Instructor Resources

Access Handbook

Access Working with an Instructional Designer

An accommodation letter from the UC Berkeley Disabled Students Program (DSP) is needed in order for the instructor to grant an accommodation (e.g. extended exam time). New students needing disability-related accommodations must complete the 5-step DSP in-take process prior to receiving accommodations. In all subsequent terms, students must request accommodation letters be send to faculty for every course. In addition to course faculty, Julie Moss – OOMPH DSP Proxy, receives a copy of the accommodation letter. Julie will work with the instructional teams to ensure the implementation of disability-related accommodations for each OOMPH course in which a student is enrolled.

Please also note the DSP statement on temporary conditions.

Our evaluation data show that instructor response times have a significant impact on student perceptions of the course experience. Please ensure that your syllabus states a policy on email response times. OOMPH recommends the following wording: Instructor will respond to email inquiries within two business days. General course questions should be posted to the Ed Discussion Q & A forum, which is monitored by the entire instructional team. While email response times should take no more than 2 business days, it’s the prerogative of the faculty whether to respond on weekends and official holidays

The policy stated below is the default for any course that does not state a specific late policy. Any course-specific late policy will override the policy below

Late Assignments Policy:

Any request for an extension on assignment or exam submissions should be made in advance of the posted due date. The course instructor has full discretion as to whether the late penalty will be waived. Otherwise, late assignments will be deducted based on individual course policies. If an emergency event prevents submitting an assignment by the deadline, please contact your instructor as soon as reasonably possible, including documentation with your request for an extension.

96-Hour Grade Turnaround Time

Our evaluations show that grade turnaround time and instructor feedback have a significant impact on student perceptions of a course’s value. Official OOMPH policy states that all assignment grades should be returned to students within 96 hours of the submission deadline: i.e. an assignment due at 11:59 pm Pacific on Monday should be returned to students with grades and feedback by 11:59 pm Friday of that week.
Please work with your course facilitators to ensure they’ve scheduled dedicated grading time throughout the term. If facilitators are having trouble keeping up with the grading schedule throughout the term, there may be an opportunity to redesign course deliverable with the OOMPH ID Team.

Submission of Final Grades

Grade submission deadlines are determined by the university Office of the Registrar. OOMPH courses that run during the first half of the campus term often end well before the campus grade submission deadline. In these cases, final grades should be calculated and published to students on bCourses within 7 calendar days of the end of the course. Please keep in mind that many students need these grades for timely employer reimbursement.

SPH Course Evaluations

OOMPH has a goal to achieve 70% or higher response rates on end-course evaluations. Your Instructional Designer will post the following message on the course site when the evaluations are open to students. Please follow up with a personalized message to students emphasizing the value of these surveys to course development and keeping OOMPH in-line with campus standards of eval completion rates.

End of Course Evaluations

The pared-down BPH end of term evaluation provides students with a brief, four question survey used for school and university level analytics. As a supplement to the BPH end of term evaluation, OOMPH provides a unique survey focused on the aspects of OOMPH Courses and student learning that most impact our programmatic assessments and developments. 

If the BPH evaluation receives a response rate of at least 70%, everyone in the course will receive a 0.5% extra credit. The same is true for our OOMPH evaluation: a response rate of at least 70% will earn the entire class an additional 0.5% extra credit.

These evaluations are extremely valuable for helping us to continue to improve the course. Every year we are testing new approaches, based on last year’s feedback, so you can help us to make this a truly human-centered course!

FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) is a federal law that regulates the collection, use, and sharing of student education records and materials that contain students’ personal identifiable information. Under FERPA, institutions must obtain written consent from students before releasing any of their education records to third parties.

Recordings of synchronous sessions often capture students’ personal identifiable information. On Zoom, a student’s name, voice, and image are captured as part of the recording when they participate in a session. You can share this type of recording but only with your class, preferably by posting it to your bCourse site. By hosting your recording in bCourses, you ensure that only your students are able to access the recording.

If you want to share this same recording outside of your course (e.g., another class you teach or the same course but a different semester), you must obtain written permission from the student(s) who were recorded. To do so, we recommend you ask your student(s) to complete a FERPA Consent to Release Form.

