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April 22, 2025
In our Personal Experience Insights series, members of the Everspring Learning Design department share first-hand accounts of creating online learning content and meaningful takeaways from their professional experiences.
January 24, 2024
Over the course of your teaching career, you may inherit an online course developed by another faculty member. While such a situation can offer many advantages, it can also provoke many questions and pose significant challenges. Inheriting a complete course with materials and assessments already in place can simplify and streamline some aspects of instruction, but it can be difficult to identify where to start and what to prioritize as you begin engaging with the course. This blog outlines a four-phase process that can lead to a successful transition.
December 29, 2022
Designing a successful multimodal course means, at each step of the process, considering what each format does well—structuring the course such that each piece of content, each activity, and each interaction uses the most effective delivery method available. But what does that look like in practice? This piece describes three approaches to structuring a multimodal course. In each model, asynchronous and synchronous time complement one another and support module- and course-level objectives. Where the models differ is in the relative importance of asynchronous activities in enabling students to complete synchronous activities and vice versa.
August 27, 2025
As an administrator or department chair, you are in a unique position to shape an online program and establish programmatic requirements or recommendations. This is because you have been tasked with taking a broader view of the program, focusing not only on individual course development (as a faculty member might) but also on how an array of courses must be cohesively united to achieve certain goals, values, and accreditation standards. To that end, this piece focuses on why consistency across a program is integral to program quality and student success, and therefore why it falls within your purview to consider standardizing certain elements, requirements, and design choices across all courses in a program.
October 13, 2022
From trivia games to final exams, quizzing tools have a variety of uses for learning as well as assessment. Exams and quizzes have a particularly plentiful range of possibilities in a multimodal or hybrid course, where they can be administered synchronously or asynchronously. Research suggests that the presentation of a tool influences student behavior in response to the tool. When comparing two student discussion boards, one an ungraded discussion and one a graded replacement for a final exam, Cheng et al. (2013) found that students displayed more knowledge on the graded board but more evidence of learning on the ungraded board. The students who participated in the study were more likely to grapple with new ideas when the stakes were low but more eager to showcase topics they were confident about when their responses would have a greater impact on their grades. When considering quizzing tools, we recommend allowing your course goals to guide your usage.
February 03, 2026
This piece is part of a series exploring competency-based education (CBE) and focuses on the central role of administrative leadership in successful CBE implementation. For curated research on CBE that may be of particular use to administrative leadership, consult our annotated bibliography on CBE in higher education.
February 03, 2026
Microcredentials have gained significant traction in recent years as a way to bridge workforce skills gaps and expand learning opportunities beyond the traditional framework of higher education (Musseau, 2024). As the job market rapidly evolves, these credentials provide flexible, targeted, and application-based learning pathways that align with emerging industry needs.
February 03, 2026
As an administrator or program director, you may be tempted to launch a new program as soon as need, idea, and opportunity converge. After all, the sooner a program opens its doors, the sooner students become proud alumni. However, the more planning that is done at the outset of program implementation, the more holistic and coherent the program will be, and thus, the more successful.
November 02, 2022
If you’re developing a course with synchronous and asynchronous elements, you have a host of options for engaging students and delivering content. Research suggests that incorporating multiple modalities increases accessibility, engagement, and learning (Mick and Middlebrook, 2015; Margolis et al., 2017). With that said, it is important to be intentional about multimodal course design. Both synchronous and asynchronous methods of delivery are effective, but activities can be better suited to one or the other modality and synchronous time is often limited. Delivering selected content asynchronously can support students’ understanding of how information is organized and leave more time for interactivity in synchronous sessions.
March 23, 2020
Your class was never intended to be online. It was delivered face-to- face to a live audience. Perhaps it followed that same structure for years. Now, with little warning, it’s an online class. Where do you start? What do you prioritize? And what is essential to create a meaningfully engaging learning experience online? Rapidly transitioning a course to online doesn’t require recreating every element of the face-to-face version.