Lessons from a Faculty Fellow
Thinking about designing (or improving) an online course can be an intimidating process. I am sure that many feel like they are not sure where to begin-something like “I know a good online course when I see it…but how do I create that?” Or you can be like me and have WAY too many ideas and not know where to even start. The good news is that the friendly folks from the FIC can always keep you on track (and help you organize your massive to-do list of projects).
During my fellowship this Spring 2021 semester, we took my grand plans for STA2023: Elementary Statistics Online and narrowed them down into some achievable goals that I could share with others:
Using Honorlock with Publisher Content
Though I had used proctoring software in the past, I had not used Honorlock in my courses yet. From the instructor's perspective, I found it very easy to set up and use, particularly with the resources already available in the Virtual Proctoring InfoGuide. Setting up Honorlock with a third-party publisher (we use Pearson’s MyStatLab) only took a few steps that were easy to follow. However, once the semester started, I found that students were getting hung up on one particular step of the Honorlock process for publisher exams…inserting the exam password. Once I explained this step to students (usually via email), they were able to take all of their exams with little to no issues for the remainder of the semester. We were able to identify this area of need (Honorlock’s student tutorials just weren’t specific enough and the visuals just didn’t look similar to what our students were seeing) and we were able to create a tutorial video for students that was specific to our DSC classes that use Pearson MyLab publisher exams. When I used this tutorial video in the course this summer, the millions of questions I received about the password whittled down to just one or two! More information and that video can be found in Jasmine’s blog post, Using Honorlock for your Publisher Exams.
Using H5P to Create Interactive Content:
If you haven’t used H5P yet, I encourage you to do so! This tool can help you create rich, interactive, personalized content and take your delivery of material up a notch. Think of H5P as a way to create the best presentation that you have ever seen in your entire life. There are many different content types that are available-from interactive videos, to course presentations and flash cards-you can even create quizzes with immediate feedback so you can reinforce what students should be learning and give them a bit of encouragement. H5P is fully accessible and also responsive and mobile-friendly. For us math and science folks, H5P supports LaTeX, so you can include symbols, notation, and equations in your content. You have the option to grade and track the interactions, so you can drill down to see how (and if) students are interacting with the content. H5P is pretty intuitive, but it does take some experimentation. There have been several blog posts with H5P examples as well as a H5P tab on the Falcon Online for Faculty InfoGuide.
Course Design & Consistency
My favorite part of the fellowship was tapping into different perspectives to help my course design. I know that sometimes (especially after teaching a course for many semesters) I can make assumptions about how clearly I am communicating and organizing course information for my students. Having discussions with the instructional designers about the organization and what makes sense for students helped guide the redesign of some elements of the course. We consolidated similar materials into one topic (for example, video lessons on one section were grouped together under one topic under the Content area), considered accessibility and universal design when creating materials, and added items that upped the pizazz level in the course, like module banners. The instructional designers were great resources for understanding elements in Falcon Online that I had not worked with much in the past (like the Visual Table of Contents) and helped me make my course “look pretty,” which was something that I always wanted to do, but felt like I lacked the creativity and skills to do so. To learn more about developing more consistency in your own course shells, read Aaron's blog post, Best Practices Course Template and Homepage.
Key Takeaways
The takeaway that I am most proud of is that not only can I share the skills that I learned during the process with my colleagues in my department and other faculty college-wide, but that I created a course that I can share with all of the faculty teaching Statistics in my department. This will help us foster consistency between instructors and promote a streamlined learning experience for our students. I also developed an important relationship with the crew in the FIC and know that I can always run ideas by them and ask for their expertise-this will only help improve my courses and my students’ learning experience here at DSC.
Rachel Repyneck
Faculty, School of Mathematics
rachel.repyneck@daytonastate.edu
386-506-4842