We found 7 results that contain "moocs"

The Master of Arts in Educational Technology Program (MAET) at Michigan State University is honored to support the amazing work that educators are doing around the world as they transition to a range of remote teaching contexts. Our Mini-MOOC on Remote Teaching focuses on high-priority, digestible topics with the intent of applying them to practice tomorrow. Because educators are teaching across a range of remote teaching contexts, we include no-tech, low-tech, and high-tech strategies throughout the experience. This Mini-MOOC is a self-paced learning experience. For more information, including enrollment information, please go to the College of Education MAET Blog: https://edwp.educ.msu.edu/maet/2020/03/30/maetminimooc/ 

The following is a list of educator professional development tools, resources, and supports at MSU. This collection is just that, a sampling of offerings aimed at providing anyone who supports student success by contributing to the teaching and learning mission with a place to start when they're looking for ongoing opportunities for growth outside of the #iteachmsu Commons. 
 

SOIREE: The SOIREE (Spartan Online Instructional Readiness Educational Experience) workshop was created to help you better prepare to teach online. You will learn online pedagogical principles and develop proficiency with a variety of technologies. You can check out SOIREE for more information. (Fall programming TBD)
ASPIRE: The ASPIRE (Asynchronous Program for Instructional Readiness) workshop was created to help you better prepare to teach online. ASPIRE is entirely self-paced and will guide you through the processes and issues you'll need to address in order to develop an online version of your course. You can check out ASPIRE for more information, including enrolling in ASPIRE.
The College of Education’s Mini-MOOC on Remote Teaching: The Master of Arts in Educational Technology Program (MAET) at Michigan State University is honored to support the amazing work that educators are doing around the world as they transition to a range of remote teaching contexts. You can check out CED Mini-MOOC for more information, including enrolling in the Mini-MOOC.
#iteachmsu: You teach MSU. A wide educator community (faculty, TAs, ULAs, instructional designers, academic advisors, et al.) makes learning happen across MSU. But, on such a large campus, it can be difficult to fully recognize and leverage this community’s teaching and learning innovations. To address this challenge, the #iteachmsu Commons provides an educator-driven space for sharing teaching resources, connecting across educator networks, and growing teaching practice. #iteachmsu Commons content may be discipline-specific or transdisciplinary, but will always be anchored in teaching competency areas. You will find short posts, blog-like articles, curated playlists, and a campus-wide teaching and learning events calendar. We cultivate this commons across spaces. And through your engagement, we will continue to nurture a culture of teaching and learning across MSU and beyond.
Teaching and Learning Bootcamp: The Teaching and Learning Boot Camp is offered to bring together educators new to MSU from across campus to explore and exchange ideas about quality and inclusive teaching, as well as find community among the large group of people who are engaged in the important work of creating the best learning environments possible for our students. The focus is to assist educators in developing practical materials that are needed for immediate use in their teaching and to best prepare them for their courses and work with students. For more information, check out Teaching & Learning Bootcamp.
Accessible Learning Conference: For the last five years, the Accessible Learning Conference has provided a forum for students, educators, community members and leaders to connect, share knowledge, and foster innovation in accessibility in higher education. You can check out the Accessible Learning Conference for more information.
MSU Dialogues: MSU Dialogues is an intergroup dialogue program for students, faculty and staff at Michigan State. It is a face-to-face learning experience that brings together people from different identity groups over a sustained period of time to: understand our commonalities and differences; examine the nature and impact of societal inequalities; explore ways of working together toward greater equity and justice; prepare individuals to live, work, and lead in a complex, diverse stratified society. Go to MSU Dialogues on Race, Religion, or Gender for more information.
Course Review Process: Quality Matters (QM) is a nationally recognized, faculty-centered, peer review process designed to certify the quality of online courses and online components. MSU purchased a campus subscription to the QM Rubric to assist faculty and instructors in creating quality courses that will improve online education and student learning. For more information on getting started with peer course review and Quality Matters at MSU, please visit MSU SpartanQM Webpage.
Alternative assessment/Online exam workshops: These workshops ran live in 2020 and provided information and examples of designing online exams and assessing students with alternative assessments beyond exams. Recordings of the workshops can be accessed asynchronously via #iteachmsu Commons. 
