Accessibility and Design - Why Color Matters

When you finally completed grad school and began your teaching career, you may have envisioned lecturing before a throng of students, and the satisfaction you would feel as you witness them grow in their understanding and discover their most rewarding careers. However, you may not have anticipated how much time you'd spend creating and curating instructional materials and compiling them into the nth PowerPoint presentation, agonizing over visuals, fonts, colors, and diagrams and hoping students appreciate the effort. While you may not cater to every student's aesthetic palate with your design choices, you can afford color accessibility for students with visual impairments. You may find that all students benefit from the steps you take to improve accessibility in your visual design


9 Strategies to Promote Collaborative Online Learning

At the beginning of a new semester, higher education faculty consider the best approaches for promoting collaborative experiences in the online environment. Collaboration is critically important to the learning process and promoting these experiences online can help to reduce isolation, promote class community, and increase all forms of interaction. In fact, with just a few simple course design-related strategies, faculty can easily facilitate collaboration and ensure a more meaningful and robust experience for online learners.


Engaging Online Students - Beyond Traditional Lectures

When it comes to online learning, it’s important to provide students with engaging experiences to meet the needs of today’s diverse learners. Research has shown that engaging students in the learning process not only increases their attention but also cultivates critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Before you decide on your lecture approach, it’s essential to first examine your learning outcomes to identify which method will best achieve your goals in a meaningful way.


5 Lessons Learned From the Rapid Shift Online

If you’re a faculty member who taught during the COVID-19 pandemic, chances are you spent hours learning new technology, conducting live online sessions with your students, and adapting your content to the digital environment. Although this rapid change brought many unforeseen and complex challenges, it also resulted in creative ideas and new approaches to ensuring academic continuity. Now that most of us are returning to the (new) status quo, there’s no better time to reflect on the unexpected opportunities and, dare-we-say, innovative digital solutions that emerged as a result of the pandemic.


Utilizing a landing page in your online course design.

Whether students are just starting their online learning journey or are already seasoned online students, logging into an online course at the start of a new semester can seem daunting. As an instructor, you have the power to reduce your students’ feeling of being overwhelmed, and even help them feel encouraged and excited to get started. Incorporating a landing page design in your online course offers similar benefits and avoids a few common pitfalls that your students might experience when opening up the course for the first time. 

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