Wired Ivy

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 how do we retain them once we have their attention?

School isn’t the central h...

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 group of students in Switzerland and Italy.  

As he mentioned in the previous episode, ...

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, limited-term situation, and consider whether some of those tools might be more durabl...

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 with that. 

But that is small case quality matters; the myriad initiatives 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 for their classes and degree programs, and negotiating reciprocity agreeme...

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 develop those all-important learning objectives.  This Footnotes is a first...

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 wholesale emergency pivot from in-person to virtual classrooms in March 2020, there was...

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 Wired Ivy co-host Dan Marcucci!  As Dan explained in Episode 23 - Anatomy of a Lesson...

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 student has raised Elizabeth's awareness of the ways in which instructor...

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 traditional to a virtual classroom. 

In Episode 18 - Virtual Speaks Volumes, our g...

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 how to apply the lessons we learned online to our non-virtual courses – in ...

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 intentionally loosened some of the time threads.  We empower faculty and learners wit...

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 - Newfoundland and Labrador’s University offers undergraduate and graduate Maritime Stud...

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 different approach in a recent paper, published in Impacting Education, entitled...

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 doctrine -- textbooks are a classic example.  

This practice, which has served b...

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 designing their courses, regardless of whether they'll be teachin...

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 passing scientist. But even here, bivouacked in a shipping container station, with your s...

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. Look past the uniforms and the grudges and you’ll find the line drawn between ...

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 changes the map.

So how does an program director chart a course from in-per...