This book is meant to be a short course to help you prepare to move your teaching online. Do a chapter a day. Or just pick the ones you like.

Activity Sheet: This document provides an overview of how online education helps remove common barriers to accessing education, such as geographical restrictions, disabilities, scheduling conflicts, social stigma, and financial constraints. It uses simple icons and explanations to illustrate how the flexibility and accessibility of online learning platforms can expand educational opportunities to a broader range of students. This would be a useful resource for those exploring online education options, comparing modalities, or looking to increase enrollment through distance learning programs.

The attached file is a course schedule or outline template in a Word document. It contains a table with columns for week, dates, topic, and activities/assignments. The table has rows for each week of a 15 week course, with dates, topics, and placeholder activities and assignments filled in.

This customizable Excel template provides a master framework to plan and organize learning activities for online courses. The template contains sheets to outline course modules, schedule weekly learning objectives and activities, plan assessments and assignments, and track student progress. Columns are provided to capture activity details like name, type, description, duration, assignments, and more. The template is fully editable so course designers can add or remove sheets as needed to match their planning process. By providing a structured planning template, this Excel file aims to help streamline the instructional design process for online learning. Use it to map out engaging and effective learning experiences for modern online courses.

The Faculty Quick Start Guide is an outcome of a project by ISKME, supported by a grant from the Michelson 20MM Foundation, to conduct a study and develop a set of resources to accelerate OER use for distance education, especially the urgent shift to remote learning during the pandemic in 2020. The Guide, created in collaboration with a selection of OER and online education champions across California community colleges (CCC), contains:

- Models and approaches to online learning, and to emergency remote learning in the context of COVID-19;
- How and to what extent OER fits into these models, and local and state-level supports needed for its integration and sustainability;
- Design considerations for integrating OER in online learning, including pedagogical and platform considerations;
- Curatorial practices, such as using OER curation tools and aligning curated OER to learning outcomes; and,
- Starting points and tips for colleges and faculty who want to initiate OER integration into distance education.

Tailored to faculty and campus administrators both in California and beyond, the Guide has the aim is to enable system-wide shifts to meet postsecondary institutions’ long term goals for distance learning, and faculty’s emergency plans for remote learning in response to the COVID-19 and potential future crises.

The Guide is also available as a PDF for download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17AXs30dZeLOrGeNBQ-ISc_OJXIxE9xtB/view?usp=sharing.

See the companion guide for administrators at: https://www.oercommons.org/courses/iskme-michelson-20mm-oer-campus-administrator-quick-start-guide-public/edit

The attached file serves as an exemplary template for structuring an online course into modules over a 15-week semester. The outline demonstrates effective course design principles including:- Organizing content into manageable weekly modules - Incorporating diverse learning materials - Building in recurring assignments- Scaffolding assignments to develop skills over time- Aligning objectives, activities and assessments following Bloom's taxonomy for higher order critical thinking.- Providing a clear learning arc through the sequence of modules and summative comparative assignment.

Community engagement and a sense of belonging are pivotal elements in the realm of digital instruction, serving as the bedrock for enriched learning experiences and fostering a conducive learning environment. When learners feel integrated into a community, it acts as a catalyst, enhancing motivation, encouraging persistence, and providing a buffer against the isolation often associated with digital learning platforms. To facilitate the creation and nurturing of online communities and engagement, a meticulously crafted checklist is provided, offering practical tasks and steps. This checklist serves as a beacon, guiding educators and learners through the multifaceted process of building community engagement and fostering a sense of belonging.

VALUE rubrics are open educational resources (OER) that enable educators to assess students’ original work. AAC&U offers a proven methodology for applying the VALUE rubrics to evaluate student performance reliably and verifiably across 16 broad, cross-cutting learning outcomes.