>> Hi, I'm Rob Griffiths. I'm the associate vice president for distance education within the Office of Distance Education eLearning, which is a central support unit that reports up through the interim vice president CIO and is a unit within the Office of Academic Affairs at Ohio State. I oversee a team that engages in online programs, market assessment and marketing program and instructional design support and professional learning.

Online education compliance and reporting, open and non-credit course delivery strategy and support, extended education and more. But you might now know me best as the moderator for today's session. So on behalf of the panelists who will ask to have them introduce themselves in a moment, I want to again, welcome you to this conversation.

As you know, this year's innovate theme is transformation. And certainly the landscape and experience of online education, Ohio State has changed dramatically during the past 15 months. The goal today is to share the experience across three colleges who are in different phases of their journey to grow online programs and an effort to provide access to more students.

And to support in advance of workforce development needs of Ohio and beyond. We hope this session will be an engaging and meaningful part of the ongoing conversations you're likely having locally in your units about online education and around profit potential future program offerings, and credentials. This is a new conversation for many and the decision has budgetary and resource implications, and there's a lot of emerging models out there to consider.

Today's session, this session is a part of a series of breakout sessions related to online programs in the direction of online education at Ohio State including a conversation with the university leadership occurring at 1 PM today about our university's post pandemic vision. So let's get to our panelists and have an opportunity to hear from them about how they got to know, and learn about the conversation processes, and considerations occurring in their areas regarding their experiences, and approaches to online program development.

You'll hear some themes around data gathering, the program development process, managing and supporting growth, creating a suite or portfolio of options and managing culture and expectations. Of course, if we don't hear some of those themes, we can remember to ask about them later if they are important to you.

So while I asked each panelist to share a brief introduction to break the ice and get us started, don't be shy to use the chat function to share your comments and questions. And know that we strategically placed these initial questions you're responding to now, so we know that you know that you know how the chat function works.

So Hillary and I were worked to integrate your questions or comments for the panelists after they've concluded their introductory remarks. Each will be about five to ten minutes in length and this session is to spark ideas, and considerations for you, and your work. So help us identify what is most impactful for you to gain from this session.

Panelists, this is an opportunity for a conversation for you too. So don't hesitate to ask each other questions or to dive deeper into an area of interest. So thanks again for being here and let's get going. First up, I'll turn it over to Dr. John Gray from the Fisher College of Business.

Cool sharing more about the approach and strategy his department, and college have been taking, and determine whether, and how to develop online programs. So John, please introduce yourself and take it away.
>> Okay, thank you, Robert. As Robert said, I'm John Gray. I'm a professor at the Fisher College of Business and the management sciences department.

And I'm going first, because we're probably the least far along in distance learning, online education, etc. So we've long recognized that we're a little bit behind, even other business schools in that area. And as of now, the only truly online program is the specialized masters in business of analytics which was launched a few years ago.

75% online, 25% in-person, but there's an option for the 25% in-person to be done in the streaming mode. That's really our only program that is online at the moment. Now of course, we were all kind of online last year with the pandemic. We are actually also planning to move the working professional MBA to have an entirely online options.

So the working professional MBA historically has been from 6 to 9:30 on weeknights and then we added a Saturday option about five years ago, which allowed people from Cleveland and Dayton and Cincinnati to bus in. A long bus ride, eight-hour class and a bus ride home and weather and logistical issues led to challenges there sometimes.

And now we're going to offer those same courses, but offer the option to have them be streamed and done online and also try to do some innovative things to make sure the online folks are as hopefully close to as engaged as the in person folks. In my department, we started talking seriously about a master's in supply chain for a little while and then we got deep into it and we were encouraged by our dean's to consider it online.

We were set up with ODEE and they were helpful and kind of getting us to think about online, it doesn't mean the Zoom session. There's creative ways to get engagement online, etc. But we really did wanna maintain a strong connection to OSU faculty and Ohio State as a school.

And so I think a big trade-off that we faced that everyone, I think with online learning faces, that's a strong statement for me given I'm just entering this this space. Just on campus, we limit ourselves to people who are willing to travel people who are willing to live close by, etc.

But if we're purely online while we open ourselves up to the entire world, we also online in a synchronous. We also open ourselves up to the competition of the entire world and then there's lots of online options, and online programs out there. We really wanted to maintain some strong connection to OSU and OSU faculty.

We feel it's a strength. We have very strong supply chain faculty here. And so what we have decided to do, let the moment that it's not this program is not fully approved or finalized yet. It's go 50% synchronous, 50% asynchronous, roughly. So think if you have two meetings a week, one class will be asynchronous.

