Bringing Learning Technology to the World of Student Affairs: Transitioning a Mandated MOOC to a Learning Engagement Platform

Speakers

Rebecca Harrington and Greg Bunyea

Brief Description

This presentation highlights how a campus health educator utilized online technology to exceed federal and state educational mandates for all new students. We will discuss the transition from a platform with limited student interaction to the OLI platform which provides insight into learning and engagement. Thus providing the ability to adapt in-person programming content to the needs of the students.

Full Abstract

Student Affairs professionals, quite commonly those in field of health and wellness promotion, are tasked with meeting federal and state mandates related to drug and alcohol and interpersonal violence prevention education.

Often this education is designated for distribution to all incoming students. There are a number of third party vendors that deliver online learning solutions to this need, but they are often pricey ($15-20/student) and don’t provide the ability to customize beyond the name and location of support services on campus.

In 2016 SUNY Oneonta Health Educator, Rebecca Harrington became a lead developer for what became known as SUNY SPARC. She also built a companion course, PartyScience, to address drug and alcohol education mandates. A course built in Articulate Storyline and distributed for free by the SUNY System.

While interest was high in adapting the SPARC program, end user campuses faced the obstacles of purchasing and learning the software, despite grant-funded software licenses, training webinars and a technical manual.

In 2022, Rebecca worked with student interns to revise the content and then rebuilt the program on Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative Platform with support from Greg. In doing so, this annual MOOC (reaching over 1500 students annually) has now moved from a check the box mandate to a platform that measures student engagement and learning.

This platform measures student engagement across learning objectives. As a result, follow-up, in-person educational outreaches on campus can follow up where students performance is weakest.

This presentation will review how Learning Technology is being utilized in a Student Affairs based role to save money, target specific messaging to students to align with existing campus programming and to influence real time decisions about additional education students need.

Participants will be able to:

• Identify the steps in the development and design of this online course on the OLI platform
• Describe how the content is deployed and managed for an entire incoming class
• Explain the behind the scenes learning data collected by this platform
• Discuss how this data has immediate use

Session Objectives

• Identify the steps in the development and design of this online course on the OLI platform
• Describe how the content is deployed and managed for an entire incoming class
• Explain the behind the scenes learning data collected by this platform
• Discuss how this data has immediate use

Biography

Rebecca Harrington, Health Educator at SUNY Oneonta has been using online learning technology to deliver content to incoming students since 2016. Her sexual and interpersonal violence was branded as SPARC and distributed by SUNY, derivative works are in use in hundreds of campuses nationally.

Her work in this area earned her a 2018 SUNY Chancellor’s Award.

She has also contributed to the development of a mental health online program, Wellstart, funded and distributed by the American College Health Association. Initially this work was done with Articulate Storyline, but is now transitioning to Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative Platform. She has annually overseen an LMS delivered course to all new students, usually 1400-1800 students) since 2017-2018.

Co-Presenter Bio

Greg Bunyea is a Learning Engineer at Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI). At OLI, he helps educators across the globe author evidence-based courses that improve over time. An alum of University at Buffalo SUNY and Carnegie Mellon’s Master’s of Education Technology, he has been working in higher ed and technology for 5+ years.

Session Notes

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