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Top 5 Best Practices from #BPF2016
Each year, Northwestern’s Office of Change Management hosts the Best Practices Forum, a one-day conference in which a wide range of faculty and staff present their recent successes in order to provoke positive change across the university. The event promotes collaboration between departments, and Provost Daniel Linzer provided a great illustration of that in his…
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Creating a Syllabus Using Quality Matters Standards
What does a quality online course look like? How do we make sure every course is high quality? How do we measure or define quality? Those are all tough questions we ask ourselves every day (or at least very, very frequently) as we design and develop online courses.…
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Help Your Students Make Better Virtual Presentations
Common activities that occur in many professional and classroom settings, like giving a presentation, don’t always work in a distance learning environment in the ways we would expect. Differences in technology platforms can make the fairly simple process of talking and showing something to a group a difficult task.…
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Maximizing Your Synchronous Sessions – Part 1: Technology
Online courses at the School of Professional Studies make use of a limited amount of synchronous sessions – where students and the professor are all online at the same time – to build community and reinforce key course concepts. All faculty are required to host at least one synchronous session per quarter; the majority host…
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Rubrics: A Clear Pathway To Success
If you follow any higher education-related publication like Faculty Focus, The Chronicle of Higher Education, or Inside Higher Education you may have noticed that there has been ample discussion about rubrics. Topics like why use rubrics come up repeatedly in these publications, and in this blog post I will address some of these issues.…
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Quality Matters: April 2016 Online Learning Webinar
The April Online Learning Webinar focused on Quality Matters. Reba-Anna Lee, Director of Online Program Development, provided an overview of Quality Matters. She highlighted the program’s underlining principles, purpose and standards rubric. The webinar concluded with a preview of the second part of the series which will focus on the application of the QM rubric…
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Building Roadmaps with Canvas Icons
Are the students in your online class unsure how to approach the week’s tasks? There are many solutions, and I’ve seen everything from built-in LMS features like completion tracking to printable checklists. One particularly elegant addition to an online course is the roadmap.…
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Spring Quarter 2016 Begins Tomorrow!
Welcome back to faculty, students, and staff as Spring Quarter 2016 starts tomorrow, March 29! We’re offering over one hundred sections of our online courses, including several new classes in Information Design & Strategy and Medical & Health Informatics. Some important dates as we kick off Spring Quarter: April 1 – Spring Tuition due April…
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Offline Access to Course Materials
In December, Canvas announced a new feature to download course materials in EPUB format for viewing as an ebook. The feature is still in beta testing and as of the publish date of this blog post Canvas has not announced a date to move the feature out of beta.…
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Accommodating Adult Students – Perspectives from AccessibleNU
Learning Designer Krissy Wilson and Content Editor Christine Scherer asked Alison May, Assistant Dean of Students and Director of AccessibleNU, about the unique needs of adult students and the implications for online coursework. Dr. May has served AccessibleNU since 2007, and most of her work has focused on partnering with colleagues to raise awareness of…