Conference Presentations

This session will discuss a cross-departmental initiative supported by state, system, and institutional stakeholders at a four-year institution to implement the Accessible Syllabus Project, lessons learned, and compliance improvement data; and will demonstrate related tools and resources.

Nearly a decade after designing my courses based on Quality Matters (QM) Standards and teaching fully online, the March 2020 pivot to emergency remote instruction was business as usual for my students while I assisted my colleagues with the transition online.

Ever feel like your online learners have not done any actual learning before attempting an assessment?  Receive assignments that do not meet the requirements that you are pretty sure you spelled out?  Let's strategize ways to guide our learners!

Making learning meaningful through real-world application is a hallmark of academic rigor. However, focusing on the importance of geographic location may neglect online learners, especially those who are remote. This session will provide actionable ideas to implement online teaching and learning strategies that enable students to apply their learning in meaningful ways to their communities, regardless of their physical location.

Making learning meaningful through real-world application is a hallmark of academic rigor. However, focusing on the importance of geographic location may neglect online learners, especially those who are remote. This session will provide actionable ideas to implement online teaching and learning strategies that enable students to apply their learning in meaningful ways to their communities, regardless of their physical location. 

The 3 C's online strategic planning framework is comprised of course quality, capacity, and culture. This framework touches all of the areas necessary to create a strategic plan for online programming at any level. A fully-realized plan will be presented using strategic planning software.

A well-known African proverb advises, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” As many online educators, administrators, and e-learning professionals can attest, the sentiments expressed in these statements aptly describe the relationship between synergy and success. Institution-wide collaboration for online quality matters! But what strategies are successful Quality Matters implementors incorporating to support academic and student support units while galvanizing the strength of institutional administrators? 

Improve the quality of your students’ research and writing by embedding a learner support team into your online course. Find out how faculty, librarians, writing consultants and instructional designers at Berkeley College teamed up to accomplish this by applying QM General Standard 7.3. Participants will discover how to structure, implement and assess a team-facilitated online course that puts expert academic assistance at students’ fingertips and improves learning outcomes.

A gap in professional development to meet the requirement of online teaching experience was recently identified on our campus. This presentation will discuss how the Strategies for Teaching Online, a fully online course aligned to the QM Rubric, was developed to address the gap.

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.

This session will discuss a midsize community college's journey to incorporate common assessment across multi-section courses. We will cover the rationale and research behind using common assessments, the Communication Department's pilot project, and lessons learned from the school-wide roll-out. We will also discuss the logistics of documenting assessment data, tracking common assessment results, project examples, unforeseen benefits, achieving faculty buy-in, and frequently asked questions.

Throughout pandemic, some undergraduate students indicate that they feel disengaged with  online coursework while others struggle in silence.  Mental health concerns and best practices for a healthy, engaged classroom will be examined and discussed.

Throughout pandemic, as a result of stress, some undergraduate students have indicated that they feel disengaged with online coursework while others struggle in silence. Mental health concerns and best practices focused on social emotional learning (SEL) for a healthy, engaged classroom will be examined and discussed. In this interactive session, participants will be able to learn about strategies that can be immediately implemented in their teaching practice.

From recruiting and onboarding to enrollment, there are definite steps that lead to an online program that is student-centered and focused on success. This highly engaging session will focus on setting the stage for student success and retention in online programs, and resources for the session will be both synchronous and asynchronous so that participants can share and access materials long after the conference has concluded.

During this presentation, we'll discuss different ways in which teachers can stand out from the crowd, develop meaningful connections with students, and make their courses a little more than boxes and videos on a screen.

Quality Matters (QM) is one of the most widely adopted sets of standards for best practices in online courses to promote student learning. In this study, we examined student perceptions of the impact of QM-certified courses on students’ learning and engagement. Fifty graduate students enrolled in online courses completed a survey developed based on the QM Rubric items. The QM framework includes 43 individual standards clustered into eight general categories.

Join this session for a brief overview of research related to student views of quality online learning followed by an active discussion about how we might include the student point of view in future research projects. What questions should we ask? What do we need to know to help tomorrow’s students succeed? Bring your ideas!

Do students agree with the items included in the QM Rubric? Do they rate QM Standards at the same level of importance? Help us find out! In 2024, a research team will repeat the 2009-2011 national study of student perspectives of quality using the recently released QM Higher Education Rubric, Seventh Edition. Join the session to discuss study details and learn how to participate.