The other will be recorded and allow the students to have a little bit more flexibility, and we also wanted to have experiential aspects in most classes. We wanted to we are gonna have a capstone project advised by faculty and then we're gonna have three in-person long weekends, if you will, at Fisher where we do something that really benefits like negotiations will be taught in an in person setting.

We'll do some tours and things like that, and also wanna get them connected to Columbus and Fisher faculty, and Ohio State through that. So we did that kind of with again, guidance in ODEE and our own thinking and looking at other programs anecdotally. And then we just recently, EAB was I believe employed by ODEE to help us benchmark.

And they thought we did pretty well, basically. We just got that report a week or two ago. Some of our peer and aspirational schools are offering fully in-person still. These are more established programs that maybe have been that way for a while. There are some kind of hybrid models like we're talking about and there's an awful lot of purely online programs, but the majority of those seem to be schools that maybe aren't quite.

We believe are quite of the caliber of Ohio State and they felt like we did a good job of designing the program. We are still working out a lot. We literally just presented this to our department yesterday. So we're still at the department approval level. So we get to have college university, etc., etc.

So we will learn a lot through the program and I'm really excited to hear it from the other panelists who are farther along in this process, and hear your thoughts, and comments. That is my five minutes.
>> John, thanks so much. Next up, I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Ramona Denby from the College of Social Work who can share more about her collegees xperience of a wildly popular online master's degree in social work and some benefits and challenges stemming from that experience.

Remina, Ramona, sorry, feel free to introduce yourself and take it away.
>> That's okay, Rob. One of those are names are Ramona or Remina, one of those are names was to. Thanks so much for the introduction. I'm Ramona Denby Branston, I'm a professor. And Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Social Work.

And so happy to be with you all this morning, anytime there's an invitation for me to brag about my colleagues and brag about our wonderful edtech team, I jumped on that invitation. So thank you so much all for that, and I see that a lot of them are with me this morning.

I'm glad that they're online here too, because as a relatively newcomer to Ohio State, I think this is a quiz. My team is quizzing me, so they're gonna wanna see how well I do, they've been trying to teach me for the past two and a half years. But we are really excited about our programming in the College of Social Work.

We have a fully online MSW program, graduate program a master's degree in social work. And at our BSW level, our undergraduate level, we have a significant portion of that curriculum that's also available online. We started our journey around 2013, 2014 and it started for us in the College of Social Work, actually with our undergrad program, which is actually not our fully online program.

It's our MSW that has the fully online option, but we actually started our journey with just a handful of courses. We started at the regional campus, and during that time our goal was to make sure that the students that transfer into the Columbus campus, have the same experience.

That they've been exposed to the same content, the same assessment, experiences. And so we started a partnership working with the Newark campus and Kelly Cup was our lead instructional designer that helped build that process out starting with our relationship on the Newark campus. And so we started very incrementally, we started with just a small kind of online pilot using our ASAP program, our ASAP program is our advanced standing program.

Where students already are coming into grad school with an accredited undergrad degree they can go through an accelerated program, an advanced standing program. So we were very intentional about starting with that small pilot and growing from there, and so after a couple years of that pilot, we launched our full MSW program.

So we literally went from the year 2016 to 17 students to over 500 today, so just rapid acceleration, rapid growth and a short period of time. Today we're in 34 states, three countries, is where we do our programming around our MSW. We currently have about 60 full online courses that are directly operated out of the College of Social Work.

And we have the best educational technology unit, not on campus, not in the state in the US hands down empirical I have the data. So the best team and that team is led by Byron Roush, he's a director, our instructional designers her Kelly Cup on and Karma he's new newer to our unit.

And until recently about a year ago Diana Palmer and Aaron Carpenter were also part of that team as well. And so I say that because it becomes important in understanding our journey and our success. I think that's why we're so successful with our online program because we were very intentional about choosing great people.

And embedding them into the experience we don't see them as a tag unit are an add on unit. While they're an independent unit within our college, they're very much embedded into our community and they have all the standing and respect that anyone else within our teaching and learning enterprise has.

And that's really important, I think with respect to developing these programs and doing a good job at it. So again, just a little bit more about our journey than I know I need to turn it over to nursing but we were very intentional about couple things how we grew our infrastructure, how we created it.

And then relationships that became so critical, relationships between our instructors and our edtech team. And so again, starting with a handful of courses, our pilots seeing some success there, and that was really important because sometime faculty are a little skittish in the beginning about whether or not this will be quality.

