by Terry Pollard | Jul 16, 2020 | Blog, Educational Development, Educational Technology, Faculty Development Workshop, Teaching and Learning
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
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 | Mar 17, 2020 | Blog, Educational Development, Educational Technology, emergency instruction plan, Learn, Online Learning, Pitfalls, Student Engagement, Teaching and Learning
It is easy to just assume that you will be able to have live class sessions online using Zoom at the same time and day they have been scheduled, but that will not produce a good learning experience for the students, nor will it be pleasant for you as the instructor. We gathered a couple of really good posts that align with our approach to moving online quickly.
Do This, Not That
~Alison Wang, Online Teaching Do This Not That
Click on image to download the PDF. 
Shared through Creative Commons, Attribute, No Derivative, No Commercial Purpose.
This has been flying around social media, but it’s one of the good ones. She refers to particular systems and programs but her advice is right on.
What? Did I hear you correctly? YES!
As Rebecca Barrett-Fox says “You are NOT building an online class. You are NOT teaching students who can be expected to be ready to learn online. And, most importantly, your class is NOT the highest priority of their OR your life right now. Release yourself from high expectations right now, because that’s the best way to help your students learn.” ~https://anygoodthing.com/2020/03/12/please-do-a-bad-job-of-putting-your-courses-online/
And we like her list of 10 considerations:
- Your students know less about technology than you think. Many of them know less than you. Yes, even if they are digital natives and younger than you.
- They will be accessing the internet on their phones. They have limited data. They need to reserve it for things more important than online lectures.
- Students who did not sign up for an online course have no obligation to have a computer, high-speed wifi, a printer/scanner, or a camera. Do not even survey them to ask if they have it. Even if they do, they are not required to tell you this. And if they do now, that doesn’t mean that they will when something breaks and they can’t afford to fix it because they just lost their job at the ski resort or off-campus bookstore.
- Students will be sharing their technology with other household members. They may have LESS time to do their schoolwork, not more.
- Many will be working MORE, not fewer, hours. Nurses, prison guards, firefighters, and police officers have to go to work no matter what. As healthcare demand increases but healthcare workers get sick, there will be more and more stress on those who remain.
- Some of your students will get sick. Others will be caring for people who are ill.
- Many will be parenting.
- Social isolation contributes to mental health problems.
- Social isolation contributes to domestic violence.
- Students will be losing their jobs, especially those in tourism and hospitality.
Other recommendations she puts forward that we promote as well:
- “Don’t do too much. Right now, your students don’t need it. They need time to do the other things they need to do.”
- Make all assignments due at 11:59 pm on the same day of the week. Make them due on Sunday at 11:59 p.m. instead of Friday so that they use the evenings and week-end to get work done.
- Allow students to take every exam or quiz twice so that if there is a technical problem (such as getting kicked out of the LMS), they will have another opportunity to complete the exam.
- Record lectures only if you need to. But use the TED talk method: no longer than 18 minutes and focused on one concept, big question or idea.
- Don’t fuss over videos. Don’t worry about your ums and ers. It helps if you write a script (also provides a transcript for ADA purposes) and read through it a few times. Then practice 5 times just the first few sentences or first few slides. That will get you into the recording without the jumpstarts we do at the start.
- Do NOT require synchronous work! Students’ life and schedules have been turned upside-down as well. A good use of Zoom or Bb Collaborate is to use it for office hours or tutoring sessions. But make it optional.
- Do not use proctoring or ask students to record themselves when taking a test. This is a violation of their privacy and they did not sign up for an online course.
- Remind them of due dates. This is not hand-holding!! They need contact from you and as we said before, their lives have been turned upside down. Be kind to them and kind to yourself. Be supportive and encouraging, Be a mentor and coach!
- Respond to them when they ask for help. These are anxious times and they will need encouragement.
We will continue to share quick tips and helpful resources over the next few weeks!
by Terry Pollard | Mar 16, 2020 | Blog, Educational Development, emergency instruction plan, Event, Feedback, Help Your Students, Online Learning, Other Resources, Pedagogy, Pitfalls, Student Engagement, Teaching and Learning
Student needs are changing during this move to offering alternative modes of instruction. Faculty who want to find out what challenges students are facing can utilize a new web form created in Office365.
The form can be modified by faculty prior to sending out. The survey should take students 5 minutes to complete, and asks for the following types of information:
- whether students expect to have reliable Internet access
- times of day students expect to do online work
- preferences for asynchronous or synchronous activity
- accessibility requests (content in different formats, for example)
- basic psychological and physiological needs
The survey form is available below. Note the options for modifying the survey questions, collecting data, and sending out the link (the Settings icon can be found top-right of your screen, to the right of the Share button).
