Course Design

The Need for Pragmatic Expectations in Online Courses

As spring 2021 approaches, emergency remote teaching has perpetuated the need to offer online courses, without time to properly design and prepare for its implementation. While some faculty members were already teaching online or hybrid courses before the pandemic, for many others, their introduction to

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Developing Online Courses with Course Design Cards

We observed a new level of interest and excitement among participants during a recent faculty-teaching workshop. We attribute most of this energy to an innovative course design tool that we have been piloting at our university. Course design cards help faculty to brainstorm new approaches

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A book lies open on the keyboard of an open laptop

Refresh Your Course with Open Educational Resources

Many faculty and institutions are turning to open educational resources (OER) to lower costs to students and improve instruction. While much has been written about the search, evaluation, and selection process for OERs, the need to produce a coherent and engaging design for OER delivery

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An Online Course Maintenance Program that Works

An Online Course Maintenance Program that Works

One of the challenges that an online program faces is how to keep courses up-to-date. Links break, articles become outdated, new material appears, and so on. In essence, an online course starts deteriorating as soon as it is built. New programs are often unprepared for

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assessing readiness to learn online

A Simple Tool for Getting Students Ready for Online Learning

Many of the things that make online learning so attractive to students, such as the flexibility of anytime, anywhere access, can also make it more challenging. Without the benefit of the structure and familiarity of a face-to-face course, less organized students can quickly lose their

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blended learning - game day approach

A Game-Day Approach to Hybrid Course Design

Students arrive in our courses with a variety strengths and weaknesses. In a writing course, some students may struggle with grammar, while others are ready to practice alternative styles of discourse or more sophisticated rhetorical techniques.

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what message does your syllabus send

Send the Right Message with Your Syllabus

Instructors spend a considerable amount of time planning the topics, content, and activities in their courses, but comparatively little time thinking about the syllabus. The syllabus often is treated as an afterthought at the end of course development and is used to summarize basic information

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green screen - student engagement

An Engagement Epidemic: Designing an Immersive, Media-Rich Course

Long before the written word, humans relied on stories to entertain, instruct, and preserve cultural traditions. Storytelling is a fundamental way that humans communicate, and yet it is often left out of the college classroom. Rather than telling students stories about how something works or

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