2017 Agenda and Program

Glenn Stutzky

Michigan State University

Keesa V. Johnson

Michigan State University

Christopher Irvin

Michigan State University

Glenn Stutzky, Keesa Johnson, and Christopher Irvin, the Michigan State University team behind the award winning course, “Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse – Disasters, Catastrophes, and Human Behavior”, a fully online course that brings together the latest thinking on how and why humans behave during disasters and catastrophes.

Dr. Carolyn Behrman

The University of Akron

Annal Vyas

The University of Akron

Dr. Carolyn Behrman and Professor Annal Vyas, co-directors of the EX[L] Center will discuss unique and innovative experiential learning approaches that enable students to emerge as civically engaged, skilled and adaptable leaders, ready to take on real-world challenges.

Heidi Cressman

The University of Akron

With so many career options available to women today, why don’t girls picture themselves in STEM roles? What holds them back and what can educators and others do to change their perception.

Wilson Huhn

The University of Akron

This presentation proposes four courses that could be offered online to students, prospective students, or a general audience. The pragmatic purposes of these courses are to recruit students to the University of Akron and to develop a new revenue stream for the University. The pedagogical purpose is to make high-quality interactive academic courses and educational programs available to people anywhere. The courses are: Introduction to Law for International Students; Abraham Lincoln: In His Own Words; The Civil Rights Movement and the Constitution; and The Nature and Role of Law. Professor Huhn will also share a draft of a paper on Formative Assessment for Teaching Doctrinal Courses in Law School: Five Types of Online Quiz Questions.

Michele Thornton

The University of Akron

Many students experience boundaries to meeting education goals. Online education expands the learning opportunities in higher education to open up and go beyond the boundaries in traditional face-to-face classrooms. This presentation identifies some of the boundaries students experience and explores how online education can help overcome these boundaries. Let’s discuss some of the ways we can open up and eliminate boundaries for our students.

Matt Wyszynski

The University of Akron

Anyone thinking about planning a study abroad program should keep in mind the four R’s: Relevance, Resistance, Resources and Renewal. Each of these aspects of a study abroad program impacts the others. This presentation will explain each R and also describe some best practices to plan a successful study abroad program.

Patrick Chura

The University of Akron

This 50-minute workshop session will explore oral history and drama as tools for teaching creative engagement, language skills, social ethics, and community involvement. It will encourage the use of oral history plays or “verbatim theater” as a means of opening up educational boundaries and transcending barriers.

To begin the session, the presenter will give background about Voices of Vietnam, a play created from oral history interviews done in May 2016 by students at Ho Chi Minh City Open University. The play, which addresses the legacy of the “American War” in Vietnam, was performed by Vietnamese students in June and by University of Akron students in November 2016. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen argues that Ethical Memory of war requires all nations to remember “their own” but not fail to remember others as well. Voices of Vietnam promotes Ethical Memory by speaking the truths of the Vietnamese people while evoking the humanity and inhumanity of soldiers and civilians on all sides of the conflict.

The session will then explore and demonstrate possibilities for adapting similar projects to the classroom situations of NEXT Conference participants. Current UA students will read a scene from Voices of Vietnam and participate in a discussion about the range of skills that can be learned or reinforced by creating and performing oral history. These include interviewing, editing, scripting, reading, listening, and speaking—along with the multiple creative-interpretive proficiencies involved in staging a dramatic performance.

After discussing the students’ scene, audience members will be called on to participate by reading aloud selected passages from Voices of Vietnam that express widely differing opinions about Americans. A general discussion about the reading experience and the sometimes provocative content of the passages will follow.

Finally the presenter and participants will discuss and debate how the task of speaking the voices of others—especially those of differing races/ethnicities, nationalities, gender identities and age groups—can help students develop greater social awareness and cultural sensitivity. How might the assumption of new identities and perspectives through the staging of oral history not only teach practical skills and promote “ethical memory” but also cultivate empathy?

Michael Bett

Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is a long-term research project that uses the foundation of learning engineering to build and iteratively improve demonstrably effective courseware. Data gathered by use of OLI courseware in live classrooms is central to the approach, driving feedback loops for learners, instructors, and courseware authors.

Our efforts over the past 15 years employing evidence-based research in learning have led to low-cost, effective, adaptive courseware that results in students learning more in less time. The OLI development environment enables course authors to map course learning objectives to sub-objectives and well-designed adaptive instructional activities. OLI courses have direct benefits for high need students including 1) providing additional practice and instruction on concepts that may be difficult or unfamiliar; and 2) an instructor dashboard that monitors student activities identifying opportunities for continuous course improvement, as well as indicating concepts students fail to master. Instructors use this to focus instruction in blended courses. The outcome of this approach has been analyzed in numerous external studies, which have shown that students using OLI learn more and retain that learning longer than they do in traditional instructor-led courses, and that students using OLI learn up to six times more than they do in courses consisting of video-only instruction.

