Author: admin

How to Teach a Good First Day of Class (chronicle.com)

Who: The events will bring together a round table of three teaching experts: Isis Artze-Vega, vice president for academic affairs at Valencia College, in Florida; Regan A.R. Gurung, associate vice provost and executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Oregon State University; and Viji Sathy, associate dean of evaluation and assessment in the office of undergraduate education in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s College of Arts and Sciences. They’ll be joined by Chronicle reporters Beth McMurtrie and Beckie Supiano.

What: A four-part series of interactive virtual events for instructors and the administrators who support them. We plan to cover the changing student/professor dynamic, how to foster motivation and engagement, and the future of grading and assessment, respectively, in our first three sessions. While all of the sessions will be interactive, the last one will be built entirely around questions from our audience.

When: The final Fridays of January to April at 2 p.m., Eastern time. That’s January 28, February 25, March 25, and April 29.

Where: Discussions will be on Zoom; sign up here. And we plan to keep the conversation going in the newsletter, too.

Why: To help professors think through common challenges, like expanding student engagement and fine-tuning grading and assessment, and to provide a sense of community along the way.

Sign up here!

Teaching: Let’s Talk About Teaching (chronicle.com)

January 12 – 13, 2022

Co-hosted by:
Business, Economic, & Applied Research Center (BEAR)
Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE)

Welcome to the second annual Georgia Gwinnett College Teaching, Learning, and Research Symposium. It is undeniable that the last two years have been a tumultuous time across the world. As circumstances initially thought to be temporary settle into foreseeable permanency, the question becomes ‘how do we move forward?’ Although we must answer this question in every area of our lives, we gather together now to focus on ‘how do we move forward as educators, scholars, and researchers?’

This year’s theme of Aftermath: Higher Education in a pandemic-altered world, provides us with an opportunity to discuss moving forward. Over the span of two days we will share in a wealth of works featuring the latest pedagogical methods and new and evolving research. For the first time, we are joined by undergraduate researchers who are engaged in a variety of scholarly pursuits.

We are delighted to offer a hybrid format this year, and we look forward to engaging with everyone virtually and in-person. The Symposium continues to draw participants from all over the map. Again we have strong participation from multiple institutions in the state of Georgia, along with participants from Texas, Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, West Virginia, and Mississippi, and for the first time we have gone international with participants from Peru, India, Thailand, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

Enjoy yourself and enjoy each other as we spend time refreshing, renewing, and learning. We are glad that you are here, and we hope to see you again next year as we move forward together.

Co-Chairs

Dr. Reanna Berry, Director of Accounting BEAR Center, Assistant Professor of Accounting
Dr. Rolando Marquez, Associate Director for CTE, Assistant Professor of Instructional Technology

Download the complete schedule

The last two years have been full of challenges, particularly for faculty. Teaching, a very social and interaction-based profession, was forced into an isolating experience for many. Educators had to work through the struggles and find ways to adapt their virtual classrooms to fit the new realities of teaching. In the process of supporting students, keeping up with demands, and managing their own personal challenges, faculty feel exhausted and pouring out of an empty cup – with little to give.

Please join the CTE staff for our Winter Institute as we welcome renowned educator, speaker, and author of the book Small Teaching Online, Flower Darby. She will provide us with a three-part workshop that:

• reminds us about teaching with resilience and joy – the pandemic required us to teach in new formats, using technology (some familiar, some less so) in new ways to help our students learn. We will reflect on what we’ve learned and explore how these approaches strengthen our practice in all classes, enabling us to create rewarding teaching and learning interactions that welcome and support students, regardless of format.
• explores practical, small-teaching-style strategies that can be applied in any class.
• provides an opportunity for small group interactions with colleagues to brainstorm solutions to challenges and feel re-energized about teaching.

The Winter Institute will take place on January 11 from 9 AM – 1 PM. This year, you have the option of joining us in the Heritage Room with a small group of colleagues (40) for the livestream or you can join us from home.

Register on Eventbrite

Watch the recording (contact cente@ggc.edu for the password)

Facilitator:

Flower Darby

Flower Darby celebrates and promotes effective teaching in all class formats to include, welcome, and support all students as they learn and succeed. As faculty and an instructional designer, she’s taught community college and university classes for over 24 years in a range of subjects including English, Technology, Leadership, Dance, and Pilates. A seasoned face-to-face and online educator, Darby loves to apply learning science across the disciplines, and to help others do the same.

Flower speaks, writes, presents and consults on teaching and learning theory and practice both nationally and internationally. She has helped educators all over the world become more effective in their work. She is the author, with James M. Lang, of Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes, and she’s a columnist for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The second annual Georgia Gwinnett College Teaching, Learning, and Research Symposium, co-hosted by the Business, Economic, and Applied Research (BEAR) Center and The Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE), invites submissions for a hybrid, regional conference to be held January 12-13, 2022. The conference theme is: “Aftermath: Higher Education in a pandemic-altered world,” and will feature a SoTL track, a non-SoTL empirical research track, and an undergraduate research track. Submissions that align with the theme are particularly encouraged, but other topics are also welcomed.

The deadline for submissions is November 12, 2021. See our previous blog posts for more information on faculty and undergraduate submissions.

The Conference on Meaningful Living and Learning in a Digital World 2022 call for proposals has opened for 45-minute presentations or 7-minute simple talks opens on August 5th, 2021, and will close on October 27th, 2021.

Presentations should be related to one of the conference topics, and include provisions for meaningful interaction with the audience.

Accepted presenters will be notified on or before November 1st, 2021.

