Community college teachers across Ohio will hone their online teaching skills in 2021 through ACUE’s 25-week program focused on online college instruction, thanks to a collaboration between the Ohio Association of Community Colleges (OACC) and the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE).

Beginning the week of Jan. 11, 168 faculty members from 22 Ohio community colleges dove into the program, Effective Online Teaching Practices, through which they are learning about and implementing a comprehensive body of evidence-based teaching practices shown to improve student achievement and close equity gaps. ACUE programs in effective teaching practices are based on more than three decades of research that demonstrates effective teaching improves learning for all students.

“Our mission is to support Ohio’s community colleges, ensuring students get the education they need to ensure rewarding, successful future careers,” said Laura Rittner, executive director of the Success Center for Ohio Community Colleges. “To that end, we face an urgent need to prepare our faculty through professional development in online instruction. The response to our call for program applications was so strong that we expanded the program to offer more seats.”

The opportunity is offered free of charge to faculty through a partnership between ACUE, the nonprofit Achieving the Dream, and the OACC’s Success Center.

“It’s an honor to be able to partner with the Ohio Association of Community Colleges and help faculty strengthen their online teaching skills,” said Jonathan Gyurko, president and co-founder of ACUE. “Together with the Success Center, we’re helping college students persist and engage in their studies, learn more deeply and graduate fully prepared for rewarding careers and meaningful lives.”

Equity-promoting teaching practices are among the hundreds of recommended approaches that faculty learn about and develop in ACUE courses, as demonstrated in ACUE’s Inclusive and Equitable Teaching Curriculum Crosswalk.

Jack Hershey, president and chief executive officer of the OACC, said the training will teach faculty ways to keep their online courses fresh, interesting and impactful by using technology and other resources. Each participant will be part of a faculty learning community sharing experiences, learning from each other and bouncing ideas off of one another during the course.

Faculty will be teaching classes at their colleges while taking the course, so they can use what they learn immediately. Those who complete the program requirements will earn the ACUE Certificate in Effective College Instruction, awarded in collaboration with the American Council on Education (ACE).

“We are working hard to better engage students in their learning and to level the playing field to close equity gaps among Ohio students,” Hershey said. “Offering this course to faculty is one more way to do that.”

Since 2012, the Success Center has been a leading member of the Student Success Center Network (SSCN). Managed by Jobs for the Future, the SSCN works to scale proven practices to help more students earn credentials that lead to good jobs. The Success Center’s partnership with ACUE is offered as part of the Every Learner Everywhere (ELE) initiative and was made possible by Achieving the Dream (ATD), an Every Learner Everywhere network partner.

The OACC represents the presidents and trustees of the state’s 23 public two-year institutions that work to advance community colleges through policy advocacy and professional development.  For more information, please visit OhioCommunityColleges.org.

What’s it like to teach an online class with 1,500 students?

For Steven Mintz, a leading educational innovator and award-winning teacher and author, it takes a coordinated team of well-trained teaching assistants and interactive courseware that he’s been developing for years. The transition to online learning in Mintz’s self-described “mega class”–an introduction to history at the University of Texas at Austin–came with many challenges, and also some silver linings.

“The great irony is that the change to online allowed us to do things that we couldn’t do in the past,” Mintz said. “In some ways it made it a better educational experience for the students.”

In this interview, Mintz also shares why teachers should think of themselves as “learning architects”, and the significance of teaching history in unprecedented times.

Higher education’s ‘liminal’ moment

SM: You often hear that a crisis is an opportunity, but I think this time is different. It’s forcing us to face up to some very difficult issues involving cost, staffing, instructional design, and student engagement and learning. Institutions are dealing with program consolidations and cutbacks, they’re making really difficult decisions about replacing faculty with nontenured faculty. We would have had to deal with some of these issues sooner or later. It turns out we need to deal with them now.

But this may be a moment to embrace the challenge. Anthropologists would say we’re in a liminal moment when transformational change is possible. That window will close, but this is a moment to think in new ways.

Focusing our ‘intellectual firepower’

SM: My understanding is that about 35 percent of our undergraduate enrollment is in about 25 classes, and we all know what those classes are. They’re the U.S. history, freshman composition, Bio 101, Psych 101, et cetera.

Some of these classes have very high DFW rates. The equity and achievement gaps in these courses is glaring. Some of our classes have very inequitable distributions of grades–often more along student profile lines than should exist.

