Thomas Dyer and Jacob Aroz (both of CHSS) presented Level up: Gamifying your online courses with digital badges

• Digital badges are ways for learners to display the skills they have obtained from courses and can be part of greater gamification design. They are motivating, promote community, encourage critical thinking and rewards participation in formative assessment activities. Session attendees heard about what students had to say about badging through a thematic analysis of their unsolicited commentary.

Dr. Jean Mandernach, B. Jean Mandernach, PhD Executive Director in the Center for Innovation in Research and Teaching at Grand Canyon University was awarded the prestigious conference Schullo Award, and Dr. Mandernach presented research from three studies:

• Big Class = Big Benefits: Exploring the Unanticipated Impact of Increased Student Agency in the Online Classroom (Schullo Award Winner)

Initial research was conducted to explore strategies to increase online course size without increasing faculty workload; this research focused on the use of a course design model that emphasized consistent - but distributed - student-student, student-content, and student-faculty interaction. As such, rather than all students completing every assignment every module, students selected from assignment options that were each designed explicitly to target either interaction, presence, or feedback. While the results of the research showed that course size could be increased from 25 to 80 students without decreasing learning quality or adding to instructor workload, most surprising was the increase in student satisfaction and engagement that occurred in the new, larger-class model. Follow-up research consistently finds a common theme underlying the enhanced experience: student agency. The presentation provided an overview of practical, manageable strategies for fostering student agency in the online classroom (regardless of class size); in addition, potential and limitations of integrating a distributed online course design were explored.

• Virtual office hours: Maximizing engagement for all course modalities

Research overwhelmingly supports the value of office hours to foster student engagement, satisfaction, and learning. But these benefits can only be obtained if students actually attend. This presentation offered concrete strategies for designing, scheduling, and facilitating synchronous and asynchronous, online office hours to maximize attendance, use, and promote student engagement.

• Innovative Strategies To Enliven Synchronous & Asynchronous Remote Learning

This session explored inclusive practices focusing on ways to address self-assessment of attitudes, conventionalized ideas, bound potential, and skills needed that are crucial for overcoming the obstacles in doing your best work. In addition, the importance of essential conversations for understanding cultural differences, were highlighted, when partnering to create a climate of success in our work and teaching spaces.

Lisa Duryee, Alli Schilling, Marnie Davis (all CCOB), and Helen Hammond (previously CCOB, now CIRT) presented Examining the Impact of Multiple Practice Quiz Attempts on Student Exam Performance. Liz Loar* (Alumni of GCU CDS) was the 5^th author on the study. (*The session was presented in memory of our dear colleague and co-author Dr. Elizabeth Ann O'Dell Loar, whose dedication to teaching and learning touched so many.)

• Assessment of learning within the online classroom is a growing point of discussion, particularly with regard to student exam performance. Session attendees learned about new research comparing the differences between limited and unlimited attempt practice quizzes and impact of each on student exam scores. The researchers offered suggestions for the application of this information for faculty, curriculum developers and administrators.