Open the Form
A heartfelt thank you to our colleague Dr. Mae Claxton, Professor of English, for reaching out to the CFC with this idea.
by Eli Collins-Brown | Feb 28, 2020 | Active Learning, Be Present-Mindful, Domains/disciplines, Educational Development, Faculty Development Workshop, Help Your Students, Learn, Student Engagement, Teaching and Learning
Guest Blogger ~ Dr. April Talent
Whether you’re teaching an Honors Section of a course, working with an Honors Student one-on-one through an Honors Contract, or just thinking about how to keep your Honors Students motivated in a regular class, studio, or lab, there are a variety of resources available with ideas for faculty on boosting learning outcomes for Honors Students.
This short article from the University Honors Program at Kansas University describes moving learning outcomes up to the highest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy in which learning goals are aimed at synthesis, evaluation, integration, and creation. These higher levels of critical thinking are key to inspiring Honors Students in their studies. They create modes of learning that challenge motivated students in creative ways that go beyond just doing more.
This paper (access provided through Hunter Library), written by faculty in The Netherlands, looks at instructional factors and how those strategies challenged their high-ability students. In their conclusions, they affirm that the combination of student autonomy, complexity, and teacher expectations come together to be effective in keeping these students motivated and challenged and ultimately improving outcomes. These factors further underscore the value of establishing learning outcomes for Honors Students that are at the highest levels of critical thinking in terms of course learning goals.
The Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt has a useful summary of Bloom’s Taxonomy on their website. This is a quick resource that summarizes the action verbs that are aligned with the different processes of learning, e.g. planning, producing, generating, checking, critiquing, attributing, organizing, and differentiating, corresponding to critical thinking at the highest levels of Analysis, Evaluation, and Creation.
References and Resources
Armstrong, P. (n.d.) Bloom’s taxonomy. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/
Scager, K., Akkerman, S. F., Pilot, A., & Wubbels, T. (2013). How to persuade honors students to go the extra mile: creating a challenging learning environment. High Ability Studies, 24(2), 115–134. https://doi-org.proxy195.nclive.org/10.1080/13598139.2013.841092
Teaching honors students. (n.d.). The University of Kansas Honors Program. Retrieved January 23, 2020, from https://honors.ku.edu/teaching-honors-courses
by Eli Collins-Brown | Nov 20, 2019 | Active Learning, Activity, Blog, Classroom, Collaborative Learning, Cooperative Learning, Domains/disciplines, Educational Development, Pedagogy, Teaching and Learning
“Group work!”
The mere phrase elicits dread in the heart of almost high performing college student and many time spells frustration for the faculty who know its potential benefits but wonder why it is so hard to get this important teaching tool to work right.
Professor Emeritus, Parks and Recreation Management
Dr. Maurice Phipps, faculty emeritus for Western Carolina University has developed a guidebook for teachers and students to rediscover the value and the joy of cooperative learning.
“Cooperative Learning is a highly effective method of instruction and students trained in effective group skills are valued in the workplace but groups can be dreaded without some assurance that group skills and group processing are properly taught and applied.” – Maurice Phipps
He has simplified the challenge of group work by using the five elements of Cooperative Learning, which he says must all be present in order for students to form a high performing cooperative learning community. He breaks down group work into concepts, skills and roles, and tactics and strategies.
What does cooperative learning look like?
- Positive interdependence (ways to ensure students work together)
- Individual accountability (making sure all students are learning)
- Face-to-face interaction (many ways to interact)
- Interpersonal and small-group skills (to enable effective group functioning)
The Group Book
Dr. Phipps cowrote and published The Group Book: Effective Skills for Cooperative Groups as a reference manual for teachers and students to use in bringing together the necessary pieces.
Faculty can use it as a workbook for students (e.g. study p.5-10 and come into class prepared to practice the skill).
Or they can review it themselves and deploy the strategies as needed.
Some teachers give it to students to help them take ownership of their group learning and solve the kinds of 21st century problems they will encounter throughout the rest of their life.
Why?
- Faculty who want to use this, do it because they want their students to learn soft skills (that combine with technical skills) for student success.
- Compared with other dynamic group learning methods (e.g. team-based learning), cooperative learning is flexible and adaptable to any learning environment.
- The only way to enable high-functioning student groups in your classroom is to equip students with group processing and group skills while setting a context for them to succeed.
Want to learn more?
- Read more about Cooperative Learning using the resources below.
- Keep an eye out for upcoming events hosted by the CFC for Excellence in Teaching and Learning that may include a workshop hosted by Dr. Phipps on the art of facilitating group work.
- Dr Phipps is also hosting a regular faculty discussion for WCU faculty on the benefits, challenges, and strategies of group work. Please send him a message for more details.
- Schedule an appointment with one of our educational developers to see how you can implement this unique learning design.
- Don’t forget to pick up a copy of “The Group Book: Effective Skills for Cooperative Groups” online or at the Coulter Faculty Commons for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.
Resources
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