Instructional Design
Recent Seminars
Data Driven Decision Making for Online Instructional Design
With constrained budgets and increasing calls for evidence of learning effectiveness, online programs are being forced to continually evaluate programs with an eye toward increased effectiveness. This seminar will introduce participants to strategies for leveraging analytics to inform the instructional design processes and improvements.
video Online Seminar • Recorded on Tuesday, March 15th, 2011
Course Design and Development Ideas That Work
This 17-page report features proven course design alternatives implemented in courses of varying sizes and disciplines. It’s sure inspire you to rethink how you could change certain components of your courses to build a better learning environment.
Five Tips for Designing an Online Faculty Workshop
What is the best way to train and support a beginning online faculty member? At some colleges, the only option is on site training held on the campus over a day, a weekend, or a period of days during the summer. These on-site workshops, while potentially very effective, commit the faculty members to time, travel, and often inflexible scheduling. However, Berkeley College, with campuses in New York and New Jersey, has designed an online faculty workshop and set of training and support tools to complement its other professional development offerings.
Establishing Online Instructor Performance Best Practices and Expectations
Helping faculty learn to survive and even thrive online is critical if we are to realize the potential of this new learning space. During a Magna online seminar awhile back, I made reference to a strategy that an institution can employ to help faculty save time online. I referred to a document created at Penn
Strategies for Increasing Student Learning and Performance
When it comes to course design, is the goal to help your students understand concepts, enable future retrieval of concepts, or enable future retrieval of concepts and apply them in real-world situations? To create more effective learning environments, and minimize forgetting, some faculty are turning to Situation-based Learning Design (SBLD), which aligns learning context with performance context.
Instructional Design: Who’s Playing First in My Course?
At a symposium about teaching projects on our campus, one group of faculty presented a set of projects they had done that involved giving students control over course design issues. The projects had grown out of a reading group that studied When Students Have Power by Ira Shor. The faculty presenters said that they let students design the syllabus and that the students typically created a rigorous course that was enhanced by the student ownership. I think I’m a student- and learning-centered teacher, but I’m also a teacher who has determined essentially all the course structure. So a few days before classes started, I decided NOT to spend my last few hours before the opening of the semester organizing, selecting, and deciding on syllabus issues, but to step (off a cliff?) into a world where students have power. Would chaos ensue if I gave students power in my general chemistry class?
What College Professors Can Learn from K-12 Educators about Instructional Design
Unlike their college-level counterparts, those who teach students from kindergarten through high school (K-12) spend a significant portion of their education studying the “how” of teaching. What they learn can be invaluable to college professors who enter classrooms with vast content knowledge but little (or no) background in teaching and learning. Regrettably, college teachers often disdain what their K-12 colleagues do and know. As those who teach these teachers, we’d like to showcase some of what college professors can learn from those who teach younger students.
Instructional Design: Designing Courses and Assignments That Promote Deep Understanding of Essential Concepts
Our college is in the midst of a curricular project that aims to transform courses so that they promote a deeper understanding of core concepts through carefully designed assignments. The college hired Grant Wiggins, co-author of Understanding by Design (Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins) to assist faculty in making these changes, and I’d like to report on my experiences redesigning a course I teach called The Legal Environment of Business.