Learning Communities: Learning Communities provide safe and supportive spaces for complicated conversations about curriculum and pedagogy. Michigan State University has supported these initiatives since 2004 and continues to do so through a funding program administered by the Academic Advancement Network. Learning Communities at MSU are free to select their own topics and determine the structures that best support their inquiries. Accordingly, communities tend to vary greatly in their practices, interests, and agendas. All communities, however, share three things in common: they meet monthly across the academic year, explore important educational themes, and welcome all members of MSU’s instructional staff, regardless of rank or discipline. Please go to Learning Communities (AAN) or Learning Communities (#iteachmsu) for more information.
Cohort programs: Lilly Fellowship - The program is intended to advance the University’s continuing efforts to support excellence in teaching and learning. The program supports a cohort of six faculty or academic specialists at all ranks with at least five years of service to the institution. The Program also provides an opportunity for Fellows to expand relationships and collaborative engagement with peers and colleagues within their own college and across the University. The program is supported by matching grants from AAN and the Fellows’ departments and/or colleges. The goal is to develop academic leaders who will guide the University into the near future with regard to learning, teaching, and educational programming. Participants are expected to focus their work on a project of their choosing that will make a substantial contribution to a unit’s educational efforts. The unit can be a program or a department, but it can also be a college or a University unit or initiative. Using the proposed project as a foundation, participants will also learn leadership concepts and models, build specific skills, learn more about how the University works, and practice what they learn through the activities of their project and small group mentoring and coaching. Adams Academy - The Walter & Pauline Adams Academy of Instructional Excellence and Innovation is named in honor of former MSU President Walter Adams and his wife and MSU faculty member emerita, Pauline Adams, in recognition of their sustained commitments to promote instructional excellence. The program brings together a cross-disciplinary group of faculty and academic staff for a year-long fellowship focused on teaching and learning. Adams Academy Fellows explore the literature on effective university teaching and learning practices and consider how this robust body of research can be used to guide instructional decisions in the courses they teach. Participants learn from and contribute to a community of teacher-scholars committed to excellence in teaching and learning.
Technology and Tools: IT Services offers many different resources to support teaching and learning efforts. For more information, check out Tech and Tools workshops from IT.
MSU Libraries Workshops: MSU Library & Archives provides a series of events, seminars and workshops on a wide variety of topics including but not limited to: Mendeley, data management, 3D models, special collections, distinguished lectures, Zotero, geocoding and more. Go to MSU Library Workshops for more.
The Graduate Teaching Assistant Institute: The New Teaching Assistant Institute is a university-wide orientation for graduate teaching assistants, in partnership with academic and support units on campus. It is up to departments to decide to require or recommend that their students attend this program (*graduate students should ask their graduate program directors if they are unsure about participating). All attendees must register and are expected to attend the entire day. Go to Graduate Teaching Assistant Institute for more information.
Certification in College Teaching: The Michigan State University Certification in College Teaching program is an initiative of The Graduate School, in partnership with departments and colleges. The program is designed to help graduate students organize and develop their teaching experience in a systematic and thoughtful way. Program participants partake in a series of workshops, enroll in a graduate course devoted to teaching in higher education, engage in a mentored teaching experience with a faculty member and develop a teaching portfolio to highlight, organize and reflect upon their teaching experiences. Upon completion of the program, students receive an MSU Certificate in College Teaching and the accomplishment is noted on their transcript. Visit Certification in College Teaching for more information. 

Educational Videos: Best Practices
This document uses learning theory and research to suggest best practices in creating educational videos.
Audio

Don’t read out loud. If you want to create a script, do it. Read it a few times. Put it away and try and speak as naturally as possible when you record. You won’t (and shouldn’t) stick to the script word for word while recording, but it should help you sound articulate without reading from a script.
Don’t speak too slowly. Research shows that speaking slowly results in learners thinking the speaker is less credible and having less interest in the materials. Speaking slower does not increase retention (Simonds, Meyer, Quinlan & Hunt, 2006).
Keep language informal. Speak in a conversational way, avoiding jargon, technical terms, and “academic-speak.” Put concepts in your own words. Use first and second person (I, you) to create a personal connection. This is referred to as the personalization principle in multimedia learning theory (Mayer, 2009).

