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 Opening Remarks and Tour
with the OTL 2011 Conference Team
Hear from the Jossey-Bass and LearningTimes conference team for an introduction to this online conference, a tour of the online community, and to view messages from colleagues around the globe. |
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 Engaging Online Learners: Activities for Creative Instruction
Rita-Marie Conrad and J. Ana Donaldson
As more and more courses move to the online environment, research tells us that instructors are searching for effective online instructional strategies and guidance about implementing new technology in a way that truly enhances learning. While new media offers a wealth of opportunity, online education is many times employed in a non-interactive mode which tends to create something more akin to digital correspondence education. Engaged learning, on the other hand, stimulates learners to actively participate in the learning experience, and thus gain the most knowledge from it. This session offers instructional guidelines for meeting the evolving needs of online learners and educators. We provide specific recommendations for successful learning events that include the foundational element of student engagement. We also discuss how to design and incorporate activities based on the Phases of Engagement model.
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 Online Learning: How It Disrupts Traditional Higher Education for the Better
Henry J. Eyring
Online learning is the first potentially disruptive innovation in higher education in more than a century. Its cost advantage over classroom-based instruction has long been appreciated, and its capacity to deliver comparable cognitive learning outcomes is now established. The future, though, holds even greater possibilities. Steady innovations in learning software, combined with deeper understanding of the way learning occurs, will make online learning a vital tool not only for those who can’t afford or access a traditional college education, but it will fundamentally change the way that traditional colleges and universities operate. As those institutions incorporate online learning into their instructional activities, everyone—teachers, learners, and society at large—can benefit.
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 Modifications for eLearning: Conquering the Content so Your Students Can Too
Robin Smith
You’ve been teaching in the classroom for years, but teaching online is a bit different. In this session you will learn how to modify your content for the online environment, how to ensure that your content is easily updateable, and how to develop your online course so that adult learning theories are followed. Forms will be available so that you may easily incorporate these ideas into your own online course.
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 Strategies and Tools for Assessing the Online Learner
Rena Palloff, Ph.D. and Keith Pratt, Ph.D.
Evaluation of students in an online course can be challenging, and explaining to students about how they were evaluated can be even more challenging. In order to effectively assess student performance online, the instructor needs to understand basic principles of student assessment and needs to develop creative assessment practices that move away from the traditional use of tests and quizzes. This session looks at some of the techniques and tools that support creative assessment practices in the online environment.
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 Maintain Your Quality of Life: Managing Your Time, Rather Than Time Managing You
Simone C. O. Conceição & Rosemary Lehman
The landscape of higher education is changing. Market demands are pressuring instructors to move their traditional courses to the online environment or create new online courses. Teaching in this landscape requires instructors to take a fresh look at their practice, adapt their course design, and modify their teaching strategies, all of which requires them to rethink the ways in which they prioritize and manage their workload. This interactive session focuses on the strategies instructors use to manage their workload when teaching online through stories, tips, and a practical template for managing tasks and prioritizing time. The major concern for instructors when dealing with workload is maintaining quality of life, and this session also provides a number of strategies to find balance and success.
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The Excellent Online Instructor: 10 Tips for Training and Development
Rena Palloff, Ph.D. and Keith Pratt, Ph.D.
Good instructors and instruction are the strongest marketing tools an online program can have. Because research evidence suggests that a good instructor is the key to student persistence in online courses, hiring, training, and evaluating good online instructors has become high priority for most online institutions. Providing good training and also providing incentives for keeping good faculty have become critical concerns. In this closing session, we’ll debrief about some themes from the day through the lens of our top 10 tips for how instructors and institutions can achieve effectiveness and excellence.
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 Strapping on the Toolbelt—Getting and Keeping Students Engaged
Jonathan Finkelstein, Kevin Johnson and Susan Manning
The four phases of engagement as explained by Rita-Marie Conrad and Ana Donaldson lend themselves to a variety of fun technology tools. Engage your learners through audio, video, collaborative tools and more! Tool-masters Jonathan Finkelstein, Kevin Johnson, and Susan Manning will enliven your morning with a survey and demonstration of gadgets and gizmos that even beginners can use to enhance engagement and learning.
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 The Mobile Academy: The Future is in the Palm of our Hands
Clark N. Quinn
With mobile devices flourishing to the point of almost being a plague, how can we turn this tide to our advantage? To truly take advantage of mobile, you have to think a bit differently. You have to look afresh at learning, and take a principled approach at the capabilities on offer. In this session, we will explore mobile devices in a way that gives us a pragmatic handle on what they can do, and we’ll systematically review the higher education learner experience and highlight opportunities to make learning more accessible and more effective. The future is in the palm of our hands, we need to grasp it before it gets away!
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 Moving Day: Tasks and Tools to Get Your Content Online
Susan Manning and Robin Smith
What are the major tasks involved in moving your course online and what tools can assist you in the move? Susan Manning and Robin Smith will “unpack” these issues by discussing and demonstrating tools you can use to chunk up content, present a view of your course, and create activities for students. Tools reviewed will span the gamut from free and web-based to subscription models.
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 Documenting Learning in the 21st Century: Engaging Students with Electronic Portfolios
Tracy Penny Light, Helen L. Chen, and John Ittelson
Electronic portfolios (ePortfolios) have become a popular and powerful way for students to document, demonstrate, and reflect upon their learning. This session outlines a framework to support instructors who are planning to use ePortfolios as a method to engage students in this documentation process while also capitalizing on the unique pedagogical, technological and strategic affordances of new technologies. This approach guides students in reflecting on and providing evidence of the way they design, internalize, and transfer transformative learning experiences. We discuss the ways that this framework, in combination with ePortfolio technology, can foster the practice of making important connections between academic content and societal issues and concerns. At the same time, this approach can also provide educators with important feedback about how their learning designs are promoting (or not promoting) the values of civic engagement in the 21st century through the development of empowered, informed, and responsible learners.
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 Tools for Managing your Workload
Kevin Johnson, Simone C. O. Conceição, and Rosemary Lehman
What do you get when you mix strategies for managing an online instructor’s workload using Conceição and Lehman’s four-step process with Manning and Johnson’s strategies for choosing technology tools to solve a problem? You get an amazingly useful session that introduces specific technology tools that help online instructor’s solve problems specific to managing their workload within the context of design, teaching, support, and time allocation. In this session, we will discuss and demonstrate specific technology tools that help solve problems specific to designing online courses, teaching online, supporting online instructors, and allocating the instructor’s time.
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Wrap-Up of OTL 2011
with the OTL 2011 Conference Team
Join your Jossey-Bass and LearningTimes hosts, conference co-chairs Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt, and your colleagues from around the globe for for a special online conference wrap-up.
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