Online Teaching Hub

An email is sent through the UCBA faculty listserve with the link for registration. Ruth Benander is the current facilitator of the seminar. For questions, email Ruth.Benander@uc.edu.

UCBA faculty teaching online or hybrid courses are expected to have completed the UCBA Distance Learning Design Seminar. In addition, many who are interested in teaching online or who use techniques such as flipped classrooms or put a lot of content online have also found the seminar helpful.

The Distance Learning Design Faculty Seminar will be offered online each semester to UCBA faculty. This course is a structured course that facilitates building (or improving an existing) online or hybrid course.

If you are teaching -- or planning to teach -- an online or hybrid course, please consider registering for this seminar as a way to prepare your course. Completion of the seminar is expected (per the UCBA DL Policy insert link here) for faculty teaching online or hybrid courses. In addition, faculty teaching flipped courses, and those using Canvas or other technology, also find the seminar beneficial when designing their courses.

Seminar activities will begin the second week of the semester and will run throughout the semester, ending before the end of the semester. The Course includes eight modules. The modules mostly run weekly; however, several modules run better over two weeks, so the session can span 11 weeks.

Participants are expected to attend an all-day Quality Matters Applying the Rubric workshop (if you have not already). This workshop scheduled for the second or third week of the semester at UCBA. If you anticipate a conflict with the Quality Matters workshop, please talk with the instructor regarding alternatives.

After completing this course, participants will be able to:

• Create and organize appropriate readiness assessment activities, student learning outcomes, assessments, and activities for an online course delivered through the Canvas learning management system.
• Appropriately align student learning outcomes, assessments, and activities for a given online course.
• Evaluate and provide feedback on peers' student learning outcomes, assessments, and activities in a supportive manner that promotes effective revision.

• In the syllabus, give an approximation of how much time the course will take.
• Mention that online is the same workload as face2face.
• In the Readiness Assessment Activities at the very start of the course have an activity where they give advice to student trouble scenarios. One should include having a hard time managing the course workload.
• Have the students write a promise of time committment early in the course.
• Have a time management activity early in the course where they plan when they will get their coursework done.

• Grade postings.
• Provide a rubric and a sample good posting.
• Provide clear guidelines for responses that outline all the components of a good posting. Consider scaffolding the response with a) describe X, b) explain X, c) evaluate if X is Y based on your description and explanation.
• Have a minimum sentence requirement.
• Reqire citations from articles and the textbook to back up assertions.

• Have an orientation to the course resources at the start of class.
• Provide a chronological list of activities with due dates at the start of each module or unit so that the list of what they must do is clear.
• Give clear instructions and include little tutorials when a new kind of activity shows up.

• Assign drafts for feedback so that you get better final projects that are quicker to grade.
• Use a rubric for grading to make the grading process go faster. Use the filled out rubric as feedback.
• Consider noon deadlines since midnight deadlines seem to result in late assignments done late at night.
• Make clear response policies, maybe email questions answered in 24 hours, feedback on assignments in 48 or 72 hours.
• Block specific, non-negotiable time out to "teach" your online course. Say, "No," when people try to schedule things during that time. Say, "No, I'm sorry, I can't come then: I'm teaching."

• Have a canned message that includes the phone number for UCIT and Blackboard Help.
• Anticipate the technology problems and create a little library of Jing tutorials so that you can just email out a link to students who can't do things.
• Put all the course technology in you Readiness Assessment which requires students to run through all the tech in the first week to see where the problems might be and solve them early.

• We need to model the careful phrasing of email to our students so they can see good modles.
• Address the student using all the protocols of formal email with a salutation, a body that explains the message, a closing, and one's full namel.
• Make a tutorial or exercise that explains what good formal email looks like and insiste that this forma be followed in the email communication of the course. If you do this, then you need to remember to do it yourself to model what it looks like.

• Compare it to a face to face version of the class. Technically, they should be equivalent.
• Have a peer review
• Check the course alignment: list the student learning outcomes, list the major assessments and which learning outcomes they assess. List the activities you do and how they line up with the assessment. Fix holes or overlap.