And whether or not this modality is something that we want to pursue, so we were really intentional about making sure everything was excellent, to be able to bring those on with us that may be had a little bit have doubts. So we built out faculty expertise, got faculty buy in, from the from the very beginning, took some of the overhead burden away from faculty in terms of the design aspect which helped them quite a bit.

As well and then gave ourselves time to really create, and so for us developing any one course is really almost a year experience. It's a two semester experience, we take an entire semester of just creating the instructor, developing the content and being created and then having another set aside period semester around the design piece.

So giving yourself that full year I think is what has helped us as well, the infrastructure making sure there's adequate staff when we started this skyrocket of growth. We added two additional lines to the unit as well, and then I'll just kind of end on this point and hand it over to my colleague, Wendy.

I think what's important and what has really helped us as we went into this process, not thinking about it, as way to grow enrollment or as a financial model. We went into this process thinking about this is a modality to deliver quality education. This is a modality to gather get access to people who would not otherwise have access to graduate education.

So we grounded everything we did in learning theory and within our pedagogy and our social work. Value base and really embraced it from that vantage point, I think that's really helped us.
>> Mana thank you and if you have a moment to skim through some of the chat you'll see that there has been direct impact on The online Master of Social Work for some of those that are in the audience here so it's really nice to look at.

Finally, I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Wendy Bowles and Dr. Christy Browning from the College of Nursing, a college as in participating in online programs for many years. And has built an online portfolio and pathway for learners, Christie will be sharing more about the graduate programs and when you can share more about the college's undergraduate offerings.

And together and collectively they can share about the college's efforts and strategies. Wendy Christy, feel free to introduce yourself and share more about your work.
>> Thanks Rob, I appreciate listening to the other panelists too. And I'd like to tag on to what Ramona said that I think with our combination of resources and wonderful team, we have through the years University and within our own programs were the best in the world.

So, we'll just expand that a little bit more, all of us together collectively, are really making great strides in this online programming. We have started with undergraduate programming and RN to BSN, which is our registered nurses that are coming back for completion in their baccalaureate degree. And in 2015, we have been doing this for a long time with online programming.

But in 2015, we really realized that we needed to change and expand and really improve on what we were doing with online programming. And so we partnered with OD at that time to implement a change. And how we were operating as a team and as a unit within our department.

So we took a really close team approach to course development. We worked through each of our courses as these small pods of faculty and people that were providing support from OD. Those first meetings, I heard Aaron Carpenter's name, Dianna Palmer, those were all people that we've worked with so closely in the beginning and they were so fantastic.

They help with partnering with our faculty. We had a group of about ten faculty that were collaborating in those first classes. And it was such a positive experience being able to come together and make decisions about how to use a templated format in our program. So consistent delivery was really evident for our students.

It's really so beneficial to the student learning to see the same format in all courses. They spend less time navigating Karman Canvas this way and more time diving into the content. Our RN to BSN faculty team in those first meetings also worked to incorporate some of the Quality Matters standards based on this templated format that we use with OD.

And we had a lot of fun, too. Because based on the instructional designers, they were able to provide us with tips on how to deliver the content, make assignments more engaging for students. Creating standardized program rubrics is something that we also really focused on. Cuz we wanted to make sure that the students were seeing consistent messages throughout the program while individualizing it to the faculty that were teaching it.

So they can still individualize their courses. But there's certain things that we standardize throughout the program. And we're still going strong. Six years into it after those initial meetings. And every three years, we still go through refreshers, but within our program, refreshers through OD. But within our program in the RN to BSN team of faculty, they meet on a regular basis for professional development.

They meet as course pods. What's going on in this course? Are there things we need to refresh? They work together to individualize what they're doing in their courses, but also be consistent across. And so we just have a really strong, great group of faculty that continue to work together on that.

We've also been part of the national rankings. So for the Ohio State bachelor programs, RN to BSN is one of the largest that represents those programs. This past year, we were number three and for this year. And last year, we were number one. So it's really cool to see how those rankings kind of support what all of the great programming that we're doing.

The RN to BSN program, one of the biggest factors I think is probably our low student-to-faculty ratio. So if you're looking at that for online programs, I'd really be cognizant of how you're able to streamline that. And the strong IT support that we have, both from the university and from the College of Nursing.

I can't say enough about our great IT support within our college as well that's helped to support this 24/7 kind of constantly being able to address the needs of the students. And so that's been well received. And we have excellent support from our faculty, from our Student Affairs Department, from our IT.

