Rebekah Palmer Email and Phone Number

*Oversee academic processes for all departments within Extended Studies. These processes include course-instructor approval, certificate creation and curriculum updates, course creation and management, and the maintenance of forms, procedures, and official policy documentation.*Work closely with the Academic and Instructional Affairs team, Extension IT Services, Student Services, Instructor Services, DES Dean, Associate Deans, Academic Directors, and Program Managers in all departments to ensure our courses, programs, and other initiatives run smoothly and adhere to all relevant internal and external policies.*Plan and deliver an ongoing monthly training program for DES program managers. The goal of this training is to reduce process errors due to unfamiliarity with standard operating procedures and to meet the needs of new program managers who need training in DES academic processes (as well as to help existing program managers review these processes).*Collaborate with the Academic and Instructional Affairs team on many other administrative and online learning projects, including process mapping in ProMapp, clarifying official policy for issues such as student conflict or UC credit courses and transfer requirements, Canvas template and blueprint initiatives, updates to sample courses and resource courses on Canvas, and defining internal processes for 3rd-party integrations into Canvas.

*Worked with the Online Learning team to import and clean up course content from the Blackboard LMS into Canvas.*Mastered skills in the Canvas LMS by participating in live training webinars, watching instructional videos from Instructure and other users of Canvas, researching questions in the community forums, and reading the support guide and documentation provided. Used the skills I developed in this process to create original content and updates to resources in Canvas to support instructors and students. These resources (pages) included technical instructions, how-tos with images, and pedagogical guides.*Analyzed existing courses and delivery methods against the unique needs of DES instructors to implement a template for new Canvas courses. Researched best practices for course design and organization in Canvas, surveyed existing template courses from other higher-ed institutions, studied graphic design and HTML, and accessibility policies/requirements for Universal Design and UX. Designed, created, tested, and revised four unique template courses. Three of these templates were optimized for course delivery methods (Live-Online, Hybrid, or Fully Online), and the last was designed to be less language-intensive (to be used with our programs that serve English language learners and international students).

*Taught 18-24 hours per week with classes from 12-20 international adult students (Native Languages: Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Kazakh, German, French, and more). Courses taught included Academic Writing, Technical Writing, Conversation, Pragmatics, Oral Presentations, Grammar, Academic Listening, Reading Skills, Pronunciation/Fluency, Idioms, TOEFL, GRE, and University Preparation.*Developed completely new courses from scratch and updated or created new content for existing courses; applied best practices for all areas of teaching, including needs analysis, writing and refining objectives, backwards design, triangulated assessment, and instructional methods.*Began using the Schoology LMS in 2013, and led the effort to bring this platform to the English Language Institute. Provided ongoing, program-wide training sessions for instructors and staff on all aspects of the Schoology LMS, best practices for its use in the classroom, overall benefits of an LMS, and the processes for using the LMS to share resources within our instructor group.*Worked with the administration to plan and manage a year-long rollout to bring all instructors and students into Schoology. This process included creating digital versions of the majority of our student-facing paper resources and internal policy documents and housing them in the LMS (in a way that was logical for students and instructors), creating and enforcing minimum benchmarks and adoption timelines for instructor use of Schoology, and creating a new training curriculum to support our low-tech and tech-resistant instructors/students. Created a Schoology Orientation course (in the LMS) that could be delivered to our international students by any instructor. The course included information on getting started in Schoology, subtitled video, demonstrations, FAQs, and procedures for getting help.