We need to make these classes unbelievably great. That means we need to put every bit of our intellectual firepower into making sure students have great activities, great assessments. And it’s certainly worthwhile, I think, investing really serious resources into these 25 key classes. That’s not outside of our realm of possibility.

‘Professor as learning architect’      

SM: This notion of the professor as learning architect or learning engineer, I think, is a goal we need to cultivate.

And that changes the professorial role. You’re not a transmitter of knowledge. And you’re not just a guide on the side. It’s a lot more of a hands-on role to design learning experiences. It’s a very demanding role. But it’s a role that can pay off because then you can better engage them, guide them, mentor them, and inspire them. You can help your students construct their own knowledge.. That is a kind-of constructivist vision of education, a John Dewey-esque vision of education.

In some ways, that is what ACUE is doing. It wants teachers to rethink their role to be more guided by learning objectives, and then aligning everything–their activities and assessments–to those objectives.

The ‘real success’ of teaching history online to 1,500 students.

This semester [fall 2020], I taught approximately one-fifth of all the new students at UT Austin. So that’s 1,500 students.

Now, the great irony is that the change to online allowed us to do things that we couldn’t do in the past. In some ways I think it made it a better educational experience for the students.

The backbone of the class is this interactive courseware that I have been working on for several years. I am convinced that the next iteration of the textbook are asynchronous online activities that are multimedia-rich, contain simulations and animations and podcasts, but above all are inquiry-based. And they have embedded frequent assessments so that I can figure out what students are learning and what they aren’t.

So I had been working on this for many years and now I have the chance to do it at an incredible scale, for many students.

It turned out that the breakout sessions were the real success of the class. I had 18 teaching assistants who all ran the breakout sessions, and I was amazed by what they did in those sessions. They focused on student writing skills, on developing the students’ analytical skills, and providing students with opportunities to work with primary sources and do history.

At UT Austin, it is very difficult to have breakout sessions in large classes because there isn’t enough space. But online? It’s no problem.

Teaching history in unprecedented times

SM: Not since the late 1960s, or early 1970s, has history seemed so relevant. The issues that we’re dealing with right now–statues, inequities in our society, racism–these are the issues that a history class deals with. So it was crucial for me to connect past to present and to really center the class around issues that students are pondering outside of class.

Inequality is right at the top of the agenda, and having a class that’s dealing with those issues, I think, struck many of the students as deeply meaningful. And they weren’t doing it all by themselves, they were doing it with a big chunk of their classmates. That did create a community in ways that I have not seen prior to this.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

Solution Tree and ACUE have partnered to improve student outcomes through Redwood Learning, a new professional development initiative to prepare and credential K-12 educators in evidence-based teaching practices for online learning. You can view the full announcement here.

The first course offered by Redwood Learning is Foundational Strategies for Distance Learning, specially designed for secondary educators.

“We are thrilled to partner with Solution Tree to support positive outcomes for students nationwide through proven, research-based teaching strategies,” says Susan Cates, CEO of ACUE. “Our first course is designed to address the extraordinary need among teachers to effectively educate their students in virtual and blended environments. We look forward to making a difference through Redwood Learning for many years to come.”

The new professional learning brand will debut at REMOTE K12: The Connected Teacher Summit, hosted by Arizona State University (ASU) on Jan. 9, 2021.

Learn more about Redwood Learning

Read the full press release

The resilient educators behind every resilient student.

What’s left to say? 2020 was unprecedented. Time and again our partners persevered, got creative, worked tirelessly, and were fonts of inspiration. Among them all, we’re so proud of:

• The University of Colorado Denver, which strengthened the quality of their online and introductory “influential courses”
• Amherst College, which ensured that faculty could provide the personal, dynamic, and rigorous experience student expect, online
• College of Lake County, whose faculty adopted and reflected on the impact of evidence-based practices
• Vance Granville Community College, which became North Carolina’s first community college ACUE partner, quickly followed by the NC Community College System
• Salt Lake Community College and Norfolk State University, whose faculty sustained meaningful connections with students
• OpenStax, which continues to provide a wealth of open educational resources to educators and students, including free access to homework and courseware
• Our friends Flower Darby, Mike Wesch, and Kevin Kelly, who freely shared their online expertise in our Online Teaching Toolkit. They were joined by Kevin Gannon, April Mondy, Viji Sathy and others, along with 12,000 faculty across 1,500+ institutions globally for Effective Online Instruction webinars
• Active Minds, which published a valuable resource on student and faculty wellbeing and mental health
• Our podcasting colleagues at Teaching in Higher Ed and Tea for Teaching,  who kept showcasing stories of quality teaching, inclusion and equity, faculty resilience, and student success.
• ACUE faculty Andrew Ishak and Benny Ng capturing national attention with ‘viral’ videos

