give a student an iPad and expect him/her to know exactly what to do (although that may change with each future class). We need to make the materials that are already created, accessible for the online world. We need to work with faculty to make sure they are comfortable with the changing capabilities of this technological world. And finally, we need to help the faculty create the content that takes advantage of the technology but also enhances learning and value to students. At the end of the session participants will know about the challenges for students and faculty, results of a student focus group and survey, and the institutions' follow-up to address issues that surfaced. We will describe the technologies used for creating and consuming content: app and app development: cloud storage; Blackboard; slides; video; and iBook Author. We will share our journey through this collaborative effort between administration, faculty, students, librarians, IT staff and instructional designers to give participants a leg up in implementing similar transformative digital interactive changes. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 427 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments eLearning Instructional Design Visualization: An Innovation in Online Course Design Bucky Dodd (University of Central Oklahoma, USA) Online course design is a constantly changing and dynamic practice in today's educational landscape. As the demand and uses for online learning grow, it is important the techniques and practices used to create online courses remain relevant and focused on supporting the needs of today's learners. This requires an important shift in thinking from using traditional instructional design processes to more flexible methods that enable designers to make effective and informed design decisions. Session Overview and Approach: This session presents the progress of a multi-year research and development project aimed at creating design techniques that use visualization technologies to assist online course designers with making more effective design decisions. eLearning Instructional Design Visualization (eIDViz) uses a suite of visualization techniques to create a visual online course design model. These models visualize high-level elements that are fundamental to the design of effective online courses, yet are frequently minimized or lost in traditional instructional design methods. Many common design documentation methods are limited in the way they enable comparisons and evaluation of design trends (i.e. tables, text descriptions) (Few, 2012). e-IDViz models serve as decision-making prototypes for exploring, experimenting, and evaluating design ideas quickly and without having to use development resources or time. The foundational goal of e-IDViz is to empower online course designers to make the most effective and efficient design decisions based on data and evaluative processes. Visual prototype design models provide a strategic scaffold for engaging in analytical-focused design decisionmaking. Using visual methods to support learning processes has been widely discussed (Hyerle, 2009); however, this line of inquiry has not been adequately explored from instructional design decision-making perspectives. Session attendees will learn how e-IDViz can be used as a strategic tool to enhance design decision-making and address key online course design challenges and opportunities. Demonstrations, worked examples, and group discussions are used to engage session participants and enable the transfer of new knowledge to practice. After attending this session, attendees should be able to:        Describe the purpose of e-IDViz Explain the role of visualization in the online course design process Identify uses of e-IDViz Explain the e-IDViz process Differentiate between diagnostic and prototyping visualization techniques Use visualization technologies to create online course design prototypes Differentiate between conceptual and data visualization models Context: Online course design is a rapid, complex, correlative, and successive decision-making process. Traditional instructional design and rapid prototyping models are commonly used to Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 428 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments design online courses; however, these approaches limit flexibility and effective decision-making during the design process. Systems-based and iterative design methods fail to incorporate opportunities to convert cognitive decision-making to visual and sharable models. Hortin (1989) emphasized the need for instructional designers to "externalize their internal representations" (p. 21). This method of making invisible elements of designs visible and comparable allows for deeper and more informed decision-making processes. The role of the online course designer as decision-maker is rarely discussed in literature, yet represents a fundamental aspect of being able to create online courses that meet the needs of today's learners and teachers. Problem: The problem addressed in this presentation is a lack tools and techniques for assisting online course designers with making effective and informed design decisions. The majority of instructional design processes used to create online courses are based on systems-models (i.e. ADDIE) or iterative approaches (i.e. rapid prototyping) (Allen & Sites, 2012). While these methods are widely used and accepted, both focus on overall design phases, rather than supporting designers' decision-making processes. For example, the ADDIE model establishes a process through which design problems are analyzed and a solution is systematically developed. ADDIE provides a roadmap for the design process, but does little to help designers make effective decisions based specified criteria or needs. Traditional instructional design methods fail to make key aspects of the design approach visible so that effective design decisions can be determined. This is an increasingly important need as design options grow rapidly with the advancement of technology and understanding of how people learn in online environments. Approach: Beginning in 2010, initial versions of e-IDViz were used to explore how online courses and learning experiences are designed. This was used as a consulting tool to help designers revise and improve existing design ideas. More recent research and development has focused on using e-IDViz to support online course designers' decision-making processes and for diagnosing design problems of online courses, workshops, and performance improvement programs. e-IDViz contains several primary benefits:    Allows design ideas and decisions to be visually represented, shared, and refined. Establishes a macro-level perspective that is frequently absent from many online course design processes. (designers commonly focus on micro-level design factors) Enables continuous refinement and development based on a common prototype model Results: e-IDViz allows for design ideas to be quickly visualized, evaluated, and revised without having to invest development time or resources. This approach empowers designers to refine their decision-making processes and determine the most effective design approaches based on visual prototype representations. This is a strategic advantage over traditional design approaches in that the designer can easily evaluate the collective vision, strategies, and relationships of online courses. e-IDViz also supports both short-term and long-range innovation in online course design because a visual prototype model is created that can be compared, evaluated, and improved over time, whereas traditional methods often require designers to recreate an understanding of a design approach before recommending improvements or use of innovations. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 429 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments References: Allen, M. & Sites, R. (2012). Leaving ADDIE for SAM: An agile model for developing the best learning experiences. Davners, MA: The American Society for Training & Development. Few, S. (2012). Show me the numbers: Designing tables and graphs to enlighten (Second Edition). Burlingame, CA: Analytics Press. Hortin, J. A. (1989). Instructional design and visualization: The roles of visual thinking, visual rehearsal, and introspection. Performance & Instruction Journal, 20-21. Hyerle, D. (2009). Visual tools for transforming information into knowledge (Second Edition) [Kindle Edition]. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Active Learning in an Online and Blended World Tawnya Means (University of Florida, USA) In the traditional model of teaching, instructors are seen as the provider of knowledge. In this same model, students are seen as the receptacles of the provided knowledge. But this instructorfocused model limits student engagement in and excitement for lifelong learning and critical thinking. There are a number of teaching strategies for encouraging student engagement in active learning. The strategy of team-based learning places the responsibility on students as individuals and in teams to prepare ahead of attending class. Developed by Dr. Larry Michaelsen, team-based learning has been used in business schools, medical education (for example: Duke NUS’s TeamLead), and other programs to focus the time spent in class on active, application-based significant learning activities (http://teambasedlearning.org). Another strategy for engaging students, “flipping” the classroom was the inspiration for the current MOOCs and is seen in such models such as Khan Academy’s developer Salman Khan and the University of Colorado. With this strategy, students use video lectures or other online resources to prepare before they come to class and meet with the instructor in class to complete their “homework” and work through problem-solving activities. Some institutions are developing physical learning environments that support these technologyenhanced methods for engaging students in learning. Notable examples are SCALE-UP (http://scaleup.ncsu.edu/), TEAL (http://icampus.mit.edu/projects/teal/), and TILE (http://www.classrooms.uiowa.edu/TILE.aspx) classrooms. The University of Florida has built an active learning studio classroom (http://warrington.ufl.edu/activelearning.asp) designed to encourage instructors to experiment with changing teaching strategies using technology that brings distance students “into” the physical classroom to facilitate a new type of blended learning, where students in the classroom are working with students who are located remotely, while still using team-based, application activities. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 430 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Instructors at the University of Florida are experimenting with a variety of methods for changing the focus of learning to place more responsibility on the students. Team-based learning has been implemented in a variety of courses including ethics, telecommunications, business strategy, architecture and design, journalism, and cross-disciplinary medical professional courses. While some of these courses are taught in the Active Learning Studio classroom, others are taught in traditional classrooms with typical furniture. Instructors are also experimenting with a variety of technologies and tools for teaching in online, blended and face-to-face courses that encourage active learning and student-focused learning environments. The primary goal of this session is to share various experiences from instructors at the University of Florida. As a result of this presentation, participants in this session will be able to: 1. identify the benefits of active learning; 2. identify teaching strategies for engaging students in active learning; 3. identify technologies that will support student collaboration and engagement; and 4. be inspired to try teaching strategies and technologies that engage students in active learning. W3C, WCAG2.0, 508, Hut, Hut, Hike! What's Your Game Plan for Accessibility Donna McLauchlin (Education Service Center Region 4, USA) Discover the principles and guidelines that will make your course a winner for everyone! Know the Rules:  What is 508 compliance?  Does it really apply to your course?  Can you ignore it?  Who is the W3C  What is the WCAG2.0? Know the Playbook:  What is accessibility?  How do you achieve it?  Is there a magic formula?  What will it cost?  Will this make my course boring? Create Your Offense:  What is Universal Design for Learning?  What does it have to do with accessibility?  Isn't this going to take a lot more time? Discover the answers to these questions as we explore ways that will not only make your course more accessible, but also more engaging for all of your students. If you create any course content, this presentation is for you! Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 431 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Throughout the class, various tools will be demonstrated as well as some video examples of different accessibility features. Attendees will participate in several polls and in addition to a handout, a LiveBinder web resource will be provided to all participants. Anywhere, Anytime! Enhance Your Online Teaching Presence & Engage Your Students with Video Loretta Driskel (Colorado Mountain College, USA) All good online course design begins with a list of clear objectives or outcomes; however, how we help our students meet those outcomes is often up to us as the instructor. Research from experts on learning styles, multiple intelligences and online learning has shown us that we can do a better job of helping students to achieve course objectives/outcomes by finding ways to engage them in our course, as well as our course content. Our 21st century students are engaged by video, as evidenced by the number of hits to YouTube videos alone each day. Video that engages our students can be as simple as a short welcome & instructor introduction or as supportive as narrating PowerPoint lectures which can be viewed repeatedly, and so much more. In this session, participants will view actual examples from faculty members that show how simple to use, free online resources can be used to enhance their teaching presence and engage their students in class. We will discuss ways to complement existing course content with video, look at various video sources and video creating applications, plus the equipment needed to create video and an overview of the various ways to share videos. Participants will consider that with the availability of laptops, tablets and cell phones, nearly every student has a phone, videos can be watched anywhere, anytime the student has a few free minutes and watched repeatedly if they desire. We will conclude with a brainstorming session of ideas for fitting video into a variety of disciplines as a way of enhancing lectures, engaging students and achieving course objectives. At the end of this session, participants will be able to: • • • • Find relevant video through resources such as MERLOT, EdTed, Creative Commons, YouTube, and Khan Academy. Create a screencast using freely available tools such as Jing and Authorstream. Differentiate between ways to share video, specifically linking vs. embedding. Discover that mobile learning is an easy way to engage students where they are whether laptop, tablet or cell phone. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 432 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Interactive Digital Portfolios: The Future is Now! Oscar Perez (University of Texas at El Paso, USA) Steven Varela (The University of Texas at El Paso, USA) Mike Pitcher (The University of Texas at El Paso, USA) Hugo Gomez (University of Texas at El Paso, USA) William Robertson (The University of Texas at El Paso, USA) This engaging, hands-on session will examine the evolution of a seven-year portfolio development project at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Results will be disseminated, authentic inter-disciplinary artifacts demonstrated, and participants will learn how to create interactive digital eBooks to use for collaborative links between the educational, professional, and personal. Context: The Learning Environments (LE) area within Academic Technologies (AT) at UTEP offers new ways to expand, shape, design, and "envisioneer" the future of learning. LE works directly with students, faculty, and staff to utilize technological innovations, research and prototyping to rethink and reimagine the connection and functionality students, faculty and staff have within educational spaces. Problem: Students and university departments struggle in setting up a framework for students to document their experiences/projects/ expertise during their college life and connect them to their professional and personal lives. Interactive, digital portfolios are a simple, yet robust, technological solution to a much-needed form of documentation. Approach: Academic Technologies implemented this project on its own student-staff employees where, as each student progressed towards graduation, we reviewed their existing portfolios and made recommendations to add/refine based on their newly acquired experiences/projects/ expertise. After students worked on their portfolios, a panel of professionals reviewed them, providing the students more feedback, so they could again revise and resubmit. This process is repeated each year as the student progresses through their degree. Presenters will explain their process of implementation, strategic feedback, plans for providing professional development to other departments/programs, and work with workshop participants to create their own digital portfolio. Results: The current project has resulted in 100% student-staff in AT taking part in the program to graduate with professional e-Book portfolios. The value of digital portfolios by students has risen tremendously as the portfolio program has grown beyond the department level, and has crossed over into several, new experimental programs within UTEP's College of Liberal Arts Honors Program, the College of Nursing and Health Sciences, as well as the College of Engineering. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 433 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments What Happens to Curriculum Developers in the Digital Age? Kenneth Sherman (University of the Rockies, USA) Chad Harris (University of the Rockies, USA) Eszter Major (ED MAP, USA) It may seem like yesterday (and it was) that curriculum developers were excited and challenged by the prospects of working with eBooks. From those first few books that were converted to PDFs, we've moved to billions of digital learning assets, static and multimedia. Curriculum developers are still excited, but the challenges are greater than ever and scalability remains elusive. As we in curriculum development have navigated the shift from print to digital, we've moved from publisher centric, to aggregators, to multiple types of producers including OERs, user-generated content and niche, supplemental content creators and the assessment market. This rapid growth has created obstacles as well as opportunities. In developing new graduate programs in targeted fields, University of the Rockies staff faced problems numerous problems related to time (not enough), money (never enough) and content (too much available to have confidence that the best available materials have been identified and incorporated.) Curriculum developers found themselves facing a new value chain of creators: traditional publishing partners, new media companies, supplemental providers, assessment providers, and software enablers. An opportunity and challenge of this chain was the need to choose distributors of their digital content: the creator's own channels, traditional textbook distributors who were reinventing themselves, or the aggregators who hold as much as 90% of available titles in their portfolio. Our programs involved niche areas with a plethora of content but not a lot of standard sources. Our strategic committee had pointed ideas for the courses about mapping content to learning objectives that were not driven by a single-textbook solution. The challenges facing an internal curriculum development team to have the course design drive content - not vice versa were intense. Further, the content needed to be accessible in mobile learning environments as well as more traditional ones. (This is a key requirement. University staff is conducting an ongoing study to develop a model to measure student engagement with a mobile learning tool that integrates the Community of Inquiry Model and Framework for the Rational Analysis of Mobile Education. An initial finding of the study is that most students found the mobile application improved their learning experience due to increased access to their courses. An example of how this increased access classes while on the go helped students was seen in an improved work ethic because the student feels more committed to and active in the courses.) Curation today plays in important role in supporting and controlling the continuing evolution of content. We realized that utilizing curation at the front end of the curriculum development process could provide the basis for a solution to these challenges - and that a partnership with ED MAP, with whom we were already working to provide students with course materials, offered a cost- and time-effective approach. We utilized the ED MAP CURATE platform to create a usecase for interpreting existing content (not create new content) and to find the most relevant content online for the launch of a Master of Science degree program in Human Services. We utilized their IT expertise to help us create an architecture to import it into our learning environments so it could be accessible to our learners. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 434 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments In launching this new approach, we utilized curation primarily as a way to identify the most relevant resources to use to build the courses. There are at least five uses of curation: 1. Discover - the act of curating the most relevant information about a particular topic into a single location. 2. Map - the act of assembling disparate forms of content into a more simplistic format where only the most important or relevant aspects of the content are shared. 3. Filter - engage human experts to filter assets specific to the student experience we wish to create 4. Ingest - use of metadata and open file formats to move the content from point A to point B. 5. Assess - evaluate cost, continuity, learning, engagement. Curation today builds upon digital delivery. With digital delivery, choice can become convenient and new titles and content are coming into the market faster. For the University of the Rockies curriculum development team, the integration of our learning management systems partners and digital distributors allowed us to innovate how content would be brought into our online classrooms. The integration and creative tensions between course design, scalability, emphasis on quality, and assessment of learning outcomes became new challenges and opportunities to manage. Session goals: 1. Introduce audience to concept of curation: what it is and what it does. 2. Identify emerging curation academic and commercial ventures 3. Review new challenges to curriculum development activities in age of plentiful content and multiple learning environments. 4. Describe how University of the Rockies piloted a curation platform use-case to improve the curriculum development process. 5. Share findings from the use case 6. Discuss audience experiences with curation and meeting challenges of curriculum development. Engaging the audience: As identified above, a goal of the session is to invite the audience to share their experiences with curation and how they are meeting today's challenges of curriculum development. We'll supplement those discussions using interactive Q & A. Flipping Classes Your Way - Useful Tools, Apps, and Strategies Enoch Park (Pfeiffer University, USA) David Gannon (Bryant University, USA) Focus of Proposal: In its basic form, a flipped or inverted teaching style is one in which the majority of the instructional content is delivered outside of the classroom while skill development exercises, problem solving and peer collaboration are conducted within the classroom with instructor guidance and assistance. Technology available today allows faculty the option of providing students with lecture content outside the traditional classroom period and using that prized face-to-face time for high-value learning engagements. This session will give Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 435 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments faculty, support staff and technology providers a background on what a "flipped" strategy entails, what it offers, scenarios under which it would be most beneficial, strategies for effective creation of flipped session, and an overview of the technology tools including mobile apps available and how they can be used to support inverted teaching. This session will provide: 1. An overall understanding of what flipping the classroom means, the history behind it and its potential to improve teaching and learning in today's educational environment. It will also summarize research that demonstrates gains made through flipped classroom techniques. 2. Demonstrations of the software and other resources that can be used to effectively conduct flipped classroom activities - many of which are free! 3. Step-by-step strategies that can be employed by faculty and support staff to map out goals, plans and actions to make flipped classroom techniques a part of any curriculum. Participant Engagement Strategies: The audience will be encouraged to interact and contribute during the session, share ideas through backchannel communication, and encouraged to initiate collaboration. Interactive demonstration of tools and process, as well as best practice cases will be shared with the audience. Leveraging New Data-Driven Marketing Technologies to Impact Student Enrollment Joseph Diamond (All Campus, USA) Kyle Shea (All Campus, USA) This presentation will describe the best practices utilized to recruit and engage prospective students through emerging technologies and media outlets. Those who coordinate the marketing, recruitment and enrollment process for an online academic program at a traditional nonprofit university will benefit from the streamlined, tested and sometimes free resources available to ramp up interest and retention. Utilizing an innovative student-centric model of communication, your recruitment practices can bridge the fundamental relationship between the student, advisor, and academic program through optimized strategies that prepare students for matriculation while offering support in their journey towards graduation. These high-touch and personalized strategies from awareness to application to acceptance and beyond will embolden your academic programs' relational savvy and reputation. Our methodology will be presented with an accompanying PowerPoint presentation, case studies and mock campaign strategies. A question and answer session will also be included. This model has brought remarkable growth through research and personalized implementations for college and university programs across the country. Much of this success is attributed to the approach of honing in on emerging technologies and open source offerings that connect student, faculty and academic advisor. Fundamental to this approach is the importance of developing an engaging and rich relationship with students to set the tone for a quality student experience. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 436 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Matching a student's personal and professional interests to a flexible, online, in-demand degree program is also vital. This traditional approach, translated into a highly interactive distance education environment, requires close attention to the ever-changing landscape of media and technology. The Presentation Will… 1. Demonstrate how emerging technology plays a role in creating more engaged, informed prospects 2. Address types of media that should be implemented and how to best optimize the technologies available 3. Provide meaningful data and statistics that demonstrate the results of social media, mobile, webinars and aggregation platforms 4. Teach participants how to take advantage of open source products and services for low cost, high impact engagement. At the Conclusion of Presentation, Participants Will…     Understand the key role in emerging technologies for creating a high quality student experience. Identify the products and services available for implementing consistent and personalized experiences for students, advisors and faculty in communication. Take away data and case studies to share with colleagues and departments to encourage participation in the new wave of technologies presented. Have increased comfort in utilizing new types of software, media platforms and social web offerings. Improving Workforce Readiness Through Competency-based Education Modules Christopher Keane (American Geosciences Institute, USA) Heather Houlton (American Geosciences Institute, USA) This presentation will outline how to improve the workplace readiness of new graduates through focused, asynchronous modular courses that are built around a competency-based education approach. Employers, especially in STEM fields, have voiced an increased concern that new graduates are not appropriately prepared for entering the workforce. The specific deficiencies noted by professionals range from basic business knowledge to specific technical skills for which the core curriculum and/or expertise is not available to address during a formal degree program. This has resulted in unemployment and under employment of new graduates, even in fields for which career opportunities are plentiful. Research related to student decision-making for majoring in specific fields will be applied to the development of our modules to assess the nature of the students who may seek to address any deficiencies when starting a professional career. Specifically this research will discuss how students may view this employment barrier in relation to when they formally entered into the discipline - "Natives" who initially declare a major versus "Immigrants" who switch into the major. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 437 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments This effort is a collaboration among a number of professional societies, some of which provide Continuing Education Units (CEUs) used for state-level licensure in the geosciences. Very few degree programs in the geosciences position new graduates for licensure or specifically prepare students for employment in the non-academic workforce. As a result, often early-career professionals must fill in these gaps. We are pursuing two unique techniques during the development of our competency-focused modules to address workforce deficiencies. First, part of the student evaluation mechanism for the modules are to reflect on or to provide an analysis of an actual applied example from students' or practitioners' work experiences. These reflections and analyses are not only part of students' assessments, but also add to an organic knowledge base for all current and future students in the course. This knowledge base is moderated and becomes a critical exposure mechanism for students to become increasingly workforce-ready. This is particularly important for "soft skill" topics like ethics and regulatory compliance where actual problems are often more complex than those presented in a formal educational setting. The second thrust is the development of a "credential locker" for individuals. Upon successful completion of modules, appropriate certification of completion will be added to the locker. Additionally, as part of the collaboration with CEU-granting organizations, those CEUs will also be deposited in the credential locker, along with student supplied materials, such as college transcripts. This locker will be a permanent record of professional credentials from a wide-range of organizations and can be shared singly or publicly by the student as they see fit. Using Mobile App Design to Teach Content: Student-Led Innovations in Teaching with Technology Michelle Miller (Northern Arizona University, USA) Mobile apps have tremendous promise for teaching content, but can app development itself become a conduit for active exploration of course material? This presentation reports on an experimental project in which university undergraduate students used open and low-cost online resources to design and mock up original mobile application ideas in a hybrid Psychology Senior Capstone course titled Mind, Brain, and Technology: Using Psychology to Thrive in a Wired World… 1. Course learning objectives called for students to integrate their knowledge of major research findings in psychology across different sub-fields and across disciplines. 2. They also emphasized effective communication skills in different modalities (e.g., written, oral presentation). 3. Lastly, the course called for students to engage in inquiry around contemporary conceptions of the psychology of online communication and the impact of technology on diverse arenas of human experience including cognition, education, and social interactions. To realize these goals, the course instructor designed the Mobile App Development Project. As part of this semester-long, multi-part project, students completed the following:  Brainstorming ideas for new, original mobile applications, grounded in empirical psychology research, that would promote human well being Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 438 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments       Surveying the existing market for competing applications, and contrasting those with the proposed application Construction of a student-generated wiki of open online resources for designing and mocking up mobile apps for iPhone, iPad and/or Android (e.g., Tiggzi, Denim, Proto.io) Literature review of psychology research supporting their app designs Detailed description of what the application would do Graphic mock-up of major components of the app Final oral and written presentations of their app designs Students worked collaboratively on their app projects on a weekly basis throughout the semester, culminating in final oral presentations "pitching" their app designs. These presentations were of generally high quality, and student feedback indicated that the app design project was a highly engaging and authentic means for exploring the course material. Informal feedback from students also indicated that it was effective at building their technological skills, e.g., in finding and evaluating open online resources. This information session, besides giving an overview of the goals and techniques of the app design activity, will specifically highlight projects that focused on "gamification" of learning activities. For example, one project presented a novel, game-based approach for preventing loss of foreign language knowledge, while another focused on an app for fast-paced quizzing games in small, in-person groups. Both projects were grounded in research in educational and cognitive psychology, and surfaced important insights about how to effectively "gamify" learning in a mobile app environment. The session will also present ideas for how in which mobile app development projects could be adapted to teach other types of course content and achieve other learning objectives. Challenges of Course Development for an Interdisciplinary Program in Health Care Informatics Margaret Czart (American Sentinel University, USA) Health care informatics is an emerging field in health care that spans and integrates the fields of health care administrative and information technology. With the ever increasing availability of data, the enhancement in analytical methods and tools, and advancement in technology, there is a significant blurring of tasks and responsibilities required to provide end-user and decision-maker actionable information. This blurring requires the health care informatics program to provide an interdisciplinary set of subject matter that leads to team based learning outcomes to data management, analytics, and information visualization and presentation. Providing this interrelated subject matter challenges the program and course developers in merging two often disparate fields of study (health care business and IT) to ensure an accurate presentation of the highly collaborative and team environment the informatics field requires. One of the greatest challenges in this program is to meeting the requirements of the core competencies of both health care and technology. A successful program requires a balance of Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 439 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments knowledge and hands-on experience from both fields in order to prepare the students to meet their career goals. The presentation covers the various approaches used to develop strategic thinking for implementation of a successful informatics program in a health care environment and course development and faculty requirements for this interdisciplinary program. The challenges of discussion include: 1) bring faculty up to date on important informatics related issues of both fields, 2) determining the level of knowledge required from both fields in the individual course, and 3) finding faculty to develop and teach the courses. Educating the Next Generation Workforce: Collaboration, Convenience, and Quality of Online and Digital Learning Rebecca Hartley (Clemson University Center for Workforce Development, USA) Kristin Frady (Clemson University, USA) Manufacturing, aviation, and automotive industries are growing in the United States. Currently there is a demand for technology proficient, highly skilled technicians and as these industries continue to grow there will be a greater need for a more qualified, technological workforce. It is incumbent upon the technical education community to produce a well-trained and highly qualified workforce to respond to the unique needs of these growing industries. Through initial funding from the National Science Foundation, the Clemson University Center for Workforce Development (CUCWD) has been able to advance its mission to improve workforce educational capacity in STEM fields across South Carolina. In addition, the CUCWD has obtained additional funding from both private and federal funding sources to support innovative online learning opportunities for P-12 school districts who introduce students to career opportunities in STEM fields and technical colleges who are charged with the technical education of tomorrow's workforce. Through these funding sources, the CUCWD has created virtual resources designed to support industrial development, sponsor competitive award opportunities for P-12 and technical college classrooms, support scholarships and internships across multiple South Carolina institutions of higher education, and finance conferences to create greater awareness of workforce development needs. To bridge the gap between industry requirements and student education, , CUCWD is engaged with 16 technical colleges in the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program to create state-of-the-art digital learning resources to expand and improve the ability to deliver education and career training that can be completed in two years or less. This session focuses on innovative ways educators might share STEM education materials through digital means and to a wide variety of audiences (i.e. P-12, technical college student, displaced workers). Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 440 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments The goal of the presentation is to share with the participants the benefits of collaboration between four year institutions, technical colleges, and P-12 school districts to create digital learning tools and provide online instruction for the next generation workforce. Participants from states with a strong need for an advanced manufacturing workforce may find this session particularly helpful as multiple online simulations of industry tools will be spotlighted and demonstrated. This interactive session features upbeat music, participant participation in collaborative brainstorming and virtual reality simulation demonstrations, and a reflective question handout to encourage participants to consider how the elements of the CUCWD model might support instructional design initiatives in their own schools. You Earned a Degree, Now What? Building Job Marketability with WordPress ePortfolios **recap session** Michael Szapkiw (Liberty University, USA) Graduating students enter the job market hoping to find the perfect job they have been training for throughout their years in school. But graduating students often find that there can be thousands of others competing for that same perfect job. So what will help them stand out in the crowd? And how can educators help? One solution is to create a learning environment with the potential to meet course objectives and equip students with a practical tool to find distinction in an often crowded job market. The solution I will discuss is eportfolios created with the software WordPress. Eportfolios (or electronic portfolios), like traditional portfolios, add a new dimension to learning and can provide new opportunities for students to enhance their learning, to increase selfdevelopment, and to consolidate their learning artifacts. Those artifacts can provide tangible proof to a prospective employer that a student has the skills and abilities necessary to be successful in and offer significant value to that prospective employer. In the least, an eportfolio can function as an online resume for a student. At its greatest, an eportfolio offers a full expression of an individual's professional identity and technical competency in this digital age, and it promotes the individual above others when he or she has a professional online presence and other candidates do not. Not only do eportfolios provide a means for students to TELL professors, peers, and prospective employers who they are and what they can do to benefit others, eportfolios also provide a means for students to SHOW their experience, talents, and skills through media-rich websites using videos, audio, photos, and even active learning units and educational resources they have created. Employers are no longer just looking at resumes. They are online, searching Google with prospective employee names, and finding reasons to hire (or not hire) your students. When those employers search for your students online after receiving an application, what will they find? Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 441 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments Give your students an edge in the job market with an eportfolio that is wholly owned by them. A student with their own website eportfolio that is branded with his or her name and that can be kept and maintained for a life-time will become a lifelong asset. This can be easily achieved with a student-created eportfolio using WordPress as a content management system. In this presentation, I will share examples of eportfolios created with WordPress. I will demonstrate how to setup a WordPress website with a custom domain name. I will focus on the self-hosted version of WordPress, which means users have the ability to choose a personalized domain name - not one that has "WordPress.com" at the end of the URL. I will also discuss how to implement a WordPress eportfolio throughout a student's coursework that gets the student to incrementally build the eportfolio while also meeting course objectives. Who will benefit most from this presentation? Anyone who understands the significance of eportfolios, wants a self-promotional tool to share online with others, and/or is interested in learning about WordPress as an eportfolio solution for their students or for themselves will benefit the most from this presentation. Who should avoid this presentation? Anyone who is uncomfortable with learning new technology, cannot do basic editing in a word processor, and/or despises the thought of personal or professional information being publicly available online should avoid this presentation. Participants will leave the presentation with a Web resource that will haveAll the information shared in the session, as well as links to free training, tutorials, and resources for using WordPress. Exploring iTunes U for Delivery of Art 10 Angela Dick (The Pennsylvania State University, USA) Megan Kohler (Penn State University, USA) In July of 2012, Apple released a new version of iTunes U. Education Technology Services and the College of Arts and Architecture within Penn State became interested in what type of opportunities this technology could offer our students and faculty. A well diverse team was formed and challenged to develop an online art appreciation course with approximately 150 pieces of artwork into Open Educational Resource (OER). The goal of this session is to share our experience in transforming a currently offered residential online art appreciation course that was then repurposed into an OER within iTunes U. 1. First, we will share what we have found in using this unique learning approach and new learning environment. 2. We will then highlight our exploration of copyright and Fair Use policies to provide a model that can be utilized when developing Open Educational Resources with this type of course content. 3. Additionally, we will share our evaluation of the educational opportunities that an institution can have by delivering their open course content through mobile devices such as iPads. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 442 Track 7: Technology and Emerging Learning Environments 4. Lastly, we will highlight the importance of intercollegiate collaboration between Education Technology Services and the College of Arts and Architecture within Penn State along with a team with a wide range of expertise. Initially the primary goal of this development effort was to investigate the educational opportunities available through the iTunes U environment for other units and/or faculty at Penn State wishing to explore the use of iPads as an alternate delivery mode for their courses. During this course development, the team was faced with several major challenges that turned into opportunities for other faculty and departments across the Penn State community such as the difficult task of creating an online art appreciation course for thousands of individual learners. We will also share the benefits of creating this course that currently has over 60,000 students enrolled after the first 6 months of being available on iTunes U. Engaging Learners Through Interactive Fiction: Developing the Historical Williamsburg Living Narrative Hap Aziz (University of Florida, USA) Engaging learners in classroom, whether real or virtual, can be challenging with "traditional" education support materials. There is a growing body of literature demonstrating that computer game characteristics such as interactivity, appropriate challenge, and in-game puzzles to be solved are effective ways of motivating learners to progress through course materials. During this session, the presenter will focus on his "Historical Williamsburg Living Narrative" project, which was selected by the Horizon Report 2013 as exemplary work in the effective gamification of education content materials and assignments. (More information regarding the project may be found here: http://historicalwilliamsburg.com.) There will be discussion regarding the game genre of Interactive Fiction and how it may be used to build compelling and relevant course content for a variety of subject matter areas. By examining the "Historical Williamsburg Living Narrative," session participants will understand how to approach the development of interactive narrative assignments for their own course curriculum needs. Topics to be covered include the following: - development of appropriate interactive narratives for course curriculum - creation of physical and logical maps for environment navigation - design and implementation of game-play puzzles that develop more general problem-solving skills By the end of the 35 minute information session, participants will have the ability to develop basic Interactive Fiction scenarios, and they will know how to establish "next steps" in the authoring process. