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KSC Faculty at Institute on Global Learning This summer, a team of Keene State faculty members from all three academic schools will participate in "Shared Futures: General Education for a Global Century," an institute sponsored by the American Association of Colleges and Universities to help faculty integrate global perspectives across the curriculum. The institute will be held in Ellicott City, Md., from July 31 to August 5, and will draw faculty from 32 colleges and universities. During the fall 2011 semester, the core Keene State team will draw in faculty and staff from across campus to implement the goals and strategies developed at the institute. By building a network of educators dedicated to this integrative work, Shared Futures facilitates curricular change and faculty development on campuses nationwide. Through an online social network, the initiative hopes to create new connections between educators and new opportunities for partnership and learning. Keene State faculty members attending the institute include professors Charles Weed (political science), Margaret Henning (health sciences), Patricia Pedroza (women's and gender studies), and Rich Blatchly (chemistry). For more information, contact Prof. Weed at cweed@keene.edu or visit the Shared Futures page.

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The instructional design staff supporting faculty developing online courses historically focused primarily on faculty receiving a course release for one semester for which their department was compensated under an award from the Provost's office. The goal was to complete development within this one semester. Unfortunately, that was a rare occurrence. As a result, many course development projects lingered, funds were encumbered, and online courses were taught without being completely developed and reviewed for quality assurance. In the Spring of 2013, the approach changed. we invited faculty receiving awards to join a community focusing on the practice of developing high-quality online courses. We adopted a cohort approach to project-based professional development in the form of an online course.

dScribe, short for "digital and distributed scribes," is a participatory and collaborative model for creating open content. It brings together enrolled students, staff, faculty, and self-motivated learners to work together toward the common goal of creating content that is openly licensed and available to people throughout the world. It was first developed by students and faculty at the University of Michigan to leverage the interest and talent of students in working with faculty and staff to transform educational material into open educational resources (OER). The dScribe model encourages students, faculty, staff, and other interested individuals such as alumni and community members to get involved in not only creating open content, but also generating awareness about the benefits of creating and sharing educational content with a global learning community.

Participants will collaboratively build a set of shared online resources as they gain knowledge and skills to help faculty integrate technology. In each activity, groups will develop materials as Google Docs that will be immediately available to all. Participants don't need to be wizards but should be familiar with digital learning tools. Each participant must bring a laptop and should be able to create and edit Google Docs. The intended audience includes instructional technologists and technology integration specialists.

How to get faculty excited about professional development

# Develops higher level thinking skills # Promotes student-faculty interaction and familiarity # Increases student retention # Builds self esteem in students # Enhances student satisfaction with the learning experience # Promotes a positive attitude toward the subject matter # Develops oral communication skills # Develops social interaction skills # Promotes positive race relations # Creates an environment of active, involved, exploratory learning # Uses a team approach to problem solving while maintaining individual accountability # Encourages diversity understanding

The developing themes have influenced the design and strategy of media production at SCE, including: Strategizing videos to tie directly to course assignments and/or assessment Advising faculty members to use conversational language in production; also encouraging them to use humor and draw on past experiences Adding audio/visual elements to the video that supplement the content; the videos should not convey information that students could just read as text Producing high-quality videos (despite mixed findings related to production values, elements such as professional sound, lighting, and graphics are considered important when creating high-quality media) Keeping the four-minute view time as a design consideration, especially when producing longer-form content lectures that can be broken up into shorter segments

Teaching in the Disciplines is a new resource that is designed to complement the general and cross-disciplinary resources in the rest of the Online Instructional Resources website. Teaching to the Competencies is also a new resource that is designed to support MSU's Liberal Learning Goals and Outcomes as well as provide additional resources focused on competency-based education.

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