Equity

Our partners redoubled efforts to create inclusive and equitable learning environments, to ensure every student, including Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students, have the opportunities necessary to succeed. For example:

• MSU Denver linked effective teaching practices with anti-racist pedagogy,
• California State University Los Angeles math faculty closed equity gaps through evidence-based teaching, use of OERs, and a redesigned co-requisite math curriculum,
• NC Central University’s Shauntae Brown White discussed how she helps all her students thrive,
• The University of Missouri-St. Louis co-developed our Inclusive Teaching Practices Toolkit, which was amplified by inclusive online teaching webinar series, delivered in collaboration with AASCU, APLU, CIC, NASH, ACE, Every Learner Everywhere and Strong Start to Finish, and
• ACUE’s Inclusive and Equitable Curriculum Crosswalk, which makes clear links between great teaching and equity, showing the hundreds of equity-promoting practices recommended in ACUE courses.

Impact 

We all know that quality instruction leads to stronger, more equitable student outcomes. We also know how important it is to make the proof plain, with compelling evidence. This year,

• A study with Broward College found that students were more likely to complete and pass courses when taught by ACUE-credentialed faculty, with the impact significantly larger on outcomes for Black and Pell-eligible students,
• Broward’s Provost, Marielena DeSanctis, discussed these findings to a national audience on ACE Engage,
• Laurell Malone, NC Central University’s coordinator of faculty development, emphasized the value of impact data on institutional decision-making,
• The University of Texas System’s Rebecca Karoff discussed with the American Council on Education how the system prioritized quality teaching and faculty development to meet student success goals during a crisis,
• Change magazine featured six years of ACUE research on the links between effective teaching, improved academic achievement, and closed equity gaps, among students taught by ACUE-credentialed educators, and
• EdWeek’s Rick Hess discussed the importance of demonstrable impact, and why investment in faculty matters, with ACUE’s Jonathan Gyurko and with historian Jon Zimmerman.

Scale

Plus, our partners won’t rest until every faculty member has the support they seek, to deliver the evidence-based instruction that every student deserves, in person or online.

• CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez penned a forceful opinion about the need for effective pedagogy and practice, across CUNY, now and beyond the pandemic. He emphasized his vision in a talk with ACE and the importance of funders like the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
• Strong Start to Finish helped to bring support to developmental education faculty across Arkansas and Ohio
• Every Learner Everywhere partnered with Jobs for the Future, ACUE, and ATD to support faculty and strengthen online instruction delivered by faculty across North Carolina and Ohio, and
• The National Association of Systems Heads (NASH) is leading “Scaling Instructional Excellence for Student Success,” through generous support from the Charles Koch Foundation. System and campus leaders have embraced this opportunity, and the program is empowering nearly 1,500 professors with the evidence-based teaching skills they need and want to be more effective educators—in person and online. Their students are receiving a better education, with particular benefits for first-generation, low-income, and underserved students. 

Our 2021 Resolution

As an unfathomable year ends, we’re so proud to share that nearly 15,000 ACUE faculty members across more than 200 colleges are making a difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of students.

Our catalog of offerings continues to expand, with courses in online teaching and career guidance, delivered through full and microcredential courses to cohorts at institutions and through open enrollments to individual faculty.

And more is on the way, with new courses focused on guided pathways, equitable learning, and digital courseware.

Your passion and commitment invigorates our work, and we promise to remain steadfast in our pursuit of student success and equity.

Happy holidays, from all of us at the ACUE team.

Brandon Cooper is a Senior Instructional Consultant in the Center for Teaching Excellence at Texas A&M University.

When I committed to becoming a facili-taker – facilitator and participant – for ACUE’s Effective Teaching Practices course, I worried that I may be taking on more than I could handle during an already challenging semester. But I discovered that the ideal time to change my instructional practices is now.