Alternatively, you can work with your instructional designer to edit the recording by removing the parts that contain students’ identifiable information. This option is not always feasible, especially ifwhen the recording captured a high level of interaction between the instructors and students.

For more information, see the University of California policy on the use of course recordings.

As an instructor, you maintain the intellectual property (IP) and the copyright on all of your course materials (including lectures, lecture notes and materials, syllabi, and study guides).

That means that only the instructor, and anyone to whom the instructor has granted permission, may reproduce, distribute or display (post/upload) course materials.

For more information, see UC Policy on Ownership of Course Materials.

Many third-party materials can be used in your course under the doctrine of Fair Use, but there are additional considerations depending on the type of media. Below are some guidelines for specific content:

Slide images — You can publicly post your own content online, but images from other sources should not be posted in publicly available locations. Therefore, we recommend that you only post lectures and slides in the bCourses platform, which is restricted to students in your course. By doing this, you limit your risk of violating the copyrights of others.

In-lecture use of audio or video — Playing audio or video off of physical media during an in-person class session is most likely protected under a provision of copyright law often referred to as the “face-to-face teaching classroom use” exemption. However, that exemption doesn’t cover playing the same media online. If you can limit audio and video use for your course to relatively brief clips, you may be able to justify those in lecture recordings as fair use. For media use longer than brief clips, you may need to have students independently access the content outside of your lecture videos.

Course Readings — Sharing articles in bCourses that you’ve obtained yourself is generally permissible under Fair Use. For more information on this topic, please see UC’s systemwide Copyright and Fair Use policy.

ebooks — Some ebook collections can be used in classes via the campus VPN. In other ebook collections, publishers and authors limit access to a small number of users or cut off access after a certain number of uses. If you plan on using an ebook as a required reading, please contact Public Health Librarian Michael Sholinbeck by emailing msholinb@library.berkeley.edu to confirm if the school has a multi-user license. If the library does not have a multi-user license, he might be able to obtain it or help you identify an alternative source.

While each scenario involving incomplete grades is unique, OOMPH has identified three of the most common types of incompletes within our program:

1. Unexpected event: student has finished most of the course when an unexpected event (often work related) necessitates a request for a little extra time – a week, a month – to finish the final course elements..
   Instructor and student agree on timeline/work to complete
2. Needs to repeat (all or some of) course next year: Instructor and student agree on percentage of course to be repeated in the next year, and what can be carried over from the current year.
3. Catastrophic event: Circumstances beyond the student’s control prevent an immediate discussion of how the incomplete will be handled. Instructor and student agree upon a future date (preferably no more than 3 months in the future) to consult on incomplete contract.

The OOMPH experience places a premium on individual student needs and customizable degree plans. However, one constant is a need for a consistent procedure and clear expectations agreed upon by all parties. Faculty can begin the process by filling out the OOMPH Incomplete Contract.

With the goal of promoting retention and persistence among our online students, OOMPH has established the following policy for reaching out to at-risk students. If a student is flagged as at-risk (of non-completion) based on one of the following categories, the first step is for a member of the instructional team to reach out to the student. If there’s been no response within 48 hours, please forward the concern along with your observations/comments to the  Program Manager team. Send an email to oomph_prog_mgr@berkeley.edu, putting the course number and at risk student in the subject line. 

Potential signs of a student at-risk for non-completion:

• Student missing from all course activities for one week (including week one)
• Student participating in the course but neglects to submit two minor or one major deliverable
• Other indicators of concern as determined by the instructional team.

The development of online, primarily asynchronous, outcomes based, student-centered learning takes a village. That village encompasses the entire OOMPH team, helmed by Cathy Garcia, Executive Director. Each instructional team is composed of the faculty, facilitators (GSIs and lecturers), and instructional designers (IDs). The role of the ID on the instructional team might not always obvious, and in some cases it may seem that IDs primarily provide technical support, but this is complicated in a distance learning environment. Technology is certainly a crucial component of online delivery, but the pedagogical strategies supporting the use of technology are fundamental to the success of the course.

To that end, the OOMPH best practices recommendation is to hold a weekly check in meeting throughout the course development/refresh and instructional period that includes all members of this team: faculty, facilitators, and instructional designers. Our experience has shown that even when the weekly discussion doesn’t involve technology, numerous questions arise regarding OOMPH policies, grading strategies, and other areas in which the ID provides value as a representative of the OOMPH program.

