SUNY Effective Online Practices Award Program

A common theme in educational research centers on the need to reach students "where they are" in terms of their diverse and emergent developmental profiles. In world languages pedagogy, upper-level students often present a variety of motivational and competency needs, which makes a “one-size fits all” approach problematic. Inspired by Buffalo State College's Department of Modern and Classical Language's Ambassador Model, which holistically engages four "exit profiles" (Diplomat, Scholar, Engaged Professional, Global Citizen), I developed an Autonomous Language Learning component to intermediate and upper-level language coursework. Making use of Blackboard Learning's journal and rubric-creation features, the Autonomous Language Learning Component offers students a private, dialogic space with the instructor where they can focus on linguistic and sociocultural explorations of the target language and its cultures. In addition, students are encouraged to integrate their own academic and career interests. The work always focuses on autonomy support, with a focus on autonomy, competency, and relatedness (Ryan & Deci, 2017) within the student's emergent Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1934/2012).

Harnessing the power of the tools of your learning management software provides options for your students. Blackboard’s Adaptive Release allows students to unlock content based upon the successful completion of established criteria set by the instructor. It allows students to accelerate the learning process while ensuring they are mastering content with preset proficiency levels that determine whether students are prepared to move forward.

Employing adaptive release ensures equitable opportunities by removing barriers. It affords students opportunities to manage time, develop self-regulatory skills, schedule management, flexibility, ownership, goals, and allows for future thought processes more effectively. The choice to take advantage of the flexibility that adaptive release offers is with the students. Students can progress through the course as outlined in the syllabus or they can use adaptive release to move more quickly through a module if they master the content. Additionally, if a student chooses to move through a module and start a new module in less than a week, they are not locked into the quicker pace for the semester. Adaptive release provides individualized flexibility while maintaining rigor without regard for academic discipline. We teach in different academic areas, library and physical education, and we successfully implement Adaptive Release.

A peer mentor program expands training options beyond single workshops or training sessions, offering flexible approaches to meet the needs of a diverse faculty. Ongoing professional development programs introduce faculty to new teaching and learning technologies as well as pedagogical approaches for teaching distance education programs. Additionally, Faculty mentorship can provide important individual, customized, and discipline-specific training for faculty who are new to distance education and online teaching.

Course review process at SUNY Canton is a peer-driven effort anchored in a course quality review rubric. New online, hybrid, and flex courses must be approved prior to their delivery and all previously approved courses must be reviewed every three years. A governance committee is charged with the online course review. Courses are evaluated using a governance-approved course quality review rubric. The rubric SUNY Canton uses was adapted from SUNY Online Course Quality Review rubric (OSCQR). The rubric consists of 50 essential and suggested standards. Each standard carries with it a certain amount of points and each course must reach an agreed-upon minimum score.

The push to graduate a more diverse population has taken on new urgency, as the world grapples with social unrest, a digital divide, and educational access issues. More concerning, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) study also found that students lacked Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) skills, making them less desirable to employers (NACE, 2016). Our findings, recently presented at the 12th Annual United Nations Geneva Forum in Dec. 2020, this presentation builds on the successful use of student data as the baseline for developing innovative DEI programming, which uses gamification and curricular innovations.

The SUNY Exploring Emerging Technologies for Lifelong Learning and Success (#EmTechMOOC) directly assists college students, as well as faculty and others, to gain skills to effectively use emerging technologies and lifelong strategies for their personal and professional lives to be able to keep pace with technology change.

This self-paced, collaborative, and engaging course helps learners everywhere gain comfort, familiarity, and mastery of freely-available web-based collaboration tools. #EmTechMOOC uses discovery exercises to guide participants’ learning while building a personal learning toolkit for a lifetime of use.

The EmTech online community supports life-long learners at all levels including current and career-seeking professionals. This proposal addresses the support that EmTech provides to student learners either as they voluntarily self-enroll or as they participate under the guidance of faculty to either participate in the entire MOOC, complete portions of the MOOC as a class assignment, or simply take advantage of EmTechWIKI resources to discover emerging technology tools and resources to demonstrate their learning (for projects, assignments, etc.).

This practice is aimed at increasing participation in synchronous courses by creating learning alliances between students. It assumes that the purpose of meeting online is to create a sense of belonging through having shared goals that the students work together to achieve. It is not primarily to disseminate information; lecture notes, narrated Power Points, videos, and other supporting documents should be made available in the Learning Modules ahead of the meetings. Class participation is often focused on the individual and evaluated as such; this approach shifts focus from the individual to teams of learners, who collaborate on answering study questions, posting to a discussion board, sharing key learnings in class, etc. Dividing the students into smaller groups allows them to connect with each other and share the responsibility of facilitating the class meetings. Students who would like to lead the group may sign up as Group Leaders for one extra credit and report back to the professor on the success of their breakout sessions. A dynamic system of Participation Points forms the backbone of this teaching practice. But the key to creating successful learning alliances is to make the meetings fun and stimulating, which produces in the students a desire to study and learn.

In mid-March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic all our classes were moved to an online asynchronous mode. This was also the first time, I was teaching my Public Finance and Public Policy class. It took me weeks to design in-class exercises and activities ready for our face to face modality that overnight became mostly useless. In the beginning of this class, I already decided that I will be using Open Educational Resources (OER) in place of a commercial textbook. The plan was to also use students to help write parts of the material that will be available to the general public. But because of the pandemic, I pivoted my class so that COVID-19 became our main topic through which we learned and studied Public Economics. Talking about applied and experiential learning! The assignment for the rest of the semester was trying to understand in real time what was going on during these very confusing times, when the information in the news was mostly inconsistent and constantly changing. The result of this assignment was a set of public webpages created by students that helped others and the broader public understand and appreciate the pandemic through the eyes of economists.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced schools around the world to move online in 2020, including my home institution University at Buffalo. Months into online learning, many students started to suffer from either social disconnection in asynchronous settings or Zoom fatigue in synchronous settings. How can we effectively include our students online to feel meaningfully connected yet not overwhelmed by long lectures and presentations? Liberating Structures (LS) are simple, concrete tools that can be used to organize learning activities and facilitate transformative learning experiences in ways that include and engage all students. Each LS specifies five interrelated structural elements:(a) The structuring invitation to focus attention, (b) spatial arrangement that allows participants to stand, move freely and be face-to-face, (c) participation distribution to ensure everyone participates at once and equally, (d) group configuration to ensure one works with pairs, quartets and whole group, and (e) the sequence of steps and time allocation for effectively executing the above. Detailed instructions and examples are available on LiberatingStructures.com. In Fall 2020 was, I was able to adapt LS through weekly synchronous Zoom meetings to create an inclusive and interactive online learning experience. Examples of adapted LS are: 1-2-4-ALL, Drawing Together, Celebrity Interview, and Critical Uncertainties.

Adjustable lesson formatting allows the student to choose between in-person or online instruction at any time, as their needs change. The student is able to pursue their study without jeopardizing their own safety and health or that of their family members and peers. High risk students, or students with high risk family members, have the option of designing their schedule for my class in such a way that they are studying fully online, studying in-person while minimizing contact with other people as much as possible, or alternating between the two as works best for them. Establishing this practice as a professor has allowed my students to continue pursuing their study of classical violin, both as soloists and in small groups, without impacting their health as potentially high risk individuals during the Covid-19 pandemic. Also, this practice has greatly increased the attendance rates of my classes, as students have the ability to design their schedule in such a way that it maximizes their potential and allows them to succeed.