Interactive Teaching Strategies: Engaging All Students

Wednesday, April 5, 2017
12:00-1:00 pm
Click to register

This webinar will present a variety of teaching methods and strategies designed to engage students in the learning process. From "the onion ball" to "mission possible," participants will be introduced to up to 10 different strategies that can be modified and adapted to meet the needs of diverse content areas ranging from math to history, science to psychology, and beyond. Such strategies will help the content come alive and become meaningful to students as they participate in active learning.

This session is presented by Dr. Elissa Barr, Professor, Public Health, a faculty fellow in the Office of Faculty Enhancement.

Webinar log-in details below.

To join the Meeting:

https://bluejeans.com/432563653

To join via Browser:

https://bluejeans.com/432563653/browser

To join with Lync:

https://bluejeans.com/432563653/lync

Meeting ID : 432563653

To join via phone:

1)  Dial:

                +1.408.740.7256 or

                +1.888.240.2560  or

                +1.408.317.9253

                (see all numbers - http://bluejeans.com/numbers )

2)  Enter Conference ID : 432563653

For connection questions, contact Erin Kendrick, erin.kendrick@unf.edu, OFE Events Coordinator

Wednesday, April 5, 2017
12:00-1:00 pm
Click to register

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Faculty Innovation Team (FIT) Meeting

Monday, April 3, 2017
4:00-5:00 pm

Faculty Lounge (16/4201) 

Click to register

Faculty are invited to join the Faculty Innovation Team, a group of UNF faculty who care about student engagement and student learning and who are not satisfied with just getting students through a course. We will share ideas, post instructional videos, and participate in collaborative teams to support each other in classroom observation.

Monday, April 3, 2017
4:00-5:00 pm

Faculty Lounge (16/4201)

Click to register

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Interactive Teaching Strategies: Engaging All Students

Wednesday, March 29, 2017
12:00-1:00 p.m.

Online Learning Lab,Building 10, Room 1102

Click to Register

This interactive session will present a variety of teaching methods and strategies designed to engage students in the learning process. From "the onion ball," to "mission possible," participants will be actively involved in learning and practicing up to 10 different strategies that can be modified and adapted to meet the needs of diverse content areas ranging from math to history, and science to psychology. Such strategies will help the content come alive and become meaningful to students as they participate in active learning.

This session is presented by Dr. Elissa Barr, Professor of Public Health and Faculty Fellow with the Office of Faculty Enhancement

Wednesday, March 29, 2017
12:00-1:00 p.m.

Online Learning Lab,Building 10, Room 1102

Click to Register

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Transformational Learning Opportunity (TLO) Workshops

Transformational Learning Opportunity (TLO) Workshops

The Office of Undergraduate Studies and the Office of Faculty Enhancement (OFE) will be hosting two workshops to help faculty plan for Transformational Learning Opportunities (TLOs) and to apply for the TLO Grant Program. The first session will provide an overview of the program and foundational perspectives. The second session will provide a hands-on workshop for developing effective assessment strategies.


The TLO Application Deadline for projects taking place in 2017-2018 (July 1, 2017-June 30, 2018) is Friday, October 28, 2016. Find more details on the TLO Application webpage.

Designing Successful Transformational Learning Opportunities (TLOs)

Friday, September 30, 2016, 12:30-2:00 p.m.

Social Sciences Building 51, Room 1205

RSVP to ofe@unf.edu or contact Dan Richard with inquires.

Faculty and staff interested in applying for Transformational Learning Opportunity (TLO) funds are invited to attend the TLO workshop titled, "Designing Successful Transformational Learning Opportunities (TLOs)." This session will provide an overview of the TLO concept, some examples of past successful TLOs, and guidelines for applying for financial support.   

Manageable and Meaningful Assessment of Transformational Learning Experiences

Tuesday, October 4, 2016, 1:30-3:00 p.m.

OFE/FA Conference Room, Building 16, Room 3108 
RSVP to ofe@unf.edu or contact Dan Richard with inquires.

UNF Faculty who apply for TLO funding design a wide variety of truly transformational learning experiences for students. Designing an assessment plan both enhances the TLO application and provides an important way to maximize student benefit from the experience.  Yet assessing transformational learning objectives can be difficult because the objectives can be difficult to define, and because TLOs may not include graded assignments in the same way as other classes do. This workshop will help participants define transformational learning objectives and develop manageable assessment strategies for determining the impact of the TLO experience. Faculty and staff interested in applying for Transformational Learning Opportunity (TLO) funds are especially encouraged to attend.

How Can Profs Keep Students' Attention? Put Them in Charge

It's important for faculty to work their hardest to ensure their courses, especially when they are long or comprised of tedious or difficult subject matter, hold their students' attention and keep them engaged. Because it can be so easy for students to drift mentally in class (research purports that college students retain only 10% of material covered in lecture-based courses), it is critical that faculty employ new and creative ways to hold engagement high and get students involved and thinking critically.

