Early Bird

Welcome to the Virtual Nest

Where good ideas come to roost.

By Haley Murphy, project manager, Online Learning

April 7, 2021

Starting this month, Online Learning will provide a new standing element of the Early Bird: the Virtual Nest. This twice-monthly series will highlight strong practices, emerging research, professional-development opportunities and more.

While these highlights will focus on online learning, they’re valuable for all modes of instruction because when we implement best practices for online students, all students benefit collectively. Whether you’re a faculty member, staff member or administrator, this series will offer new and valuable information to enhance your ability to support Metropolitan State University of Denver students.

Resource highlight:

Listen to the Key with Inside Higher Ed: Hear candid conversations with higher-ed newsmakers on how colleges and universities are coping with the pandemic, with a special focus on equity and lower-income students.

Online-course design:

Read What Worked This Spring? Well-Designed and -Delivered Courses.
Professors and students have viewed their remote learning experience most favorably this spring when their courses incorporated more “best practices.” That's the path to making the inevitable virtual education better this fall.

Online instruction and pedagogy:

Read A Renewed Focus on the Practice of Teaching.
The abrupt transition to online teaching during the pandemic may fundamentally change how faculty members approach education, write Shigeru Miyagawa and Meghan Perdue.

Read Show Them You Care.
Michel Estefan suggests four ways to help build supportive in-person or online classrooms that generate equity among students.

Online program development and administration:

Read Online Learning to the Rescue: Again.
Online learning has helped rescue higher education from the pandemic and from natural disasters, wars and untold disasters. Will it now inject higher ed into the fourth industrial revolution?

Online Recruitment, Retention and Strategy:

Read Time for Reinvention, Not Just Replication or Revision.

Watch Key Predictions that Higher Education Can’t Afford to Ignore.

Online tools and technologies:

Listen to Covid-19 and the Future of Higher Education.
“The presumption that face-to-face instruction is always superior to digitally mediated forms is not going to be sustainable, regardless of when the pandemic ends,” Mitchell Stevens says, as he talks about the pandemic’s long-term implications on the college experience.

Deep Dives:

Read Improving Critical Courses Using Digital Learning and Evidence-based Pedagogy.

Read Drivers of Quality in Online Learning.
How to increase engagement, satisfaction, skill development and career impact worldwide.