ONLINE LEARNING
Aaron began designing and building online courses for Relay Graduate School of Education while the school was in the early stages of developing online courses for its masters in teaching program. Over five years with Relay, Aaron worked in partnership with content experts across the United States to design dozens of online modules, and produce, film, and edit the video for them. The courses are designed to maximize students’ online engagement while providing practices and exercises to help learners incorporate these lessons into every day life and work as educators.
Since working with Relay, Aaron has designed and built courses for braidEDmedia/Center for Practice Innovations at Columbia University, Mindful Schools, and The Fearless Heart on various online learning platforms including Coursera, Articulate, Moodle, and Teachable.
Explore Aaron’s online course work below.
Relay GSE
Courses co-designed and built in multiple platforms, and video filmed and edited by Aaron Soffin, 2011-2015.
In his role as Director of Online Media at Relay Graduate School of Education, Aaron collaborated on dozens of online learning modules and courses. Most notably, Aaron worked with Dave Levin, founder of KIPP Schools to build Relay’s first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), Teaching Character and Creating Positive Classrooms, which enrolled more than 50,000 students in its first four sessions. The video presented here, an interview with Professor Angela Duckworth, co-founder and CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit that uses psychological science to help children thrive, and author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, is an excerpt of that course.
He also collaborated with Maia Heyck-Merlin, founder and CEO of The Together Group, on the MOOC, The Together Teacher, designed to help classroom teachers develop a personal organization system (see sample video here) and with the writers of the Eureka Math K-12 curriculum to design a pilot training for 3rd grade math teachers using the curriculum (see video sample here).
braidEDmedia
Courses built in Articulate by Aaron Soffin, 2017-2019.
In partnership with braidEDmedia and Modern Epic, Aaron built six courses for the Center for Practice Innovations at Columbia University to help train health-care providers in various topics, including suicide prevention, working with survivors of intimate partner violence, and reducing recidivism.
Review the full course on Intimate Partner Violence on NYC.gov here.
Mindful Schools
Designed courses, filmed and edited video, and built courses in Moodle, 2015-2020.
Aaron has played multiple roles in the creation of Mindful Schools’ courses, including Mindful Communication, Working with Emotions, and Self-Compassion for Educators. He has managed course design, filmed and edited video, and built out courses in the Mindful Schools’ Moodle platform.
The video here is the intro video for the most recent course, Self-Compassion for Educators.
Making Life Work
Course designed and built in Teachable by Aaron Soffin, 2019.
For this course, Aaron re-configured pre-existing writings and videos of Miki Kashtan into a six-week online course. The videos, readings, activities and discussion forums in the course teach participants how to integrate principles and practices that move toward a world that honors the needs of everyone, that welcome each person’s truth, and that rest on faith that solutions can be found to the most challenging problems facing us.
Enroll in the course for free here.