Raymond Benton, Jr., a professor at Loyola University Chicago, has managed to put a new spin on an active-learning classic. In what is known as a "jigsaw classroom", students are divided into subgroups within the class, with each subgroup learning a specific topic that they then teach to the rest of the class. Each subgroup member becomes an expert in their allotted area, and the subgroups must educate each other in order to complete an overarching assignment that all groups must complete as a class.

In Benton's version, the "jigsaw classroom" puts students in control of more than learning and communicating information in a given course topic. In an example he provides, a small class of students are given three assigned readings, all of which teach student must read before class, and are randomly assigned to a reading group and a discussion group. In each reading group, the students discuss one of the three articles thoroughly, comparing their own conclusions and understandings of the article. They become experts in that one article, knowing that the other group members will ask questions about that article they will be responsible for answering. Next, they discuss what they did not fully understand about the other two articles and form a list of questions for the other groups. The students then move to discussion groups, in which article "experts" are represented equally, and ask and answer questions and engage in conversations about the articles. Students then reconvene in their original reading groups to compare the answers they received from other groups and share how they answered questions about their group's article. Finally, the professor regroups the entire class to have a class discussion debriefing what they learned about all the articles.

This method is rich with opportunities for active critical thinking and deep levels of processing that will allow students not only to pay attention, but also to engage with the course material in ways they would not remotely approach in a traditional lecture.

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Reforming Physics Education: What’s the story?

2015-2016 UNF Physics Colloquium Series presents:

Reforming Physics Education: What’s the story?
by
Dr. H. Vincent Kuo
Teaching Professor of Physics, Colorado School of Mines
Friday, April 8, 2016
2:00-2:50 p.m. 
Science & Engineering Building, Building 50, Room 1202
Refreshments will be provided

 Much has been argued in recent years for the benefits of experiential learning environments, but how are such contexts operationalized? What are the elements that can characterize such reforms? In this talk I will discuss the differences between teaching and learning environments, present some examples of what the physics education and research communities had contributed in this arena, and describe the adaptation that Colorado School of Mines had implemented, as well as identify some of the unintended consequences of our implementation.
All those interested in teaching within the STEM disciplines or those interested in teaching innovations in general are encouraged to attend.

Alternatives To Traditional Final Exams Encourage Student Engagement, Learning

When students leave college classrooms at the end of the semester, what are they really taking away with them? Too often, courses culminate in a student turning in a traditional multiple-choice final exam, quietly muttering "Thank you" to the professor, and walking out of the lecture hall having learned little of substance that will stay with them for more than a couple months. The suggestion to exchange final exams for semester 'finales' may seem far-fetched, but the idea might have practical value.

The most common reason students walk out of a course without having learned meaningfully is that they never made course material relevant to themselves. Past research indicates that students experience greater levels of motivation to learn when their teachers make content personally relevant to the students. Personalizing knowledge by putting it into one's own context is all that it takes for students to understand more deeply, rather than just hearing information, memorizing it, and regurgitating it without having ever really thought about it.

There are plenty of examples as to what a semester "finale" might look like. In general, they all focus on giving students an ultimate experience they can use to make course material personal and practical for them- something they can take with them into their future. The idea is to get students thinking,especially on the last day, so they can leave the course still mulling over what they've learned and how it can continue to apply to their intellectual life. Presenting students with just one particularly novel, perplexing question, for example, and asking them to solve it within a confined time is one way to change the final assessment paradigm. Perhaps instead of a final exam, the last day of the course could be a rubric-outlined debate or a collaborative assignment.

The point is, there is a serious lack of genuineness and creativity in the way most professors assess their students at the end of their courses. Final exams as they stand now often make the end of the semester feel more like a chore than a crescendo of an academic experience. By adding a little novelty, a little intrigue, and a little excitement, professors can create an end of the semester assessment that students will be talking about, and thinking about, long after the course is finished.

How do you add creativity and engagement in your final exams?


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Using Rubrics Adds Depth to Analytical Learning

In recent years, higher education has moved in a utilitarian direction, refocusing on the purported purpose of post-secondary education- preparing its students to live and work after graduation.

Many faculty have begun to show a preference of active learning, a strategy that fosters critical and analytical thinking about material and its application. Recently, support has risen for utilizing rubrics as a way to support effective teaching. Rubrics, scholars suggest, have many uses in university classrooms to stimulate active learning by increasing the quality and quantity of student performance.

