Online learning (OL) courses help faculty develop general teaching competencies with a specific focus on online instruction. Courses are free and open to all current Penn State faculty, staff, and graduate students who want to develop their instructional and course design skill set. Self-guided courses can be completed at your own pace. Instructor-led courses are facilitated by Penn State faculty with significant experience in online teaching.
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 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 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, April, June, July, 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 2050: Essentials of Online Teaching for Graduate Students
Offered: May, September
OL 2050 is the starting point for graduate students to embark on the Online Faculty Development certificate program. The course addresses 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, July
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 2200.01: Assessment of Online Learners
Offered: June, October
Assessment of student learning is essential in understanding and contributing to their academic achievement. In this course, we extend beyond traditional ways of assessing student work, such as tests and quizzes, and explore several other assessment types. The higher education community is increasingly committed to creating learning-centered environments in which faculty are actively involved in helping students succeed. This course goes deeper into the topic of assessing student learning than OL 2000 did.
Course Objectives
After taking this course, instructors will have a framework for:
- engaging students in ongoing assessment activities to improve learning outcomes
- varying assessment strategies to more accurately evaluate learning
- using assessment data to improve teaching and learning
- leveraging technology to assess and promote learning
OL 2300: Teamwork in Online Teaching and Learning
Offered: Under Revision
This course is designed to help you create a team assignment for your class. You and other participants will learn from each other through discussions, and you’ll create your own team assessments and receive feedback on them.
Course Objectives
After taking this course, you should be able to do the following:
- describe specific criteria that will help you decide whether an assignment should be completed by a team or an individual
- identify various team configurations and methods for creating teams
- identify and describe the four stages of team development
- identify different methods of assessing team assignments
OL 2450: Integrating Open Educational Resources into Your Course
Offered: February, June
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: 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 3300: Teaching the International Student
Offered: Under Revision
This course provides you with material and activities that can assist you in online classes that enroll significant numbers of international students. The course is designed for instructors without extensive experience with international students or those who have worked with international students only in advanced degree programs that afford considerable one-on-one interaction. Because online courses lack these affordances, this course will prepare faculty to work with international students in an online environment. World Campus growth trends project that more and more international students will enroll in online courses and programs in the coming years.
Course Objectives
After taking this course, you should be able to do the following:
- refer to research on the issues and concerns of postsecondary instructors working with international students in online environments
- identify international students’ motivations for, and experiences with, taking online courses
- improve international student participation by employing cross-cultural sensitivity, intercultural awareness, and empathetic communication strategies
- employ effective strategies to support intercultural communicative capacity
- engage in critical reflection on assumptions or biases encoded in the curriculum
- make curriculum adjustments for the international learner
OL 3400.01: Online Course Design
Offered: March, 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
OL 3500: Gamification in Online Teaching and Learning
Offered: April
This is a course about what it means to “gamify” your teaching. It’s an immersive experience situating you in the language and culture of gaming. The goal is for you to redesign a course you’ve been teaching as a gamified experience. Whether these ideas seem perfect to implement now or something to explore later, you won’t look at online teaching the same way after the journey of this course.
Note
This course begins on the first day of the month and ends on the last day. The design is a hybrid of self-guided and instructor-led content. You can move at your own pace during the month, but an instructor will be present throughout to give you feedback and keep you on track.
Course Objectives
After taking this course, you should be able to do the following:
- define educational games
- define gamification
- provide rationales for inclusion of an educational game in a given educational lesson
- provide rationales for inclusion of selected gamification techniques in a given educational lesson
- demonstrate the ability to design gamification techniques and include them in a given educational situation
- list basic techniques for assessment of game-related activities in educational settings
Upcoming Instructor-Led Courses
Course registration closes one week before the start date for instructor-led courses. All course work should be completed within the designated course timeline.