One of the first tasks of the team is to identify roles and responsibilities in regard to the following course development tasks:

Course review

• Providing a quality assurance review of course features
• Reviewing all due dates (checklist, assignments, discussions, quizzes)
• Reviewing all links
• Reviewing all videos to ensure adherence to course outline
• Including weekly overviews to ensure adherence to given week

Standard Course Tools

• Creating graded tasks
• Editing graded tasks
• Trouble shooting graded-task settings
• Dates of availability
• Providing extended access to individual students
• Providing extended time on quizzes per DSP guidelines
• Assigning “group” properties to assignment submissions

Publishing course elements

• Publishing course site
• Publishing weekly modules
• Ensuring availability of all weekly tasks

Week Zero is a wonderful method of scaffolding your course design to address the ever-expanding student profile in OOMPH courses: from new public health professionals to retired/retiring physicians, to campus students joining us from a select group of schools and degree programs.

Week Zero is an opportunity to invite students with varying degrees of experience with the subject matter of the course to prepare the week prior to the term (leaving open availability to this content throughout the term). Here are some examples of courses that have recently used a Week Zero approach:

W200G: Students for whom this is the first OOMPH course may use this extra week to complete OOMPH 101 & the Attribution Tutorial.

W224: Students are given advanced access to course materials, along with foundational tutorials on using Excel.

Supplemental tutorials and learning experiences can be a great way to scale course content to address the needs of learners with different levels of experience in the subject matter. These tools can also be used to introduce topics that are beneficial but not central to course content, such as software and tangential concepts. The instructional design team can assist with every stage of development. All of these tutorials can be designed to earn a final score and/or a certificate of completion. (These tutorials are hosted on our external version of Canvas known as Catalog, which is outside the CalNet suite. Once you’ve created your free account with Catalog, you’ll be able to access all of the following tutorials. Click any of the links below to create your account). 

OOMPH 101

Perhaps our best known tutorial content, OOMPH 101 was developed using a combination of tools. The animated elements were designed in Vyond, while the sequences were joined and quizzing functions added with the tool Articulate Storyline. Using this tool, learners can be provided tailored feedback on incorrect answers and coached through to successful completion of the learning experience. 

Attribution Tutorial 

Another supplementary learning experience required of all OOMPH students, the attribution tutorial was created using the same tools and similar methods as OOMPH 101. The added features include fill-in-the-blank quizzing that coaches learners with tailored feedback until the correct response is achieved. 

Survey Methods Sampling Tutorial

Originally designed as a sampling tutorial for PHW219, Survey Methods, the course instructional team met with the vendor Smart Sparrow to develop an adaptive learning experience that would respond to student input with feedback geared toward coaching them successfully through the tutorial. When the vendor was acquired and their product dismantled, the OOMPH instructional design team used the course authoring tool Articulate Storyline to create a nearly identical tutorial. Without needing to complete the development stage, which had already been handled by the original vendor, the technical process of building the tutorial took about 40 hours. 

Math, Computing, and R Tutorial 

This tutorial aims to prepare learners  for quantitative public health breadth courses including Introduction to Probability and Statistics in Biology and Public Health, commonly known as 142, and Epidemiologic Methods I, a.k.a. 250 or 250A. This tutorial is appropriate for students in both  the residential  (PH142 and PH250A) and online versions (PHW142 and PHW250) of these courses. This tutorial was built by curating a variety of resources, utilizing the module and quizzing features native to the Canvas environment. 

Podcasting: A Primer

This tutorial was initially developed for Maternal and Child Health Nutrition as part of an effort to build population communication skills into courses in manageable learning chunks and with course appropriate assignment expectations.

Managing the Covid-19 Pandemic 

Designed by Jay Graham in the early days of the COVID pandemic, this tutorial brings together expertise from Berkeley Public Health and UCSF. The design, which utilizes the module and quizzing features native to the Canvas environment, enables learners to navigate through sequentially or selectively target areas of greatest interest. All modules must be completed for learners to earn a certificate of completion. Interested learners can further use that certificate to apply for Continuing Educations credits through a partner service.