Visuals

Change visuals often. If you are recording a screen-share of Power Point, use more slides and change the slides more frequently, spending less time on each slide. Visuals (photos, images, and diagrams) are better than words.
Omit needless words. On PowerPoint, that is. Use more images than words because people learn better when they hear the words and see images. This is referred to as the redundancy principle in multimedia learning theory (Mayer, 2009).
Include your face? Maybe! This could help create a connection with learners and help you retain viewer attention by letting you switch between a visual and an image of the speaker. Research shows students may prefer seeing your face, but it doesn’t necessarily help them learn (Kizilcec, Bailenson, & Gomez, 2015).
Recording via Zoom? Select options to record both the active speaker and the shared window (Power Point) so that you can edit the video in a way that includes both. You can do this in Zoom Settings by using Zoom Cloud Recording and selecting to “Record active speaker, gallery view, and shared screen separately.”
Informal settings are fine! High quality production backgrounds don’t engage learners more. Relax and find that balance of professional yet personal (Guo, Kim, Rubin, 2014).
Use tablet drawing. Learners are more engaged by Khan-style videos that show “live” drawing than by static images (Guo, Kim, Rubin, 2014). If you have the tools to do this, great! If not, consider using annotation tools in Power Point.

Content Considerations

Leave off speaker intros and objectives. This type of material can be presented in the description or in the materials preceding the videos. Jump straight into the content. This helps you keep videos short.
Keep it short. Research with MOOCs suggests 6 minutes or less is optimal (Guo, Kim, Rubin, 2014). In addition, it is harder for learners to use a longer video to review specific content. Keeping videos under 6 minutes isn’t a hard rule, since context matters, but shorter usually is better.

Hosting Considerations

Provide background information. Introduce the topic, the speaker, and tell the learner how long the video will be in the video description or in the material preceding the video.
Provide a take-away for more technical content. An example would be a fact sheet or a fillable PDF form with a note-taking outline that learners can fill out while watching and then download and save.
Consider interactive videos. Camtasia lets you add simple interactions to your videos to keep your viewers engaged. MediaSpace allows for interactions as well.

Before, During, After

Frame videos with a task before, during, and after. If you are hosting the video in an online course, have your viewers do something related to the topic before watching it to activate their background knowledge and build schema. Give them a task to do while watching the video, and then give them a task after to check their comprehension or to relate the content to their life experiences. Some basic examples are below.





Before


During


After





Discuss a question about the topic in a forum




Listen to answer specific question(s)




Transform the material into another form (perhaps write a summary)






Reflect on the topic by considering a question




Take notes




Answer comprehension questions






Read related content




Complete a partially filled-out outline




Discuss the topic in a forum






Take a poll related to the topic and notice how your peers answered




Fill in a chart or graphic organizer relating to the content




Share an experience from your life that relates to the material






Learn related vocabulary




Write down one thing you heard that is new and one thing you heard that you already knew




Apply what you have learned by responding to a posted scenario





 
Final Thought: Not everything needs to be a video.
Not everyone likes video. Presenting materials in different ways and including variety is important. Some material is better read, or presented as a job aid, a table, or a visual. In addition, making a change to a produced video is much more difficult than updating text. Be strategic in choosing how to deliver information.
References
Guo, P. J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of MOOC videos. L@S 2014 - Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, 41–50. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556325.2566239
Kizilcec, R. F., Bailenson, J. N., & Gomez, C. J. (2015). The Instructor’s Face in Video Instruction: Evidence From Two Large-Scale Field Studies. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107(3), 724–739.
Mayer, R. E. (2009). Multimedia learning (2nd ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Simonds, B. K., Meyer, K. R., Quinlan, M. M., & Hunt, S. K. (2006). Effects of instructor speech rate on student affective learning, recall, and perceptions of nonverbal immediacy, credibility, and clarity. Communication Research Reports, 23(3), 187–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/08824090600796401
 
 
 

MSU is leveraging our Coursera Partnership and their offer to provide free access to nearly 4,000 online learning experiences during the Coronavirus pandemic.
 
