Resources

The Excellent Online Instructor: Strategies for Professional Development

The Excellent Online Instructor is a guide for new and seasoned faculty who teach online, those responsible for training and developing online instructors, and administrators who must evaluate online faculty performance. This comprehensive resource describes the qualities of and explains how one can become an excellent online instructor. Written by Rena M. Palloff and Keith Pratt—noted experts in online instruction—the book

• Includes models based in adult learning principles and best practices
• Offers guidelines to test instructors’ readiness to teach online
• Contains ideas for overcoming faculty resistance
• Reveals how to develop an effective mentoring program
• Shows how to establish a long-term faculty development effort

Managing Online Instructor Workload: Strategies for Finding Balance and Success

A large number of institutions are now providing online programs, requiring instructors to change the way they think about teaching and master a distinct set of workload management skills. The first book to discuss workload management for online instructors, Managing Online Instructor Workload offers practical strategies, advice, and examples for how to prioritize, balance, and manage an online teaching workload. Based on surveys and interviews, the timely and comprehensive insight in this book is essential for online instructors, instructional designers, faculty developers and others involved in online learning.

The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out

Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring, building on what Christensen has done for business, healthcare, and K-12 education, apply Christensen’s model of disruptive innovation to higher education. Unlike the many doom and gloom books that have come out recently, they offer a nuanced and hopeful analysis of where the traditional university and its traditions have come from and how it needs to change and find new models for the future. Through an intriguing examination of the histories and current transformations of the authors’ two very different university homes–Harvard and BYU-Idaho–and through other stories of innovation in higher education, Eyring and Christensen decipher how universities can find innovative, less costly ways of performing their uniquely valuable functions and save themselves from decline. They explain the strategic choices for traditional universities to consider and alternative ways in which they might be made. As higher education communities face vast operating problems like fluctuations in enrollment, overexpansion of campus capacity and non-academic activities, and battles between local boosters and governing boards, this book offers novel insights into the kind of change that is necessary to ensure the economic vitality of the traditional university. It uncovers how the traditional university survives by breaking with tradition, but thrives by building on what it’s done best.

Engaging the Online Learner: Activities and Resources for Creative Instruction, Updated

This updated edition of Engaging the Online Learner includes an innovative framework–the Phases of Engagement–that helps learners become more involved as knowledge generators and cofacilitators of a course. The book also provides specific ideas for tested activities (collected from experienced online instructors across the nation) that can go a long way to improving online learning. Engaging the Online Learner offers the tools and information needed to:

• Convert classroom activities to an online environment
• Assess the learning that occurs as a result of collaborative activities
• Phase-in activities that promote engagement among online learners
• Build peer interaction through peer partnerships and team activities
• Create authentic activities and implement games and simulations

Conquering the Content: A Step-by-Step Guide to Online Course Design

Conquering the Content provides a highly-practical blue-print for course development and content presentation for web-based courses. While providing guidance for incorporating learning theory into online courses, this book primarily furnishes online instructors with the practical templates, learning guides, and sample files to construct and manage their course content. Unlike other books about online instruction that cover theories of teaching and learning, instructional design, or even graphic design this book gives the “how to” of preparing an online course by focusing on content. The much needed step-by-step guidance in this book will result in fully formed courses where high-quality content is the central feature.

Written by Rena M. Palloff and Keith Pratt, experts in the field of online teaching and learning, this hands-on resource helps higher education professionals understand the fundamentals of effective online assessment. It offers guidance for designing and implementing creative assessment practices tied directly to course activities to measure student learning. The book is filled with illustrative case studies, authentic assessments based in real-life application of concepts, and collaborative activities that assess the quality of student learning rather than relying on the traditional methods of measuring the amount of information retained.

The Technology Toolbelt for Teaching

Instructors are under pressure to integrate technology into their traditional or online instruction, but often they aren’t sure what to do or why they should do it. The Technology Toolbelt for Teaching offers instructors a down-to-earth guide to common technologies, explains the pedagogical purposes they serve, and shows how they can be used effectively in online or face-to-face classrooms.

Designed to be easy to use, the book includes:

• 50+ fresh and useful technology tools for teaching
• A decision matrix for choosing and using the right tools
• Examples for using each tool in higher education and K–12

This comprehensive resource contains an array of useful tools that address problems of organization such as a time management calendar, aids for scheduling meetings, and mind-mapping or graphic organizers. The authors also include a variety of online tools for communication and collaboration, and tools to present content, help establish presence, and assess learning.

Learning in Real Time: Synchronous Teaching and Learning Online

Learning in Real Time is a concise and practical resource for education professionals teaching live and online or those wanting to humanize and improve interaction in their online courses by adding a synchronous learning component. The book offers keen insight into the world of synchronous learning tools, guides instructors in evaluating how and when to use them, and illustrates how educators can develop their own strategies and styles in implementing such tools to improve online learning.

The Mobile Academy: mLearning for Higher Education

This vital resource contains a theory-based and practice-based guide that explores the ways mobile devices can be used in higher education. It offers instructors, instructional designers, and administrators to systematically integrate mobile devices into their courses and other academic support services to facilitate the learning outcomes and student success they desire. Specifically, the book covers the use of text messages, mobile web, ebooks, and mobile apps, as applied to: the administration, classroom content, assessment, communication, and more. The book contextualizes mobile learning as a tool for institutional management.

Documenting Learning with ePortfolios: A Guide for College Instructors

This book offers online instructors guidance in creating and implementing e-portfolios with their students. While some institutions adopt off-the-shelf e-portfolio programs, their cost and lack of flexibility can be a hindrance, and often a build-your-own approach is preferred. Based on real models, this book will advise both instructors who are using an institutionally-licensed e-portfolio application with their students and those who prefer to create their own program using various web 2.0 tools in designing and implementing e-portfolios in the classroom. Further, the book will cover the role of Faculty ePortfolios, Course ePortfolios, and Institutional ePortfolios as tools to capture and display artifacts of professional development and academic effectiveness.