NCCC Online Teaching Academy

Free Resources to Help with Remote Learning in 2022 by Dian Schaffnauser.

SUNY Online is pleased to host and showcase several diverse presentations from our SUNY campuses in celebration of National Distance Learning Week (NDLW), November 8-12, 2021. The webinars are designed to generate greater awareness and appreciation for distance learning, discuss current issues and emerging trends, highlight best practices, and recognize leaders in the field.

Please Join the NCCC Online Learning Dept. is presenting Optimizing High-Quality Digital Learning Experiences, on Monday, November 8th from 1:00-1:45pm.

National Distance Learning Week with SUNY Events

SUNY Online is pleased to host and showcase several diverse presentations from our SUNY campuses in celebration of National Distance Learning Week (NDLW), November 9-13, 2020. The webinars are designed to generate greater awareness and appreciation for distance learning, discuss current issues and emerging trends, highlight best practices, and recognize leaders in the field.

Open SUNY/SUNY Online – Your Resources for Remote Learning During Covid-19

SUNY has created a website dedicated to Support Remote Learning during Covid-19 for Campuses, Students and Faculty/Staff.  They provide technology tools, webinars/training and much more.

Check out – Tea for Teaching

Check out this great resource created by John Kane and Rebecca Mushtare.  They run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego. This website offers a series of podcasts of informal discussions of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning. 

Online Learning at NCCC is pleased to announce the launch of our newly created Faculty Technology Toolkit. Over the last year, we spend a good amount of time helping faculty with their ongoing efforts to refresh and revise their online courses through design and teaching behaviors. Through that effort, we felt a technology toolkit would be helpful to many.

The Technology Toolkit provides information on each of the technology tools we recommend and support, and some that we pay annual licensing fees for at NCCC.

Please, take a moment to browse our new Technology Toolkit. You will find technology resources for grading and feedback, interaction & sharing, polling, presentation, document sharing and hosting, screencasting, video creation and storage, social bookmarking, web conferencing, communication, blogging, website creation, and more.

We hope you enjoy our new faculty resource.

Best Regards,  Online Learning @ NCCC

NCCC Online Learning faculty support center

NCCC Online Learning  faculty technology toolkit 

This month we are highlighting Principal 7: Good practice respects diverse talents and ways of learning. I recommend that you take a few minutes this week to learn about UDL (Universal Design Learning).  UDL allows educators to provide a spectrum of activities, assignments, and assessments that can increase opportunities for all facets of learners.

Here are some resources that I highly recommend:

Faculty Focus Article – UDL: A Systematic Approach to Supporting Diverse Learners
TOEP – Web 2.0 Accessibility Discovery Resources
Magna Commons*

Universal Design for Learning: How to Improve Satisfaction and Retention for Students at All Learning Levels
Using Universal Design to Support All Online Students

Atomic Learning* – Learning Styles

* Must log into Blackboard to view Magna Commons and Atomic Learning content.

This month eLearning at NCCC will continue providing training and workshops to support our online course observation and effective online teaching guide by providing resources and workshops to support Principle #6.  Principle #6 is “Good practice communicates high expectations.”

With this principle, effective instructors have high, but reasonable, expectations for their students.  They clearly communicate those expectations and provide support to their students in their efforts to meet those expectations. In an online course you can communicate high expectations through the following:

• Explicit communication of the skills and knowledge every student needs to have in order to be successful in the course.
• Explanation of course learning goals and student learning outcomes, and how the assignments are designed to help students achieve those goals.
• Frequent feedback provided to students through written explanations or narrated screencasts that provide detailed feedback on assignments and other course activities.
• Motivation and encouragement that inspires students to move past the easy answers to more complex solutions.
• Routine use of critical and probing questions when communicating with students about course assignments and activities.
• Examples of high and low quality work, along with a discussion of the differences between these.
• Examples of student work that demonstrate advancement toward learning goals

We curated some great resources to support this principle and they include:

Online Assessment Techniques (OATs)

Exploring the Advantages of Rubric

Rubric Resources from NCCC eLearning Blog

5 Ways to Help Students Succeed in Online Courses

Screencasting Feedback and More from the NCCC eLearning Faculty Support Blog

SUNY Tools of Engagement Discovery Resource on Screencasting

Grading with Voice on an iPad

In addition, we’re holding some workshops and drop-in clinics focusing on the Blackboard Grade Center, Setting up Rubrics in Blackboard, Screencasting feedback, and more.  View our eLearning event calendar for dates and times.

Remind text messaging!  At times throughout the semester, do you wish you could get a quick message to your students?  I would highly recommend using Remind to communicate with your students. This tool is free! Many students already have knowledge of this service because it is used in most high schools to communicate with their students. This service allows you to quickly push out messages to your students without giving them access to your personal cell phone number.  You choose if the service is one way or allow students to text you back.  This is all done without exchanging phone numbers.

To learn more about Remind visit their channel in YouTube.

This academic year the eLearning department at NCCC is focusing on providing training and workshops to support our new Online Course Observation/Effective Online Teaching Behaviors self-evaluation guide. Each month we will focus on one of the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education with a specific focus on Online Teaching. December will focus on Principle 3 which is to “encourage Active Learning.”

Active learning methods engage students in the learning process by encouraging them to discover, process, and apply information.  In an online course, student activities to support this would be active uses of writing, speaking, or other forms of self-expression, opportunities for information gathering, synthesis, and analysis in solving problems, engaging in collaborative learning, and reflecting on their learning.  Below are a few articles you can read to learn more and I invite all NCCC faculty to join us for our live sessions via Zoom.  We will showcase examples of active learning tools such as reflection journal assignments, resource curating and sharing, and collaborative learning spaces.  See this document for the session schedule and log in information.

Suggested Readings:
7 Things You Should Read about Instructional Strategies for Active Learning

Simple Techniques for Applying Active Learning Strategies to Online Course Videos