Anyone with a msu.edu is eligible providing you use your msu.edu e-mail when signing up.
 
Access and sign up on the Coursera-4-Campus platform by using the URL below:
https://www.coursera.org/programs/michigan-state-university-on-coursera-207nw
 
Please note the following when signing up:

You must sign up with your msu.edu e-mail
Please follow the prompts and provide the requested information in order to gain access

 
Free Access is available through 12/31/20.  If you intend to complete courses and earn the corresponding credentials, you must meet all course requirements and secure your credential by 12/31/20.  Extensions will not be available.

Stephen Thomas
Title: Drawing to Teach: Visualizing our Curriculum for Reflection and CommunityLocation: Room 2130College courses and programs of study are comprised of a complex arrangement of structures and processes that can make them difficult to conceptualize or communicate to others. When describing a course to others, we often fall back on simplistic narratives of the topic without referencing the pedagogy, assessment, learning environment, resources, student engagement, or a myriad of other impactful features. In this presentation we will look at what it might mean to use visual tools and formats to more formatively represent our curriculum to allow reflection on your teaching, receive feedback from colleagues, and foster community around our teaching efforts.
Dr. Stephen Thomas is the Assistant Dean for STEM Education Teaching and Learning, the Associate Director for the Center for Integrative Studies in General Science at and the Digital Curriculum Coordinator for the College of Natural Science at MSU.  For his bachelor’s degree from Denison University, Stephen majored in Biology and minored in Art.  This interest in the science/art intersection continued into graduate school as he freelanced as a biological illustrator while earning his masters and Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in Organismal and Evolutionary Biology and Entomology.   Since coming to MSU, Stephen’s focus has shifted from virulence of fungal pathogens of Lymantria dispar to visual communication of science in formal and informal settings and the use of technology in teaching.    Stephen has worked on projects such as the use of comics to reduce subject anxiety in non-major science courses, the development of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to teach general science, and augmented reality and kiosk games to engage visitors in science museums.  In more recent projects, Stephen has worked on curriculum for Drawing to Learn Biology where students explore science practices of observation and visual model-based reasoning through nature journaling.  In his professional development work, Stephen collaborates with Dr. Julie Libarkin on building communities of practice in STEM teaching, STEM education research, and interdisciplinary experiences in art, science, and culture. You can learn more about this work at the STEMed@State website. 

In-Person Lectures vs. Online Instruction
Actively engaging students in the learning process is important for both in-person lectures and for online instruction. The ways in which students engage with the instructor, their peers, and the course materials will vary based on the setting. In-person courses are often confined by the fact that instruction needs to be squeezed into a specific time period, which can result in there being a limited amount of time for students to perform group work or to actively think about the concepts they are learning. Alternatively, with online instruction, there is often more freedom (especially for an asynchronous course) on how you can present materials and structure the learning environment.
Currently, many instructors are faced with the challenge of adapting their in-person courses into an online format. How course materials are adapted into an online format are going to differ from course to course – however, a common practice shared across courses is to create lecture recordings or videos for students to watch. The format and length of these videos play an important role in the learning experience students have within a course. The ways in which students engage with a longer video recording is going to be much different than how students engage with multiple shorter videos. Below are some of the important reasons why shorter videos can enhance student learning when compared to longer videos.
 
