SOE Recommendations for Online Courses

SOE Recommendations for Online Courses:

Attached please find the committee’s recommendations for online course implementation for the School of Education. In preparing this document, members of the committee researched open university courses offered by other institutions of higher learning, NCATE requirements, literature dealing with academic honesty issues, the SUNY Learning Network, and other scholarly literature related to online coursework in general.

The committee also met with Dean Savi Iyer, who is currently working on developing College-wide guidelines for the development and implementation of online courses. That said, the committee’s recommendations are broad and should be viewed only as guidelines – it does not make sense to develop policy at this point in time, without College guidelines firmly in place.

Included here you will find Considerations for Offering Online Courses, Suggested Methods of Engagement, and Recommendations.

Considerations for Offering Online Courses

• Instructional support in the use of online courses should be provided to students prior to or at the outset of the course.

• All learning outcomes from official course outline must be met.

• Usual academic rigor needs to be maintained.

• The instructor should be provided and take advantage of support from CIT.

• Course must meet college requirements for ADA compliance.

• Access to the course syllabus should begin one week before the start date of the course.

• Courses need to run within a college specified schedule to facilitate registration and posting of grades.

• Assessments should be clearly defined and have posted rubrics where appropriate.

• Instructors should attend a myCourses online courses training prior to start of the initial course.

• Courses must follow the conceptual framework of the School of Education.

• Faculty should have both virtual office hours and live on-campus office hours (when at all feasible).

• All posted readings and materials should be in the .pdf format (even if it is in .doc format) and never in .docx format to

insure student accessibility to readings and materials.

• Faculty who teach online should be proficient in the available online delivery methods.

• Faculty who teach online course should be observed using criteria comparable to live teaching observations and

appropriate for online teaching. Observers can be given limited access rights to online courses.

• An honor code splash screen that the student must read and agree to before proceeding to the course and tests should be implemented by CIT.

Suggested Methods of Engagement

• Face-to-face office hours, when at all feasible • Peer review through Dropbox & Teams on myCourses

• Live office hours online • Webinars

• Blogs • Links to student-produced YouTube videos

• Forums • Tracking of course reading downloads

• Wikis • Papers & responses submitted via Dropbox & Teams

• Live Chat • Sykpe

All these forms of engagement can be assessed/evaluated and have rubrics associated with them, at the instructor’s

discretion.

Recommendations

Recommendation: Links through multiple points of entry to Online Courses (Department, Office of the Dean, Master

Schedule Pages, etc.).

Recommendation: Courses should be registered through SUNY Learning Network.