 Hi, everyone. It's Monica Wahee here, your Data Science and Public Health Online Educator, and I'm here to make a suggestion on how you can make your online courses more engaging in an evidence-based way. So, if you are a professor or an instructor of some sort, and you're in a hurry to make some engaging online curricula, and you wanted to actually work for teaching your learners something, here's my hack for doing that, and also I'll throw in a few freebies. What initially inspired me is this article by Wickershem and McGee from back in 2008, called Perceptions of Satisfaction and Deeper Learning in an Online Course. What I really liked was how they set up this table one. They put least ideal on the left and most ideal on the right. Actually, I do studies of Deeper Learning, both online and in-person. So I posted about my research and this table from this article below. As you can see, I pulled out a few principles talked about in the article and put them on my blog post. But now, I was thinking of this article again when I did this more recent blog post, which is what this video is based on, where I focused on how I develop very real-world simulations in my curriculum for my learners relatively easily. I thought I'd share that with you in this video. One of the easiest ways I make Deeper Learning curriculum online is by reappropriating real-world examples from the real world of data science and public health that I live in. Real-world simulations actually cover many different Deeper Learning principles or DLP's listed in that table in that article. If you look at it, you'll see that simulations really hit multiple DLP's, which is why they are recommended so highly by educators. I found that I can design my simulations to illustrate separate concepts on purpose. For example, in my free online data collection course, I wanted to show the difference between the files you make if you are doing a data abstraction compared to the ones you make if you are doing a survey. So I made a scenario with two different characters with two different use cases and that helped me separate these two related concepts into different use cases. So this is how I use my simulation to separate concepts into different use cases and help the learner keep track. You can also more easily demonstrate multiple applications of the same concept with a simulation. For example, I have my online statistics course with all my lectures on YouTube, and if you are a statistics professor, you can use these. Just visit my blog where I hook you up with everything you need. So as you can see, one of the videos is about percentiles and box plots, and one is about sampling. So what I did was have the learners go to americanhospitaldirectory.com or ahd.com. So ahd.com collects public data from Medicare Quarterly Reports and presents it online. You can pay for a subscription to their database, but what I like for teaching about healthcare is that we can look at the basic hospital data online. I was teaching this course to learners in Massachusetts, so let's click on this link. See, this is real world data. The first hospital, Brockton Hospital, really has 197 staff beds, and some of my learners have worked at these hospitals before. So as you can see, the other video is about sampling. So I told the learners to do systematic sampling of these hospital beds. Don't know what systematic sampling is? Well, you have to watch my sampling video then, but then I showed them how to make a box plot of it by using this online tool. You probably know I teach SAS and R courses on LinkedIn Learning, but this statistics course was an undergraduate course at a nursing college, so I couldn't ask these learners to play around with SAS and R, but I could ask them to go to this online box plot generator, enter the sample of number of beds of Massachusetts hospitals they took, and make a box plot. Then I had them posted on a discussion board and comment about it. Remember, all the learners were sampling from the same hospital data, so they had plenty to talk about when their box plots looked different. So they could look back at the differences in their sample and comment to each other. So in addition to showing multiple applications of the same concepts, it also hit the deeper learning principle of social learning. But probably the most important reason to include real world simulations in your online learning is that you are probably teaching learners who need to apply their skills in a real job shortly. Actually, if you take my data curation course on LinkedIn Learning, all those curation files I show you started out in some sort of real project. I do research in this stuff, so I know why people don't do simulations more often. It's because they are a little hard to set up. But I'm an expert at it, so I'm going to tell you my hacks for setting up online simulations very quickly so you can keep your online learners engaged. First, you wanna pick an ideal topic, one that your learners are curious about. Think about what your learners have been asking you about in recent months, like what topics have they been bringing up? These might be the ones they need to know for their work or job search. Also, most people do more than just teach. Think about the work you have been doing in industry outside of teaching. What are your colleagues up to? Because these are future employers of your learners, so you want your learners to know about the topics your colleagues are researching. Okay, now you should have selected a topic. That will be the focus of your learning objectives. Next, you wanna pull out files that you will use in the simulation from your real-world activities so you can help your learners have a real-world simulation experience. Yes, I mean real computer files, like the examples I showed from that data curation video. If you take my SAS and R courses, you will see I use data dictionaries to guide my coding. Those data dictionaries started out as real files from a project. Since they were so important, I included them in my simulation. When you use examples of real files from your projects, you really help your learners prepare as much as possible for applying skills in a real job. Hey, if you have some great ideas for simulations for your learners, but you're in too much of a hurry to put them together before your next online class starts, just contact me by email or on LinkedIn and we can meet for a free consultation on Skype or Zoom and I can see if I can help you get your curriculum together. Also, please put comments on this video or on my blog post if you have suggestions for other educators. Actually, make sure you visit my blog post, where I link you to all my freebies, free online courses, YouTube videos, and other learning resources that can be helpful for instructors to use. I hope this video inspired you as to new ways to add deeper learning to your online curricula. Thanks for watching and have a nice rest of your day.