The COVID-19 pandemic caused instructors to quickly pivot their teaching into the remote environment. Now, as we conclude over a year of remote instruction, faculty need to focus on developing excellence in online and hybridized education. Research has been dedicated to discovering best practices in online teaching, but much of that work was…

In this reflective writing, the author shares some experiences of learning to teach in higher education, the pathway she has taken on this online adventure, and how her online teaching has been influenced by the pandemic context.

The number of students taking online courses has been increasing steadily, and a recent survey revealed that 73% of college students would like to keep taking hybrid and online courses after the pandemic. However, completion rates in online courses have been traditionally low partly because of the transactional distance between instructors and…

Student engagement is consistently identified as a key predictor of learner outcomes within the online learning environment. However, there is limited guidance about using proactive strategies to improve engagement for low and non-engaged students: for example by specifically employing course learning analytics (CLA) and nudging strategies in…

When the global pandemic forced campuses across the United States to send students home in March 2020, instructors were thrown into triage mode, forced to rapidly transition their on-the-ground classroom curriculum to a format that could be completed remotely by students spread out across the country. At the same time, centers for teaching and…

The spring of 2020 brought a necessary pivot to emergency remote teaching for all faculty. As a team of instructional designers at the Indiana University School of Public Health, we developed a rapid response protocol to analyze faculty's instructional design needs and provide effective and efficient support strategies. In this reflective essay,…

This paper introduces a web-based, interactive point pattern analysis "game" that allows users to generate quickly and repeatedly a point pattern on screen and immediately learn whether the pattern is statistically different from random. It uses two point pattern analysis methods: quadrat analysis (QA) and nearest neighbor analysis…

Online courses are increasing access to college for students who have been traditionally left out of higher education. However, minoritized students are less likely to succeed online when compared to their White and Asian peers. As the student population becomes more diverse, colleges and universities have an opportunity to improve this problem by…

Many educational institutions use Learning Management Systems to provide e-learning content to their students. This often includes quizzes that can help students to prepare for exams. However, the content is usually web-optimized and not very usable on mobile devices. In this work a native mobile application ("UML Quiz") that imports…

Using effective assessment techniques can improve an instructor's understanding of student needs and support learner-centered classrooms. Evaluating student learning takes on a new meaning in online classroom environment where students and instructors do not share physical proximity. According to Garrison (2011), the assessment strategies used to…

The Internet has disrupted or threatened to disrupt the traditional business models in many different areas, including publishing, record companies, retail sales, motion pictures, and advertising. One potential source of disruption for higher education is online learning, especially the recent focus on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Can…

This paper describes a faculty development model called the highly relevant mentoring (HRM) model; the model includes a framework as well as some practical strategies for meeting the professional development needs of faculty who teach web-based courses. The paper further emphasizes the need for faculty and administrative buy-in for HRM and…

Since MIT and Harvard started edX, their joint experiment with free online courses, the venture has attracted enormous attention for opening the ivory tower to the world. But in the process, the world will become part of an expensive and ambitious experiment testing some of the most interesting--and difficult--questions in digital education. Can…

The function of leadership is to create a vision for the future, establish strategic priorities, and develop an environment of trust within and between organizations. Great leadership is a process; leadership involves motivational influence, leadership occurs in groups, and involves a shared vision (Northouse, 2010). Instructional designers are…

This chapter provides an overview and implementation guidelines of Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT), an interactive engagement pedagogy used across disciplines and across the academy, now in its fourteenth year. The heart of JiTT pedagogy is Web-based pre-instruction assignments called warm-ups, with some colorful local variations, such as GeoBytes in…