Get the students talking

Posted on April 14, 2020 by tripaths

I’m working with CTL to design a hybrid course. My course is called Launch Academy and it brings together students from any major who want to launch a new venture while in school.

Every student has a different business idea, and different baseline competencies related to new venture launches, but all of them have a common spirit of entrepreneurship. Despite their diversity they have that important aspect in common.

One of The Five Common Pitfalls of Online Course Design, that resonated with me was the admonishment not to ignore the ways students can interact in a properly designed online or hybrid course. That will be important in my course. I would like my class to be a true community, with students who observe each other, learn from each other and provide meaningful support. The common spirit they share should enable this.

I will facilitate it through regular use of peer feedback assignments, implemented on discussion boards. These students want to talk about their ideas and their work and they want to help each other. Enabling that is something I need to make happen.

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Keep Teaching – Spring ’20

Posted on March 18, 2020 by Cub Kahn

OSU QuadGo to the Oregon State University Keep Teaching site for resources on strategies and techniques for remotely teaching your Spring courses including the use of Canvas and Zoom. On that page, you will see important links as well as a schedule of daily training sessions offered via Zoom. No need to sign up; just join any session during the scheduled time.

If you have technical questions, the OSU Service Desk is your front line for support.

To help you rapidly prepare for Spring term remote teaching, you have access to a Remote Teaching Canvas course template that can be imported into your empty Canvas course sites. The template itself gives simple directions to import it into your course sites. You can do this in 2 minutes!

Also check with the Center for Teaching and Learning blog for tips and updates.

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Check out a New Professional Development Opportunity

Posted on March 2, 2020 by Cub Kahn

pink cherry blossomsGood news! The deadline has been extended to March 8 to apply for this Spring’s pilot of the Applying Learning Technology Community.

All faculty teaching on-campus courses are encouraged to submit proposals. This community will give participants the opportunity to explore learning technology with support from the Center for Teaching and Learning and Academic Technology.

Professional development funding provided. See the call for proposals.

Space is limited. Apply today!

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Find Out About Open Textbook Funding

Posted on January 13, 2020 by Cub Kahn

Oregon State University’s Open Educational Resources (OER) Unit provides Affordable Learning Grants for OSU faculty to adapt, adopt or author an open textbook. Such textbooks are licensed under an open copyright license and made available online to be freely used by students, faculty and members of the public.

If you are thinking about applying for an Affordable Learning Grants and have questions, please come to one of these workshops to learn about the application process, the MOU, and answer questions about open educational resources:

  • Wednesday, January 15, from 10:00am-11:00am in the Valley Library Drinkward Conference room
  • Friday, February 14, from 12:00pm-1:00pm in the Valley Library Drinkward Conference room
  • Thursday, March 12, from 3:00pm-4:00pm in the Valley Library Drinkward Conference room

Questions? Contact Stefanie Buck, OSU Director of Open Educational Resources.

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A Hybrid Approach to a Graphic Design Professional Practice Course

Posted on November 20, 2019 by gallaghc

Graphic Design Professional Practices is a senior level course that covers professional ethics & standards, business practices & tactics, and production techniques for graphic designers. With graduation hot on their heels — seniors review, discuss and participate in what it means to be a professional graphic designer.

In contrast to the typical graphic design studio course, with project centric content — this course contains more ‘out-of-class’ content (reading, short videos, tutorials), reflection and discourse. Students are asked to build their own set of  ‘best practices’ and approaches when it comes to being a happy, healthy and challenged professional.

I’m using the hybrid model to as a way to diversify and expand the delivery, output and engagement beyond the classroom. I’ve recently found that there is an ‘issue’ or lack of productivity and motivation in the classroom setting alone. Our students need the flexibility to construct their own spaces and environments to work best in — to be able to share and discuss their work across a variety platforms — from online discussion to classroom presentation.

I’m shooting for a 50/50 split between classroom to online time. Class time will primarily be used to share, present, discuss and debate ideas face-to-face — while online time will be reserved more for content delivery, peer review, reflection and discussion.

I think of the hybrid model as a ‘node’ — one pathway is the classroom and other is online — when the two paths come together, they create a connecting point, that connecting point is an ‘learned point’ for the student.

