n the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, many academic institutions around the world responded to the sudden need to move learning online, with what might be considered emergency measures. We at CLTD, similarly, created resources and worked with academics across the university to mitigate against the loss of learning opportunities our stu-dents were faced with.
To gauge the effects this move had on students, the Learning and Teaching Team engaged in a series of COVID-19 dialogues with faculty student advisers, faculty student council reps, and academics (see Re-sources, below). We suggest that while the initial move to online learning was necessitated by the pandemic and executed under pressure of time, a revised response is required. This will allow us to deepen the ped-agogical underpinning of our practices. The purpose of this eBook is to formulate a response as we approach the second semester.

This series of eight brief videos by Karolyn Kinane, Associate Director of Pedagogy and Faculty Engagement at the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia, offers college instructors some basic vocabulary and skills to start engaging in teaching as a contemplative practice. The series introduces contemplative pedagogy with special attention to its role in backward design, offering specific examples from online learning environments in higher education. The videos demonstrate the relationship between course design best practices such as alignment and transparency and contemplative values such as presence, awareness, and compassion. Viewers can engage in exercises to identify the beliefs, habits, and intentions that undergird instructors’ teaching philosophies and practices. Viewers are encouraged to develop strategies to design learning experiences in line with one’s most pressing goals for student-learning.

A resource to help instructors design quality online discussions.

Created as part of a project in the 2017-18 Cross-institutional ID2ID Peer Mentoring Program for Instructional Designers co-sponsored by Penn State University and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) (http://www.id2id.org). Examples are provided for Canvas LMS users. However, you may copy (Remix) and edit for another LMS or improve it as described in the "Improve this resource" section to earn an open digital badge.

Before creating this OER, content was shared with and improved upon through suggestions from instructional professionals in the ID2ID and Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) communities.

Version 2 Released: 2/10/2024

This OER course “Digital Course Accessibility for Educators” was developed thanks to a grant project awarded to Lane Community College in Sept. 2023.This course is meant to be implemented in spaces where people are creating courses and course content for students of any kind. It has a focus and theme around education and online learning, teaching instructors how to implement accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in the learner’s online course content. The format of this course was created as an online facilitated course and is estimated to take around 10 hours to complete.

Current formats provided include:
Moodle backup file. (Uploads to Moodle and other LMS’s that have a Moodle import option)
Moodle Common Cartridge file. (Uploads to Canvas, Blackboard, and other LMS’s, but may have more limited importability.)
Google Drive course file. (Includes all content in Moodle and common cartridge but in Google docs. Usable for anyone who does not have an LMS listed or needs access to source files for those using LMS’s above.)

Preview the Course: https://classes.lanecc.edu/course/view.php?id=122173

I use an "engaging question" on the first day of class in all of my courses. This activity is designed to be both engaging and central to all of the course content. That is, the activity is designed around questions that we can keep coming back to, over and over, after each learning unit. This approach not only provides a unifying focus for the course, but it also provides an opportunity to model critical thinking as we revisit the question each time with a different perspective. For the Dynamic Earth and Global Change (the Physical Geology course at Macalester) I chose a question about climate change. The activity starts with two graphs (plots of surface temperature and atmosphere CO2 composition for the past 1,000 years). Students are asked to describe the graphs, interpret the graphs, make some predictions, and explain the graphs using basic earth science processes.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

As educators, we want all of our students to succeed, and the Inclusive Scorecard I provides a user-friendly tool to help achieve that goal. This 11-point checklist helps you identify design issues that unintentionally hamper the learning of disadvantaged students and/or students of color. Designed for higher education courses, the Scorecard draws from the venerable instructional-design practice of learner analysis. The Scorecard provides clear direction for creating a welcoming learning environment in which every student has an equitable opportunity to succeed. Designed for online courses, most of the Scorecard principles also apply to materials that faculty use in face-to-face classrooms.

Motivating Students by Design (2018) explains how instructors can motivate students intentionally through the design of their courses. The two primary purposes of this book are to present a motivation model that can be used to design instruction and to provide practical motivation strategies and examples that can be used to motivate students to engage in learning. Based on decades of research, Dr. Brett Jones presents a framework to organize teaching strategies that motivate students. All of the strategies presented are followed by several examples, which provide readers with about 150 ideas for how the strategies can be implemented in courses. This book will be useful to graduate students and beginning professors, as well as professors who are more experienced and want to refine their instruction or try new strategies.

