Office of Online Education

My experience working with the Office of Online Education has always been enjoyable, thought-provoking, and -most importantly – productive. It was great to be able to talk through course ideas and then have the OOE experts turn those ideas into something practical and pedagogically beneficial for our students.

What I have experienced here is a kind of renewal of my desire to teach and my ability to teach… and I really believe that I am far better at doing that now than I was before I encountered the design team of online education.

Working with the Office of Online Education is a great opportunity for faculty to get mentorship in teaching and learning generally. I’ve learned by teaching online in terms of thinking about some of these main topics of building community, thinking about inclusivity, equity and thinking about our grade policies and assessments in a new light.

The instructional designers challenged me to be thoughtful in what I was creating by offering solutions to help ensure my course would have long-term sustainability. Throughout the course build they thoughtfully reviewed my materials and provided professional opinions on teaching various learning styles.

Working with the instructional design team from the Office of Online Education was a fantastic experience. I learned so much about Canvas that I can now apply to other projects, and my favorite part of the experience was how welcoming, earnest, and enthusiastic the whole team was about our project.

Just as bad industrial designs (e.g., buildings and airplanes) can cause serious problems later, bad course designs can really hamper a good learning experience. The Wake Forest instructional design team showed my blind spots in my online course design and offered me invaluable coaching.

The professionalism and expertise of the people I worked with made all the difference. And I’m confident that whatever the classes that I’m teaching, I’m better now than I was before I started working with my colleagues in online education.

Working with the design team really helped me reframe, sit and pause a bit more to think about the big picture of the learning experience and connecting all the little dots along the way.