Instructor Q & A: Melissa Beers, Ryan Hansen & Jackie Spiegel of Psychology

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In this series of posts, we’ll ask instructors to describe their experience at the onset of the online GE creation process. Once the semester has finished, we’ll revisit them to see how things went. 

psychPsychology 1100 is a popular GE course that has been taught online through a number of different incarnations.  It is currently taught by Ryan Hansen, a graduate teaching assistant in clinical psychology, who will continue to teach through fall semester.  The original version was created by Jackie Von Spiegel, who is now an advisor in Psychology Department. We spoke with Ryan, Jackie, and PS 1100 Program Director Melissa Beers about how this course first began and what it has evolved into over the years.

Q: Thinking back to the initial decision to create the online general education courses and your involvement, what were some of your first concerns or questions?

 Melissa Beers (MB):  I was first involved with developing an online section of Introduction to Psychology in 2007.  Our biggest concern at the start was what resources it would take to mount the course online. At that time, the only models we had to work with were examples in which faculty programmed their own courses, and those were an enormous amount of work for a questionable return on investment.  Carmen was key.  From the beginning, the ability to build, structure, and manage the course through Carmen was essential. Carmen makes it extremely easy to manage an online course.

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April 2014: Online GE Project Update

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Course: Statistics 1450 (and 1350)

Update by Kevin Kula

April has been a month of progress for our Statistics GE online team.  We have had productive meetings and are bringing in a few experts/guest speakers into our meetings to ensure we’re making informed decisions moving forward.  Thank you to John Votino from ODEE’s Learning Systems & Infrastructure team for speaking with our group on Mediasite.  The information John provided helps us to have further discussions on what software we will use to both create and host our videos for these courses.  Additionally, we are collaborating with colleagues from the Math Department on their ‘flipped and flexible’ work with Math 1151 and 1152.  We learned some great tips from Elizabeth Miller, including lessons they learned from use of CarmenConnect, in-person proctoring methods, and Piazza integration with our learning management system.  We are thankful for supportive Buckeye colleagues like John and Elizabeth.

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