by Eli Collins-Brown | May 6, 2020 | Blog
As we wrap up the Spring semester, we are thinking of Summer and Fall and how the pandemic has changed how we are going to facilitate student learning. The Coulter Faculty Commons is offering numerous workshops to support all instructors through this change process. Two of the summer workshops require registration or application and approval by the deans and department heads, and the deadline is approaching quickly!
Moving Rapidly to Remote Instruction starts on Monday, May 11. This is for instructors who will be teaching summer courses online. See Details and Register!
Fast-Track Online Course Design starts on May 18 and runs through the end of June. This is for Fall online course planning. See Details and Apply!
by Eli Collins-Brown | Apr 21, 2020 | Educational Development, Educational Technology, emergency instruction plan, Faculty Development Workshop, Online Learning, Pedagogy, Teaching and Learning
We want to give a huge shout out to all instructors who made the shift to remote instruction with lightning speed so we could finish out the spring semester! As the parent of a graduating senior, I am so appreciative of everything you are doing so all of our students can complete this term. Has it been easy? No! Has it been comfortable? No! Are you making it work? Yes! If you’d had more time to make this move are there some things you would have done differently? Absolutely!
Guess what? We DO have more time to prepare our summer courses that were going to be offered in person, but now need to be moved to remote instruction. And we DO have the workshop to help you do just that!
Moving Rapidly to Remote Instruction (MRRI) will help you rapidly develop your face-to-face course for remote instruction for this summer’s semesters. If you are planning on teaching a summer 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 and experienced WCU online faculty in designing and facilitating remote instruction. This is not the full Online Course Design Institute, which is for online courses that will be taught next Spring. Instead, we have more time to prepare for the summer courses and design them to be more enjoyable by you and your students.
Dates: May 11 – May 31
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 Blackboard, Zoom, and Teams
Outcome: By the end of May, you will have your online course designed and developed, in Blackboard, 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!
by Eli Collins-Brown | Apr 7, 2020 | Other Resources, Student Engagement, Student Performance
From the Honors College
Students with Honors Contracts in progress this semester may need to make changes to those plans when warranted by the transition to online classes and/or social distancing or travel restrictions and/or a change to S/U grading option. The Honors College has been instructing students in this kind of situation to reach out to their faculty member first to start a conversation about the needed modifications and to reset expectations. Students with needed modifications to their projects have been asked to email the Honors College at honors@wcu.edu with a summary of the agreed upon modifications and to copy (cc) that email to their faculty member. Faculty members are asked to reach out to students who may be in this situation, if they haven’t yet heard from the student. Early intervention in this case will help to stave off issues at the end of the semester. For students who do not need any modifications to their Honors Contracts, no action is needed.
Success with an Honors Contract project will continue to be assigned Honors attribution by the faculty member at the time when Final Grades are submitted. For students with approved Honors Contracts in progress, a special drop-down box appears next to the student’s final grade box for the course in the Final Grades window. If a student has not been successful in earning Honors attribution, the faculty member can likewise select that option in the Final Grades window. Faculty cannot assign a grade of Incomplete only to the Honors Contract. If a faculty member needs to assign an Incomplete, that Incomplete is assigned to the course and then both the grade and honors attribution are assigned when complete.
The link below, to the Registrar’s website (click > Web Grading > Final Grades Reporting), shows the Final Grades screen with Honors Contract options.
https://www.wcu.edu/learn/academic-services/registrars-office/information-for-faculty-and-staff.aspx
The Honors College Office is functioning currently in a fully online mode. Faculty with questions about Honors Contracts are encouraged to email us at honors@wcu.edu.
by Eli Collins-Brown | Mar 27, 2020 | Collaborative Learning, Educational Development, Educational Technology, emergency instruction plan, O365, Online Learning, Other Resources, Teaching with Technology
As more schools begin to make the transition to distance learning and online classrooms, we want to help. Microsoft has created resources, training, and how-to guides that we hope will help educators and their classrooms make this transition.
To help support you during this time, we’ve created a support page for O365 with the information Microsoft has provided.
Microsoft Education is committed to helping all teachers, students, and staff stay engaged and focused on learning. Creating an online classroom is an important step in moving to a remote learning experience. Free for schools, Microsoft Teams, provides a secure online classroom that brings together classroom management features, collaborative workspaces like OneNote Class Notebook, and virtual face-to-face connections in a single digital hub that keeps students engaged.
Information included are Microsoft’s top resources on distance learning, Web Pages with tools to connect remotely, Microsoft Teams quick start guide for EDU (PDF). Webinars designed for educators, Blog posts, and Free Training,
These resources have been provided by the Microsoft Corporation and are included in this post for the convenience of WCU faculty who want to use Office 365 to facilitate online learning.
(more…)
by Eli Collins-Brown | Mar 18, 2020 | Educational Development, emergency instruction plan, Student Engagement
We encourage maximizing asynchronous communication for almost everything. There are many great ways to use Zoom or other sychronous tools for limited real-time communication. Here are some standard best practices (tried and true from more than 20 years of online teaching) to get you started and hopefully help you manage your and your students’ stress!
General best practices modified for this situation:
- Use announcements in the LMS to send a message to the entire class. I suggest one per day with reminders and encouragement. Be sure to select the email option so each student will get an email with the announcement that will prompt them to access the course.
- Email your students from within the LMS because they are already enrolled and you won’t miss anyone.
- To save yourself from feeling like you are chained to your laptop and answering a million emails, create a “Questions” discussion forum and encourage students to post and read/respond in that forum. Tell them not to email you unless it is personal nature, but all course questions are to be posted in the forum. Encourage them to answer other students’ questions to get the peer to peer collaboration going. If the answer is wrong or not quite right, you can post an encouraging and tactful correction. Check this Questions forum multiple times during the day.
- Also, set specific ‘office hours’. If possible schedule these at the same time each day. Post the days & times in an announcement. Use Zoom for these real-time, synchronous sessions.
- Use Zoom to hold real-time, one-on-one tutorial sessions with any student who aren’t able to ‘attend’ office hours. Keep these short – 15 minutes max. When using Zoom, be sure to post the link in your course in the announcements or Questions discussion forum.
Recent Comments