Brightspace Webinar: More than an LMS, it's a Strategic Goals Support Tool
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Brightspace Teaching & Learning Community webinar series: More than an LMS, it's a Strategic Goals Support Tool, with Susan Colaric, Associate Vice President, Online Learning & Services, St. Petersburg College
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Brightspace Webinar: More than an LMS, it's a Strategic Goals Support Tool
- 1. More than an LMS Susan Colaric Associate Vice President Online Learning & Services
- 3. 44,411 in credit courses 12,943 in non-credit courses
- 4. 70% part-time 50% 24 and younger 59% female 97% in-state 44,411 in credit courses 12,943 in non-credit
- 5. 70% part-time 50% 24 and younger 59% female 97% in-state 44,411 in credit courses 12,943 in non-credit
- 6. 70% part-time 50% 24 and younger 59% female 97% in-state #1 in number of online courses offered ST. PETERSBURG 3,990 VALENCIA 3,357 #1 in number of online students enrolled ST. PETERSBURG 92,164 VALENCIA 72,960 #1 in unduplicated head count ST. PETERSBURG 29,911 VALENCIA 29,756 44,411 in credit courses 12,943 in non-credit
- 9. Faculty and staff readiness Student readiness Student support Course revitalization Workforce & career readiness
- 13. Completed MyCourses for Faculty 1,708 Teaching an Online/Blended Course 533 Developing an Online Course 114 Applying the QM Rubric 194 QM Peer Reviewer 46 Faculty Certifications
- 20. MyResources for Faculty Page views since started June 2015 71,490 Average page views per month 6,499 MyCourses Support & Student Services Hub Page views since started June 2015 338,063 Average page views per month 30,733
- 22. Faculty and staff readiness Student readiness Student support Course revitalization Workforce & career readiness
- 27. Rotating banners MyCourses Support & Student Services Hub Academic Toolkits Smarthinking integration Every course has an online presence Student Support
- 31. LOR ePortfolios
- 32. Faculty and staff readiness Student readiness Student support Course revitalization Workforce & career readiness
- 33. Dean: identifies Development Facilitator & Peer Reviewer ID Team and Development Facilitator: schedule set Development Facilitator: works with Faculty throughout design process Design Process QM Standards #3-8 are used to inform the design and development of the course. Development Facilitator works with the Instructional Design Specialist to develop engaging content and interactions. Faculty who teach the course will be able to provide immediate feedback to the Development Facilitator for continuous improvement Development Facilitator, Peer, and Dean Review Instructional Design Specialist works with IDD team members Dean and Development Facilitator: collaborate with Faculty on course structure and approach; instructional strategies; assessments Dean with Faculty: Course Outline reviewed for QM standard #2; any changes submitted during appropriate C&I cycle Dean: New course needed Dean: Course identified for revitalization
- 37. Semester Year Completion % Opt Out % Spring 2014 37.18% .98% Summer 2014 27.35% .60% Fall 2014 34.78% 1.07% Spring 2015 40.94% 1.42% Summer 2015 34.25% 1.32% Fall 2015 52.12% 1.98% Spring 2016 55.51% 2.42% Enhanced Delivery Survey of Instruction Completion %’s
- 40. More than an LMS Susan Colaric Associate Vice President Online Learning & Services http://ols.spcollege.edu/
Editor's Notes
- When we think of a learning management system we often think of course materials and managing online courses. But at St. Petersburg College we’re using it to provide support for all members of the college community – faculty, students and staff. And for materials throughout the student life cycle – immediately upon application and registration through graduation and into a career. Today I want to share some of those efforts and hopefully hear from you if you have additional things that you have implemented.
- First, a little background on SPC. We are a member of the Florida State College System – formerly the Florida Community College System. We primarily serve the citizens of Pinellas County in west central Florida but our online programs reach students across the state and across the US. We have 10 campuses with the northernmost and southernmost about 35 miles apart.
- We are an open enrollment institution and for AY 2014-15 served 44,411 in credit courses and almost 13,000 in non-credit.
- 70% of our student are part-time and they tend to be fairly young thanks in part to dual enrollment programs while they are still in high school. We offer certificates, associate and bachelor degrees.
- With instructional method, we’re pretty evenly divided with 36% taking face-to-face only; 34% taking a mix of F2F and online and 30% completely online
- We lead the state colleges in distance learning – the number of online courses offered, students enrolled, and unduplicated head count.