What follows is a breakdown of how the learning module (or node) “Career Research + Positioning” would be linked through online and face-to-face activity:
Reading: Read the AIGA article Building Blocks Of Design Studio Culture.
Assignment: Build a frame or narrative — of the type of studio and work you want to belong to. Choose three ‘hard’ and two ‘soft’ building blocks from (or based on) the article and write a statement that explains the importance of those ‘building blocks’. Post to the online discussion board.
Online Discussion: Read through your classmates ‘building blocks’ and find where you have overlapping interests. Respond by letting them know why that shared consideration is important to you as well.
Fieldwork Assignment: Research Studios/Agencies/Organizations that you might like to work for based on your Design Culture Building Blocks. Make arrangements to visit or interview two of these studios.
In Class Presentations: Design a visual presentation that explains the ways in which the studios you interviewed support your studio culture building blocks.

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Working to hybridize infectious disease training in the veterinary school

Posted on November 18, 2019 by Doublebluff

I have taught bacteriology to vet students for the past ~12 years. I am not a veterinarian and thus my training is more basic than they would probably expect. Over the years I have tried to tweak my course every year to add relevance to most of the DVM students.

This year my tweak is going to be a bit larger. I plan to hybridize my course by integrating all my material into four different terms of their training. I hope to link all of my lecture material to specific lectures that the clinical faculty present, such that my discussions of basic bacteria will be applied to the specific disease that other faculty are talking about in their course. For example, if a clinician is going to talk about canine skin diseases, there might be an online lecture attached that addresses what Staphylococci are and how they work to cause disease in a host. This will be continued throughout the early training of these students (years 1 and 2) such that their understanding of basic microbiology will dovetail with the nature of a specific disease.

The in-class aspects of my course will include the laboratory portion which will be required to stay where it is. I will also coordinate case study presentations in a variety of settings that will be presented in full-class settings, again across the first two years of the curriculum.

The challenges that I expect mainly deal with my ability to get faculty to buy into the approach. I think I can make the lectures work online, though this will reduce my direct contact with the students, which I enjoy. I will have to get other faculty to transfer some of their material to a different term, as we will be adding information to each of their courses.  this is primarily because of the course-and-a-half concept. This might be a deal-breaker, as it is tough to expect a lot of people to make these kinds of adjustments. I hope to begin the process just after the holidays, with a goal of implementing in Spring of next year.

We will see how it goes. I am committed to making this work, but I expect there will be both anticipated and unanticipated challenges as I work to integrate my course material across the veterinary curriculum.

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Hybridizing Sociology of Religion (in a nutshell)

Posted on November 18, 2019 by gallaghs

In the new hybrid version of Sociology of Religion, we will be shifting much of the lecture material to online and much of the discussion to the classroom.  This concept has rocked my pedagogical world!

The first week students will begin with a reflection piece submitted online and discussed in class on the social factors that have shaped their current perspective on religion.  Whether that is a deeply held commitment to one of a the historic traditions that have dominated western culture, or spiritual but not religious, or nothing at all, this exercise helps students begin the process of thinking sociologically about religion.

The course will push students to read ahead, so they are prepared for classroom discussion each week, followed by interacting with additional learning materials (lecture, discussion, research) online during the week.   Students are also going to be actively engaged in research – doing 4 fieldwork observations at religious gatherings/ services during the quarter and working collaboratively to present those to the class.

Given the diversity of experience students bring to this course, my hope is that they leave with a better grounding in an understanding of the history and substance of the religious traditions that have shaped and are shaping the cultural and social experience of the US, as well as the importance of religious institutions and social movements in US politics and communities.

We’ll see!  the course is very much …under construction sign

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Special Animal Medicine as a newly “hybridized” course

Posted on November 15, 2019 by sargentj

by Jennifer Sargent

Special Animal Medicine (frequently abbreviated as SPAM) is a required class on the husbandry, behavior, medicine, and surgery of nontraditional pets. These include common relatively common pets like rabbits and hamsters as well as more classic exotics such as parrots and reptiles. The course is taken in the 3rd year of the professional veterinary curriculum by all 72 students in a given class. It occurs in the spring quarter before veterinary students begin the clinical rotations that make up their final year of training. This is a 4 credit course that meets once per week.

