Notes from last Friday’s session on QM Plus/Pedagogically Distinctive Features: Victoria Van Kirk Pride, Andrea Yelin, Kristin Rozzell, Victoria Hohenzy, Sarah Brown, Bridget Wagner, Tricia Hermes and I had a very productive session on Online Learning & Teaching, and it was particularly great to have both FYW and WRd202 folks in the room.
Sharon Guan, FITS Director, joined us to give us some background on QM Plus/Pedagogically Distinctive Features from both institutional and pedagogical perspectives. If you’re familiar with Quality Matters — https://www.qualitymatters.org/ — you’ll know that DePaul uses it for assessing the design of online courses, employing its extensive rubric for reviewing our courses. The QM Plus/Pedagogically Distinctive Features initiative focuses on those aspects of our online courses that have to do with engagement and interaction, which are not usually part of the course-design process, but part of the teaching. (In this regard, Sharon referred to those of us in WRD as “pioneers.”)
And Kristin’s daughter recited a poem for us!
Sharon shared examples from her own teaching, examples from other departments, and observations from her institutional bird’s-eye view about how teachers enact good, productive instances of engagement and interaction.
If you’re using one of our newly redesigned WRD104 or WRD202 master course shells, we focused on these bolded elements:
- Course Overview and Introduction
- Learning Objectives (Competencies)
- Assessment and Measurement
- Instructional Materials
- Course Activities and Learner Interaction
- Course Technology
- Learner Support
- Accessibility and Usability
- (And then, parenthetically, just to remind us: what’s the current state, thinking, and methods regarding student-to-student interaction? Research has shown that online courses with high levels of student-to-student interaction have a positive impact on learning.)
Unbolded entries represent the kinds of materials that FITS Instructional Designers can help us “pre-load” into our D2L courses ahead of time.
After Sharon’s presentation and some very compelling & generative teacher talk, we decided to build on this opportunity and scheduled another DWRD Online Teaching & Learning workshop — Friday, February 19th, 10:00-11:30 in SAC 300. Sarah Brown will join us, especially for those who’d like to work with videos and screencasts, which often prove to be excellent tools for engagement. If you can’t make it, let me know, and I’ll be sure to collect materials for you.
Thanks for reading!