And from state authorization too as we expanded to over 40, I think it's at 40 states now that we're able to deliver the RN to BSN program. So I will turn this over to my colleague, Kristy Browning, to talk more about the graduate side.
>> Thanks so much, Wendy.

And it's a pleasure to be here to speak to all of you. Thank you, Rob, for the invitation. And it's always exciting to talk about our wonderful programs at the College of Nursing and try to share with other programs and faculty that are interested in developing more online programs.

And so I'm Kristy Browning. I'm the assistant dean for graduate clinical programs and an associate professor of clinical nursing. And I don't wanna say all the same things that Wendy has said. But I echo everything that she has said with we would never have the success of our students in our programs without the infrastructure that we have in our building.

I think that's definitely where things get started from our instructional design folks to our IT folks to Student Affairs to everybody in our building. It really is a team effort. And we could never be successful without having the entire team and in addition to our great partners with OD.

And so I think that really is the secret to having success in anything. So I'll share a little different aspects. I certainly echo all of the things that Wendy has said for the undergraduate pre-licensure programs. In the graduate side, we actually have four fully online programs. And I'll just talk a minute about our two clinical graduate programs.

So we have a Doctor of Nursing Practice, which is our clinical doctorate. And we have our master's in nursing with 11 specialty tracks, four of which are fully online. So our DNP program and our four tracks of our master's program are all fully online programs. And one thing that I would say that when we're going to recruit students and recruit applicants and market our programs is we really start with educating our applicants.

And what their experience is going to be at the Ohio State University and how we set ourselves apart from others. We all know that online education is taking off everywhere, and we also know that online programs are not all the same. And so I think what we have been able to offer our students with our online programming is what we call the personalized touch.

So I think a lot of applicants and people who maybe aren't fully aware of online programming. They hear online and they think that it's all asynchronous, that you just complete the coursework when it's convenient to you and you don't have any face-to-face interaction. And so we work really hard to educate our applicants that our online programs are all synchronously offered so that they are almost always meeting face-to-face with their faculty and with our course cohorts.

And then we often have a flipped classroom approach, where they do a lot of the education, the learning and the didactic content maybe themselves before they come to class. And so during their class time, we really have this specialized instruction in detail and group learn and group think that you wouldn't be able to get just by watching a static lecture.

And so we work hard to educate all of our applicants that that's what sets us apart. And so that's what they're getting into when they're applying to our program. And then one thing that Rob talked to us about, talking a little bit about how does your program stay consistently rated, highly ranked?

And I would say one thing that has worked with our programs is continuing to evaluate. So we definitely get assessment data all the time with our programs. But continuing to evaluate every semester every year, what is going well? What could go better? And what do we need to change?

So we do offer a course evaluations for every one of our graduate courses, so that's separate from the SDIs at the university sense. So we examine those course evaluations every semester in our graduate studies committee. We have the elected students who are part of those committees. And the students and the faculty get feedback every semester to decide, hey, what's working well?

Or how can we improve this? Or do we need to change an experience? And so I'm excited to talk more about our programs, and certainly on our campus, and outside of our campus. And thanks again for having us join the panel.
>> Thanks so much, Wendy and Kristy.

I really appreciate everyone's overview to help set the stage for us. Now I'd like to turn it over to a series of questions that we've been gathering from the attendees of this session. And of course, if there's any questions you have for one another, feel free to ask each other on the panel about those.

We're all here to learn together. We do have some attendees that are not a part of the Ohio State community, but are attending from other institutions, and to innovate today. But a vast majority are Ohio State members who are looking to help advance and improve on the online courses and programs that they have in their college.

And one thing that was emerging in the conversation in the chat was around this I think ongoing theme that we've had in the pandemic. But how do we support the growth of online programs, but not at the expense of what we're doing in the face-to-face delivery? And there's a lot to unpack in that question, but I know it's a pinch point for some of us.

So I was hoping to hear from each of you how the conversations are going about what you're trying to do the strategy of online courses and programs, and how that fits into the face-to-face strategy? Or if there are issues that remain in that space, kinda what you're wrestling with, and what you're working through and talking through.

If there's a volunteer to go first, feel free to jump in. Otherwise, I can call somebody out.
>> I probably have the least to say, since we haven't really established the program. But I mean, that's why we really focused on the synchronous programming, as Kristy mentioned at the end.