Additionally, OLI is much more than just a technology. It is a set of strategies for course design, development, delivery, and evaluation. OLI development teams use learning science research results to inform course design and learning science research methods both to unpack the cognitive tasks and to design the instructional intervention. OLI courses instantiate research and hold the collective memory of what works and does not work, so time and resources are spent on refinement rather than wasted on reinventing existing successes or failures. The live data collected by OLI is instantly analyzed and creates a feedback loop for students and instructors. Course design teams, and learning science engineers use the same data for evidence-based continuous course improvement.

More than 27 high-quality courses in the sciences, math, and languages that employ the latest learning science research. We are interested in partnering with other institutions that would like to either use any of these courses or would like to create additional courses. As a nonprofit, all our courses are freely available for individual use, and can also be used by instructors as a textbook replacement. See more at http://oli.cmu.edu.

Rich Heldenfels

The University of Akron

While much is made of the television series as a novelistic approach to storytelling, spanning hours and years, the individual episode can provide plenty of fodder for discussion in a very concise way – as little as 20 minutes in a half-hour stripped of commercials. Though brief, a suitable episode is rich in material which could be the basis for a discussion of argument in a composition course, or of social issues in that and other courses.

Steve Edgehouse

Stark State College of Technology

Melissa A. Askren Edgehouse

University of Mount Union

Linda Bigham

University of Mount Union

This panel will explore (1) the possibilities of online feedback in College Credit Plus courses as well as (2) supporting teacher professional development for CC+ situations and (3) an exploration of the do's and don't's for all shareholders involved.

Erin Makarius

University of Akron

Social media is an integral part of student’s lives during college. By connecting with other students via social media, individuals are able to broaden their network and build a community of friendships. While extensively used and examined outside of the classroom, we investigate how social media can be used to build a community of learning. In particular, we asked both students and professors the extent to which social media was used in their course and how it influenced outcomes such as satisfaction, classroom culture, commitment, and performance. In this session we will discuss how social media can be used effectively in the classroom to enhance the student learning experience.

Jennifer M. Cunningham

Kent State University

This presentation addresses some of the affordances and constraints of using available digital media such as an open source textbook and Web 2.0 technologies in online composition classes.

Nicole Hunka

The presentation summarizes a specific, theory-driven intervention focused on increased student/faculty engagement and academic motivation via individualized goal-setting (across five areas), at the classroom level.

Alan Snow

The University of Akron

Technology is a given in the contemporary classroom; however, its effectiveness demands our scrutiny. The variety of teaching technologies and methodologies now available to instructors is greater than ever, but effective implementation is an ongoing struggle. Recent advancements in lecture capture (LC) software allow more instructors to implement this technology in the classroom. LC is a digital recording of audio and video feeds taken directly from class. Stored content files can then be made available to students for review and/or preview at any time. Research has demonstrated that student engagement trumps all; meaning, methods and technology must regularly engage students in order to be effective. After four years of research I have found that lecture capture (LC) technology and flipped-classroom methodology improves student academic performance and increases the number of A and B grades by engaging students. To determine the effectiveness of LC and the flipped classroom approach, grade means as well as mean percentage of A and B grades from courses with and without LC available were analyzed in both standard and flipped class formats. As a complement, student surveys also gauged perception of LC and flipping the classroom. The use of advanced teaching technologies is not guaranteed to improve student success; however, my research indicates implementation of LC promotes the learning cycle and provides students the opportunity to improve their performance. The session will introduce LC, summarize its effectiveness and student perceptions, demonstrate the flipped model, and provide attendees a chance to discuss its merits across the disciplines.

James Wallace

The University of Akron

Thomas Swinscoe

The University of Akron

A panel discussion, featuring instructors and students, examining how incorporating volunteer work with the ELI at UA may broaden student world views, help to break down communication and social barriers, and expose both native speakers and international students to different perspectives.

Courtney A. Gras

The University of Akron

Bill Lyons

The University of Akron

Do your students both expect power point and complain about ‘death by power point’? Do you, yourself, secretly yearn to be free of the power point doldrums? We think Pecha Kucha will both revitalize your (and your students’) presentations and provide an interesting and illuminating spark for more thoughtful discussions.

This technique was created in Tokyo in 2003 by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham Architecture to help architects—or just about anyone using power point— more quickly (and with more enthusiasm) get to the point and avoid talking too much.

Pecha Kucha is Japanese for ‘chit chat’ or ‘the sound of conversation.’ When I first heard this, the line in William Carlos Williams’ poem Paterson came to mind: “a voice calling in the hubbub….”

A Pecha Kucha presentation is a structured approach to an informal conversation—20 slides, 20 seconds each, advancing automatically, as the speaker is challenged to find creative ways to tell her story—blending well-chosen images and intentionally-crafted storytelling—within these liberating constraints.

Pecha Kucha, then, is a 6-minute and 40 second ‘chit chat’ that structurally discourages the droning-on that kills any presentation and is at the heart of death by power point. PK replaces the disengaged reading of text-heavy slides with ‘the sound of conversation,’ the hubbub of real people telling stories that matter to them.

