[Plsfaculty] May Digital Learning Update

[Baltrus, David A - (baltrus)]

Hi all,

I wanted to write (and hope to do this monthly) and provide a sense of some of the things I'm doing in my administrative role as Coordinator for Digital Learning and Online Education in PLS.

First, I'm here as an intermediary between PLS and the CALS digital learning group (described/introduced by Jim Hunt at a recent faculty meeting). The CALS group is there to aid with putting course content online in a useful and accessible way. This doesn't mean that there are funds available through CALS to help make our course more accessible, but it does mean that there is a very experienced and helpful team that can both help to guide course decisions as well as assess online courses for Quality Matters. Given the Gen Ed refresh as well as the push for UAOnline, the CALS team is going to be quite active over the next year or so and so one of my goals for PLS is to be an accessible and responsive voice that can fill in gaps and guide courses as we move forward with online learning in PLS. For some that are already going through the Gen Ed refresh and moving to UAOnline, I'm here to help as much as possible to smooth the transition and bring the courses to where they need to be, please feel free to contact me and use me as much as necessary, and I've already been in contact with some of you to help where I can.

Secondly, for many of us, our online course evaluations have typically been lower than for our traditional in class offerings. While it's easy to come up with reasons for these discrepancies, one of the main challenges with online courses is that effective courses must be taught in a completely different way than traditional in class lectures. Ultimately, this hasn't been a large problem for us, but it's a problem nonetheless that we should be concerned about moving forward as online learning becomes more and more important to our role as instructors at UA. Outside of the Quality Matters assessments (which aren't necessary for the Icourse format), there is no set of formal guidelines or best practices for how we teach courses online in PLS. With the encouragement of Matt, another one of my goals is to establish a set of standards and best practices for Icourses in PLS. These will obviously be aspirational as academic freedom is also critically important to all of us, but will hopefully help to guide a sense of shared experience for the students that take our courses online. With this in mind, I've also begun to sketch out ways to help our graduate students + become effective teachers in an online environment (if they so choose), and are working with Matt and Shelley to develop a potential training experience for our graduate students as we help to retrofit courses for an online environment (for those that want help). More on this later in the year.

Lastly, I view part of my role as helping to expand the role for PLS in effectively teaching and training all undergraduates associated with UA. I'm currently working with Tanya Hodges at Yuma to find ways to make the virtual teaching interactions between campuses more effective and (quite frankly) positive. The Yuma undergraduates and the program that Tanya is running are exceptional in a variety of ways, and it will be a huge benefit to us here in Tucson to find ways to best communicate across these campuses. Likewise, thanks to the encouragement of many of you, I've set down the path to begin to create an undergraduate major in Genomics here at UA that can be offered completely as a major to UAOnline. Aside from the incredibly fun administrative paperwork that accompanies this task, I'm doing my best to reach out to all the relevant parties on campus to make sure that this program has the buy-in of everyone and that we do our best to really shape the program in ways build for earning a Bachelor of Science in a completely virtual way (if they so choose).

Happy end of semester!

Dave
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