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How & Why to Humanize Your Online Class
Humanize Your Online Class
Category: Faculty Development
Distracted Minds
James M. Lang has written a series of articles for the Chronicle of Higher Education on distraction and attention in higher education. The articles draw from his new book, Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. In his book he makes a compelling argument that rather than thinking about how to ban distractions you should focus on creating learning environments that support and sustain attention. If this has piqued your interest, you can find his series of articles on distracted minds at these links:
- Distracted Minds: Why Your Students Can’t Focus
- Distracted Minds: 3 Ways to Get Their Attention in Class
- Distracted Minds: The Role of Tempo in Good Teaching
- Distracted Minds: Why You Should Teach Like a Poet
Photo Credit: #WOCinTech Chat / CC BY 2.0
A Teaching Conference in Our Own Backyard
I find that attending a teaching conference is a great way to get inspiration and new ideas, especially at the beginning of a semester (and a new year and a new decade). And this year we have one right in our own backyard!
The Center for Engaged Learning & Teaching (CELT) at Tulane has a similar mission as CAT+FD, and we support each other when possible. Plus, registration is free!
According to conference chair, Mallory Monaco Caterine, the 2020 Sparking Success Faculty Development Conference is shaping up to be a great event--with already over 150 faculty from around the New Orleans area signed up to collaborate and learn together. The more, the merrier! I know it falls during our registration, but Jay Todd and I are presenting, and we'd love to see you there!
Open Access Week: October 22-26
This year's theme is Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge. Xavier has events for faculty, staff and students all week. Please refer to the schedule for more information. RSVP for Wednesday's Faculty Lecture: knichola@xula.edu.
How Do You Know When Your Course Is Ready?
This summer, I'm on the verge of accomplishing something I've never accomplished before: having all my classes completely planned and plugged into the LMS before the semester even begins. ...continue reading "How Do You Know When Your Course Is Ready?"
Basic Needs Security and the Syllabus
When I read this article from Sara Goldrick-Rab "Basic Needs Security and the Syllabus" from August of last year, it really resonated with me, due to several projects I'm currently working on that have somehow converged--it is that time of year when faculty are asking for tips on creating their syllabi or feedback on items they should perhaps add, I'm collaborating on initiatives to try to save students money on textbooks, our office has been working with graduate students since 2017, and of course, we are always conscious of our mission here at XULA.
Professor Goldrick-Rab decided to include the following statement in her syllabus for a Master's higher education course:
Any student who faces challenges securing their food or housing and believes this may affect their performance in the course is urged to contact the Dean of Students for support. Furthermore, please notify the professor if you are comfortable in doing so. This will enable her to provide any resources that she may possess.
Professor Goldrick-Rab said that she decided to add this to her graduate syllabus to acknowledge that students face financial challenges that could affect their performance in their courses, to let them know that she cares about them, and to try to point them in the right direction for resources.
It makes me wonder how many of our own students are threatened with basic needs security. Would you, as an instructor, add similar verbiage to your own syllabus? Do you know any students who are hungry or homeless? I don't, but just yesterday, a parent called me to say that they couldn't afford to send their son back to XULA for the fall--it was just too expensive. She wanted to find out if there were enough online courses offered so that he could continue his studies while they tried to save and perhaps he could attend in person again in the spring. Many of our students and their families are struggling, and perhaps they would appreciate it if we do acknowledge their challenges, even in a small way, such as adding a statement to our syllabus and providing resources for them.
Slow Writing
Berg and Seeger argue for a greater mindfullness of our time, even if they never use that particular language. They argue for faculty to incorporate into their lives what they call "timeless time," sessions that are purposefully (mindfully) organized in order to allow us to focus wholly and completely on an activity... an activity like writing. According to Berg and Seeger, a session of "timeless time" requires several things of us:
- A period of transition, time to focus our energies on the upcoming activity;
- The acceptance that we will probably need more time than we think accomplish this activity;
- A sense of "playfulness"; and
- A silencing of our inner and outer critics who think that such activity is a waste of time (and money).
So on the one hand, I'm encouraged to squeeze in 15 or 30 minutes to write, no matter what, to be consistent and regimented -- the same 15 or 30 minute every day of the week, while on the other, I'm encouraged to not simply carve out a chunk of time during which to write, but to create an extended session of timelessness -- a meditative, almost spiritual experience.
At first, this seemed contradictory, but they're not. They just need to balance each other. So I'll be trying something new in the next week: I'm still carving out that 30 minutes each day (I've been doing it at 8:30 every night, after I've read to and put my son to bed, because I'm not a morning person (I'm really just not)), but I'll be leaving the first 5, 10, or 15 minutes to prepare myself to write for the rest of that half hour.
The question now is what to do with that "period of transition." I want to say I'll do some kind of focusing meditation; however, I'm guessing that will often be supplanted by a need to review some research before I start writing. A challenge I've found with the write every day model is that you need to be prepared to write -- not psychically prepared, as Berg and Seeger suggest, but prepared with the research in mind. When I do creative writing, that's often not an issue, as it's all in my head. But scholarly writing, but its nature, can't be all in my head. So I've found myself leaving big gaps in my writing these days, notes to myself to "check the literature on this" and "verify this idea." So that transition period may become a literature review period. We'll see.
