In Episode 40, “globetrotters.edu,” Sandy Strick and Karen Edwards at the University of South Carolina, described how they created virtual study abroad trips for their Hospitality and Marketing students. Initially, they needed an alternative when the pandemic stopped international travel, but they discovered they had created a valuable format to us…

By now, practically everyone who has a connection to academia has heard that the traditional audience for higher education is headed for a demographic cliff. In response, colleges and universities are exploring ways to attract an older audience of degree completers and life-long learners to bridge the gap. But who counts as an adult learner, and ho…

It’s especially appropriate that we’re taking a deeper dive into the topic of virtual field experiences on this Wired Ivy Footnotes episode because as I’m speaking, early in May 2022, Dan is in Europe having just completed a study abroad experience with a group of our students in Finland and Estonia, and he’s just started to working with a second g…

As the world reopens, in fits and starts, higher ed is attempting to speed away from the pandemic as quickly as possible. But the end of the academic year is now on the horizon and, for academics, that means it’s time for an assessment. A glance in the rear-view mirror, a review of the virtual content and activities created to address a specific, l…

Educators who are engaged in online teaching are, at some point, going to hear the words "quality matters." At first mentioned, this seems self-evident. As educators, we understand that the quality of our course design content and delivery is important for learners to have a productive and hopefully optimal learning experience. No one would argue w…

It’s time for Wired Ivy Office Hours! A quick but deep dive into an online higher ed term or concept to cultivate effective communication and weed out confusion. Prior to 2014, academic institutions in couldn’t legally give non-resident students access to their online courses without going through a costly and lengthy case-by-case approval process …

Listeners who’ve followed Wired Ivy for a while now will know Dan and Kieran are firm believers that course design needs to begin with the learning objectives, regardless of academic level and mode of delivery. And yet, when we listened to the previous episode, Made to Measure, we couldn't help but notice it doesn't include any guidance on how to d…

High-stakes academic assessments create conditions that motivate students to cheat. At the same time everyone wants a laudable level of academic integrity in higher learning. Fair or not, for many years there has been a dismissive accusation that online learning was particularly vulnerable to massive cheating. Then, when universities made the whole…

A popular perception, especially in the Age of Covid, is that online instruction consists solely of delivering lectures via Zoom to a Hollywood Squares screen of boxed faces and, therefore, doesn’t allow for personal connections to form between instructor and instructed or between learners. Tell that to students who have taken online classes from W…

In Episode 30 - Ocean Onliners, our guest Elizabeth Sanli offered perspectives from both sides of the virtual podium – she teaches online courses for Memorial University - Newfoundland and Labrador's University and she's currently an online student, pursuing a Bachelor of Education to go along with her PhD in Kinesiology. Returning to class as a st…

The classic structure of formal education is built on a one-way flow of information, from teacher to student. Since most educators' experiences as learners followed this conventional format, from K through 12 and beyond, it’s no wonder we often fall back on habit, stuck in that same transmit-only configuration even after we’ve transitioned from a t…

Welcome to Wired Ivy Footnotes! Clippings from a previous episode, mulched with commentary from Dan and Kieran, to help your online course design and delivery skills grow. Now that the majority of higher education faculty have had at least some experience with virtual instruction, returning to a physical campus has caused many academics to ponder h…

Time is the raw material of our days. On the one hand it is precise and predictable. The clock chimes hours into equal measures. But on the other hand it is pliable and easily warped. We write the syllabi, we schedule assignments, we set grading schemes. If we are careless, time can unravel and spin out of control. In online education we have inten…

As universities attempt to turn away from the remote emergency instruction of 2020 and return to seat-based classes, here at Wired Ivy we’re taking a decidedly contrarian approach. Since everyone else seems to be talking about a return to campus, we’re trading the Ivory Tower and for the deep blue sea. The Marine Institute at Memorial University - …

