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Professional Development Catalogue

We provide a variety of general and specialized professional development opportunities through our range of trainings and workshops in various delivery formats. Every fall and spring semester, we curate topics from our comprehensive professional development catalogue to cater to the needs of our faculty, staff, and graduate assistants.

Stay informed about our current offerings by visiting our Professional Development page. There, you'll find an array of captivating titles. We are excited to offer enriching and accessible professional development experiences, personalized to empower our online faculty.

Discover new possibilities, enhance your skill set, and embrace the future of education with MS State Online.

Live Session (Credit) - 20 to 45 minutes in Webex or in-person

Self-Paced Course (Credit) - 1 to 3 hour work-at-your-own-pace course in Canvas; no specific deadlines

Workshop (Credit) - 1 to 4 hour in Webex or in-person exercise that assists in the creation of one or multiple items

Lady sitting at a computer

Community of Practice (Credit) – 1 hour guided discussion with peers in-person or online

Resource (Non-Credit) - Static content that is displayed on the website; can be a video, document, activity, etc.

If you are interested in a topic in our catalogue that is not an upcoming session, an Instructional Design team member will be happy to assist you. Contact IDhelp@online.msstate.edu or call us at 662-325-8959.

Live Sessions and Workshops

This session provides a basic overview of non-proctoring based methods to promote integrity, counteract cheating on exams, and prevent plagiarism in written work. Brief overviews of Turnitin and Honorlock are included.

Active learning is any learning when the student participates or interacts with the learning process. Join us as we discuss ways to incorporate active learning assignments in your curriculum.

This session builds off skills taught in the previous "Getting Started with Canvas Studio" module. This session will cover technical Canvas Studio functions such as advanced video editing, studio quizzing, and studio insights.

This training will focus on how to assess students using methods other than the multiple choice test. Both formative and summative assessments will be discussed.

It is difficult to keep your students engaged in a traditional classroom and can be more difficult in an online setting. In this session, we will discuss various practical strategies to combat learner fatigue in fast-paced online courses.

This session provides basic definitions, requirements, and steps to creating an accessible online course. Examples and demonstrations will show participants how to meet minimum ADA accessibility requirements within their own courses.

In this workshop, we'll go over designing pages in your Canvas course using the General Use Template from MS State Online. Learn how to effectively use our Canvas page template to design organized, visually appealing pages for your course. We will also discuss the importance of page design for supporting learning in an online setting.

Canvas page design directs learners' attention to vital areas allowing them focus without being overwhelmed. This video will cover topics such as content placement, order, sizing, and cognitive overload. By the end of this session, you will understand how to create a clean, well organized Canvas page.

This session will help you design quality rubrics for your assignments. It will discuss types of rubrics, how to create different rubric criteria, and how to determine point breakdowns as they relate to the needs of each assignment.

This session focuses on how to build effective rubrics that make grading assignments easier and faster.

In this module, you will learn how to create rubrics in Canvas and determine which assignmentsare appropriate for rubric use.

Lecture videos are one of the primary instructional materials used in online courses. We will discuss the best practices for planning, recording, and editing a standout video for your online course in this training session.

In this session, we will discuss the best practices for quality online quiz design.

This section provides items and processes to aid you in crafting unique lectures for synchronous and asynchronous online courses.

Gain techniques to foster online student engagement through various modes of communication and online course design elements. From boosting student confidence to making individualized connections with your students, this session teaches you simple ways to create an engaging and safe learning space in your online course.

Organizing your online course doesn’t have to be complicated. This session will focus on essential strategies that can improve the structure of your online course. Get ideas on how to elevate your content flow, reduce student stress, and support student engagement through organization. Join us to learn about what you can do to make online course facilitation a breeze.

The semester is wrapping up, and you want to ensure your students finish strong! This session will discuss how to end your course on a positive note and reinstate essential takeaways.

Gamification is a hot topic and has been for some time. This training session will take a brief look at the history of gamification in education while also exploring strategies for incorporating gamified elements in your Canvas course.

This session is a small-group workshop designed to help faculty develop questions and the skills to develop future questions that are helpful in creating student engagement in online discussion boards. Participants will leave with one or more developed discussion questions at the end of the session.

This workshop provides strategies for incorporating interactive learning tools in your online course. We will build a fully working demo of a learning activity using several interactive learning tools during this interactive training session.

