SUNY Effective Online Practices Award Program

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The CEI Academies for faculty development have gained traction and acclaim on the University at Buffalo’s campus. Through relatively modest investment and grant support, the Center for Educational Innovation has been able to serve the larger university by training staff in course design, teaching, and pedagogical best practices and theory. By virtue of the Academies, CEI is able to provide faculty with the skills and knowledge necessary to implement effective course design as they seek to enhance their educational offerings and build online infrastructure within their decanal units and departments. At the heart of this initiative is a commitment to shareable and scalable content, whereby the university and the SUNY system may generate online course capacity, while meeting basic faculty development needs. System-wide, CEI plans to expand the impact of the Academies through a forthcoming MOOC version in addition to a special workshop this summer for SUNY learning designers.

In the Teaching Methods and Strategies asynchronous course, students are required to formalize best practice teaching strategies (SSSC, 2019; Harmon & Marzano, 2015; Hebert, 2011) in the New York Stated Education Department Lesson Plan Assessment (NYSED, 1997; NYSED, 2005; NYSED 2015). This course (description) emphasizes health education instructional methodologies in school settings which effect health behaviors. Students demonstrate health education instructional strategies and evaluate student learning objectives. Some instructional methodologies may include discussion, lecture, problem solving, demonstration, experiment, role play, cooperative learning, educational games, debates, goal setting, peer evaluation, use of media and computer-assisted instruction.

Creating asynchronous online learning communities that parallel the communities formed in on-campus courses can be challenging and complex. By using interactive tools, such as Google Slides, faculty can create innovative opportunities for students to learn about each other and create connections among students. Specifically, creating a space for students to contribute to an interactive presentation introducing themselves to the class creates a heightened sense of community not yet achieved without it. This practice describes an innovative way to transform the learning community in an online course by encouraging students to connect with each other at the start of the semester through interactive student-created presentations.

In the Winter of 2019, SUNY Geneseo offered its first intersession semester, attracting Geneseo and non-Geneseo students (including many non-traditional learners) to this intensive 3-week offering. The challenge for one instructor was to adapt a 16-week face-to-face course (S/COMN 103 Interpersonal Communication) of 50 students to this new environment without sacrificing student engagement and learning. Furthermore, as the course satisfies a Social Science General Education requirement and is a foundational course for the 500+ Communication major at Geneseo, the intersession version needed to be nearly equivalent in workload and rigor to the regular semester course. The instructor and learning technology specialists worked to design a course that would quickly establish student-instructor and student-to-student rapport in support of learning objectives. Key strategies included thoughtful course policies and informal extra-class communication including REMIND, Google Hangout office hours, multi-media discussion posts, and short, online videos to frame the course’s nine modules, two essays, discussion activities, and midterm and final exams. The result is Fast-Community, a replicable system for an engaged online class particularly well suited to a shortened time frame. The course is freely available on Canvas at https://canvas.instructure.com/courses/1541068

Menu Planning is a class with both creative and challenging concepts. Many students are not ready for all of the mathematical concepts involved in the course. To help teach these concepts online, I developed instructional videos with demonstrations, collaborative practice activities, and quizzes. In addition, written transcripts accompany these videos, to better accommodate multiple learning styles, in alignment with the concept of differentiated instruction.