We really wanna make sure that the case discussions that is the kinda typical of the business school classroom were still occurring. And using the technology as well as possible, so these help to make the discussion as much as like an in-person classroom experience as possible, and then allow the kind of lecture content to be asynchronous.

So we don't know how to do it yet really necessarily, but that was the reason we insisted on some synchronous content, and then a few days in person to try to, again, build the networks and connections.
>> And I'll just piggyback on what's been shared. I think we've been very intentional to make sure that we have a parallel curriculum process.

And what I mean by parallel processes that are online, and are face-to-face, curriculum is aligned, and we don't separate it out. And even from the standpoint of admission, to go back to a point that Kristy made before about how you support students, and don't treat them any differently.

So when our students apply for the program, our review committee, they are not aware that a student is applying for an online program versus applying to our face-to-face program. So from the very beginning, we don't separate it out. So we don't have different standards for the online versus the face-to-face, is what I'm trying to say.

The admission standards are the same, and even with our curriculum. And students are allowed to switch modalities if they wanna switch modalities between face-to-face and online. And so we're consistent in the courses, so we don't necessarily design a course just to be stood up face-to-face versus. So there is consistency across the curriculum, no matter the modality.

And I think that kinda helps a little bit too.
>> Thank you. And I'd like to piggyback on this a little bit to talk about asynchronous versus synchronous as well, because I think that's something that people struggle with when they're trying to move into this online space. The RN to BSN Program has been really intentional about giving that personalized attention, even though you're in this asynchronous space.

And I think I heard Kristy say this too, it's about still making that learning community evident within your program, and also the personal connections with the students. Things that the students say when they first get into our program is their expectation of online programming is just like what Ramona said.

Or I think it was Kristy, somebody said it, that they go in thinking they have this checklist of things they gotta do and get done. And it's all about the skills and things that they're doing online. And then they shortly realized about a week into it it's really not about that because we really reach out to our students.

We have that personal device connection. We meet with them one on one. It's not about just being in this online space, and plop, there's your program. The asynchronous environment really is very enriching. And the students start to realize that very early on that the difference in how you deliver that is quite evident with that personalized attention.

And so that's something that I think sometimes people struggle with when they're trying to go into this space, cuz you can be successful in person, synchronous, asynchronous. It's just different pedagogues in how we teach it.
>> And I think it definitely depends on the content you're trying to deliver.

So I think in our graduate programs, they're learning at a much higher level. And they really need that real time discussion for some of the content that they're learning, and applying and practicing, and learning how to be leaders. So I think it's a good examination to decide different aspects of how you're working with your students, and what type of content, and course objectives that you're looking to accomplish.

So I think that across our entire program at all levels, that is what we've tried to do to make sure we're matching the right type of online modality with the content being delivered.
>> And Rob, Wendy reminded me of something too. I just wanna underscore her point too.

So we focus around the student part of this, which is what we definitely should do. But a part of that quality piece, and then alignment is how you get your instructors ready too. So lots of emphasis in how you prepare and support your instructors. And our team is just masterful at doing this.

And so they spend a lot of time with instructors. And these are formal trainings, but they actually spend a lot of one on one time with our faculty and instructors too, helping them understand how to connect with the students. Because that's part of the biggest criticism that we hear from our online students, that they feel like their instructor doesn't Know them or that they're just one out of hundreds of people and so, our team they do a really good job of helping our instructors use tools and processes to build an inclusive space for the students to help them feel connected to one another.

Help them feel connected to the instructor, just the instructor using their own creativity bringing their own personality out by hosting live sessions, or how they show up in the discussion parts of the class. So just that using yourself as as an instructor to be able to reach the student and I think our teams and our faculty together have done a great job of building that piece out.


>> Ramona thank you. That's a wonderful segue back to the other panelists here because one of the questions that was coming out of the chat area was around the strategies that have been employed. Or what you've done to help drive faculty buy in and collaboration, and building programs, as well as helping them be aware about how to support the online or post traditional learner In these programs in these courses.

And social work is set up in a way that it's a college that does not have individual departments within it. So you're you're all working through the same sort of centralized vision and direction of where you need to go. Whereas nursing in the college business each have different units that are also part of the college and it's a little bit of a different tactic and a different approach to be able to bill that buy in and I was hoping for nursing to share a little bit about what's been happening in the last few years.

To help bring people together and support the involvement of all the faculty they're engaged in online programming.
>> Sure I can expand on that's been one of the most rewarding things right because our team has been so innovative and come together at developing the courses. In fact, when we first started this transition, it was a brand new idea and we all know how brand new ideas go, right?

