This presentation will discuss ways of integrating general education literacies into an online capstone course for Professional Studies degree learners. The capstone course is the culminating experience for the Bachelor of Science in Professional Studies and builds on the concepts covered within the program of study. The capstone course provides learners with the opportunity to integrate key general education literacies and synthesize the knowledge and skills acquired throughout learner coursework.

Online presentations serve as both a highly flexible assessment strategy and a great source of transferable skills for students. At the same time, online presentations often inspire student stress and a variety of technical challenges. This presentation provides a collection of proactive techniques and strategies designed to help students both prepare for online presentations and more thoroughly enjoy and benefit from the related experience.

The College of Education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) has developed an open, “plug-and-play” tool allowing customization of OER textbooks by adding interactive assessments to enhance student retention, engagement and accountability. The tool tracks students’ activities and visually displays their progress to both instructors and students via dashboards. Designed using open-source software, the tool is freely available to educators at UHM and beyond.

Engaging students during out-of-class work and keeping them accountable for that work are key factors for student success (Hwang, Lai, & Wang, 2015). While web-based resources are often used in online and face-to-face learning environments, they typically do not include embedded assessments, nor do they track student progress as they use those resources. Instructors report an ongoing need for online systems that provide students with formative assessments and provide faculty with feedback on student progress (Seaman & Seaman, 2018).

This presentation will provide participants with a preview of how educators can use the tool to customize OER textbooks and use student progress data through the tool’s dashboards. We will also share preliminary results from a study piloting the tool in a graduate level course then provide a question and answer period in which session attendees can share their feedback and related experience.

I argue that online discussions conceived as communities of inquiry (CoI) should place as much emphasis on learners teaching teachers as teachers teaching learners. First, in CoI as originally conceived, learners teaching teachers is a possibility. Teachers and learners are identified in the first instance simply as “participants.” Second, online discussions succeed or fail depending on participants’ level of engagement. Learner teaching and teacher learning increase the chances of success by increasing the ways participants can contribute to discussions. Third, given that CoI have shared goals requiring collaborative solutions, it is just as important theoretically that learners share their solutions with teachers as teachers share theirs with learners. Fourth, the CoI model is based on John Dewey’s “new order of conceptions.” Dewey demonstrated at his University Elementary School that learners, regardless of age, can contribute as much or even more to the solution of problems as teachers. Finally, learner teaching is important even when it seems teachers know “everything” and learners know “nothing.” Dewey taught us that learners never learn exactly what teachers teach, because the experience they bring to their engagement with teachers is unique to them. Sharing their learning with teachers tests teacher knowledge in new ways, and the class takes one step closer to achieving a truly collaborative solution.

The breadth and multi-layered complexity of feminist theory, work, and active research offers many productive lessons and insights in online learning contexts. This essay explores both how and why online learning (and in online learning in higher education contexts, in particular) is a distinctly feminist endeavor and opportunity. A variety of practical reflections and applications are shared, as well.

Are you tired of doing all the work of teaching? Find out how to transfer the learning work to your students by designing a class that allows them to understand the power of active learning. Through the technique of backwards design, you can use the course learning outcomes as the basis to create opportunities for practice, assessment, and feedback that will foster student agency, authentic learning, and student success. (Salahab, 2020) Research has shown that productive struggle and continued practice cause neurons to grow and make connections in the brain, helping with mastery of skills and/or knowledge. (Sriram, 2020) Participants may choose to practice active learning by designing active learning.

The challenges of grading, including stress and fatigue, are many. These challenges, in conjunction with the demands of limited time and low-view rates, are often compounded in online, text-heavy environments. This presentation explores a variety of strategies and tools to add fun, engagement, and additional educational value to the online grading feedback process.

This forum will explore the use of polls and virtual field trips to structure  live seminars that encourage student engagement and co-ownership of the synchronous learning community. Both strategies are based in the finding by Stoerger and Krieger (2016) that student evaluation suggests that the learning experience is improved when students are involved in the construction of knowledge.

Conference participants will be invited to take a poll early in the presentation to gauge their current use of some variation of the strategies to be explored so that we can adapt the presentation to the experience level of the audience.  Continued engagement will be encouraged throughout the presentation by asking open-ended questions to give participants the chance to share experiences and ideas about their own use of polls and virtual field trips.  Attendees will  benefit from this presentation by gaining new perspectives on ways to use existing technology to maximize student engagement and learning during synchronous online learning.

Interruptions to university learning are inevitable. These can be precipitated by instructor illness; local circumstances such as fires or industrial accidents; climatic events; internet disruptions; political events; or even terrorism. The COVID19 pandemic, an extremely disruptive event, had historical precedent and was therefore worth anticipating. Many instructors with no prior training or experience with distance learning found their courses ill constructed to abruptly convert to remote learning.

This presentation will outline how principles of crisis planning and communication can be integrated into the course syllabus. Students are informed how they might continue to progress in a class and communicate with the professor during uncertain times. Learning activities are designed within a course infrastructure that will accommodate a seamless shift to remote learning and alternative modes of communication.

Thoughtful and transparent planning can lessen the impact of unexpected disruptions, thus minimizing stress and increasing efficiencies for an instructor and their students.  The desired results were articulated by a recent student during the COVID19 emergency: “This [course] was set up for remote learning better than all of my other classes by far. It was the most accessible and understandable class that I had, and everything was laid out for us from the very beginning so that helped ease a significant amount of the stress that is associated with online learning.”

It’s no secret that grading is a powerful impact and influence on how well and whether one learns (Hattie, 2012). However, the topic of equity and grading feedback is less often discussed. Issues of bias persistently arise when evaluating grading feedback. Instructors often bring biases (some unconscious, some conscious) to the grading processes. Biases can result from a variety of factors, including prior knowledge of student grades and scores, race, class, ethnicity, gender, and other factors (Malouff et al., 2014). This presentation seeks to raise awareness and infuse a more intentional reflection on bias, equity, and inclusion into the feedback process. Principles of inclusive syllabi are applied to support more inclusive feedback. Original checklists are shared as tools to promote more reflection and inclusivity in the grading feedback process.