UNG DETI teaching staff members David Babb and Ervin Howard have been awarded the Best Paper Award by the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration.
Article By: Agnes Hina
University of North Georgia (UNG) Distance Education and Technology Integration (DETI) teaching staff members David Babb and Ervin Howard were awarded the Best Paper Award by the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration (OJDLA) for their paper "Explore UNG's Self-paced Professional Development Workshops. An update on our micro-credential series for online teaching certification."
The paper will be published in the June edition of the OJDLA, and the authors will also be recognized for their outstanding work at an award ceremony at the 2023 Distance Learning Administration (DLA) conference held in July at Jekyll Island, Georgia.
"The purpose of the paper and the conference is to share knowledge of how we are solving issues and developing innovative ways to use the online environment in education," Babb said. "Our goal was to not only share what we are doing, but to allow others to use that knowledge at their own university."
Babb and Howard have been researching self-paced, online course development and digital badging since 2021. Their data collection process is expected to extend well into 2024. Howard shared how they hope to inspire UNG faculty to pursue self-paced, online course development and digital badging with their own students.
This distinction has left the pair "very excited and hopeful for future aspirations in publishing more journal articles that relate to our research," Howard said.
Babb said they are still collecting both quantitative and qualitative data from their pilot study to compare.
"We are excited to see how our findings can be used to improve online education at UNG and beyond," Babb said.
