The Scholar-Practitioner Model at UNE Online

Scholar-Practitioner teaching online
The Scholar-Practitioner Model is an advanced educational and operational model that is focused on the practical application of scholarly knowledge. At UNE Online, course designers and instructors follow this model to help graduate students make important connections between theory and practice by connecting the core curriculum with core experiences. What does the Scholar-Practitioner model look like at UNE Online? At UNE Online, we live out the Scholar-Practitioner model by employing faculty who are currently working in the field in which they are teaching, and currently doing the work that they are teaching about. Our Scholar-Practitioners are not only up to date on the latest interventions and theoretical frameworks, but they also have the ability to talk to the students…

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CGPS Collaborates to Meet Challenges of COVID-19

UNE Logo Blog Wide
In 2020, all of education (higher education as well as K-12) has been grappling with the new realities of remote learning and “pivoting” to emergency remote teaching as schools and institutions are forced to close related to COVID-19. As an entirely online graduate school with years of experience delivering online learning experiences, UNE’s College of Graduate and Professional Studies (CGPS) is well-prepared to handle new challenges brought on by COVID-19, in support of our impacted students and faculty. Collaboration across the college CGPS provides fully online and asynchronous instruction and strives to provide authentic experiential learning for all students. For students thinking about a new career, gaining real-world experience can be invaluable. Many CGPS academic programs offer site-based or…

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UNE Online integrates interactive branching scenarios and video roleplaying

Counseling session in the online MSW program
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 field, and as the field evolves, so must the learning process. Feedback from our course evaluations and student surveys has shown that students excel when presented with interactive elements. We have taken our student surveys and their anonymous course eval feedback to heart, and we have worked diligently over the past year to bring new elements into our courses that…

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Tips for Strengthening Your Course Narrative

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 may not be able to say why. The same thing holds true for courses. A course is also a type of story. The narrative unfolds through readings, assignments, lectures, and other materials. And as with a story, a course will seem inadequate should major narrative elements be missing. More often than not, the effects of badly designed courses and badly…

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Curriculum Mapping - Giving Direction to Learning

Education Levels Across America
One of my favorite features on my iPhone is the Maps App. I lost my beloved DeLorme Atlas & Gazetteer several moves (and states) ago. I don’t have a GPS in my car. I’ve often found myself lost in many an unfamiliar part of a town when traveling for work or even pleasure. There is something very comforting in saying, “Siri, where is the nearest gas station?” In program development and course development, curriculum maps serve a purpose similar to geographic road maps: They help give direction. “Curriculum mapping is the process of indexing or diagramming a curriculum to identify and address academic gaps, redundancies, and misalignments for purposes of improving the overall coherence of a course of study and,…

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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 formative assessment should provide students the valuable, low-stakes practice opportunities that will lead them to success in the course’s summative assessment. Instructional scaffolding refers to the supports that faculty provide to help students learn new tasks or concepts they may struggle with on their own. Similar to the scaffolding construction workers use, these are temporary supports that are…

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How to Write Compelling Final Project Prompts

Writing 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 example, a good final project might ask students to complete an educational flyer or develop a blueprint for a blog. Both of these assignments help students cultivate skills they will use in the discipline. A bad final project is unrelated to course material. It fails to provide context; that is, it does not explain why students should complete the project…

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For the Love of Rubrics

Choosing 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 call single point. Holistic Rubric A holistic rubric provides the students and faculty with different proficiency levels. For each level, all the criteria are listed describing what a student would have to do to achieve each. Let’s take a look at this example from the Ohio Department of Education: Holistic Rubric Example. As you can see from this example…

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Why do it: Essential Questions for Learning

Essential Questions
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 the message. If you are not familiar with essential questions as they apply to course and curriculum design, you are in for a treat! Essential questions are defined as the big, important questions that recur in one’s life, open-ended overarching questions exploring the deeper connections between objects in the world, and some say these are the questions that touch our…

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