Persuasive Strategies for Introducing Distance Education Pedagogies and Best Practices to Instructors

“That’s not how I do it in my face-to-face classes”: Persuasive Strategies for Introducing Distance Education Pedagogies and Best Practices to Instructors

 Even in the wake of the covid pandemic, many post-secondary instructors remain hesitant to try out the distance and online teaching strategies that professionals in these fields most recommend. What steps can we take to help create instructor buy-in for high impact practices in distance and online education?

In this presentation, Waterloo will share two new open educational resources geared toward helping online instructors identify and implement new practices for creating high quality online courses and humanizing their approach to online education. Drawing from the extensive needs analysis that informed the design of these resources, we emphasize the importance of presenting instructors with concrete examples and tangible take-aways when providing training and consultation. To showcase the new OERs and provide a starting point for implementing them, or creating something similar, we will take participants on a tour of what we have created highlighting the strategies we have used throughout to encourage instructor buy-in and respond to the needs of today’s online and distance educators.

Speakers:

• Daniel Opperwall - Online Learning Consultant, University of Waterloo

• Kristin Wilson - Online Learning Consultant, University of Waterloo

• Pia Zeni - Lead Online Learning Consultant, Strategic Projects, University of Waterloo