Change is hard and it is one of those things that once we created a vision and we said look, this is what we're trying to do, and we got our team teamed together the core faculty that usually worked in our undergraduate program. And this is what we're trying to do this is the vision, how can we get there, okay?

And look at the resources that od can provide, look at how the things could be restructured and we can work together on this and we started creating a vision and we worked through that vision together, so it wasn't that one person was not necessarily coming along on the team.

We all came together on the team at the same time. And we worked on that vision collectively. And so I would say from our standpoint back, if I can think about those early days in 2015 it was all about creating that vision and Odie really helped us with that.

I know I'm mentioning Odie a lot because but they've been our direct partners with this. And we really work together to try to see what are the different, what are the possibilities that we could do with our into BSN it just became fun. I mean, we are our team just really enjoys coming together and what can we do with this assignment?

And it's just I think that that's really what creates the creativity and innovation that comes out of that the programming and working together so and our team just really enjoys working together and continuing with that professional development.
>> JOHN, I know that the conversations are a bit more recent within the fish college business and just starting to connect in different ways to think about the program and the design of where you want to go.

Are there been any specific tactics or specific set of conversations or structure that has helped you move and bring people together for this conversation any move away.
>> I don't know that I've anything insightful to say there. We are I think we're just we know we're late. We know we need to do this, right?

So it's really admirable that the nursing school did this it was able to get people to rally behind it early, when other schools weren't doing it. So, know what needs to happen. We do have a group of people in the core team that are very excited to work together and develop some of this content together.

But no, I don't know that I have some generalizable, insightful thing to say about about that we've done at this point.
>> Fine, thank you very much, John. We know that online education is education. We know it's about connecting people with other people, with content, with ideas, with experiences.

And that it's not just sitting behind a computer screen passively just sitting at a keyboard and not engaging with other people. And that brings forward another theme that was coming out of the chat was around the hands on experiences and online education, the experiential type of opportunities in online education.

What are the possibilities to allow somebody to participate in an online program but still have. Engaging, meaningful real world experiences as a part of that experience. And I know nursing and social work that's foundational to the work that you do especially in the topic areas that you're in.

But it's also able to be translated into many other disciplines of thinking about how do you engage and develop that. I was hoping perhaps Ramona, you'd be able to talk a bit about how people have the in person experiences as a part of the online programs and nursing as well.


>> Yeah, definitely thank for that's a great question too. So I think we actually have a little bit of as a profession of social work, a little bit of a head start on that, in that our curriculum is built around an experiential model to begin with, so our students while they're taking their online classes.

They're also involved locally wherever they are in their community, in a practicum, in the field practicum experience. And so a lot of what we're doing online in their courses becomes reinforced when they're in person with their agency field instructor or their preceptors, or their liaisons who they're working with.

And so, we work closely with our with our field unit and developing our courses and make to make sure that the content reinforce what their are doing in their practicum as well as there are getting that in person experience too. But, but if I could channel for a moment, my colleagues in Edtech they would probably say that it even goes way back before that and it begins with just an instructional design.

And so they say that, they would say that you have to be very purposeful and deliberate about the instructional design and this we use a continuous quality improvement process where what we analyze, we design, then we implement and we constantly do that cycle over and over again. And so what I think what's helped with our students to to tie in with their field experience and to get this immersive experiences is that we have standard processes in terms of how the content appears in their course.

Standard storyboard type of modeling, we make sure that the people that are designing the classes that they're they're all within our faculty or our community lecture. So we don't outsource whatsoever. So I say that to say that people are connected and grounded to the subject matter. Oftentimes some of the folks that are designing for us are also people that are teaching in the field, their agency field instructors, their lecturers.

So they are they're recent, they're contemporary, they're up to date on the content on the practice modes and so that all gets them reflected back into it our design so it's not separated out. So it's really this the synergy between our practitioners and the theory of what we're delivering in courses.

Yeah, and I can speak for a minute in nursing. So some of the online programs that we have do require experiential learning, where they have clinical practicum hours, where they have to have direct patient care. And so those learners do have their clinical experience locally, wherever that may be.

And that's something that our college helps connect the student with. And some of our programs and depending on what the need for the national certification exam that the student is going for. We do have intensives for some of our programs, where as long as we market ahead of time, when they're applying to the program that they know that they're required to come to campus three times in the program.

We don't have anyone who's doing it once a semester. So we do bring students to campus, where they have these intensive learning experiences that are three consecutive days. And so that is one way that we accomplish this sense of personal experience and coming to class. And I was reading one in the chat, just one comment about students who feel like they don't get to know each other in an online program.