More Opportunities for Students to Actively Engage with the Material
Decades of research on how people learn has shown that active learning (in comparison to more passive approaches, such as direct instruction or a traditional lecture) enhances student performance (Freeman et. al., 2014). While “active learning” can often be a nebulous phrase that has different meanings, active learning can be broadly thought of as any activity in which a learner is metacognitively thinking about and applying knowledge to accomplish some goal or task. Providing multiple opportunities for students to engage in these types of activities can help foster a more meaningful and inclusive learning environment for students. This is especially important for online instruction as students may feel isolated or have a difficult time navigating their learning within a virtual environment.
One of the biggest benefits of creating a series of shorter videos compared to creating one long video is that active learning techniques and activities can be more easily utilized and interspersed throughout a lesson. For example, if you were to record a video of a traditional lecture period, your video would be nearly an hour in length, and it would likely cover multiple important topics within that time period. Creating opportunities to actively engage students throughout an hour-long video is difficult and can result in students feeling overwhelmed.
Conversely, one of the affordances of online instruction is that lectures can be broken down into a series of smaller video lessons and activities. By having shorter videos with corresponding activities, students are going to spend more time actively thinking about and applying their understanding of concepts throughout a lesson. This in turn can promote metacognition by getting students to think about their thinking after each short video rather than at the end of a long video that covers multiple topics.
Additionally, concepts often build upon one another, and it is critical that students develop a solid foundation of prior knowledge before moving onto more complex topics. When you create multiple short videos and activities, it can be easier to get a snapshot of how students conceptualize different topics as they are learning it. This information can help both you as an instructor and your students become better aware of when they are having difficulties so that issues can be addressed before moving onto more complex topics. With longer videos, students may be confused on concepts discussed at the beginning of the video, which can then make it difficult for them to understand subsequent concepts.
Overall, chunking a longer video into multiple shorter videos is a simple technique you can use to create more meaningful learning opportunities in a virtual setting. Short videos, coupled with corresponding activities, is a powerful pedagogical approach to enhance student learning.
 
Reducing Cognitive Load
Another major benefit of having multiple shorter videos instead of one longer video is that it can reduce the cognitive load that students experience when engaging with the content. Learning is a process that requires the brain to adapt, develop, and ultimately form new neural connections in response to stimuli (National Academies of Sciences, 2018). If a video is long and packed with content, developing a meaningful understanding of concepts can be quite difficult. Even if the content is explained in detail (which many people think of as “good instruction”), students simply do not have enough time to process and critically think about the content they are learning. When taking in various stimuli and trying to comprehend multiple concepts, this can result in students feeling anxious and overwhelmed. Having time to self-reflect is one of the most important factors to promoting a deeper, more meaningful learning experience. Unfortunately, long video lectures provide few opportunities (even when done well!) for students to engage in these types of thinking and doing.
Additionally, an unintended drawback of long videos is that the listener can be lulled into a false sense of understanding. For example, have you ever watched a live lecture or an educational video where you followed along and felt like you understood the material, but then after when you went to apply this knowledge, you realized that you forgot or did not understand the content as well as you thought? Everyone has experienced this phenomenon in some form or another. As students watch long video lectures, especially lectures that have clear explanations of the content, they may get a false sense of how well they understand the material. This can result in students overestimating their ability and grasp of foundational ideas, which in turn, can make future learning more difficult as subsequent knowledge will be built upon a faulty base.
Long lecture videos are also more prone to having extraneous information or tangential discussions throughout. This additional information may cause students to shift their cognitive resources away from the core course content, resulting in a less meaningful learning experience (Mayer & Moreno, 2003). Breaking a long video into multiple shorter videos can reduce the cognitive load students may experience and it can create more opportunities for them to self-reflect on what they are learning. 
 
More Engaging for Students
Another important factor to think about is how video length affects student engagement. A study by Guo, Kim, and Rubin (2014) looked at how different forms of video production affected student engagement when watching videos. Two of their main findings were that (1) shorter videos improve student engagement, and that (2) recordings of traditional lectures are less engaging compared to digital tablet drawing or PowerPoint slide presentations. These findings show how it is not only important to record shorter videos, but that simply recording a traditional lecture and splicing it into smaller videos will not result in the most engaging experience for students.
When distilling a traditional lecture into a series of shorter videos, it is important to think about the pedagogical techniques you would normally use in the classroom and how these approaches might translate to an online setting. Identifying how these approaches might be adapted into a video recording can help create a more engaging experience for students in your course.
Overall, the length of lecture videos and the ways in which they are structured directly impacts how students learn in a virtual setting. Recording short, interactive videos, as opposed to long lecture videos, is a powerful technique you can use to enhance student learning and engagement.
 
