Smooth Semester Tips

Collaborative Learning: Rethinking Student Assessment, Engagement, & Groupwork

In this guide, Dr. Wendi Benson of Marshall’s Psychology department, explains how to make collaborative learning (what we often term “group work”) appealing and rewarding for students. As she explains, students who might have struggled in the past to embrace collaborative learning will see its benefits when it is effectively implemented. These benefits include: increased confidence, reduced test anxiety, and intrinsic motivation.

Generating Rubrics with Blackboard Ultra’s AI Design Assistant

Dr. Laura Stapleton of Marshall’s Mathematics & Physics department, provides real-time demonstrations of rubric creation within a Blackboard Ultra course. Get useful tips and reminders. Learn how to create the most effective prompts for rubric generation inside AI Design assistant.

HOME at Marshall: Standard 2 – Outcomes & Assessment: Clarifying Alignment and Relevance

This video by Dr. Shannon Miller-Mace of Marshall’s Mathematics & Physics department, focuses on Standard 2 of the new “homegrown” course review checklist, H.O.M.E. – a humanistic set of standards to ensure engagement in online learning here at Marshall.

Using the ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation) model for Course Design

In this tutorial, Dr. Laura Stapleton, one of Online Learning’s faculty liaisons, provides a practical guide to course design that will allow you to identify needs based on a problem-solution orientation that starts with learning objectives and moves toward instructional strategies.

Backward Course Design

From Harvard, this article explains why and how you should start with your Capstone assessment and work backward to ensure alignment.

Transparency in Course Description

This annotated course-catalogue description provides a thorough example of the kinds of details that would offer enough transparency to students. The template includes questions to help identify substantive content and target the most crucial course information. This Harvard model serves as best practice for the course description appearing in your syllabus and posted to your Welcome module at least one week prior to the class start date.

Instructor Resource Center

This Organization is run by Marshall’s Design Center, providing information that is specific to the platforms and tools in use at our institution, including Blackboard, Teams, Panopto…

Best Semester Practices

This webpage contains helpful hints to ensure that faculty are employing best practices at key moments in the semester.

Midsemester Survey Example 

Get help administering a midterm course review. The problem with “Distance Education” is just that. The potential for uncommunicated frustrations is greater, and it may be due to some course designs or practices contributing to common confusions.

Getting Started Designing a Hybrid Learning Course

From the Center for Teaching Innovation at Cornell University, this page presents a chart with side-by-side comparisons of learning activities employed in a traditional learning setting versus a hybrid setting. This easily digestible graphic will help faculty to pursue the central question: “Which of these learning activities or assessments would best lend themselves to an online format and which to a face-to-face format?”

OER and Fair Use: Incorporating Affordable Instructional Materials in Online Courses

This Marshall resource comes from the Design Center Newsletter archives, and it answers many of faculty’s most frequently asked questions surrounding the use of sources within Blackboard courses.

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