2015 Annual Conference

Gamification is popular in higher ed. What it boils down to is motivating students to keep trying, reach new levels of accomplishment, and be successful. (All of these are things we do naturally when playing games because we love challenges, regardless of the number of attempts it takes to attain mastery.) One way to foster achievement is to offer rewards for each level of skill attained or accomplishment completed.

Is
quality of course design enough? Quality Matters' new program certification
broadens and strengthens the notion of quality assurance. Early in 2015 the
University of the Rockies had the opportunity to participate in the Quality
Matters program certification pilot. This session will address strategies for
obtaining leadership buy-in and lessons learned from the entire experience. A
Q&A session will follow the 15-minute presentation.

This presentation outlines the incentives, objectives, process, outcomes, and faculty reflections for rolling out QM on a campus of 20,000 students. 

A professor and a consultant share their experiences of how several small, private colleges are using QM to build an online program from scratch—not only utilizing QM as a tool for evaluating online courses but as the framework to strategically plan the transition of courses from traditional on-ground to online.  Their process involves “The Four I’s”:  Infrastructure (technology capacity, talent and tools), Initiative (purpose), Implementation (faculty development, owner support) and Instruction (consistent, deliverable course material).

During this interactive session, we will review case students of actual questions from faculty, discuss actions that were taken and could have been done different to help faculty meet Standards 2.1 and 2.2, and share suggestions and experiences writing or helpful faculty write measurable learning objectives.

The audience will learn that it takes a TEAM to implement a QM initiative. We will describe an implementation plan, highlight data showing progress of success, and identify best practices and challenges involved in implementing QM in a nursing program. The presentation will showcase resources that encourage colleague engagement. Reflections from various colleagues (including administrator, faculty and Instructional Designer) will be included.

ASU's Online Campus created, designed, and implemented a one-week online student orientation course last fall for a subset of its online population.  The results -- increased student retention, decreased DEW rates higher grades in subsequent courses, and prepared students.  Find out what we did, how we did it, and why we are expanding the orientation to all ASU Online students.