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 443 Electronic Posters 'Open-Campus' At Bossier Parish Community College: Opening the Book on OpenSourcing Developmental Education Sarrah Martin (Bossier Parish Community College, USA) One hurdle which underprepared college students meet early on is that developmental classes are typically offered only on-campus. Those students who cannot get to classes are impeded by space/time limitations of the traditional learning environment. Colleges have long sought to balance accessibility needs with quality engagement by blending in a few online "refresher" options. Yet developmental students are vulnerable from the beginning; they typically require close engagement and are, generally, not self-starters—attributes indicative of students unsuccessful in an online environment. Ultimately, as a response to poor retention outcomes, most colleges have limited their online developmental offerings only to those few students who've already demonstrated aptitude markers for success. Further, under-preparedness remains an increasingly significant issue for high school students, and students preparing for college-level placement testing have few options with regard to consistent, easily accessible, engaging and inexpensive tutorials. --Bossier Parish Community College's (BPCC) solution? Design a series of non-credit, developmental, video-based, online courses as counterparts to "for-credit" offerings, accessible in a free, easy-to-access framework, with no strings attached. Through the Blackboard portal, BPCC's "Open Campus" model engages participants in a userfriendly, video-lecture-based format. Courses are designed and taught by BPCC's full-time faculty in the divisions of developmental English, math, and reading. Each course reflects content, andragogy and learning outcomes students experience in traditional, for-credit developmental counterparts with only a few exceptions:All courses are non-credit and selfcontained. BPCC's "Open Campus" series targets high school students preparing for placement testing, developmental students enrolled in for-credit courses as well as students/non-students who are homebound, work-restricted, military members or living abroad. BPCC's goal is to provide anyone, anywhere, access to quality, developmental instruction in English, math, and reading through a free, portable learning platform. Audience interaction is encouraged through the synchronous survey tool: polleverywhere. Participants may employ smartphones, tablets, or other portable devices to respond to questions posed by presenters; results are displayed on the screen in real-time. By the end of the session, participants will have gained a working knowledge of an efficient, open-source design plan and developed a framework for possible timelines, expenses, and challenges in applying open-source models to meet their students' instructional needs. A Model Taxonomy of Educational Objectives for the Online Learning Environment Antoinette Bruciati (Sacred Heart University, USA) Although course content at institutions of higher education is delivered through a variety of ways that include; online, blended, mobile learning, and others, the teaching methodology adopted by Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 444 Electronic Posters many senior faculty members has largely remained unchanged. Traditional teaching methodologies that are based on a cognitivist-oriented approach continue to serve as the foundation for structuring course content and assessing student achievement. Cognitivism includes the subcategories of multiple intelligences, brain-based learning, and learning styles. Through a cognitivist-orientated approach, faculty place greater emphasis on assessing a learner's knowledge, feelings, and creativity. However, in many instances processes such as memory, problem-solving, comprehension, and attention are also measured.In contrast, the development of 21st century skills and understandings among online learners requires that faculty adopt a social-constructivist approach to teaching and learning. Constructivist theory is founded on the assertion that individuals construct new understandings by reflecting on prior knowledge and experience. A social-constructivist approach to teaching requires learners to actively seek knowledge, interpret information, and work collaboratively for the purpose of generating new knowledge.Drawing on an understanding of the importance for situating educational learning outcomes within a socio-cultural context, this session presents research findings that support the continued development of a model taxonomy of educational objectives for the online learning environment. These research findings are based on an 8 year investigation that explored the use of the Blackboard Instructional Management System for delivering online graduate teacher education courses. Seven levels for the assessment of educational objectives were developed and are categorized according to the ways that adult learners assimilate information and communicate in an online learning environment.This presentation offers practical recommendations for using the taxonomy as a framework to guide the development or revision of online courses. Methods for the development of benchmark assessments at each level in the taxonomy are included. A Multi-Layered Approach to Building a Course Design Quality Enhancement Program Allison Peterson (Texas Woman's University, USA) When an institution grows from 2 to 32 distance programs in 14 years, how do you begin to establish a level of quality across faculty, courses and programs? After reflection and review, Texas Woman's University Office of Teaching and Learning with Technology has undertaken a three phase, multi-year, course design quality enhancement program. The program is completely voluntary and build on grassroots, word of mouth interest. Phase 1 - 2007-2009 Phase 1 of the project, implemented a three year plan to introduce faculty to the Quality Matters rubric and process. Over the three years, 41 faculty were trained to be Quality Matters Peer Reviewers, 6 received the flagship Applying the QM Rubric training. In addition to the faculty participating in the pilot, 15 more faculty participated in Peer Reviewer Certification through other Distance Education programs.All members of the Teaching and Learning with Technology staff are also trained in the Peer Review process. This provides the university a pool of more than 60 potential Quality Matters Peer Reviewers. As a byproduct of the Peer Reviewer training, 8 TWU courses are nationally recognized as meeting expectations of the Quality Matters rubric and process. Phase 2 - 2009-2011 Phase 2 of the program moved the program from a pilot project to a major component of the Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 445 Electronic Posters Office of Teaching and Learning with Technology strategic plan. A budget for annual subscription fees, training, and official course reviews was set in place. The goal to increase the number of institutional certified peer reviews and number of official course reviews conducted each year. Competition for funding for official course reviews would be based on participation in QM training and additional Distance Education professional development. This phase saw only an additional two courses receive national QM recognition. Phase 3 - 2011-present Phase 3 of the project focuses on additional faculty training, individual course reviews and program implementation plans. With individual faculty interest tapering off, the decision was made to approach programs with the prospect of national recognition of a Quality Matters Implementation Plan. This recognition could be used in marketing of the program, to saw a commitment to the quality of the program. Faculty would receive training in nationally accepted standards for online course design and programs would benefit from consistency of quality course design across the curriculum. The decision was made to first approach the Nursing PhD program. The program was in the middle of program redesign from hybrid to 100% online. Faculty were already receiving additional faculty development training, to improve their online teaching techniques. The opportunity to have the overall program nationally recognized for its commitment to students through quality course design was a plus. Quality Matters Academic Advisory Council approved the Texas Woman's University 100% Online PhD in Nursing implementation plan to begin Fall 2011. To date, Nursing has had six courses nationally recognized for meeting QM standards, with two additional courses currently preparing for review. The Nursing plan was soon followed by implementation plans for the Masters of Kinesiology emphasis in Sports Management and Bachelor of Health Studies programs. Implementation Plans All current implementation plans cover a four year period of faculty training, informal and official course reviews. Within the first year of each plan, faculty participate in the Applying the Quality Matters Rubric workshop. Additional Peer Reviewer certification is optional. Each core course within the program goes through an informal QM review, conducted by one trained TWU peer reviewer, using the QM rubric. Reviewers provide feedback to the faculty course developer, who makes adjustments to the course, prior to official QM course review. Reviews are sequenced based on course rotation, so that mature courses (those taught multiple times) may be reviewed each year. At this time, additional Implementation Plans are in development for the Doctor of Nursing Practice, Master of Education - Special Education, and Doctor of Occupational Therapy. Each of these programs have or will seek approval from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) for change of delivery module to hybrid or fully online. Within their documentation for that approval, each has stated their intentions to seek approval of a QM Implementation Plan. In each case, the THECB has specifically noted the inclusion of the implementation plan as a benefit to the program. Additional Course Design Initiatives Quality Matters has come to have some effect onAll course design efforts undertaken by the Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 446 Electronic Posters Office of Teaching & Learning with Technology.All members of the Instructional Design team go through both Applying the QM Rubric and Peer Reviewer training. The department offers a summer Online Faculty Development Program (OFDP) which is based on providing new online faculty the basic tools for quality course design. By the end of four weeks, faculty have developed over half of the course elements which will lead to meeting expectations of a QM review. Completion of the program, requires the faculty member to successful meet expectations of a full QM informal review of their course by the following summer. A newly develop hybrid course project has set a similar informal review as the last stage of successful completion. A Multi-Modal Approach for a Multi-Cultural Online Classroom Mary-Lynn Chambers (Elizabeth City State University, USA) Faceless online students have racial identities that must be considered as online instructors develop a rhetorically effective pedagogy. So, how do we connect and communicate effectively with our online students who do not claim SE as their first language or dominant dialect? This session begins by identifying the various communication styles connected with ethnicity. There will be a specific focus on African Americans whose dominant dialect is African American Vernacular English. Through the use of a handout and PowerPoint slides, resources and methodology will be considered with the intention of inspiring a change in pedagogy whichAllows for a more effective multi-modal approach. Research demonstrates that a multimodal approach to online classes improves student agency, thus being rhetorically more effective. In order to establish this truth, there will be an opportunity for participant interaction regarding the indication of linguistic flags and common instructor responses. These common responses will be addressed and more rhetorically effective responses will be shared in the latter half of this session. This part of the session will provide: 1. Practical suggestions regarding the multi-modal approach to online learning. The incorporation of the visua. lThe need for the verbal. 2. Options regarding the effective use of emerging technology in the classroom Blogs Wiki Webpages Cell phones. 3. The development of an effective online pedagogy that will have a positive impact on a multi-ethnic online or hybrid classroom. This session will provide resources that will aid any online or hybrid class teacher in re-engineering their pedagogy so that a multi-modal approach to the classroom can become a reality. The participants will have an opportunity to interact with the material, share what has worked inside their classroom, and develop a better understand of why a multi-modal approach is necessary, especially when your classroom is a multi-cultural 21st century classroom. A National Survey of Faculty Development Evaluation Outcome Measures and Procedures Katrina Meyer (University of Memphis, USA) Vicki Murrell (University of Memphis, USA) RQ1. What outcome measures are higher education institutions using to evaluate their faculty development for online teaching? RQ2. Are there differences in use of outcome measures by the institutions' Carnegie type? RQ3. When and how are faculty asked to evaluate the training they receive? RQ4. Are there differences in evaluation options by institutional Carnegie type? Findings for RQ1 and RQ3 are summarized below (RQ2 and RQ4 are not discussed due to space limitations): Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 447 Electronic Posters RQ1 Responses indicate that institutions rely heavily on three faculty assessments of the training received: their satisfaction, assessment of usefulness, and assessment of relevance. These may be seen as the reliable, tried-and-true measures by trainers in a variety of settings. What is perhaps more interesting is the reliance by at least 72% of the institutions on some sort of assessment of the faculty's skill or competency with online teaching, which is a perhaps worthwhile parallel to the emphasis on competency assessments for student learning. Three outcome measures of particular interest because they emphasize the importance of encouraging critical reflection on the part of the faculty person - the faculty participants' assessment of improvement in their teaching, changes they made to their face-to-face teaching, and changes in perception of their teaching role - are used by only half of the institutions. One wonders if the greater use of transformational learning among faculty developers would set the scene for more faculty to undertake some serious reflection on their beliefs about teaching. At least half of the institutions use student evaluations of faculty teaching, but only one-third use student course grades which use is, by turns, a positive and negative. In other words, at least onethird are attempting to tie the success of the training to students, but only one-third. The lower rates for other measures that attempt to capture student learning - student grades for specific assignments and cumulative GPAs - may be because of the difficulty of doing so, or the likelihood that the results tell the developers little of importance. It might be useful for those institutions that use such measures to share what they are learning about the validity of using these measures, in an attempt to improve the evaluations of other institutions. Two other infrequently used evaluation measures are of particular concern. First, few (21%) of institutions attempt to capture the cost of training, and fewer yet (5%) evaluate how and whether faculty participants understand the research that provides the basis for the training. This latter finding has two explanations: perhaps including research findings in the training is not valued by faculty developers, it is not considered appropriate for the faculty, or an outcome measure has not been devised to assess this (or there may be another explanation). Given the findings of [46], where only 48.9% of the institutions indicated that they included research bases of online learning, the simplest explanations may be "all of the above." RQ3 First, no one type of evaluation seems to be universal; even online evaluations were used only by 80% of the institutions. But the ascendancy of online evaluation is intriguing in comparison to the lesser-used paper evaluation tool (34%). In other words, these institutions seem to have moved online with their evaluations. Second, the majority of institutions continue to pursue summative evaluation (afterAll of the training is completed), although about one-third try to evaluate in a more formative fashion, by evaluating after an element of training is completed (say, perhaps after a powerpoint presentation was made or a lab exercise was done) or afterAll training of a particular type is completed (say, afterAll the powerpoint presentations were completed, orAll of the exercises). Third, evaluations that take more time and resources to conduct seem to also be used by fewer institutions with 29% of institutions trying to evaluate training after a passage of time, 18% of institutions using one-on-one interviews, and 21% of institutions using focus groups. Given pressures on budgets and staff, these lesser frequencies are Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 448 Electronic Posters understandable, but their loss means that in-depth, rich, and reflective evaluations may be foregone. Perhaps such evaluation tools can be done occasionally. Accelerating Student Success Online: Embedded Support Works Alexander Garcia (Jones International University, USA) Accelerating Student Success Online: Embedded Support Works The advent of online education has opened higher education opportunities to many students who might not otherwise have sought to earn a degree. As a recent New York Times editorial noted, "... courses delivered solely online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated people, but they are inappropriate for struggling students who make up a significant portion of college enrollment..." (NYT, February 19, 2013, p. A22). Many traditional and online universities have sought to meet the underprepared students' needs through a cycle of placement testing and developmental courses, resulting in a loss of time and interest on the part of students and a high number of drop-outs early on. To counter this problem, Jones International University (JIU) has developed a strategy to engage students immediately in credit courses while providing embedded developmental support on a just-in-time basis. This approach was implemented in the initial courses taken by beginning or freshman students in the School of Business during the summer of 2012. There are no special remedial courses. Instead; a structured academic support system was built into the full-credit college courses. Remedial resources including the Pearson products MyFoundationsLab and Smarthinking are an integral part of and directly embedded into each of these courses. Highly skilled well-trained instructors who are among the best at JIU supply additional academic support directly to the students in these classes. This parallel approach to remediation within the coursesAllows students to immerse themselves into their lessons and jumpstart their program of study. Incorporating additional faculty tutoring along with proven computerized remedial resources for personal self-paced just-in-time improvement in writing and composition directly into the initial courses helped more students succeed. Many colleges and universities typically use placement tests to judge their incoming students' ability to complete college level courses. Students who do poorly on placement tests are required to take remedial classes to improve their skills and ability to pass college level courses (Adams, 2012). As a result, college placement tests have the potential to add months or years to the time along with the associated expenses required for a student to earn a college degree with no guarantee that the student will actually succeed (Groux, 2012). Several studies have found that "students who enroll in remediation are less likely to complete degrees or transfer than nondevelopmental students" (Bailey, 2009, p. 15). "The research is clear: Remedial education as it is commonly designed and delivered is not the aid to student success that weAll hoped" (Complete College America, Inc., 2012, p. 5). Prior to embedding remedial resources directly into courses for incoming freshman students, the courses were very traditional in nature. They offered faculty student interaction typical in online courses and brick and mortar universities.All students were treated the same with little if any remedial help available for the students challenged by the material and as a result, many students struggled, became frustrated, and often quit. No special non-credit remedial courses were Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 449 Electronic Posters available to help prepare students for the undergraduate credit courses. It was a make or break process. This new approach embedding remedial support was launched during the June 2012 term in the ENG100: The Writing Process course with 18 students. Since new eight-week terms begin on the first Sunday of every month, there were two sections of the new ENG100 course run in the July 2012 term with a total of 31 students. During the August 2012 term,All sections of ENG100 and ENG101: Composition utilized the embedded remedial support approach. In the October 2012 term, this new approach was implemented inAll sections of the CRT100: Critical Thinking and Creative Problem Solving course. JIU defines retention as the ability of a student to successfully complete a course and persistence as course completion rates. The use of the embedded remedial resources has improved retention. In addition, embedding these tools and resources has also improved persistence as more students are successful in their subsequent courses. The overall result is that more students are continuing their educational progress toward an undergraduate degree than were doing so prior to the implementation of these embedded remedial resources. The objective of the presentation is to show how the embedded remedial support tools were implemented in the early freshman general education courses and their impact on retention and persistence. Data will be shared displaying the before and after effects along with information on the effect on student success in their subsequent courses. Video testimonials from students describing their experience and success with these remedial resources will be presented along with a brief demonstration. The purpose of this approach is to improve student success and retention and the results indicate that it has. References Adams, C. A. (2012, October 17).Community Colleges rethink placement tests. Education Week, 32(08), 9-12. Bailey, T. (2009). Challenge and opportunity: Rethinking the role and function of developmental education in community college. New Directions forCommunity Colleges. No. 145. Complete College America, Inc., Charles A. Dana Center (2012). Core principles for transforming remedial education: A joint statement. Retrieved from: http://www.completecollege.org/docs/Remediation_Joint_Statement-Embargo.pdf Groux, C. (2012, June 26). Rethinking community college placement tests. Retrieved from the U.S.News & World Report website: http://www.usnewsuniversitydirectory.com/articles/rethinking-community-c... The Trouble with Online College. February 19, 2013. New York: New York Times, p. A22. Gannon Cook, R. & Sutton, R. (2012). Hard Lessons Learned: Administrators' Assessments of Online Courses and Student Retention. In T. Amiel & B. Wilson (Eds.), Proceedings of World Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 450 Electronic Posters Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2012 (pp. 818826). Chesapeake, VA: AACE. Retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/p/40845. Active and Dynamic Online Diagnostic Assessment Page Jerzak (Florida Atlantic University, USA) Diagnostic assessment has been used for a wide variety of functions including: (a) diagnosing student difficulties; (b) measuring improvement over time; (c) motivating students to study; (d) categorizing students' capabilities in relation to the whole class; (e) encouraging the implicit learning of disciplinary skills and conventions; (f) to get information about students' performance levels, attitudes, experiences, etc.; (g) to create benchmarks for comparison across classes or cohorts; (h) to see gaps or areas where remediation or additional assistance is needed, and (i) to understand how learning takes place and how student attributes affect their learning. Diagnostic assessment can help learners identify their strengths, weaknesses, traits, and characteristics. It can also help individuals self-assess their abilities and knowledge. Diagnostic assessment has been used for job suitability, course placement, identifying training needs, and improving skills-€”both in academics and in the workplace. While many educators use diagnostic assessment in the form of placement tests, this is only one way in which it could be utilized. Diagnostic assessment can be expanded beyond basic knowledge to include attitudes, motivations, past experiences, learning dispositions or preferences, concerns or fears, a means of increasing selfawareness and self-assessment, and a means of creating community and groups within online learning. Diagnostic assessment can also be employed to combat stereotypes, myths, misinformation, assumptions, and other challenges that faculty face when teaching particular subjects or even technologies. Diagnostic assessment can be moved beyond the course to the program level-- potentially helping instructors and administrators improve online learning and student success. Many faculty members struggle with underprepared students and students who may lack motivation in their courses. Students may be incorrectly placed in courses or choose courses that are at levels significantly different from their abilities. Being able to help students adjust their course selection, work efforts, time management, background knowledge, and skills can ensure that these students will be ultimately successful in their courses and in later employment. Diagnostic assessment can certainly help with these issues, and can ensure that the time and effort faculty members spend with these students yields worthwhile results. Faculty members also have to deal with the additional time and effort that comes with creating and adding new assessments. Retooling a current assessment to include diagnostic questions can make already existing assessments more useful and may lessen workload. Developing more active and different types of diagnostic assessments for online courses and programs may also allow faculty to address specific remediation needs, decrease alienation, address concerns prior to a course or program beginning, reduce class time spent on these issues, conduct anonymous assessments (if needed), and allow for student experiences to be incorporated into the course or program. Indeed, retooling of specific assessments can pinpoint student difficulties or issues while engaging students and helping them self-assess ways in which they can work around such problems. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 451 Electronic Posters Given the various ways in which diagnostic assessment can be applied, this session will provide multiple examples for use across a number of different courses and programs. Multiple tools such as surveys, discussions, blogs, journals, and more will be used to demonstrate the ways in which these assessments can be employed in a course. Participants who attend this session will learn ways to conduct and update diagnostic assessments as well as identifying specific online tools that can be used for these processes. Participants will also learn about using programfocused diagnostic assessments that are more active and useful to gain necessary data for student success. This session will be useful for novice and more experienced assessors who want to further explore and develop diagnostic assessments for their courses or programs. During the program, participants will be engaged with interactive questions and answers, audience contribution, and will create a plan to develop one or more diagnostic assessments for their courses or programs. Advancing Research in K-12 Online Education Through a Conceptual Framework Michael Corry (George Washington University, USA) As online distance education continues to grow, so does the need for empirically-based information for educators, administrators, and policy makers in order to make deliberate and calculated decisions about its adoption and use. This is particularly true in the area ofK-12 Online Education. The 2009 U.S. Department of Education "Evaluation of Evidence-based Practices" noted the dearth of rigorous studies into online learning at K-12 levels. This is particularly important given online learning is one of the fastest growing trends in education and the number of K-12 school students enrolling in online learning continues to increase. The International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) reported there were 1,816,400 enrollments in K-12 online courses during the 2009-10 school year. Additionally, the number of full-time online students rose to 275,000 in the 2011-12 school year. To assist researchers in this important area, a conceptual framework forK-12 Online Education research has been developed. A conceptual framework, which may lead to the development of many theoretical frameworks, can enhance online distance education research by explaining, "either graphically or in narrative form, the main things to be studied, the key factors, concepts, or variables, and the presumed relationships among them" (Miles and Huberman, 1994, p. 18). With a conceptual framework, establishing a common lexicon, empirically extrapolating research to apply to K-12 students, and focusing on the design and analysis of online distance education are but a few of the advances that may be realized. This presentation will discuss the development and use of a comprehensive conceptual framework for research inK-12 Online Education. The framework is intended to identify the factors, variables and concepts key to research in online K-12 education. Presenters will also provide an overview of current, timelyK-12 Online Education research topics and discuss their importance to the future of the field. Additionally, the relationships betweens these items will be discussed in the context of the framework. Participants will gain a general understanding of the framework and the current body of research in online K-12 education as well as identifying research opportunities for their own studies. Specifically, participants will: -Gain a general understanding of a conceptual framework for research in online K-12 education as well as an overview of the current body of research in the field. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 452 Electronic Posters -Understand the development of the Framework for Research in Online Distance Education and its origins in online K-12 learning practice. -Be able to enhance their own research practice by understanding how to use the framework and current research to produce future research opportunities, learning where are the research deficits in the current body of knowledge, and discovering how their own research fits in the vast field of K-12 Online Education. Advancing Research in K-12 Online Education Through a Conceptual Framework is for participants who nourish a curiosity about current research in online K-12 education and a desire on how to advance a path into the future. The presentation encourages interaction between the presenters and audience through questions and answers, audience contributions by sharing of experiences and an invitation for further discussions and collaborative efforts beyond the presentation. An Asynchronous Approach to Online Faculty Development Jennifer Shreckengost (Grantham University, USA) As online education continues to expand, so has the number of professionals who teach online. Online adjunct instructors come from professionally diverse backgrounds. Many are simply subject matter experts and have had no formal training in best practices for online teaching and learning. Some adjunct faculty work full-time in their professional field, which creates a challenging situation when it comes to implementing professional development and training opportunities. How can institutions provide robust professional development opportunities that are appealing, while also accessible, to these adjunct instructors? Grantham University is committed to the professional development ofAll instructors to remain relevant in their fields and in best practices of education for online adult learners. Through the use of asynchronous technologies, Grantham University's Teaching and Learning Center has developed asynchronous professional development opportunities for both their full-time faculty as well as their pool of adjunct instructors. Strategies and resources for best practices in online teaching and learning are readily available, while opportunities for collaboration are created. By creating asynchronous sessions, adjunct instructors and full-time faculty are able to participate and collaborate with one another on their own time. Using a team approach, sessions are facilitated by the Teaching and Learning Center, in collaboration with all participants, creating a sense of belonging and community among the adjunct instructor population. Apps That Matter: How to Get on the Techno-Savvy Gravy Train Elizabeth Hodge (East Carolina University, USA) In the wake of an era where students focus on mobility, on demand responses, and social interaction it is important that educators understand and value the use of mobile technology to create synergy in and out of the classroom. Students of all ages are "Wi-Fi" connected with each other using a variety of apps. Where do we turn as the endless list of apps can send an individual searching and testing for countless hours? In a recent course developed at a southeastern university, one professor has developed a conceptual framework that assists educators in finding a purpose and use for mobile apps for teaching and learning. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 453 Electronic Posters The goal of this informational session is to provide the conceptual framework for an interpretative approach to the social reality of engaging students in the learning process through the use of mobile apps. The conceptual framework will provide a construct in which conference participants will be able to understand the: 1) key factors, 2) constructs, 3) variables, and 4) relationships for selecting apps that serve a purpose for teaching and learning. Participants will receive an electronic copy of the presentation and an activity thatAllows them to apply the conceptual framework to their classroom environment. Avoiding Negative Synergy and Creating Community in the Online Classroom Pamela Lee (Saint Leo University, USA) Each year, thousands of students enroll in programs to earn degrees in a plethora of disciplines. To provide greater access to these educational opportunities, Universities are incorporating distance education and online instruction. Online instruction as a core part of the curriculum is not only being adopted in colleges and universities whose mission is focused on distance education. Online instruction is also consistently incorporated in predominantly campus-based universities as well. A 2011 study conducted by the Pew Research Center surveyed more than 2,000 adults, and more than 1,000 presidents of colleges and universities across the country. Seventy-seven percent of these presidents reported that their institutions offer online courses, and 46% of the adults who earned degrees in the past 10 years reported that they have taken an online course (Parker, Lenhart & Moore, 2011). The cohort model, in which groups of students begin and progress through degree requirements together, is also increasingly used to support online programs. Research suggests that cohorts inspire group processing and leadership skills; they also lead to enhanced commitment and motivation as well as better academic performance. The cohort model may also encourage persistence and retention among distance education students (Barnett, Basom, Yerkes, & Noriss, 2000; Schott, Chernish, Dooley, & Lindner, 2003; Witte & James, 1998). However, while there are some important benefits to the cohort model, there are also some challenges. For example, because effective engagement and interaction among the students are important to their success, conflict among them can frustrate or even derail their efforts to complete their coursework. Researchers have examined the impact of group dynamics, such as climate, norms, roles, communication, and cohesion”on learning groups. Additionally, because students cannot physically interact, as in the traditional classroom, some students feel isolated and disconnected; group work sometimes becomes arduous and overwhelming as students struggle to find a sense of community in the classroom (Rovai, 2002; Schott, Chernish, Dooley, & Lindner, 2003). In other words, as Jackson and Mathews (2009) suggests, negative synergy may become a powerful force that significantly influences group learning and achievement. Synergy can be described as getting more done with less (Francis & Young, 1979) or the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Negative synergy produces a reverse effect where the sum of the subsets of a system is less than the sum of the whole. To understand and address negative Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 454 Electronic Posters synergy among learning groups, Jackson and Mathews (2009) offers the Negative Synergy Group Activity Model, which is roughly based on the Johari Window (Luft and Ingham, 1955), a communication model which describes how people give and receive information about themselves and others (Team Building Tips, 2006). The Negative Synergy Group Activity Model consists of four quadrants which categorize relationships among self and groups on two dimensions:”action and reaction. The four quadrants are: How the Instructor Acts, How Students Feel, How the Instructor Feels, and How Students Act. How the Instructor Acts is a critical component of the Negative Synergy Group Activity Model because it is the only quadrant that the instructor can directly manipulate. It describes the means through which the instructor projects into the group. "If the instructor is attentive, open, strong, secure, and engages in imaginative solutions to problems, then that message is sent to the group" (Jackson & Mathews, 2009, p. 426). This paper will specifically address new technologies and applications for Android and IOS devices as well as social media thatAllow the instructor to create that sense of community in the online classroom. Based on the Jackson and Mathews (2009) Negative Synergy Group Activity Model, this paper discusses and presents a variety of technological resources which can be implemented in order to create, maintain, and enhance positive synergy within online learning groups. Best Business Practices Advising Disabled Veterans in an On-Line Post- Secondary Education Environment Jorge Trevino (Penn State World Campus, USA) Todd Lawson (Penn State World Campus, USA) Introduction: With the recent return of Veterans from the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, many of them are turning towards higher education as a means to improve their skill to direct them towards their desired educational and career goals. Some of these students are Disabled Veterans that have chosen an on-line format to meet their needs. Yet, the culture of this population is different from that of the civilian students with disabilities and the challenges they face are compounded by the unfamiliarity of the on-line education delivery format. The Pennsylvania State University has identified this phenomenon and has conducted action research to apply best business practices in assisting this population by providing a means to gain equal access to college courses on-line. Background for the Study: Veteran On-line Students with Disabilities (VOSD) have been seeking out ways to complete their educational goals. Some VOSD are choosing on-line programs as vehicle to complete a college degree for varied reasons. Many from this population assume that these types of educational programs afford them more equal access to education. However, many Veteran online students with disabilities are discovering that there are additional challenges and problematic issues associated with on-line learning. By attending this presentation you will be able to answer the following questions: RQ1 - Why are Veteran on-line students with disabilities, whom self-disclose are unwilling to follow through with the established academic adjustment protocols to be covered under the Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 455 Electronic Posters American Disability Amendment Act of 2008. RQ2- What is currently being done by Academic Advisers working with Military students that can have a positive impact on the Veteran on-line students with disabilities population that is increasing the follow through rate with this population? RQ3- What relationship between the Veteran on-line students with disabilities, Academic Adviser and Disability Service provider can be discovered and processes implemented to increase this populations willingness to apply for accommodations to increase student success? Point of View: Disabled Counselor insights of the study: Real world comments from the Penn State World Campus Disability Counselor on the study and the effects observed. Academic Military Adviser insights of the study: Real world comments from the Penn State World Campus Academic Military Adviser on the study and the effects observed. Best of Both Worlds - Prepare Instructors for Online Delivery Through Modeling and Simulation Pei-Ju Liu (Central Michigan University, USA) Mingsheng Dai (Central Michigan University, USA) In the recent Babson study "Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States", 6.7 million of students took an online course and 32% of the total students enrolled in higher education took at least one online class. While 77% of academic leaders believed the learning outcomes in online learning as the same or superior than face-to-face, only 30% of the officers felt their faculty accept the value and legitimacy in online education. What caused such a large gap? Additionally, 69% leaders rated online education is critical to the long-term strategy. As an institution, what can we bridge the gap and help faculty understand the value and manage online learning? The Global Campus of Central Michigan University offers a three-component program to prepare instructor for successful online teaching. The program covers a basic technical training for the learning management system, a teaching online workshop, and a course development workshop. Instructors will sign up a workshop based on their needs. To prepare faculty who have never taught online, the Center for Instructional Design (CID) developed a four-module Teaching Online workshop. This workshop offers faculty an opportunity to gain pedagogical understanding of online teaching and practical experience in online learning. It covers creating an online syllabus, preparing and presenting online content, developing communication strategies, constructing engaging activities, applying alternative assessment methods, best practices, and other issues that are crucial for effective online teaching. As growing demands for online courses, CID developed an Online Course Development workshop. This workshop provides an online course developer with an organizational structure Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 456 Electronic Posters of transforming and redesigning his/her face-to-face course into an online course and to prepare the course developer with both online teaching best practices and hands-on technical activities. Upon completion of the workshop, s/he will be equipped with strategies in facilitating an online course and skills to complete the development of his/her own online course. Each participant will have a dual role in the Online Course Development workshop as an online student and instructor. As an online student, s/he will be getting first-hand experience in communicating and interacting with the facilitator and peers in the workshop, participating in weekly live chats, submitting online assignments, responding to discussion board activities, etc. At the same time, the participant is an online instructor, designing and developing his/her own online course content, creating and grading online assignments, activities and discussion responses, and facilitating the online learning environment via live chat in his/her own online course development shell. Both workshops have been up and running for 4 years. The positive feedback is overwhelming. Over 95% of the participants indicated the workshops are useful and they are able to utilize what they have learned to their online courses and even to enhance their face-to-face classes, and they will recommend to others. Faculty regarded workshops "very worthwhile, informative, hands-on, practical, on target, and motivating". They felt "much more comfortable about teaching an online class" after the training and would definitely integrate technology into their in-seat classes as well. "Great class overall, I feel more confident about being able to teach the course for Spring '13 and know where I can get assistance when needed." and "I'm glad to have had the opportunity to take it before teaching online." "This was, hands down, both the most difficult and the most useful and informative training workshop I have ever experienced. It is beautifully organized and paced, and I am so grateful to have been a participant in it." "The organization of activities was really excellent in the workshop. I now have a terrific model to use for creating a very nice course." " Having never taken an online course, it provided me with the information/tool I will need to instruct an online course while putting me in the students' shoes." "Course was very stimulating and absolutely necessary to teach online." "I liked our dual roles as students and teachers and being able to work with our own development shell." "The assignments were meaningful and relevant. My eyes are wider opened, mind is sharper, and ideas are richer after taking this workshop." "This workshop has exceeded my expectations. It presents so many internal and external, readily available resources that can help us enhance an online course's design and delivery." We hope the Conference participants will take away what we have built for their own institutions' online training programs. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 457 Electronic Posters Beyond Blogging: WordPress as a Platform for Innovation Nicole Wilson (James Madison University, USA) Kevin Hegg (James Madison University, USA) JMU's Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) recruited 13 faculty for a WordPress pilot in the Spring of 2010. Faculty came from sociology, nursing, psychology, English, CIS, writing and geology. Most of the faculty used WordPress for course-related activities like blogging and lightweight course management. Since then, over 5,000 users have logged into over 140 sites. CIT has installed over 400 plugins and themes. CIT has also integrated WordPress authentication with JMU's central user directory so that students and faculty do not have to manage another set of login credentials. CIT has also written a script to synchronize WordPress site membership with course enrollment feeds coming from JMU's Student Administration system. In this presentation, we will show how faculty are using WordPress as a platform for building innovative and engaging web applications to support their teaching and scholarship. We will cover a wide range of topics and technologies; such as podcasting, video sharing, digital humanities, digital storytelling, online exhibits, social networking, Google maps, mobile-friendly themes, content upload from mobile devices, student journals and fanzines, the flipped blog, coauthoring, peer review, and more. Our demonstrations will highlight a couple of emerging trends within the JMU community. Multimedia assignments delivered online with a shelf-life extending beyond the semester are becoming more common. Students are creating video and audio files and sharing these on easily discoverable web sites. Students are also creating exhibits of carefully curated artifacts. WordPress is a place where scholarship is expressed. Unexpectedly, WordPress has also become an object of learning, a class assignment. Students in disciplines like Public Relations and Technical Communication are learning to build WordPress sites. At the end of this presentation, participants will appreciate the extent and variety of WordPress use in teaching, learning, and scholarship at James Madison University. Beyond Competency: Understanding the Learning and Development of Online Teachers Peter Rennert-Ariev (Loyola University Maryland, USA) Study Context The presentation will report on an 18-month long participant observation ethnographic study of twelve graduate students' learning and development as they progressed through a graduate certificate program on online teaching and learning. This program is a 15-credit on-line graduate program designed to provoke students to experience and critically reflect upon high-quality online learning; build a depth of knowledge in online teaching and learning; and engage in increasingly complex learning experiences to develop online teaching skills. The study was designed to uncover participants' understandings of the roles and competencies that they were developing as online instructors. The study is intended to contribute to a developing theoretical base that will better inform the types of pedagogical and institutional transformations necessary to support quality online teaching. Theoretical Framework A growing body of research literature has emerged in the last decade examining higher education faculty experiences in online learning settings (Seaman, 2009; Zhang, J., & Walls, R. (2009). The knowledge base on high quality online teaching, however, still lacks rich, thick descriptions Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 458 Electronic Posters about the lived experiences of faculty teaching online or the changes they experience in an online learning environment. Researchers have studied online teacher roles and competency development in various higher education contexts (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001; Berge & Collins, 2000; Graham, Cagiltay, Lim, Craner, & Duffy, 2001; Goodyear, Salmon, Spector, Steeples, & Tickner, 2001; Guasch, Alvarez, & Espasa, 2010; Salmon, 2004). As noted by Baran (2011), however, the literature tends to emphasize a "competency-driven" vision of online teaching that lacks nuanced attention to issues of empowerment of online teachers that might include promoting critical reflection, and integrating technology into pedagogical inquiry. Studies investigating online teacher roles and competencies tend to follow a "technical view of teaching," which "focus on the primacy of knowledge and value transmission rather than a broader sense of education" (Rennert-Ariev, 2008, p. 113). In contrast, this study focuses on understanding participants' experiences through transformative learning theory as a perspective that considers teachers as adult learners who continuously transform their meaning of their own development has online instructors through the ongoing process of critical reflection and action. Setting and Data Sources The structure of this program, entirely online, provided a rich archive to uncover participants' learning and development. Data sources included student work products, reflective blogs, individual assignments, group assignments, as well as transcripts of synchronous and asynchronous discussions. In addition, two ethnographic interviews were held with each participant in the program focused on their developing understandings of their own competencies as online instructors. These interviews were analyzed for overarching themes, attending to ways in which students' experiences conveyed dimensions of a "transformative" (versus "competencybased") view of teaching. Data analysis processes adhered to systematic analytical and iterative stages common in qualitative research drawing from the work of Glaser and Strauss (1967) on grounded theory and Eisenhardt's (2002) guidance on building themes from self -study. In addition a number of strategies were used to ensure credibility including peer debriefing and member checking (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Findings A central theme in participants' understanding of their developing competencies as online instructors was their understanding of the centrality enhancing the instructor's social presence. Participants emphasized that teaching presence is a significant predictor of students' perceived learning, satisfaction, and sense of community. Participants frequently discussed that social presence is essential to creating effective online environments and constructed many strategies that instructors may deploy to create a community of inquiry supported by strong social presence. Participants also focused on innovative and effective uses of various e-tools that can be used to promote synchronous and asynchronous forms of communication. Participants noted various e-tools that can be easily learned and implemented and helped them to construct a larger repertoire of strategies they could use depending on their particular learning goals and the needs of their students. Finally, participants noted that their competencies were closely related to their capacity to work effectively within their own organization/institution to gain the resources and support that they need. Some participants had envisioned online learning as taken place primarily in individual interactions between students and the instructor. Several program experiences, however, helped render participants more aware of the significant role that the instructor has in building community and of ways to develop ongoing and meaningful interaction among students. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 459 Electronic Posters Participants found these goals to be important as they generated strategies to increase opportunities for their students to collaborate and develop a healthy learning community. Conclusion The study highlights the challenge that online instructors face "to move to something new when the patterns of behavior required for success are not fully established" (Natriello, 2005, p. 1890). Because of these patterns many online learning practices are employed in limited ways, such as relying heavily on the replication of traditional classroom environments. New approaches to professional development in online learning will need to go beyond merely encouraging practitioners to replicate existing models of teaching and learning. By better understanding how practitioners in various contexts learn to transform themselves as online teachers - a process that includes attending to social presence, e-learning tools, and organizational context - greater opportunities will emerge to construct professional development for online teaching as a transformative experience that uncovers new affordances for powerful learning. Cognitive Presence, Content Accuracy, and Faculty Student Interactions in an Asynchronous Course for Teachers David Randle (American Museum of Natural History, USA) This presentation will discuss some of the results of a mixed-method study that examined interactions and learning outcomes of science teachers in an online graduate-level course on evolutionary biology intended to improve teachers' science content knowledge. The focus of the study was to use data generated from the coding of asynchronous discussion text to look for patterns of cognitive activity, use of scientific statements, and general faculty student dynamics. Three areas of results will be presented. Levels of Cognitive Presence and scientific accuracy Discussion posts made by the participants in the course were analyzed for cognitive presence using the Community of Inquiry (COI) framework. In comparison to other studies using COI coding for cognitive presence, this study found a relatively high level of Integration. Forty-seven percent of total posts by learners were coded at the Integration level and 38% at the Exploration level. Seven percent were Triggering Events. Since the discussion prompts supplied the initial question for each discussion, it is not surprising that students posted few Triggering Events. The high frequency of Integration level posts may be attributed to how the discussion prompts in this course framed the tasks and may also be influenced by student performance expectations laid out in the course discussion rubric and communicated to students by faculty in discussions and assessments. The CoI coding scheme uses the following as evidence of Integration: "Reference to previous message followed by substantiated agreement or disagreement," "Justified, developed, defensible, yet tentative hypotheses," "Integrating information from one or more sources - textbook, articles, personal experience, other posts or peer contributions," and "explicit characterization of message as a solution by a participant." The course design provides students with essays, links to outside resources, and textbook readings that are intended for use in the construction of discussion posts. The discussion rubric prescribes explicit guidelines for reflection on the course content. To receive a grade of Exceeds Expectations (roughly equivalent to an A), a student must have "Reflected on the discussion questions using course materials Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 460 Electronic Posters while drawing in other resources and asking additional questions." To receive a grade of Meets Expectations (roughly equivalent to a B), a student must have "Reflected on the discussion question using course materials." At either of these levels, the expectations laid out by the course framers are clear that students need to integrate resources from the course into their discussion responses. Based on these findings, it is suggested that designers of online instruction be mindful in the framing of learning tasks and use open-ended discussion prompts that may require the use of reference materials if Integration level cognitive activity is the goal. There were 395 posts made by learners that contained sufficiently identifiable science content to be analyzed for accuracy. Of these, 336 were scientifically accurate. These statements outnumbered statements with partial scientific misconceptions (55) and statements that were scientifically inaccurate (4). The fact that 85% of posts containing scientific statements were accurate may be attributable to online learning environments being particularly well suited for fostering critical thinking and developing reflective learning communities. The fact that most of the posts that included scientific statements were coded as accurate may indicate that participants were able to carefully compose their responses and check reference sources before submitting to the discussions. Student Faculty Interaction As the course progressed, the number of faculty posts per discussion declined, while the number of student posts remained relatively constant. Student-to-student posts increased in frequency as faculty participation dropped. One explanation for this trend is that the students developed a learning community that did not depend on faculty to stimulate conversation. In the first three units faculty posts were 32% of the total posts. In the last three units faculty posts made up 15% of the total posts. It is possible that more involvement by faculty early in the course modeled expected posting behavior for the students and helped set expectations for levels of course participation. Another explanation is that since students' grades were dependent on discussion participation (40% of their total grade for the course), they posted responses to whoever was available. By the later stages of the course they had received grades for previous discussions and should have been well informed of discussion grading criteria. The instructors were explicit about setting participation expectations through announcements, feedback in the grade book, and references to the grading rubric for discussions so students knew what they needed to do in order to succeed. Temporal patterns of course participation Analysis of temporal patterns was done by compiling the combined number of posts from corresponding days (first, second, third, etc.) fromAll seven discussions. The number of student posts increased toward the end of each discussion period, however the frequencies of posts with scientifically accurate statements and Integration level cognitive activity remained relatively constant over this same period. The increase in total posts was due to the increase in other types of communication in the discussions. Posts that did not contain statements that could be coded for scientific accuracy or cognitive level were coded as Other Interactions. These post were often brief, can be considered social interactions, and, while they did not deepen the conversation about the scientific content, they are hypothesized to strengthen the online community and lead to higher levels of cognitive presence. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 461 Electronic Posters Twenty-six percent of the Other Interaction messages expressed thanks for explanations, examples, or links to resources. Personal messages about likes, dislikes, interests, or household events were also common (20%) as were quick exclamations (17%) such as expressions of congratulations when the course instructor announced to the class that she had just retired from classroom teaching. An interesting group of posts were comments left by learners about their own metacognition (10%). This information could be potentially useful for the faculty and sheds light on how students processed information in the course. Commons: Building an Online Community Across an Online College Campus Mary Bold (American College of Education, USA) Darlene Hunter (American College of Education, USA) American College of Education uses virtual Commons to help with communication, retention, and building the online community across our online campus. Our Commons consist of Student, Faculty, Ambassador, and Alumni Commons. Our Commons serve as a repository for additional resources to support learning and development across the different groups of individuals working at the college. The Commons provide a space for individuals to ask questions and receive answers. As an online College, we strive to make sure that students have a space for self-help and a means to come together to build the online community that they are missing by not visiting an on-ground campus. While launching the Student Commons in 2012, the College was planning a migration to a new LMS. The College used the Student Commons for college-wide announcements, information and webinars about program requirements, and discussion boards monitored by Student Support Reps. By introducing students to the Student Commons, the college simultaneously introduced the new LMS and eased a technology transition for thousands of students in 2013. Faculty Commons is used as a space for collaboration, announcements, policies, and professional development. Faculty members use this space to collaborate on projects and share resources about the courses they are teaching. This space is used to give faculty a voice and build a community among the faculty. Ambassador and Alumni Commons utilize the same technology but are established for former students. The Commons have proven to be very successful. They continue to grow and develop, meeting the needs of the College. Similar to the way student behaviors shape on-ground campuses, the online students created their own cowpaths on the discussion boards, sharing questions that they had for their fellow classmates. Student engagement can be tracked through the built-in analytics, similar to usage statistics for a Web site. From a technology standpoint, the Commons represent a strategy of using the most efficient platform for whole-College consumption without creating the need for new portals or new programming. This is achieved by converting the LMS used for courses to the purpose of largescale enrollments. For the College, there was some risk in this strategy because the relatively new LMS software had not been tested for such uses. Pioneering the effort, the College has Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 462 Electronic Posters demonstrated the robust nature of the software and also established a set of best practices for Commons creation and management. This presentation will display visual representations of the Commons, with highlights as well as pitfalls explained. The presenters will outline the decisions made around the creation of the Commons, as well as the best practices that emerged during design as well as during maintenance. The audience will be invited to pose questions and share their own experiences with similar online communities. Completing the Circuit: Designing, Developing, Piloting and Improving Electric Circuit Analysis (ECEN 150) Patricia Hendricks (Brigham Young University-Idaho, USA) Presentation Description: Resistors restrict the flow of electric current. Resistors: Educational Constraints (7 min) Theoretical Perspective: Laboratory experimentation is optimal. Online classes often rely on computer simulations but students often find short-cuts in the simulations. Psillos (1998) Malaric, Jurcevic, Cmuk & Mostarac (2008) Azad (2010) Clark, Flowers, Doolittle, Meehan & Hendricks (2009) Guiding Questions: 1. How can online students have a laboratory experience? 2. Engineering at BYUI is both technical and theoretical. Can online students learn technical skills such as soldering? 3. How can online Instructors grade technical laboratory experiments? Discussion: Software/hardware options for online students Lab experiments adapted for online students Instructor observations Student satisfaction comments & data Capacitors store electric charge Capacitors: Collaborative design team. (10 min) Theoretical Perspective: Learning can be enhanced by a design team working collaboratively. Wiggins and McTighe (1998) Hattie (2012) Alekson & Ralston-Berg (2011) Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 463 Electronic Posters Guiding Questions: 4. How can the design process contribute to student achievement? 5. How can we maximize the perspectives of each member of the design team thus maximizing students learning? Discussion: BYUI Curriculum Design Process: 4 semester process: Prepare, Develop, Review, and Pilot Curriculum Designer, Faculty Course Lead, Online Instructor Transistors amplify electric current. Transistors: Peer learning/teaching (10 min) Theoretical Perspective: Peer feedback is extensive but often incorrect. Student learning is enhanced by peer interactions. Relevance and guidance is essential. Hattie (2012) Light (2010) Guiding Questions: 6. Can an online engineering course function without a Teaching Assistant (TA)? 7. If we impose study groups on students will that have a beneficial impact? 8. How can we structure discussion boards and group activities so that the uninformed are not leading the dumb? Presentation: Class structure and organization Homework and Lab tutorials Summary (3 min) Share data that compares online students satisfaction and performance to face-to-face students; and online students using myDAQ to online students using the BYUI lab. Summarize our lessons learned (the class is currently in pilot. We will have student performance data and student/Instructor satisfaction data to present after August 2012) Correlations Between Transactional Distance (TD) Constructs and Student Learning Outcomes in Online and Blended Courses Kayode C.V. Adebowale (Stony Brook University, USA) Tian-Lih Teng (Stony Brook University, USA) Contemporary distance education is often defined by educational delivery via information and communication technology (ICT), and separation between learners and instructors. Separation, most importantly spatial and temporal separations between the learner and the instructor, conspicuously distinguishes Online Learning Environments (OLEs) from Traditional Face-toFace Learning Environments (TF2FLEs). However, latest developments in ICT have helped abridge much of the spatial separation between the instructor and learner in distance learning, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 464 Electronic Posters and provided immediacy to communication across this physical distance (Hannum, 2009). Until recently, most studies in the field of online learning have largely ignored, for better or worse, the ferocity at which Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has bridged the physical distance between learners and instructors in OLEs. Consequently, the concept and assumptions of "distance" in distance education has undergone a paradigm shift (Garrison, 2000) towards the temporal separation that has developed between the learner and the instructor, as a result of overreliance on ICT. It is not that spatial and temporal separations are not important differences between OLEs and TF2FLEs; not at all. Rather, it is what temporal separations produces; that is, the new paradigm of "perceptual gaps" that develops as a result of learning via a Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) which should be the focus of more studies in this field. Such separation, we propose, significantly changes the "perceived distance" between and among the learners and instructors, as well as other stakeholders involved in an online learning environment. Capturing the dimensions of this "perceived distance" and how it could be abridged has proved elusive for some, and immeasurable by other researchers. Nevertheless, some theories of "perceptual gaps" in OLES, and empirical studies testing their falsifiability have tried to shed more light. In this study we briefly look at the theories of perceptual gaps in online learning environments, but focus on testing one theory that has recently dominated this field, that is, the Transactional Distance (TD) theory. Ultimately, the goal of any perceptual gap theory is to posit possible impacts on online and blended students' affective and cognitive learning outcomes. Creating Online Superheroes: Combining the Power of Certification with the Awesomeness of Instructional Design R.C. Callahan (Weber State University, USA) Kit Inpornvijit, Ph.D. This session describes the development of a Master Online Teacher Certification (MOTC) program for online faculty at Weber State University (WSU), in Ogden, Utah. The presenter(s) will provide an overview of how to develop such a program, the research behind the effort, and the program evaluation process and reports. PROBLEM STATEMENT Designing an online course can be challenging and time consuming (Allen & Seaman, 2011). Unfortunately, faculty in higher education are commonly unaware of the current best practices in online education (Kosak et al., 2004). Therefore, it is critical that institutions provide a professional development program valued by faculty that promotes quality in online course development (McQuiggan, 2007). PURPOSE The purpose of this session is to share the experience of designing, implementing, and evaluating an internal certification program for online faculty. The Instructional Designers at Weber State University have been offering the MOTC program for 8 years and the popularity of the program has grown exponentially. This year we had over 40 applicants for 18 seats! Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 465 Electronic Posters OVERVIEW OF MOTC The MOTC was developed to assist professors interested in cultivating exemplary online courses. This certification includes an online course, face-to-face workshops & hands on training. The faculty selected for this program will learn valuable tools and concepts to increase the interactivity & pedagogical expertise of their online classes. Compensation is provided for full attendance and participation ($1000 value). Topics Include: Instructional Design, Design Tools (multimedia), Best Practices, Emerging Technologies, Assessment, Final Project Presentation of research findings to peers THEME (or sparkle factor) The presentation materials will be designed with a superhero theme, including images, comic strip story lines, and (possibly) modest costumes. LAYOUT Poster Presentation- Detail the MOTC program design process. List session topics, objectives, and samples of content. Provide evaluation statistics and participant testimonials. Show marketing materials and provide handouts. Showcase the online portion of the program. REFERENCES Allen, I. E., & Seaman, J. (2011). Going the Distance: Online Education in the United States, 2011. Sloan Consortium. PO Box 1238, Newburyport, MA 01950. Kim, K., & Bonk, C. J. (2006). The future of online teaching and learning in higher education: The survey says. Educause quarterly, 29(4), 22. Kosak, L., Manning, D., Dobson, E., Rogerson, L., Cotnam, S., Colaric, S., & McFadden, C. (2004). Prepared to teach online? Perspectives of faculty in the University of North Carolina System. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 7(3). McQuiggan, C. A. (2007). The role of faculty development in online teaching's potential to question teaching beliefs and assumptions. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 10(3). Vrasidas, C. (2004, March). Issues of pedagogy and design in e-learning systems. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Applied computing(pp. 911-915). ACM. Demystifying and Honing Research Skills Lori Poole (CSU-Global Campus, USA) Research skills are needed in many aspects of life. From determining where to live to learning about a topic of interest to researching a topic for a 10-page paper, the critical thinking skills acquired by applying research techniques are invaluable. In the recent past, a trip to the library was required to do research. In today's digital age, information is at our fingertips and accessible without searching through dusty library stacks. But is this information reliable and based on scholarly findings? Or is it personal opinions or gossip passed from one person to the next posted online forAll to access? While the mediums for researching may be different, the methods needed to learn how to select quality, reliable sources Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 466 Electronic Posters has not changed. This seminar will present various research techniques to assist learners and educators in honing their research skills. As educators we attempt to incorporate research skills in activities such as writing assignments and course presentations. Many college class assignments require students to use scholarly and/or peer-reviewed articles as resources. But how many students actually know what these kinds of articles are? Or how they differ from popular press? Or where to even look for scholarly articles? This presentation will also reviews ways to educate students on how to find, indentify and use scholarly articles, as well as tips on citing sources and incorporating them in class assignments. In addition, research findings on how college students view research and scholarly articles will be covered. Developing Media Rich Environments to Enhance Online Learning Jeffrey Bauer (University of Northern Colorado, USA) Creating media rich learning environments to enhance online learning does not need to be complicated or time consuming if you have a vision of how to proceed. The goal of this presentation is to provide a vision for teachers, course developers, instructional designers, and any other interested individuals on how to use some reasonably simple and highly accessible tools to enhance online teaching so that Digital Natives will feel right at home. The approach can be used in any type of online teaching format, whether it is synchronous, asynchronous orBlended Learning. Using multimedia in online instruction has many benefits that are supported in the research literature. Mayer (2009) advanced the notion that using pictures instead of words alone supports improved learning. Computer created video products such as animations, graphics, illustrations and photosAll contribute to the learning process. Mayer's research on Dual Cognitive Theory claimed that people process words and pictures separately, but one at a time. It is through processing and organizing that the learner engages in cognitive activities to assist them in their learning. The first step in the process is to identify course outcomes, develop instructional strategies and then begin to build related content. This is where the instructional designer or instructor can identify or create related media that enhances student understanding of the content. For example, in the introductory educational technology class that was mentioned above, there is a unit on learning theories that form the foundation of instructional design. Students read information in the textbook about instructional theorists such as Piaget, and Skinner. This presents an ideal opportunity to integrate online videos where they can actually see, hear, and experience Piaget, and Skinner in person by watching YouTube videos. I typically copy the embed code so that students do not need to exit the learning management system (LMS) to watch the videos. Other types of media can be incorporated into the LMS such as diagrams, text files, podcasts, photos and animations. It is best to embed these materials into the lesson rather than linking to them because links will navigate them away from the lesson. Additionally, the potential of students encountering dead or misdirected links is always a risk. However, either through embedding or linking to appropriate materials, students can have access to rich media that enters Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 467 Electronic Posters the brain through different channels which is supported by Mayer's theories (2009). The experience can be powerful and transforming, allowing students to experience primary sources and providing them with access to audio and video materials that make the content come alive. There is no shortage of tools available to make use of multimedia in online teaching. Thousands of applications exist thatAllow developers to create simple animations, videos, audio tracks, graphics, multimedia databases, electronic presentations, and 3-D animated environments; consequently, it is impossible to coverAll of them; however, the author has selected a handful of tools that are accessible, easy to learn, stable, and compatible with most learning management systems (LMS) used by colleges and universities, as well as K-12 schools, today. YouTube is a logical place to start. With a vast amount of content available, online teachers and developers should know how to link and embed YouTube content in their courses. Having your own YouTube accountAllows you to create, upload, edit and provide access to original materials that are simple to produce. Even if you do not have a YouTube account, you still have access to the entire content of the site. The presenter will demonstrate how to incorporate several YouTube features to optimize the impact of the content. Connecting with online learners in a genuine and positive manner is essential in order to motivate your students to want to learn the content of your course. Building positive relationships between students and the instructor can be enhanced by making use of multimedia that features the instructor in various roles including course manager, motivational speaker, humorist, and, naturally, as a competent teacher. Most instructors have the ability to create videos with their laptops or tablet devices. You can create videos of yourself explaining class projects, presenting new information, making comments about assignments submitted and many other course related topics. Students consistently tell me that simply explaining the assignments using a video as well as text is extremely helpful. It is best to make these videos course specific; in other words, you can refer to students by name, talk about current events, mention due dates, and other things that show the students that you created the videos specifically for them. This is a great way to bridge transactional distance and to let the students know that you care about them. I use my iPad to create my videos. I simply set the device on my desk, prop it up at the appropriate angle, access the video recorder app, and hit record. I do pay attention to lighting and room acoustics. If necessary, I will edit the video and enhance the audio, but most of the time, I simply record, upload to YouTube and then embed the video into my Blackboard shell. Students tell me that they enjoy my video announcements and it helps them feel like the really do have a "live" instructor teaching the course. It is important to speak in a natural, conversational tone and talk to students as you would in a live classroom. Once you get good at video announcements, you will find yourself creating them regularly since they take about the same amount of time to produce as a text-based announcement. There are many other uses for your web cam and recording app besides announcements, but if you are new to this media, announcements are a great place to start. The presenter will demonstrate several ways to create and upload your own videos simply and efficiently while retaining a professional look and feel. Several other methods for creating media rich learning environments will be presented including how to customize graphics, photos, illustrations and text materials to support your learning outcomes. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 468 Electronic Posters EdTech and Student Services: Supporting Online Learners Through Blogging Melissa A. Venable (OnlineColleges.net, USA) While blogging may not be new, it is one of the latest forms of technology and social media to be integrated by student support services. With functionality in mind, blogging platforms provide not only flexibility, but also an easy-to-learn interface for offices interested in presenting a range of online content and opening additional communication channels with current and prospective students, as well as alumni. This session will introduce a variety of ways in which today's student support personnel, especially those serving online or distance students, can add blogs as an outreach strategy. Webbased access to these services is also becoming more popular with many non-traditional oncampus students who, like their online counterparts, are juggling the demands of work and families. The goals of this session include providing attendees with: a description of the typical features of a blog site, a short list of education-friendly platforms, and examples of how blogs are currently being used in the context of student support. Examples from for-profit and not-for-profit institutions will be provided covering services such as career services, academic advising, library and research activities, learning skills, technical support, financial aid, and health and wellness counseling. This session will also provide attendees with guidelines for getting started with a blogging initiative leading them through a series of questions to determine: what platform will be used (free or fee-based, hosting, usability), what content will be shared (topics, events, resources, reports), and who will contribute (directors, staff members, partners, students). A list of different blog post types and formats will also be made available to help new student services bloggers generate writing ideas. A collection of blogging communities and resources for exploration of current practices will be included and attendees who are already blogging will be asked to add their sites to a list of resources available after the presentation. Enhancing Student Engagement and Social Learning Using Online Book Clubs Enid Lawrence (Southern New Hampshire University, USA) Based on the Community of Inquiry (COI) model, educational experiences happen when students encounter a cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence (Garrison et al., 2001). Following this model, presenters will explain how book clubs were used to transform a traditional online asynchronous classroom activity to an engaging, social, active online learning experience through asynchronous peer interaction and collaboration. Presenters will explain Southern New Hampshire University's successful implementation of asynchronous online book clubs in a combined Community and Global Health course, including the following three undergraduate and graduate levels: 1) undergraduate RN-BSN students, 2) advanced pathway BSN-MSN students, and 3) graduate MSN students. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 469 Electronic Posters In this particular course, students select one of the five book options presented to them, and they are placed in groups, according to the book chosen, to read and discuss within the selected group, with a group limit of 4-5 students per book club. The Community of Inquiry demonstration of cognitive presence is evident in the exploration of the assigned readings, in the exchange of information and ideas brought forth from the readings, and in the integration and application of new ideas extracted from the readings. Students discuss and critically appraise course concepts and themes as relevant to their particular book. And as a result, students are seamlessly able to apply the knowledge and ideas gained to both cultural and community situations and to policy issues abroad. It is generally accepted that social context greatly affects the nature of learning activities and outcomes (Resnick, 1991). As such, the focus on social presence is emphasized as book club members take turns leading the discussion with guiding questions and helping fellow students prepare for their book club presentations. This is presented as a means of encouraging group collaboration, fostering an environment of trust, and providing a forum for open communication to further enhance successful learning outcomes. Book clubsAllow students to take advantage of abundant resources available in the readings, as well as sharing and gaining experience from peers' unique backgrounds. Students collaborate and express their group's ideas in creating a final presentation, where each group will share their review of their book along with presenting a critical analysis of the book's most salient points. Instructional design and how we use technology to create a learning environment are paramount in achieving quality learning outcomes (Anderson & Garrison, 1995; Clark, 1994). The instructional design and the creation of the activity, in collaboration with subject matterExperts, is where the teaching presence is shared, ensuring quality student learning outcomes. Teaching presence is also shared through group facilitation by the instructor and also by the students, as students share the responsibility of leading the discussions with guiding questions. The successful implementation of these book clubs, following the Community of Inquiry model, was evidenced by both faculty and student feedback, which presenters will share with the audience. Presenters will also engage the audience by polling to see how many have considered implementing an engaging activity, such as the book clubs presented here. Presenters will also discuss other successful, collaboratively engaging activities, if applicable, to enhance the discussion and audience takeaways from the presentation, in an effort to ensure attendees leave equipped with the tools to implement collaborative strategies, following the Community of Inquiry model, in their own courses. Presenters will also share successful strategies for design, development, and implementation, such as use in online discussion forums, group wikis, etc., along with overcoming potential difficulties and limitations in the successful deployment of collaborative activities within a learning management system. Ensuring Accessibility in Online Education Colleen Fleming (Adler School of Professional Psychology, USA) Online education gives opportunities to a wide array of students, but also presents unique challenges for students with disabilities. Solutions to these challenges are as diverse as the students who may require accommodations in order to get the full learning experience for a Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 470 Electronic Posters course. Some examples of accommodations include providing transcripts or captions for videos, converting documents such as PDFs so that they can be read by a screen reader, making sure that all course functionality can be accessed using a keyboard, and giving students extra time on tests within the learning management system. Accessible online courses can be developed by using inclusive course design, reviewing courses for accessibility, and training faculty and staff to create course materials that can be accessed by students with disabilities. Making sure that online courses are accessible can be an overwhelming undertaking, but it is possible even with a small staff. Incorporating accessibility as part of the course design, course review, and faculty education process helps prevent rushed attempts to update a course to meet student needs. This presentation will outline the accessibility requirements for online higher education courses, the accessibility procedures and training that have been implemented at the Adler School of Professional Psychology, and practical ways to ensure that online course content can be used effectively by all students. Evaluation of Adjunct Instructor Workload and Employment Conditions in Higher Education Melanie Shaw (Northcentral University, USA) Adjunct instructors serve in an increasing number of faculty jobs in higher education. With a growing contingent workforce, higher education institutions continue to add positions for adjunct faculty members, yet little is known about the workload or work conditions of adjuncts. Leaders of higher education need to more fully understand these new types of adjuncts in order to make contingent assignments attractive to build and retain an active and effective pool of contingent personnel. The purpose of this presentation is to share findings from a mixed methods study which included an exploration of adjunct workload and employment conditions in higher education. Data from this study were used to understand the factors that most influence adjuncts to seek and remain in positions in higher education as a contingent faculty member. The presentation will include both qualitative and quantitative responses regarding the adjunct experience teaching in higher education settings. Goals of the presentation include sharing updated data regarding workload and employment conditions for adjunct faculty - particularly those who have decided to forgo fulltime employment to pursue adjuncting at multiple institutions. Evaluation of Products to Identify and Prevent Academic Violations, and Promote Academic Integrity Shrilatha Sira (Arizona State University, USA) Academic Integrity covers a host of issues and poses a major concern to schools and universities. There are many tools available to help preserve academic integrity; which are viewed from two perspectives:Administrative: deals with cost in deploying the tools, and long term effectiveness Academic: covers ethics, learning measurements, and faculty and student evaluations. At Arizona State University, the W. P. Carey School of Business takes academic integrity very seriously and ensures that: Students are evaluated for their own work; a safe and conducive testing environment is made available; any type of fraud or cheating is identified, reported and Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 471 Electronic Posters prevented. We look to evaluate tools and methods that provide continuous improvement. During the past year, we tracked the following tools to determine their effectiveness in online and blended classes. Respondus: Respondus LockDown Browser locked down the testing environment within the Learning Management System when began their computer based assessment. Students were unable to print, copy, or access other applications and websites till they submitted the test. While this took care of multiple issues of cheating that could arise in proctored assessments, one major drawback noted was that there was no way to check for impersonation and verify that the test was proctored if students wereAllowed to take the test remotely. Acxiom: Acxiom's Identity Verification and Authentication system was used in the pilot conducted in two under graduate courses from January through March 2012. Students logged in and began taking their computer based test. At random intervals during the test, students were presented with credit related questions. They could continue with the test only after answering the questions correctly. This feature provided an additional layer of identity verification. One of the issues experienced was that international students and students with no credit history were unable to answer certain questions as they had no personal data associated with them. This prevented them from proceeding with the test. Alaris: Alaris, INC used the SignHear technology and created a signature pad that picked up sound waves of a person's signature. The pilot was conducted in an undergraduate class in the summer of 2012. Students were initially asked to sign their name on a special signature pad. In order to capture the variations in signatures over time and compensate for these variations, students were asked to sign their name 5 times. Before the exam, the students were asked to sign in. The signature was analyzed to verify the student's identity. Students were allowed to take the test only after their identity had been verified. VProtor: VProctor was used in the pilot conducted from March through April 2013 in an undergraduate course with approximately 250 students. It remotely proctored and monitored the students' physical environment during computer based exams. Students sat in a quiet room, installed the proctoring software on the computer they used to take the test, logged into VProctor and typed in a few words as instructed, using their keyboard before they started the test. Students were informed in advance regarding the specific behavioral traits that would be considered violations. Their visual and audio patterns were recorded and in turn, used to trigger video captures and launch modules to detect potential violations. The violations were reported to the proctoring server at the time of occurrence while the video, screen captures and audio data were uploaded at the end of the exam. The instructor or proctor could review the data at a later date. Lessons learned: Through these trials, we learned some valuable lessons listed below. Select the platform to run the trial; choose an appropriate test group; make sure the appropriate technology is available and Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 472 Electronic Posters installed; ensure adequate support is available during the trial run; inform the group of the expectations in advance; avoid changes to expectations as this may confuse the participants; select appropriate behaviors to consistently capture and measure results. Benefit to Attendees: This session will provide department heads, system administrators, IT managers, technical support personnel, faculty, academic support staff, and instructional designers determine best practices in using specific tools and identify things to avoid. An overview of each product will be provided to allow participants to have an understanding of the products and their impact. We will share more information regarding each trial, the issues we encountered during the trial, the level and type of support that was provided to address them and the feedback we received at the end of each pilot. Examining Differences Among Online Faculty Reporting Student Plagiarism Using the Theory of Planned Behavior Susan A. Moeder Stowe (University of St. Francis, USA) Among higher education faculty, having to address academic misconduct and plagiarism is often viewed as a negative aspect of teaching resulting in inconsistent reporting by faculty. Some faculty members take no action in response. Differences exist in attitudes between traditional regular full-time and part-time adjunct faculty members in terms of plagiarism. With the growing use of part-time adjunct faculty to meet the demands for online learning, a fuller understanding of the influences on reporting of student plagiarism among faculty members teaching online is needed to expand the knowledge base about student plagiarism. The purpose of this quantitative nonexperimental study was to examine whether any differences or relationships existed among regular full-time faculty members and part-time adjunct faculty members who teach at least one class online related to reporting student plagiarism in terms of the variables from the theory of planned behavior (TPB). A survey design with hypothesis testing, correlational, and regression analyses was used. Approximately 651 faculty members who teach at least one class online, including 180 regular full-time faculty members and 471 part-time adjunct faculty members from two different Midwestern universities were invited to voluntarily complete the Faculty Reporting Plagiarism Questionnaire (FRPQ). This researcher-developed questionnaire was constructed from modifications made to previously published scale content, reflective of the TPB variables: intention, attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived control. Factor analysis was performed to examine goodness-of-fit of the FRPQ items to TPB. Adequate power for two-tailed t-tests of independent samples was obtained with 156 completed questionnaires (43 [24%] from regular full-time faculty members and 113 [24%] from part-time adjunct faculty members). Exploring Communication and Conflict in the Online Environment Rebecca Bonanno (SUNY Empire Sate College, USA) The potential for communication difficulties between students and faculty in online instruction are well documented, as are best practices in improving communication and minimizing conflict (Hailey, et al, 2001; Vonderwell, 2003; Wallace, 2003). This study explores how instructors at the Center for Distance Learning (CDL) at Empire State College perceive communication and conflict in their own teaching practice. Instructors were asked about communication difficulties, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 473 Electronic Posters successful communication strategies, conflict in the online classroom, and their perceived need for professional development in these areas. Results reveal that about two-thirds of surveyed faculty reported experiencing some type of communication difficulties or conflict with students. Respondents most frequently attributed these problems to the behavior of their students, such as non-responsiveness, failure to read and/or follow directions, and unreasonable expectations about the course. In describing effective communication strategies, many respondents focused on the practical aspects of communication such as frequency and modality (email, telephone, etc.). A smaller number of respondents discussed communication and conflict in terms of affective and interpersonal processes such as relationship building, empathy, or negotiating meaning and understanding. The authors will discuss the value of encouraging a multidimensional understanding of communication and conflict among instructors. This presentation will: review best communication practices in online instruction; describe the types of miscommunication and conflict with students that CDL faculty experience, as well as the strategies they find most effective; and, discuss the potential benefits of encouraging instructors to reflect on the affective and interpersonal aspects of communication and conflict avoidance/management in their online classrooms. Participants will: learn about strategies for improving communication and conflict management/avoidance in the online environment; reflect on their own use of affective and interpersonal strategies in online communication; and, identify strategies for enhancing instructor professional development in these areas. Facilitating the Development and Recognition of Metacognitive Skills in Students for Academic Success and Retention Katherine Pang (University of Liverpool OnlineLaureaute Universities, USA) The purpose of this paper is to present techniques that will equip faculty to identify, recognize, and develop metacognitive skills in students so as to foster academic success and improve retention. Empirical studies have shown that metacognition impacts students' learning across different domains (e.g. Brown & Palinscar, 1982; Paris & Winograd, 1990) and can empower students to take charge of their own learning, increase perceived efficacy, and decrease the potential for learned helplessness. Maqsud (1998) established that low achieving students who were taught to use metacognitive strategies demonstrated an increase in positive attitudes and academic achievement. Stewart, Cooper, and Moulding (2007) found that students with higher metacognitive skills achieved greater academic success than students with lower metacognitive skills regardless of overall aptitude; finding that students who were successful in various learning domains also had high levels of metacognitive knowledge. As a result, the focus of this paper is on equipping faculty to develop the metacognitive skills of students within the context of online learning environment so that they can facilitate deep and active learning across aDiversity of cognate subjects to promote their own academic success. To promote meaningful and effective learning that translates to arenas outside of the online classroom, students must learn to contextualize their constructed knowledge within the related frames that provide the mechanisms for applied learning. The integrative frame model (IFM) is derived from an epistemology that views the frames as social cognitive lenses for understanding the substantive and procedural principles of a variety of cognate subjects In the integrative frame model, the learning activities are grounded in an inductive process, where learning is developed Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 474 Electronic Posters through exploration and experimentation that stimulates the development of metacognitive (selfregulated and self-facilitated) ability as contrasted with a more deductive method where exploration is constrained by a passive learning process. Understanding the frames develops skills of adaptive transfer in which students create new scenarios and solutions to demonstrate understanding and then evaluate effectiveness based on a construction-deconstruction connectionist process model. Pang (2009) developed the construction-deconstruction connectionist (CDC) model as a novel approach to teaching based on a collaborative, active learning, in-class activity. The CDC model is built upon the premise that for purposes of classroom learning, learning is not only a cognitive event, but it is a psycho-dynamic social process that must consider the four metacognitive domains that manifest in an academic environment. When educators start from the premise that metacognition is the understanding of knowledge, an understanding that can be reflected in either the effective use, or overt description, of the knowledge in question (Brown, 1978), then identification, reasoning, and critical thinking can be thought of as a means of processing and deconstructing knowledge for the purpose of applied analysis and application to the learning task. In memory research, for example, it is accepted that thinking about meaning leads to deep processing, thereby enhancing memory recall. Deep processing, as a result, produces encoding of distinctive representations and activates more relevant knowledge. It is the activation of this relevant knowledge in the context of the identification, reasoning, and critical thinking process that is significant in a discussion of developing skills of applied analysis. Mayer and Wittrock (1996) defined transfer as "when a person's prior experience and knowledge affect learning or problem solving in a new situation" (p. 48). Hatano and Inagaki (1992), on the other hand, considered the importance of representations, or mental models in the transfer process, noting that as one moves from novice to expert, the ability to adapt knowledge, to allow for contextual differences, manifests in the ability to apply the content. Both perspectives on transfer have relevance for overcoming constraints and suggesting instructional techniques for implementing an integrative approach in online practices. References Brown, A. L. (1978). Knowing when, where and how to remember: A problem of metacognition. In R. Glaser (Ed.), Advances in instructional psychology (pp. 77-165). Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum. Brown, A. L., & Palinscar, A. S. (1982). Inducing strategic learning from texts by means of informed, self-control training. Topics in Learning and Learning Disabilities, 5(1), 1-17. Hatano, G., & Inagaki, K. (1992) Desituating cognition through the construction of conceptual knowledge, in: P. Light & G. Butterworth (Eds.), Context and Cognition: Ways of Learning and Knowing, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Mayer, R., & Wittrock, M. (1996). Problem-solving transfer, in D. Berlinger & R. Calfee (Eds.), Handbook of Educational Psychology. New York: Simon & Schuster. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 475 Electronic Posters Paris, S. G., & Winograd, P. W. (1990). How metacognition can promote academic learning and in- struction. In B. Jones & L. Idol (Eds.), Dimensions of thinking and cognitive instruction (pp. 15-51). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Stewart, P. W., Cooper, S. S., & Moulding, L. R. (2007). Metacognitive development in professional educators. The Researcher, 21(1), 32-40. First Year Experience and Student Self-Authoring in Higher Education Daniel White (Southern New Hampshire University, USA) DESCRIPTION: This presentation consists of three parts: FIRST, we will quickly review conventional First Year Experience (FYE) curricular models universities have widely adopted to increase student retention and long term academic success. We will describe the assumptions our and other universities made about their traditionally-aged first year learners and how these assumptions aligned well with Baxter-Magolda's Cognitive Ways of Knowing (1992) research. SECOND, we will describe how our current FYE now accurately accounts for our nontraditional students' epistemological stances and adult learning needs. During our pivot, we no longer assumed our first year learners to be blank slates waiting to receive knowledge; rather, we leveraged their rich, experienced, mature lives to inform a "Self Authoring" curriculum linking personal goals, self-regulation, and general education content (Baxter Magolda, 2010). THIRD, we will summarize the overall design of our new FYE curriculum. We will chart where academic skills that are cultivated in the initial student success course reappear in different forms in early content based courses. These grade-bearing content and process-based exercises require and encourage our first year students to juxtapose personally meaningful episodes and perceptions onto formal knowledge structures. "Writing" or "authoring" themselves into the course content will heighten engagement, participation rates, and knowledge ownership. GOALS: 1) Share with participants how epistemological models can robustly drive truly-learner centered curricular experiences. 2) Explore differences between traditional and non-traditional epistemological models. 3) Share understandings regarding how initial orientation course structures can explicitly inform AND shape general education liberal arts courses. From Flipped Classroom to Dual Enrollment: How ENMU Achieved Campus-Wide Capture in 12 Months Mary Ayala (Eastern New Mexico University, USA) While Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU) is the third largest school in the state, it covers more ground than any other university. The entire eastern part of the state, to be exact. In the dean's quest to make education accessible to the region's traditional, non-traditional and dual- Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 476 Electronic Posters enrollment students (high school students taking college courses), she had to think outside the traditional classroom experience. Armed with a Title V grant, ENMU devised a plan to support graduate programs and other key academic initiatives with Mediasite as the central educational technology to bring itAll together. Join Mary Fanelli Ayala, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, as she shares how they successfully met their ambitious timeline - from pilot to full-scale, campus-wide deployment in less than 12 months. She'll outline the process of getting faculty onboard with some of the most ground-breaking initiatives in higher education including: -Facilitating a flipped instruction pilot - faculty are exploring pre-recording their lectures for students to watch prior to class, leaving class time dedicated to dynamic discussions and interactions -Creating hybrid classes - students in the classrooms and online interact simultaneously via live webcasts -Branching out into asynchronous distance learning -Helping high school students earn college credits - New Mexico's Dual Enrollment program allows high school students to take college classes, either on campuses or online, to earn high school and college credit. -Recording special events and guest speakers, providing professional development online, connecting alumni and more. Fun with Video: A Practical Guide to Creating and Implementing Video Instruction in an Online Environment Adam Morad (Maryland Institute College of Art, USA) Students need visual cues to understand the important points of discussion topics, concepts, and feedback. In the online learning environment, this can be challenging. Video instruction can bridge the gap and fill the void for online students by providing them with what they often miss from the traditional classroom - visual cues. Video instruction has enabled online instructors to deliver online courses that engage online learners. Even the tech-challenged can feel comfortable utilizing many of the technologies available to create video instruction. Through video instruction, instructors are able to create an online presence, set the tone and give clarity to complex concepts. Students have benefited from video instruction because they are able to connect with the online instructor, understand complex problems, and utilize their visual learning style. Don't be left offline, plug into this fun and easy to follow workshop. Learn how to take your online course from dull to dynamic in just a few easy steps. In this presentation, you will get much more than “talking heads”: Adam Morad and Carol Abraham present an engaging and collaborative workshop. They will walk participants through the process of creating video instruction and provide handouts. The video instruction workshop participant will be able to: identify various uses of video instruction for online courses; distinguish the advantages between the various free and subscription based technology available to create video clips; design and create video instruction with the use of handouts and their choice of technology; apply best practices for creating video instruction. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 477 Electronic Posters By the end of the session, participants will understand how the advantages of using video instruction can help them reach their online students while creating a dynamic online course. They will walk away with the tools needed to immediately begin incorporating video instruction into their online courses. Gather Locally and Connect Globally: BYU-Idaho's International Reach Alan Young (Brigham Young University-Idaho, USA) Online learning at Brigham Young University-Idaho has made progress extending educational opportunities to students in various international locations, while also reducing the cost of education and increasing the quality of the student experience. This presentation provides an overview of the program's international outreach, while simultaneously reducing costs and improving course quality. Over the past few years BYU-Idaho has extended its reach to students throughout the United States and Canada, Central and South America, Europe, and Africa. These students take University courses online, enrolled in sections with peers around the world. The communitybased course model enables a rich, international, learning experience. As part of their program, the students also gather regularly with other students living in their same locale. The presentation will describe some of the implications of international outreach and the influence on the lives of the various bodies of students. Cost is usually the most prohibitive roadblock to higher education for this target student population. A combination of factors haveAllowed BYU-Idaho to offer an education to students online at half or less (depending on the country) of the tuition of an on-campus student. The presentation explores the factors that haveAllowed a drop in costs, as well as the various implications of lower cost on course quality and serving more students. Increasing the quality of the student learning experience has been the highest priority of the University's online learning initiative. Quality has increased through a collaborative design and development process, a focused instructor development program, and systematic evaluation and R&D processes. This presentation will show how progress has been made for various types of quality indicators. Global + Mobile = Globile: US Teacher Candidates Text Tutoring International Students Denise Skarbek (Saint Leo University, USA) Holly Atkins (Saint Leo University, USA) The urgency and need for teacher candidates to become internationally literate is critical. One of the most powerful ways in which technology could potentially transform education is by encouraging students to "go global" via "mobile" or "globile" to overcome geographic barriers and to teach and learn with others around the world. With the twenty-first century wireless and mobile technology, students are more than ever, technologically conscious and engaged in the mobile device revolution. Since technology is at the forefront of education and instructional strategies, teachers for students with and without disabilities cannot afford to ignore the importance of moving abreast with the pace at which the change is taking place. The potential Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 478 Electronic Posters for improving teaching and learning in school contexts exists when using mobile devices to tutor. Tutoring is one instructional arrangement that has been used extensively to increase student learning in elementary settings (e.g., Delquadri, Greenwood, Stretton, & Hall, 1983; Greenwood, Delquadri, & Hall, 1989; Greenwood et al., 1987; Johnson & Johnson, 1984; Maheady & Harper, 1987; Nelson, Johnson, & Marchand-Martella, 1996). Through the use of teacher candidate tutors, content may be individualized toAllow students extensive opportunities to respond and receive feedback (Greenwood, Carta, 8c Kamps, 1990). In fact, Greenwood et al., (1987) suggested that opportunities for individual responding are higher during tutoring than during traditional classroom instruction. Moreover, tutoring might be used to increase students' engaged time during instructional activities when managing students is often difficult, such as independent practice. Providing more engaged timeAllows struggling students increased opportunities to cover the material within the curriculum which otherwise may be hampered due to classroom constraints and extended breaks from school. Due to attractiveness of mobile devices such as portability, flexibility, adaptability, and availability mobile learning, which integrates teaching and learning is considered a viable option for improving and tutoring students with or without disabilities. Synchronous text tutoring refers to 1:1 tutoring taking place in real time in which the tutor is physically distant from the student. Synchronous text tutoring may offer important advantages, including the following: (a) access to skilled tutors is extended beyond students' geographic boundaries; (b) text tutoring can be made available during school or outside of school hours; (c) text tutoring can be accessed from home, school, or other locations with Internet connection, potentially increasing access, and (d) text tutoring in the home may increase parent involvement by providing frequent updates and debriefing of each tutoring session and (e) immediate feedback is given to child. The idea of giving elementary students with or without disabilities immediate feedback and guidance via SMS is consistent with the concept of scaffolding proposed by learning theorist Vygotsky. With the scaffolding provided by SMS, elementary students gradually develop an understanding of the concept being taught. Employing mobile devices for tutoring has potential toAllow teachers more possibilities and flexibility in working contexts. This means that teaching and learning are not restricted to classroom and schools. Suggesting that research on determining the effectiveness of mobile devices to assist student learning deserves further investigation. Therefore, this study encourages teacher candidates to practice newly acquired, evidence-based strategies in math and English and become globally literate, and invite elementary pupils from Ghana and Germany to participate in a pilot project of using a mobile device that has Internet accessibility and SMS (short message system) capabilities to be tutored. Goals of Presentation: Participants will be provided the texting lesson plan script and texting lesson plan, specific mobile device parent instruction manual, instructions for both teacher candidates and students, an ethics module on texting etiquette to train k-12 students and teacher candidates, a copy of an example of texting lessons, and preliminary results of the texting sessions. Hire Technology: A Hybrid Delivery Approach for Dual Credit Advanced Manufacturing and Logistics Jeff Pittman (Ivy Tech Community College, USA) Manufacturing and logistics have led Indiana out of the recession, but employers struggle to find qualified applicants. As factories and supply chain operations become increasingly high-tech, and the Baby Boomer workforce approaches retirement, the need for the next generation of Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 479 Electronic Posters skilled workers is becoming desperate.Enter Hire Technology, a hybrid dual credit manufacturing and logistics curriculum designed to prepare students for both the workforce and college. Hire Technology was developed as a partnership between Conexus Indiana, an organization that is working to position Indiana as the recognized global leaders in advanced manufacturing, Ivy Tech Community College and the Indiana Department of Education.Hire Technology is a two-year program that facilitates student achievement by including contextualized math and science concepts to reinforce key academic STEM concepts while promoting the development of applied problem-solving skills demanded by advanced manufacturing industry members. The program, now rolled out to nearly 40 high schools and career centers across Indiana, enables students to complete industry-recognized certificates while preparing for post-secondary programs and careers in advanced manufacturing and logistics. The program features courses from Ivy Tech Community College™s online Manufacturing Production and Operations Program (A.A.S.) and presents students with the opportunity to learn in an online environment, within manufacturing labs for hands on experience and in projects with partnering advanced manufacturing and logistics companies. Students who complete the 1st year of the program earn 6 credit hours and students who complete the 2nd year of the program earn 9 credit hours of dual credit which jump starts their completion of the Manufacturing, Production and Operations A.A.S. degree at Ivy Tech.Unique and engaging for students, Hire Technology successfully completed its pilot year with much success and has expanded to nearly 40 schools across Indiana in the 2013/14 academic year. Participants attending this session will learn about how multiple organizations have collectively developed a technology based curriculum, see how hybrid learning is being effectively deployed at the high school level and be able to interact regarding how such a program could be introduced in their state. Historic Nemo Blizzard, Flipped Classroom, Online Doctorate Course Ekaterina Ginzburg (Yale University, USA) Jessica Shank Coviello (Yale University, USA) During the session we will show how one hybrid course of the DNP (Doctorate in Nursing Practice) program at Yale University used Adobe Connect to conduct what should had been an on-site meeting entirely online. During the 4.5 hour class the students fromAll over the world were able to successfully work in groups and give live group presentations to their classmates and the professor. DNP program is designed as a hybrid program with 4 on-site meetings per semester. The February 10th class meeting was scheduled to be on-site. The students were supposed to work in groups and give presentations at the end of the class. To maintain the planned activity and assignments, as well as class schedule, it was decided the day before the Blizzard (which happened on Feb. 10th) that the class will be held online using our LMS platform and Adobe Connect.All the resources were posted and connection instructions were delivered to the students, who live in different states of the USA and Israel. Nobody knew what to expect, but we hoped for the best. During the session we'll explain the structure of the class, the preparation efforts, and the class itself which involved breaking into groups, and conducting group presentations online. We did have certain difficulties and unexpected surprises along the way. During the session we'll be happy to share our success story and challenges that we experienced and learned from. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 480 Electronic Posters Implementing a Flipped Classroom Initiative to Bridge Multigenerational Gaps in the Classroom Bobbi Carter (Calhoun Community College, USA) The traditional lecture format has remained relatively unchanged for thousands of years students gather together in a room to listen to their instructor expound on a subject. While some instructors have added question/answer or discussion components to their courses, most have continued to rely on the one-way distribution of information through traditional lecture. These educators employ passive learning activities delivered in an instructor-centered classroom rather than leveraging group dynamics to enhance the teaching and learning experience. One reason instructors typically give for maintaining the traditional lecture format is that they have too much material to cover. Advances in educational technology over the past decade, however, have enabled educators to begin delivering lectures and content online. This has been significant because when students are able to "attend" a lecture online at a time of their choosing, class time is freed for active learning and group interaction such as discussions, experimentation, and other activities that emphasize understanding through application. This concept of delivering content via the Internet and using classroom time for activities became known as the "flipped classroom" and has gained a lot of attention in the last decade Unfortunately, many of the flipped models lack the implementation framework necessary for success. They focus on delivering traditional lectures electronically and using classroom time for homework. They also ignore the fact that technology in education has the greatest impact when integrated into the curriculum at a fundamental level that promotes engagement, and only then can the resources aid in transforming existing teaching methodologies into something more effective. I came to Calhoun Community College as the Distance Learning Coordinator in Aug 2011, and I very quickly determined that many of the distance learning sections defined as hybrid were using a flipped classroom model. These hybrid courses had been created because the College had experienced rapid growth and space was at a premium so in order to accommodate the growing number of classes, many were converted to hybrid courses with half of the class delivered on campus and half online. As I began taking a closer look at these hybrid courses I found that the sections were filling rapidly but that the completion rate was only averaging 66%, which was 6% less than online sections and 10% less than traditional sections. In exploring the structure of the hybrid courses, I found that the instructors were lecturing 90 minutes in the classroom and using our lecture capture system to record the other 90 minutes of lecture. My theory was that our low success rates in the hybrid sections was a result of this split lecture model because the students were not engaging with the instructor, fellow students, or the content. Exasperating the problem was the fact that our average student is a Millennial who is accustomed to and expects social interaction, variety, engagement, and activity while online. I believed that in order to help these students succeed in the hybrid sections, we would need to add these elements. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 481 Electronic Posters In Nov 2011, I was allowed the opportunity to speak at the Fall Professional Development Day where I talked about frustrations in teaching and generational differences in our students and how a refined flipped classroom model could be used to address those issues. I asked for volunteers to participate in an initiative to develop a model and by the time I got back to my office after the in-service, I had all ten of my volunteers for the "Flipped Classroom Initiative." In Jan 2012, the flipped classroom initiative was launched with the goal of developing a complete model with implementation framework and best practices to improve teaching and learning in hybrid courses. We knew that while the benefits of flipped classrooms are many increased student engagement and retention, higher student satisfaction, improved learning and academic performance, etc. - the process of getting there would be daunting. We anticipated technical hurdles, pedagogical challenges, and basic inertia standing in the way, and we were right. With the assistance of ten instructors from nine different subject areas, I was able to develop a framework and best practices for implementing and utilizing our flipped classroom model to improve student outcomes and success rates across the entire College. Class time for hybrid courses is now being used for group work, group discussions, hands-on activities (lab exercises and simulations), question/answer, etc. The online portion of the hybrid courses has undergone the biggest change with instructors who were limiting their online content to 1-3 hour videos lectures and textbook reading assignments are now posting 5-10 minute videos, journal articles for discussion forum assignments, self-assessment and practices exercises, and various other pieces of content that promote active learning and engagement in the online environment. We have collected faculty and student feedback, course grades, and completion rates to determine efficacy of our flipped classroom model and have found that our flipped classes have an average success rate over 80% and have therefore surpassed that of online and traditional courses, which are 72% and 76% respectively. Calhoun has been able to develop and refine a flipped classroom model that has resulted in improved student outcomes, but not every institution has had the same levels of success so I am sharing our experiences and lessons learned with educators interested in improving teaching and learning through a flipped classroom model that focuses on engaging students through active learning in a student-centered environment. Attendees of this session will participate in a group discussion to identify the instructional needs and challenges that both instructors and students face, and play the "Generation Gap Game" to explore intergenerational, technological, and communication differences that appear in the classroom and in the online environment. Materials for attendees will include an outline of our process for developing an institution-specific flipped classroom model and our best practices and lessons learned documents. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 482 Electronic Posters Improving Student Outcomes by Using the Community of Inquiry Framework to Guide Course Redesign Jennifer Richardson (Purdue University, USA) Matthew D. Pistilli (Purdue University, USA) The 2011 National Survey of Online Learning reveals that the number of students taking at least one online course has now surpassed 6.5 million and 65% of higher education institutions now say that online learning is a critical part of their long-term strategy (Allen & Seaman, 2013). As new courses and programs are developed and the market for such courses and programs continues to grow, it is necessary to ensure the quality of the students' learning experience through a reflective and iterative process that includes looking to best practices in online learning. Framework Our program has implemented a design-basedResearch Study based on the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000), a dynamic process model that is social constructivist in nature and grounded in John Dewey's (1938) notion of practical inquiry. The CoI framework was designed to define, describe and measure elements supporting the development of online learning communities (Swan & Ice, 2010). The CoI framework assumes that effective online learning, especially higher order learning, requires the development of community, which is often considered a challenge in the online environment. Since its initiation over a decade ago, the CoI framework has been utilized in countless research studies to explore the effects of differing strategies on online learning processes. Moreover, the development (Swan, Richardson, Ice, Garrison, Cleveland-Innes, & Arbaugh, 2008) and subsequent validation (Arbaugh, et. al., 2008) of a common instrument to measure the CoI has allowed researchers and course designers alike to examine effective course elements that can impact learning processes and predict student outcomes. The purpose of this study is to examine student outcomes, including final grades, student enrollment persistence, CoI survey results and course evaluations (perceived outcomes for learning and satisfaction) within and across courses in a fully online MS program and implement instructional interventions based on the CoI framework to increase these outcomes.All data will be matchedAllowing us to look across courses, instructors, and interventions. This study will examine the following research questions: (1) How does course design (e.g., features and affordances) contribute to student perceptions of social, instructor and cognitive presence? (2) How does course implementation impact presence? (3) Do student learning outcomes increase as instructional interventions based on the CoI framework are introduced? This is phase 2 of a larger study. Methodology Design based research (DBR)Allows us to bridge theory and practice in education, including a better theoretical understanding of the learning phenomena addressed by an intervention and knowledge of useful and generalizable design practices (Design-Based Research Collective, 2003). As Hoadley (2004) explains, "Design-based research is, at its heart, an attempt to combine the intentional design of learning environments with the empirical exploration of our Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 483 Electronic Posters understanding of those environments and how they interact with individuals (p. 204). Central to DBR is the systematic investigation of innovations designed to improve educational practice through an iterative process of design, development, implementation and analysis in real-world settings (Wang & Hannafin, 2005) to help us understand "how, when, and why educational innovations work in practice" (Design-based Research Collective, 2003, p. 5). Data Collection for the project extends to the 11 courses in the online MS program at a large Midwestern University. Each course being examined has been offered at least twice to date (multiple iterations in different semesters) with redesigns occurring between each iteration. The research process will be continuous, with overlapping tasks as course offerings are not offered in a corresponding order each time they are offered (what some students have as course 1 others may have as course 5). Steps for the process: (1) Following each course two processes have been put into place: (a) iteration an analyses of the means for each of the 34 survey items for each course is conducted; any items that rank below 4 on the 5 point scale (1= strongly disagree, 5= strongly agree) will be designated as an area for potential modification within a course (Swan, Bogle, Day, Matthews, Boles, 2011). (b) Additionally, using a project developed instrument (Course Inventory for Identification of Instructional Intentions) allows course designers and instructors to systematically evaluate the design features (i.e., affordances) present in an online course and identify components or interventions that are necessary or insufficient. For example, various forms of content presentation, student-to-student interactions, and assessments can be coded to produce an inventory of course features which can then be correlated to patterns of use, student outcomes, and student survey results. (2) For second and third iteration courses we will determine overall picture of each course through the course inventory instrument and matched student data: CoI surveys, course evaluations, and final grades. Where do differences lie between the first, second, and possibly third iterations? What interventions were put into place? Which interventions appear to be more effective? Aside from the identification of problematic course elements, analysis of variance will be conducted across course iterations to look for significant differences in student outcomes (e.g., final grades CoI survey items and course evaluations). It is hypothesized that the student outcomes and ranking of CoI items (above 4 on the 5 point scale) will increase with each iteration. (3) This is followed by a collaborative redesign, between the researchers and the course designer, of course elements that show the need for improvement and possible best practices that are related. This step will include reviews of the literature on best practices, especially best practices based on the CoI framework. (4) Repeat (through at least third iteration for this study). Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 484 Electronic Posters This research has implications for the design and teaching of online courses, especially as they relate to best practices and students' learning experiences. Additionally, this research will impact the retention of students at a time when there is an aggressive market and growing demand for new students. Increasing Instructor Productivity and Building Online Communities with VoiceThread Daniella Smith (University of North Texas, USA) While asynchronous discussions can be convenient for online students with demanding schedules, they can seem impersonal. In addition, reading multiple discussion threads can be a tedious job for instructors. Creative instructors often look for suitable methods for enhancing asynchronous discussions to build a sense of community within their classes. VoiceThread provides an effective tool that enables online instructors to personalize asynchronous discussions while allowing students to engage in conversations via text, audio, and webcam comments. This presentation will discuss the implementation of VoiceThread in a distance learning class. The presenter will upload presentation slides to the conference website. In addition, to using effective presentation skills, the presenter will engage the audience during the presentation by: 1. Inviting the audience to participate in a live demonstration of VoiceThread 2. Presenting short film clips that demonstrate how VoiceThread has been implemented in an online class While the program will share practical applications of VoiceThread, the presenter will also share student comments regarding the use of VoiceThread for online discussions and assignments. The session will be designed to accomplish the following objectives: 1. The session participants will understand how to easily set up and post a comment on a VoiceThread. 2. The session participants will recognize the benefits of using VoiceThread to build a sense of community for distance learning students. 3. The session participants will be able to describe the best practices for implementing VoiceThread activities. 4. The session participants will understand how VoiceThread discussions can enhance faculty productivity. Instructional Design Considerations for the Implementation of Quality Rubrics in the Course Design Process Amy Hilbelink (Ultimate Medical Academy, USA) Melissa A. Venable (OnlineColleges.net, USA) According toAllen and Seaman (2011), "65% of higher education institutions now say that online learning is a critical part of their long-term strategy". In addition, "Thirty-one percent of higher education students now take at least one course online." Based on this impressive continued growth in online learning, it seems fair to assume that online courses are being Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 485 Electronic Posters designed and developed at a high rate across the country and across a variety of institutions; both traditional and non-traditional, public and private. From the authors' personal experience supporting online faculty and designers at various institutions, we realize that online courses are being created by individuals, such as faculty, instructional designers and instructional technologists with a variety of skill sets. Some have been formally trained in the design and development of online courses while others have simply had to create online courses quickly, without benefit of help or resources, and without formal training. Fortunately, there are various processes and guides that may be used to assist these online course designers with the creation of online courses. The purpose of these guides is to ensure appropriate aspects of course design are being followed and incorporated. The ADDIE is one such guide, as is the new SAM model (Successive Approximation Model). These guides can assist designers with the steps of the course creation process, but they do not assist with ensuring quantifiable areas of quality are also included in each course and/or program of study. How then can designers of any online course ensure they are incorporating appropriate quality indicators and standards in their courses? And who can assist them in that effort? To that end, the Quality Matters® and Quality Scorecard®'s were created. These two tools offer easy-to-use rubrics and categories that instructional designers and administrators may choose to implement in the creation and evaluation of their courses and programs. This poster will provide a general overview of both of the quality instruments as tools in the design process. It will offer a guide to similarities and differences between the Quality Matters® and Quality Scorecard® as well as present design considerations on how to meet expectations for quality course design within each area of the rubrics. According to Scalzo and Pickett (2012), in their description of the two tools, "QM is a course design rubric that focuses only on the instructional design of an online course, the scorecard examines the entire online program." We believe that each offers designers of online courses challenges and opportunities. From the perspective on any course designer, whether trained in the field of Instructional Technology or not, what are the best ways to utilize these tools in the design process, and at what stage in development should they be used? We will discuss how various course activities can be incorporated that will support Quality Matters® and/or the Quality Scorecard®. We will provide suggestions on how the rubrics may be incorporated in course and program design to ensure quality standards are met. Handouts will be available with suggestions for online course designers that compare how the two may impact the course and program design process. The poster will cover some of the many questions an instructional designer may have about applying these standards during the design process. References: Allen, I.E., and Seaman, J. (2011). Going the Distance: Online Education in the United States, 2011. Babson Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group, LLC ; Retrieved May 4, 2013 from http://sloanconsortium.org/publications/survey/going_distance_2011 A Quality Scorecard for the Administration of Online Education Programs: Retrieved April 10th, 2013, from http://sloanconsortium.org/quality_scorecard_online_program Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 486 Electronic Posters Quality Matters Higher Ed Program Rubric: Retrieved April 10th 2013, from https://www.qualitymatters.org/ Scalzo, K and Pickett, A. (2012). Quality Standards and Organizational Self-Assessment for Distance Learning and Continuing Education Organizations. http://www.slideshare.net/alexandrapickett/sloanc-quality-score-car Integrating ICTs in Cameroonian Primary Schools: Case Study: The City of BERTOUA CAMEROON Sikali Wafing Annie Laurence (ICT University Baton Rouge Louisiana, Cameroon) One of the objectives of education is to train competent and competitive persons and primary education is a fundamental stage for learning processes. Nowadays, ICTs seem to be an asset that can be relied upon in order to attain this objective especially in an increasingly competencebased environment. Digital media are generating real progress and fundamental changes in the Teaching and Learning process and new educational prospects have favoured access to new resources, which are quite different from traditional ones. Integration is a key aspect of theBlended Learning approach especially in primary education where teachers can enhance an existing curriculum, improve communication with the school community and devise forums which reinforce & enrich the early childhood education. While many children at the primary level still need to acquire fundamental skills for an online learning process, ICT enhanced learning is still possible and capitalizing on the opportunities offered by digital tools to enrich learning processes can be a reality inAll primary schools. However, the integration of ICTs in an educational system leads to many changes necessitating modifications in pedagogical content and attitude. While new competences are expected from actors in the educational system, the integration and adoption of ICTs poses a challenge for actors in the Cameroonian education system. This study seeks to; pinpoint the challenges faced by ICT actors in Cameroon's education system particularly in primary schools and; offer a two step recommendation for the real appropriation of ICTs. Cameroon is one of the sub-Saharan African countries making enormous progress in the use of ICTs in the education sector. The Cyber Education project launched since the official inception and integration of ICTs in Cameroon's education system by the government in 2001 targeted two sectors: secondary and tertiary education while primary schools were not a priority. Today, the Basic Education sub-system is being taken into consideration as an acknowledgment of the urgent need to ensure ICT training from primary school, where personality is developed. ICTs could enable the pupils to express themselves as unique individuals and prepare them for future studies and continued learning, and also enable them to socialise through collaborative work, to ensure their social wellbeing. ICT programmes are currently being designed with an optic to building the capacities of teachers to better address the challenges of the information era. These challenges involve supplying primary schools with modern technology tools in a bid to improve the quality of teaching and learning. Moreover, while private schools introduced ICTs into their curricula in the 1990s, in the absence of specific policy guiding the teaching or use of ICTs in education, each private school applies its own teaching method or programme. The major question posed is whether the Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 487 Electronic Posters necessary measures to ensure that ICTs are securely and effectively integrated into primary education curricula, have been put in place by the Cameroonian government and educational system actors? Cameroonian policy on the subject seems to straddle two approaches. It recommends the integration of ICTs in the education system. Nevertheless, due to the lack of adequate means to enable the effective implementation of this policy, a palliative measure seems to have been put in place. It involves encouraging teachers to be priority actors in this integration process by being personally involved. ICTs offer a particular advantage in student learning as "intellectual partners" and represent extraordinarily powerful cognitive tools. However, relying on individual and sporadic initiatives makes it difficult to mobilize the whole system, especially. Integrating ICTs in a system can start either from the top or from the bottom. The question remains to know whether such integration always occurs in the desired manner. Talking about change in the educational system implies the transition from the state of non-use or low use of ICTs to a state of systematic deployment of ICTs in curricular and extracurricular activities. The goal of integration is to cause a dramatic change: change in habits, content and tools, by causing a move from traditional teaching methods to an innovative approach, which helps to make students competent and competitive. Change is therefore the expected end result of an integration process. Stakeholders in Cameroon's educational system failed to consider the possibility of using ICTs in schools right from its inception. As a result, in the face of unanticipated change, these unprepared actors have had to deal with a fait accompli: using ICTs in daily activities thus creating the need to review and facilitate the ICT integration process. Philibert de Divonne (2006) distinguishes between two interrelated processes of change: organisational and individual change. Organisational change can be considered as the process through which an organisation seeks to adapt to changes in its environment in a continuous process or by a break from them, under constraint or by anticipation. Organisational change is therefore a project to be undertaken, and the provision of available means to do so while, individual change is a psychological learning process involving the adaptation of individual behaviours to a new context. Thus, successful organisational change necessitates successful individual change as an opportunity for each member of the organisation to feel involved. For this process to succeed, a special framework must be provided to accompany change that leads to progress in the organisation. But then, what could motivate the desire to see a system change? The major objective of this presentation is to highlight, through the Cameroonian experience, the determining role of a State's education system and actors as concerns challenges toBlended Learning. Participants stand to gain a lot from this presentation as Cameroon is one of the leading sub-Saharan African countries in the use of ICTs in the education sector. This presentation on Cameroon will bring participants in contact with the intricacies and realities of ICT integration in education in sub-Saharan Africa. Disparities in culture and development levels present a platform for intercultural exchanges, experiences and awareness as well as an avenue for future brainstorming and cooperation to tackle unique challenges inherent in similar systems, which need to be considered for the determination of universal standards. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 488 Electronic Posters Is There a Proctor in the House? A Practical Approach to Implementing Respondus Monitor Joseph DiPietro (George Mason University, USA) Online instructors may be hesitant to administer meaningful exams in distance fashion choosing instead to rely on face-to-face proctoring and/or testing centers for support. Issues of student identity (e.g., is the student taking the online test the student who should be taking the online test?), environment security (e.g., is there an iPad or smartphone on the student's desk while she takes the online test?), and general concerns related to academic integrity abound. Respondus Monitor is a new software application that helps toAlleviate these concerns and was successfully adopted and implemented at a large public university outside Washington, D.C. When used in tandem with Respondus LockDown Browser, Respondus MonitorAllows instructors to verify student identity and record respective test sessions through use of students' webcams. After a student completes an assessment, the instructor can easily revisit recorded test sessions. Respondus Monitor is intuitive, easy to use, and seamlessly integrates into a learning management system's Respondus Building Block. This tool has been an overwhelming success at our institution, and we have seen rapid faculty adoption since launching a beta test in November of 2012; enterprise-wide adoption begins in August of 2013 so even more insights will be gathered by the time the Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning rolls around. A media-rich presentation has been created to guide attendees through related content. These materials outline the three-phase plan developed and used for implementation as well as general best practices and tips on what to avoid will also be discussed. The session will open with an introduction to the host institution where the case study was conducted followed by a very brief overview of the instructional design workflow used. The underlying problem related to concerns of test security in online environments will be presented and further expounded upon, and the pros and cons of other test security/integrity applications explored prior to the adoption of Respondus Monitor will be discussed. The rationale behind selection of Respondus Monitor will be explored fully in terms of its synergy with Blackboard Learn 9.1, the case study institution's learning management system. Participants will be provided with recommendations for faculty recruitment and a complete overview of the three-phase implementation procedures. A link for related digital resource downloads will be provided in addition to a discussion of results, possible implications for the field, and ample time for general questions/answers. Target audience members include instructors, instructional designers, policy makers, and/or learning management system administrators. Attendees of this session will: 1) be presented with an overview of the problem (i.e., concerns related to academic integrity and security of assessments administered in online environments), 2) evaluate the cognitive and functional affordances of Respondus Monitor; 3) learn more about the host institution that conducted this case study in a Blackboard Learn-based distance learning environment; 4) receive materials to help them successfully implement their own (learning management system-agnostic) piloting of Respondus Monitor; and 5) be presented with best practice recommendations for implementation and meaningful discussion to better inform the field. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 489 Electronic Posters It's All About the Process - Internal Partnerships to Bring Quality Programs Online Gale S. Rhodes (University of Louisville, USA) "My name is Department Chair. I'd like to take my program online. What do I need to so I can make this the best online program in this field?" At University of Louisville (UofL), when we hear this from a dean or department chair, we know we have a true partner - a decision-maker who sees the opportunity to get it right from the start to focus on quality, to incorporate best and effective practices in course design, faculty training, recruitment, and admissions. In this presentation, we will describe a partnership approach to bringing a program online that is process-oriented, strategic, and collaborative, and how we maintain the partnership to ensure success. We'll cite examples of programs that have embraced this approach and have had success (2000 prospective student leads in the first year), and those that haven't (300 leads). During the session, we will review our online program checklist and processes, and highlight decisions that must be made that have strategic impact, such as determining program format, developing a marketing plan and conducting customized faculty training programs. We will also discuss the importance of establishing quality standards from the start, ensuring all decisions stem from this basic operating assumption. Participants will receive copies of the template checklist, marketing questionnaire and other supporting documents. We will facilitate small groups to both evaluate our process and share their own processes with the larger group keeping in mind the Sloan-C effective practice rubric. Goals of the Session: 1. Participants will be able to design a strategy for partnering with their institution's online office. 2. Participants will be able to develop their own process to launch an online program. 3. Participants will be able to use a quality rubric as the foundation for launching an online program. Jump Starting Student Success in Online Courses: What Students Need, Want, and Use Sarah Schroeder (University of Cincinnati, USA) Maria Palmieri (University of Cincinnati, USA) Shelley Paden (University of Cincinnati, USA) Session Goal: To help participants determine the necessary elements of a Start Here or course orientation area to improve student success in online learning environments. Session Learning Outcomes: At the end of this session, participants will be able to: determine which elements of their current Start Here areas are most useful for students and which can be trimmed; examine effective layout of online and blended Start Here areas; determine which elements of their current Start Here areas are useful for students and which are unnecessary. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 490 Electronic Posters There is a dilemma in online learning. How much of a helping hand do students needs to get started successfully in a course? What elements of the Start Here area do students feel are most helpful in getting them out of the blocks successfully? When is less more or is less just less in getting students off to a successful start in the online environment? We set out to collect data via online survey from an initial set of 45 online courses including nearly 2000 students using the Blackboard learning management system. Over 1000 student completed the survey. Students completing the survey were enrolled in fully online courses in three schools in two different colleges. Through student self-report, we looked at what areas of the standard Start Here in our courses students were most frequently accessing, when and how often they were accessing items, and how useful they felt the items were to their successful start in the course. We also examined how use related to students' feeling of preparedness to succeed, prior experience with online learning, satisfaction with online learning, and student demographics. By looking at student use of elements in the Start Here area of courses through survey data collected during the first week of the course, we can streamline our Start Here areas improve emphasis on necessary course resources and prevent overloading students with unnecessary information. Leaping Forward with Enthusiasm! A Faculty Group Transitions to eLearning as an Intentional Collaborative Effort Judy Somers (Florida Atlantic University, USA) Debbie Beaudry (Florida Atlantic University, USA) Based on Best Practices in faculty development, this session will provide insight into working as a team to meet effective online course development principles. We will outline tips that can be used as you transition to online learning and think about how you can make that leap. You will reflect on how a collaborative program development process could work for you and your colleagues. This session will benefit participants who might be uncertain about the prospect of developing an effective online course. It will also provide insight into the strategies involved in coordinating online courses across a program. Participants in the session will: identify research about current models for faculty development in online learning; evaluate the benefits and challenges of a collaborative course development process; utilize a concept map to demonstrate the different approaches to curriculum between face-to-face and online environments. This presentation will describe a collaborative effort among five faculty members as they entered an eLearning program with the intent to design a cohesive series of online courses within an education master's program. We will identify literature about current models of faculty development intended to guide faculty in the process of moving to online course design. We will share our learning experiences that led to a synergetic development process among cohort members as they progressed through the stages of designing effective online courses following course development guidelines. The goals of the group/team were to develop continuity across content and consistency in format of the delivery of the courses. While working through the dynamics of harmonious interaction, the faculty group wrestled with the usual challenges of online course development, such as: creating a learning community within each course, establishing a relationship between the instructor and student in an online environment, incorporating strategies that ensure student learning and understanding, and providing Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 491 Electronic Posters opportunities for student interaction. The results of this collaborative effort are five graduate courses that will provide students with an experience that effectively links their learning across the core courses in their masters programs, and a serendipitous result: a strong interrelationship among a faculty group. Detailed reflections of the instructors as they worked through the program and began teaching the courses will be shared in this session. (Get the inside scoop!). Two of the courses were offered during the summer semester, so preliminary, basic assessment information and perceptions of the students will be offered as well. This session will provide you with the opportunity to pair/share experiences with a partner as you reflect on the ideas presented, offer suggestions for the group, and create a concept map to reflect on the transition between face-to-face and online courses. PowerPoint slides, web links and handouts will be posted on the conference website. Handouts will be provided in the session for the concept map activity. Learning is the Object: Responsive Design for Online Course Content Nicola Wayer (Florida State College at Jacksonville, USA) Eduardo Rodriguez (Florida State College at Jacksonville, USA) This presentation focuses on how a team at Florida State College at Jacksonville (FSCJ) came together to overcome accessibility, copyright, and cross-platform usability challenges to create a library of faculty-authored reusable learning objects (RLOs) in a responsive design that is accessible, engaging, interactive, and device agnostic. Faced with a mandate from the College to develop online courses with as much original content as possible for several rapidly growing online degree programs, a team at the FSCJ Center for eLearning (CeL) collaborated to develop an interactive learning object (LO) that is 100% accessible and usable across browsers and platforms. While they are primarily used as supplemental lecture content in online courses, the LOs can also stand alone or used flexibly in other courses. The number of students taking at least one online course now exceeds 6.7 million (Allen & Seaman, 2012). Despite rapid growth in online enrollments over the last few years, how content is delivered through a learning management system (LMS) has not significantly changed. Course lecture material is often posted as a PDF or PowerPoint file for students to download. Sometimes lecture content is packaged using rapid authoring software and streamed as a video or Flash object. Each of these approaches presents problems with accessibility for online students with disabilities (Coombs, 2010). Textbook publishers now offer lecture slides to supplement instructors' face-to-face classroom lectures. In many online courses, these presentations are posted without any added instructor lecture or narration to put them in context. This approach creates a number of problems: online students are missing out on the benefit of a complete lecture, students using screen readers may have problems accessing the content, students using mobile devices or those without the necessary software on their computers may not be able to open them, and there are potential copyright issues with distributing publishers' material online. The Pew Research Center estimates that 88% of U.S. adults own a cell phone and 55% of them use their phones to go online; 45% of 18-29 year olds who use the Internet on their cell phones report that they do most of their online browsing using just their mobile device (Smith, 2012). In a survey of college students conducted for Pearson Education, 40% reported regularly using a tablet computer (Pearson, 2013). With statistics such as these, it seems highly probable that a Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 492 Electronic Posters significant number of students are using mobile devices to access their online courses. Platforms such as Blackboard and Moodle have created apps for mobile devices to access the respective LMS, but these apps do not guarantee that course materials will open or display correctly on students' mobile devices. Together, accessibility, cross-platform usability, and copyright issues present challenges to developers of online courses. At the Center for eLearning (CeL) at FSCJ, a team of three instructional designers (IDs), a media designer, and a web developer came together to create the CeL's Learning Object in an effort to overcome these problems. The creation and development of the LO has been a team effort: IDs worked on content development and provided ongoing feedback about the user interface and user experience; the media designer provided graphics and coordinated the development of any audio or video content for each LO; and the web developer created the code for the framework of the LO. As the IDs worked with faculty subject matterExperts, or SMEs, to identify learning objectives and develop the knowledge content for each course, they gathered ideas for different ways the content should be displayed and interactive features that would be useful to have in the LO. Based on their input, the web developer created the framework for the LO and templates for different ways of displaying content using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Throughout the web development process, it was considered key that the code be compliant with WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications) standards andAll pages were tested using JAWS Screen Reading software from Freedom Scientific; as a result, navigation features were built in to make it more accessible to screen readers. As the media designer added graphical and multimedia elements to each LO, alt tags were used for each image element and captions and/or transcripts were added for audio and video resources. The resulting LOs meet web standards as well as being compliant with sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Another priority during the web development process was to make the LO usable to students and faculty accessing courses via a mobile device such as a cell phone or tablet computer while still being usable to students using desktop computers with different platforms and varying screen sizes. To accomplish this goal, responsive web design was used. Responsive design ensures thatAll elements are able to resize themselves based on the display size and orientation using CSS queries (Snell, 2013). Because SMEs were paid for their work in developing courses, original content and materials they developed was the property of the College and free of any copyright restrictions. As images and other resources were selected to supplement the content, careful attention was given to not use copyrighted material unless it fell within the bounds of Fair Use. Together, the features of the LOAllow for rapid development of content and the building of a repository of reusable learning objects that can be used college-wide and not just in CeLdeveloped courses. By bringing together the disciplines of instructional design, media design, and web development, the Center for eLearning has been able to create a template for dynamic, accessible faculty-authored RLOs that are device agnostic and usable across platforms. With the Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 493 Electronic Posters Learning Object, it is possible to deliver engaging lecture content that is directly connected to learning outcomes and is both accessible and usable. Leveraging Blackboard Collaborate Plan for Just-in-Time Faculty Development Cecelia Green (Quality Matters, USA) Goals 1. Distinguish how just-in-time faculty development provides faculty with tools they can use immediately. 