And so how does that work? And so I'll quickly mention, in one of the classes that I teach, every week, I break the students up into random groups. Sometimes it's two people to a group, sometimes it's three or four people to a group, that functions really easy in Zoom for breakout rooms.

And I give the students a ten-minute assignment, something to talk more about, whatever the objectives are of the day. And they talk about it as a group, and then we come back, and we share, and we might do that a couple of times in class, and I randomly assign the groups.

And so within the class, they get to know each other, and a little bit about their experiences and thoughts. And I teach a class early in the program. And so having spoken to some of the students, they say that a lot of times, when that happens early in the program, they start to get to know their student colleagues.

And they stay in touch from semester to semester and course to course as they're in, and then that's a good way to start building relationships. So I think it just starts with being creative and thinking about ways that students can get to know each other. And then, often we have students across the country.

So, it's not unusual for students to have these close connections when they're sitting in different states.
>> And very quickly, we have a lot of group case studies and group projects, and then the groups present their insights, and the students challenge them. And typically, the groups may remain stable in the in-person classes.

But it just occurred to me that, perhaps, changing the group throughout the semester, allowing everyone to kinda work with the different people on project. Cuz the group cases can be hours of kind of joint discussion to try to figure out how to present, so they'll get to know each other through that as well.


>> Thanks, John, and I know that, as a part of the program design process you're going through, understanding how best to engage and create community with your students is a very important part of the conversation. So they have a Fisher College of Business experience, and does that become a required part of the program?

Is that a part of the orientation, informal check ins, graduation, type of experiences, how to bring people together, and allow that networking to happen? So it's a part of all of our conversations across all of the programs about how do we create this sense of community and engagement with our students, to connect with each other, to connect with our faculty, to connect with our institution.

I had another set of questions that seem to be emerging out of here too, and we've touched on it briefly in various points in the conversation today. But the sense of evaluation, the assessment of how do we know that we're doing well in this space. How do we know that students are gaining the expected learning outcomes that they are intending to get?

How do we know that they are engaging with one another in meaningful ways? And just as a refresher, if you touched upon it in the past, we'd like to hear a little bit more about how your evaluation process goes, perhaps, at the course level, and what conversations occur there, or at the program level.

Just to help the audience members better understand how you're approaching a systematic set of evaluation for continuous improvement.
>> Sure I can start with that.
>> On this one.
>> I'll start, since I just recently did a conference with John Muir and Amy program assessment, we are measuring assessment outcomes through our courses and also evaluating our end of program outcomes.

So we've been working on that within our program. Part of that is developing a curricular map and knowing where your course objectives align with whatever competencies that you're looking for. So are they aligning with your end-of-program outcomes, or you're aligning with your national accreditation? For us, it would be CCNE or AACN accrediting body.

And so that is one of the ways that looking at alignment across your program is where everything falls. And so looking at it from that perspective first. Within Carmen campus, there are ways to actually measure your course outcomes to make sure that the assignments are matching up with course outcomes that you have within your courses.

And then, you can also align that with your program outcomes. And so that is just one of the things that we recently presented at the assessment conference, and one of the ways that we have measured it. And then, we look for how our students are progressing. We set certain benchmarks for that and see where we need to make improvements.

We also measure this through a couple of surveys, a national survey called Skyfactor. And that's sent out to all of our students to get feedback based on program outcomes and student satisfaction, and then we also have post grad surveys. So we have one right at graduation, one at one year, and one at five year, that continues to measure how we have met the outcomes of our programs.

And so those are just a couple of ways that we measure based on a kind of a big picture scale.
>> And I'll also just share couple of examples, kind of a similar model to Wendy's. I think this is one of the areas where we are really looking forward to our next growth point in terms of our formalized evaluation and assessment system.

And we are fortunate in that Diana Palmer is going to lead us in this effort. So this is part of the portfolio she's taken on in the past six months. And so we're really excited and may have to pick your brain, Wendy, a little bit to get some of those neat strategies that you all have in place.

But our competencies are preset by our accrediting body. So the Council of Social Work Education prescribes nine different competencies. And they are the same no matter if a student is taking the content online or if they're in-person. So again, not separating out the face-to-face versus the online. And so that pretty much guides a lot of what we're trying to measure.

But we've tried to use a triangulated approach. And so we encourage peer evaluation. So our instructors to get other faculty to work with them, to go into their course, evaluate their course, give them some feedback on the design and how they're delivering it. Of course, student evaluations is a critical part.

