SUNY Effective Online Practices Award Program

The College of Nursing at Downstate Health Sciences University implemented the campus’ first fully distance education program as of fall of 2019. A robust faculty development program was initiated in fall 2018 (see attached). Upon completion of the faculty development program in spring of 2019, the College of Nursing team, in conjunction with Academic Computing and Technology, embarked on development of the online RN to BS program. Using the QM and OSCQR rubrics, a standardized course template for online learning through the Blackboard learning management system was developed. The College was the first, campus wide, to pilot the Respondus lock down and Respondus Monitor systems for remote testing. This system allowed faculty to maintain test integrity and eliminate the opportunity for academic misconduct from distance education students. Each part of this project has led to the successes of students and faculty as we work toward increasing out digital footprint to allow for high quality, accessible education for all of New York State. The College of Nursing plans to continue this trajectory to increase its number of online students and programs in the next three years.

Accessibility: How to make your course content more compliant from Word Documents to LMS objects. This self-directed course utilizes open sources on the web allowing us to use tutorials whenever and where ever we need them while building and teaching our courses. This course is useful to both Distance Ed and Traditional Campus instructors.

Leading in an era of augmented intelligence, our Chancellor has argued, means preparing our students for the future complex social, technical, and geopolitical landscape. She made this point about 200 years after another woman considered how best to prepare people for the future complex social, technical, and geopolitical landscape when she wrote Frankenstein. With that in mind, I pursued an international collaboration, co-designing and co-teaching an online course entitled “The Walking Undead: Zombies and Vampires in Transatlantic Cultural History.” With the support of our institutions—Empire State College and Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada—a colleague and I taught advanced undergraduate students and MA students in the course in both institutions. This collaboration leveraged the intellectual capital and educational technologies of both institutions to provide our students with a deeper and richer experience of the material than they could otherwise have had. By facilitating an academic conversation between students living in countries which have had radically different experiences of post-coloniality, we hoped to provide a model of a way in which partnerships and collaborations can take place in the complex social and technical stage of online learning, and to highlight SUNY’s achievements to the broader geopolitical landscape of higher education.

The SUNY Exploring Emerging Technologies for Lifelong Learning and Success (#EmTechMOOC) helps to meet these needs. It is an open-access resource targeted to the lifelong learning needs of faculty, staff, students, and anyone from across the globe who have a desire to keep pace with technology change.

Overall Goals of this project helps participants to:
- identify the value and implications of using established and emerging technology tools for personal and professional growth.
- gain strategies to develop lifelong learning habits to keep pace with technology change.

This project consists of two associated parts; #EmTechMOOC and EmTechWIKI.

#EmTechMOOC is a Massive Open Online Course. The MOOC, hosted on the Coursera platform, provides a supportive environment for dialogue and sharing among participants.

EmTechWIKI has been built to complement the MOOC. It is a socially-curated discovery engine to discover tools, tutorials, and resources. The WIKI can be used as a stand-alone resource, or it can be used together with #EmTechMOOC. Anyone is welcome to add or edit WIKI resources.

Learning activities provide accessible, curated information and application exercises pertaining to current and emerging technologies relevant to learners and professionals alike, such as audio, video, social networking, etc. http://suny.edu/emtech

The Adaptive Feedback Assistant was developed to help students struggling discussions in online learning environments. This often inhibits student success and decreases student retention rates. The tool consists of brief trainings that follow the principles of Universal Design for Learning. Each contains optional videos that use best practices in instructional video design. Adaptive commands identify students struggling in online discussions and delivers the training. The delivery is automatic and instructors can modify the threshold triggering the feedback assistant. The adaptive nature of the tool allows it to supply student support while not providing extraneous cognitive load to for students. The personalized nature of the content delivery contributes to an environment that better supports student engagement by not burdening students with unnecessary content while simultaneously offering scaffolds to support students in need.

After piloting the Adaptive Feedback Assistant, and collecting positive results, it was included within a course model for the faculty. Early analytics show that the videos of the training are being utilized at a significant rate. The training is available as an OER resource and as a Blackboard package with the Course Model that meets 40% of the OSCQR standards before content is added.