Rubrics bring clarity and order to assignments that are more subjective and require more abstract thought than multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank style questions. However, the benefits of using rubrics can go much further than that. Rubrics help to ensure quality by providing criteria for what different levels of manipulation and understanding of material are worth in terms of grading. Best of all, because students have a means to assess their work as they are completing it, they engage in the critical thinking required for self-evaluation.

Rubrics can be used in creative ways to boost energy in the classroom and enable students to view material from novel standpoints. For instance, a rubric might be used as a means for students to think like their professor if they are asked to write a rubric for their own assignment or use a rubric to grade their own work or those of their peers. When students create rubrics or grade using a rubric, they are applying course knowledge in a more complex and applied way than a typical assignment may require. Classroom practices that include rubrics hold great potential in stimulating deeper levels of thought and engagement with material by forcing students to think analytically and critically.

Gateway Course Conference in Atlanta - Call for Applications

The Office of Faculty Enhancement invites faculty who teach, coordinate and/or develop curriculum for high enrollment courses and/or high risk gateway courses to attend an upcoming conference on gateway courses in Atlanta, GA.

The John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education will be hosting a conference on Improving Institutional and Student Performance in Gateway Courses. The conference will be held on April 3rd-5th, 2016, at the Grand Hyatt Buckhead, Atlanta, GA.

Gateway (high enrollment, high risk) courses provide unique challenges for students who may be unprepared for the rigor of the course or who may have difficulty progressing in their curriculum plan if they do not succeed. Helping students succeed in these gateway courses improves student retention and graduation.

The Office of Faculty Enhancement will support the travel and collaboration of 3-5 UNF faculty members to attend the conference and present what they have learned to the UNF faculty community. Faculty interested in attending and being a part of the UNF innovation team, contact Dan Richard at drichard@unf.edu with a brief statement of your interest in the conference and in gateway courses. Preference for funding will be given to faculty who teach gateway courses. 
Faculty interested in OFE providing travel support (funding) will need to contact drichard@unf.edu with your interest by February 29th. 

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FLIP Learning Community Spring 2016 Meetings

FLIP – Flipping Learning Innovation Panel

A flipped classroom is one in which lectures are delivered online and face-to-face time is devoted to student projects and homework.

If you are interested in learning more or if you have experimented with various forms of class flipping, this faculty learning community (FLC) is for you. Come and share your ideas and hear from others who are working on flipping their classrooms.
RSVP to ofe@unf.edu

We will be continuing our monthly meetings this semester, Spring 2016.
The dates of the upcoming meetings are:
Friday, February 12, 9:30 a.m. 
Friday, March 11, 9:30 a.m. 
Friday, April 8, 9:30 a.m. 

We will meet in the Office of Faculty Enhancement (Building 16, Room 3108) conference room. Here is a map: http://bit.ly/unfmapofe

On Friday, Feb 12th, Georgette Dumont, Assistant Professor in Political Science & Public Administration, will present on capturing short video segments for flipping the classroom. Come and join the conversation.



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Call for Applications - Course Redesign Summer Institute

Call For Applications:

Course Redesign for Effective Learning (CREL)

  

The Office of Faculty Enhancement (OFE) invites full-time UNF faculty to participate in a summer course redesign institute. The purpose of this institute is to provide faculty with the time, resources, information, and collaborative support needed to revise and redesign a selected Fall 2016 or Spring 2017 course (or design a new course) in ways that will maximize student learning.

Deadline for Applications: Tuesday, March 15th, 2016  

Interested faculty should complete the online application at: http://bit.ly/crel2016

  

OFE invites all full-time UNF faculty who are interested in enhancing student learning apply for the CREL program. Such proposals could include student projects, research activities as part of a course, community-based learning, or other forms of engaged learning.

The UNF faculty selected to participate in the CREL and who produce a redesigned product will receive a $1000 stipend.

The dates for the 2016 CREL workshops are Tuesday, June 21^st, Thursday, June 23^rd, and Tuesday, June 28^th.

The Review Process

The proposals will be reviewed by the OFE Director in consultation with the Faculty Association’s Faculty Enhancement Committee.

Applications will be reviewed according to the following criteria:

·                The proposed change represents a significant change to the structure, organization, or activities associated with the course.

·                The proposed change is reasonable given the time constraints.

·                The proposed change is likely to affect student learning positively.

Faculty members who have been awarded summer research and teaching grants are eligible to participate in CREL.  For those who have received a summer teaching grant, the CREL project proposal should involve a different course than that on which the summer teaching grant is based.  Preference will be given to first-time participants in OFE’s course redesign workshops. Applications from a variety of perspectives and methods are encouraged. Selection of proposals will ensure a broad participation across disciplines on campus.

Preparing the CREL Proposal Application

Interested faculty should complete the online application at:

http://bit.ly/crel2016  

The deadline for applications is March 15th.​

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