Director's Choice Recommendations - A curated collection of resources for faculty teaching online at all levels of experience and development
Many of the best resources for guidance in the design and building of your online course can already be found in numerous locations. Online course development and design is a robust professional field and our colleagues have amassed a dizzying array of pages, documents, videos and sound files towards this effort. Below are a few choice examples to get you started. This page models a "curated" list of resources, which reflect the individual but highly informed choices and bias of the Director of Distance Education, Dr. David S. McCurry.
Download the Revised Online Teaching Faculty Handbook
(Currently being revised and reviewed by the Distance Education Advisory Group)
External Partner Resources - The Office of Distance Education and Upstate subscribes to a few different organizational resources that provide discounted or free resources for members. Here are two of the most important for you, as faculty teaching teaching online courses:
The Online Learning Consortium (OLC) is an institutional membership driven consortium that offers training, tools, research and a host of other services. Upstate is an institutional member and we are provided discounts on training workshops, courses and conferences.
The Teaching, Learning, and Technology Group (TLTG) is also an institutional membership organization with live events every Friday and special events online for members. Upstate is an institutional member of the TLT Group. You can create a member account using your " @uscupstate.edu " email address and access the extensive archives available in the members area. Select "Subscribing Institution Individual Membership (Free)" from the choices on this page: http://tltgroup.roundtablelive.org/Individual
General Online Course Design
Online Learning Consortium / Open SUNY Course Quality Review - This rubric document can be used to self-assess your online course prior to the Level 1 or Level 2 course design process.
The rubric is also used in evaluating course quality as part of the UpOCC system.
Top 10 Tips for a New Online Course is a good summary of important points to consider in designing your first online course. Specifically speaks to faculty transitioning a course from a traditional face to face experience to online.
A really good starting place for any faculty new to the online teaching process.
Bloom's Revised Taxonomy. Interactive web chart (using Flash technology) demonstrating relationships between verbs and cognitive functions of learner outcomes.
Assessment in Online Courses
Student Peer-Review. This site at University of Florida offers great descriptions and suggestions for how to organize student peer-review processes in your course. Peer review engages students in critical thinking, collegiality, deep skills and knowledge integration and social learning. While you are at the site, check out all of the other great resources at UF for online teaching, brought to you by their Center for Instructional Technology and Training.
Good Learner Outcomes. This resource page provides some good examples, and
counter-examples (my preferred method, btw), of learner outcome
statements. Also read these and see how much easier it is to plan
activities and assignments from the exemplary statements than it is for
the previous examples.
Engaging Students and Communications - a critically important part of any course, but especially in distance and online learning and teaching.
Student Engagement Tools. This PDF document from Faculty Focus (a good resource in its own right) provides some good anecdotal ideas for how and why online communications in your courses are important. Not really focused on "tools" per se, but some good ideas.
Best Video Practices. This research study compared short videos, longer lecture-style videos, tablet demonstrations, and powerpoint slides with narration. Provides results and recommendations for best practices.
Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning in Online Courses
The link to Portland Community College, with one of the better resource sites for Accessibility will prove helpful.
Open Education Resources and Content - There have been great developments in the past several years in the quality and availability of open educational resources (OER), which by definition are available electronically, generally free, and often curated by editors and professionals across most academic fields. By converting your course to online, you might well consider also drawing on these resources in your course. The advantages are twofold; students can more easily access course content and materials online and by using open resources, you eliminate a substantial added cost to their education. Most regularly used textbooks have an OER equivalent that is equal to, if not better in many cases, to the commercial texts. Open resources are often assembled through contributions from many members of the academic community and reflect multiple, diverse viewpoints far greater than those found in traditional texts.
Open educational resources also provide an avenue for your scholarly contribution to widely accessible course materials for your teaching colleagues around the globe. You become a producer, not just a consumer, of course content. Some would argue that to be the traditional and rightful role of a professor in any course.
Using OER in a course also places the emphasis in academic creativity back in the hands of you, the professor. Too many commercially published texts have evolved into full-blown course materials, with presentations, tests, quizzes, videos, sometimes to the point where one might reasonably ask "whose course is this, really?" By using OER, you commit to producing an online course more rich with content for your students. Instead of just one or two commonly used texts, you have access to literally hundreds of published and peer-reviewed collections. Here are some good starting points:
The OER Commons
MERLOT II Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching. One of the original and oldest collections for OER.