The upheaval that we’ve all experienced these last 10 months has left no arena of our lives untouched, including our learning environments. Indeed, aspects of post-secondary education have been fundamentally altered, some of them for good. So, when I realized that I would be doing a lot of new things this semester (ahem, blended synchronous instruction, ahem), an overhaul of my teaching practices didn’t seem all that risky by comparison with, say, venturing out for toilet paper. Participating in the Effective Teaching Practices course supplied me with a seemingly innumerable supply of new things to try.

Here are a few of my favorite modules so far and a description of some of the practices that I tried and will continue to use going forward (whatever my learning environments look like).

Promoting a Civil Learning Environment

There was so much to glean from this module that I couldn’t limit myself to just one practice to implement. But I believe that what’s done on the first day of class does more to promote a civil learning environment than any number of corrective measures later. For this reason, I opted to use a community-based approach to the creation of classroom norms, guidelines, and netiquette on the first day of class – “syllabus day.”

Naturally, my students and I spent some quality time unpacking key points of my syllabus statement on inclusion and equity. We then segued to small groups so that students could work together to generate proposals for the norms, guidelines, and netiquette that would guide us toward our goal of cultivating an inclusive and equitable learning environment. I used Zoom breakout rooms to create small groups with each group member having a clearly defined role, and the group completed a Google Form to record their proposals. We discussed these proposals as a class before wordsmithing and making decisions about which norms, guidelines, and netiquette we would adopt.

In the past, I’ve simply put this information in my syllabus, but I found that the community-based approach increased student agency and promoted a sense of ownership in addition to other benefits. I’ll make some changes the next time around, but I was very pleased with how this turned out. In fact, I don’t think that I’ve ever had a better “syllabus day.”

Connecting with Your Students

We all agree that meeting one-on-one with students during office hours is beneficial for students and instructors alike. In the past, I have even “cancelled” classes in order to meet with each student individually. But this module encouraged me to require my students to attend one-on-one conferences during the first few weeks of the semester, which I did by using a scheduling app that interacts with my calendar and allows students to set up Zoom meetings with me.

Like many of you, I have been teaching in a blended synchronous context (with students attending in-person and online), so one thing that I realized right away was that this was the first time that my students had ever seen my face (outside of my directory photo and a few random personal photos provided in my Canvas profile). And it was also the first time that I had seen many of their faces. These meetings were informal and focused on getting to know my students, why they chose their major, why they chose our university, and what aspects of the course were “working” for them (and which were not).

Meeting with students one-on-one early in the semester really helped us to forge a personal connection, and it afforded me the opportunity to demonstrate my commitment to their learning. Moreover, I think it helped my students feel less anonymous (especially in an age of social distancing). My impression is that students were more willing to reach out later in the semester because we had already “broken the ice,” and they knew that their success was my priority.

No doubt, in the future I’ll continue to require early one-on-one meetings.

More than Practices

I’ve focused a lot here on teaching practices. But undoubtedly the most beneficial aspect of the Effective Teaching Practices course has been its cohort-based approach. All of us who have built a course know that we must limit ourselves to certain content even though we’d like to cover everything, so only the narrowest of topics can be presented exhaustively. When we place that carefully curated content in front of learners, however, it’s like shining a beam of light into a prism. Discussions inspired by ACUE course content have inspired so many more ideas for enhancing my instructional practices, and the cohort-based approach has connected me with a community of instructors to commiserate, collaborate, and create with. I needed to try something new this fall (like many of you), and my cohort provided a supportive place to experiment and reflect.

Rather than being the worst time to try something new, I have found this present moment to be the best time to do so.

Much of the discussion around COVID-19 and higher education has understandably focused on the impact on student learning and outcomes. However, students aren’t the only ones feeling the effects of social distancing. Most of the 1.5 million college and university instructors across the country have been challenged to find new and creative avenues to build community amongst their students and colleagues. Educators at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi (TAMUCC) are working to stay connected in a way that not only builds community but also enhances their professional development and teaching effectiveness.

Dr. Kellie Smith, assistant professor of communication at TAMUCC, took a position as director of TAMUCC’s Center for Faculty Excellence in 2017 and was immediately impressed with the faculty body’s deep commitment to growing as educators.

“The faculty at TAMUCC is an incredibly robust community of sharers who are willing to discuss what they are doing in their research and in their classrooms—including what’s working or not,” said Smith.