September is a great time to look at our syllabi, course designs, our delivery strategies, and our degree programs with fresh eyes. Often, when we undertake this kind of review, we tend to focus on what’s missing, what doesn’t work. Carey Borkoski of Johns Hopkins University and Brianne Roos of Loyola University - Maryland make the case for a diffe…

Teaching is fundamental in academic life, and faculty put a lot of work into creating original lessons and courses. U.S. copyright law generally states that employers owns the rights to work produced by employees while on the job, but in higher ed, there are categories of intellectual property that are typical exempted from this work-for-hire doctr…

When students take their first online class they usually don't know what to expect. It can come as quite a surprise to find out that learning at a distance isn't all that different from learning on campus. That's because faculty tend to choose from the same basic menu options -- lectures, readings, discussion, homework, papers, and exams -- when de…

Sometimes you just want to get away. And if you’re teaching online you can! Bouvet Island in the Southern Ocean is the place to go. It’s the most remote land on Earth, with the closest neighbor being the Princess Astrid Coast of Antarctica, 1100 miles to the south. Your company will be elephant seals and macaroni penguins -- and the occasional pass…

There’s a new showdown brewing on campus: Team Sync, Team Async, and running as an Independent candidate, Team Self-Paced. Fans of each are sorting themselves out on the sidelines and, I gotta be honest with ya, if Self-Paced wins it will be a Cinderella story for the ages. Like so many conflicts, the adversaries are more similar than different. Lo…

There are many reasons to create academic programs that can reach students who are unable to travel to campus. Maybe you'd like to expand the audience for an existing in-person degree, or create an entirely new online offering. But before you begin this journey there's something you need to know — when geography is no longer a barrier to access it …

It’s summertime, and the living is… well, easier than last year, at least. With the start of a new academic year on the horizon, a mere two months and change away, we decided this is the perfect season for an episode that begins to explore the choreography of moving from learning objectives to lessons to assignments that will resonate with an onlin…

One would have to assume that if ever there were academic subjects, and student audiences, that lend themselves to at least a flipped classroom approach to teaching, that list would have to include mathematics and computer science. After all, math and computer science provide the infrastructure that make virtual classrooms feasible. And yet, as we …

As higher learning moved into the Fall 2020 academic term, it became clear the Covid-19 pandemic would continue to impact all professors, whether they were seasoned veterans or newly minted. Educators who had honed classroom techniques over decades had no choice but to adapt to new techniques and technology at the start of the school year, even tho…

In keeping with a tradition started in Season One, Dan spoke with a panel of alums from programs featured in some of our Fall 2020 episodes -- North Carolina A&T’s Online Master of Science in Agricultural Education from Episode 17, Growth Edge; Virginia Tech’s Online Master of Natural Resources from Episode 15, Field & Screen, and the Online Progra…

Look past the equipment in an academic wet lab classroom -- pipettes, test tubes and flasks, microscopes, DNA sequencer, gel and blot imaging station -- and what’s left? When the University of California system moved to all-remote instruction, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, UC Irvine Associate Teaching Professor Pavan Kadandale had to ask hi…

Artists are trained to look, to examine the world from different perspectives, to notice the smallest detail and appreciate the big picture. Maybe that’s why sculptor, installation artist, and Professor of Art and Design, Rebecca Hutchinson, saw that it was entirely possible to teach studio arts, including ceramics, in a virtual classroom… and to r…

Our guest this week, Chastity Warren-English of North Carolina A&T State University, is uniquely qualified to cultivate an online graduate program. That’s partly due to her training in agricultural education, a career she chose early in life. Shortly after the germination of her own graduate studies, she was chosen for an internship that helped her…

Whether the subject matter is undergraduate poetry or graduate creative nonfiction, a writing class would appear, at first glance, to be almost perfectly suited to the virtual classroom. We’ve all read the novel and seen the film adaptation’s opening scene of an author, a libation for company, the muse for inspiration, and a laptop to capture the e…