- Our Mission is to promote student success and enrich our communities through education, career development, and self-discovery. And we recognize that student success actually begins with faculty and staff success so that they can support the students on their pathway.
- Everyone contributes to helping students Start Smart and Finish Strong. It is because of the students that we are here and everyone recognizes that they have a role to play in helping students succeed. From physical plant helping students find the correct building on the first day of classes to programmers who built a degree audit system that keeps students apprised of their progress to completion.
- For our purposes today, I want to share a little bit about how D2L, what we call MyCourses, has become central to that mission in 5 areas. Faculty and staff readiness Student readiness Student support Course revitalization Workforce & career readiness
- Starting with faculty and staff readiness, we use MyCourses for all training – both synchronous in conjunction with Skype and just-in-time asynchronous. All material needs to be available whenever someone needs is and with faculty and staff working varying hours training has to be centralized and supported.
- We want everyone to have easy access to the resources needed. Sometimes the information is organized around a particular topic so you may not remember all the services available to a student at a particular time, but you always know where to go to find the information. As an example, here is the information for faculty and staff on Accessibility Services.
- Or sometimes the information is organized by a particular training module. Here are a couple examples. You see the Introduction to MyCourses which was designed for students. All faculty and staff have access to it and most go through the training themselves so that they know what they can refer students to. There isn’t any reason for each faculty member to develop instructions on how to use a dropbox; they just need to know where to send the student for the information. You’ll also see one of the faculty certification courses. This one was designed specifically for faculty teaching studio music courses.
- We have various levels of faculty certification based on teaching modality and role. All faculty are required to take the MyCourses for Faculty certification. Other levels of certification depend on the instructional method used – so if someone is teaching online or blended they would have two certifications to achieve. If you are developing an online course you would have 4 courses – the online teaching certification as well as Developing an Online Course and Applying the QM Rubric. These are asynchronous 2 week courses that are facilitated by other faculty or members of the instructional technology team. And they are offered several times a year. Faculty work varying hours and some adjuncts have full-time jobs outside of their teaching because they work in the field that they teach in. So having a flexible schedule is important.
- In addition to required trainings that faculty are enrolled in, we have a self-registration system for asynchronous self-paced courses. These are options available to faculty to improve in a particular area that they are interested in.
- Faculty can see what is available as well as what they are currently enrolled in. Here I’m registered for the courses on the top and the bottom so they aren’t available for me to register for. But if I were interested in Camtasia or Flipping the Classroom I could register for them. These are asynchronous, self-paced courses. Faculty can register at any time and complete at any time. There is a project or quiz at the end to gauge completion.
- The last one shown here is for Career & Academic Advising Staff. All of the members of this team have recently completed Career Development Facilitator certification from the National Career Development Association which was supported through MyCourses. This involved 115 folks from career services, advising, veterans services, accessibility resources, student support and student life & leadership staff completing 120 hours of training each in a combination of face to face and online.
- We’re still on the home page here… what is circled are rotating banners for both students and faculty. Faculty see both, students only see the student version.
- This allows us to bring timely information to the front with one-click access to the important information. You’ll see with the student one that they can still apply for summer internships. That will soon be replaced when the semester starts and probably have something for the Learning Resource Center workshops.
- Although we introduced MyCourses to everyone in Intro courses, there are times when students or faculty might need information on advanced features or for a tool that they don’t use very often. So we built a searchable database online that students and faculty can access anytime to get the information they need. Notice that you can link to the resource from within MyCourses or you can enter a search term here. It was completed in June 2015 and we continue to add resources to it.
- This started as a project when we migrated to D2L and has grown from there. There is a lot of technical help information for MyCourses that use screencasts as well as step-by-step text instructions. The student side also includes general information that students can access from within MyCourses such as registration, financial aid, career services. Making it convenient to find all kinds of information from within the LMS increases the likelihood that the system will be used since the LMS is where students spend the majority of their tgime. And you can see from the data here that both faculty and students make good use of the materials. We analyze the use of the systems to determine what areas we might be missing information on and whether the users are satisfied with the results returned.
- Another area where we help faculty and students be ready for teaching and learning is in the Commons. Faculty groups and student groups have Commons areas to share information and documents. This is particular important in programs that have practicums with forms that need to be filed. Having them available within the LMS makes it easy for students to find the appropriate form and cuts down on paper by having everything submitted electronically. One area that uses a common extensively is the Classroom Management Commons for School of Education students. It’s an important resource for students to stay in touch with each other and with faculty to discuss successes and challenges as they are first in their K-12 classrooms during their practicum.