In August, 60 faculty members comprising a diversity of colleges, disciplines and stages of career at TAMUCC began ACUE’s comprehensive online course in Effective Teaching Practices. As faculty cohorts work independently through the 25 course modules, they come together regularly via WebEx to discuss what they’re taking away from the course and how they’re implementing the proven teaching practices within their own courses.

“Being the coordinator of these events has been a delight because we have so many faculty members who are willing to speak during faculty discussion panels, participate in book clubs, and volunteer to organize and facilitate communities of practice,” said Smith. “They’re not just sharing, they’re investing in others, adding a whole new dimension of community.”

Dr. W. Scott Sherman, TAMUCC associate professor of management, has appreciated the benefit of reading and talking to faculty outside the College of Business and getting their different—and sometimes confirming—perspective on how to address opportunities and challenges.

“The blessings from the ACUE course have been many, but the two primary are: first, more intentionality about what I do with my students, as I had grown comfortable in what I was doing, and then also a sense of community around teaching and the ability to learn from and support one another as we deal with a pandemic on top of typical teaching issues,” said Sherman.

That feedback is common among TAMUCC’s ACUE cohort participants.

“Our faculty are not only appreciating the value and the skills to implement in the classroom, but they’re also appreciative of this increased sense of community among faculty who are going through this together during this unique time of uncertainty and social distancing,” said Smith

“We’re not seeing each other in the hallways or running into each other in the line at Starbucks, so the more opportunities we have to get together—albeit virtually—are welcome.”

Smith and her co-facilitator Dr. Pamela Greene, TAMUCC assistant professor of nursing and health sciences, believed it would be helpful to share some of the teaching practices that faculty in the ACUE cohort are exploring with colleagues outside the program. In October, they hosted their first virtual “Teaching Talk” and invited faculty from across campus to hear more about what their colleagues in the ACUE program were learning. It was such a success, they are planning more of these events.

“The objectives behind the ‘Teaching Talks’ were two-fold,” Smith explains. “We wanted to give our ACUE participants an informal opportunity to share their ACUE experiences with our larger faculty body and give our non-participating instructors a glimpse of the strategies our faculty course takers are learning. We also wanted to pique the interest of faculty members for future potential ACUE programs, we’ll now have a list of faculty who are lining up to participate because the impact of effective teaching practices on student success is invaluable.”

Greene and Smith, who refer to themselves as facili-takers—since they are both facilitating as well as going through the program alongside their colleagues—are encouraged by the faculty responses.

“I’m hearing faculty members say things like ‘ACUE is helping me get off auto-pilot and back to teaching with intention. The adjustments are minor—but powerful,’ and, ‘Each time I try something from one of the modules, I am surprised at the results. This ACUE stuff works,’” Greene shares. “Overall, I am amazed at the ongoing enthusiasm and sense of accomplishment faculty are experiencing.”

TAMUCC Faculty Perspective

“My initial thoughts when I learned of being recommended for the ACUE Cohort were those of enthusiasm. I embrace learning opportunities whenever possible and attend professional development workshops, seminars and lunch and learns hosted by the TAMUCC Center for Faculty Excellence on a regular basis. I felt that the ACUE Cohort would be a wonderful opportunity to enhance my teaching craft.

So far, I have completed nine modules within the 25 teaching competency module program. In that time, I have learned many new things and have been reminded of best practices that I might have forgotten about. Professional development is what the learner makes of it, and I have made it a point to take something from each and every module and use in my courses. One thing that stands out to me that I utilized this semester was to distribute information to my students addressing common errors. I distributed a list of common errors to a group of students after they submitted a rough draft. This practice benefitted the students and me. I was able to address common errors in a timely manner and help students revise their rough drafts efficiently. Then, after the students submitted their final drafts, I had the students write a reflection about the process. Reflecting on the learning process was a great learning tool for all of us. I was able to see where I might need to improve instruction in the future and where my strengths were. It also allowed my students to reflect on their own strengths and weaknesses and see how important self-reflection is. In addition to learning new things, ACUE has validated many of the best practices I already utilize in my courses. It is always good to relearn things and find that you are doing things well! Thank you ACUE for allowing me the opportunity to better myself as an educator.”

—Dr. Michele R. Staples
Clinical Assistant Professor
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi
Department of Curriculum, Instruction and Learning Sciences