Imagine a traditional college class. Chances are, you'll picture an instructor standing in front of a chalkboard, whiteboard, or projection screen in a room or auditorium of seated students taking notes. At the same time, you know from your own educational experiences that learning isn't limited to to lectures, discussion, lab, or field trips durin…

The curtain is rising on another academic year — admittedly it's odd one — and another season of Wired Ivy! Now COVID-19 has shoved online teaching in higher ed from backstage to center stage… in university operational plans, in faculty development offerings, in the lives of students and their families, and in the news. Six months in and counting, …

In ages past, information distribution was a problem with few solutions. True, a printing press could be gleaned by a man of means and esteem, but with literacy scant, and paper steep, the dispersal potential, while intensified, remained circumscribed… and not cheap. Which is why the best shot for knowledge dropped by a founding father, or a schola…

Dan wants to know... how long can you hold your breath? Sperm whales broadcast songs of nested digital clicks twice as loud as a rock concert to communicate over thousands of miles of open ocean. With their large-brained, digital, long-range connections, these marine mammals are the original online educators. Plus, they can dive to 7,000 feet and h…

Dan's just back from an annual family pilgrimage to Cape Ann on the Massachusetts coast, where spending time with his four-year old grandson means roaming outdoors, digging in the garden, sleeping under the stars, and swimming. Maybe that's why Dan decided this week's topic would be suggestions for swimming in the ocean of online learning. Many fac…

When you think about it, terminology is a kind of short-hand. Having an established, defined vocabulary allows academic colleagues to discuss their discipline without having to explain what they mean by every technical word they say, every time they say it. So isn’t it odd that,125 years since Wolsey Hall, Oxford, became the first college devoted t…

Throughout Season One, our conversations with faculty and program directors have centered on the role of virtual learning communities and our efforts to encourage students to connect with one another. Well, the academic year has ended so you know what that means--time for teacher evaluations! In Wired Ivy’s first ever panel discussion, Dan spoke wi…

Can a 500-year old teaching philosophy translate to online learning? Saint Ignatius of Loyola articulated a series of spiritual exercises, which became the basis of Jesuit learning. Central to this philosophy are the learner has primary agency in the learning, and the process of discovery and reflection will unsettle old ideas. Isn't unsettling old…

Moving a lecture from face-to-face classroom to virtual conferencing is a pretty straight-forward conversion. That doesn’t mean the switch is seamless or ideal, but it is feasible. Activities that are inherently welded to synchronous delivery in a physical space, like studio and field trips... that’s a different story. Or is it? While we’re on that…

Now that many institutions have closed the book on their spring term, educators may finally have some time to catch their breath, reflect on the emergency remote instruction experience, and think about how to prepare for various teaching contingencies in the fall. What better time to talk with an experienced educator on the front line of the sudden…

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused nearly all higher ed institutions in the U.S. to switch their campus-based courses to remote delivery, and on very short notice. There’s already been quite a lot of media coverage on the challenges this change poses for instructors and institutions. Later in this season of Wired Ivy, we’ll be talking to a friend and…

The novel coronavirus pandemic is disrupting families, communities, and workplaces everywhere. Famously, it’s disrupting higher education as well. Because for the foreseeable future we cannot gather in groups like classrooms, professors and students involuntarily had to move online. Emergency remote higher education is just that — a quick pivot. St…

Last week, Kieran and Dan talked about the value of virtual learning communities to help students and faculty feel engaged and supported. Now we're shifting from theory to practice, sharing some of the things we’ve tried and continue to use in class to help foster learning communities. Listeners, help us make this a conversation by sharing your hit…

Dan and Kieran discuss the contribution of online learning communities to better learning outcomes, their benefits and challenges, as well as creative ways to connect and manage virtual groups.بقلم Wired Ivy

Dr. Kieran Lindsey and Dr. Dan Marcucci have a combined 18 years of experience in the virtual classroom. Dan lives in Pennsylvania, Kieran lives in Missouri, and their online graduate program is based Virginia, so they're quite aware that online faculty and administrative staff can feel pretty isolated. You may have been teaching online for a long …