References
Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410-8415.
Guo, P. J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014, March). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of MOOC videos. In Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning@ scale conference (pp. 41-50).
Mayer, R. E., & Moreno, R. (2003). Nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning. Educational psychologist, 38(1), 43-52.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). How people learn II: Learners, contexts, and cultures. National Academies Press.

Dr. Crystal Eustice (Department of Community Sustainability Studies Assistant Professor of Practice, Academic Advisor, Internship Coordinator) & Jackie Martin (MSU Extension Leadership & Civic Engagement Educator, 4-H Program Supervisor)
 
The Thank an Educator Initiative was born out of the #iteachmsu Commons project, an effort to recognize the great practices of individuals on campus who contribute to student success by supporting MSU’s teaching and learning mission. On such a large decentralized campus, it can be difficult to fully recognize and leverage the expertise of educators. The #iteachmsu Commons' current focus has been to develop and launch a web platform for educators across campus to share their expertise and experience, connect with others, and grow in their practice.
 
You’ll notice that we’ve specifically chosen to denote the audience of this platform as “educators” which the #iteachmsu Commons’ founding units (the Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology, the Academic Advancement Network, and the Graduate School) define in the broadest sense – anyone who contributes to MSU’s teaching and learning mission. This includes but is not limited to faculty, academic advisors, librarians, coaches, graduate teaching assistants, undergraduate learning assistants, infrastructure planning and facilities, learning designers, IT, planning and budget, staff, etc.
 
We (the #iteachmsu Commons team) have had unwavering enthusiasm for the platform, which is now live at iteach.msu.edu, but we weren’t sure that the Spartan community would identify with the goals of the project (despite the platform’s for educators – by educators development). As a part of my 2018-19 Hub Graduate Student Fellowship, I was able to further observe and investigate how individuals on our campus qualified their work (as it related to the mission and vision) and how they identified with the role of educator. While I found overwhelming support for the type of platform we were building, many of the individuals I spoke with did not personally identify as an educator despite their work contributing to teaching and learning at State. Thus Thank an Educator was born.
 
I designed and launched the inaugural year of Thank and Educator as a part of my Hub fellowship last year as a way to celebrate all the individuals who contribute every day to helping MSU be the institution of higher learning that it is today. By intentionally launching the initiative across the MSU community and asking for individuals to share stories of the positive impacts made by MSU educators, we were able to not only recognize the great efforts of invaluable Spartan community members but also showcase the diverse roles and ways in which people take up being educators on our campus. 80 Educators were nominated by fellow Spartans and were recognized at the first annual #iteachmsu Educator Awards during last year’s Spring Conference on Student Learning and Success. This initiative wouldn’t be possible without the support of Dr. Jeff Grabill (Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning, and Technology) and the Provost’s office, and I am excited to say that it is continuing in this 2019-20 academic year.
 
I have been at Michigan State for the entirety of my postsecondary experience. I came here in 2008 for my B.S., finished a M.S., and plan to complete my doctoral degree by the end of this academic year. Throughout my time as a Spartan, I have encountered countless individuals who were invaluable to my experience but weren’t limited to those who stood at the front of my classes. Thank an Educator gives me the opportunity to recognize those people who made a difference in my MSU experience (as both a learner and a colleague), and for that I am thrilled. I have received correspondence from individuals directly, saw posts featuring educator awards on Twitter, and have even seen award certificates hanging in offices or by desks. I am deeply honored by the idea that I have played a small part in amplifying the work educators do at MSU, and reinforcing the value of that work through this initiative and community.
 
Anyone can recognize a Spartan educator who has made an impact in their lives by clicking “Thank an Educator” in the left panel of this site! You can also read about educators who have been recognized in our "Featured Educator" posts!
 

Vivek Vellanki (College of Education Doctoral Student) & Terry Edwards (Assistant to the Chair, Department of Teacher Education)
 
https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2019/honoring-msus-educators/