Excelsior College has developed a Student Success Guide geared toward students deciding whether online learning is right for them, or those who are already embarking on an online education in need of some guidance. This free, open tool contains twelve sections with text, images, videos, animations, presentations, and interactive activities.
Excelsior College has developed a Student Success Guide that is free and open to the public! This website guide is geared toward students deciding whether online learning is right for them, or those who are already embarking on an online education. The content is not institution-specific and is written so that it is appealing to a diverse range of students. The guide is not located behind a login and we encourage other institutions to make use of the work that we have already done! There are twelve sections that include text, images, videos, animations, presentations, and interactive activities. Some of the content has been created in an embeddable format so that it can be integrated directly onto another website or within a course without having to link out to our site.
The guide is broken down into twelve sections:
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Distance Education
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Goals & Motivation
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Learning Style & Memory
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Study Plans & Techniques
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Time Management
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Financial Resources
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Critical & Creative Thinking
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Reading, Writing & Presenting
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Preparing & Taking Tests
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Communication & Working with a Group
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Online Learning & Technical Literacy
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Being Engaged in Your Learning
This presentation will showcase the features of the Student Success Guide, focusing on the appeal to a diverse audience, simple layout, and practical content. The material in this guide was specifically sectioned and written to provide students with concise, helpful information. We will demonstrate the embedding process for those wishing to embed some of our content. We will also showcase the presentations and interactive activities that provide varied means of viewing content. We would like to exhibit a number of animations created specifically for this guide that provide an opening and closing for each section, featuring a fictitious student with some questions and concerns about taking online courses. These fictitious students have realistic lives that present plausible challenges with taking online courses, such as family and work time commitments, lack of motivation and technical concerns. We will get the audience involved in discussing ways they could use sections of this at their institution.
We look forward to the opportunity to unveil this tool to the world!