- We crossed a little bit into student support here but I also want to highlight some efforts for Student readiness.
- As soon as a student applies they are accepted and assigned a student ID. Academic advisors then reach out and register the student for Getting Started – an overview that covers a number of important topics. Students can attend on-campus or online. A welcome message from Dr. Law An overview of Smart Start which is the orientation program An introduction to our communications – website, social media and email We provide some student success tips and important financial Information as well as information on getting their textbooks before classes start We also give them a chance to get a student ID and let them know the benefits of SPC Student IDs – for instance, all students can ride public transportation for free by showing their ID so we want to make sure everyone knows about this benefit And we actually assign homework during this orientation to help students be prepared for the first day in class.
- For the homework, we ask that they complete an Introduction to MyCourses before classes start so that they are ready to access the materials they need. All course sections within MyCourses open automatically 3 days prior to the class start date. For online courses that would mean opening on Friday for a Monday start and for classroom courses it would be three days prior to the first class meeting. The introduction to MyCourses was developed with hands-on simulations so that students can practice things like sending emails and dropboxes where the student gets immediate feedback without the course being facilitated. Non-facilitation with immediate feedback was important particularly when we migrated over to D2L and had 36,000 students who needed to be ready on the new system but also for long-term sustainability. We’ve also build in success tips such as study skills and netiquette tips.
- Getting Started, which is before the semester starts, leads to Smart Start which is the first 4 weeks of the semester – both online and on-ground versions – for any student new to SPC. With Smart Start, we worked in collaboration with Student Services to develop a common experience for all students as they begin their education at SPC. The goal was to provide information on the critical services we had identified to get students off on the right foot: Academic support resources, career planning, academic planning. We have included integrations with services such as Focus 2 which helps students identify a career path if they aren’t sure of what they want to study. At SPC a student’s academic plan always begins with the end in mind so career planning comes first and then academic planning. All of the information a student needs to support his or her learning is available directly from the course and students will always have access to it for future reference.
- Participation in Smart Start and its associated activities is monitored and tracked in reference to retention, completion, and job placements.
- I’ve already mentioned the rotating banners to help students stay on track and the MyCourses Support and Student Services Hub. The Academic Toolkits were funded by a Title III grant, and are a compilation of short lessons, interactive activities, and formative assessments that allow students to identify, remediate, and master competencies in order to fill any gaps in their knowledge. Housed in MyCourses, they are on-demand and reviewable as they need. Some example topics would be: graphing linear equations, sustaining focus in a paragraph, or writing a thesis statement. Since the toolkits were developed in small, complete chunks of instruction, faculty can also make a copy to place inside of a course for review. So a philosophy instructor helping a student with paragraph construction can have materials readily available. The Smarthinking integration allows all students to have access to tutors 24/7 and we also use that platform for our own tutors to do online sessions. And critical to student success is that every course has an online presence. That way students always have access to a syllabus, gradebook, and contact information for ease in connecting with faculty and fellow students. With something like this you can make it available to faculty and make it a policy but without an easy way to monitor it and provide feedback to the faculty its hard to say that all courses have these items. So we built a dashboard for chairs and deans to monitor compliance.
- Access is controlled to only those who should access it and chairs and deans can get a quick overview of which faculty to contact. Here you see information on Biology for the summer session. The courses don’t start until May 16th but you can see one green checkmark indicating that the course is ready with a syllabus, content and gradebook and others that have a caution status. A dean can download a spreadsheet or
- Click on the caution symbol to get more information. Having chairs and deans check a week before courses are active to students helps to reduce calls to the help desk when students “can’t see” anything in the course. Another nice feature is the link at the top of the details page gives the chair direct (and quick) access to the course itself.
- Using the MyCourses gradebook is not only critical to helping the student monitor progress throughout the course, but we use the MyCourses gradebook to transfer grades automatically into the SIS. Faculty didn’t want to keep grades in MyCourses all term and then also have to enter them into PeopleSoft at the end of the term so we automated the transfer process. This was a change that made some faculty uncomfortable at first since we blocked the grade access in PeopleSoft to get everyone used to it. So we created a confirmation email once a faculty member submits grades. The email lists the course, itemizes the grade distribution and gives instructions on how to make a grade correction if needed.
