Winter Break Professional Development Days (January 13 & 14)
Come join us after the holidays for workshops to kick off the Spring Semester! Steve Flusberg and Keith Landa have scheduled a series of pedagogy and instructional technology topics that you can use in planning your spring courses.
This is a great way to reconnect with colleagues, have an opportunity to talk about teaching and learning, and check out new tools for engaging with your students. Please click on the links below to register for any (or all!) of the workshops that you’re interested in.
Wednesday morning, January 13
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9:30-10:30: Celebrating Successes from the Fall Semester
- Register for this workshop
- Steve Flusberg, others
- 2020 was a difficult year, to say the least, and higher education has been hit especially hard. Rather than dwell on the negatives, let’s take this opportunity to celebrate our successes. In this introductory session, we invite faculty to share positive lessons and inspirational stories from the fall semester. What activities, assignments, and techniques worked well in our courses? How did students surprise us with their creativity, intellectual achievements, and academic or artistic accomplishments? We hope this discussion will help inspire and motivate and that we can all come away with new insights about the nature of teaching and learning in this challenging time.
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11:00-12:00: The Science of Learning in the Classroom
- Register for this workshop
- Steve Flusberg
- Scientists have learned a lot about human learning over the past century. In this accessible session, we will review some of the basic lessons of this research and talk about how to apply them in our teaching and course design. Importantly, most of these principles are relatively straightforward and can be implemented within existing curricula with little difficulty. Even if you have attended a similar workshop in the past, it can’t hurt to take a refresher course!
Wednesday afternoon, January 13
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1:00-2:00: Moodle for Remote Classes
- Register for this workshop
- Keith Landa, others
- Moodle is foundational for our remote instruction, whether we are doing online-synchronous, online-hybrid, or online-asynchronous classes. This session will review some of the key tools in Moodle and the instructional affordances that they provide, including: discussion forums (including the new features available in Moodle 3.9), quizzes for low- and high-stakes assessments, how to add H5P interactive content, effective use of rubrics and grading guides, and other tools of interest to the workshop participants. We will also cover resources for ensuring accessibility of your course content.
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2:30-3:30: Effective Use of Asynchronous Course Content
- Register for this workshop
- Keith Landa
- Asynchronous course presentations let you offload content delivery from your live class meetings with your students. You can use this to do “flipped classroom” designs for your face to face or online-synchronous courses, trade off recorded lectures for class time in online-hybrid courses, or provide greater instructor presence in your online-asynchronous courses. This session will discuss the use of VoiceThread (including introducing the new VoiceThread assignment types), creating interactive web videos, and low tech video recording options.
Thursday morning, January 14
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9:30-10:30: Social Annotation to Engage your Students with Course Materials
- Register for this workshop
- Keith Landa, others
- Social annotation allows students to collaborate on highlighting and annotating course readings, respond directly in the text to questions that you may pose, and helps to engage students with course readings whether you are teaching online, face to face, or providing remote instruction. This workshop will explore the basics of social annotation and demonstrate how to add the Perusall tool to your Moodle course, including adding course readings to the platform, setting up assignments, and integrating those assignments into Moodle.
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11:00-12:00: Effective Synchronous Course Sessions
- Register for this workshop
- Keith Landa
- How do you keep students from zoning out during yet another Zoom session? This workshop will discuss ways to adapt active learning approaches to online synchronous class sessions. Topics will be determined by workshop participants, but could include such instructional approaches as low-stakes classroom assessment techniques, polling, peer instruction, jigsaw discussions, concept mapping, and others. Technology tools within and beyond Zoom will be covered as appropriate.
Thursday afternoon, January 14
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1:00-2:00: Assessments in the Time of COVID
- Register for this workshop
- Steve Flusberg, others
- Assessing student learning outcomes isn’t easy when classes are remote and our routines are sidelined by a global pandemic. So what are the most (and least) effective forms of assessment in the time of COVID? In our discussion, we will invite faculty participants to share any assessment strategies that have worked well (or not) over the past couple of semesters, and we will talk about thorny issues related to cheating and accountability.
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2:30-3:30: Mental Health and the Pedagogy of Care
- Register for this workshop
- Steve Flusberg, others
- College students were facing a growing mental health crisis… and then the pandemic hit. In this session, we will talk about the role faculty can play in addressing and accommodating the mental health concerns of students. We will also review the resources available for students and discuss the importance of empathy and compassion in teaching in higher ed. Finally, we will take the time to consider our own mental health and the importance of self-care in pedagogy.
We hope to see you there!
Steve Flusberg, Faculty Director of Pedagogy Development
Keith Landa, Director of the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center