News for and about University of Portland faculty and staff.
At a recent brownbag lunch, four faculty members shared tips for getting started on Untethered Lecture Capture. Their lessons learned in two years of implementing this approach are distilled at this link.
For more information or questions, contact Karen Eifler, Garaventa Center, at eifler@up.edu.
How might a tutoring structure help us to support students? In this week’s Teaching & Learning submission, Jeffrey White from the Learning Commons considers the tutoring cycle as a tool for facilitating active learning during interactions with students and the learning material during office hours visits.
For more information contact White at x7141 or white@up.edu.
What do you do (or what CAN you do) when a student stops showing up to class? From a recent brownbag conversation on the topic, the Teaching and Learning Collaborative compiled concrete, specific suggestions from the Shepard Academic Resource Center, the Care Team and faculty colleagues.
Big takeaways: follow through on attendance policies in your syllabus (changing them out of sympathy does no one any favors); let students know, in word and email, that you noticed they were gone and that you’d like to help them get back on track; don’t shy away from alerting the Care Team (via Early Alert) when a student misses a week of class without explanation. A lucky list of thirteen strategies and insights from that brownbag session are gathered in this 2-page document.
Think-Pair-Share is a classic way to improve equity and engagement in the classroom, according to Carolyn James, mathematics. Students think about a prompt individually, discuss their ideas in pairs, and the instructor leads a discussion as student share their ideas with the whole class. Think-Pair-Share can easily be extended; consider having students write during think time (even in a STEM class) or using technology (like polling software) to share ideas more equitably. In particular, Dr. Derek Bruff recommends Think-Pair-Share-Analyze, in which students make sense of, compare, and evaluate the ideas shared by their classmates. Read more about Think-Pair-Share in Dr. Bruff’s blog, Agile Learning.
With some extended breaks coming up in the next two months, faculty may have more time to do professional reading than the usual academic schedule allows. There’s a boatload of scholarship on effective teaching strategies for college teachers of every discipline, with more on the way all the time. One of UP’s rock star librarians, Heidi Senior, compiled this very helpful list of extended resources, helpfully clustered by type of medium: website, news service, book, and table of content subscription service. Click here for a list that manages to be both succinct and comprehensive. Then pour yourself a cup of coffee and do some exploring.
Have you ever worked with an instructional designer to improve a course? According to a recent study released by Inside Higher Ed, the chances are good that you haven’t. Fewer than half of faculty participants in the study have experience working with instructional designers, but those who have reported that they “overwhelmingly appreciated the experience” – a full 93 percent of respondents rated their time with an ID as positive. So what gives? Why are IDs underutilized in higher education institutions? The truth is that there is sometimes a dearth of information about available ID resources on campuses, coupled with lingering misperceptions about what, exactly, that IDs can do for you.
So, what can time with a UP instructional designer do for your course? To find out more, please visit this week’s TLC from the TLC blog post over on the Teaching and Learning Community Blog.
Feeling fresh from summer’s rest, research, and writing? The new academic year provides new opportunities to design or redesign courses to increase support for student learning. Nationally, more faculty, departments, and institutions are adopting Universal Design for Learning (UDL) strategies to provide students with multiple pathways to learn, individualized opportunities to demonstrate course competencies; and communities of learners to support individual and collective student learning outcomes. To learn more, please check out the “UDL In Higher Ed” resource page from CAST.
Questions? Interested in getting started with UDL in a specific course? Please contact Melanie Gangle, accessible education services, at gangle@up.edu.
Happy New Year, academic-style, from the Teaching & Learning Collaborative, a loose conglomerate of twelve educators from across campus who strive to collect and coordinate resources and initiatives that support the superb teaching at the core of our shared mission. In every issue of upbeat, you’ll find access to a resource (reading, video, RFP) meant to inspire you and to be consumed in the time it takes you to savor a Coke Zero right there at your desk. All of these tips are archived at the Teaching and Learning Hub. This week’s tip is an 8-minute guided tour of this peer-developed, comprehensive resource. Click here for the tour or here to explore the hub on your own.
How much of the stress students (and faculty and staff) feel during finals is rational? How much might it help our collective mental health to identify the points where our stress is irrational? The last in the year-long series on mental health on the Teaching & Learning Community Blog offers some ideas from the types of cognitive-behavioral techniques used in self-help programs to suggest ways we can all get a little perspective on the stress of final exams.
For more information contact Andrew Guest, psychological sciences, at guesta@up.edu.
When dealing with stressed out students at challenging points in the semester, have you ever wondered if UP students are any different in their psychological concerns than students at other universities? This week’s mental health blog post on the Teaching and Learning Community Blog has some data to address that question. How do our students compare to other US college students in relation to mental health, and what are the implications for faculty and academic staff working with those students? For more information contact Andrew Guest, psychological sciences, at guesta@up.edu.