BlendKit2017, the open, online course on blended learning design, combines a global cohort with value-add local interactions to provide a powerful professional development experience for those faculty and designers wishing to get started with or brush up on designing effective blended courses. The “local cohort option” (see video introduction) encourages the formation of face-to-face groups to provide mutual accountability and institutional contextualization for the more general global cohort experience. Past groups have reported that local sessions were extremely valuable in helping individuals apply blended learning design principles and successfully complete the global cohort. Groups can be as simple as occasional “coffee conversations” or as robust as full-blown institutionally incentivized faculty development programs.
SUNY Online Teaching is pleased to partner with the Center for Distributed Learning at the University of Central Florida (UCF) to showcase best practices in online teaching and learning via the award winning international Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository (TOPR) – an open public resource hosted by UCF that reviews, selects, and organizes effective online practices for online faculty, instructional designers and other online teaching and learning practitioners.
TOPR is an open resource for faculty and instructional designers dedicated to enhancing online and blended teaching strategies, serving as a comprehensive repository that showcases a wide range of teaching strategies. Each entry is meticulously drawn from the real-world pedagogical practices of experienced online and blended teaching faculty. These strategies are illustrated with actual course artifacts, providing a concrete understanding of their application. Furthermore, each entry from contributors across the world is thoughtfully aligned with findings from relevant research or professional practice literature, ensuring that the strategies are both practical and evidence-based.
SUNY Online Teaching, in collaboration with the University of Central Florida (UCF), sponsors an initiative to recognize excellence in online teaching practices across SUNY by annually inviting entries from our Effective Online Practices Award Program to be submitted to TOPR for consideration and inclusion.
Additionally, the SUNY Online Course Quality Rubric (OSCQR) standards have been cross-walked with the TOPR repository to include TOPR resources into the OSCQR rubric, where applicable, as examples to help faculty refresh their online courses.