It is helpful to know who is using this free PDF version of the book. Please take a minute to complete a brief informational survey at https://bit.ly/interest-motivatingstudents

How to access this book This text is available as a whole book in PDF at https://hdl.handle.net/10919/102728. A print-on-demand version is also available via Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Motivating-Students-Design-Strategies-Professors/dp/1981497013

Students are given a short introduction to fossils, strata, Steno's law of superposition, and the development of the geologic time scale from initial description of systems, through the realization that fossils could be used to correlate between systems, to the assembly of the modern geologic time scale. Then, each student in the course is given a sheet of paper with a simple stratigraphic column and associated fossils representing a geologic system on one side and a short description of the location and history of discovery of the system on the other. On a large wall, students then assemble four geologic columns from their systems representing mainland Europe, Great Britain, the Eastern U.S. and the Western U.S. using the fossils illustrated on their sheets to correlate systems. The instructor guides this process by placing the first system on the wall and by providing some narration as the columns take shape. Europe and Great Britain are assembled first, one sheet at a time, providing when completed the framework of the modern geologic time scale. Once this is up on the wall, the remaining students can assemble the other two columns in minutes using fossils to correlate between American and European systems. A temporal gap in the Grand Canyon sequence provides an opportunity to discuss the incompleteness of the rock record in any one place and a system composed of igneous and metamorphic rocks with no fossils is used to point out the difference between radiometric (absolute) and biostratigraphic (relative) dating.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

This is a large-scale participatory activity used to prompt students to review what they have learned and to think actively and cooperatively about the connections between the systems we have discussed prior to the activity. It produces a large, visual product students can reflect on.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

The “Four C’s of Quality Course Design” is a professional development workshop for Higher Education Faculty.

The Four C's of Quality Course Design provides a simplified approach to constructing a high-quality online course based on four C’s - course mapping, consistency, community, and critical thinking. The purpose of the workshop is to empower faculty with strategies and resources to develop engaging online courses based on the Universal Design for Learning principles, the Quality Matters Rubric, and the Open SUNY Course Quality Review Rubric (OSCQR).

This workshop is a product of the Creative Commons OER Certification course provided by a grant by the Alabama Commission on Higher Education. The entire workshop is shared by the creator using the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This participatory seminar focuses on the knowledge and skills necessary for teaching science and engineering in higher education. This course is designed for graduate students interested in an academic career, and anyone else interested in teaching. Readings and discussions include: teaching equations for understanding, designing exam and homework questions, incorporating histories of science, creating absorbing lectures, teaching for transfer, the evils of PowerPoint, and planning a course. The subject is appropriate for both novices and those with teaching experience.

 A simple zero-based course design process enables you to better organize your Astro 101 course and make it more understandable to students. This process covers establishing teaching goals, developing core ideas, determining student outcomes, and assessing learning.

This video outlines potential ICT in Education courses that might be adapted to create a similar course for Teachers in the Philippines

In this unit, students will identify mass extinctions as paleontologists have done and recognize and understand the "pull of the recent," that is, the human tendency to know more about events closer to the present. Students prepare by reading an article prior to class that describes mass extinctions. At the beginning of class, students place historical events along a physical model of the geologic timescale. Next, they examine a diagram showing changes in biodiversity across the last 542 million years and identify patterns in those data. Students and the instructor then finish class by discussing that although fossils (and rocks) are critical for explaining the present and predicting the future, their mechanisms of preservation biases our understanding of Earth's past.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

During Unit 2, students will learn about the causes of two past mass extinctions and discuss the controversies surrounding these causes and the evidence upon which the theories in the debates are based. Before class, students will be assigned to read one of a set of different articles about theories for the causes of the end-Cretaceous and the end-Permian mass extinction. During class, students will get in groups with others who read different articles to pool their knowledge about flood-basalt eruptions and catastrophic asteroid impacts. They will re-group to compare and contrast the two proposed causes of the end-Permian and end-Cretaceous mass extinctions and the mass extinctions themselves.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

Using a systems dynamics approach, students will work in groups to conceptualize and construct a model of the global carbon cycle considering five major Earth systems: atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere. The models will draw on information from the pre-class activity and invoke system features such as boundaries, stocks, flows, and control variables. Using a scenario describing a global, catastrophic event, the students will consider how new conditions change the behavior of carbon cycling in their model world. Students will use the model to explain changes in environmental variables such as permafrost cover, atmospheric gases, and global temperature, as well as feedbacks within the system.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

In this unit, students will gain a deep-time perspective on how life evolves on a dynamic planet. They will use the Equidae (horse family) as a case study to examine the relationship among climate, biomes, and fossils to determine how changing environmental conditions influenced horse morphology and diversity through time. After a brief introduction, students will work in groups to examine data and formulate ideas about why changing climatic conditions and an increase in grasslands led to changes in horse morphology and diversity. This example of adaptive radiation and extinction within one well-known group of organisms in response to changes in Earth's interrelated systems demonstrates how the geologic record provides an important context for understanding modern patterns of biodiversity. Students will also use the data to evaluate earlier and more recent ideas about Equidae evolution to appreciate how scientific ideas can change over time based on new evidence.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

A short guide introducing open course packs, a set of course materials designed to align and integrate with an open textbook. Includes links to equity-minded course design resources, including Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Transparency in Teaching and Learning (TILT), Culturally Responsive Teaching, and Open Pedagogy.

The course design, in-class activities, assignments, and citations here offer ways educators can use the writing process to improve student learning, focusing on undgraduate and early graduate work. These materials can be remixed and repurposed, in whole or in part, as you wish under the terms of a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. If you repurpose these materials for a particular discipline or context, an email about your work would be greatly appreciated!