Conference Presentations

Last month, much of higher education was caught off guard as we were asked to quickly pivot classroom-based courses to remote delivery. As the situation moves from an emergency response to one of acclimating to our new learning methods and modalities, we now have better opportunities to discuss options moving forward, as well as contingency planning considerations for the future. This session is appropriate for administrators, faculty, QMCs, and instructional designers/DL staff, as we come together to discuss workable solutions based on institutional context and goals.

Once upon a time, there was a small college in Westchester County, NY.  They believed that quality did matter - and still does! Follow their journey...

We are fortunate to have buy-in from the top, which gives us the ability to try different things. But how do we extend it throughout the college, to all of our faculty, the instructional designers, and keep it going when people move on?  Learn how a small institution, with a small online division, emraced QM in principle and is preparing to move forward.

Ever wonder how your online teaching skills stack up? The National Standards for Quality Online Teaching provide a framework for you to benchmark your skills. Take the self-assessment powered by 2gnoMe to see your strengths and receive valuable professional development options to help address any gaps in your practice.

This presentation will introduce a crosswalk of the NSQ with Universal Design for Learning Guidelines. Participants will explore how this tool can support & promote equitable (re)design of virtual activities and lessons, and share strategies for increasing accessibility in online courses.

With a limited number of instructional designers and the number of online faculty increasing, our ID team developed a responsive and flexible training method. It is flexible enough to scale the number of faculty trained without neglecting quality, and is responsive and respectful to time and technology knowledge constraints of faculty. Attendees will get access to our flexible model resources including a unique QM Scavenger Hunt.

We applied two different approaches to the design and development of MOOCs and delivered them in the open source LMS Sakai using the QMContinuing and Professional Education Standards as guidelines.

Instructional design staff and faculty presenters will examine the highlights and pitfalls of the MOOC course design and development experience.

My presentation will be in prezi.

Providing multiple means of learning for students when designing World Language courses requires deliberate design and an intentional focus on digital accessibility. Meeting the needs of all learners in a World Language course often requires cross-organizational support and communication. Collaborate with fellow educators to discuss strategies for supporting World Language learners when designing and teaching online World Language courses that meet the digital accessibility needs of students. 

Videos can make learning come alive. Especially if they are teacher created. One misconception is that Closed Captioning (CC) is just for deaf and hard of hearing. What about students who are not auditory learners or students whose native language is not English? Closed Captioning can help all learners, but not all CC videos are created equal. Participants will learn how to search for CC videos on both YouTube and Google and evaluate it for accuracy.

Imagine that you were sitting in on a class and you could not hear, view, interact with, and/or interpret the material being taught. Chances are, you might end up feeling disconnected, isolated, and more than anything, frustrated. The good news is that when we take time to specifically focus on accessibility when designing and deploying course content, we can break down those barriers and the possibilities are endless. Come join me on this accessibility adventure!

The last 10 years have seen the rise of large-scale student success efforts focused on helping more and more diverse students finish what they start in higher education. In this presentation, we'll explore how quality online and blended learning - including competency-based options - have expanded access and success in higher education. Next, we'll dive into how the digital signal coming from these efforts has informed and improved student success work, especially advising and strategic-nudging outreach.

Education has seen an increase in the number of one-to-one initiatives in the past few years. As a result, many institutions have been replacing traditional printed textbooks with a variety of digital resources. Moving away from print options should have brought good news for individuals with different perceptual, motor, or cognitive abilities. Unfortunately, digital content developers have implemented new technologies without regard to persons with disabilities leaving many students on the outside looking in.

Embrace the power of storytelling to increase engagement and information retention. Making that story interactive can be even more powerful. Join us for a hand-on session in which we create interactive stories using a free tool called Twine.

Over the past few years, our college has been working on encouraging faculty to develop robust QM courses. However, we discovered that faculty are overwhelmed at the thought of redesigning courses to meet QM standards and recommendations. One faculty even said that taking on QM was like “eating an elephant.” We found that her views were shared by many other faculty who simply did not want to invest the time due to the fear of beginning and undertaking such a large project.

After losing $1.6M in performance-based funding due to a 1% decline in success rates, our college committed to improve student success. Learn how a large, multi-campus, unionized college implemented Quality Matters, leading to a 4.6% increase in student success rates.

This session will demonstrate how a well-designed on-line course can enable professors to use unique, low stakes, write-to-learn assignments to (1) improve engagement and student persistence, (2) help students develop an effective learning, researching, or writing process (3) help instructors to improve their understanding of their student's capabilities and points of confusion and (4) improve the social presence of students in their online courses.

This session will demonstrate how a well-designed on-line course can enable professors to use unique, low stakes, write-to-learn assignments to (1) improve engagement and student persistence, (2) help students develop an effective learning, researching, or writing process (3) help instructors to improve their understanding of their student's capabilities and points of confusion and (4) improve the social presence of students in their online courses.

This presentation showcases our attempt at Stevenson University to use Quality Matter rubric as a guide, a free, cloud-based Course Management System (CMS) as a structured supplementary channel, and emerging technologies as a model for the process of online course development. We hope this approach would help our instructors embrace both QM Rubric and emerging technologies, and build the collegial and collaborative relationship between faculties and instructional designers to improve the quality of our online courses.

The presentation will highlight the alignment of QM standards in an international, collaborative, and online learning context. It will center on the development and engagement of an international collabortion learning unit between two colleges and courses - The College of Westchester (New York) and Empire State college (Panama).

A STEM faculty learning community was created at North Carolina Central University to assess online science course offerings and instruction. Faculty completed the APPQMR course coupled with services from the Division of Extended Studies and implemented changes in their subsequent online courses. This presentation describes the impact of that training and application of Rubric Standards on the design and student outcomes for an Introductory Biology course over four terms, as published in the QM-focused 2017 edition of the American Journal of Distance Education.

Clear expectations, intuitive navigation, easily found course components -- all good ideas for online course design, right? We know them when we see them, but can we purposefully design them? Join us to discuss how the design of structure and interface of online courses can benefit the  learner, educator, and organization as a whole. Also, discuss how program-wide design standards can help support learner success, and break down examples of structures that can serve as a  guide when designing, updating, or improving online courses.