2. Describe how technology is leveraged to maximize interactions in synchronous environments. 3. Model best practices for using synchronous tools for learning. Most professional development using web conferencing tools like Blackboard Collaborate and Adobe Connect are passive experiences. Faculty log in and basically listen to a "lecture" with some 'back-channels' available either through a Twitter hashtag or through a closed chat in the tool itself, but little interaction occurs amongst the faculty participants. Leveraging tools such as Blackboard Collaborate Plan, Quality Matters has created just-in-time faculty development workshops that are engaging and interactive. Learn how using small class sizes and existing tools such as breakout rooms, and polling, faculty engage with one another to learn together and apply new information and strategies right away. Using Collaborate Plan takes the stress out of synchronous presentations so facilitators and participants can focus on the content. In this interactive session, conference attendees will participate in a Bb Collaborate Plan session to experience how the tool can be leveraged. Best practices, lessons learned, and selected evaluation data will be integrated into the Plan session. Leveraging Blended Learning Technology to Create a Student Centered Environment Barbra Thoeming (Desire2Learn, USA) An online environment can give every student a voice, increase engagement, and drive highorder thinking. By incorporating technology into the existing classroom, teachers can build community and create a student centered classroom. Utilizing technology can free up class time to focus on activities that utilize the potential of the group. Introduction to Blended Learning (10min) Elements of Blended Learning - with discussion questions (15min) Blended Learning within various grade levels - with discussion questions (20min) User stories/scenarios (10min) Closing (5min) Session Learning Outcomes -Strategies for using an LMS in a blended learning environment. -User stories to provide ideas for getting started that lead to success. Discussion Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 494 Electronic Posters Questions How are you approaching blended learning in your curriculum? Are there activities in class that you could move online that would personalize learning? What fears do you have about blended learning? What online resources or tools do you currently use with your students? How can an online social environment helps students be successful in their interactions with their peers? Leveraging Technology to Enhance the Student's Social Experience and Promote Effective Learning Environments Amanda Zemmer (University of Cincinnati, USA) Jonathan Zemmer (University of Cincinnati, USA) Faculty members and instructional designers are continually looking for new ways to enhance the student's social experience and augment the faculty member's presence within the online classroom environment. Participants in this session will receive an overview of our utilization of online technology that enhances the student social experience and their learning environment. At the University of Cincinnati College of Nursing faculty and instructional designers collaborated on ways to make this a reality for the distance learners. In two online courses in the RN-BSN program it was a challenge to develop a unique, social presence that will work to draw in the students and create a community of learning, care, concern and collaboration. We utilized a practical approach that combined existing technologies to enhance the student's social experience. As Offir, Lev, and Bevatel (2008) stated, "One of the main factors affecting learning performance is learning interaction between instructors and learners". Indeed learning can take place in the absence of social interactions between faculty members and students. However, online learning should be reflective of the onsite, synchronous classroom environment that has historically produced learning communities that thrive on faculty and students placed in the same classroom milieu. Several technological approaches were employed which included: Home page addition to the CMS, Adobe Connect, and Voicethread. Each of these tools employed together helped to create an exciting, interactive environment that empowers students to interact with the course content and discover the technology. An important note is that the faculty provided tutorials to the students for the CMS, VoiceThread and Adobe Connect. For the CMS home page, the instructional designers hired a third party developer to build a CMS tool that functions as a homepage which draws students into the course, by automatically creating hyper links within the course to the Announcements, Faculty welcome video, Program Director welcome video, introductions, learning modules, assignments and syllabus. Faculty also utilized VoiceThread in a several different ways. The faculty created a personal introductory video highlighting career and personal pursuits. In turn students were encouraged to create a VoiceThread for themselves and comment on others' introductions. This was in a lead up to a group project utilizing VoiceThread as the technological vehicle for the assignment. By leading with a non-intimidating activity with a new technology such as VoiceThread it helps to Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 495 Electronic Posters lessen the pressure on the student and fosters their creativity and freedom to explore the technology and utilize it to its full potential. Thirdly the faculty used the Adobe Connect sessions at the beginning of the semester and at midterm to disseminate information about the course. Most importantly, the students asked questions live from the faculty member. This dispelled many misconceptions about the course surrounding the syllabus, assignments and rubrics. Also the faculty broadcasted the expectations for the students in a personal way, that a static syllabus or rubric could not,All while being able to address students' fears and concerns. Positive feedback about a synchronous session in an online course was promising. The session generated a social interaction that built trust between the faculty member and the student. This foundation resulted in a learning environment formed around mutual care, and introduced a collaborative environment in which the student could be heard and their suggestions implemented for the benefit ofAll learners. A student was quoted saying, "I truly enjoyed the information sessions we were able to ask the questions we needed and able to see the face behind the grades." Fostering a vibrant social environment within the online classroom is crucial. While not utilizing new technologies, this approach offers a different a way to capture the attention of the online student from the beginning of the class. Faculty members have a unique opportunity to create social learning environments that rival the onsite classroom. Reference Offir, B., Lev, Y & Bezalel, R. (2008). Surface and deep learning processes in distance education: Synchronous versus asynchronous systems. Computer and Education, 51(3), 11721183. Living It Up with Live Binders: Organizing Faculty Shared Web 2.0 Resources Leslie Johnson (Kaplan University, USA) Lea Rosenberry (Kaplan University, USA) With the rise in popularity of Web 2.0 classroom tools such as YouTube, Screencast, VoiceThread, Prezi, Wordle, Animoto, Dropbox, etc., online educators have more ways than ever to deliver information to students dynamically. The sheer volume of resources available makes them difficult to locate and use within the classroom, and even more difficult across classrooms. Live Binders can be used to organize Web 2.0 resources so they are easier for faculty to share and present to students, and for students to use to get the help and support they need. This presentation will demonstrate how Live Binders were implemented within online courses to better organize faculty created and shared Web 2.0 resources. Live Binders are virtual 3-ring binders that can be used for organizing, sharing, and collaborating. When using Live Binders, resources developed by faculty in multiple formats can be compiled into one place. Students don't have to click on separate links that take them to the different sites where the Web 2.0 presentations are housed; they can view them from within the Live Binder. Separate Live Binders were created and placed within each unit of a course to make topic specific resources quickly and easily available for students. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 496 Electronic Posters The positive impact of the implementation of these Live Binders will be shared, as well as new ways Live Binders are being utilized for faculty training within the department. An interactive tour of livebinders.com and a demonstration of how to build a Live Binder will also be included. Participants will be able to create and use their own Live Binders after attending the presentation. Magical Multimedia Tools for Educators Joshua Murdock (Valencia College, USA) Engaging students with various types of media to appeal to a variety of learning styles has become an everyday task for educators. Learn about some of the latest in FREE and CHEAP multimedia tools for educators to enhance their courses. This session will cover at least 15 multimedia tools and show real examples of how these tools can be utilized in online and traditional classrooms. Step beyond a basic YouTube video to create content using avatars, cartoons, slideshow, and screencast that will help your students learn and become engaged with the content. Many of these tools can be utilized for students to create their own content to share with fellow students. Goals: -Learn about 15 new tools to utilize in developing content. -Develop new ideas to enhance your courses to engage students Mandatory Adjunct Instructional Technology Training Melanie Morgan-Jackson (South Florida State College, USA) Patricia Manderville (South Florida State College, USA) Join us to learn about the mandated technology training each new adjunct faculty member receives, prior to their first day in the classroom. We hold hands-on training sessions covering the Student Information System, Course Management System, Email System and classroom technology. In addition, instructional design basics, Admissions and Registration basics as well as components such as copyright laws are shared in this workshop. We will shareAll our outlines and handouts to interested participants. The eight hour workshop is broken into four 2 hour segments. Employers (Department Chairs) may choose which sections will most benefit their adjunct faculty.All our resources will be shared in this session. Outline of workshop: South Florida State College Adjunct Instructional Technology Workshop Level A - 2 hours (do not need "Network/Outlook" sign on): SFCC Computer Standards, and Additional technology resources available Basic Employee Information: Technology Training Opportunities and additional Professional Development Opportunities Location of SFCC Resources (Mailboxes-Admin Building, etc. )-share activities, campus map and answer questions Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 497 Electronic Posters Copyright guidelines (Fair Use Act, Digital Millnm Copyright Act, and other websites where they can stay current) Library Resources Internet Resources Business Office Information-Direct Deposit of Paycheck PAWS Sign on Information-Hands-On log ins by participants on computers (Co-requisite "Faculty Assistance") Employee Services- Display earnings history, deduction history, pay stubs, W-4 information, W2s, and leave information. Personal Info-View your address(es), phone number(s), e-mail address(es), emergency contact information, & marital status; View name change & social security number change information; Change your PIN Faculty/Course Info-Display class schedules, detail and summary class lists, student information, and on-line grade entry (may not need depending on employees present) Employee Technology Assistance: EL Department-our goals & resources here-EL Brochure with specs and EL Help Desk Info IT Department- IT Help Desk Info and Goals and services provided Quick Review of IT Manual-security and passwords Smart Podium Training Faculty Essentials: (Note-if staff are present, they may stay for this 15 minutes, or take a break/leave) Registrar's Information-Term info on reporting of NoShows, Grades, etc. Importance of recording attendance for class Advising Assistance Level B - 2 hours (do need "Network/Outlook" sign on): Computer & Network Sign on Information-Hands-On log ins by participants on computers (Corequisite "Faculty Assistance") SFCC Admin Network and Outlook-same username and password password will expire every 60 days must use an SFCC Admin computer to reset the password-(which are on the "admin" network) OR call the IT Help Desk 784-7462 SFCC Computer Network Structure Outlook-Basic Email Training- This is our main method of communication toAll SFCC employees, majority of SFCC doesn't know your "other" email address Send & receive messages Attachments College Info Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 498 Electronic Posters Public Folders President's Council Minutes Faculty Council Minutes FACC folder Professional Development folder College Calendar Online Resources-Panther Den Online-Luminis and D2L:Preview of SFCC's Course Management System (D2L) and Portal BASIC: Review what students are told via SFCC Orientation (Per Dean Annie-this is their official communication method from SFCC to students-Email and News Items) How the system is used now Campus news (Hurricane, Internet down, volleyball game, SGA meeting, etc.) Emails from Student Services and other SFCC staff members-Advising (Change a class time), Cashier's office (Check is ready to pick up), etc. and Faculty members Student Organizations have areas in system-Post minutes of meetings, have "virtual meetings", share ideas on discussion boards, get current info out to members Committees have location on system-However Minutes are stored on SFCC Web Page as well Each and every SFCC Class has a Class in the system Classlist in class ability to "emailAll" students at one time Level C -2 hours: Online Learning Resources: Understanding Gen.com-Reason we are here today, students today process information differently-stats on today's students and their learning styles Review most recent Student Technology Survey results and SFCC Student Population Org Structure at SFCC-present quickly chart from HR SFCC Web Page Resources Icons off home page (PAWS, Panther Den Online, Employment, Catalog, Schedule) Faculty and Staff page (Employee email and other links) Netiquette Info Basic Software connection info (Internet, Word, Excel, etc.) Additional resources-Skills Tutor, etc. An overview of instructional technology and best practice ideas Best Practices- Online Veteran Faculty or Workshop presenter share their online teaching experiences & tips on various topics below Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 499 Electronic Posters TLC and EL Office info (tour- Time permitting) Tutoring Area for Writing and Math-services available Open Computer Lab Library information is located upstairs EL Office-Individual smaller studio, Larger Studio, Faculty and staff Technology Resource Area (computers, scanner, cameras, etc.) Training on Scanner, Digital Cameras, and creating an Adobe PDF document (Time permitting) Level D -2 hours: (Level C and Level D Equates to "Level 1" of Technology Institute) Advanced- Online Resources-Panther Den Online: Classroom Materials Management and Communication Handouts Tests and the Testing Center Technology Challenges and Fixes Communication with Centers Calendar postings for due dates and assignment dates Communication Using D2L Content area as course resource management area Creating engaging student instruction Benefits of using online resources inAll classes Class List-User Impersonation, User Progress, User HomePage, Email and Pager Link Pager Email-configuring, capabilities, campus wide, or course specific, addresses, attachments Benefits of using an online discussion board to increase student learning Discussion boards (including grading rubrics) Using Drop Boxes to facilitate assignment submission News- post announcements Locker-file storage for faculty, staff and students-Public and/or Private Course Site Information, Course Content Management & Development/Management Creating Modules and Topics Upload and adding content (syllabi) Overview of Organizing content-(File Structure and file names Folders-Create & manage) WYSIWYG Editor File Management (for Faculty & for Student) Edit files, Delete Files, Students-(Downloading and saving files, Printing files, Error messages that might appear and what to do) Locker-Storage Location Help-Option inside D2L or other web pages Additional Options-Quizzing and Gradebook Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 500 Electronic Posters Measuring Grit Mac Adkins (SmarterServices, USA) How do you measure grit? Do students who seem to have more grit really make better grades, feel more satisfied, participate more fully and enroll more regularly? How can you quantify levels of grit among students? How do you assist and support learners who are not a strong fit for distance learning? Research reveals that students often drop out of college courses due to noncognitive factors such as their availability of time, support from family, levels of motivation, willingness to ask for help, technical skills, etc. Learn about how schools measure and remediate these non-cognitive factors. In this presentation you will learn about research conducted at the following nine institutions to measure the relationship between learner readiness and student performance: Anthem College, Argosy University, Career Education Corporation, Cuyahoga Community College, Dallas Telecollege, Georgia Northwestern, J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, Middlesex Community College, and Virginia College. You will also view results of the Annual Student Readiness Report which contains three-year trend data from over 690,000 students from over 320 colleges and universities regarding levels of non-cognitive indicators of student success. OBJECTIVES: Participants will explore the concept of using non-cognitive factors to predict college student readiness. Participants will understand the relationship between non-cognitive factors of online student readiness and four key performance indicators for students: academic success, engagement, satisfaction and retention. Participants will learn about research conducted at multiple institutions to measure these key performance indicators and their relationship to online student readiness. Participants will receive aggregate data on the national level about three-year trends in online student readiness. MOOC Design Decisions: What Matters Catherine Dutton (Texas Woman's University, USA) Rebekah McPherson (American College of Educaiton, USA) MOOC design involves many details: selecting the topic, writing the description, designing the title and course organization. Tools like Quality Matters guidelines can direct navigation, starting materials and remind one to align objectives to activities, but there are many more considerations. One must ask questions like: -How to maximize social media to market a MOOC? -How to design a course for potentially thousands of students and not employ 20+ instructors to grade assignments? -What constitutes meeting course objectives? -How can students report activity and engage with other classmates in positive ways? -What level of interaction do instructors plan to have with the students? -How to design a course for global interaction? -How to step out of the "expert" mode and capitalize on the Expertise of those in the MOOC? While designing the MOOC, Digital Tools for the K12 Classroom, the presenters had the opportunity to learn and grow in their own understanding of student engagement, motivation and Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 501 Electronic Posters course design for a non-credit bearing, non-certificate granting course. The MOOC's enrollment peaked at 700 students. Almost 25% of the participants had never taken an online course prior to participating in the MOOC and 85% had never used the platform (Canvas.net). Over 60% of the participants in the course had a master's degree or higher and many were instructional technologists/designers for colleges or school districts. This crowd-sourced poster presentation will build on previously collected data and encourage attendees to share their own experiences as MOOC participants and/or instructors in terms of design, interaction and assignment types. The presenters will share design decisions with supporting evidence demonstrating which decisions worked well, and which needed revisions. The presenters hope that many conversations will be sparked about assessment options, specifically, going beyond the standard MOOC multiple-choice quizzes and peer assessments. New Online Adjunct Mentoring: A Faculty Development Program Diane Johnson (Saint Leo University, USA) Susan Nelson (Saint Leo University, USA) With approximately 180 adjunct faculty teaching approximately 250 sections of courses with a student enrollment of approximately 3000, online faculty can feel very isolated. Building a sense of connection and community through new online adjunct faculty mentoring has been an informal ongoing effort by Saint Leo University's Center for Online Learning for the past four years to minimize this potential isolation. To help foster this connection and community, prior to the start of the term, each new adjunct faculty member is assigned an adjunct faculty mentor to assist with questions and orientation. This relationship continues during his or her first term of teaching. The mentor is usually teaching the same course that he or she will be teaching or at least the mentor will be from the same discipline. Mentors are asked to meet with their mentee informally to discuss the following: -Classroom expectations -Policies -procedures -grading -assignments -discussion boards Also, -If agreeable with the mentor, the new online adjunct faculty member is allowed to observe a class -If agreed upon by both the mentor and mentee, the mentor is allowed to observe the new online adjunct faculty member's teaching during his or her first term Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 502 Electronic Posters Mentors are asked to be a resource for our new online adjunct faculty members byAllowing the new online adjunct faculty members to ask questions in a safe environment based on their subject matter content. Results of this Mentoring Program will be reported in terms of student satisfaction with their online faculty, currently 4.55/5 and faculty satisfaction with the mentoring that they have received. The goal of the presentation will be to share positive experiences with the potential audience of distance learning administrators and practitioners. Obesity Awareness Through Virtual Simulations Margaret Czart (American Sentinel University, USA) The goal of this presentation is to demonstrate how virtual simulations educating the public, raising awareness to the general public, promote health (diet and exercise), determine causes of obesity and determine how one may change their lifestyle through the use of motivational interviewing. Simulations in virtual environments may range from passive learning (making simple choices) to highly active (continuous exploration) (Nelson and Erlandson, 2012). The simulations in this presentation will consist of interaction with programed programmed NonPlayer-Characters (NPC's) and other objects in a small community town environment. These are interactive based on a set of predefined rules for responses to specific questions asked of the participant. The content of the simulations will score and assess an individual's understanding of the environmental factors influencing obesity are: age, gender, marital status and education. Being overweight or obese are key risk indicators for hypertension, heart disease and Type II diabetes. Obesity can also contribute to the development of high cholesterol, back problems, osteoarthritis and certain types of cancers. Other diseases such as depression and certain neurological problems may lead to overeating. A simulation is defined as a technique in which the exercise moderator creates a situation and assigns roles where individuals tend to play themselves,Allowing them to experience their own reactions in a specified setting (Williams, 1983; Kipper and Har-Even, 1984). Other researchers have stated role play to be an unstructured situation in which an individual's behavior is not predetermined to fit the roles they are assigned, in comparison to simulations that are believed to be more structured with specific rules. Based on these definitions and the similar elements used to describe the two techniques, some researchers use the term role play simulation (Lowenstein, 2007, pp.173-181). Due to this lack of a standard definition to distinguish the two terms, in this literature review, both techniques will be referred to as role playing and be defined as a technique that assists students in developing and improving decision-making and problemsolving skills, allowing them to realize the problem and the steps to take to solve the issue at hand by acting out a specific role. The simulations within this presentation will begin with an interview with a programmed NonPlayer-Characters (NPC's) where the student will be asked to enter their weight and height to assess their BMI. The student then will be interviewed by the programmed Non-PlayerCharacters (NPC's) with questions regarding their goals related to their weight and will be Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 503 Electronic Posters provided with introductory information related to behavior change. Next, the students will be directed to other simulations related to: balancing calories - this simulation will take place in a restaurant/cafe/ice cream shop. The students will be asked to order a specific meal and are given the number of calories consumed. If the calories consumed are in balance then they maintain their weight. If the calories consumed are greater than those used by the body then they gain weight. Preventing Weight Gain - this simulation will take place in a gym/clinic/park. The students will introduce the importance of physical activity to maintain/lose weight and reduce the risk of various diseases. Healthy Eating - this simulation will take place in a grocery store. The students will learn what types of foods are healthier than others. For example foods such as fruits, vegetables and milk may be considered as "healthy foods". Other foods such as desserts and soda may be considered as unhealthy foods. Healthy Eating at Home- this simulation may provide information about selecting to eat the healthiest foods at home. This includes fruits, vegetables and drinking water. This includes the limitation of sitting by the TV and staying active. Food Pyramid and Food Labels - this simulation may take place in the school where the student may learn about the food pyramid and how to read food labels. The programmed Non-PlayerCharacters (NPC's) may also be used to assess the student's knowledge of the food pyramid and how to read the most common food labels. Causes and Consequences - This simulation may take place in the library/clinic where students may interact with a programmed Non-Player-Characters (NPC's) to learn more about the various diseases associated with obesity and other facts. The students may also interact with a programmed Non-Player-Character (NPC's) to learn how they may change their health behavior. Motivational Interviewing- this simulation may take place in the library with programmed NonPlayer-Characters (NPC's) toAllow students to learn about the principles and skills required of motivational interviewing. Food Serving - this simulation would require students to select the correct foods and serving size on a daily basis. Included may be topics to shopping tips, smart snacking and planning food. This simulation may be similar to a game with texture changes. Food and Activity Journal- This simulation would require students to enter information regarding their daily diet and exercise behaviors. The assessment of these simulations may be conducted with both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The quantitative may be done using a student's score at each simulation or all simulation in their entirety. The qualitative assessment maybe completed by analyzing the text discussion with the Non-Player-Characters (NPC's). One of the main advantages is that students are not visible and they remain anonymous. This type of role playing removes the factors of anxiety, concerns of being observed and criticized by Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 504 Electronic Posters the instructor as well as other students; however, as in face-to-face role playing, the instructor must keep in mind the importance of planning, meeting course objectives, and providing feedback to all participants (Swink, 1993; Bell, 2001). Other benefits of virtual environments have drawn the attention of educators. First, it gives students a sense of presence in a learning environment. Second, students are able to move, interact and make gestures as they would in a traditional classroom. Students tend to act more at ease, which allows them to express their thoughts and ideas. Third, it allows students from certain fields such as public health to practice certain skills like health promotion in a "safe environment" through role-playing exercises. Online & Blended Student Survey Results: What Students Want Jessa Carpenter (University of Florida, USA) By attending this session participants will: be able to relate student satisfaction data to decision making; have one example of assessment and it's results; be able to perform a gap assessment of what students want and need vs. what they are providing; prioritize results to maximize efficiency of offerings. In February 2013 the department of E-Learning, Technology, and Creative Services (etc) at the University of Florida College of Education partnered with the Division of Student Affairs to survey all online and blended learning students. We were struggling to find support for the development of support services for online students in the college and had very little research about student needs to base our decision making off of. With a 10-day response window and no incentive for participation, we received 145 total responses at 6.65% response rate. The diverse participants provided us with quantitative and qualitative data about their experiences, frustrations, and barriers to success. In this session the presenter will share the data, how it has shaped the department's decisionmaking process, and lessons learned. Participants will leave the session with a copy of UF's survey questions, an executive summary report, and an idea for how evidence based decision making can be used in their work. We will encourage student services professionals to perform a gap assessment that analyzes the services they current offer against the services students want to determine where efficiencies can be made. I will also explain our prioritization strategy and invite brainstorming, discussion, and comments about how this instrument and process could be improved for future implementation. If verbal brainstorming is not possible, I will bring supplies to facilitate a round-robin brainstorming where each participant writes an idea on a card then passes it to the person on their right several times, so that you have lists that are inspired by another person's ideas. My goal in presenting this survey is to create a space where interested persons can come together to improve this instrument for use in multiple spaces, learn from the survey results I have already obtained, and show value in evidence based decision making. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 505 Electronic Posters Online and Hybrid Student Preferences for Lectures -- Live, Recordings, or Text? Kristine Fish (California State Polytechnic University, USA) The purpose of this study was to determine differences in student preferences and learning outcomes with live lectures, audio/visual recordings of lectures and text lectures in online and hybrid classes. The primary research question was: Are there significant differences between perceived quality of live lectures, audio/visual recorded lectures, and text lectures among online and hybrid students? A secondary research question was: Are there differences among learning outcomes among hybrid and online students? Hybrid students attended class and listened to live lectures half the time and recorded text online lectures with some text only lectures the other half of the time. Online students listened to audio/visual recordings of lectures half the time and read text lectures the other half of the time. Learning outcomes that were assessed were exam scores and total points earned in the course. The same instructor taught the classroom sessions and recorded the audio lectures. Results indicate that there were no significant differences in student preferences or learning outcomes between "live" and recorded lectures. There was a significant difference, however, in student preferences for live or recorded lectures over text lectures. In other words, students did not want to read the lectures. No significant differences existed for learning outcomes among the hybrid and online students. It appears as though the majority of students prefer to listen to lectures, rather than read them. Perhaps learning might be enhanced if a text narrative is provided in addition to the audio/visual recordings of lectures. Further research is needed. Online Learners' Cognitive Presence in Self-directed Inquiry: Evidence From Learners' Reflective Writing Ye Chen (Syracuse University, USA) Tiffany Koszalka (Syracuse University, USA) INTRODUCTION Garrison (1992) proposed that self-directed learning can be effective when learners are provided adequate external learning process management and participate effectively in internal meaning construction. He argued that self-direction is created to help students further develop intellectual skills of inquiry and reflection that lead to deeper understanding. Cognitive presence is a concept proposed to describe the intellectual aspects in learning. Garrison, et al., (2001) defined cognitive presence as "the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse" (p. 11). A sound understanding of the nature of cognitive presence in self-directed online learning will be helpful in designing effective learning experiences. However, the nature of cognitive presence in learners' self-directed online learning has not been well investigated. This study explored online learners' cognitive presence in selfdirected learning and inquiry experiences. The study sought to address: 1) Which phases of cognitive presence were exhibited by learners during a self-directed online learning? 2) How frequent were the four different phases of cognitive presence exhibited during the course? 3) Where did cognitive presence appear most and least often during the course? RESEARCH SETTING This study was conducted in a graduate-level online course in a northeastern university in the United States. The online course was designed as self-directed inquiry where students were Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 506 Electronic Posters encouraged to determine their own learning path and pace and tasked with determining a context of interest for an independent project. Students had to identify a performance problem, design a solution, document the solution through a storyboard, and evaluate the solution using a rubric. To facilitate student inquiry tutorials, readings, project rubrics, and two synchronous virtual sessions with the instructor were provided.All in-class social interactions occurred during the two virtual sessions; there were no asynchronous discussion boards. Students were encouraged to build social connections to people outside of the class, in their chosen context, who might be helpful in their course projects. Students were required to write reflection journals. The reflection journal was to include a narrative description of (i) the process and key decisions made, (ii) incidents during project-related social interactions, (iii) thoughts and feelings toward readings, support resources, and project work. METHOD Content analysis method was employed to identify themes in the journals. Garrison's (2003) practical inquiry model was used as the coding scheme to help identify and analyze the four phases of cognitive presence: triggering event, exploration, integration, and resolution. Student reflective writings were used as the primary data to identify evidence of cognitive presence. A single paragraph was selected as the unit of analysis. FINDINGS In this 11-week course, 8 students produced 151 journal entries with 42,816 words.All journals were analyzed. 20% of them were coded by an outside reviewer which resulted in an inter-rater reliability of 0.81 (Pearson correlation). Phases of cognitive presence. Overall, exploration had the highest frequency (56%) of coded units, followed by integration (27.8%), triggering event (11%), and resolution (5.1%). See Figure 1. Fig. 1 The relative frequency of cognitive presence phases The result revealed that exploration was the dominant cognitive presence phase in selfdirected inquiry. The exploration phase poses more of a divergent nature in which the learners search various information resources to understand the problem and identify possible solutions. The lower frequency of integration suggests that more higher-order thinking skills (i.e. synthesis, evaluation, analysis) were needed, which made this phase more challenging for learners (Garrison & Anderson, 2003). Triggering and resolution phases were least frequent perhaps because they may have been associated with rigorously defined course expectations/tasks and specific rubrics provided by the instructor, respectively. Cognitive presence in self-directed inquiry over time.All of the cognitive presence phases were present at different levels throughout the learning period. There was no fix time period unique to one specific phase of cognitive presence. See Fig 2. The four phases of cognitive presence were not exclusive to each other, and two or more categories of cognitive presence could appear within the same period. Fig. 2 Frequency of cognitive presence phases over time In order to explicitly visualize the evolvement, the 73-day timeline was divided into 3 segments, and each part represented a 23-25 day period. Fig. 3 Design inquiry pattern over time As the triggering event was used to initiate the design inquiry, most triggering was observed at the beginning. At the end of the online course a few triggering events still occurred when learners' design projects were nearly completed. This was consistent with Garrison, et al., (2001) view on triggering, arguing there is no end of cognitive presence development. In resolution, further problems were usually identified which became new triggering events that might have led to new cycles of inquiry and continuous learning. Similar patterns were observed in exploration. Once students gained enough information, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 507 Electronic Posters exploration decreased as they moved into stages to organize and create defensible solutions. This also may explain why the frequency of integration reached its highest point at the middle period of online learning. An opposite pattern was displayed in resolution. This may have been because during resolution learners focus more on testing tentative design solutions generated during integration. It was reasonable that resolution reached the highest point at the end of this course when most students had proposed their design solution. CONCLUSION This study investigated the cognitive presence of learners in a self-directed online course by analyzing their reflection journals that documented their design process and inquiry. Preliminary findings begin to unpack the complexities of cognitive presence at different times during online learning. Future work may include analyzing different types of data associated with cognitive presences, identifying instructional strategies that may stimulate higher cognitive presence, and determining other factors that influence and motivate adult learners' cognitive presence in selfdirected online courses. Peer Review of Teaching Performance: Is Inter-Rater Reliability Improved by Provision of Directed Instructions? Claire DeCristofaro (Ashford University, USA) Lynn Trevisan (Ashford University, USA) DESCRIPTION: In institutions of higher learning, peer review rubrics are a means to communicate the standards or criteria of instruction to faculty. Such rubrics are used for multiple purposes, including evaluation of teaching performance and professional development. Regretfully, subjectivity often plagues the interpretation and application of criteria, thereby reducing the reliability, validity and thus effectiveness of the review process. Using a five-domain peer review rubric, specifically designed and used for online instruction, the main goal of this study was to determine the extent to which the reliability of the rubric could be affected by the use of two sets of instructions, involving concrete examples of the criteria within each domain and/or pointers to locations of information within the reviewed course. One might expect that pointing reviewers to the location in the online classroom where information can be obtained for each criterion would improve reliability above the level obtained without explicit instructions. One might also predict that adding concrete knowledge of each criterion in the peer review rubric would further enhance the reliability of the tool. To our knowledge, no study has investigated this issue in the context of a tool whose purpose is to examine standards of behavior (best practices) of instructors in the online classroom. Internal benefits of this project include more effective use of the peer-review rubric. External benefits consist of enhanced knowledge/awareness of the effectiveness of instructions regarding the use of peer-review rubrics and related criteria. METHODS: Archived classes of the same introductory-level course that had been taught by adjunct faculty were examined by pairs of full-time faculty (i.e., reviewers). Reviewers possessedExpertise in the subject area of the selected course by virtue of academic preparation and professional experience. Reviewers were asked to use a five-domain Baseline Rubric: fostering critical thinking, instructive feedback to students, high expectations, establishing relationships, and instructorExpertise. For each domain, five levels of performance were Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 508 Electronic Posters available (distinguished, proficient, developing, introductory/beginning, and not observed), each described in general terms. These domains and related criteria reflect benchmarks for best practices in online education. Reviews were to be performed under one of three conditions of instruction: (a) Non-directed: Reviewers used the Baseline Rubric without specific instructions. (b) Location-directed: Reviewers used the Baseline Rubric with instructions that linked each domain to specific locations of information in the course. (c) Fully-directed: Reviewers used the Baseline Rubric with instructions that linked each domain to specific locations of information in the course and included definitions of terms, background information regarding terminology, and concrete examples of the criteria. RESULTS: Spearman's rank correlation was computed for ratings between members of each pair of reviewers. Correlation coefficients between reviewers within the same condition were compared across conditions via the Fisher r to z transformation. The effectiveness of the interventions was assessed based on five categories of effective instruction. DISCUSSION: The value of faculty peer review for both formative and summative assessment has long been appreciated. However, existing rubrics are often used informally, without prior testing for interrater reliability. An often neglected issue is the extent to which specific instructions regarding rubric utilization may improve inter-rater reliability. Furthermore, optimal inter-rater reliability leads to perceived objectivity in the review process. This study addressed both issues by evaluating the effects of instructions provided to reviewers using the same Baseline Rubric. Consistent agreement between reviewers might improve confidence in the objectivity of the reviews, and acceptance of this feedback by faculty being reviewed. In addition, such perceived objectivity might spur increased use of peer review in professional development and quality improvement endeavors pertaining to the delivery of online instruction. Podcasting as a Unique Teaching Tool: A Case Study and Hands-On Lesson From the Walden University Writing Center Anne Shiell (Walden University, USA) Nikolaus Nadeau (Walden University, USA) Brittany Kallman (Walden University, USA) Scholars have noted several educational benefits of podcasting to students, including improved study habits, greater engagement, increased motivation, higher exam scores, and enhanced accessibility in terms of students learning on their own time and in their own location. Based on these proven benefits, in June 2013, a team of three writing instructors from the Walden University Writing Center launched WriteCast, an audio podcast pilot intended to model conversation about the writing process, help listeners develop and hone specific writing skills, and encourage students to independently seek out appropriate Writing Center resources for their individual needs. Hearing and responding to discussion on a given topic is a common learning style that is difficult to replicate in online environments. The podcast formatAllowed the team to model verbal dialogue about writing, supplementing the monologic, lecture-based style of other one-to-many resources offered by the Walden Writing Center, such as webinars, static online resources, and automated learning modules. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 509 Electronic Posters In this session, part lecture and part workshop, attendees will help create a sample podcast episode while learning from the WriteCast team's challenges, successes, and promising practices, including: -Development: formatting (lecture, conversation, interview), episode drafting (and revising, and revising), open access and considering audience, collaborating across distance. -Production: basic audio editing, equipment needed (and not needed), free tools for creation and publication. -Assessment: listener feedback survey results measuring student perceptions of WriteCast's impact on writing knowledge, writing skills application, and motivation to use other writing center resources. While this podcast pilot was funded by a Laureate Education, Inc. grant, funding is not needed to create a professional and engaging podcast. Join the WriteCast team for hands-on experience with starting or enhancing a podcast for your classroom or student support center. As part of their work at Walden University, Anne Shiell, Nik Nadeau, and Brittany Kallman Arneson design and deliver online webinars, regional and national conference presentations, and Walden University student residencies and faculty training sessions. Preventing a Crash & Burn: Early Warning & Formative Assessment: a Perfect Fit for OL Lynn Wietecha (Lawrence Technological University, USA) Higher education is good at summative evaluation - those assessments that validate outcomes and skills at the end of a course or unit of study. Accreditation, program outcomes, and course completion dataAll require rigorous assessments. Student complete papers, projects, take quizzes and tests to show that they met course objectives and obtained the skills and knowledge necessary to complete the course. On the other hand, formative evaluation, the smaller, targeted opportunities for feedback to improve the performance, are more infrequent. Ironically, online deliver is perfectly suited for formative assessments. When combined with robust early warning systems available in many LMS's, formative assessments can target students for needed support to retain them and guide them to success. Lawrence Technological University has worked to incorporate formative assessments into OL courses in a variety of ways. We also implemented a campus-wide early warning system using Blackboard features and Google forms so we can identify students who are struggling early in a course. These efforts have helped us retain students and increase our completion rates. Lawrence Technological University's online bachelor's degree programs are ranked sixth in a national survey released Jan. 15 by U.S. News and World Report. The survey rated online programs on factors such as best practices, graduation rates, student indebtedness, and academic and career support services offered to students. LTU's online bachelor's degree programs scored highest in the entire country for student engagement. http://www.usnews.com/education/onlineeducation/bachelors/rankings. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 510 Electronic Posters This presentation seeks to build a case for course designers and developers to incorporate more formative assessments and early warning systems into their courses to promote student success. Upon completion of this presentation, participants will . . . .distinguish between summative and formative assessments; identify the benefits of formative assessment; build a list of formative evaluation strategies that can be quickly implemented in online courses; recognize the elements of a successful early warning system; observe how an early intervention system might be adopted. Participants will be engaged in this presentation early by participating in variation of a group simulation designed to illustrate the value of formative assessment and feedback. For information on the clapping exercise, see http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/thinkingabout-kids/201002/are-you-good-giving-feedback-exercise-in-clapping. Principles for Enriching the Faculty Development Opportunities At Your Institution: Add the World & Expand Your Reach Kelvin Thompson (University of Central Florida, USA) Over the past three years the University of Central Florida (UCF) has deliberately added diverse faculty development opportunities for its online and blended faculty while also facilitating access to the resultingOpen Educational Resources to faculty around the world. In this session, the core principles underlying these faculty development offerings will be delineated for and discussed with participants. Each principle will be illustrated with examples from UCF's faculty development offerings. Participants will be encouraged to identify opportunities for applying these principles in their own contexts. AlmostAll of the example faculty development offerings are open for online access to anyone with an internet connection. Participants will also be encouraged to identify opportunities for adaptation of these faculty development materials in their own contexts. For years UCF faculty had been requesting faculty development offerings "beyond IDL6543" (i.e., UCF's flagship faculty development program for online/blended teaching which was the foundation for UCF's 2003 recognition with the Sloan-C "Excellence in Faculty Development for Online Teaching" award). After a slow start-up period, UCF began to roll out a suite of new faculty development offerings in 2010 based upon a core set of guiding principles. Over the past three years each offering within this suite has developed its own online presence. Growth data and effectiveness metrics for each offering in the suite will be shared in this session as evidence underlying the suitability of the faculty development principles presented. Some of the offerings in this "beyond IDL6543" faculty development suite have been the focus of previous Sloan-C conference presentations (Futch and Thompson, 2012, October 10; Thompson and Moskal, 2012, October 12; and Thompson and Futch, 2012, April 23) and other venues (e.g., Cavanagh, 2011; Thompson, 2012, March 8; and Thompson and Futch, 2012, January 23). For instance, the BlendKit Course materials have served as the basis for two open, online course cohorts of nearly 2,000Blended Learning faculty and designers from many institutions around the world (Thompson and Moskal, 2012, October 12). This session builds upon this past work by providing an overview of the impact of theseOpen Educational Resources (OER) designed for institutional faculty development adaptation in support of online andBlended Learning. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 511 Electronic Posters The BlendKit Course, a part of theBlended Learning Toolkit, is a complete set of faculty development materials appropriate for either self-study, group discussion, or institutional implementation.All components of the Toolkit are available publicly online, and are available for use as is, for adaptation, or for remixing asOpen Educational Resources (OER) under the terms of a Creative Commons license (BY-NC-SA 3.0). The Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository (TOPR) is an online compendium of pedagogical practices proven effective in online and blended course settings. Each practice is aligned with research/professional practice literature and is illustrated with artifacts of the practice in use. The entire repository is open for access and contribution by faculty/designers around the world. Each entry is available for use as is, for adaptation, or for remixing asOpen Educational Resources (OER) under the terms of a Creative Commons license (BY-NC-SA 3.0). In this session, participants will: - Identify faculty development needs related to online/blended learning at their institutions - Identify open faculty development principles for application at their institutions - Recognize adaptability options for the faculty development materials presented in the session - Determine suitability of the faculty development materials for their institutions' online/blended learning faculty development needs - Contribute suggestions to increase the adaptability of the faculty development materials presented Privileging Learning Over Assessment in E-Portfolios Jaesoon An (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA) J. Garvey Pike (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA) The use of portfolios in universities usually requires students to capture learning artifacts and reflect on the learning process. It carries great potential for encouraging student-centered learning, where students engage in creation and collection of multimedia materials and take ownership of their learning in the process. Portfolios can be used for extending options beyond university such as career after graduation as well. There are two very different kinds of eportfolios, one that privileges assessment and one that privileges learning. The problem with assessment oriented e-portfolio systems is that they present logistical barriers that not only prevent them from facilitating rich learning experiences but also end up creating another layer of meaningless process to satisfy licensure or assessment requirements for both students and faculty. On the other hand, learning oriented e-portfolio system, like Mahara, is recognized as a tool that can harness the potential for student-centered learning and make the assessment process seamless or painless. Cases of using e-portfolios for active learning have been reported across the nation, ranging from facilitating holistic college learning experiences from the first year to graduation, engaging students in inquiry projects individually or in learning communities, to capturing outcomes of such learning campus-wide. The Center for Teaching and Learning at UNC Charlotte has made available the Mahara e-portfolio system to all faculty and students as a part of Moodle learning management system upgrade. There are groups of people in the campus who have been using varying e-portfolio systems for varying purposes. The campus-wide Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 512 Electronic Posters integration and support of Mahara is now creating heightened interest in using Mahara as a unifying e-portfolio system for diverse purposes such as active learning in individual courses, program, licensure, or certificate requirements, or campus-wide Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP.) As typical as in any learning technology adoption, the use of Mahara impacts existing learning and assessment processes - that is, the design of learning activities or program requirement processes. This session will describe how pockets of Mahara users modified their teaching processes to facilitate student-centered, active learning and capture learning outcomes systematically for assessment purposes. Adoption cases of individual courses and programs will be presented and discussed. A brief introduction of how Mahara works at UNC Charlotte, particularly in conjunction with Moodle, will be presented as well. The goal of the session is to help attendees understand what a learning-oriented e-portfolio system can do and how to adopt such a system in a way that enhances student learning and effectiveness in learning outcome assessment. Promoting Science Based Student Inquiry and Cross-Curriculum Problem Solving Skills: ESSEA Curriculum Modules Stan Schmidt (Western Governors University, USA) ESSEA (Earth System Science EducationAlliance), a consortium of 40 universities and organizations has and continues to develop a series of curriculum modules that combine inquiry investigations with real-time NASA and NOAA data to provide K-16 students and pre-service educators with significant experiences in inquiry and problem based learning. Modules are available free of charge toAll educators and address a range of current and significant science/societal topics. These modules are adaptable to on-line and traditional settings. Educators have long been challenged by the National Science Education Standards (NSES) to create learning environments in which students learn through inquiry , " multifaceted activity that involves making observations, posing questions, examining sources of information to see what is already known, planning investigations, reviewing what is known in light of experimental evidence, using tools to analyze data, proposing answers, explanations, predictions, and communicating results." (NSES, 23) . For educators, the tools were the catch- finding time to identify data sources that students can access to obtain current and relevant data. ESSEA modules embed real-time data sources at a click that students can explore and use to focus on key questions. This focus on inquiry and problem based learning continues in the New Generation Science Standards (NGSS). In place this summer, these standards urge educators to provide instruction that reflect the interconnectedness of science and real world, is performance based, builds on previous learning, provides deeper understanding of content and its application, and is designed to prepare students for college, career and citizenship. ESSEA curriculum models address these new points of emphasis, andAllow teachers to focus, not on the logistics of lesson preparation, but on the flow and effectiveness of learning. The availability of real-time data is a unique and compelling feature of ESSEA's instructional design, and is engaging to students seeking current, visually appealing and significant information to use in addressing a challenging task. The free availability, teacher friendly format, Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 513 Electronic Posters wide range of topics and adaptability of these modules make them a valuable tool for every educator's toolbox. During this session attendees will receive an introduction to ESSEA modules, look together at teaching resources available on the ESSEA home page, examining a typical module, receive a free link to access and use these modules, and have an opportunity to ask questions about this resource. Attendees will also have the opportunity to explore a module of personal interest, and I will be available to assist as needed. This session invites all educators interested in using real-time data to support student learning activities. Written from a science perspective, these modules may be used in any subject area that is impacted by natural world events. This session will also benefit educators teaching in pre service teacher preparation programs, managing in service teacher preparation programs, and educators/administrators interested in meeting the demands of the NGSS. Remote Control: Virtual Teams Work Kristina Ambrosia Conn (Altius, USA) Bill Zehner (Tifflin University, USA) The "Perceived" Downside: not much work gets done when your office is your living room. (Presenter, dressed in pajamas crosses stage to sit in recliner, cracks a beer, and pretends to turn on television.) Relationships suffer. (Silos; presenter hits computer key to change status to ‘busy'as he continues to watch ESPN.) The Real Upside: we really do work. Flexibility can be your friend. Accountability tools (Jira/Confluence, weekly check-in's, etc.) (leadership, value). In truth, it is entirely possible to create a remote team that is not only innovative and collaborative, but also goes beyond just being colleagues (leadership, value)(Have presenter hit computer key again and new message pops up on projector - instant message reads: Sunday, 11:52 p.m. "Hey, I know you got hit with a last minute project - call me, I'll help you." Conclusion Marissa Mayer May Be Wrong. Context Ivy Bridge College of Tiffin University is a fully online program offering courses and degrees in Business, Criminal Justice, Education, and General Studies. A significant majority of courses lead to Associates degree programs; however, the College recently added a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Studies and Masters in Education. All of the courses were developed using a geographically-dispersed team of subject matter experts, course and instructional designers (CID), learning management system administrators (LMSA), librarians, and faculty. The core team performing this work, the Curriculum and Learning Services (CLS) team - is a fullyremote, yet highly productive cadre of professionals. The CLS team is made up of 11 members, including 6 CID, 3 LMSA, and 2 Librarians. Their primary responsibility is to develop, deploy, implement, evaluate, and revise the entire portfolio of courses offered by the institution. Under the leadership of the Associate Dean for Curriculum and Learning Services, the team manages the course development, revision, and deployment process for over 135 courses launched over 6 terms in 3 semesters for over 1500 students and 135 faculty, all while living in 3 states, 10 different locations, and only meeting twice annually. Over three years as a team, CLS has Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 514 Electronic Posters maximized their productivity through collaboratively-established values, solid leadership, clear yet evolving processes, andExpert use of technology. This session is intended to establish the overarching benefits, strategies, and technologies used to develop a highly-productive yet geographically-dispersed team. Who can benefit from attending this session? Any person who is remote - or works or leads remote employees - will find the strategies offered in this session beneficial and immediately useful: teachers who conduct courses online; tutors who support students and faculty remotely; employees who span states; anyone who uses conference calls even while at the same locale; project managers leading academic initiatives at a distance; instructional designers building and revising courses for mainly adjunct, remote faculty; those who remotely administer distance learning programs or platforms. Statement of what participants will learn: Participants will learn how to cultivate collaboration and innovation in a remote environment, how to ensure accountability when working with a remote team, how to view flexibility as friend not foe, what strategies to use to foster a cooperative team culture, and practical strategies for developing a high-performance work team that is results oriented, including the entirely-remote process used to convert 90 courses in 120 days. Participants will also gain example-based rationale for working remotely: modeling the framework established by an entirely-online college, employees expected to work in and from the same environment; employer-specific benefits, particularly facilities, financial, and human resources, tapping a national talent pool located in Ohio, the San Francisco Bay Area, and other random places nationally; employee specific benefits, particularly flexible working hours, emphasis on work outcomes not traditional time frames, and the importance of responding to family needs, as well as some of the distractions and limits that can influence remote teams. The primary vehicle for such productivity is the human capital; however, the platform is the technology. IBC uses a diverse portfolio of technology tools used to organize, communicate, and manage the workload. The primary tools, outside of the learning management system (Moodle) are: Lync: an Exchange-integrated Microsoft product used for individual and conference calls, meeting invitations and schedule resolution, screen sharing, instant messaging, and status management; JIRA: an open/community source web-based application used for project management, bug reporting and tracking, and agile development management; Confluence: an open/community source, web-based application - used in concert with JIRA - to communicate, share, collaborate, and develop transparency between teams and workgroups; Google Doc: the web-based application used for synchronous editing, and sharing documentation outside of closed systems, and SugarSync/DropBox: the application used for document storage, version control, naming convention implementation, and central file access for course content and materials. The tools are used to enhance a repertoire of strategies that improve communication and collaboration, including:remote meetings: teams and workgroups hold weekly status meetings, with documents shared via the tools not eMail attachments,face to face meeting: semi-annual summit meetings to build cohesiveness and grapple with long-term planning and implementation,document review: using "round robin" or "divide and conquer" strategies, the Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 515 Electronic Posters team processes often-insurmountable amounts of information with the proper strategies, and knowledge-building events: the team uses informal engagements, such as a professional ‘book club', wiki discussions, and other strategies to engage each other, develop new perspectives, and enhance the team spirit. Participants will engage in the presentation in various ways, including: assessment of: existing strategies (for those with remote employees), institutional opportunities and barriers, team culture, tools that enable productive remote work, and next steps. Discussion of concepts with frequent opportunities to poll the audience, check for understanding, and ask questions. Concluding comments with takeaways and opportunities for discussion.All participants will receive handouts describing the intricacies of the process beyond the presentation. Final Question to Audience: Did we do a good job on this presentation? Remind audience that the presentation was a creation of remote collaboration. Rules of Engagement: Engaging Adjunct Faculty in Course Development, Program Review, and Retention Initiatives Eric Klein (Ashford University, USA) Gina Warren (Ashford University, USA) Ashford University uses several approaches to elicit strong adjunct faculty involvement. In this presentation, we review challenges and successes in comprehensively integrating adjunct faculty into program-level assessment, curriculum development, and program review processes, as well as retention and student success initiatives. Ashford University is a private academic institution that is regionally accredited and provides educational opportunities through a variety of online Associate's, Bachelor's, and Master's degree programs. The University offers students an online learning model that provides technological access to knowledge, which is increasingly valued by individuals seeking higher education, especially adult learners. At Ashford, full-time faculty members are responsible for teaching and participating in a variety of activities that support the mission of the University, including research, program and curriculum development, assessment, faculty support and development, and student support. Full-time faculty also provide governance and guidance to the University in a shared governance structure, and participate as elected members on various internal committees. However, adjunct faculty represent a high percentage of the instructional faculty at Ashford, and the importance of their active engagement for student success cannot be understated. The purpose of this session is to discuss the ways in which we thoughtfully and strategically engage our adjunct faculty. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 516 Electronic Posters This presentation is designed to be engaging and will include opportunities for audience participation and interactive question and answers throughout the presentation. This presentation is also geared for a broad audience of faculty and administrators in higher education who recognize the important role adjunct faculty play in student learning. The goals of this presentation include: 1. Explain Ashford's collaborative course development process, including how full-time and adjunct faculty collaborate by using data and evidence to make curricular decisions. 2. Discuss the importance of the involvement of adjunct faculty in program review, and describe ways in which adjunct faculty can be actively involved in the data collection, self-study, external site visit, and action plan. 3. Describe how adjunct faculty are uniquely involved in University retention efforts, with a particular focus on student orientation and matriculation initiatives. 4. Share (with audience participation) best practices for engaging adjunct faculty in ways that maximize their value and expertise. School District Snapshot: Online andBlended Learning for At-Risk Middle and High School Students Amy Garrett Dikkers (University of North Carolina at Wilmington, USA) Aimee Whiteside (University of Tampa, USA) Context Every nine seconds a student drops out of high school (Hupfield, 2010, p. 1). The International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) Research Committee (2010) reports that 9% or 1.2 million high school students in the United States drop out before graduation each year (p. 2). As a potential solution to this monumental problem, Rose and Blomeyer (2007) suggest that virtual schools "are well positioned to directly address the needs of at-risk learners" (qtd. in Archambault, et.al, 2010, p. 3). Moreover, Hupfield (2010) tells us that two concepts play a large role in whether students graduate; they are (a) the level of quality adult-student relationships in their lives and (b) the extent to which they work on six key resiliency skills, including building confidence, making connections, setting goals, managing stress, increasing well-being, and understanding motivation (p. 2-4). Cavanaugh, Barbour, & Clark (2009) urge that more studies are needed that examine the quality of high school student learning experiences in virtual environments, especially those of lower performing and at-risk students in order "to design appropriate supports as this particular population of students continues to grow within virtual schools" (p. 13). Therefore, this embedded case study about a medium-sized school district in the Southeastern United States hopes to move closer to understanding the virtual learning experience of at-risk students and whether online and blended environments hinder or help their learning experience. The district size is above average for the state, serving 12,000 middle and high school students in a county with a population of 200,000. The district has a 80% graduation rate, equaling that of the state. District middle and high schools are using blended and online learning for a variety of purposes, including remediation, acceleration, enrichment, credit recovery, intervention with Exceptional Children and as early intervention for at-risk students, and as part of the non-traditional high school. The current study is an embedded case study of the district, exploring the multiple ways blended and online learning are used for the benefit of atrisk students. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 517 Electronic Posters Research questions How is the district using online andBlended Learning to support at-risk middle and high school students? What are the benefits and challenges of online andBlended Learning for at-risk middle and high school students? What are the stories of particular students who have benefited from online andBlended Learning? Methods The case study method involves interpretive inquiry focused on observing a particular phenomenon within its context. Yin (2003) defines a case study as "empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident" (p.13). Stake (2000) explains, "The case plays a supportive role, and it facilitates our understanding of something else. The case still is looked at in depth, its contexts scrutinized, its ordinary activities detailed, but all because this helps the researcher to pursue the external interest" (p. 437). Case studies represent an important pedagogical and research technique that humanizes and deepens the understanding. Additionally, an embedded case study design (Yin, 2003) allows for a more detailed discussion of the multiple uses of blended and online learning in this particular districtlevel context. Data Sources This embedded case study includes multiple data sources. Details of the methods for data collection are provided in the presentation. District-level: interviews with key district personnel, including the Supervisor of Online Learning and Virtual Academy Coordinators (one at each of four traditional high schools); non-traditional high school level: principal, teacher focus group (n=8, 89% response rate), student survey (n=50, 66% response rate); credit recovery: state virtual school teachers in the Credit Recovery program (n=48). Survey of students taking online Credit Recovery courses for summer school (to be completed in Summer 2013). Results For this brief proposal, we provide a glimpse into the data from the non-traditional high school. A description of various district-level initiatives in blended and online learning, as well as data from students and teachers in the Credit Recovery summer school program are provided in the presentation. The district has seen a consistent increase in pass rate (48 to 69% across two summers) since moving to using the state virtual school for summer school Credit Recovery. At the non-traditional high school, teachers widely use APEX for blended learning and students also take classes online through the state virtual school. Students identified clear benefits for online and blended learning with 95.9% (n = 47) selecting "ability to work ahead" and "ability to work at my own pace". Connecting with other K-12 online learning research, 75.5% of students (n = 37) credited online andBlended Learning with providing them the "ability to graduate". Students identified challenges of blended and online learning including having to be "responsible for my own learning" (68%, n=34), needing "time management" skills (62%, n=31), and having a "lack of immediate response to questions" (50%, n=25). When asked how they manage these challenges, the majority stated some variation of "tough[ing] it out", "deali[ing] with it", or asking for help from others (teachers, peers, and family members). Notably, 81% (n=39) reported no one taught them strategies or skills to help them learn online. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 518 Electronic Posters Significance of Research Finding a solution to decrease the amount of high school dropout is a monumental concern--both for individuals and for society. Bloom and Haskins (2010) indicate, "Over a forty-five-year career the earnings difference between a dropout and someone with only a high school degree can amount to more than $700,000" (p. 2). Jay Smink, Executive Director of the National Dropout Prevention Center at Clemson University, suggests online coursework as a solution, especially for students who are "lacking a few credits for graduation " (qtd. in Mathews, para. 13). Looking at online and blended learning affordances through the lens of a population of students that have not succeeded or been a good fit for a typical high school provides educators knowledge about how to best reach this population and help them get to high school graduation. Search, Share, & Embed: Multimedia Resources for Online Teaching and Learning Julie DeCesare (Providence College, USA) The Internet has provided a wealth of multimedia and video content to teachers, students, and researchers. It is saturated by user-created materials (YouTube, Vimeo), digitized or born digital special collections by non-profit institutions (ArtBabble, Arkive, Duke AdViews), educational distributors and producers (Learner.org, WGBH), for-fee providers of on-demand streaming media (NetFlix, HuluPlus, Amazon Instant), and library database vendors (Swank Digital, Alexander St. Press) -- and more. Educators are often challenged by access and of feature film content. Copyright, but also just the ability to find the materials in the format they need, can be complicated for use in online environments. This presentation will help instructors and technologists navigate, discover, and mine for feature film content and clips using a selection of mobile apps and web interfaces. Focus will be on free resources with licensing available, such as Movieclips.com, CanIStreamit? (web and mobile app), as well as, discussion of other multimedia resources available for online learning. The presenter will also provide a link to material covered and presented, which includes additional resources. The presentation is geared towards researchers, educators, librarians, and instructional designers, fromAll institutional levels: K-12,Community Colleges, and Universities/Four Year Institutions. Attendees will learn of practical resources, discovery tools, and applications for feature film multimedia research, analysis, and discussion. Smashing the Myths of For-Profits: Retention, Open Enrollment, and Quality Renee Aitken (Northcentral University, USA) Karen Ferguson (Northcentral University, USA) The media is filled with stories about the sins of for-profit institutions of higher education. These stories do not often include data to support the accusations because for profits are private institutions and do not publicly present their data. The online for profit world is different than traditional institutions, even those offering online programs. In this presentation, we will demystify one online university by talking and sharing data about leadership, retention, open enrollment, and quality. We will discuss the business philosophies the online for profit models in their best practices and share the philosophies of adult learning models. Finally, we will explain why these institutions are needed in today's landscape of higher education. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 519 Electronic Posters Supporting the First Major E-Learning Project in Nigeria Kirby Milton, Jr. (Michigan Virtual University USA) Bunmi Akinyemiju (Venture Garden Group, USA) Each year up to 1.2 million students qualify to begin their undergraduate education in Nigeria. However, Nigeria's 104 universities are only able to accommodate 300,000 students with campus studies each year. This imbalance has created a great demand for distance learning to allow more students access to in-country education. Kirby shares how MVU is leveraging its e-learning expertise to support the creation of a large body of online content by recording lecturers at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) in partnership with the Center for Distance Learning (CDL) at OAU and managed by Mr. Akinyemju™s Venture Garden Group/Edutech NG, a technology consulting company in Lagos, Nigeria. Implementing a large scale Mediasite project in a developing country poses significant challenges. Kirby and Bunmi will share their experiences relating to training novice lecturers, acquiring and delivering Mediasite ML Recorders in country, program accreditation and roll out of the online degrees, thereby providing valuable insights to those facing similar challenges and opportunities in less-developed countries. Bunmi will be available to discuss all aspects of the new online programs, including plans to expand to other universities in Nigeria and surrounding countries. Tap Into Your Class's Hive Mind: Stimulating Online Group Interaction and Preparing Students for Exams David Weesner (Richard Stockton College, USA) Students often experience anxiety over "studying the wrong thing" or "not knowing what to expect" from quizzes and other outcome measures. By utilizing a simple online group-discussion format, students can work together to prepare each other for examinations. Using this format, the instructor can identify weak areas of understanding, and steer individual at-risk students before their grades are impacted. Data comparing the same class taught with and without this teaching method documents the effectiveness of the exercise. Outcomes include higher level of learning, higher grades, and improved student evaluations of the instructor. Meet Dr. Weesner at the poster session to see how simple it can be to create group study without the stress often associated with collaborative projects. Participants will learn how to spend less time writing exams and help students better prepare for tests. Whether you're teaching hybrid or MOOC or another format, you can easily use these strategies to get everyone "on the same page." Teaching Online: The New Faculty Experience Michelle Franz (Northern Virginia Community College, USA) As educational systems evolve and demand for higher education gains momentum the need for stimulating accessible and affordable options for students around the globe increases. To that end, online teaching and learning is increasingly viewed as a way to address such issues. This results in more faculty than ever facing the possibility of teaching courses in a virtual Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 520 Electronic Posters environment; faculty who may not be comfortable, or prepared, for the differences between faceto-face and online instruction. At NOVA's Extended Learning Institute (ELI) rapid growth in online courses and programs means equal growth in instructional staff. To meet and retain that demand ELI has implemented a First Year Experience program that provides faculty support and development services toAll faculty teaching for the institution for the first time. This includes instructional and technology support through professional development, orientation programming, mentoring and evaluation. Participants in this session will learn about (and discuss) the different components of our New Faculty Experience program and the process of its development. Technology "Connectors:" Focusing Technology Infrastructures and Support Systems on Student Success Hugo Gomez (University of Texas at El Paso, USA) Steven Varela (The University of Texas at El Paso, USA) Technology solutions and student services are often disconnected and their deployment can be problematic, and fail to achieve either learning outcomes or intended technological goals. This presentation will discuss how Academic Technologies (AT) at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) created an ecosystem of technology infrastructure, faculty consultation, student workshops/training, and technology support to revolutionize the process of implementing technology on campus, beyond traditional IT roles, and more directly on student success. Context: The Learning Environments (LE) area within Academic Technologies (AT) at UTEP offers new ways to expand, shape, design, and "envisioneer" the future of learning. LE works directly with students, faculty, and staff to utilize technological innovations, research, and prototyping to rethink and reimagine the connection and functionality students, faculty and staff have within educational spaces. Problem: Institutions and university departments struggle in setting up large infrastructures for the deployment and use of technology, and usually rely on a traditional IT framework to do so. This is typically limited to technology support for the mechanisms themselves, and doesn't consider the full context of what a campus requires, including student training and faculty consultations. Approach: Academic Technologies has implemented several projects that are geared around deploying student technology ecosystems rather than just student/faculty technologies. We looked at what it takes to support a technology and it's deployment fromAll angles from the infrastructure needed, the workshop and training aspects, and the consultation with faculty to be able to understand and focus the technology alongside pedagogy. The process is focused on meeting student learning outcomes inAll areas from support structure to technology deployment and faculty consulting rather than focused merely on technological deployment. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 521 Electronic Posters Presenters will explain their process of ecosystem implementation, strategic feedback, plans for growing this to other programs, and the multitude of programs currently using such an ecosystem infrastructure. Results: The current project has resulted in multiple programs utilizing this service to deploy technologies within their departments. We have served approximately 8-10 thousand students , including from departments such as Business, Graphic Design, English, History, Dance, Engineering and others. We have provided a unified support structure successfully in and out of departments. Technology and Virtual Worlds: Faculty Recognizing and Dealing with Challenges Stephanie Blackmon (University of Oklahoma, USA)\ Online learning is a large section of the higher education landscape today, and as online education continues to grow, educators and researchers continue to explore new technologies to deliver online courses. However, there is a gap between the use of these technologies and the information about professors' experiences with these new tools. There are virtual worlds such as Second Life and Open Sim, but we need more information about how faculty fare in these environments to help others make informed decisions about whether or not these environments and other new forms of technology are right for them. In my initial study on faculty perspectives of faculty persona in a virtual world, my purpose was to get faculty members' feedback on their lived experiences with faculty persona in the threedimensional virtual world, specifically when they used the virtual world Second Life. The data from that study also included participants' valuable insights on faculty members' lived experiences with virtual world technology. Therefore, the purpose of this current study is to share professors' lived experiences with virtual world technology challenges and some of their perspectives on dealing with those challenges. As with my previous study, the goal is not to tout or tear down a particular type of technology or virtual world. The goal of my study is to provide participants' insights on some of the challenges they noticed and sometimes overcame when using a specific virtual world, Second Life. In order to gain access to participants' lived experiences, I conducted a phenomenological study. More specifically, I used van Manen's (1990) hermeneutic phenomenology because itAllowed me to directly access participants' lived experiences and impart interpretations of the data I collected concerning participants' lived experiences. According to van Manen's hermeneutic phenomenology, there are "methodological features" researchers must consider when employing this research inquiry (van Manen, 1990, p. 30). Therefore, the purpose of my study was to put the audience in close proximity to the lived experiences of my participants, not to express a general theory about faculty persona or virtual world technology. Although I provide descriptions and interpretations of professors' technology experiences in a virtual world, I am aware that the human condition is too complex to completely express (van Manen, 1990), and as such, I attempted to get the audience as close as possible to participants' lived experiences. The 10 participants I interviewed were from colleges and universities around the world and in the United States. After securing Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for my study, I Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 522 Electronic Posters looked for 10 participants who had taught part of a fully online course in Second Life or who had taught a course completely in SL. When selecting potential participants, I did not consider the number of online classes taught, whether or not a participant had tenure, whether or not participation in an online class was compulsory or voluntary, the number of years at institution, or full- or part-time status at an institution. I selected participants from literature about virtual worlds. For example, I searched The Chronicle of Higher Education, EBSCO, Google Scholar, ERIC, and my university's database for articles about virtual environments. I used the following search terms: "virtual environment," "virtual world," "virtual world education," "immersive virtual world," and "Second Life." I looked for articles that were written by or about virtual world users, read the articles, recorded the contact information for those I thought would fit my study, and contacted them via email to participate in my study. I wanted participants to understand that I selected them based on the insights I gained from their work and the value their perspectives could bring to my study. I contacted a total of 50 potential participants and selected 10 participants for my study. I conducted three semi-structured interviews in Second Life with each participant, and each interview was 30 minutes to one hour in length. In order to keep participants' identities and data private, I did not name participants' institutions, and I provided each participant with a pseudonym. I analyzed the data by using qualitative coding to surmise themes, or "structures of experience" (van Manen, 1990). The themes were developed according to participants' interview responses. The findings showed four challenges for faculty when dealing with virtual world technology: equipment challenges, in world virtual world challenges, university readiness challenges, and student readiness challenges. However, despite the numerous challenges participants shared about virtual worlds, no one mentioned removing their courses from those environments. Many of the participants plan to offer more courses or parts of courses in three dimensional virtual worlds. The challenges of virtual world technology are very present and quite real. However, participants' attitudes about those technological challenges did not cause them to walk away from virtual worlds. Part of this can be attributed to the professors' attitudes about virtual world challenges. From the faculty members who considered themselvesNovice virtual world participants to the professors who were quite experienced with virtual worlds, each seemed to have a clear understanding of the potential issues they could have with virtual worlds, were not dissuaded by the technology issues, and found great benefit and satisfaction in using three dimensional virtual worlds. Virtual worlds still hold value for many faculty members. Because of the three dimensional virtual world, professors and students can create themselves in new environments and discuss the implications of those creations. The worldAllows for a different level of interaction as a part of face-to-face courses, traditional online courses, or courses offered completely in SL. For some, the technological glitches that often come with the use of virtual worlds does not outweigh the potential benefits of trying this (and other) new technologies. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 523 Electronic Posters Test Your Testing IQ Donna McLauchlin (Education Service Center Region 4, USA) Get your pop-quiz on! Join us as we explore some of the ins and outs of designing tests and quizzes in an online environment. Polls, quizzes and games will get your brains rolling and ideas flowing! Which of the following best describes what participants will gain from this class? A. A framework that will help you develop appropriate assessments B. Tips for writing more effective test questions C. Alternative methods of assessing knowledge D. All of the above Right! You know the answer! And you'll be at the head of your class after you attend this workshop. Research shows that the more stressed a learner is, the less learning is taking place. This class will allow participants the opportunity to determine their purpose in creating an assessment, explore some assessment methods and then sample some virtual activities and instruments that create a learning environment that is student-friendly and supportive. A LiveBinder will be shared that will include resources and handouts. The Future of Online Education: A Review of the Data on Online Education Students Andrew Magda (The Learning House, Inc., USA) Scott Jeffe (EducationDynamics, USA) The advent of MOOCs has made online higher education more discussed than ever before, but for many institutions, successfully developing and delivering online programs can be difficult. Knowing who is studying online and why can help colleges and universities tailor their programs to meet the needs of this growing population. The Learning House, Inc. and Aslanian Market Research conduct an annual survey of 1,500 past, current and prospective online students to better understand what students are looking for in an online program. Learn the results of the 2013 Online College Students survey in this informative presentation. Dr. David Clinefelter, Chief Academic Officer of Learning House, and Carol Aslanian, Senior Vice President of Market Research Services Aslanian Market Research, a part of Education Dynamics, will share the results of the 2013 survey, as well as significant changes noted from the 2012 survey. Learn how students choose online programs, including cost, availability, the reputation of the institution; what role faculty plays in program selection; and the importance of credit transfer processes. The speakers also will discuss whether students find online programs worth the investment and time, what impact MOOCs are having on traditional online programs, and if graduates have experienced success in the job market because of their online degree. By the end of the session, attendees should have a deeper understanding of who is studying online, why, and how those students choose an online school. Attendees can ask questions for a better understanding of the data and how it can impact their online programs. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 524 Electronic Posters The Greatest Education for the Greatest Number Susan Hines (Ashford University, USA) This presentation examines curriculum design techniques for a higher-education market that is increasingly open, global, and mobile. It takes as an extended example a college-level composition course that was developed to meet open-education resource (OER) standards for a thirteen-college consortium in 2011 and follows it through its inaugural launch as an MOOC in 2013. While critical of the MOOC hype, the presentation underscores an urgent need for open learningmanagement systems and high-quality, free-to-the-public instructional content to educate a planet that is hungry, if not desperate, for knowledge. It reviews the literature on educational costs and new business models, multilingual database translation, and evaluates the potential of digital badges to compel a national and international discussion about curricula and common outcome measures. A principal goal of this presentation is to consider carefully the ramifications of "spanning the globe." American universities are poised to expand online internationally en masse, but are America's brands of education going to resonate with international students, or will the global market be confused and ignore our overtures? Without affordable curricula relevant to its students and international in its perspective, American higher education may find itself "spamming the globe." While there are a significant number of American universities in the online international market already, the open-education model, with low- and no-cost degrees is going to present an interesting challenge. The University of the People, a tuition-free online institution, is already shaking things up. The MOOC providers are also challenging; companies like Coursera are taking shape has multinationals, partnering as readily with Sapienza University of Rome as they do with Johns Hopkins. While it remains to be seen if Mill's utilitarian edict will make education greater, greater numbers of people from around the world now have some access to higher education, and that is indeed progress. The HP Catalyst Academy: A Global Resource for STEM Teachers Betty Hurley-Dasgupta (SUNY Empire State College, USA) The presenter has been named an HP fellow, responsible for creating a minicourse for STEM teachers. The first offering will be in June 2013. In this presentation, I will begin with a description of the HP Catalyst Academy project, which is beginning with 15 minicourses, but will quickly expand. These are courses developed with assistance from ISTE and the New Media Consortium and will be hosed on a site supported by HP. They are free resources for K-20 teachers in the STEM area. Participants in these minicourses will receive badges as recognition of their work. I will then describe my particular course, "Exploring STEM Competencies Through ePortfolios." Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 525 Electronic Posters Here is the curriculum plan: Portfolios have been used for years to collect student work, but ePortfolios now provide a rich environment for collection, integration, reflection, publication and assessment. This minicourse immerses teachers in an ePortfolio environment in order to explore its potential for learning and assessment. Participants will be able to engage with other teachers as they create profiles and pages, as well as reflect on their learning through journalling. Participants will leave this course with a deeper appreciation for evidence--based learning and how to use ePortfolios to support a learner-centered environment. Activity One. After reading about competencies and how ePortfolios provide an environment for building competencies, especially in communication and collaboration, participants will place a reflection on this topic in the journal and copy it to their initial reflection in the profile page on the HP Academy site. Activity Two. Participants will add components, including a photo, to their profile page. They will create a journal and share it on their profile page. They will then apply the journal rubric to members of their school group. In their second reflection on the HP Academy profile page, they will reflect on the assessment of their peers. Activity Three. Participants will create a page and share it with their group. They will then apply the portfolio page rubric provided to each other's pages. In their Academy profile page, they will reflect on the assessment received for their page and provide two improvements they plan to make based on that assessment. Final Activity. Participants will engage in a group forum and view the community engagement rubric. They will complete a final reflection in their journal about what they have learned. They will assess themselves: What strengths did they demonstrate in their work in this mini-course? In what ways could they improve in their use of ePortfolios? What insights did they gain from this mini-course? What plans (three things) do they have for implementing ePortfolios in their school? They will place this self-assessment in the final reflection on the HP Academy site. I will discuss the activities, assessment challenges and lessons learned from the first offering. Since this is being offered several times, participants can provide feedback for the next iteration. Time will be given for questions and comments. Participants will benefit from learning about a free resource as well as learning more about the topic of ePortfolios. They will also gain information about techniques for assessing work from a large group. The Impact of Online Faculty Social Presence on Postsecondary Online Student Achievement Michael Berger (Grand Canyon University, USA) Online courses rarely involve face-to-face or synchronous communication between faculty and student. The result is that most interaction is computer-mediated. The differences between faceto-face communication and computer-mediated communication can greatly impact online instruction. Face-to-face communication is a much richer channel than computer-mediated communication, and there are concerns about faculty ability to build rapport with students and develop an effective social learning environment in the online classroom. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 526 Electronic Posters However, it has become apparent that online participants are capable of having complex interactions and building relationships even in lean computer-mediated environments. Social presence is a measurement of the extent to which computer-mediated communications seem unmediated, and is created by the messages of faculty and students in the discussion forums of their online classrooms. A component of Garrison, Anderson, and Archer's Community of Inquiry model, social presence is a tool that online faculty can use to build connection and rapport with their students. Social presence cues can be included in discussion forum posts and represent social communication elements separate from the academic task at hand. The eight most common types of social presence cues are: 1. Humor/playful asides, e.g. jokes, self-deprecating comments 2. Emotions, e.g. emoticons, emotional language, "I feel" statements 3. Self-disclosure 4. Support for a student or agreement for an idea 5. Addressing people by name 6. Greetings/Farewells/phatics 7. Complimenting another's idea 8. Allusions of/to physical presence, e.g. references to "the classroom" In a study to determine the benefits of faculty use of social presence, research was conducted on 30 online classrooms. The study reviewed every discussion forum post and most assignment feedback generated by the faculty member in each of the 30 classrooms and counted the social presence cues. Faculty were then ranked and grouped based on their total social presence use in the classroom. These groups were compared to determine if there was a significant difference in the mean student final grade in the classroom, student retention to the end of the class, student persistence into the next class, and student satisfaction with the faculty member. After the data was collected and analyzed, it was found that faculty who were in the high social presence tertile scored significantly higher on student satisfaction and student persistence. In addition, the impact of the individual social presence cues on satisfaction was calculated. The ones with a significant positive correlation were: humor, addressing by name, emotional displays, and complements. This session will start with a brief summary of social presence and the methodology of the study. The data and results will follow. The second part will focus on thePractical Application of this information. The eight social presence cues are not complicated and easy to introduce into a forum post of almost any topic, and can be used atAll academic levels. Training materials would be simple to create and evaluation of faculty use easy to do. Beyond faculty, any service that uses computer-mediated communication (library chats, technical support, etc.) would benefit from the possible increase to customer satisfaction that using these strategies could provide. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 527 Electronic Posters The Power of a Strong Partner: U of IL “ Illinois Online Network” Scott Johnson (University of Illinois, USA) The presentation will summarize the ION MVCR program. There will be a discussion of the Master Online Teacher certificate, the Certified Online Learning Administrator certificate and an overview of the MVCR catalog. The presentation will also include highlights of the resources found on the ION site, the services offered by ION, and the benefits of ION membership. The Products of iPad-Centric Instruction, Student Collaboration, Video Games, and a Hybrid Setting Jared Cootz (Lone Star College-Montgomery, USA) David Zimmerman (Lone Star College-Montgomery, USA) Instructors, students, distance learning advocates, and mobile learning supporters will benefit from the poster session presentation. This presentation will provide tangible, concrete examples of how to engage students using iPads, online resources and current video games like Mass Effect 3 and Assassin's Creed 3. Goals: 1. Highlight an effective approach to using mobile devices in hybrid instruction. 2. Illustrate examples of effective student collaboration. 3. Model an approach to integrating current video games into the classroom. 4. Attendees will leave with a multitude of ideas about how to make this work for their students. 5. Attendees will leave with a collection of apps that will assist them and their students with using iPads in an instructional setting. The poster session presenters are prepared to discuss the following topics and more. 1. The use of mobile devices in the hybrid classroom and classrooms in general. 2. How useful are the iPads for instructors? 3. How do you develop a class with an emphasis on gaming? 4. How does the gaming work in the class? 5. Feedback from the students. 6. Feedback from the administration. 7. Feedback from the faculty. 8. Success and completion rates for students. 9. Student products from the course. 10. Useful iPad apps for the classroom and beyond. 11. What is the next step? Feedback from interested parties is encouraged throughout the poster session, during the rest of the conference, and after the conference ends. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 528 Electronic Posters The Teaching and Learning Laboratory: Preparing Faculty for Digital Course Development Steven Varela (The University of Texas at El Paso, USA) William Robertson (The University of Texas at El Paso, USA) Hugo Gomez (The University of Texas at El Paso, USA) Oscar Perez (The University of Texas at El Paso, USA) Mike Pitcher (The University of Texas at El Paso, USA) This presentation will discuss how an institution can create and implement a sustainable and scalable professional development system, particularly to provide faculty support and training to teach with technology and in online environments. Context: The Teaching and Learning Laboratory (TLL) area within Academic Technologies (AT) at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) centralizesAll faculty training, instructional support and pedagogical enhancements in one area. The lab provides faculty with a one-stop-shop for issues related to technology, including teaching, learning, and scholarship, while providing collaborative opportunities to discuss current research and theory; innovative and practical teaching strategies; and knowledge of policy and campus resources to support technology-enhanced/driven course development. Problem: Accreditation agencies in Texas require that faculty members are qualified in the pedagogical intricacies of blended and fully online course design and delivery because they are substantially different from the ones typically used in a traditional classroom setting. As a result, The Office of the Provost/Academic Affairs at UTEP mandated thatAll faculty who will be teaching in online environments receive professional development/training in these digital environments to ensure quality instructional and course design and implementation. Rather than burdening a department with training its faculty, the TLL assumed the responsibility of providing professional development to faculty members in blended and online course design and delivery, and has done so through the creation and facilitation of training academies. Approach: The TLL created "Digital Academies" to assist instructors in the design of effective online courses and learning experiences that meet accreditation standards. These academies include skill enhancement in: instructional design and effective pedagogy for computer-delivered courses; course management strategies for an online environment; assessment of student learning and performance; assessment of online course effectiveness in light of program learning outcomes; use of specific tools in an online course management system; knowledge of copyright and ADA compliance laws; knowledge of policies and guidelines for academic integrity, as well as technology tools to maintain it. The TLL has worked in collaboration with other areas of Academic Technologies to create a cycle of completion of training, course development, and launch of an online class. In the Blended Teaching and Learning Academy participants learn about the "flipped" classroom, best practices for teaching hybrid courses, and effective instructional design for blended learning. This is a 4-week academy, facilitated by the Senior Instructional Consultant in AT, and is delivered in hybrid format to replicate real course experience for participants. The Teaching Online Academy helps faculty learn about how to transition their face-to-face course to a fully online environment, how to design an effective online course, and how to use and apply technology for effective course management and Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 529 Electronic Posters delivery. This is a 4-week academy, facilitated by experienced online faculty with support from AT staff, and is delivered fully online to replicate the experience of being an online student. Results: Over 500 faculty members at UTEP have earned a Certificate of Completion for the respective academy completed prior to teaching their first online course. This has documented that they have received the necessary training to be successful, and have gained the technical expertise related to developing and delivering an online course according to widely accepted, researchbased standards for blended/ online teaching. The Use of YouTube to Engage Digital Natives: Student Preferences and Perceptions in Online and Hybrid Courses Nicole Buzzetto-More (University of Maryland Eastern Shore, USA) Mediated realities have augmented perceptual understanding and we must harness these new modalities in order to hyper-stimulated digital learners of today. In particular, the research suggests that targeted YouTube videos enhance engagement, depth of understanding, and overall satisfaction in fully online learning environments. This presentation will discuss the benefits of the use of YouTube and similar video sharing services in the instructional process. Further, it will present the findings of study that examined, and compared, student perceptions with respect to the value and usefulness of YouTube as a pedagogical tool finding discernible differences in the perceptions and preferences of fully online verse hybrid learners. Attendees will learn the tips for incorporating YouTube into the instructional process. Digital natives consider technology integral to the information gathering process (BuzzettoMore, 2011) with a particular preference for user generated media (Jones and Shao, 2011). YouTube is the world's largest video sharing service with approximately, 60 hours of video are uploaded to the server every minute, over 4 billion videos viewed each day, and over 3 billion hours of video watched each month by over 800 million unique monthly visitors (Prigg, 2012). Further, more video is added to YouTube per month than the 3 major US TV networks created in 60 years (Prigg, 2012) and YouTube is currently the number 2 search engine on the Web (Buzzetto-More, 2012). YouTube provides free access a huge volume of educational videos. YouTube EDU is a service for educators which contains short lessons from teachers, full university courses, professional development materials, and inspirational videos from global leaders. YouTube Teachers was created to help K-12 teachers use educational videos to educate, engage and inspire students aligned to common core standards. Finally, YouTube for Schools is opt-in program thatAllows schools to access thousands of educational videos from vetted YouTube channels like PBS, TED, and Khan in a secure environment with teachers the videos to make available to students. The research shows that educational videos appeal to visual learners (Miller 2009, Fernandez 2012 , Eick, C. J., & King Jr, D. T. (2012) supporting multimedia learning theory (Berk, 2009; Miller, 2009; Fernandez, 2012; Eick and King, 2012). Well-selected YouTube videos have been found to help students engage more deeply with subject matter, and recall the information they've learned longer (Hilner,2012; Eick and King , 2012; Burke and Snyder, 2007). Youtube Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 530 Electronic Posters has also been shown to promote active learning and critical thinking (Logan, 2013) while increasing students' depth of understanding (Tan and Pearce, 2012; Jones and Graham, 2013; Pratt and Feikes, 2013; Logan, 2012; Hilner, 2012, Cardine, 2008). YouTube has also been found effective at enhancing fully online courses (Jones and Graham, 2013) in particular as a tool to encourage course discussions, enhance lectures, support independent learning, and assist in tutoring (Logan, 2012; Youtube, 2012; Berke, 2009; Miller, M. 2009. Finally, YouTube has been found to be a best fit to the characteristics of the Net Generation of students and a valid approach to tap their multiple intelligences and learning styles (Berk, 2009 and Miller, 2009). A study conducted in the Spring of 2013 at a Mid-Atlantic minority serving institution sought to examine student perceptions regarding the usage of YouTube videos to augment instruction in online and classroom-based courses through a survey with 221 respondents. Ninety eight percent of respondents had used YouTube previously; however, only 26.5% had ever posted to video sharing service. Eighty two percent either agreed/strongly agreed μ4.11 that they would like to see YouTube in more of their classes. Ninety-four percent of respondents said that YouTube is useful at engaging students μ4.37, 62.7% found it useful at delivering lectures μ4.07, 76% said it was useful at explaining course concepts μ4.11, 99% found it useful at stimulating class discussions μ4.41, 85% found it useful at presenting demonstrations μ4.45, 68% said it was useful for student research μ3.93, 82.4% found it useful at supporting classroom learning μ4.19, and 99% found it useful at creating a more exciting learning environment μ4.46. Follow-up questions were posed to 100 students with a 71% response rate. Fifty-seven percent of respondents were enrolled in a fully-online section and 43% were enrolled in a hybrid section. Crosstabulations were performed. Additionally, ANOVAS were conducted, with p values included in the full text. According to the findings, students fully online student are much more likely to visit an online video service in a given week (70% online compared to 30.8% of in-person) and are more likely to watch a video placed on a course website (70.7% online compared to 40.1% in-person). Fully online students exhibited greater strength of agreement to scaled questions that examined perceived value added including: whether they enjoyed watching the videos (μ4.54 vs μ 4.18), whether the videos enhanced their learning experience (μ4.44 vs. 4.04), preference over PowerPoint files (μ4.28 vs. 3.78), and desire to watch unrequired videos (μ3.98 vs. μ 3.3). When asked the ideal length for a course video the in-person students indicated a preference for shorter videos at 1.5 to 3 minutes while the online students indicated a preference for longer videos at 5-7 minutes in length. With respect to audio preference, 70% of online students selected instructor narration while the in-person students preferred music at > 64%. When asked to considerall the resources used during the term and select the most valuable 74.3% of online students selected the YouTube videos whereas 39% of in-person students selected the live lectures given by the instructor. In summary, all participants reported that they enjoyed the YouTube videos and felt that they increased their engagement and understanding, stimulated discussions, and created a more interesting learning environment. When compared, the fully online students demonstrated a Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 531 Electronic Posters greater voracity with respect to perceived value added and preferring longer 5-7 minute videos with instructor narration. The World in Your Pocket- Learning to Teach with Your Mobile Device Gail Krovitz (Pearson eCollege, USA) The NMC Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition listed mobile apps and tablet computing as technologies that will have a large impact in education around the globe. However, many teachers still insist that students leave their phones at the door and don'tAllow the technology to be used in class. A mobile device in class is generally viewed to mean that the student is not on task or paying attention to the lesson. How can teachers get engaged in using mobile devices in their lessons? Learning to engage this powerful technology in a positive way extends the boundaries of the classroom and makes so much possible with the knowledge that's available at our fingertips. However, teachers may help getting there. In some cases, teachers' reluctance to use new technologies in the classroom is due to never having seen the technology properly modeled in an educational setting. To help break down that barrier, this presentation will showcase some creative ways people are already using mobile devices in their teaching, and stress the importance of teaching students responsible use of this important technology. Bring your mobile device and let's play! Amy Stever (Penn State University, USA) It used to be, when new students arrived on campus, they were expected to attend an orientation that involved arriving to stuffy auditorium on the same day with possibly hundreds of other students. They would often receive a 300-page, spiral-bound, 4-color "student handbook" that usually was used as a dorm room door stop instead of a useful resource! For online students, the thought of attending such an orientation is history. Even sending a pre-orientation email with boring blather about academic policies that haven't been revised in 25 years is so “30 seconds ago.” Let's face it, the student handbook and synchronized face-to-face new student orientation, as we once knew it, is archived, on the shelf, out to pasture, and left in the dust for the new generation of online learners. Today, in addition to selecting the convenience of online learning, students want an engaging, interactive and informative orientation that will set their expectations about their program and direct them to academic success. They want videos that welcome them to the college, real-time discussion forums with faculty, and resources that will test their current preparedness for online study. Additionally, they want an opportunity to meet their fellow classmates as they prepare, in many instances, to return to the classroom after a long hiatus from academic study. A lot has changed Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 532 Electronic Posters since they last took a test, and it's up to the college administration (us!) to properly prepare them for their virtual college experience. During this information session, we will share our rationale, delivery method, and strategies for creating and implementing an interactive and engaging new student orientation program for our online graduate certificate and master of professional studies programs. Access to our online orientation site will be made available to all session participants. Attendees Will:  Consider our rationale, delivery method, and strategies for creating and implementing an online orientation site.  Provide feedback on the site's content and design  Gain access to our online orientation site  Receive suggestions for implementing their own orientation site. Tips for Recruiting and Training Graduate Student Teaching Assistants in Blended Learning Environments Courtney L Kowalczyk (Walden University, USA) Brian Ragsdale (Walden University, USA) CONTEXT: Increasingly graduate students in Blended Learning environments are looking to learn more about teaching from their professors and may volunteer their time to serve in these learning environments. Being a graduate student teaching assistant (GSTA) serves multiple purposes including: strengthening prior learning by teaching peers and providing an initial training ground for working with faculty, designing learning activities, presenting limited lectures, and ensuring the smooth operation of the blended classroom environment. APPROACH: Each summer and winter quarter, Walden University PhD students in clinical, counseling, and school psychology attend online and face-to-face courses. Students are intermixed from Clinical, Counseling and School psychology specializations and/or programs across several classrooms and meet for a total of nine days of face-to-face lectures, small group exercises, and classroom instruction. These face-to-face meetings are referred to as Walden University Academic In Year Residency (AYR). The information presented in this poster is gleamed over running a three-year graduate student teaching assistant program across 7 different blended programs. Graduate student teaching assistants (GSTA's) apply to become part of the team, are usually nominated by a professor, and have high GPA's over 3.5. Graduate student teaching assistants go through roughly 6 to 12 hours of pre-training sessions over the internet before arriving to the on-ground classroom. One excellent recruitment strategy that we have discovered is that when there are only a few GSTA applicants, it is helpful to ask GSTA's to invite or nominate one of their friends or buddies to the program. This has been an effective strategy because students with high GPA's typically have relationships with other high GPA students. Also if both are accepted into the GSTA program, they often work in teams supporting each other in the learning environments. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 533 Electronic Posters RECRUITMENT, INTERVIEWING, AND TRAINING TOPICS: Interested students who would like to be a GSTA are sent an email that contains a secure online application. In the application, we request courses of interest, grades within the course, availability, name of the faculty who nominated them, and ask the students to write a brief paragraph on why they would like to become a GSTA. Phone interviews are then arranged with students who meet the stated criteria for the above mentioned applicant fields. Each call includes one faculty member and/or two current graduate assistants. This model has worked very well because our lead GA, who has a yearly stipend, has the most contact with the applicant GSTA's and plays a role in the training. We typically have between 12 - 18 GSTA's, during the blended portion of our program, with a ratio of 1 GSTA for every 11 students. GSTA's support faculty in the blended face-to-face context and are not in the online portion of the classroom. Selected GSTA's then undergo 2--3 hour training sessions via the web using powerpoint and/or live meeting. The first training session covers the more fundamental or basic skills used by GSTA's. One of our former graduate assistant's, Ms. Cher Rossiter, played a strong leadership role in developing these materials and we developed a two-word slogan that dominated both of these training sessions: "Flexibility and Patience." Whenever something came up on the ground that was unexpected and had the potential to throw the GSTA team for a loop, we would repeat our slogan, "Flexibility and Patience." Training areas for GSTA's fall across 5 key domains: 1) relationship building, 2) productivity tools, 3) policy and procedures, 4) classroom and programmatic operations, and 5) specific refreshers on technical skills needed, in our case, scoring psychological tests and technical aspects of general test administration. For example, in the relationship domain we talk about GSTA engagement with multiple constituents, classmates, professors, and administrators. Under the policy and procedures domain, we cover things like medical emergency, incident reporting, and privacy-confidential topics. Before concluding their time in the blended program, each faculty member holds a brief ceremony recognizing the GSTA accomplishments and this culminates with giving the GSTA an award certificate. We also require thatAll GSTA's provide a two-page journal reflection piece which is sent directly to the faculty member(s) who leads the program. GSTA's who participate in our program and faculty and students routinely compliment us on the training and efficiency of the graduate student teaching assistant program. Transformative Learning in Online and Blended Study Environments Utilizing Technology John M Beckem II (State University of New York, Empire State College, USA) According to Jack Mezirow (1991) transformative learning is the expansion of consciousness through the transformation of basic worldview and specific capacities of the self; transformative learning is facilitated through consciously directed processes such as appreciatively accessing and receiving the symbolic contents of the unconscious and critically analyzing underlying premises. At the core of Transformative Learning theory, is the process of "perspective transformation", with three dimensions: psychological (changes in understanding of the self), convictional (revision of belief systems), and behavioral (changes in lifestyle), (Clark, 1991). To date, the overwhelming majority of literature on the subject of fostering transformative learning online is purely conceptual (Taylor and Cranton 2012). The goal of this presentation is to demonstrate how transformative learning has been achieved in online and blended study environments of adult students through the use of current, relative Web Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 534 Electronic Posters 2.0 and Social Media technologies at SUNY-Empire State College by putting into practice theory and research. Participants of this presentation will be given the history and development of transformative learning theory, findings of quantitative and qualitative research, examples of assignments, rubrics for assessment, student outcomes, student feedback, and criteria for selecting and implementing appropriate technologies to foster transformative learning in online and blended study environments. For example, the arts can be a means of transformative learning, through either the creating of art or the witnessing of art created by others (Lawrence, 2009). Artistic expression in the broadest sense encompassesAll forms of art, including but not limited to visual arts, music, poetry, dance, drama, storytelling, and creative writing (Lawrence, 2009). Georgia O'Keefe (1976) stated that the arts take us out of our heads and into our bodies, hearts, and souls in ways thatAllow us to connect more deeply with self and others. Cajete (1994) notes: "The creation of art is an alchemy of process in which the artist becomes more himself through each act of true creation. He transfers his life in a dance of relationship with the life inherent in the material that he transforms into an artistic creation" (p.149). Transformative learning through artistic expressions have been created in my courses using PowerPoint, Prezio, Windows Movie Maker, WAV files, Flickr, Adobe Photoshop, and Instagram. For example, in my Managerial Leadership course, students were given an assignment to reflect, outside the box, on what they had learned regarding leadership behaviors and demonstrate their learning and reflection, through artistic expressions. Students were encouraged to demonstrate their artistic reflections through poetry, music, video, PowerPoint presentation with pictures & music, or any other artistic form they desired. After they had created their artistic reflection on leadership behaviors, students were instructed to post their creation in the module Self-Assessment drop box for others to see and discuss their interpretation of the artistic reflection. As part of the assignment, students were instructed to submit a separate one-page attachment, summarize their meaning of the artistic reflection as well as their thoughts and feelings regarding the assignment itself. Through the use of audio and video technologies such as Windows Movie Maker, Wav files, and MP4 files, students were able to compose music, create spoken word poetry, and produce short films and videos. Students used photography and technologies utilizing pictures such as Flickr, Instagram, and Adobe Photoshop to create digital photography, digital artworks, and digital collages. Presentational technologies such as PowerPoint, Prezio and Windows Movie Maker enabled students to create visual artistic forms of expressions. Many presentations also included student composed music, spoken words and artwork. Student submitted work included poems, a Haiku, music compositions, PowerPoint presentations, digital photography, digital artwork, advertisements, and a stream of consciousness poetry about a student's impressions of leadership as they had been shaped by the course, just to name a few. Here are a couple of students' comments from the assignment: "I enjoyed doing this assignment. I don't think of myself as very artistic but it was fun to think "outside the box". I don't get a chance to do anything artistic in my professions as it is a very Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 535 Electronic Posters analytical profession. It made me really look at what I feel leadership means and how it pertains to individual personality characteristics." "I really enjoyed this assignment as it forced me out of my comfort zone to look at and interpret leadership in a different way." Art can be evocative (unintentional and spontaneous) or provocative (intentional and deliberate) (Kates, 2005). Both have the potential for facilitating transformative learning. Although art can evoke emotions in others, the artist can sometimes experience unexpected emotional reactions from his or her own work. According to McNiff (2008, p.40), "In the creative process, the most meaningful insights often come by surprise, unexpectedly, and even against the will of the creator." Wilbur (1996) describes the powerful and evocative experience of witnessing works of art: "It grabs you, against your will, and then suspends your will. You are ushered into a quiet clearing, free of desire, free of gasping, free of ego, free of self-contradiction. And through that opening or clearing in your own awareness may come flashes of higher truths, subtler revelations, profound connections" (p.90). Other examples such as Transformative Learning Through Student-Centered Learning Utilizing Technology; Prior Learning Assessment and Transformative Learning; and Evaluating Transformative Learning Online will be provided as part of this presentation. Transforming an Online Learning Module Into a MOOC (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse) Jim Jorstad (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, USA) Robert Hoar (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, USA) The seed for a math MOOC at UW La Crosse was planted in 2007 long before the term became mainstream, when Professor Robert Hoar and his colleagues created a large collection of online learning modules and webcasts to help students enhance their math skills. They gathered data, tracked viewing habits and assessed student performance. What they found was that students showed marked improvement in their math skills over time. Last year, armed with a solid concept and assessment data, Dr. Hoar was ready to take those math modules to a larger audience. In collaboration with the UW System he applied for a Gates Foundation grant to develop a math MOOC and provide it free online to anyone. The UW La Crosse/UW System Math MOOC was born. Now, with more than 1,900 students enrolled, the MOOC has attracted students diverse in location and background. More than 40 countries are represented and include those preparing for college, entire high school classes, an 11-year-old prodigy and an even an 83-year-old grandmother. Join Dr. Hoar and Jim Jorstad from the UW La Crosse as they take you step-by-step through the process of creating their MOOC. They'll take your questions live, share lessons learned along the way and discuss the future of this groundbreaking class, including: Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 536 Electronic Posters -How to break through the hype to discover what the reality and potential of MOOCs truly are. --Can they be scalable, sustainable and profitable? -How webstreaming was leveraged to explain, promote and disseminate the MOOC concept as well as engage a massive international online audience. -Data showing online courses support traditional pedagogies and enhance student success. -How this course lays the groundwork to test the MOOCability of other teaching and learning experiences in other disciplines in the future. Transition Learning Into Calls to Action: Community Development Through Social Media and Marketing Valeri Paul (University of California Cooperative Extension, USA) Patti Wooten Swanson, Ph.D (University of California Cooperative Extension, USA) Introduction In a recent survey, 57% of Americans indicated concerned about their lack of savings (Singletary, 2013). The Consumer Federation of America started the America Saves campaign through the outreach of various organizations, including the University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE). The Consumer Federation of America initiated the America Saves campaign in 2002. Products and services are not sold. Instead through this social media marketing approach partnerships are made with government agencies, organizations, non-profits and business. These partnerships create an environment that informs, promotes and disseminates savings strategies for a wide audience. Each year the campaign highlights savings through its partnership outreach with a celebration called America Saves Week. Each partner adopts a means of communicating and promoting savings that aligns with their own community outreach. At the national level, America Saves offers for free a variety of resources created for partners to use and co-brand. Some of the resources include press releases, educational materials, proclamations, savings tips, newsletters and much more. These resources are designed get the message out with minimal effort and integrate easily into already developed campaigns. Additionally, many partners add incentives to their own campaigns. This campaign aligns well with the initial intent of the Morrill Act of 1862, otherwise known as the Land Grant Act, which assigned higher education institutions the responsibility to conduct applied research and education that directly impacts the community. United States Department of Agriculture (2013) reports 100 land-grant universities delivering research expertise to local communities through Cooperative Extensions that educate individuals and groups within the community on eating healthy, shopping, preparing foods, and other similar topics. According to Englert, Sommerville and Guenole (2009) social marketing requires a behavior change. Behavior is very important, because "savers" and "spenders" populate all socioeconomic groups according to the America Saves (2011) website. The America Saves campaign through the UCCE creates an environment to serve both the individuals and the community by transitioning learning into a call to action to build personal wealth through the simple steps of the campaign. Set a Goal, Make a Plan and Save Automatically. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 537 Electronic Posters Purpose The purpose of this examination is to report trends and improve strategies used by Cooperative Extensions, like UCCE, in the social marketing promotions and campaigns. The local San Diego Saves will use this report data and analytics for ongoing improvements from the answers to the following questions. For the end-user (the saver), "Did the campaign support your work toward your goal achievement?" For the partners, "Does this campaign and the resources available support your outreach to your customer, client or employees?" Social Marketing Finishing this statement is easy for most. "Don't Drink and..." This social marketing campaign slogan was designed to inform, teach and change behavior. Most people know the slogan "Don't Drink and Drive." These types of social marketing strategies require analysis, planning, execution and evaluation. According to Kotler and Lee (2008) social norms marketing is based on social norms theory. Both identify what people perceive as normal or typical behavior. Social marketing turns the problem, which is a severely misperceived typical behavior or attitude, into an opportunity or a call for action to become the reality. This new reality serves as the environment for people to strive to emulate or feel safe to take an action. The San Diego Saves strategies create a safe environment for people to believe and take action through a website that tracks progress of goal setting savers and resources for partners. Social Marketing research by Kotler and Lee (2008) Andreasen (1995), Kotler and Zaltman (1971) along with the AMA's newest definition are the foundation for this examination. The most recent definition of social marketing by the American Marketing Association (2007) emphasize creation, communication, delivery and exchange. The four Ps of Marketing, product, price, place, and promotion ground the analysis and offer relevance. Partnerships within social marketing play significant role in the environment for change according to Kotler and Lee (2008) and Hastings and Donovan (2002). An adaption of the latest definition of social marketing for behavior change frames this study using the explanations by Dann (2008) to consider the campaign creation, communication, delivery, and exchange. It aligns well with the research by Wymer (2011) and Serban (2011) on related social marketing campaigns with the following assumptions of motivation, promotion and efficiency. For the sake of the San Diego Saves campaign the last variable, law effect is not used. Assumptions Descriptions Motivation / Creation Social involvement of organizations Promotion / Communication & Delivery The promotional means used Efficiency / Exchange The ability to inform and expected impact Table 1 Social Marketing Effectiveness Criteria adapted from Serban (2011), Wymer (2011) and AMA (2007) Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 538 Electronic Posters Conclusion From this analysis, the relationship between the importance of partnership and four variables: motivation, promotion, efficiency San Diego Saves offer a baseline of data and analytics that will be used to improve the campaign. Most social marketing campaigns are a means to change perceptions and improve behaviors. For this campaign, it is important to overcome the barriers to participation in saving and support those who embrace this call to action. With this review of the data San Diego Saves will create a targeted campaign that will be strategically improve its implementation. Undergraduate Researchers: The Key to What Works in Online Classes and Why Candis Pizzetta (Jackson State University, USA) Several years ago, a student in an online course I teach commented that she was enjoying my course because it was easy to navigate and to understand how her ideas could contribute to the journal that her group was creating. The journal was supposed to be a guide for students interested in learning about American modernist literature. I wondered at the time how the other students viewed the project and why they all seemed to respond to it so well. Although the students completed an end-of-semester survey about the course, their responses were likely influenced by their semester-long relationship with me as their instructor. When I later began creating another online course, I was reminded of the earlier student's comment and began to want to understand if and how I was providing a positive online experience for my students. These questions arose around the same time that I became involved in a project to train undergraduates to participate in research outside the classroom at my university. During the last year, I have worked with a group of undergraduates on an independent research project sponsored by my university's Center for Undergraduate Research. The aim of the project was twofold: to measure student perceptions of online pedagogical effectiveness and to allow the student researchers, all of whom had taken online courses, to develop their research and writing proficiency. The student researchers were interested in how students perceive the effectiveness of online learning and which strategies for online collaboration were most effective. I worked with the student researchers to help them develop a survey to assess these attitudes. I then guided them through a pilot study that included students from five online classes. The results from the pilot study answered some of the student researchers' questions and provided them with experience they will use in developing a larger study and a more refined survey. Although the undergraduate research project has potential, my focus in this presentation is not on the results of the survey but on the effect of including students in the design of research into online pedagogical effectiveness. Many educators participate in research on online learning. These educators bring with them a wealth of experience as instructors and designers of courses and curricula. Yet, very few currently practicing researchers have extensive experience as online students. The gap between faculty researchers and their often much younger student research subject is the subject of the book My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student by Rebekah Nathan, a pseudonym adopted by the researcher. Nathan writes about leaving her post Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 539 Electronic Posters as a professor of anthropology and enrolling as a student in order to study the environmental pressures on and the attitudes of post millennial students. Although Nathan's approach might be appropriate for an anthropologist, it is not feasible for most faculty researchers. In addition, even Nathan admits that she could not truly become a freshman because she brought with her years of experience as a faculty member. Yet, the idea of studying student attitudes from the student perspective is a valid one, especially as the educational framework is being restructured by online learning and digital teaching tools. Including student researchers, even undergraduate student researchers, in the design of studies on various aspects of online learning may be key to understanding what works in online classes and why. The research landscape in the field is rapidly changing. Understanding the relationship between fluid student learning experiences and research design is essential to developing more productive research methodologies. Universe of Opportunities: Strategic Classroom Use Vs. Learning Benefits Linda S. Futch (University of Central Florida, USA) Kelvin Thompson ((University of Central Florida, USA) Goals: - Identify patterns of strategic classroom management - Identify faculty mix for classroom usage and online content (pedagogy) - Identify lessons learned and replicable patterns that maximize the benefits of blended courses From an institutional perspective, blended learning can be used to maximize the use of scarce classroom space. However, faculty are drawn to blended courses to meet the needs of their students. Their ideal blend between face-to-face meetings and online work may not line up with strategic classroom management. At the University of Central Florida, we find these divergent goals playing out in a number of ways. This presentation will look at the tension between these goals and lessons learned from from a universe of opportunities. We will use interviews with administrators and faculty teaching blended courses to identify profiles and the associated outcomes. From this information, we will identify patterns and best practices that achieve the best balance between these goals. The resulting concepts may be replicated at other institutions. Using iPads for Grading and Feedback Linda Macaulay (Elizabethtown College, USA) Tired of lugging papers back and forth to school? Do you find that students can't or don't read the extensive feedback you provide on their work? Do you find that grading papers for online courses is more time consuming than if you could just write on printed papers? This poster session will demonstrate how the iPad and both free and paid apps can be used to streamline the grading and feedback process to include written and audio feedback. Bring your iPad and attendees can try this new workflow process to grade papers efficiently and with more substantive feedback for learners. Both free apps (Paperport Notes and Dragon Dictate) and paid apps (iAnnotate) will be demonstrated and reviewed. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 540 Electronic Posters Using Project Management Tools to Keep Your Online Course Design, Development and Launch on Schedule Vickie Maris (Purdue University, USA) The already fully-deployed team, creating and managing non-credit short courses in Engineering Professional Education at Purdue University, was tasked with a compressed timeline for the launch of a professional certificate series in project management designed specifically for the online environment. This informational session will give you opportunity to follow the efforts of this team as they recruited a subject matterExpert who could commit to the short timeline for development, and who agreed to teach the design team several of the project management tools that learners would be exposed to within the course. The project management tools were used in the brainstorming session, development of the revised timeline, and maintenance of the schedule for 1) course development, 2) for alpha and beta testing of the courses, 3) marketing and promotion of the new series. The launch of this new series of courses is schedule for early 2014, so you'll have opportunity to learn about what tools have worked well, which tools were not implemented, and whether or not the development and implementation is on schedule. Using Twitter to Support Doctoral Students and Faculty in the Research Process: Experience and Outcomes Marydee Spillett (Walden University, USA) Laura Knight Lynn (Walden University, USA) Context Twitter is a microblogging, social networking service. Twitter was founded in 2006 and by December 2012, Twitter had grown to serve over 200 million monthly active users. The focus of social media marketing is to use online technologies to develop rapport and build relationships with clients. Twitter is one tool in the social media marketing toolkit. Twitter is being used by a wide variety of individuals, small businesses, non-profit organizations, government, media outlets, sports and entertainment, and corporations. Twitter is one method that may enable higher education institutions to provide greater learning and teaching support to students and faculty. At Walden University, the Center for Research Quality is an academic support unit whose mission is to align, maintain, integrate, and enrich those activities that contribute to the quality and productivity of Walden University research. Accordingly, its offices formulate, coordinate, and oversee the processes that support student research capstones as well as external research conducted under the auspices of the University. To support this mission, the Center for Research Quality implemented @WaldenResearch Twitter in order to provide information and support about the research process to students, faculty, and staff. Problem At Walden University, there are over 6300 masters and doctoral students who are actively engaged in the research capstone stage of their programs. Nationally, it is estimated that about Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 541 Electronic Posters 50% of doctoral students complete their dissertations. The Center for Research Quality implemented @WaldenResearch Twitter in order to reach Walden students and faculty during the research capstone stage. The goal of this effort is to provide information and support to students and faculty who are engaged in the research process, with the ultimate outcomes of greater student retention and student success. The significance of this initiative is to improve the effectiveness of the services provided by the Center for Research Quality to Walden University students and faculty. If appropriate information and engaged connections are provided to students and faculty, this may enable students to successfully complete their research capstones and complete their studies with higher quality. This effort may also enable faculty to better support students as well as encourage faculty to conduct and publish their own research. While the use of social media may appear to be an inexpensive way to provide information to or build relationships with clients, the time investment needed to support the use of social media can be extensive. It is essential to gather information to help determine the return on investment. Approach The Center for Research Quality initiated @WaldenResearch Twitter, posting 1-2 tweets per day. Daily Twitter content included advice for staying motivated during the research process, links to resources for developing various aspects of research design, recommendations on books and strategies that were found useful, and reminders of Walden resources that support students and faculty during the dissertation process. Formative evaluation research will be implemented in order to evaluate the satisfaction of Walden students, faculty, and staff users with the @WaldenResearch Twitter and to provide evidence to inform and improve services at Center for Research Quality. The research questions include: How useful do users find the information and links provided @WaldenResearch Twitter? To what extent did @WaldenResearch Twitter enable users to feel connected to Walden? Data will be collected through online questionnaire developed by the researchers. The questionnaire contains items pertaining to: 1) demographics, 2) frequency of use of the @WaldenResearch Twitter, and 3) user satisfaction. User satisfaction is measured by a list of 7 possible informational and social outcomes, asking for user ratings on a 5-point Likert scale from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree." In addition, there are three open-ended questions to solicit additional input for future improvement. Data will be analyzed through descriptive statistics for quantitative data and reporting of content and frequency of themes for qualitative data. Results The data collection described above will be completed and results available by August 31. Implications of the findings will address the question "Is using Twitter to inform and support students and faculty worth doing?" This presentation will share the evaluation results as well as lessons learned and recommended strategies for implementation of Twitter for online student support services. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 542 Electronic Posters This session will be of interest to advisors, counselors, faculty, and administrators involved in providing advising, information, and support services for students. Session attendees will be asked to share their experiences with Twitter and to recommend resources related to providing student support services online. Session participants will be shown examples of tweets drawn from the @WaldenResearch Twitter and will be provided with a Powerpoint presentation and a bibliography of resources related to using Twitter and Twitter marketing for non-profit organizations. Utilizing Mobile Technology and the Flipped Classroom to Execute Versus Simply Propose Business Strategy in an MBA Class Douglas Nelson (Seton Hill University, USA) Seton Hill University has earned national recognition as the first University to give every undergraduate student an iPad. Many of our undergraduate courses integrate the iPad into their curriculum and classroom. My effort focused on bringing this technology into our MBA program with a focus on extending and enhancing the learning experience for our students in a course structure, which spans only 8 weeks. The MBA Capstone course integrates business skills, strategic thinking skills, and competencies developed throughout the program. Students have been able to assess and develop business strategy but did not have the opportunity to execute or "test" their strategy. Would their new strategy actually improve financial performance such as Earnings per share (EPS) and Return on Equity (ROE)? Was the selection of a specific competitive strategy (i.e., Focus Differentiation) the right decision? The integration of business simulation software and mobile technology into the course where student teams compete headto-head over a simulated 6 year period assessing, applying, and adjusting business strategy has enabled "Strategy" execution and transformed the learning experience. The adoption of business simulation software, which supported a collaborative environment in and out of the classroom with mobile technology and select strategic thinking tools, has proven to be powerful combination that engages students and puts theory into practice beyond the traditional case study. Utilizing the Community of Inquiry Framework to Examine Military Student Success in a Fully Online Environment Angela M. Gibson (American Public University System, USA) Rob Mitchell (American Public University System, USA) From 2010 to 2011 there has been an increase of 570,000 postsecondary students taking online courses. In 2011, over six million students were enrolled in at least one online course with a total enrollment of 32% nationwide, an approximately 20% increase in online enrollment in higher education since 2002 (Allen & Seaman, 2012). Through the capacity of the Web, students aspiring for a higher education now have greater accessibility and a wider array of choices. The preponderance of literature in higher education provides great detail into how the demographic characteristics of college students affect or are related to student engagement and student satisfaction at two-year and four-year institutions (Braxton, 2000; Kuh, 2007; McCabe, 2000; "National Survey", 2006; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991, 2005; Tinto, 1993, 2004). Based on such research studies, providing evidence of connection, colleges and universities have Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 543 Electronic Posters developed and implemented policies and programs designed to address gaps in satisfaction and learning that target specific demographic populations. However, these studies use populations from traditional brick and mortar institutions using face to face learning. Online education at postsecondary institutions is frequently pursued by both male and female members of the military as they work towards a degree of their choice while being based, deployed, active, or veteran. Unfortunately, there is very sparse research in the body of literature concerning active military and military affiliated students. Particularly, there is a void of research on military students and online learning. The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework includes three presences, teaching, cognitive, and social, encompassing the educational experiences of the online learner. Tested, validated, and used for development, instruction, assessment, and evaluation, (Arbaugh, Cleveland-Innes, Diaz, Garrison, Ice, Richardson, Shea, & Swan, 2008) the CoI guides practitioners in their creation and application of methods and tools that can support student learning and add to the opportunities students have for deeper engagement in the course, increased academic success, and continued persistence in their education (Arbaugh, Cleveland-Innes, Diaz, Garrison, Ice, Richardson, & Swan, 2009). Three main components, or presences, provide the structure of the CoI Framework: teaching presence; social presence; and cognitive presence (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000; Swan, Richardson, Ice, Garrison, Cleveland-Innes, & Arbaugh, 2008). Design, facilitation, and direction laid out for the cognitive and social presences create the navigational map for a learner. The instructional elements of the teaching presence must connect the student meaningfully to learning outcomes. Activities within the course, the framework of the discussion and flow of facilitation, as well as contact with students through direction instruction, focusing and resolving issues, complete the presence (Garrison et al., 2000). In this study 103,166 cases from a large national fully online university were examined to determine if a relationship was present for student characteristics, e.g. military and civilian students, for the three CoI presences. Additional, researchers examined if a relationship was present between the student characteristics of military students, e.g., student gender and age, the three CoI presences. Data from 18 months of end of course surveys for both undergraduate and graduate courses was obtained for this study. The institution as a whole serves military, military affiliated, and civilian students with over 90% of students over the age of 24. Data were analyzed in three separate linear regressions, using the forward method of entry. In the regressions, mean scores for aggregated teaching, social and cognitive Presence items served as the criterion variable. Predictor variables consisted of a binary variable military versus civilian status, a binary variable representing military versus civilian status, and age expressed as a continuous variable. One significant advantage of using linear regression is that it provides a coefficient of determination. The term coefficient of determination refers to a statistic that defines the percentage of variance explained for by the predictor variables. For this reason, the coefficient of determination (expressed as Adjusted R2 in regression) helps program directors and administrators decide how heavily to use the results in guiding their Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 544 Electronic Posters decision-making for programmatic improvement. Further, the forward method was used to order predictor variables by their relative statistical significance and variance accounted for in the predictive model. Analyses of data showed a significant relationship between demographics and CoI presences (social, teaching, and cognitive) and the demographic variable of military service. Unsurprisingly for a sample this large the ANOVA results produced a p value of .000 for all combinations of military service and CoI Presences. To further determine relative contributions of each of the predictor variables a linear regression was performed. Criterion variables; cognitive, teaching, and social presences were tested against predictor variables of age and gender from the population of military students. From the regression using forward method analysis produced Adjusted R2 with .003 or less. The relevance of the significance has limited values as the variance accounted for by the predictor variables was so small as to have no practical implications. A theme so pervasive in the literature for student success in higher education is not significant in this study. Student demographics is not a factor in the satisfaction of military students. There is no significance in the relationship between academically purposeful activities, demographic variables, and the military student. Establishing any connection, or not, with the level of the three CoI presences and student demographic characteristics illuminates an additional component to working with students in an online community. Additionally, such information may shed light on the potential directions for and the effectiveness of programs and initiatives designed to decrease attrition. A one size fits all policy may not prove valuable. Providing educational opportunities to those who serve their country can be a gratifying experience to faculty as well as the institution as a whole. With a significant increase in the student soldier population in higher education, it is necessary to determine through research if institutions, and the community of education as a whole, are best meeting their academic and intellectual needs. Further research at universities who provide online or blended learning to the military or military affiliated student is critical. Determining factors that increase student success is essential. Virtual Learning Labs: The Evolution of Blended Learning in Florida Liz Chico (Florida Virtual School, USA) Florida districts are leveraging Florida Virtual School's award-winning courses and highly qualified, student-centered teachers to implement successful Blended Learning programs in their schools. What started as a need to meet class size limitations and new online course requirements for graduation has evolved into innovative scalable models for more than just public high schools. This session will give an overview of the planning, personnel, training, cooperation, leadership, instructional models and support involved in managing Virtual Learning Labs© in nearly 400 Florida schools in cooperation with Florida Virtual School. Two of the top 10 largest school districts in the nation are levering the Expertise of Florida Virtual School to assist them in Blended Learning campuses. In this session we will explore the Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 545 Electronic Posters planning, training, and teaching and learning as they relate to both the virtual and the traditional schools. Our labs are not simply rooms of kids learning online; instead, they are engaged in synchronous instructional opportunities, are guided through the course by a facilitator in the school, regularly receive visits from virtual school Blended Learning specialists and teachers, and receive help in real time. What Educators From Different Learning Environments Think About Open Educational Resources Hope Kelly (University of Florida, USA) Nicole Stedman (University of Florida, USA) This session explores the influence of self-efficacy and outcome judgment, from social cognitive learning theory, on the adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER). Research findings from an online survey conducted from January to March 2013 are presented. The Technology Acceptance Model is used as a framework to analyze cognitive interactions that lead to integrating OER into the professional practice of educators from different settings. Path analysis confirms model fitness and indicates a strong effect between the technical quality of an OER and its perceived usefulness. A discriminant function analysis is used to delve deeper in understanding particular differences among K-12, higher education, and workplace training professionals in their attitudes about the usefulness of OER. The K-12 audience is identified as having a high regard for the usefulness of OER in relation to their work. This finding is interpreted as OER meeting a need for quality resources among K-12 educators who may have less access to up to date digital resources on topics relevant to their instruction. Recommendations for the design of OER to improve perceived ease of use and instructional messaging for K-12 educators conclude the discussion. This session will be of particular interest for those involved in improving the formal use of OER by educators and training professionals. When It Comes to Plagiarism - Nationality Matters! Results of an Empirical Study Kathleen M. Kelm (University of Liverpool/ Laureate Online Education, UK) The Chinese culture has often been associated with plagiarism (Pennycook 1996). However, most of the research done on plagiarism and nationality issues was qualitative in nature or used a small sample (Hayes & Introna, 2005). This study presents a quantitative research showing that nationality has an influence on plagiarism and that African and Middle East/Gulf students plagiarise at a higher rate than other students. The University of Liverpool (UoL) and its eLearning partner Laureate have been offering online degree programmes for several years now. In the programmes that include master and doctorate-level degrees in a number of areas (Management, Information Technology, Law, Public Health, Clinical Research, Education, etc.) study thousands of students from all around the world using a paradigm of €œany place, any time. Similarly to other UK Universities (Dick et al. 2002, Dutta, 2012), UoL is dealing with many plagiarism cases ranging from simple cut-and-paste cases to buying academic work from paper mills. The extent of the phenomena is disturbing: during the study period (2010-2011) 3841 incidents were reported in the various programmes, with a little over 20% of the students caught Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 546 Electronic Posters plagiarizing in their first year.In an attempt to reduce the plagiarism rate, steps to support the faculty and students have been taken, including updating the academic honesty policy, faculty training, student education and support, including a focused targeting of new students. As part of the effort, a quantitative study of the plagiarism incidents was conducted.This recent study, looking at all new master-level students in a period of two years shows that the rate of students plagiarizing in their first year of studies differs significantly for some nationalities. Students from Africa and the Middle East/Gulf countries plagiarise significantly more than students from other areas of the world, including China, while students from USA and Canada plagiarise the least. The difference is as high as 17% between the rate of plagiarizing students from USA/Canada (10.3%) and Africa (26.9%)! Furthermore, the rate of Plagiarism in Africa (26.9%) and the Gulf (25.4%) was also much higher (more than 9% significant difference) than other non-English speaking countries such as Latin America (17.8%) or Europe (Western Europe 10.9%, Eastern Europe 15.5%). The presenter will share the methodology of the study and its results, including: 1. Significant differences between countries and continents/geographical areas. 2. Significant differences between programmes of study (Management, Computing, Law, Health, etc.). 3. Additional analysis of demographics tested (gender, age, language). 4. Comparison with additional national integrity indices (English Proficiency Index, International Property Rights Index, and Economic Inequality). 5. Support from qualitative research about the cultural views of our students from Nigeria regarding plagiarism (Szilagyi, 2013) 6. Additional on-going research of our students from other regions of the world suggest that, Western ideas, such as originality and plagiarism, are extraneous in the student’s local cultures (Szilagyi, 2013). 7. Future directions of research:  Potential application of the findings.  Finalize, a review of the reasons for plagiarism with a focus on International students will be carried out.  Some suggestions for the source of these differences will be made.  Sharing the experiences and results of the recent plagiarism prevention efforts. References: Dick, M., Sheard, J., Bareiss, C., Carter, J., Joyce, D, Harding, T., Laxer, C. (2002) Addressing student cheating: definitions and solutions, ITiCSE 2002 working group report, pp.172-184, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/960568.783000. Dutta K. (2012), 45,000 Caught cheating at Britain's universities, The Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/45000-caught-cheating-atbritains-universities-7555109.html. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 547 Electronic Posters Hayes, N., Introna, L. D. (2005), Cultural Values, Plagiarism, and Fairness: When Plagiarism Gets in the Way of Learning, ETHICS & BEHAVIOR, 15(3), 213-231. Pennycook, A. (1996). Borrowing others words: Text, ownership, memory and plagiarism. TESOL Quarterly, 30, 210-230. Szilagyi, A. (2013, unpublished), Nigerian Students’ Perceptions and Cultural Meaning Construction regarding Academic Integrity in the Online International Classroom British Academy of Management (approved, peer reviewed paper for presentation and publication) Who's Afraid of Google Apps? Miriam Russell (SUNY Empire State College, USA) Pauline Chhooi (SUNY Empire State College, USA) Guided by Power Point slides, and electronic tutorials, attendees who view our session will learn how to build on Word document skills to create, record and provide feedback on student assignments in Google Docs, Spreadsheets, and Drawings. We'll share our excitement with the power of Google Apps using voice comments and visuals that close the transactional distance gap in online learning. This electronic poster will feature Google Drive apps that appeal toAll student learning preferences. Discover how the power of Google apps provides individualized auditory and visual feedback that promotes student autonomy. Stop at our table at any time during the session to see how to use Google tools for research and source citations as well as individualized formative feedback on course assignments. Why 92% of New Online Students Found the Interactive Online Student Orientation Useful? Sarah Fornero (Adler School of Professional Psyschology, USA) William Gutierrez (Adler School of Professional Psyschology, USA) Adler School launched its 100% online programs in Fall 2011. An online student orientation was created with the vision to duplicate the experience of on-campus students have during their onground orientation. This session willdemonstrate the interactive online orientation;explain the process of creating the online orientation;explain how the co-ordination was done to get members involved from Academic Program, Department of Training and Community Engagement, Department of Student Affairs, Adler Online, Technology Department, Office of the Registrar, Department of Financial Aid, Office of Student Accounts, Harold and Birdie Mosak Library, and Center for Learning and Teaching; andhow Moodle as the Learning Management System, Web 2.0 resources for synchronous collaboration and multimedia presentations were used to engage students. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 548 Electronic Posters Wiki Away Procrastination by Tapping Your Inner Zombies Barbara Oakley (Oakland University, USA) Christopher Kobus (Oakland University, USA) Background: We have surveyed over 1,000 students at our home institution (Oakland University, in Rochester, Michigan), about their academic challenges, particularly regarding studies in the STEM disciplines. Procrastination was found to be the key challenge faced by students. In fact, other researchers have found that procrastination has become a general problem in the population, worsened by smartphones, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other technological attractions.Procrastination researcher Piers Steel notes: "Estimates indicate that 80%-95% of college students engage in procrastination-- approximately 75% consider themselves procrastinators-- and almost 50% procrastinate consistently and problematically. The absolute amount of procrastination is considerable, with students reporting that it typically occupies over one third of their daily activities, often enacted through sleeping, playing, or TV watching... Furthermore, these percentages appear to be on the rise ... In addition to being endemic during college, procrastination is also widespread in the general population, chronically affecting some 15%-20% of adults." (Steel, P. "The nature of procrastination: a meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure." Psychological Bulletin 133, no. 1 (2007): 6594.) Students often do not understand how harmful procrastination can be, particularly in the STEM disciplines, where new neural structures must be built bit-by-bit over lengthy periods of time. Students are also unaware that relying solely on willpower is often the worst approach to managing habits of procrastination. Instead, we have found that enlisting habit and peer pressure through Wikis and the Pomodoro (timer) method makes a powerful difference in students' ability to improve their work habits. The Session “What Participants Will Learn and Do”: In this session, participants will learn of Oakland University's experiences in teaching incoming STEM students about the cognitive processes that underlie their desire to procrastinate – including all-important "zombie" habits of procrastination (centered out of the caudate nucleus) which they will tap into and change. Participants will see how individual Wikis with commentary can be set up and used to help students gain a better understanding of their unwitting habits of procrastination. Through this education-coupled-with-Wiki methodology, not only can individual attitudes towards procrastination be changed, general cultural attitudes about procrastination within the classes as a whole are found to improve. As will be described, these cultural changes can translate into important improvements in institutional retention, as well as retention within the vital STEM disciplines. Participants in this session will actively brainstorm with one another how to integrate procrastination prevention educational materials and Wikis into their own classes. What Participants Will Take Away: Participants will gain a new understanding of how to use Wikis as well as student teamwork activities to directly address and help prevent procrastination. They will also gain an understanding of the impact of procrastination on student performance and retention. Why Should Participants Attend? Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 549 Electronic Posters Educators often do not realize the impact of procrastination on students' ability to succeed. If you want to improve the success rate of students in your class, improve retention at your institution, and perhaps even grapple with a few of your own procrastination issues, this session is for you. (Pssst, and we also have fun with zombies!) You Earned a Degree, Now What? Building Job Marketability with WordPress ePortfolios Michael Szapkiw (Liberty University, USA) Graduating students enter the job market hoping to find the perfect job they have been training for throughout their years in school. But graduating students often find that there can be thousands of others competing for that same perfect job. So what will help them stand out in the crowd? And how can educators help? One solution is to create a learning environment with the potential to meet course objectives and equip students with a practical tool to find distinction in an often crowded job market. The solution I will discuss is eportfolios created with the software WordPress. Eportfolios (or electronic portfolios), like traditional portfolios, add a new dimension to learning and can provide new opportunities for students to enhance their learning, to increase selfdevelopment, and to consolidate their learning artifacts. Those artifacts can provide tangible proof to a prospective employer that a student has the skills and abilities necessary to be successful in and offer significant value to that prospective employer. In the least, an eportfolio can function as an online resume for a student. At its greatest, an eportfolio offers a full expression of an individual's professional identity and technical competency in this digital age, and it promotes the individual above others when he or she has a professional online presence and other candidates do not. Not only do eportfolios provide a means for students to TELL professors, peers, and prospective employers who they are and what they can do to benefit others, eportfolios also provide a means for students to SHOW their experience, talents, and skills through media-rich websites using videos, audio, photos, and even active learning units and educational resources they have created. Employers are no longer just looking at resumes. They are online, searching Google with prospective employee names, and finding reasons to hire (or not hire) your students. When those employers search for your students online after receiving an application, what will they find? Give your students an edge in the job market with an eportfolio that is wholly owned by them. A student with their own website eportfolio that is branded with his or her name and that can be kept and maintained for a lifetime will become a lifelong asset. This can be easily achieved with a student-created eportfolio using WordPress as a content management system. In this presentation, I will share examples of eportfolios created with WordPress. I will demonstrate how to setup a WordPress website with a custom domain name. I will focus on the self-hosted version of WordPress, which means users have the ability to choose a personalized domain name - not one that has "WordPress.com" at the end of the URL. I will also discuss how Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 550 Electronic Posters to implement a WordPress eportfolio throughout a student's coursework that gets the student to incrementally build the eportfolio while also meeting course objectives. Who will benefit most from this presentation? Anyone who understands the significance of eportfolios, wants a self-promotional tool to share online with others, and/or is interested in learning about WordPress as an eportfolio solution for their students or for themselves will benefit the most from this presentation. Who should avoid this presentation? Anyone who is uncomfortable with learning new technology, cannot do basic editing in a word processor, and/or despises the thought of personal or professional information being publicly available online should avoid this presentation. Participants will leave the presentation with a Web resource that will have all the information shared in the session, as well as links to free training, tutorials, and resources for using WordPress. You Say You Know It? Prove It! Brian Worden (Capella University, USA) Currently, Capella University is engaged with the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) in the application process for formal accreditation of two direct assessment programs. Capella University is one of four universities in the country chosen to participate in the HLC's direct assessment pilot group for full program accreditation as highlighted in recent Inside Higher Ed article from the April 17th issue, titled, Big Disruption, Big Questions. The panel discussion will engage participants through candor and open dialogue about the academic, philosophical, technical, and operational tsunami that comes with implementing a competency-based direct assessment learning model. The opportunities (and headaches) are virtually limitless with a shift in paradigm of this scope. We will discuss the decisions that needed to be made, the rationale behind those decisions, and the results of those decisions during our deep-dive into direct assessment program implementation. Participants are encouraged to engage with the panelists in frank discussion about direct assessment models. This session is a must for anyone involved with an institution that is considering developing a direct assessment program. We will tackle issues ranging from the miniscule to the mammoth. How do you evaluate competency in a direct assessment program? How do you validate the integrity of the assessments? Can our systems support this? Will employers value a degree earned using direct assessment? Last but not least, we will answer questions and provide tips for navigating the rigorous yet murky regulatory criteria for accreditation of direct assessment programs. Participating panelists will represent the core aspects of direct assessment program development including: academic innovation, learning analytics, curriculum and course design, and university operations. This will be an open discussion addressing the good, the bad, and everything in between as it pertains to direct assessment. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 551 Electronic Posters Participants can expect to walk away from this session with a fundamental understanding of competency-based direct assessment programs, an understanding of the extent of the paradigm shift that must take place to successfully implement a direct assessment program, and an understanding of the academic, regulatory, technical, and operational perspectives of direct assessment program implementation and administration. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 552 Vendor Showcases Developing Your Online Strategy Gerald M. DiGiusto (Eduventures, USA) Hallie Boger Hartman (Eduventures, USA) Join Eduventures to discuss steps you can take to ensure your online strategy positions you as an educational leader by enabling you to extend your reach and provide faculty, students, and communities with new modalities of working and learning. Hear about best practices that high performing and successful institutions use to engage and support the campus community, optimize the academic portfolio, maximize the return on infrastructure investments, and leverage online delivery to support your strategic priorities. This session will address how to develop a sophisticated and sustainable strategic plan for online learning that achieves enrollment growth and pedagogic innovation and improved learning outcomes. Learn how Eduventures can help you achieve success in a changing online marketplace! Levering Mobile Devices in Complex Course Configurations to Verify Student Engagement Towards Learning Outcomes Derrick Meer (Via Response Technologies, Inc., USA) Adam Wandt (The City University of New York, USA) Real-time learning analytics provide instructors with data that verifies student performance in hybrid, large lecture and distance-based courses. Observing students behavior in these complex course configurations, in both the aggregate and real-time, is essential to the process of creating effective pedagogies that ensure learning outcomes are achieved. Even more importantly, student performance data is becoming a mandatory requirement for accreditation of complex course configurations. Come learn how Via Response provides instructors and administrators with real-time student performance analytics that validate progression towards learning objectives and accreditation metrics in very large lecture, hybrid and distance courses. The Evolution of Online Science Nicholas Benedict (eScience Labs, USA) Science education is challenged by the demands and rapid growth of online education. The reality of offering lab-based science courses via online formats has lead college educators and administrators to consider and discuss the fundamentals of a science lab experience. This informational session will outline the current landscape of online lab science courses and discuss emerging trends. Come prepared to engage with other education professionals and discuss your own experiences and questions. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 553 Vendor Showcases Leveraging Technology to Improve Financial Literacy Education Kris Alban (iGrad.com, USA) Our Government has recently taken a hard stance on financial literacy, saying that “financial education should be as fundamental as the education we are all required to receive in U.S. history and government.” Unfortunately, limited resources have made it difficult for many colleges to provide this for all of their students. This session will examine the numerous ways that colleges are leveraging technology to deliver a more personalized, more effective personal finance education to their students. To Flip or Not to Flip: The First Comprehensive Study of Flipped Classrooms Sean Brown (Sonic Foundry, USA) It’s easy to picture a traditional classroom “a lecturing professor with rows of students watching, listening and taking notes”. But that age-old model is turning a cartwheel in some of the best classrooms in academia. And chances are someone in your department is already flipping their classroom. Join Sonic Foundry, the educational technology leader, as they walk you through the most comprehensive study that’s been done on flipped classrooms, and learn about the technologies to launch your flipped initiative. Measuring Grit Mac Adkins (SmarterServices.com, USA) How do you measure grit? Do students who seem to have more grit really make better grades, feel more satisfied, participate more fully and enroll more regularly? Research reveals that students often drop out of college courses due to non-cognitive factors such as their availability of time, support from family, levels of motivation, willingness to ask for help, technical skills, etc. Learn about how schools measure and remediate these non-cognitive factors. Stylus Publishing and our new Online Learning and Distance Ed. Series Sarah Burrows (Stylus Publishing, LLC, USA) Michael Moore (Stylus Publishing, LLC, USA) Shaqunia Clark (Stylus Publishing, LLC, USA) Stylus publishes books that focus on higher education and inclusive teaching in K-12. Our higher education program covers an array of areas such as teaching and learning, online learning, leadership and administration, etc. Our new Online Learning and Distance Education series aims to publish practical titles in all sectors as a means of self-managed professional development. With Michael Moore at the helm of this series and the collective contribution from top-shelf authors, this series will provide the quality of resources needed for study, research, practice, and training. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 554 Vendor Showcases International Enrollment and the Rise of Global Student Mobility Jonathan Shores (PlattForm, USA) Jon Gaunt (PlattForm, USA) This presentation will explore trends for the large “and growing” number of globally mobile students around the world. International enrollment trends will be highlighted, with a particular focus on the U.S. Topics include a discussion of the U.S. as both the top education destination in the world and as an exporter of students for short-term programs. Trends, Innovations and Solutions in Online Education for for Secondary and Developmental Programs Daniel Kalef (Edgenuity, USA) Finding new and better ways to use technology in, and independent of the classroom in middle school, high school and college developmental programs is more important than ever. As more and more secondary school districts are moving toward offering fully online and blended courses and programs, the need for courses that are interactive, innovative and show results is more important than ever. At the same time, the epidemic of students entering college in need of remediation is reaching historic levels. Edgenuity has been at the forefront of online education for the past 15 years and has solutions to solve these problems. This session will demonstrate some of the best practices and tools available. Quick Start to Captioning Tole Khesin (3Play Media, USA) This session will cover the basics of captioning for accessible online video, including captioning basics, applicable accessibility laws, as well as best practices for creating captions, the use of different captions formats, video player compatibility, impact of HTML5 and mobile devices, and workflow options for lecture capture and video platforms. Also, we will demonstrate the latest technologies that leverage captions to make video searchable and interactive. UMUC: Doctor of Management in Community College Policy and Administration Patricia Keir (University of Maryland University College, USA) The Doctor of Management in Community College Leadership and Policy program is cohortbased and draws students from a wide variety of community colleges throughout the nation. Unlike many doctoral programs, in this program, the doctoral dissertation research and writing courses are staggered throughout the program and provide a highly structured, highly mentored process designed to help students avoid the dreaded "ABD." In this presentation, the unique research approach of the program, the curriculum, the qualifications of the faculty, the executive leadership coaching segment, and the results of student graduate evaluations will be highlighted. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 555 Vendor Showcases Maintaining Exam Integrity in Distance Education Lily Turnquist (Kryterion, USA) Online proctoring and authentication are important to maintain quality and academic integrity in online learning and have a significant impact upon your institutions future accreditation and compliance. Know your options and learn what questions to ask in regard to FERPA compliancy, authentication and various methods of online proctoring. Discover some of Kryterion's newest developments and innovative concepts in online proctoring and authentication. Revolutionize Education Using Video Grenville Gooder (Kaltura, USA) Video is revolutionizing education. Your institution is likely either already engaged in or looking to expand into blended learning, remote learning, on-demand personalized learning, competence based learning, MOOCs, flipped classrooms and social learning. What do these new forms of learning have in common? They are all powered by online video. So how can you effectively introduce this kind of programs into your institution? In this presentation you will learn how to plan and execute an effective video management solution acorss campus for the various departments and their needs. Improve the Integrity of Your Academic Programs with Identity Authentication Dan Zurawski (Authentify, Inc., USA) Jennifer isn’t ready for her online test. Will your courseware know Ed did her a favor? The 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) requires distance education institutions to have formal processes to validate student identity but do not give suggestions on how to authenticate students. Dan will discuss the HEOA and how to make certain the online student is the same student throughout the entire online course. Discover and Implement Open Educational Resources (OER) as Primary Course Content Lida Hasbrouck (Ginkgotree, USA) Faculty and instructional designers use Ginkgotree Bundles to bring all their course content together seamlessly online as an interactive alternative to the traditional textbook. Students actively access every type of resource, annotate documents, and interact with peers all in their Ginkgotree Bundle. What you get for attending:  Ginkgotree’s OER Guide showcasing top online content  Best practices for OER discovery  Instructional designer, faculty and student perspectives of using OER in Ginkgotree Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 556 Vendor Showcases Ginkgotree is preferred over traditional etextbook or course pack solutions because any variety of copyrighted content, webpages, streaming online media, lecture videos, and worksheets can be united in a Bundle. A "ClearPath" to Student Success: Engaging throughout the Student Lifecyle Gunnar Counselman (Fidelis Education, USA) Sharon van Wyk (American Public University System, USA) Michelle Newman (American Public University System, USA) Preview American Public University System's innovative social engagement platform, ClearPath, that supports student success from application to classroom to graduation to job interview.Join us for this special Diamond Sponsor Product Demonstration We Gamified this Session! Family Feud: Getting Online Faculty & Administrators on the Same Page Kevin Kelly (Wiley Larning Institute, USA) Join us for a fun session where faculty and administrators will uncover the most pressing issues in online teaching and learning. The winning team will win one-year subscriptions to Wiley Learning Institute workshops! Differentiate yourself with a graduate degree from Nova Southeastern University! Melissa Ruidiaz (Nova Southeastern University, USA) Today’s job market is competitive! Set yourself apart by earning a graduate degree in technology. Join our showcase to explore the graduate degree programs offered at Nova Southeastern University’s Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences. Come learn about us as we want to learn more about you! University Marketing - Art or Science? Lynne Koreman (Colloquy, USA) Marketing used to be an art with beautiful images and meaningful messages but couple that with data analytics and an internet that lets you track everything and now marketing has become a science too. The marriage of art and science has made marketing more powerful than ever in its ability to understand and drive interest in online programs. How do you find the right marketing creative, media mix, and tools to drive interest, ensure right fit of student to program and program to student, and prepare candidates for life as an online student?Join a discussion not just about marketing and recruiting best practices but how to drive theory into action with real-world examples and case studies that allow you to drive qualified and prepared applicants into successful students who graduate.This session will be relevant to online program directors, administrators, marketers, and recruiting and retention teams. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 557 Vendor Showcases Remote Proctoring Solutions: Where Technology and True Integrity Intersect Steve Lesser (Software Secure, Inc., USA) An institution’s online education strategy is only as good as the quality of the degree programs that drive it. Trusted proctoring solutions have become essential tools for authenticating the identities of online students, assuring that students are taking exams without cheating, and assessing student performance effectively. But it can be a challenge deciding which solution is the best fit for your institution. Join us for a discussion where we’ll present data that supports why a technology-driven strategy reigns supreme for offering institutions the most cost-effective, affordable, scalable and efficient online test proctoring. Automated Course Scheduling and Balancing Gwen Hall (American Public University System, USA) Course scheduling can be complicated and challenging with monthly class starts, future enrollment predictions, faculty workload considerations, and analytic reporting needs. American Public University System€™s Automated Course Scheduling and Balancing System (ACBS) methodologically tracks, manages, and predicts scheduling requirements. Create Once, Use Anywhere - Content in the Cloud David Evans (SoftChalk LLC, USA) Learn how SoftChalk Cloud is leading the revolution that is enabling educators to create and transform their own learning materials into engaging, interactive learning experiences for students.See how easy it is to create one and use anywhere. This means you can create one learning content item and use it in multiple courses, or even in multiple learning management systems. You can even track student score results from a single content item directly into multiple courses, in multiple LMSs, simultaneously! If you think it takes too much time, or that you don't have the skills to create engaging, interactive content - think again! See how easy it is to use SoftChalk's 25 interactive activity templates. Find and embed rich media including images, videos and web widgets. Assess how well your students are grasping your material by adding point values to activities and tracking student results. In this presentation, I will discuss the importance of the Cloud as it applies to digital learning content - how it differs from digital learning content of the past, and the "how" and "why" of transitioning to Cloud-based learning content. Cloud-based e-learning content is: portable, discoverable, customizable; gives educators and institutions more control over their content, is more engaging, interactive and effective for learners, is more granular, portable and organized in ways that are easier to maintain and customize, can be more easily deployed in new contexts, recombined and restructured to address multiple learning modalities. Goals/Objectives -What are the features of SoftChalk Cloud & cloud-based learning content -How cloud-based content enables easier creation, management and reuse of content Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 558 Vendor Showcases -The "Why" and "How" of transitioning to a cloud-based learning content system Proctoring Online Exams: Navigating your Options Eli Adler (Voice Proctor, USA) Ariel Rosen (Voice Proctor, USA) As schools add more and more online classes, it’s essential that they can be sure that online exams have the same credibility as pen and paper exams taken in a conventional exam setting. How is your school ensuring the integrity of its online exams? Can you be certain who is taking an exam online? Do you want to add proctoring to your online exams but not sure where to start? In this session we will cover some of the information that you to need to help you make an informed decision when choosing an online proctoring service. Innovative Solutions for the Future of Learning Adam Kloza (McGraw-Hill Education, USA) Student success, teaching excellence, affordability, and an effective digital transformation paththese four principles build the foundation of McGraw-Hill Education's learning solutions. Come learn how adaptive learning software, lecture capture, eBook partnerships, course redesign, and more, are improving student readiness and retention, and advancing the quality of education. How Subject-Specific Study Skills Improve a Student's Ability to Learn Math Online Paul Nolting (Academic Success Press, USA) Improving math success is now a national issue in high schools, colleges and universities due to the low math success rate and time needed to complete math sequences. Institutional and organizations such as the Carnegie Foundation, American Math Association for Two Year Colleges, National Center for Developmental Education, National Council of Teachers of Mathematic and others are looking for solutions. Learning math online is expanding through virtual high school, high school courses, home schools and in support of STEM programs. Colleges and Universities are expanding math online learning through required online homework, online reading, online testing, emporium lab model and other online math learning components. Business are also having their employees to improve their math skills need for certain project through online leearning. However, many high schools, colleges and universities need to improve math success rates by making the students "online ready for math learning" which requires them to learn how to use online resources because they were never taught how to learn math let alone how to learn math from online resources. As any well-seasoned math instructor will readily attest, over the last decade the Internet has forever changed the way students at all levels learn and apply mathematics. Not only are students and employees taking an increasing number of traditional math courses and math lab based courses that are supplemented with online homework and additional resources, they are taking entirely Web-based math courses.With this in mind, today's math students face a number of new and formidable challenges.Learning math online requires Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 559 Vendor Showcases high levels of concentration and self-motivation. This means the negative behaviors that have always plagued math students - namely procrastination and self-doubt - are even more dangerous to those learning math online. Because of these factors, it is no longer enough to merely teach students the math itself. In order to succeed. students must learn unique, subject-specific math study skills that will help them take control of their own learning. The objective of this presentation is to provide:    Information about a successful supplemental Web-based program that is custom designed to improve math success by teaching students dedicated Web-based math study skills, persistence Test anxiety reduction strategies. According to Benjamin Bloom (1976) the variables that mot affect achievement in math are cognitive entry skills and intelligence (50%), quality of instruction (25%) and affective characteristics (25%). These three areas mainly focus on math placement and the ability to learn. They also involve math instruction/tutoring (now online), as well as study skills, motivation, persistence and test anxiety (Nolting, 2011). This session will demonstrate through a Web-based program how to assess these affective characteristics. It will also demonstrate how to assess math calculation skills and math learning styles. The website features nine research-based modules to improve online math study skills in the areas of reading, completing homework, taking notes, time management, memory techniques, procrastination and test-taking skills. Additional modules focus on reducing test anxiety and the reasons why learning math pays off. The website also features chapters from the award-winning "Winning at Math" textbook, which is the only math study skills text to featured research and videos written and hosted by Dr. Paul Nolting - an award-winning national math expert.Participants will have a chance to ask questions and contribute to the discussion. Participants will leave this presentation with a better understanding of the variables that affect math online learning and how to improve the success of students using these online resources to improve their math grades. Respondus Monitor & LockDown Browser: Protect the Integrity of Online Tests Nick Laboda (Respondus, Inc., USA) This information-packed session shows how to maintain the integrity of online exams within both proctored and non-proctored environments. Two products will be demonstrated: LockDown Browser and Respondus Monitor. Collectively, they lock down the computer (no printing, copying, accessing other applications) and use webcam technology to ensure integrity of online exams. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 560 Vendor Showcases Time to Adapt: A Discussion for Innovative Instructors Hank Bowman (Adapt Courseware, USA) Adapt Courseware is a comprehensive online curriculum resource that personalizes the education experience so you can achieve measurable learning outcomes, increased student retention and higher student and instructor satisfaction. Adaptive learning is changing the way students engage with their courses, their instructors and each other. Adapt Courseware is at the forefront of this learning evolution. Based on years of research, Adapt Courseware's teams of academics and developers understand how students learn, how they want to learn, and how they can more effectively learn. Using proven learning science principles and advanced multimedia techniques, Adapt Courseware individualizes the learning experience for each and every student while eliminating the textbook entirely. Content is designed from the beginning to be adaptive and reaches students based on their own abilities and academic needs. The result is validated research showing double digit improvements in outcomes and retention. Come see for yourself how Adapt Courseware can create a more rewarding experience for the instructor and the student. Transforming the Educational Environment Through Digital Course Materials Ginny Harbold (Courseload, USA) Ryan Hively (Courseload, USA) This session will dive into how Courseload’s approach to digital course materials is helping institutions address challenges, such as:  Improving faculty and student engagement with a common toolset for all course content.  Enhancing pedagogy through the delivery of content in support of various learning styles and abilities.  Creating the conditions for the lowest cost for proprietary eTextbooks through aggregated demand.  Allowing instructors to supplement traditional materials with low-cost alternatives, such as open educational resources and faculty-generated content.  Enabling immediate access to all course materials to support full-term learning.  Increasing student retention and success through real-time analytics around reading and engagement. 10 EdTech Startups That Are Making a Difference Now Mikal Belicove (Today's Campus Magazine, USA) President Obama's recent decision to combat rising college costs and make college affordable means that a rating system will be established so students and families have the information they need to select schools that provide the best value. Once this ratings system is established, Congress will tie federal student aid to college performance so that students maximize their aid at institutions providing the best value. Savvy college and university administrators need to start preparing for the new rating system now, and the 10 EdTech startups profiled in this presentation “as chosen by the editorial staff of Today’s Campus Magazine” can help. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 561 Vendor Showcases Noel-Levitz: Three Data Elements You Need to Know About Your Online Learners Julie Bryant (Noel-Levitz, USA) This session will identify three data points available from Noel-Levitz assessment tools that will help you recruit and retain online learners. There are three critical data elements you should gather from your online learners in order to: 1. Know what recruitment messages to highlight 2. Connect students with the services they need to be successful 3. Make the right improvements to the educational experience to keep the online students enrolled in your program. National data for these elements from nontraditional students will provide insight on trends in priorities. Suggestions for the best ways to gather these data will be provided and examples on ways institutions are using this type of data will also be provided. “No One Wants to be Taught by Faceless Robots” Keeping the Human Element in Your Online Courses with TechSmith Jason Valade (TechSmith, USA) Matt Dennis (TechSmith, USA) Online learning brings your knowledge and expertise to an eager community of students across the globe. But teaching online doesn’t have to be a one-way street. Keep your students engaged with content that is interactive and sparks discussion.Your students will love being able to learn at their own pace and collaborate in a virtual classroom. With a few key tools, you can build engaging online courses to help students apply, analyze and discuss course concepts while still retaining the high expectations of your traditional teaching. Keep a human element to your online content, because no one wants to be taught by faceless robots: create bite-size video lessons to promote online dialogue with your students· include various multimedia like audio, video, photos & graphics, maps, eBooks & simulations· use document sharing for real time collaboration· interactive tools like Google Hangouts, chats & instant messaging all help promote discussion· include quiz questions in your videos to gain real-time insight on student comprehension· encourage peer review of student assignments online to lessen your grading workload· ask students to record a short video to analyze or interpret course concepts. Cengage Learning™ MindTap Online Learning Platform Kristin McNary (Cengage Learning, USA) Cengage Learning’s MindTap represents a new paradigm in online learning:    Fusing together authoritative textbook pedagogy with customizable Learning Paths Innovative access to a variety of instructional utilities through a unique app model known as MindApps Access through MindLinks, a service that allows for seamless LMS interoperability Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 562 Vendor Showcases  MindTap engages students with a powerful and innovative PERSONAL LEARNING EXPERIENCE. MindTap is a personalized digital solution that engages students with interactivity and custom content while supporting differentiated learning styles by offering instructors and students a choice in content, devices and learning tools. Whether a user is interested in making their own notes and flashcards or they want to view a lecture and connect using social media, MindApps are an innovative way to do more than ever before with your text. MindTap is empowering students by providing anytime, anywhere access to all course materials, and now access is even available directly from an LMS through an innovative service known as MindLinks. Learn more by clicking on hyperlink provided! Multi-Sensory Learning with VoiceThread Amanda Volz (VoiceThread, USA) Using asynchronous multi-sensory communication tool can enhance the student’s experience within an online learning space. With a focus on why this form of communication can be so transformative, the presenter will offer detailed examples showing how shared media, voice, and video can enhance a student's sense of instructor and peer presence and increase overall satisfaction with course participation and objectives. Attendees will learn how a few simple structures like the proper introduction of methods, clear goals, scaffolding, and simple workflows work together to ensure a high level of success for faculty and students. An Evaluation of Student Outcomes by Course Duration in Online Higher Education Scott Burrus (Northcentral University, USA) Melanie Shaw (Northcentral University, USA) To facilitate student learning and ensure financial stability, leaders in higher education institutions offering online degrees are adopting course schedules with shorter terms. This presentation discusses the extent to which course length influences student achievement or engagement. While the courses were identical in content and number of assignments, half were taught in a 16week format while the others in an 8-week format. Results show there was no statistical difference in student achievement or engagement between either course duration. These results are potentially encouraging for institutions looking to offer shorter duration courses to meet student enrollment needs and student preferences. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 563 Diamond Sponsor Presentations Rethinking the LMS Dr. Phil Ice (American Public University System, USA) This session will examine how emerging technologies and analytics can be leveraged to create optimized learning environments. The approaches covered will illustrate how a flexible ecosystem can be constructed to leverage best of breed resources in an integrated space. Work to date will be showcased, with input from the attendees solicited for future development. A "ClearPath" to Student Success: Engaging throughout the Student Lifecyle Caroline Simpson (American Public University System, USA) Terry Grant (American Public University System, USA) Preview American Public University System's innovative social engagement platform, ClearPath, that supports student success from application to classroom to graduation to job interview. Sloan-C 19th Annual Sloan Consortium – International Conference on Online Learning 564