Report from ACTEM

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 have a project in mind that would benefit from their expertise. And wish us all luck at ACTEM!

The presentations (and presenters) are:

Effective Discussion Board Strategies

How do you entice students to exchange ideas in an online environment? How do you facilitate discussions when you’re not face-to-face with your class? Join in this interactive session to explore discussion board best practices.

by Susan Barrett-Hyde (sbarretthyde@une.edu) & Susan Rent (sgrahamrent@une.edu)

Online Course Gamification

This is a 2-part presentation on gamifying online post-secondary courses. The first part will address the history and theory behind gamification and higher education. The second part will demonstrate simple gamification techniques that can implemented in an online course.

by Christine Baumgarthuber (cbaumgarthuber@une.edu) & Sarah Cochran (scochran@une.edu)

Building Instructional Design Community

New England is a great place to live and work as an instructional designer, but it doesn’t offer many options for socializing, networking, and learning from other designers. We’d like to change that. This roundtable is a space for anyone working in instructional design, assessment, or curriculum development to meet and share challenges, solutions, and strategies. Let’s start building a community for everyone working in ID.

by Richard Parent (rparent1@une.edu)

Creating Interactive Online Instruction

In this hands-on session, we will address one of the questions that many of us face: How can I make online instructional videos more engaging? Session participants will first examine a case study course in STEM in which in THURSDAY WORKSHOPS Jeff Bailey & Dan Ryder instructional designers evaluated platforms and selected a solution for increasing interactivity. Then, participants will testdrive the tools themselves.

Corey Butler (cbutler6@une.edu) & Mike Trombley (mtrombley@une.edu)

Design & Manage Online Group Projects

Group work can be a source of frustration in asynchronous online courses to a greater degree than in a faceto-face classroom. We will discuss concepts, strategies, and tools for ensuring a better learning experience and productive use of groups in online courses.

Olga Laplante (oslastenlaplante@une.edu)

You Are the Game Master

The session will cover a framework for designing scenario-based games that promote learning, as well as means for facilitating the games in both face-to-face and online environments. These tools and techniques will platform a discussion about the importance of unscripted play to competency in any subject, and everyone will learn a little bit more about what type of gamers they are.

Chris Malmberg (cmalmberg@une.edu)