Online Learning Courses

All self-guided courses must be completed within 60 days of registering and no later than December 31.

OL 1200: Student Support and Advocacy in Online Learning

At times, students face personal challenges or have emotional needs that impact their academic progress, social development, or emotional well-being. Instructors may be the first point of contact for students experiencing external stress, presenting them with the opportunity to recognize signs of stress before others do. This course will teach you where to direct students for assistance, when to handle concerns yourself, how to identify urgent concerns, best practices for alleviating stress, and how to foster an inclusive learning environment.

OL 2600.01 Accessible Online Course Authoring

This course equips course authors and instructors with knowledge about accessible web practices and course design that can be applied when creating and adding content in Canvas. Beyond teaching standard accessibility best practices for authoring in Canvas, this course also aims to provide a broader perspective on World Campus students and why implementing these practices matters for them.

OL 2610.01 Accessible Online Course Authoring: Introduction

This course provides instructors and course authors with introductory knowledge about the accessibility landscape at Penn State by introducing relevant laws, policies, and standards, as well as an overview of disability types and assistive technology. The course also introduces personas of students with disabilities and various models of disability to underline the point that accessibility is ultimately about people.

OL 2625.01 Accessible Online Course Authoring: Essentials

Building off the foundational concepts introduced in OL 2610, this course provides course authors and instructors with an overview of essential accessibility best practices and how to apply them in an online course environment. Participants will learn how to create digital content with accessible headings, lists, links, tables, and more, including a brief overview of how to design accessible multimedia elements like images and videos.

OL 2650.01 Accessible Online Course Authoring: Multimedia

This course is designed to help instructors and course authors learn about the core accessibility best practices related to the use of color, images, and videos. In addition to learning what makes an image or video accessible, participants will learn about various resources available at Penn State, including image description tools, captioning services, and more.

OL 2675.01 Accessible Online Course Authoring: Math

Math-heavy courses can be challenging for the wrong reasons if not designed with accessibility in mind. Fortunately, there are a variety of solutions available to help you create and implement accessible math equations that will be readable by all students, regardless of their disability or the assistive technology they use. This course provides an overview of math code like LaTex and MathML, as well as strategies for implementing accessible math in your digital content.

OL 3000.01 Supporting Accommodations for Online Learners

At some point in your teaching, you’ll be notified that a student needs an accommodation. Often, this may confront you with a question or dilemma requiring action from you, perhaps well before you fully understand all of the issues, protocols, or possible solutions. To simulate such situations and prepare you to handle them, this course forgoes the standard online course framework and instead presents a scenario that situates you in an accommodation-related problem at the beginning of each module.

OL 3100.01 Teaching the Adult Learner

According to the American Council on Education, more than 50 percent of students are adult learners. These numbers continue to grow as these individuals seek to advance in their career, obtain a degree to stay competitive, retrain for a new position, or pursue a new career. This course will teach you how to differentiate the characteristics and needs of traditional students (18- to 22-year-olds) from those of adult learners in order to help you best teach them. 

OL 3200.01 Serving Military-Connected Students

Most World Campus instructors will encounter students with a connection to the U.S. Armed Forces: currently serving members, former members, retirees, or dependents of a service member. This course will introduce you to military-connected students at Penn State and teach you how to best support them. It is designed as a mission-oriented experience to provide you with a glimpse into the life of an active-duty service member. 

OL 3300.01 Teaching the International Student

This course provides faculty with a foundational understanding of the international student experience and offers practical strategies for supporting these learners across instructional modalities. Participants will explore key aspects of the international admissions process, cultural and linguistic considerations, and the academic expectations that shape the U.S. classroom environment. Through evidence-based pedagogical recommendations, the course equips instructors to create welcoming, supportive learning environments; foster meaningful engagement; and apply informed, culturally responsive teaching practices in both in-person and online settings.

OL 3500.01 Gamification in Online Teaching and Learning

This is a course about games and what it means to “gamify” your teaching. It’s something of an immersive experience in order to plant you in the language and culture of gaming. By doing this, the goal is for you to rethink what it would look like if you took a course you have been teaching and re-thought what it would look like if it were “gamified.” Some of these ideas might stick so well you will want to work on them right off. Others might seem goofy or too opaque for you to work with. Either way, if you choose to accept the journey of this course, you just might not look at online teaching in quite the same way.

OL 3600.01 Universal Design for Learning

In this introductory course on Universal Design for Learning (UDL), you will be presented with rationales and research that support designing learning experiences with UDL in mind, read scenarios about applications of UDL, and reflect on ways you can change your current practice. This course isn’t a checklist for achieving UDL — UDL isn’t a course status; it’s an ideal that guides instructor practice and course design. Note: Although accessibility is an integral part of UDL, this course will not teach you how to design an accessible course. However, it will help you make your course more accessible, engaging, and flexible. 

OL 3800.01 Excellence in Academic Advising

This course examines the foundations of academic advising as essential components of student success and retention in higher education. Topics include the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of academic advising; the Penn State curriculum and student record systems; advising skills, including advising diverse student populations; the legal and ethical issues in academic advising; and advising technology at Penn State. 

OL 3825.01: Excellence in Academic Advising: Under-Resourced Students

This course takes a deep dive into “under-resourced” students and how to provide quality academic advising based on the essential components and unique characteristics of each student population. Topics include advising multicultural populations of students, LGBTQ students, students with disabilities, and first-generation students. Taking a holistic view of advising a student is always a good approach, but it’s particularly important when working with these student populations. This requires an understanding of many student cohorts and the unique characteristics of each population.

