Online Graduate Students

What do online graduate students want from instructors? Just ask them.

Instructional strategies for online learning are a frequent topic of these posts, for good reason. A well designed online course relies on an intentional approach to learning supported by evidence and learning theory. Formative feedback, authentic learning, and instructor presence are examples of instructional strategies that are well-supported and effective for online learning. Using the right instructional strategies to facilitate…

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March 13, 2024 |

New Box Inline Grading Tool

The New Box on the Docs

Online and face to face faculty are likely familiar with the Crocodoc inline grading tool, licensed for use by Blackboard. For a number of years, this third-party cloud-based document conversion system was the tool used to record faculty’s annotations of student’s digital work to provide them with detailed and relevant feedback as if they were handing back a marked-up paper.…

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March 13, 2024 |

Teacher laughing as she undergoes supervision and evaluation

Developing Teachers as Leaders: Supervision and Evaluation

One of the main responsibilities of being an administrator in the K-12 education setting is supervision and evaluation. Understanding the importance that the roles of supervision and evaluation play in the development of teacher leaders is vital to the culture of the school in which the practices are being utilized. In the Graduate Programs in Education at the University of…

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August 22, 2018 |

Figure with bullhorn next to bold text:

Putting Current Events in the Classroom

As instructional designers, we spend weeks or months working with subject matter experts and programs to ensure that courses have everything students need. We work on alignment and learning outcomes, and we carefully construct modules so that the content is current, robust, and presented in the clearest way possible. What happens though, when a portion of the course content is…

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May 17, 2018 |

UNE Online Graduate Courses available globally

Accessibility Helps Everyone

One of the pillars of Universal Design Language, or UDL, is the idea that when you develop your instruction and assessments so they are accessible to a wide audience, including to those with sensory impairments, the results benefit everyone. This dynamic exists across modalities, such that the more we design for students with certain sensory needs, the more we benefit…

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March 19, 2018 |

Thought bubble with idea

Fostering Growth Mindset in Grad Students

“People with a fixed mindset believe that their traits are set in stone – they have a certain amount of intelligence and nothing will change that. The opposite of this is the growth mindset – people see their qualities as things that they can develop through effort and practice” (Gallagher, 2014, their emphasis). According to Carol Dweck, Growth Mindset is…

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February 15, 2018 |

broken pencil

Authentic Learning and Assessments: Readying Online Students for the Real World

Last week at UNE Online’s first ever Online Learning Symposium         , I had the opportunity to share our goal of creating learning experiences and assessments that are not only rigorous and research-based, but also authentic to real work and real life, so that when our students leave us, they have the tools to use their knowledge…

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February 2, 2018 |

Webinar Series

Webinar - Inline Grading with New Box View

The most recent update to Blackboard, over break, included an update to its inline grading functionality. To cover the new features in this tool—which allows for student work to be read, graded, and even commented on within Blackboard, without forcing you to download—we turned to our fearless peers, Susan Graham-Rent and Susan Hyde, who delivered an excellent webinar on the…

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January 11, 2018 |

Acrobat PDF Icon

PDF Editing and Accessibility

PDFs (Portable Document Format), with their platform-neutral openability and read-only format, have become one of our most useful tools for saving and sharing documents, and are a common feature in online as well as face-to-face courses (read this article for more on the interesting history of PDFs). However, they can present challenges for some users, especially for those who are…

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January 5, 2018 |

Course Narrative

Tips for Strengthening Your Course Narrative

A good story generally contains the following elements: Protagonist: The hero (or anti-hero) of the narrative. Central premise: The argument or thesis of the story. Backstory: The context of the story. Conflict: The challenges faced by the protagonist. Narrative arc: The chronological movement of the story. Should any of these be missing, readers will find the story lacking, though they…

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July 28, 2016 |

Scaffolding for Learning

Scaffolding for Learning

Back in March, my colleague Olga wrote about authentic assessment. In her post, she noted “you scaffold the assignments (activities) and put together course materials necessary to help students do their best in achieving the desired result.” In this Vision post, we’ll take a look at how scaffolding and formative assessment can foster student success throughout your courses. Together, scaffolding and…

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June 16, 2016 |

Writing Prompts

How to Write Compelling Final Project Prompts

Final projects make or break a course. A good final project incorporates everything the student has learned in the course. It lends structure and meaning to the assignments that precede it, and it offers the student a chance to demonstrate mastery of course material in a way that is authentic to the subject matter. In an introductory nutrition course, for…

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May 19, 2016 |

Choosing Rubrics

For the Love of Rubrics

In past posts, we have discussed how to create rubrics, why we use rubrics at UNE, and how to use rubrics in Blackboard. This particular post will focus on the different types of rubrics one may encounter and what they look like. There are three main types of rubrics: holistic, analytic, and a love child of the two that we’ll…

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May 11, 2016 |

Essential Questions

Why do it: Essential Questions for Learning

We have been talking on and off about essential questions with Chris. Just the other day, because I am facilitating an online course about online course development (yup, I am!), a participant in the course submitted a syllabus with an essential question in it, and this was such a joyous moment that I had to capitalize on it and spread…

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March 24, 2016 |

Viral videos as assignments

What if students created viral videos as course projects?

Creating viral videos on purpose? It might just work! Sure, writing papers is academically significant and is a way to demonstrate understanding, analysis, and such. No question that putting together a website is collaborative and there are opportunities to make changes after peers offer feedback on the project. But, what if good videos carried a good message – and through…

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April 10, 2014 |