Note: This post first appeared on the Xavier University Faculty Writing Group's blog.
Gamification in Faculty Development
Gamification is making a boring process interesting by using fun elements from games. Educators have been using gamification even before there was an official term for it.
Gamification gets people excited like no other strategy does, probably because it holds the promise of fun and engagement, and extraordinary results. Research has shown that using gamification in education can increase learner motivation. Incentives, badges, levels, and a spot on a leaderboard are all motivators to learn. They let learners achieve in the short-term by providing visible goals.
A leaderboard that measures progress can motivate learners at all levels. A leaderboard that measures skill can fail the learners who are at the bottom.
Making Knowledge Public Using Educational Technology is the theme for our 2017-18 FaCTS initiative. We decided to add gamification to our week-long FaCTS summer seminar. Unlike past FaCTS initiatives, there were a lot of assignments that had to be completed before the first day of the summer seminar. Additionally, it was important that homework assignments that were due each night of the summer seminar had to be completed to keep us on track.
We setup a friendly EdTech Mage competition between the FaCTS cohort where they could earn XP for completing assignments. Our hope was that the participants would keep up with their assignments, have fun while doing so, and that the competition would give the cohort some ideas about how they might use gamification in their courses.
Because the XP earned by the participants would change often, we wanted an easy way to keep up with the points and have the cohort see the leaderboard rankings. Also, we were not sure how the participants would feel about having their names on the leaderboard, so we asked participants to provide an alias to use instead.
To set up our EdTech Mage leaderboard, I created a self-ranking leaderboard using a pivot table in a Google spreadsheet by following Mariana Garcia’s YouTube video instructions.
Here’s what our EdTech Mage self-ranking leaderboard looks like:
The cohort was provided the following documents related to earning XP:
- EdTech Mage Ranking System (explains the levels and the points needed to achieve each level)
- EdTech Mage Points (explains the assignments/activities you can earn points for and the number of points the assignment/activity is worth)
You can see the incentives that were given as levels were achieved in the EdTech Mage Ranking System document. If everyone completed their summer seminar preparation assignments they should have earned enough points to reach the Magician level. Therefore, on day one a prize was given to the first person who had reached the Magician level. As the week progressed, a prize was awarded to the first person to reach Sorcerer level. On the last day of the summer seminar a prize was awarded to the top three participants on the leaderboard.
Overall, we received positive feedback from the cohort about adding gamification to the summer seminar. Those of us who organized the summer seminar felt adding gamification helped to motivate the participants to complete their assignments in a timely manner and helped to keep us on track.
Gamification may not suit everyone and may not work for every situation. But for those who can find a use for it, the benefits of gamification can be substantial.
For more information about gamification read my "Why Use Gamification in your Courses?” blog post.
If you are using gamification in your courses or in faculty development, we would love to hear about it. Please leave us a comment and let us know how you are gamifying your courses or your faculty development efforts.
Photo Credit: Board Game | CCO
CAT+FD Welcomes New Faculty in Residence
CAT+FD is pleased to welcome Dr. Florastina Payton-Stewart for a three-year term as our new Faculty in Residence.
Dr. Payton-Stewart is an Associate Professor in Chemistry, and is very passionate about teaching, mentoring and advising students. She has served as Associate Director for Center of Undergraduate Research and is a member of the American Chemical Society and the National Organization for the Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers. She is a 2017 Keystone Fellow and recipient of the HERS Institute Leadership Academy STEM scholarship.
She will work with our new faculty, planning and implementing support throughout their first year.
In addition to supporting CAT+FD activities and initiatives, the CAT+FD Faculty in Residence has primary responsibility for enhancing and leading programming for first year faculty. Duties include: assisting in the planning and implementation of new faculty orientation; facilitating new faculty mentoring; organizing and implementing the new faculty "brown bag" series; organizing and implementing a coherent set of workshop open to all faculty but focused on new faculty; assisting in grant writing for CAT+FD initiatives related to first year faculty development; and assisting in the assessment of CAT+FD's programs related to first year faculty development.
We are also glad to announce that Mr. Jeremy Tuman is renewing his role as Faculty in Residence for Service Learning for a two-year term.
FaCTS on Wiki Ed
We were honored and thrilled to read this account of our FaCTS summer seminar from Wiki Ed:
For the ninth year, faculty at Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA) have come together to experiment with new pedagogy in their classrooms. Their group, the Faculty Community of Teaching Scholars (FaCTS), is funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and provides a stipend for participants to explore that year’s theme. The theme for academic year 2017–18 is “Making knowledge public using educational technology.” Dr. Megan Osterbur, who participates in Wiki Ed’s Classroom Program, helped organize this year’s group of selected applicants and saw a clear alignment with Wikipedia assignments. After all, Wikipedia serves as educational technology for student editors and is as public as knowledge gets in 2017.