Previously this was a lecture heavy course (4 hours of lecture on a Friday afternoon!) with a weekly online quiz. The hybridized version will include smaller “bite size” lecture videos on specific topics as well as online assignments and discussion to explore the topics in a more interactive manner.  During class time we will focus on Q&A related to the online materials and explore clinical case studies. Clinical case studies, hypothetical scenarios that describe a nontraditional pet with a common concern or disease, will be worked through in groups during class time. This will allow students to apply the new material in a way that mimics the “real world” cases they will face once they graduate. Following class there will be a weekly online quiz to solidify key concepts from the week’s material. As a hybrid course the goal is for the online activities to be well blended with what we do in the classroom. To achieve this the online activities (lectures, low-stakes mini-quizzes, and discussion) will introduce material and the class time will focus on synthesizing and applying that knowledge in a clinically relevant way. So welcome to SPAM Hospital, students! Your first (hypothetical) patient is ready to be examined.

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A classroom day in SPAN 113, hybrid style

Posted on November 15, 2019 by davismae

“How will you use class meeting time? What types of content, activities, assignments and/or assessments will you have online? How will your students’ online learning and classroom experience be linked?”

I’ll skip right to the good stuff since Chris and Raven have already laid out the general contours of our course (a 4-credit novice-high language course taught 100% in Spanish to a mixed bag of undergrads, grad students, and non-degree-seeking students).  And since they both broke down the questions posed above, I’ll answer a related one: what might one of our two weekly 50min face-to-face (F2F) meetings look like in the new hybrid version SPAN 113?

First, we might begin with a five-minute conversation warm-up related to this week’s online discussion-board topic as we always want to start with something active and engaging. Next, we might ask students to complete a task based on materials they’ve been interacting with in the online environment– maybe each group of 5 students read an article about a different famous Chilean and they worked together in the online environment to summarize it; now we’ll have them split into new groups and tell about their famous Chilean before playing a trivia game (“Which famous Chilean went by a nickname?”). Then we might split them into two groups, arrange them in concentric circles, and give them 2min to explain their in-progress online project to the student standing across from them before changing partners and repeating the process.  Finally, we might give them time to work together on the project– bearing in mind, of course, that all of their communication must take place in Spanish.

As Raven mentioned in her post, hybrid delivery seems absolutely ideal for this class and the other lower-division language courses; deciding what to do online and what to do in the F2F environment– and how these things will interconnect– has come to us pretty naturally as we already have a really good idea of what works better in-person and what works better online.  I think we’re all feeling really excited about delivering this course hybrid-style!

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NMC 380 Pre-Production in a Nut Shell

Posted on November 15, 2019 by tiffanca

Course Description:

Focuses on pre-production or the planning phase of various audio/visual storytelling media. Explores creative application of visualizing a text narrative into an audio/visual media production. Topics include story structure, concept development, visual research, cinematic language, shot composition, storyboarding, animatics and editing.

In the face-to-face version of this course I usually spend the first half of the term lecturing every day. For the hybrid version of this class I am going to divide those lectures into 50/50 online in video form and face-to-face. I am going to choose to put lectures online that are structured around technical concepts and terminology. These lectures are pretty straightforward and will also be easier to build in video quizzes. For the lectures with less tangible/quizzable content I will continue to cover these topics face-to-face.

On the technical side of things students need to use digital drawing software, animation and video editing software. In the face-to-face version of the course I produced tutorials that were given over a four week period to teach the student how to create and assemble their large scale project and final animatic. I am going to re-record these tutorials but have them broken up into more manageable chunks. I think I will have them broken up over seven weeks instead of four, this will allow me to cover more material online during the tutorials. My hope is that more incremental learning with the tech part of the class will alleviate the stress of the steep learning curve early on in the course.

It terms of feedback I often meet with them regularly in class to talk about their projects. With the hybrid version I plan on using audio/video feedback when grading and more peer reviews/discussions as well.

As far as the final I always do a final screening of their all video projects with buttery popcorn. I think I will continue this tradition for this course. I may think about eventually moving the final screening online, but I don’t know how to get the feeling of a dark room with warm popcorn and the sweet smell of accomplishment into Canvas.

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