Presented by Kristen Purvis, Nurhak Tuncer-Bayramli, and David Dusto

This 1-hour video presentation helps our audience gain an understanding of what AI is, its capabilities and limitations, how it can be leveraged in their online classrooms to enhance the teaching and learning experience, and how to utilize the AI resources available through ECSU’s library. My responsibilities for this project were parsing complex information on AI for introducing it to faculty, researching AI activities for online courses, initiating and continuing conversations with my collaborators in the library, scheduling the presentation, creating the slide deck, and recording, editing, and uploading the webinar to our Faculty Development Resources page.

Using Camtasia, I created this 4-minute video (hooray for microlearning!) to ensure open and transparent communication with faculty about the new online course template I created as a response to my findings for the course reviews I conducted in Spring 2023. The new template was deployed beginning in our Fall 2023 classes and eliminated all errors and redundancies that were present in the previous version that was in use before my arrival at ECSU.

I was responsible for leading UNCP's inaugural ePortfolio Initiative for Career Success (EPICS) Student Showcase in Academic Year 2021-2022, which was held entirely online - a feat that no one in our department had attempted before. This involved a significant amount of content development and marketing. One of my first tasks was to train faculty and students on what ePortfolios are, why they are useful, and how they can get started. The video linked on the left is the faculty training that I created and recorded for on-demand distribution.

My next endeavor was to advertise the showcase; in order to do so, I created a flyer using Canva (pictured on left). We distributed this flyer online and in person at the student center on campus. I also created a website (linked here) to serve as a landing page for the student finalists, judges, and attending public to join the virtual meeting rooms and 'meet' the finalists and judges through the headshots and descriptions that I'd gathered and added. The website also displayed the showcase schedule and the rules the students had to follow in order to become finalists. The students finalists were evaluated by a group of experts from different industries. Three winners were selected at the end of the showcase. While creating the website, I was meticulous about checking to make sure that all external links were working as intended, and that there was uniformity throughout the site in terms of image size, text formatting, and spacing. I was also careful to adhere to the university's style guide for marketing to ensure that everything matched up with the branding of UNCP and was in line with the principles of digital accessibility. 

In the final 2 weeks leading up to the showcase, I created a set of two collages* to highlight the student finalists (pictured on left) and the showcase judges. These were posted on our department's social media pages as a means to further draw interest from the public in attending the showcase. At the conclusion of the showcase, I presented each finalist with a certificate and badge* that I collaborated with our campus' marketing department to create.

*These EPICS materials and others can be viewed by clicking here.

Digital tools add a new dimension to 21st century learning and assessments. In this webinar, I cover various modes of educational material that can be incorporated into an online or in-person classroom to increase engagement and allow students flexibility to show their understanding of the subject matter in a way that makes sense for them. All of the tools/ideas presented in this webinar are free!

Our department launched a Camtasia Users' Community in Academic Year 2021-2022. As part of the initiative, our office sponsored the purchase of 25 Camtasia licenses to be distributed to faculty who applied and met specified criteria for their intended usage of the software. The selected faculty were automatically included in the User's Community, which consisted of a series of demonstration-based software trainings conducted in collaboration between me and the other instructional designer in our department. The video linked on the left is the final video in the series, and covers how to zoom, pan, make an object rotate, add interactive hotspots, animate text and images, download & install Techsmith assets, add a device frame, and sync captions with a script in Camtasia.
My main portion of the presentation occurs from 0:00 - 10:24.

With the surge in popularity of online learning in the last few years, digital accessibility is an asset that is desperately needed in many higher ed institutions. Knowing this, I contacted UNCP's Accessibility Resource Office to see if they would be interested in collaborating on a user-friendly webinar to introduce our faculty to the basics of digital accessibility and guide them to the vast amount of resources that are available to assist with its implementation. 

Another reason I chose this particular topic at that point in time was because many faculty had not taught online prior to 2020, and due to the urgent nature of the sudden unforeseen shift to online learning due to COVID-related class cancellations and university closures, I knew it was a vital area for our department to explore. Much of the information I included in the presentation was sourced from NC State University's 'Accessibility in the Classroom' certificate program that I completed in November 2018. I included a link to this resource so that faculty could enroll in the program, as well as links to several other accessibility resources that I have found useful throughout my ID career.

Easily one of the most requested topics for my 1:1 consultations with faculty, student engagement is something that many instructors and students struggle with. In this webinar, I first have a brief discussion with the participants on some of the reasons why students become disengaged in the first place. Next, I present several ideas and accompanying instructional technologies that can be incorporated in tandem into online and in-person lessons to help avoid some of those pitfalls, and instead get students excited about the material. As a strong advocate for open education resources, I made sure to select tools that have the most appealing price point: free!

For my final project in the Instructional Design class I took as part of my graduate studies, I created an online training aid to assist in teaching library employees the Dewey Decimal System. One of my primary job functions at the library was to onboard and train our new employees, a major component of which was how to use the Dewey Decimal System, since that is the classification system we used to catalog our library books. I used the ADDIE and Kirkpatrick Models of Instructional Design to analyze, design, develop, implement, and evaluate this project. 

I conducted employee surveys before and after administering the online training in order to gauge several different factors relating to their knowledge and comfort level using the Dewey Decimal System. By doing this, I was able to accurately measure which areas needed improvement, and overall whether the training was effective or ineffective. I was delighted to find that the vast majority of student workers showed a strong preference for the online training as opposed to in-person only instruction, as well as an increased retention of the material. The library still uses this training module to this day; I am proud that my expertise has allowed them to continue streamlining their training practices and has become an integral part of their workflow.