Fresno State Online Course Services (OCS)

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Summer 2021 - Spring 2022

Proposal Summary: Our campus project plan for 2021-22 aligned with the campus plan as our office of Innovation and Digital Excellence for Academic Success (IDEAS) provided multiple course instructional options during the past academic year. Our plan was implemented with our instructional design team, academic senate, faculty fellows, IDEAS team, and our Provost. The campus wide adoption for Panopto was a critical factor while we leverage the QLT instrument for course creation or redesign. We continued to partner with our Office of Institutional Effectiveness (OIE) to continue to gather data on online and blended learning on campus including DWF and achievement gap data to align with GI2025.

The dramatic shift to hyflex learning for the 2021-2022 academic year required a consistent campus policy and ongoing faculty support. “The Hybrid Flexible, or HyFlex, course format is an instructional approach that combines face-to-face (F2F) and online learning. Each class session and learning activity was offered in-person, synchronously online, and asynchronously online. Students decided how to participate. The flexibility of the HyFlex model demonstrates a commitment to student success, and that flexibility can also enable institutions to maintain educational and research activities during a disruption.” Our faculty participated in one of several development opportunities offered by our campus as outline by the 2021-2022 Successes below.

MERLOT II
MERLOT is a collection of free and open online teaching, learning and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community. The MERLOT collection of open resources spans across a wide variety of disciplines and education levels. What sets MERLOT apart is a combination of peer reviews, member comments, learning exercises and other valuable information and metadata associated with the materials.

2021-2022 Successes

Since June 2021 there were a total of 242 completed courses by Fresno State faculty who enrolled in CSU Online Course Services courses offered by the Chancellor’s Office. This number represents 224 individual faculty who enrolled in one or more courses. Mary Bennett currently serves as the CSU QLT Program Manager for the Chancellor’s Office. In addition, she is one of the facilitators of the online courses offered at the CSU level and leads quality assurance initiatives.

Over the past academic year, our faculty have participated in a number of activities that align with our student success plan. All of these efforts align with our Office of Instruction Effectiveness (OIE) and our collaborative efforts to align our campus GI 2025 efforts. Our QA 2021-2022 efforts continue to be implemented and evaluated in preparation for our annual report due this June. Fresno State continues to be committed to our ongoing partnership with the OCS team. There are several programs and faculty on our campus who have expressed their interest in OCS and CSU Online.

Below are some additional examples of our efforts:

• 26 faculty complete the ACUE Online 
  Teaching Certificate program 

• 84 faculty completed our HyFlex training 

• 74 faculty completed the Q1 course

• 145 faculty completed the Q3 course

• 132 faculty completed our Resilient 
  Course Design training

• SQuAIR participation to inform outreach 
  and support

• 14 faculty completed our DISCOVERe 
  training and have shared 

• UDL was an important component of all 
  programming listed above. Additionally, for 
  any Fresno State professional development 
  we included ALLY. The impact can be seen 
  by our Move the Needle Challenge results. 

Challenges

The unfortunate dismantling of our campus academic policy for Technology-Mediated Courses and Programs (APM 206) and the academic senate subcommittee has sent shock waves through our Fresno State campus. We are now part of a culture where a small group of vocal senate faculty have essentially removed any requirement for a campus level review for an online or hybrid course. This is a dramatic change and setback to our campus and for our project team that has worked so diligently over the past decade to ensure the highest quality learning experience. 

Accessibility  - Our Office of IDEAS participated in various accessibility initiatives during the 2021-2022 academic year, including: 

• Moving the Needle Challenge
  (3rd place - $500 stipend awarded)

• Global Accessibility Awareness
  Day (44th place) 

Overall results:

150+ affected courses
10,000+ files remediated
258+ hours

The Office of IDEAS staff along with our student assistants successfully remediated 10,000+ files, which affected over 150 courses and took a collective effort of over 258 hours. The process of selecting courses for remediation included prioritizing courses identified by the SSD department as high priority, and GE courses that have met the following criteria: 5 or more students enrolled, five or more files and an accessibility files score lower than 65%. A total of 19 SSD courses and 127 GE courses were selected for remediation efforts. 

Quality Assurance Team

• Jolynne Blake, Instructional Designer
• Mary Bennett, Instructional Designer, CSU QLT Course Manager
  
• William Hardiway, Instructional Designer
• Jason McGensy, Instructional Designer
• Iuliana Papuc, Academic Technology
• Eric West, Multimedia Specalist
• Mike Bach, LMS Coordinator
• Erin Ruiz, Interpreter
• Diahann Gutierrez, Office Support
• Dr. Natalie Munoz, Director Center for Faculty Excellence
  
• Dr. Bryan Berrett, Interim Director Office of IDEAS
  Quality Assurance Coordinator
  bryanberrett@csufresno.edu

We are committed to:

• Collaborations and relationship with our CO
• Committed faculty facilitators and faculty learners
• Our Campus Culture - Faculty Committed to Students
• Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning

Next Steps for Quality Assurance for 2022-2023

Goal 1: Initiate an application process and selection for a OCS faculty champion from each of the eight colleges. An MOU will be created that explicitly outlines the activities, assessments, and outcomes the champion is responsible for in collaboration with an instructional designer.

Goal 2: Collaborating with our campus brand strategy and marketing we will develop, implement, and evaluate a communication plan targeted to specific stakeholders (deans, chairs, academic senators, faculty, student affairs, and various committees)

Goal 3: Provide faculty in each college support by providing QLT reviews, course creation support, and curriculum development. We will leverage Airtable as our project management tool and an OCS committee. 

Faculty Facilitators

The following facilitators were an integral part of our faculty training this past year. They provided synchronous sessions, grading and commenting and general support in our HyFlex, DISCOVERe, and ACUE programs as well as our Teaching with Resilient Course Design summer workshops. We also had two faculty lead sessions as Certified CSU Facilitators for the Quality Learning and Teaching (QLT) courses.