General Conference Topics (for 45-minute presentations or 7-minute simple talks):

– Reconciling Humanity and Technology in the Classroom
– Humanistic Instructional Design
– Work-Life-Learning Balance
– Health & Wellness in the High-Tech Workplace
– Minimalism and Simplicity
– Coaching and Mentoring Distance Learners
– Sustainable Technology Solutions
– Social Equity and Educational Access
– Learning Science

Types of Presentations:

 45-minute Interactive Presentation: Presenter will provide 15-20 minute presentation followed by discussion or interactive component.

7-minute Simple Talk: Presenter will deliver automatically timed slide-presentation of 21 slides (visual based not bullets), each lasting twenty seconds.

The conference is particularly relevant to online teachers and leaders, instructional designers, psychologists, sociologists and social scientists, communication researchers, nurses and healthcare practitioners/researchers, librarians and media specialists, and education administrators.

Conference Location

The conference will be held at the historic Brice Hotel, located in the heart of Savannah, in the midst of historic parks and restaurants, and within a block of River Street. A tranquil oasis in the heart of the South’s cultural soul, this is an ideal place to relax and revitalize.

Submit your proposal and / or learn more.

USG Teaching & Learning Conference: “Community, Connection, and Compassion”

The 2022 USG Teaching & Learning Conference has been re-formatted to allow you to first engage in on-demand and asynchronous material, then elaborate on what you learned via guided group discussions, and finally, an option to connect in person with your colleagues and peers at one of four regional events.

Important Dates:
• Proposal Submission Deadline: Dec. 1, 2021
• Registration opens January 30, 2022
• Virtual Conference: March 18-31, 2022
• Regional Events: April 1, 2022

Conference Strands:
1. Growth Mindset: Supporting Students and Faculty
2. Technology and Teaching Modalities
3. Scholarly Lessons about Teaching (SoTL)
4. Active/Experiential Learning (HIPs)

Session Types:
• Lightning Learning: Short and concise. Pre-recorded.
• Deeper Dive: 15-minutes video presentations.

Regional Events: April 1, 2022:
• University of West Georgia hosts Susan Hrach in Carrollton, Georgia.
• Georgia College hosts Josh Eyler in Milledgeville, Georgia
• Savannah State University hosts Jim Lang in Savannah, Georgia.
• Valdosta State University hosts Jessamyn Neuhaus in Valdosta, Georgia.

To submit a proposal, or for further information, visit the conference website:
https://www.usg.edu/facultydevelopment/teaching_learning_conference

PDF version:

A new survey sheds light on the current digital divide in higher education — and what faculty can do about it in their classrooms, writes Nicole Barbaro // September 29, 2021

I’ll be honest with you: I don’t often use a lot of tech in my courses.

Of course, I use standard education technology, such as learning management systems, audiovisual tech aids and some basic design software to spice up my content — staples of the 21st-century professor. But I don’t often seek out the latest apps, the newest tech or the most innovative tools, and I worry about equitable access to them for my students.

I am always fashionably late to the ed-tech party. And when I do eventually arrive, I often struggle to get the most out of the latest technologies. Although I know ed tech is useful, it can be difficult to learn to use it.

And I am not alone. Students have also floundered, perhaps just as much as professors, when trying to use of all the new educational technology that became the new normal of online learning during the COVID pandemic. In fact, a new report I led from the College Innovation Network finds 20 percent of students reported they struggled to learn how to use ed tech in their courses this past year, and 33 percent said keeping up with how to use new technology has been hard.

The published report, “The New Digital Divide: How EdTech Self-Efficacy is Shaping the Online Student Learning Experience in Higher Ed,” shares results from nearly 700 students across four different higher education institutions, including a primarily online university, a public university, a private university and a community college. The main message from this report is that students’ confidence in their ability to learn and adapt to new technology in the classroom — or “edtech self-efficacy,” as coined in the report — is an important correlate of nearly all aspects of students’ learning experiences that we asked about in the survey. As one student reported, “The programs for some classes were very difficult to navigate. I would’ve really preferred the chance to learn how to use the program face-to-face. Emailing and then waiting up to 48 hours [for a response] could really put a strain on my homework schedule.”

And although many students found ed tech easy enough to navigate, some noticed their peers struggling throughout the year. “Although using such technology was easy for me, that same ease did not extend to every student,” another student shared.

Continue reading: How faculty should deal with the digital divide (opinion) (insidehighered.com)

Remote teaching has revealed the importance for students of learning new skills and taking creative risks without being watched, argues Maggie Melo // September 29, 2021

This fall semester is invoking a familiar distressing level of uncertainty as colleges and universities navigate the implications of the highly transmissible COVID-19 Delta variant. Compounding the troubling upticks in hospitalization and positive COVID-19 testing across the United States are questions about how the academic year will unfold. A recognizable conversation about the possibility of an abrupt transition from face-to-face to remote learning during the semester is re-emerging across social media.

In addition to these concerns, I’m worried about losing a feature of virtual learning: our ability to turn off our Zoom cameras, our power to shut down the gaze. In 2020, I was anxious about teaching a special topics course on makerspaces virtually — a class that is centered on shared tools, hands-on building and in-person collaborations. Fast-forward to 2021, and I am trying to imagine what it would look like to turn video off in a face-to-face classroom.

Remote teaching revealed an important variable that I didn’t think too much about before: the importance of students learning new skills and taking creative risks without being watched. Having a virtual classroom with the ability to turn off our cameras offered a generative, unusual sweet spot for learning. It’s an environment where students were not only together but also alone. It’s an environment where students were supported but also weren’t being observed by their instructor or peers — one where we could take a collective exhale from the performative demands of the classroom with a simple click of the “stop video” button.

Continue reading: Importance of letting students work without being watched (opinion) (insidehighered.com)