Conference Presentations

As schools shifted to virtual learning experiences in response to COVID-19, Fresno Unified School District was able to build on a (then) 4-year online learning initiative to ensure teachers and students had ongoing access to learning opportunities. In addition, they were able to continue to learn from students' and teachers' behaviors in the virtual environment to refine their online offerings as learning continues to evolve.

Quality learning experiences are commonly confounded with other variables such as mode of delivery, course grades, student characteristics including intelligence, and idiosyncratic experiences of faculty members. This session distinguishes these variables and assumptions about them from academic rigor and summarizes research support for defining quality and analyzing student learning experiences in higher education.

his session will explore the concept of student voice and choice within the larger context of learner agency and empowerment. Instructional design strategies to incorporate voice and choice, and promote cognitively engaged learning, in both hybrid and online courses will be discussed. Research-supported practices and quality standards that promote voice and choice in online courses will be presented and will be of benefit to faculty and instructional designers, as well as campus collaborators for educational equity and inclusion.

This session will provide a historical overview of QM's research on implementation, grounded in the literature for implementing quality assurance and navigating change management. Past research results and recommendations will be discussed, as well as how we're moving this research forward to provide new resources and supports for implementing online quality assurance at your institution.

This session will preview the Inclusive Teaching Online workshop at Oregon State University Ecampus and preliminary findings from its associated research study.

Clear expectations, intuitive navigation, easily found course components -- all good ideas for online course design, right? We know them when we see them, but can we purposefully design them? Join us to discuss how the design of structure and interface of online courses can benefit the  learner, educator, and organization as a whole. Also, discuss how program-wide design standards can help support learner success, and break down examples of structures that can serve as a  guide when designing, updating, or improving online courses.

Course design is at the front and center of online learning yet it is the least developed aspect of online learning pedagogy. Between the continued growth of distance learning enrollments and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the need for quality course design is essential to student success and completion and is critical to the sustainability of community colleges. This session will highlight one community college's efforts to progressively implement QM specific review standards in an effort to increase course completion rates.

Although emergency remote teaching pushed the synchronous modality back into the academic spotlight, synchronous learning was actually a popular online modality many decades ago, and is embedded within the rich and lengthy history of distance education. This session will focus on merging our foundational knowledge of synchronous learning with our modern-day technologies and teaching strategies, ending with some great takeaways for research-supported best practices for synchronous design and teaching.

You heard you need to scale up your training program “quickly” to prepare all faculty to develop quality online courses. Learn how a large scale system was able to pivot quickly with a collaborative effort across 23-campuses to provide systemwide training. A model will be shared for growing a pool of certified QM facilitators, targeted identification of faculty for specific training, and managing subscriber facilitated QM PD options with a “high touch” model of support for facilitators and participants in the classes.