We look to get our students feedback. In the moment as well as annually. We do annual surveys, exit surveys with our students as well. And then where we are headed, we did a little bit of this. But where we're headed, the other part of this triangulated model, is around self evaluation.

So encouraging our instructors to learn how they will make things different. And even if they're delivering an asynchronous course that's been previously designed by someone else. Encouraging them to think about the process and how that they can change things for the next time that they're offered. So we try to embed the feedback and making adaptations and changes around this triangulated model.


>> Thank you so much. We have just a few minutes left in our session. We're set to end at about 10:55 or so. So I think we have time for one more question. And of course, it's gonna be a big meaty one that I think will be difficult to answer.

So here we go. But actually, it's upon reflection here. What do you wish you had known earlier on in your journey, that could make your current state better, or easier? Or maybe had helped you moved along in ways that you hadn't realized at the time? And most of our attendees here are people who have been engaged with online programs and are looking to iterate and improve.

And I'm just looking for some of that reflective aha moments that may be pivot points for others to hear about that can help them see or feel where they are in their journey. I'm guessing John has something
>> David, I actually have very little to say again. Just getting ODEE involved early and getting, learning what's possible as quickly as possible.

Because again, if everybody's been teaching in person for a long time, ODEE is the Office of Distance Education. I don't know what the second E is for. But that's all, again, since we haven't gone through this yet, I really don't have any big aha moments to share.
>> This is a tough one actually.

I can just say that, I think making sure that you're taking advantage of all of your resources. And to really think out of the box, to think what some of your resources could be, so that you can be really skilled at knowing what's out there. So that when you're planning your teams to work on your program, your content development, and all of those things that you're using the best resources and that you can point faculty in the right direction.


>> I don't know if we're gonna stay with nursing or if you want me to.
>> Sure, we can stay with nursing. The only, we've had a lot of aha moments. Probably every day is an aha moment. There's things that happen all the time, and I don't think there's 100% way to prepare yourself.

If you're looking at going this direction, jump in, go for it, right? Cuz it's just a learning process. It's new to a lot of people. And it's just about jumping in and being creative and having fun with it, because there's gonna be things along the way. I would say one thing is our orientation that we have for our students.

We actually created a specialized orientation online for students that they can engage with. I mean, that's been really beneficial. And it wasn't something we started from the very beginning. And so I would say that that's one of the transitions we made. But we learn along the way and I would just say jump in, because it's been an awesome experience.


>> I can echo those as well. Lots of aha moments. I also get the benefit of arriving at a time where a program is up and running and the growing pains have already occurred. So I get to see that that finished product, but it's not to say that we're not constantly looking for improvement.

And I think one of the things for us, just the rapid acceleration of our program. We did not expect to grow this fast. And so being mindful of that rate of growth and having those infrastructure pieces in place. I think another good thing, aha moment, is not approaching this.

I think people go into this thinking, okay, I just need a design person. They're critical, but also realize the full gamut of the talent and skills, that it's technology, it's design, it's teaching and learning. It's being embedded in a theory. So see it as a comprehensive approach, not just a technical exercise.

And the other part is just meeting students and faculty where they are. So some people aren't where we want them to be yet, not to say that they can't get there. But respecting where people are and taking them along in the process. Since COVID has happened, our students, the feedback we regularly get is just open up the whole 14 weeks right now.

Just open up the whole class. We wanna see the whole 14 weeks. We wanna do it in one week. And we're gonna say, no, there is a sequential learning process to this. But being respectful and understanding where that angst is coming from with them. And same thing with our instructors, supporting them along the process.

So I think those are just some of the learning things and things that we're still trying to get better at.
>> Thank you so much. I want to give a virtual round of applause for all of you for sharing so willingly with us, being so open and transparent about where you are in your journeys.

Christy, Ramona, John, Wendy, thank you. I know there were many questions in the chat that we did not get to. I know that there were some responses to questions in the chat from our colleagues and partners in here. But please know that we have a growing community about online education at the university.

We have wonderful support personnel who are in the colleges within the Office of Distance Education E-learning at the Drake Institute who are here to help support you and the growth and direction you want to take online education. Happy to make all the connections necessary to help you find success and get the questions that you have answered.

And help you find your community, find your colleagues who can help you move forward in the work that you want to do. So thank you for your time today. Thank you, panelists. I hope you have a great rest of your Innovate day. And we'll hopefully talk again soon.