Best Practices Conference 2012

This presentation will discuss the adaptations necessary for an online lab science course and how the lab reports are used to provide a significant part of the course grade. Hands-on examples of how common household products can be used in experiments in a chemistry course, apps that help students identify trees, and others that help them to map their familiar spaces will be included. Comments that students have made about these courses in the past will also be shared.

Lubin’s global perspectives committee developed two programs aimed at improving student global perspectives skills in the BBA program and the MBA program. The programs, implemented at the undergraduate level in spring 2011 and at graduate student orientation in January of 2012. This session will describe the programs, show examples of materials and present the findings from studies to determine program effectiveness.

Peer review is a process that is centered on faculty and the support; in the form of coaching, mentoring and education that faculty may offer to one another. The purpose of this presentation is to share with participants how one school has taken steps to support improvement in online teaching by developing and piloting an additional peer assessment tool. This effort was undertaken as a pilot project with the projected outcomes of improved course and content delivery, as well as enhancement of student learning and satisfaction. This presentation introduces the tool and shares the experiences of the three faculty members who piloted it.

The goal for each student in the Masters in Management for Public Safety and Homeland Security is to complete a master’s project in place of a comprehensive examination or a thesis. The idea is to connect the learning outcomes in each of the 12 courses to produce a strategy to secure their community. This effectively ties the academic discipline of leadership/management as the core of the project. Originality, grammar and academic soundness of the strategy will also be included as part of the assessment. - After assigning ePortfolios to students for several years, this professor has developed several ways to assess student work. This presentation will showcase a rubric that was created to assess both graduate and undergraduate eportfolios. Peer feedback on ePortfolios, class presentation of student work and contest entry will also be covered. Several student ePortfolios that showcase achieved learning outcomes will be displayed as well.

This session will focus on using the University’s anti-plagiarism tool, Turnitin, with particular emphasis on using it as a learning and assessment tool. Discussions will be based on best practices for instructors to work with students to allow them to check their own writing for improperly used content, inadvertent plagiarism or quotation errors. Demonstrated use of Turnitin within Blackboard will be included.

In this session the various tools of assessment in Blackboard will be reviewed. Best practices and resources on how these tools are incorporated into education will be offered (tools include Blogs, Journals, Wikis, Tests, Assignments, and Rubrics). The use of the Early Warning System, Adaptive Release and Performance Dashboards and how they can improve student success will also be discussed.

This session will provide an overview of the new iPace initiative, launched in the fall of 2011, designed to further address the needs of the adult learner. iPace provides adult-centric marketing and student supportive services for bachelor’s completion degrees offered by the schools.

Encouraged and mandated by faculty and administrators to ensure fairness and transparency in grading, rubrics are increasingly expected by students in the evaluation of essays as well as discussion postings and group work. This session will evaluate the use of rubrics, specifically in writing instruction online, as well as in blended and face-to-face settings.

To engage students in active learning, Instructors are increasingly using online discussion boards to assess their students’ progress. There is great diversity in instructional approaches regarding the protocols, procedures and assessment criteria that should be established to maximize student participation and learning. A significant challenge concerns the tension between providing sufficient structure and guidance without negatively impacting student creativity and authenticity. In this session, participants will examine criteria and instructions for online discussion participation, as well as, see work samples and methods to share feedback and grades with students.