Always on hand to provide assistance in integrating a wide variety of technologies in the teaching and learning process
Missed a Summer Academy session or attended one and want to watch it again? Go to summeracademy.academic.wlu.edu!
As recordings are processed, they’ll be uploaded to YuJa and a link will be added for your viewing pleasure!
Register for sessions at go.wlu.edu/summeracademy!
Webinar: Small Teaching Online with author Flower Darby
Date and Time: June 15, 11:00am – 12:30pm EST
Location: Zoom
Registration: REGISTER BEFORE MAY 18th!
Small teaching is a phrase coined by Professor James M. Lang to describe an incremental approach to improving instruction. In 2019, instructional designer Flower Darby and Lang teamed up to apply small teaching principles to the online realm. The result of their collaboration is an essential volume for any educator, “Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes“.
As a highlight of the LACOL 2020 virtual workshop, Darby will lead an online mini-workshop, exploring small steps with big impacts for students.
The book recommendation is excellent – a lot of useful suggestions which would take years to figure out.
-Dr. Natalia Toporikova, Washington and Lee University, biology professor and online data science instructor, summer 2019, 2020
Establishing presence and social learning through multi-modal engagements and reflective meta-cognition are effective techniques for *any* class, both face-to-face and through the internet. Communicating the underlying what, why and how of learning is especially important for online learning success. And, like any important new skills, acquiring these capabilities takes planning and practice.
See also:
Join a live LACOL webinar and hands-on practice with five experienced liberal arts teachers from Swarthmore College, Vassar College, Williams College, and Washington and Lee University. This team regularly collaborates to deliver online/hybrid classes for the liberal arts.
Many liberal arts colleges are asking faculty to consider how they may temporarily move their teaching online as part of emergency preparedness in the face of COVID-19 or other disruptions to regular classroom teaching. Tips and guides are circulating, and faculty get lots of support from their local IT and teaching and learning centers.
This interactive Zoom session will highlight five liberal arts colleagues (including our very own Moataz Khalifa, Assistant Professor and Director of Data Education, and Assistant Professor of Biology, Natalia Toporikova!) to explore the ways they’ve learned to teach effectively online while maintaining a liberal arts approach that emphasizes personal interactions and critical thinking. Bring your ideas and questions!
Two live sessions:
Recordings will be shared afterwards.
Webinar Agenda:
Sign Up: https://forms.gle/HxRbWe5cvMubcZzA7
Additional Resources: http://bit.ly/lacol-teach-online
Is tracking college students everywhere they go on campus the new normal? According to this recent Wall Street Journal article by Doug Belkin, “Universities are recording students’ faces with video surveillance cameras, tracking their movements with GPS and monitoring their messages on social media and email. They are detailing students’ study habits through digital textbooks, recording when they enter buildings, logging their presence in class, the library and even the football game. All of these relatively new tracking technologies are in addition to years-old systems that leverage students’ IDs to monitor how frequently individuals are entering gyms, dorms and cafeterias.“
Before you even have to ask, ITS can openly assure all students, faculty, and staff that absolutely no monitoring or surveillance of any kind takes place here at Washington and Lee currently and never will.
Protecting the University’s systems and information assets is tantamount to safeguarding the personal information of students and employees. And privacy isn’t just about compliance; we also respect your privacy on a humanitarian and ethical level.
Learn more about W&L’s information security plan (ISP). It’s something we take very seriously.
Due to the current situation regarding the coronavirus outbreak, many organizations are taking precautions regarding the health and safety of their employees. LinkedIn Learning has recommended topics related to successfully managing change and working remotely.
Here’s a list of LinkedIn Learning courses (you must sign in with your W&L credentials) you can leverage to help in this admittedly crazy climate if you are impacted:
Need help accessing LinkedIn Learning? Contact the ITS Information Desk at 540.458.4357 (HELP) or email help@wlu.edu.
Our second Pedagogy and (not) Pizza session, “Designing and Assessing Presentation Assignments” was led by Stephen Lind, Assistant Professor of Business Administration and author of “A Charlie Brown Religion: Exploring the Spiritual Life and Work of Charles M. Schulz“.
We want our students to have effective communication skills, but, truthfully, designing and assessing these activities in class can be incredibly challenging. So, we want to again offer our heartfelt thanks to Stephen for sharing essential questions and criteria to consider when designing unique speaking assignments, a turn-key model that faculty can build on, and an assessment tool to give student feedback.
Lastly, in case you missed it, here’s a link to all of the super helpful workshop materials (must sign in with W&L credentials) in Box.
Is there a topic or issue you’d like CARPE and Academic Technologies to address in Pedagogy and (not) Pizza? Let us know!
“Yay, it’s flu season!”
—No one, ever
Sanitize your keyboard and evict that nasty grime and bacteria – stat!
Using disinfectant wipes to clean your keyboard and mouse — along with other measures like keeping your distance from sick people and thoroughly washing your hands before eating and after using the toilet — can help to prevent the spread of colds and flu.
Protect yourself and do your part to help prevent the spread of any viruses!
Keep an eye out for packs of disinfectant wipes in classrooms. Over Feb Break, we took the liberty of wiping down keyboards and mice and are making wipes available so you can continue to sanitize these devices before you use them.
POGIL is an acronym for Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning.
As a student-centered instructional approach, in a POGIL classroom, students work in small groups/teams on specially designed activities that follow a learning cycle paradigm of exploration, concept invention, and application, with the instructor acting as a facilitator.
Developed in Chemistry before expanding to fields throughout the disciplines, the POGIL approach has two broad aims: to develop content mastery through student construction of their own understanding, and to develop and improve important process skills such as information processing, communication, critical thinking, problem solving and metacognition and assessment.
Gail Webster, Professor and Chair of Chemistry at Guilford College, and our very own Matt Tuchler, Associate Professor of Chemistry, acted as the facilitators, leading us though the organization of a POGIL course, how guided inquiry is structured in a POGIL classroom, several POGIL activities, as well as considerations for classroom facilitation.
Attendees who experienced a POGIL-based learning environment included faculty and staff members from Accounting, Biology, Business Administration, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Cognitive and Behavioral Science, Computer Science, ITS, Journalism and Mass Communications, Physics and Engineering, and the University Library.
Many thanks to both Gail and Matt, and all who took the time to attend. We’re always thrilled to offer provide training in new teaching pedagogies and even more elated when faculty are interested and willing to learn to use these methods.
BONUS: Find the Enhancing Learning by Improving Process Skills in STEM (ELIPSS) rubrics helpful? We did, too! View and/or download all the rubrics.
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The files with “feedback” in the title — CT, IC, IP, TW — are those with suggestions for improvement. This new style is not available for all rubrics yet.
Interested in future pedagogy workshops? Sign up for the Academic Technologies once-per-term newsletter or reach out to Julie Knudson, Director of Academic Technologies, or Paul Hanstedt, Director of the Center for Academic Resources and Pedagogical Excellence (CARPE).
Some students are reluctant to embrace active learning methods, Robert Talbert notes, but it’s important to combat misperceptions they might have about them.
He reminds educators that:
