9‑25‑17 Quality Matters 5:20 presentation.
Captioner standing by.
9‑25‑17 Quality Matters 5:20 presentation.
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>> We ready?  Sorry, everybody.  Just because you like to hear Jeopardy, we'll do it one more time.  All right.  Welcome everyone.  Sorry for the short delay.  You know, technology, you work with it, you just have to roll with it every once in a while.  Welcome to those of you who are online.  This is a streamed session so hello out there wherever you happen to be.  This is toss those cookie cutters.  Which is us.  I'm Debbi, this is Heather.  We're the Alaska leads that work for UAA, full‑time, part‑time.  Heather did is the assistant director for academic innovations in eLearning as well as the Director for Title III grant.  So, she's a Project Director for that.  I also work for Kodiak College as an Instructional Designer and adjunct faculty.  Never a dull moment.  We come from class consent agenda, which seems exotic but it is now but it is big and spread out and that's one of the issues we face.  So, Anchorage is the biggest city but it's not that big.  It's less than 300,000 people.  Alaska takes up 1/5 of the entire contiguous 48 states but it's got less than a million people.  Kids, parents, everybody, elderly, we actually only have about 740,000 people.  So, we have a huge area that we're stretched out and that's one of the issues that we face.  The University System is a public University System.  We have 3 Maine   academic hubs.  The pink is UAS, we have Fairbanks which is UAF and UAA which is University of Alaska Anchorage which is the green section.  This is what we will cover today.  We're going to talk about our online master courses that are being developed as part of a Title III grant.  We're going to share some of our success stories with you and some of the pitfalls with you and get your feedback too because as part of Title III sharing is part of it but you always want to get input from others.  So, if you have suggestions for us we would love to hear about it.  Whoops, missed one.  So, it is called robust online learning.  When you get the slide decks and these are posted on the conference site already.  There are live links in here so you can go out and check out the websites if you would like to.  So, they're all hyperlinked for you.  So, one of the problems we came up with is low retention rates for minority students.  And we have a bunch of different kinds of minorities and a lot of diversity in the school systems and within the state because we have a lot of people that come up for fishing and for other industries.  One of the things that we did with our initial write up ‑‑ got a few more issues?
>> Share seeing this screen with your next slides.
>> You're fixing it?  All right.
>> So we will make it mirror.
>> Go for it.
>> See, tech.  How many of you actually teach online and this shows up a lot of times?  Students feedback and say well we see this.  You're going, where, what?
>> You're giving too much information.
>> Yes, we don't want to reveal the secrets ahead of time.  Just go right here.  It is a touch screen.  Don't do presenter?
>> Right.  So, it mirrors.  Because you're sharing your screen.  You're sharing this screen and we're seeing your slides.
>> Where did they go?
>> You saw me ‑‑
>> It's Windows 10.  Ta‑da.  Okay.  All right.  Back in action.  So, you get to see some of the statistics here.  One of the interesting things when she wrote this grant when they pulled some of the stats, students said they did not have online courses, face‑to‑face courses only, they had about 58 percent retention.  But those students that had anywhere from 1 to 24 percent actually did better.  So, the online learning actually helped in the retention.
So, I know we've got the other slides there on the side.  So, we had two models of developing courses.  One that was the current one and one we proposed under the grant.  So, we're just going to give you a little background.  Very short.  In the current model we had before we started this program, it was individually developed courses.  How many of you have individually developed courses?  Faculty gets, you know, here's your course outcomes, go for it kind of thing.  Right?  There's a problem with that.  That everybody gets to do their own thing which is good except that there was no support for it, the cost of developing a 3-credit course was about $5,500 and so if you had 5 people developing the same English course you're paying just under $30,000 for that, which is a problem.  And there's no quality control.  So, one person may have a really fabulous course and the students do very well and the others, of course, you know what happened.  So, we proposed a team method that was a little different than most teams.  And we're going to walk you through a game to help you discover some the aspects of that.  So hopefully this will all work.  We're going to play Jeopardy.  We would like you to take out your smart phone or tablets or smart phone next to your computer, whatever works.  And we would like you to go to this Google address, shortened address, https:  //goo.gl/3tovb7.  Okay it will come back up again in a second here.  I'll give you a chance to take a look at that.  You're going to get a game screen similar to what we're going to be playing.  So, you should probably see like what's on the right-hand side there.  You're going to get a list of options for all the different game cards that we have.  And we will be showing you what's in the middle here.  We're going to show you that hopefully live, if this works.  The results of your scoring.  So again, that was the ‑‑ you can't even see it on here.  So again, Google link (indicating).  So, we will get out of this and go to ‑‑ was that too fast?  Go back.  I can go back.
>> Somebody found it.
>> There's a 7 hiding under those and it's not presenting.  Interesting.  You see it?  Yep.  That's our boss on there by the way.  And it's not showing.  Okay.  Suggestions from the people who use Zoom?  My screen, which is different from what you're seeing.  I asked to share the desktop so when these could come up we would see these.
[ music playing ]
Which one are you here?  Are you one of those?
>> I'm Debbi.  We did practice this.  We did practice.  Why don't you talk about the grant so we don't lose too much more time.
>> So I'm going to grab the mic and pray.  Right here at my podium.  So hopefully it will go quickly.  This is not true Jeopardy so I'm not handing out millions of dollars in prizes, so I apologize for that in advance.  These are not necessarily right or wrong answers over on the right side of the board.  This is actually a technique that we're using with some of the grant work we're doing right now except without the intermediary of the presentation mode that we're using right here.  So, what I'm hoping to do with you, my audience who have stayed with us, thank you, I appreciate it, all of you, those of you here, those of you afar and I will ask you including those online to go ahead and put up hands and so we'll need some help from the back to pick questions for me and what I'll do is we'll try to figure out what we're doing with these grant and what these online course things really are as well as some of the issues we grappled with.  So, are we ready?  You guys are looking wonderfully excited for this time of the day.  Thank you.  Thank you very much.  All right.  So, who wants to go first?  Back there in the corner, you shot your hand up, black hair.  Or at least from here it looks back.  Maybe my eyes are wrong.  All right.  So, if you have your game board up you can go to what she just said which was online master courses for $200 and what it will do is it will bring up our polling options and you can select the answer that you think is most appropriate.  Go ahead and open it.  I don't think this is going to work with the driving of the mic.  All right.  So, go ahead and put your answers in.  Whichever one has the highest number of answers will get our selection and we'll submit it and see how it goes.
Bear in mind these are not answers right for everybody.  These are answers based on what we're doing at my institution.  So, there are lots of room to argue.  I will give you just another moment.  Looks like it's the second response.  You should be able to see these live here and if you have your screen open I believe they're also showing where you submitted your responses.
[ crowd cheering ]
The way we've been doing these courses, we've been trying to move away from the one faculty member, one course model.  Part has to do with it not be scalable.  When they develop align course no matter how good it is it's not available if the faculty member is not available to teach it.  So, you might have, you know, 500 students waiting for English 111 to open up a new section.  But if you don't have faculty members with the developed course available you're toast.  So, we were grappling with the questions how to meet our marketing needs as well as respecting the way our institution has worked for so long which is one faculty member, one course.  It's really been a struggle.  So, what we've tried to do is we've tried to develop teams that included stakeholders.  And that includes faculty member stakeholders, at least 3, definitely at least one from one of the community campuses.  So, it wasn't just the main campus hoisting things off to the community college.  One last side track before I take a person online to select our next option.  This is not designed to be a meat only sort of presentation.  Sought if you have questions, comments, thoughts, arguments, complaints, hold the complaints, but arguments are good.  Please, shoot your hand up while I'm talking and I'm more than willing to turn this into a conversation.  The odds of us getting through the game is less but the conversation is really what this is about.  We need someone from online.  Select a square, please.  Defining online master course.  Get up there.
>> The sound effects are awesome.  So, here's a question.  And this is a question I face every single day.  Is an online master course a threat to academic freedom?  Remember these aren't simple questions.  Go ahead and open the poll.  Is it a threat to academic freedom?  Give it just another moment.  That's remarkable.  I was not expecting that particular response.  All right.  Go ahead and close it and select the second one.
[ crowd cheering ]
That's not really a question with a right answer.  But among the things we have grappled with is faculty members who are in an environment of declining funds and increasing responsibilities and feeling insecure shall we say.  You know, this idea of an online master course seems to be a real threat to many people and that has to do both with the intellectual property and the academic freedom side of things, are you going to give us cookie cutter courses and force us to teach in a specific way or are you just going to try to get rid of us entirely and develop it by our expertise and have it taught by adjunct?  I think if I had to answer that for me I would say I'm not sure.  Because the model way we have developed it actually leaves the decisions about how the course is used and to what degree it is a master course in the hands of the departments.  They design the course with our designers, they are the ones who decide how much can be changed and how much cannot be changed by anybody who uses that.  And the intellectual property, again belongs to the program or department and not to us.  That has helped quite a lot.  One of the current things I can't necessarily address easily is the idea that this can be weaponized by an institution if they so choose.  And the fact of the matter is I can't guarantee you it wouldn't be.  What I can guarantee you is I wouldn't do that and my team wouldn't do that and that's not the intent of the administration we're working with.  So even if you have good intention, bear in mind there are always risks and possible problems down the line.  And so, we need to be mindful as we continue with this model that we're really respectful of not just academic freedom but for the reason that faculty members are there which is to share their expertise in the ways they're best in order to help the students meet their learning goals.  All right, somebody from in here, question.
>> [Off mic]
>> So for those of you online I don't know how well you can hear the mic.  Can they?  The comment was ‑‑
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Model that we're looking at.
[ audio sped up ]
Definitely.  That was really part of what brought it to us.  All right.  Somebody in here.  Who wants?  Go ahead.  Oh, you're going to make me talk about how hard it is.  So, factors affecting time to implementation include.  Go ahead and put your responses in.
[ sound effects ]
The answer is a very definite C on that one.  So, we'll go ahead and put that in.  Where I sit, that's absolutely true.  Definitely there are factors that included that are administrative, as well as change factors had.  It just so happens that for the first time in forever online learning really has a support of our administration.  And so, I'm able to work very closely with deans, with directors and with the provost in order to build these models, to help bring faculty in to make sure we have appropriate incentives and timely releases which has made things a lot easier for us.
[ cough ]
In the past when we haven't necessarily had that kind of cooperation, efforts like this were met in a much more ‑‑
[ audio froze ]
Declining funds for many years.  That's part of what caused us to write the grant we're doing and try to look for ways to be more cost effective and more effective overall really.  But, no matter how much you communicate, you can't communicate enough.  No matter how much you reassure, people will not necessarily be reassured.  So, I spend an awful lot of time talking to different people looking for ways to seek change that fall within what people understand and can appreciate.  It's very, very, very challenging to navigate that.  Because we don't just navigate it with, you know, the provost.  We navigate it with every faculty member that we work with, with every department and sometimes with every college.  We really do want to make sure that we're working with people who are invested in at least giving it a fair shot at having a model that's just wildly different than anything we've ever done at UAA before.  So huge challenge there in terms of change.
All right.  Somebody online.  Somebody online to give us a square.  Where do you want to go next?  I used to be a faculty member and I used to be part of our instructional design groups.  Now I find in fact that I'm a politician.
[ sound effects ]
So, it's best if you can get which?  Do you want a mandate or do you want to persuade?  Do you want to mandate or do you want to persuade?  If you mandate that means that you can make a clean sweep.  It means I can work with all of our General Education courses in an order that makes sense.  It means I can determine that there's a reasonable template for all of those courses.  Persuasion is messy.  Which do we think is best.  All right.  Let's put that one in, Debbi.  We actually have very definitely worked with persuasion.  Persuasion is messy.
[ sound effects ]
Persuasion is unsure.  But, I find ‑‑ I think one of my friends has a quote and it says something along the lines of, in a battle with institutional culture, if you take it on, institutional culture is always going to win.  And, I think that's very true from where I sit.  I'm trying to change people's minds from a model we've had for 15 years that has virtually no governance to something that requires collaboration, doesn't have specific owners, has much less direct intellectual property ownership.  So, it's scary.  It's really, really scary.  And the only way that we're going to develop institutional change which is really my ultimate goal, even if we don't ever end up with this specific model, I have to use a persuasion model.  I'm really looking at different models.  But most of all I'm looking at institutional culture.  We need to change.  It's really, really hard.  All right.  Next one.  Somebody in here.  Go ahead.
>> [Off mic]
[ sound effect ]
I knew I needed a cheering section.  Every question I get applause.  How's that?  All right.  We definitely have ‑‑ I told you they were really super easy in the first half of this.  Right?  All right.  Consistency is definitely a key feature.  Remember, as our provost says we work now in an environment where you let a thousand flowers bloom.  Whenever you work in a field like that you have wild flowers and you have no idea what that field will look like from one semester to the next.  Absolutely no idea at all.  So, from where the students sit, there's a real problem with consistency.  And it's true across all of the General Education courses, it's true across all of our online courses.  I'm not trying to change all of our courses right now.  I'm just trying to work with the top enrolling General Education requirements that nearly all of our students will see at some point or another.  So, if they have elements of consistency across those it will help them get through their first few years of classes without the same kind of struggle that they face now where all those flowers are blooming and they're all beautiful but they all have to be known one at a time.  All right.  Somebody from online, next.
>> [Off mic]
>> Ha, is it possible in a situation like this one which actually is quite high stakes to fail and to still succeed?
[ sound effect ]
You know that seems like an odd question for us to have universal agreement on.  Give it just another moment.  I kind of gave myself away with this one.  Where I sit the models that we come up with and we actually have more than one model that we're working with right now, are important but they're not the goal.  And in a case like this one where people are willing to try new things and to fail and to learn and to try something else new, it's a win all the way around.  Again, that's a shift in institutional culture for us from just doing your own thing to trying things together and learning when it doesn't work.
[ sound effect ]
Actually, Title III grants are that way.  That's one of the reasons they're written the way they're written.  So, you can try things and the institution doesn't have to adopt them.  All right.  Somebody in here.  We have somebody in the back.  That would be you, curly hair.  You guys are really interested in the political side of this.
[ sound effect ]
Is it an easy thing to include faculty members who are adjunct, who are terms or who are not on the main campus?
[ sound effect ]
This is what I'm talking about.  The answer to that of course is going to depend quite a lot on where you are.  From where I sit, it's critical.  Again, I'm not looking just to change the main campus.  I'm actually looking at changing our entire institution with I think about 650 full‑time faculty and maybe 1200 total.  And about 20,000 students I think.  So, we're looking to change the entire system.  Go ahead and submit it, Deb.
[ sound effect ]
For us it's been a real challenge.  Again, our service area for the University of Alaska Anchorage alone is the sides of the state of Georgia.  Our institution has a service area the size of the state of Georgia.  And in that we have islands like Kodiak, we have peninsulas, we have high mountain ranges, we have people who are not on the grid system and have no desire to be.  And so, I totally lost my train of thought.  I love doing that in a presentation.  From where we sit, getting the adjunct involved, getting the terms involved can be really challenging because to some degree all of our main and community campuses have to be able to be autonomous, just because they're so far apart.  When I go visit Kodiak I fly.  We can only drive to a couple campuses and when you do it's several hours away.  So, in that case when you have autonomy, even though folks belong to the same department the folks at the main campus tend to be the ones driving it.  And it's really, really easy for them to go to this mentality of, we can control the quality of our courses this way and bring the community campuses to you.  Not everybody is that way but enough folks are that we really have had to work hard to convince some of the folks to include people who are not full‑time tenure track main campus.  So far.
[ knock on wood ]
We have succeeded in all the ones that we're working on in making sure we have a distribution of faculty from different roles and different places.  Let's hope it stays that way.  Actually, it would or else they probably wouldn't let it go forward.  All right.  Someone from online this time.  Right?
>> [Off mic]
>> Define or why?
>> I wonder all the 1000s are going.  Does that mean you want me to answer all the hard questions?
[ sound effect ]
Again, we're focused on General Education courses.  One issue that frequently comes up, a‑ha.  Go ahead and put it in.  I think they're going to be in agreement with on that.
[ sound effect ]
For us it tends to be the number of sections then when things are.  But a lot of times both of those are the case.  Because again in the case of a lot of our General Education requirements they tend to be on campus, they tend to be in person, they tend to be during the work day.  Even though UAA is an urban open access University with more people working than not.  But we still kind of have that preponderance and people are looking for that flexibility of hybrid or asynchronous or mixed mode synchronous courses.  All right, one more.  Whoever you are you need to stand up and jump up and down and look excited about which one you're taking.  Any takers?  All right, you can stay seated.  All right, one in the back.  I'm crushed.  I have my 10-minute time warning and I have a taker who is excited.  All right, we will finish off the thousands.
[ sound effect ]
I've talked about this a little bit so I'm not sure this is going to be surprising.
[ sound effect ]
One of the best things that we have going for us as a grant and as a team is the fact that we are providing the faculty members with more support and more training than they have ever received in the one faculty member, one course model.  So, when they are working with us, they are working with an entire development team that includes instructional designers, librarians, media developers, a professional development program laid out specifically for the faculty members not only who are working with us to build the courses but who also will be teaching the sections to make sure that we have a baseline level of knowledge.
>> And working with Quality Matters.
>> Well that's kind of a given.
>> Yeah.
>> With the program we have all of our courses are being developed according to the Quality Matters standards.  It's actually just built into what we do.  It's very much what we breathe.  But, also, part of the grant requirements are that after the courses have been piloted a few times and they're considered mature, we will be running one section of that course done by one of the developers through the Quality Matters process.  Now note that since these are courses that are not all identical in nature they don't actually meet the Quality Matters definition of what a master course is.  And I'm okay with that.  And our institution actually is quite a lot happier with that.  So, from a Quality Matters perspective these are not necessarily master courses because they are not all identical with just very limited tweaks to things like the instructor information and what not.  These are designed to be in essence a template for the faculty members to use and they decide what can be changed and what not.  And they are the ones who teach the way they need to teach the best according to the content and according to what makes them a good faculty member.  I will wrap up here, a few quick last points then I will hand it over to Debbi.  In essence we weren't cost effective, we weren't effective in terms of the way we're keeping students and the way we're instructing students.  It was clear our thousand flowers might be blooming but they weren't blooming in a harmonious fashion and we needed to find different ways to do things.  We tried to find ways that are more cost effective that respect the spirit of what higher education is really supposed to be which is bringing in the expertise of folks who studied hard and worked hard in a given area and designed to help transform lives of students as they learn and grow and become something different and we tried to do all of that while struggling within the framework of University politics and a time of reduced fundings.  I would say genuine fear because of the nature of the changes that we've had as an institution.  And because we have a number of things going for us that include the support of the administration and actually an increased openness to change because of the level of insecurity that we have as an institution, that is things aren't working the way they are so people are willing to try new things, we're actually succeeding in moving the needle in changing the way courses are designed, developed and delivered.  This semester for example, our freshman comp class, English 111 at our institution is delivered with 5 online sections, 20 face‑to‑face sections using the same shell to 750 students.  That's change.  So, Debbi.
>> So she stole my thunder with that one.  But there's just a few stats for how we're going so far.  We started out with just two sources, 3 sections of that.  We added a few more and of course repeat the others so they become more mature, added some more, added some more in the fall.  These are just the online courses and again that English, that basic freshman writing course that has 5 online sections has 20 face‑to‑face sections, all using the same basic framework.  So, it will be really interesting.  And of course, we're testing for how well they do.  Thank you.  So current impact, we have 9 master courses developed so far.  More than 1200 students just online.  That doesn't count the face‑to‑face or bleed overs.  Thrush 9 courses in different development right now.  Twenty‑six is the total number but we will probably exceed that by the time we finish the grant.  We are just ending year 2.  I'm technically not on the grant but because the grant involves Quality Matters I bleed over and help a little bit with this.  So, here's some closing thoughts for you.  Something to think about.  How does this affect you?  How does this affect your institution or does it?  You know, what is a master course in your institution's mind?  Does it even consider master courses at this point?  Is it a cookie cutter?  Is it a framework that allows for faculty to make a few decisions?
>> More than a few.
>> Yeah, every semester.  Okay?  So, we would like to hear if you have answers to these.  So please contact us.  It should be coming up any second.  We're not going anywhere.  Why are we not going anywhere?  Wonderful.
>> You're not in presentation mode right now.
>> I have to go out of presentation mode again?  Okay.  I just love technology.
>> The slides she's trying to bring up is our contact information.
>> Also reminder to please go to ‑‑ please go to the ‑‑ this is just weird ‑‑ the website or the event mobile and do the evaluation for today and I don't know why it's not showing.  It was showing just fine and it's not in presentation mode.  So, who knows.
>> I would like to thank you all face‑to‑face and online for participating in using the polling tool and the framework we developed.  I was trying to figure out a way for us to work with everybody and have it be at least reasonably engaging for folks here and folks from afar and we had plenty of people participating in the polls and thank you for letting us know that it actually works.  We weren't sure.
[Applause].