We will briefly explain how we developed our recent Pecha Kucha presentations, highlighting our claim that this can be a powerful tool for sparking thoughtful conversations…in the classroom and beyond.

We will each do this through two short presentations—each including a 6-minute and 40 second Pecha Kucha. After each, we will invite participants to share their thoughts, reactions, questions and concerns.

Create your own Pechu Kucha in this workshop session. Earn fame and fortune by sharing your Pecha Kucha in the Steal My Idea session at the end of the conference.

Dr. Stephen C. Brooks

The University of Akron

Graduate professional programs are considered some of the most successful online learning programs. They attract mature students who have the experience and disciple needed to succeed outside of a traditional classroom. As students do not need to learn on the physical campus, they are able to maintain their employment and family commitments. This flexibility expands programs’ recruitment abilities.

Totally online programs, however, present some specific challenges, especially in professional degree programs in social science disciplines. These courses of study do not have a rigorous set of competences often coming from accreditation bodies that work easily with online learning. In addition, many courses are taught with high degrees of interaction. Students attracted to politics enjoy the give and take of class discussion and debating issues. When the presenter, with support from the Department, researched the possibility of moving the applied politics program to an online format, he strove to maintain the collegiality and professional socialization that students valued in the on-campus program. The result was a blended curriculum that included an innovative low residency component combined with synchronous distance learning and 100% online courses.

The presentation will explore the problems of creating collegiality and professional socialization in an online environment and some of the solutions to those problems suggested by online educators. The use of low residency programs will then be discussed based the limited research on low residency professional programs, including direct contact with current programs. The specifics of the proposed MAP curriculum will be used as a possible model. The presentation will conclude with an open discussion with the audience about this approach to program design.

Steve Kaufman

The University of Akron

This presentation will provide a brief overview of Open Educational Resources that are available to any instructor at any institution. Considerations for finding, adopting, and integrating open educational resources will be discussed, and demonstrations of how easy it is to link a course to an open educational resource will be covered.

Attendees will also be provided with a dynamically generated list of top online resources that instructors can use to increase engagement with their course materials.

Zhijun Yin

The University of Akron

GeoGebra is an open source graphing calculator. It can be used for functions, geometry, algebra, calculus, statistics and 3D Math. It's been viewed as an interactive math software for learning and teaching. Geogebra supports different machines: Computer, Tablet, Smart Phone and web browser and is now free now.

Gain fame and fortune in this session of multiple, Pecha Kucha-length, presentations. Participants each have 6-minutes 40-seconds to wow the audience with their amazing idea. After the time is up, the buzzer will sound and the next participant is up.

Wendy Lampner

The University of Akron

Jamie Newhall

The University of Akron

In this conference we are talking about opening the boundaries to our courses, so it makes sense to think about whether the tools we use to create your courses are all closed and proprietary. In the worst-case scenario, a vendor's product could be sold and you practically end up with another vendor owning your content, at least to the extent that it no longer works. This is where open-source protects you.

And if we are talking about cost as a barrier, we need to talk about the process to create alternative delivery formats. With no common format for interactive content, the creation process can be overwhelming. Simple things such as multiple choice quizzes are handcrafted again and again. The cost to create great interactive content and tools is often extremely high since it usually involves making yet another custom version using a different tool. In the words of Alton Brown, often our creation tools are “unitaskers.”

H5P is an open-source tool that allows users to create, share and reuse rich, interactive HTML5 learning content. In this session participants will learn the basics of H5P including how to get started, how to incorporate H5P interactions in your course, and some advantages and limitations of open-source tools.

Wendy Lampner

The University of Akron

Jamie Newhall

The University of Akron

Dont just spend a day at a conference, get some work done too! H5P is an abbreviation for HTML5 Package, and aims to make it easy for everyone to create, share and reuse interactive HTML5 content. Interactive videos, interactive presentations, quizzes, interactive timelines and more have been developed and shared using H5P on H5P.org. In this hands-on session, we will be building H5P interactives that you can use in your classes.

Ashley Miller

The Ohio State University

Education can't be excellent if students aren't fully equipped. The cost of textbooks shouldn’t be a limiting factor to their success, especially when high quality open and affordable alternatives to conventional, high cost textbooks exist. The Affordable Learning Exchange (ALX) at OSU was created to help instructors take ownership of their courses and content. ALX helps faculty navigate the waters of affordable resources and find creative solutions that promote students savings. This includes re-imagining the textbook, encouraging faculty innovation, and empowering faculty through grants and training opportunities to adopt, adapt, create and share open educational resources. Ashley will share some of the success stories and resources from ALX's first year.

Michael Sturmey

Victoria University, Melbourne

The enabling of a system wide approach for the development and sharing of H5P’s. The LTI integration we developed with Brightspace and H5P enable the creation and insertion of interactives from within the Brightspace HTML editor and the sharing of those interactives with other academics. I will demonstrate and comment on the organizational impact of this approach.