2015 Northwest Regional Conference

This session will discuss practical strategies for engaging students in online courses, including how to make your course feel welcoming, how to use interactive social media in your course, and how to manage group work effectively in the online learning environment.

Faculty often struggle with how to begin to evaluate alignment in their existing courses. This presentation demonstrates simple tools that any faculty can use when aligning course objectives, unit objectives, and course activities.

To implement a QM-based online course design program, CSUDH created the DH Network, a group of faculty who disseminate best practice in online course design through peer-to-peer sharing. This session shares design of the network's academy and consultation process and reviews lessons learned.

This session will examine the benefits/challenges of implementing the QM Rubric in online courses by way of a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) at CSU, East Bay campus.  The faculty in the FLC come from a number of departments on campus (Anthropology, Communication, English, History, and Music).

Gamification is popular in higher education and what it boils down to is motivating students to keep trying, reach new levels of accomplishment and be successful. (All things we do naturally when playing games because we love the challenge, regardless of the number of attempts it takes to attain mastery.) One way to foster those achievements is to offer rewards or "currency" for each level of skill attained or accomplishment completed.

Portland Community College's Distance Education department instituted Accessibility Guidelines for online course content in 2011. These guidelines work to reinforce
the QM 8 standards. But if instructors are developing their own courses, how closely should we hold them to these
guidelines and standards? How much is fair to ask of the instructor? What roles do Distance Education and
Disability Services play? In other words, "Who's responsible for accessibility? " The truth is, we all are. In this

Many of our faculty have completed the APPQMR training, yet seem unable to take the next step.  This year, a group of faculty met in a Learning Community to discuss how to revise their courses to meet Quality Standards.  Learn more about the FLC structure, meeting agendas, materials used, and results.

An online program sought continuity amid courses through Rogers' (2003) diffusion of innovation theory to develop a QM-based rubric, template, and matrix laced with humor to invigorate, inspire adoption, and uphold faculty autonomy.

This presentation describes successes in creating a set of support structures including a pre-review process of collaboration between faculty and instructional designers, ongoing support during the review, and post-review collaborative continual course improvement.