SHOWCASE: Teaching Transformation Talks: How Your Teaching Has Changed (90 Mins.)

Abstract

The pandemic forced entire educational systems to change. Both students and instructors had to adapt continuously to new teaching and learning environments. This session will examine what changes have occurred in our classrooms, technological and other aspects of teaching and learning, and what challenges instructors have been facing since the COVID-19 pandemic started. We will take a look at instructional innovations and learn more from our panel members from across disciplines about their new ideas for addressing pedagogical and social emotional challenges in a dominantly online classroom environment and going forward as we emerge from COVID-19 restrictions. We hope for an open and enlightening discussion, full of insight towards improvements in an online classroom setting, which will benefits student achievements and their overall involvement in the classroom. Participants will have the opportunity to share their experiences.

Conveners: Laura Poms, Jessica Hurley

Panelist Speakers:

Gabriele Belle (College of Science) will share her experience as the Physics lab coordinator converting lab experiments into an online format. She will share her experience with this transformation process and explain how they engage students in the learning activities, manage groups and create a positive learning environment.

Steve Brown (College of Health and Human Services) will share his use of Open Educational Resources (OERs) like Lynda and LinkedIn Learning in f2f, online, and hybrid Health Administration courses.

Karen Kitching (School of Business): Technology has grown leaps and bounds. Student expectations have changed along with these innovations. This presentation will provide examples of how to keep students engaged in courses delivered asynchronously online. Karen has been teaching distance courses since 2014 and hybrid courses since 2016. She will also share her tips on how to ensure that students work on course deliverables throughout the week and not at the midnight hour. Tips can also be incorporated in traditional courses.

Brian Ngac (School of Business) will share his hybrid teaching experience and how that has transformed his teaching process. All lectures are pre-recorded and his class has a semester long project in which all project activities are tied directly to each week's pre-recorded lecture. When in the face-to-face component, he acts as a mentor rather than an instructor to guide students through their custom group project.

Vivek Narayanan (College of Humanities and Social Sciences) will share his experience with various Blackboard-enabled tools--these have transformed his teaching practice and circumstance as well as the class' awareness of itself as a community. He will focus on social annotation tools such as Hypothesis and Perusall. He will go over some of the ways in which using social annotation has changed his teaching and the students' sense of themselves as a learning community. He will do a short demonstration, leading the attendees in a short collective annotation of a poem, to give them a first-hand feel of what the process is like.

Ana Stoehr (College of Health and Human Services) will share how the School of Nursing simulated pediatric clinical experiences using a combination of weekly pre-assigned readings, online instructional videos, on-line quizzes, and in-person pediatric case-scenarios. She will share how the use of faculty-led high-fidelity lab simulation enabled the continuity of a productive teaching-learning experience using pre-brief and debrief techniques. She will reflect and share with instructors across disciplines how this educational innovation was successful in creating a safe and engaging environment that facilitated student clinical learning and a sense of togetherness during a global pandemic.

Ashley Yuckenberg (School of Business) will share her experience redesigning BUS 103 in order to create a culture of collaboration and learning in an online class. She will discuss developing processes for setting up teams as well as supporting team building, team work, collaboration, and opportunities to practice using online tools that are needed to write and develop presentations. She worked on building community and teams through incorporating an online ice breaker within groups, creating team charters through the wiki on Blackboard, completion of StrengthsFinder with group discussion, and presenting in low-stakes team fashion the group StrengthsFinder summary.

Steven Zhou (College of Humanities and Social Sciences) will share how he restructured PSYC 300 to remove exams and replace them with applied projects and weekly problem sets, all open-book and open-note. The goal of this was the emulate the fact that, in the "real world", anyone who uses statistics is unlikely to be asked to recount a formula from memory, and they will likely be able to use a computer. Thus, the focus is on real-life application of statistical problems. Moreover, in the weekly problem sets, he gave students the option of turning them in early and would then grade them within 24 hours and give them the chance to make corrections. This maintains a degree of high expectations on keeping up with the material, but gives students the chance to practice and improve.