As Duke accepts faculty proposals for online education for the third year, the University continues to look for new ways that professors can embrace digital techniques—not only in massive open online courses, or MOOCs, for people across the world, but also for Duke students in for-credit classes.
The Advisory Committee for Online Education opened its third annual call for faculty proposals this Fall, seeking ideas from professors through a series of initiatives. The initiatives are part of an effort to enhance the student experience and increase Duke's global impact and visibility, said chemistry professor Stephen Craig, co-chair of ACOE.
Craig noted that the projects supported by the committee over the last two years have been wide-ranging and have served to amplify Duke's online course structure–expanding from ideas centered on MOOCs to concepts that have been integrated into the physical classrooms of Duke in Durham.
‘We do not have a particular innovation in mind, and anticipate that the best ideas will be things we haven’t thought of," Craig wrote in an email Wednesday. "We are interested in seeing the most creative and impactful ideas."
Faculty may submit proposals until December. The number of proposals looks promising and has been growing every year, said Lynne O’Brien, associate vice provost of digital and online initiatives.
"Last year we had 21 proposals and provided some level of support for 13 of them," she wrote in an email Wednesday.
Although many of the proposals accepted over the past two years have been focused on non-credit MOOCs, several faculty have also ventured into "hybrid" courses that blend the digital with the physical classroom.
Courtney Lockemer, communications manager of Online Education Initiatives, noted that several online platforms have successfully been used in teaching courses at Duke—such as a statistics course taught this summer with Sakai and WebEx.
"Students used online materials to prepare before class, then met online to work on application exercises and discuss the materials," she wrote in an email Thursday.
Lockemer noted that assistant professor of the practice of chemistry Dorian Canelas recently developed two short courses on Coursera, which allows students to watch online videos before class.
Another recent project supported by the program is the DukeWrites Enrichment Suite for International Students. Developed by Denise Comer, assistant professor of the practice of writing studies and director of First-Year Writing, the suite is a Sakai site specifically geared towards international undergraduates, Lockemer said. The site contains a collection of videos and quiz tutorials to help internationals get acclimated to U.S academic writing practices.
"Duke faculty have been very creative over the last two years, so we are looking for projects that try new things or extend current strategies to a broader set of courses," O'Brien wrote.
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