- And of course, we use the LMS for our courses in ways that you would expect: the Learning Outcomes Repository for sharing content; eportfolios for artifact collection for program assessments and certifications; using Wiris for making math content more accessible; connecting with the SIS for enrollments.
- But we are also working on a strategic initiative for Online Course Revitalization. We are in the process of reviewing and updating all of our online courses focusing on quality standards (both internal and external standards), creating engaging content and enhancing interaction to provide students the most efficient and effective educational experiences possible. This is a collaborative effort between the academic departments and the Instructional Design and Development team whereby all faculty who teach in a program have an opportunity to contribute to a standard course that can be used in all sections.
- Since this is what you would expect an LMS to “do” for your school I’ll just touch on it briefly here and provide a URL for more information at the end. We are working toward QM certification for all of our online courses using a standard course developed by the faculty and used by all. This flow chart outlines the development and improvement process. The process of revitalization begins when a program or department determines that an online course is ready to be revitalized. Several factors go into making that decision including course enrollment and other priorities. The Dean identifies a faculty member to serve as the Development Facilitator. The Development Facilitator must complete Teaching an Online Course, Applying the QM Rubric (APPQMR), and Developing an Online The timeframe to revitalize a course is approximately 20 weeks, and occurs during three phases. During the first phase (three weeks), the Dean and Development Facilitator work with the faculty in the department to review the course curriculum, refine course objectives, if necessary, and complete the Course Design Diagram. At the start of the second phase, the Development Facilitator works with the Instructional Design Specialist (ID-Specialist) and completes the Course Design Document using the completed Learning Objective Form, that lays the foundation for development. Then, over the next several weeks, the Development Facilitator works with the ID-Specialist, and completes the individual Module Design Document. The Content Expert and ID-Specialist also meet with the Instructional Design Technician (ID-Tech) and other members of the IDD Team, as needed, to strategize, assign development tasks, and monitor progress. Formative reviews are encouraged to gather feedback and to incorporate suggested improvements. During the third phase, the Peer Reviewer reviews the course for adherence to QM and SPC standards and returns it to the ID-Specialist. After reading through the comments, the ID-Specialist may work with the Peer Reviewer for clarification. Then it is discussed with the Development Facilitator and course improvements are made, as appropriate. The final step is to post the final review document with annotations on actions taken to SharePoint and the URL is shared with the Dean, Peer Reviewer, and Development Facilitator. The dean has the final “say” on whether the course is ready to use. The final revitalized course is expected to contain innovative components designed to engage students and increase interaction, while also meeting SPC standards and Quality Matters (QM) standards as detailed in the QM Rubric.
- For other courses we provide a course template so that students entering a course have a standard way to find information they need. We want them to spend their cognitive energy on the content – not trying to find the content!
- We’ve also standardized Student Support widgets and changed what used to be the Syllabus Addendum which had rules and regulations into a more student friendly Success document that is standard in all courses. The same information is there, it’s just now focused on how to be successful rather than what would get you into trouble.
- Like many institutions, we have gone to an electronic delivery method for our end of course student survey. And like many institutions, we have struggled with participation rates since the switch. The goal was to improve results by making it both a more consistent experience and a less cumbersome process for students. We reduced the number of clicks, made the survey responsive and leveraged the LMS so the survey was delivered the same way in every course. · Students see a widget appear one week before the survey begins in their course. This lets them know it’s coming. · The day the survey starts, an overlay appears with a video that explains why the survey is important along with a link to start it. The video auto plays for 7 days. · The overlay stays in place for the duration of the survey timeline OR until the survey is completed. · Once a survey is completed, the overlay video and widget disappear.
- Our response rates jumped almost 20% in a single semester.
- As the line between academics and what was traditionally called continuing education blurs we are looking to integrate these two systems as well. Currently we run two instances of the LMS for credit and non-credit but increasingly students are earning certifications within their courses and moving from certifications into courses so the distinction is becoming artificial. We’re currently looking for ways to make this more seamless.
- This is a photo of Tropicana Field where our graduation will be held on Saturday. The most critical thing to make this all work? Constant communication that focuses on the goal of helping the student. Every initiative starts with the conversation: Will this help our students learn? Succeed? Persist?
- I’ve provided a URL here where you can find more information. I’m also happy to answer questions either now or you can contact me through email.