Feelings of isolation and lack of social interaction have been cited as major reasons for dissatisfaction with online learning environments (Hwang & Song, 2018; Kuong, 2015). Activities are required that create opportunities for social interaction, collaboration, dialogue, creative expression, and building feelings of connectedness (Alt, 2018). To prevent isolation of the online learner and preserve a sense of community, students describe wanting feedback which “encourages sharing” (Maliotaki, 2019, p. 198) and is “dialogic” (p. 200). During the Fall of 2019, VoiceThread, an interactive, cloud-based communication tool, was used in an online course to deliver “dialogic” feedback during student development of a research proposal. As a pilot, a total of 20 students dialogued with their instructor for a major component in the development of their written proposals. This technology tool allowed for multi-directional asynchronous dialogue, with both the instructor and student sending and receiving information to benefit the learner.

Digital humanism is the understanding that people, not technological tools, are the center of the digital ecosystem. The term digital humanism was established by Gartner (2015) as a business principle to think about tech tool innovation as an opportunity to “redfine the way people achieve their goals and enable people to achieve things not previously possible.” The term has since been co-opted in academic spaces, most notably the 2019 Vienna Manifesto, set forth by the Vienna University of Technology, with the aims to “shape technologies in accordance with human values and needs” and to “promote democracy and inclusion.” Thinking through this philosophical framework of digital humanism, I curated features on BlackBoard to support five key strategies for student success in my online class, and by extension progress toward SUNY Gen Ed degree requirements. For these strategies, the instructor: 1) posts frequently; 2) invites student questions through a variety of modalities; 3) responds quickly to student queries; 4) solicits and incorporates student feedback; 5) demonstrates a sense of care and concern for student wellbeing.

In my Urban Economics, I created an engaging research project.

The project consisted of a policy proposal on an urban economics issue. It had to be specific and policy related to New York City, Nassau or Suffolk County. The policy proposal had to be clearly structured, have a policy recommendation, as well as a clear discussion of the argument in favor and against its implementation.

This project was split in two parts

1: PhotoVoice
PhotoVoice is a research method in which a person photographs their surroundings to increase knowledge of topics important to them.

Students had to take six photos related to their Urban Policy Issue. At least two of the photos should show strengths and characteristics of their community that positively contribute to the issue. And, at least two photos should show weaknesses and negative characteristics of the issue. The 5th and 6th photos can be positive or negative—their choice. Each photograph had to be title and have a 1-2 sentence description.

2: The Web Site
The final product was a well written website that included all the relevant information about the topic, the policy question and proposal and included links to articles, photos, graphs, data, videos, podcasts.

"QbD is designed around the COTE OSCQR rubric and therefore it falls across all the categories.

The elements of the OSCQR include:
- learner support
- content presentation & accessibility
- interaction & collaboration
- evaluation & assessment"

When the majority of instruction takes place in an online environment, it may offer more challenges for monitoring student learning and understanding of course content. Certain pedagogical techniques that combine theories and practices from face-to-face instruction can be infused in online teaching to help address these concerns and keep instruction engaging, rigorous, and responsive to student need. One practice that has research support from the field, particularly at the college course level, is the “Pause Procedure” (Ruhl, Hughes, & Schloss, 1987). This procedure has been researched in the college classroom to enhance factual recall from college lectures, with both short and long-term success, including on examinations (i.e., Hughes, Hendrickson, & Hudson, 1986; Ruhl, Hughes, & Gajar, 1990; Ruhl & Suritsky, 1995). The Pause Procedure typically includes approximately three 2-minute pauses spaced at logical breaks during lectures where students can take time to take notes, engage in brief discussion of lecture content, update notes, or engage in free recall. The idea is that students take a formal period to “encode information in meaningful units” (Ruhl, & Suritsky, 1995, p. 6). This is the time that also enhances student active engagement and thus, academic learning time, leading to increases in student performance (Berliner, 1987).