Two new course formats for today’s social work student.  As a part of our commitment to continuing excellence in online education, the Online Master of Social Work program at the University of New England is happy to announce that we have introduced two new course delivery elements: interactive branching scenarios and live video roleplaying. Social Work is a singularly demanding…

Congratulations, graduates! We’re so excited that you’ll be joining us for Commencement! Portland has so much to experience – each year we have fun listing our favorites out of all of the uniquely “Maine” things that Portland has to offer. These are our favorites here at CGPS – we hope you enjoy them! Portland Maine Visitors Guide Click to open…

As more students enroll in online programs than ever before, UNE Online’s student population and alumni network are growing by leaps and bounds. Our learners now log in all over the world, lending their diverse perspectives to every class and every discussion. Now, as you consider or undertake your educational journey, you can see just how many students are achieving…

In today’s multimedia digital communication landscape, text continues to dominate.* Digital text accessibility doesn’t have to be complicated, and ensuring that your i’s are dotted shouldn’t be a burden. There are a few rules to keep in mind. While focusing on screenreader compatibility is an important aspect of the accessibility effort, the overall benefit to users goes beyond this technology.…

How well do you know the UNE Library, and the many resources available there? Recently, I visited the UNE Library website for the same reason that many of us do: to search for journal articles. I was pleased to find full-text access to most of the articles that I needed. This was not a big surprise; what really impressed me…

Have you ever pasted text into Blackboard and found that it just doesn’t look right? It might be that the font has changed, weird symbols have replaced some letters, background colors have suddenly appeared, or your spacing and lists are all wrong. It can be maddening when all you want to do is paste a simple string of text, but…

Every now and then, we like to draw attention to the links to the articles that we instructional designers have read and found interesting during the previous few weeks. The opinions expressed in these articles don’t always reflect our own. Rather, we share them because we think they compel conversation, which we’re happy to have with our readers in the comments field below. Udacity U-Turns…

The surest way to effective education process is active learning. Case studies are one of the pathways to active learning which allows students application and transfer of their newly acquired knowledge and skills, in that sort of complex, real world-like, immersive format. There is a lot to figure out in a good case study! The list of pros is long:…

Every now and then, we like to draw attention to the links to the articles that we instructional designers have read and found interesting during the previous few weeks. The opinions expressed in these articles don’t always reflect our own. Rather, we share them because we think they compel conversation, which we’re happy to have with our readers in the comments field below. Future Trends…

What should we make of the proliferation of Coding Boot Camps? Do they threaten to disrupt higher education? Does the fact that so many fail temper the hype? Doesn’t that hype have a basis in reality when employers say they would gladly hire Boot Camp graduates? What about the reportedly questionable success of Boot Camp alumni–does that cast doubt upon…

Every once in awhile we like to curate some of the resources and articles that have interested us these last couple weeks for your reading pleasure. The opinions expressed in these resources don’t always reflect our own. Rather, we share them because we think they compel conversation, which we’re happy to have with our readers in the comments field below.  The History of…

With the longer weekend approaching, we thought we’d curate a few of the resources that have interested us these last couple weeks for your reading pleasure. The opinions expressed in these articles don’t always reflect our own. Rather, we share them because we think they compel conversation, which we’re happy to have with our readers in the comments field below.  Inception learning: La…

As both an online student and an instructional designer, I find myself thinking about attention spans often. Last year, I wrote a post here about harnessing the distracted mind, in which I offered tools and methods for staying focused, even when hilarious YouTube videos or brilliant longreads are just one browser tab away. What I’ve come to realize over the…

One of the guiding aspirations of online education is to reach across geographical (and cultural) boundaries. I love my field because I work to help make higher education more widely available to those who have limited access to it. The Educational Attainment in America map, developed by Kyle Walker at TCU, is a fascinating way to look at that challenge. He developed it…

I recently wrote about how information fluency is hoped to bolster our ability to recognize and defuse the phenomena known as fake news. It’s supposed to do so by providing the information fluent with the means to “respect the expertise that authority represents while remaining skeptical of the systems that have elevated that authority and the information created by it.” That quote is taken from…

A short post today, because we are doing some work on the site and I only have a small window in which to get this up. Luckily, I have been studying something recently which I think deserves a bit of recognition, or at the very least some conversation. That something is the Domain of One’s Own movement, that started up…

One of the keys to engaging online learners and facilitating critical thinking is providing students with timely, meaningful, and actionable feedback. Webinar: Providing Effective Student Feedback Watch this video on YouTube Good feedback is: Timely Instructional Consistent Good feedback also: Highlights a specific knowledge or skill Focuses on thinking (not writing mechanics) Moves a student’s work forward Provides a model…

For more reasons than I can count, the 2016 presidential election has amplified our country’s ongoing debate on web privacy. The topic can grow tiresome, but if we stop to consider that the issue goes far beyond someone’s email server, it becomes a little more interesting. Take student privacy, for example. We expect faculty and staff to honor FERPA. Do…

Massive Open Online Courses have had a bumpy history. Their promise, when the idea was gaining full momentum a few years back, was that so long as a course was well designed it could scale infinitely to teach four thousand students as ably as it could teach twenty. Not only that, but some forward thinkers hypothesized that a MOOC would run…

The development of creative, authentic assignments that align with course objectives is always an exciting process. However, guiding students with clearly written assignment instructions can be challenging. We owe it to our busy online students to provide clear, concise instructions that prepare them for success. This week’s blog will provide some tips to help you to do just that. Start with…

Blackboard Learn. North America. Spring 2016. 927 Institutions 70,000 Courses. 3,374,462 unique learners. The most recent Blackboard usage study casts a much wider net than has been their scope in the past. Titled “Patterns in Course Design,” the learning management system heavyweight released an interpretation on the current environment of course design. By crunching the aggregate data across their broad sample,…

Today, the Instructional Design team is at ACTEM. Several of us are presenting, in fact. So, for our Vision post this week, we thought we’d post the synopses of our presentations here, and if you would like to you can follow up with the designers responsible for them. Please feel free to email them if you would like to hear more, or if you…

I found myself mildly freaking out about what to write this week for the blog post. We are nearing term start and most of us are focused on finishing up our courses. The building is filled with stress. My favorite way to deal with stress is cake. Who doesn’t become excited and giddy, like a small child, when cake is…

This is for instructors and students alike. For those of you who are instructing, this could come in handy as a resource for any students who are claiming they can’t find the feedback you know you provided for their assignment. As a first step in addressing that issue, consider sending the student to this post. For students…well, of course this…