Preparing high quality online educational content for college writing students is particularly important for Dr. Ellis-Lai, who has completed the 80-hour Technology Integration Workshop at Texas State University twice, in 2006 and in 2013. She has also completed the 40-hour Creating and Teaching an Online Class in 2013 and the semester-long Foundations & Advanced Online Course Development Program in 2017. During the 2013-2014 school year, Dr. Ellis-Lai also completed the OLC Certificate (formerly SLOAN-C Certification) in Online Teaching, which included coursework in Digital Storytelling, Strategies for Supporting Student Research and Curation, and Workload Management Strategies for Online Faculty.
Recently, Dr. Ellis-Lai won an award for her Technical Writing course, and she has since presented at national conferences on the importance of faculty engagement in online teaching during times of crisis. She discussed her award-winning online Technical Writing course at the Excellence in Online Teaching award ceremony and reception hosted by the Office of Distance and Extended Learning.
In the past several years, Texas State University students dealt with hurricanes, power grid failures during a state-wide freeze, economic and social instability, the COVID-19 pandemic, and personal crises that made course completion unusually challenging. Dr. Ellis-Lai believes that clear online course organization, high quality content, student-centered activities, frequent communication, and compassion help her students as they work to complete their college coursework in difficult circumstances.
COLLABORATIVE ONLINE INTERNATIONAL LEARNING (COIL)
In January of 2022, Dr. Ellis-Lai began coordinating efforts on campus to help faculty learn about an international virtual exchange methodology called COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning). She has completed the COIL Coordinator training offered by the State University of New York (where the COIL methodology was founded) and participated in seminars about COIL offered by Florida International University and the Mexican Association for International Education (AMPEI), including the PIC-US-MX training supported by the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, AMPEI, and Bancomer, among other sponsors.
In the spring of 2022, Dr. Ellis-Lai and Ms. Rosario Davis, Assistant Vice President and Director for International Affairs at Texas State University, invited their Texas State colleagues to a faculty development webinar introducing them to the COIL virtual exchange teaching methodology. This webinar highlighted examples of new virtual education courses taught by Dr. Rob Konopaske, Associate Professor in the College of Business and the Director of the Institute for Global Business at Texas State University, and Dr. Claudia Roeschmann, Professor in the School of Art and Design and Associate Director for Design Innovation in the Materials Applications Research Center at Texas State University.
Dr. Ellis-Lai presented her work implementing virtual exchange programming in collaboration with a colleague from the Universidad Autónima de la Yucatán in Mexico to benefit their shared students at the International Virtual Exchange Conference in Valencia, Spain in the fall of 2022.
