Course Design
Penn State students, faculty, and staff gained access to two additional learning tools they can use at no cost.
Beyond having the ability to engage with courses from a variety of devices at any time, Penn State World Campus students can take advantage of a number of free accessibility tools to change how their materials are accessed, read, and displayed.
At Penn State World Campus, we want all students to have the same opportunities as their peers, regardless of any functional limitations. That’s why we on the Learning Design team strive to ensure accessibility is not an afterthought but rather a concept “baked in” across multiple roles and phases of the course development process. From…
We recently caught up with Josh Kirby, lead faculty member for Learning, Design, and Technology (LDT) online programs at Penn State. Here’s our conversation: Please give our readers a sense of your background and how you arrived at your current position at Penn State. I’m new to my role as the lead faculty member for…
I’m Sonya Woods, an accessibility consultant for Penn State’s World Campus Learning Design. Part of my job is working with instructional designers and instructional production specialists to help them design course content that works well for students with disabilities, including blindness. Since I work with design staff and our students are at a distance, I…
By Sonya Woods, Accessibility Consultant with Penn State World Campus At Penn State World Campus, we want all our students to have a great learning experience. Part of our focus with course design is keeping in mind students with disabilities, whether they are vision-impaired, hearing-impaired, or have cognitive disabilities such as ADHD. And designing to…
by Nikki Massaro Kauffman, Multimedia Specialist with Penn State World Campus “Teaching is a series of decisions that increase the probability that learning will occur.” Early in my career, when I was working as a high school teacher, someone shared this definition of teaching, and I’ve taken it with me ever since. What struck me…
Joe Scott is the lead instructional designer for the Penn State Video Learning Network (VLN) on the World Campus Learning Design team. The VLN is a blended learning format, meaning most of the time the students are online but come together one time a week to meet face-to-face using Polycom video conference technology powered by…
Spring semester is under way! Now that you have a few weeks under your belt, the folks in Learning Design are wondering if you would like to weigh in on elements of quality in online courses. Penny Ralston-Berg, an instructional designer with Penn State World Campus Learning Design, works with faculty to design and develop…
This fall, MBS Direct will begin offering a textbook rental service for select textbooks. Here’s information to help you get started. How do I Rent Books through MBS Direct? You can rent books through MBS’s online bookstore like you would for purchasing books. Not every book is available for rental, but when a book is,…