Want to learn how to design your online course for maximum inclusion? In this session, we will introduce you to Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an evidenced-based framework designed to optimize teaching and learning for everyone. We’ll dive into UDL’s core concepts and show you how to apply them in your online courses. Join us to discover how to make your classroom a more accessible and engaging space for every student.

This session will cover the basics of video editing through Canvas Studio with topics such as: trimming, transitions, and overlays to give your videos a polished and professional feel.

This training will provide various strategies that can be used to give quality feedback to online students, tips for grade management within the online course, and strategies for grading alternate medium assignments.

The Universal Design for Learning is a framework designed to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. In this session, we will review the three learning guidelines to assist you in implementing the UDL framework in your learning environments.

Do you have questions about how to begin University Committee on Courses and Curricula (UCCC) paperwork for a new course or program? This session will help you understand what is required to bring a course or program online through the UCCC process. Bring any existing paperwork and all questions!

This training will cover how to create a personalized syllabus that is accurate, easy to understand, and can serve as a guide for the course.

 

Self-Paced Courses

*previously titled Canvas Mastery: A Comprehensive Canvas Course

Are you an MSU instructor wanting to learn the ins and outs of Canvas? Take this course to gain fluency with the learning management system used by MSU.

This self-paced course is made for beginning to intermediate Canvas users. You will be guided through 5 modules in Canvas to learn everything from managing your notification settings to building modules, all the way to SpeedGrader and creating groups.

Browse the course to find Canvas topics you want to learn about or complete all of the module requirements to earn a Certificate of Completion. Please note: unlike our other self-paced courses, this course may require an average of 4-7 hours to complete all modules and requirements.

Learn about how to apply accessibility standards when creating your course content and lecture videos. This self-paced course will introduce you to basic accessibility definitions and ADA accessibility requirements and will provide actionable steps toward creating an accessible online course. Examples and demonstrations will show participants how to meet minimum ADA accessibility requirements within their own courses.

Ensuring accessibility is an essential prerequisite for both online and in-person courses at Mississippi State University. This self-paced course serves as an extension of the initial Course Accessibility program, offering supplementary insights and resources for faculty members engaged with Mississippi State University students. The topics covered in this course include color contrast, Webex assistant, audio-video transcription, and crafting accessible documents. Through this course, participants gain comprehensive knowledge and tools to enhance accessibility in their courses and cater to the diverse needs of MSU students.

This self-paced course will guide you through the principles of gamification, specifically related to the online learning environment. In this course, you will learn the process to create gamified learning activities while also being introduced to a few gamification applications and tools. This course is intended to introduce learners to the elements of gamification along with the process to create fun, interactive, engaging, and most importantly effective learning experiences.

Every good course begins with good learning outcomes. Learning outcomes provide students and faculty with a shared goal and language to talk about the learning happening in a course and how students will use the acquired knowledge once the course is completed. This self-paced course provides a step-by-step guide to how to construct S.M.A.R.T. learning outcomes as well as guided practice so that your learning outcomes reflect the knowledge and skills you want your students to carry with them beyond the classroom.

This self-paced asynchronous course will introduce you to basic Canvas Studio concepts, while also preparing you for more advanced topics in future courses. Once you finish this course, you will be able to add or record a video in Canvas Studio, trim dead space from the beginning and end of a video, add and edit closed captioning, and integrate it into your course for your students.

Active learning is a student-centered approach intended to engage students through new information, ideas, experiences, and reflective dialogue. In this self-paced course, we will L.E.A.R.N how to implement active learning by Leveraging prior knowledge, Explaining new concepts, Activating using activities, Reflecting on learning, and Nurturing new strategies.

This self-paced course is designed to help you learn about the difference between gamification and game-based learning and then to assist you in determining what type of game-based learning could be integrated into your course planning and development. This course is an introduction to basic concepts and common effective elements of game-based learning. At the end of this course, successful participants will be able to define and identify the difference between game-based learning and gamification, select components that can be applied to their own courses, and create an action plan for a course that uses game-based learning.

This self-paced course is intended as an introduction to utilizing low-stakes assessments to increase student understanding of course content. Low-stakes assessments can be developed in a variety of formats through many different tools, be graded or non-graded, and be a safe space for students to actively engage with course content. While low-stakes assessments can be used on their own to target specific information, they can also be utilized as a scaffold for high-stakes assessments, providing more opportunities for knowledge integration for students and easier checkpoints for faculty. This course will introduce faculty to the concept of low-stakes assessments.