The Fall Blend – A Hybrid Course Workshop Now Offered Every Week This Summer

The Coulter Faculty Commons is offering three new sections of its Fall Planning Workshop (“Fall Blend”), intended to help faculty walk through design, delivery, and technology considerations for fall teaching. A workshop will be offered each week until the beginning of fall courses, following a Tuesday – Thursday format:

  • July 28 – 30
  • August 4 – 6
  • August 11 – 13

Faculty will begin each day in a Zoom session with other participating faculty, prior to joining their small cohorts in breakout style sessions. In the breakout groups, emphasis will be provided on helping faculty work through their own unique teaching challenges and situations. Daily goals will be set by the faculty member, with a check-in late in the day. An educational technology or educational developer from the CFC will facilitate each group, bringing unity to common themes and concerns. Faculty will spend independent time between the two Zoom sessions, developing a holistic plan or working on digitizing lessons. Two live technology sessions will be hosted by the Educational Technology team in the CFC late in the week.

Faculty may sign up through an Office365 registration form.

Note: the total time commitment requires 4-5 hours each day.

Faculty will receive the following information the week prior to their workshop start date:

  • A digital workbook on blended learning
  • “Save the Date” times for the daily live sessions
  • Dates for the live “technology and course design” sessions with CFC educational technology staff
  • Video content showing how to digitize and deliver instructional content in Panopto and the LMS
  • Organizational/planning sheets to facilitate transfer of F2F teaching to digital teaching

 

CFC Offers Course for Rapid Online Transition for Online Fall Courses

Moving Rapidly to Remote Instruction (MRRI) will help you rapidly develop your face-to-face course for remote instruction for this fall’s semesters. If you are planning on teaching a fall course that needs to move online quickly, attend this three-week online workshop that will walk you through an intentional course design process and provide the expertise of the Coulter Faculty Commons who are experienced online faculty.  This is not the full Online Course Design Institute, but will take you through the streamlined basics of creating an online course so that you can be prepared for the Fall of 2020.

Dates: July 10 – August 1, 2020
When: There will be a combination of live Zoom sessions, recorded tutorials, content and assignments/deliverables.  You will have the opportunity to have 1:1 conversations with CFC staff and experience online faculty. Expect to commit 8 – 10 hours each of the three weeks to complete this process and be ready to teach.
Where:  Fully Online through the LMS, Zoom, and Teams
Outcome: By the end of July, you will have your online course designed and developed, in the LMS, with a teaching/facilitation plan in place.  You will also have the support of colleagues and the CFC throughout the summer.

The workshop is free and open to all instructors, including adjuncts.  Please register, to let us know you are joining us and to allow us to ensure that we have enough facilitators to make this workshop successful!

Respondus Trainings Available

At the current time WCU has an agreement with Respondus for three tools.

One is a limited tool that gives faculty an ability to import text quizzes into the LMS and export them from the LMS.  That tool is called Respondus 4.0.

The other two are related to proctoring of remote tests.  One product, Respondus Lockdown Browser can be used without the other Respondus Monitor, but Monitor cannot be used without the Lockdown Browser.

WCU has published information about how to use these tools in the WCU Blackboard environment, but, if faculty have an interest in more intensive training, the Vendor is providing training.  Feel free to check out the Respondus training options.

Faculty who are going to require the Respondus Monitor need to inform students that they will be recorded during exams.  Sample language is available in the CFC sample syllabus.