OL 3850.01: Excellence in Academic Advising: Under-Resourced Students II

This course is Part 2 on how to provide quality academic advising to under-resourced students based on the essential components and unique characteristics of each student population. Topics include advising diverse student populations, including athletes, online, nontraditional, high-achieving, military, and transfer students. You don’t have to complete Part 1 before taking this course. Taking a holistic view of advising a student is always a good approach, but it’s particularly important when working with these student populations. This requires an understanding of many student cohorts and the unique characteristics of each population.

OL 3855.01 Empowering Conversations: Interacting with Student Supporters

As faculty and staff, we find ourselves partnering more often with supporters of our learners, from our youngest learners to those returning to college or experiencing college for the first time well after high school. These collaborative partnerships often extend to our students’ supporters outside of Penn State (e.g., parents, partners, siblings, advocates, employers, or close friends). 

OL 3875.01 Excellence in Academic Advising: Career Advising

Although career advising isn’t the primary role of an academic adviser, holistic academic advising involves more than just course selection. Students routinely ask academic advisers career-related questions. The purpose of this course is to inform the career conversations you have with students and support you in identifying suitable referrals to career professionals and resources at Penn State.

For planning purposes, all instructor-led courses are listed with the months they are typically available.

OL 2000.01: Essentials of Online Teaching

Offered: February, March April, May, June, July, September October

This course will address four themes of teaching online: being present and engaged, preparing to teach, creating a climate of belonging, and reflecting on your teaching. In addition, you’ll be given guidance and resources to help you in instances where students experience extenuating circumstances or engage in forms of misconduct. 

Competencies addressed in this course are based on the Critical Teaching Behavior framework. This course supports best-practice in teaching and delivering an online course that is already designed. 

Course Objectives  

After taking this course, you should be able to do the following: 

• establish instructor presence in an online course
• create a climate of belonging in an online course
• identify characteristics of online student populations at Penn State
• prepare to teach your online course
• know where to get assistance to address technical course issues
• know where to direct students whose personal issues may affect learning
• reflect on your teaching
• know the resources available to improve your teaching

OL 2150: Canvas Hands On

Offered: March, June, October

In this course, you will complete important operations needed to prepare a Canvas course, add content to it, manage interactions within it, and use some advanced features. By the end of the course, you will have the technical skills necessary to prepare, develop, and teach a course in Canvas. This course focuses on the competencies necessary to operate fluently in Canvas. Best practices in online teaching are presented, but you will be assessed only on technical competencies in Canvas. 

Course Objectives 

After taking this course, you should be able to do the following: 

• prepare a course in Canvas
• host content and activities in Canvas
• manage interactions and feedback while a Canvas course is in progress

OL 2450: Integrating Open Educational Resources into Your Course

Offered: February

OL 2450 provides participants with the tools, resources, and background knowledge needed to integrate open educational resources (OER) and open pedagogy practices into their courses. In this instructor-led course, you will articulate the values and strengths of open education, navigate OER repositories in order to identify materials you can integrate into your course, reflect on open pedagogical practices, and connect with Penn State open education support and resources.

Course Objectives 

After taking this course, you should be able to do the following: 

• advocate for or explain the integration of and impact of OER use
• distinguish between the types of resources by license and format that can meet the goals of being affordable, customizable, free, and open
• explore open question banks, textbooks, and software
• explore open repositories where participants may find OER and other materials to integrate into their course
• investigate pedagogical methods, such as open pedagogy, to increase student engagement
• find support for OER, OA, open data, open research, open science, copyright, scholarly communication, and instructional design at Open at PSU

OL 2800.01 Personalizing Student Success with Intentional Design

When: June, October

In today’s learning environments, where diversity and complexity are the norm — not the exception — it’s clear that how we design is just as important as what we design. Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE) is a popular and functional model for creating intentional learning experiences. However, research has raised critiques about the model for not directly addressing the cultural components that exist in online courses. The slogan “teaching the whole student” represents an effort to be aware when teaching of the conditions that exist for students in and out of the classroom. But, in asynchronous online learning, where design and teaching have equal effect on learning outcomes, an approach to “designing for the whole student” is needed to ensure learning needs of every student are met through the design of the course, not only through delivery. In 2022, Gamrat et al. published a framework titled INCLUSIVE ADDIE to address this concern. This course explores the INCLUSIVE ADDIE model in effort to design for the whole student.

Course Objectives 

After taking this course, you should be able to do the following:

• analyze the course, your teaching, students, and the larger institutional and societal situations
• design a course for the whole student
• implement an artifact you develop into your course
• implement an interaction action plan
• evaluate your course, teaching, and design with attention to your teaching values and future evolution

OL 3400.01: Online Course Design

Offered: April, September

This course was designed for instructors with minimal learning design experience. It will help you to develop an approach to online course design that models Penn State Quality Assurance e-Learning Design Standards and employs Quality Matters Standards to promote effective and engaging learning experiences for Penn State students. Ideally, you will be taking this course to prepare for the development of a new, fully online course. Or perhaps you will be engaging in a redesign or edit of an online course that you have already taught. It will be useful to those either working on their own or in partnership with an instructional designer. 

Course Objectives 

After taking this course, you should be able to do the following: 

• align module- or unit-level objectives with content and/or activities and assessment strategy
• reflect on the different strategies used to offer a course face-to-face versus online
• recognize how course alignment is supported by select Quality Matters standards
• develop at least one rubric for a course artifact
• create an action plan to address course development and the learner experience in your course