Why Provide Student Success Resources?

In online courses, students do not possess the face-to-face means to interact with their course instructors. During face-to-face courses, instructors often provide administrative messages and “just-in-time” help before and after scheduled class sessions. In order to translate these kinds of experiences for our online students, I work with instructors to be mindful about secondary skills (i.e., skills that aren’t directly assessed) their students will need to successfully complete their courses. Once we identify these secondary skills, we work to envision resources that may foster development of those skills. I am able to get instructors to consider secondary skills and to create success resources for their students because I carefully consider the student perspective in my course design process. By being the student experience advocate in the course design process, I am able to anticipate potential barriers to students successfully completing an assignment and create resources to avoid those barriers altogether.

Collaborating as a Team

In the image above, you can see that I coordinated with a large team to create a new student success resource for Peer Review. When working with the faculty instructors for BMI 7810, they indicated that their students often struggle with Peer Review. As such, I connected with Chris Manion, the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Coordinator, to explain the scope of the class and determine if we could develop an instructional video for the topic of Peer Review. Once we had the basics down, I reached out to our Instructional Design Video Coordinator to get some studio time set aside and to receive his input on the best way to create the video.

For a products such as the new Peer Review Process Video and Resource Handout to come together, I had to serve as the glue to bring the vast resources of Ohio State to the faculty with whom I was working. Without everyone contributing their unique expertise, creating a student resource like this may not have been possible.

PEER REVIEW PROCESS RESOURCES

In BMI 7810, because students main project focused on their composition of an NIH F(31) grant proposal, they needed to have a few rounds of peer review to refine their proposal. The faculty instructors struggled with identifying good resources for peer review. After working with the Writing Across the Curriculum Coordinator and Instructional Design Video Coordinator, we developed two new resources for students to utilize when conducting peer review. Ultimately, we created resources not just for BMI 7810, but for use in any course at Ohio State.

Handout: Taking Advantage of Peer Review

Video: The Peer Review Process

ADMINISTRATIVE OVERVIEW TO THE COURSE

When I work with faculty, I coach them to create some sort of administrative welcome video to the course. These video messages can contain information that an instructor may convey during the first day of a face-to-face course (e.g. reminders about the course textbook, larger course assignments, etc.). In an online course, additional messages about time management, course navigation, and how to be successful online learners further enhance the student experience and promote greater success.

In the video example below, I worked with Dr. Robert Weber to identify various administrative messages to give to his students in PHARM 8170 to ensure their success in the course. Dr. Weber did a fantastic job of covering a lot of information in a short amount of time including referencing a great article from EDUCAUSE about keys to being a successful online student. Additionally, this sort of video message provides yet another avenue for the course instructor to increase his or her presence in their online course.

INSTRUCTOR COMMUNICATION PLAN

Our team created an instructor communication plan that instructors can work to populate with an instructional designer during the development or revision of their online course. I work with instructors to ensure that all important dates are included on this communication plan. While this document is not student-facing, it does contribute to student success by giving instructors a place to keep track of their plan to provide feedback on assignments, when modules open, when they should publish module materials, and when they should compose module summaries and takeaways. I always advice instructors to print a copy and hang it on their desks as another visual aid.

You can view a populated version of the instructor communication plan for the course, PHR 7584 below:

USING U.OSU.EDU RESOURCE PAGE

Several courses that I’ve designed include students creating a blog and/or portfolio site for a major course assessment. As such, instructors often opt to have students utilize the U.OSU platform provided by ODEE. While there are plenty of instructional videos and help articles on the ODEE resource page, I curated the most helpful and informative links and videos for the most novice user of the U.OSU platform.

CITATION GUIDE

Students often struggle with putting together their references for course papers and projects. In BMI 5740, students created a portfolio assignment in which they had to follow a discipline-specific citation style. In order to keep consistency within the project, the faculty instructors of BMI 7810 also wanted to utilize this citation guide; thus, we adapted the citation guide that I created with the faculty instructor of BMI 5740 for the BMI 7810 course. Because we reused and adapted the citation guide for another course in the Biomedical Informatics Certificate program, we maintained a sense of continuity between courses.

GETTING STARTED WITH PEERWISE

In PHARM 7583, students create their own quiz questions as assignments to offload some of the burden of high-stakes examinations. In order to facilitate creation of these quiz questions, the faculty instructor and I worked together to identify an online tool that could allow students to create questions. Through searching the Canvas Community, we found the tool PeerWise. Because this tool was an external tool, I developed a quick intro resource page to PeerWise to get students started on using the tool.