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.

Teaching for Robust Understanding (TRU) and Deep Learning

One of the most difficult tasks for instructors is to fully engage their students with classroom material. Encouraging a deep and lasting understanding of the underlying structure of material - also known as "deep" learning - has been shown to lead to higher quality learning outcomes than rote memorization of concepts - "surface" learning (Chin & Brown, 2000). Deep learning, however, is difficult to encourage in practice.

In order to assist teachers with this, Alan Schoenfeld, an education researcher at UCLA-Berkeley, has developed a tool called the Teaching for Robust Understanding (TRU) framework. Although initially designed specifically for teaching math, Dr. Schoenfeld has broadened its applicability to other fields. The TRU framework lays out five characteristics of classrooms that promote deep engagement with class material. The five dimensions of powerful classrooms are:

1. The Content
• The content of classrooms should be clear and concise and reflect the most current understanding of the subject matter at hand
2. Cognitive Demand
• The material should be difficult enough to encourage critical thinking and problem-solving, but not so difficult as to overwhelm students
3. Equitable Access to Content
• The classroom should allow for and encourage all students to engage with the material by expressing their opinions and asking questions about the content
4. Agency, Identity, and Authority
• The students themselves, rather than the teacher should be the source of the ideas being discussed
5. Use of Assessment
•  The instructor should be aware of the students' level of understanding of content and adapt the lessons to meet the students where they are as opposed to where they should be based on a set timeline

According to Schoenfeld, these dimensions are not new, but rather a condensed version of the current state of the literature on teaching. The idea behind the framework is to focus on "how students experience [the lesson], not on what the teacher is doing." This is an important distinction in that the students themselves are given the space to generate ideas and discuss their problem-solving strategies with each other rather than strictly following the teacher's lead.

The research team has provided a number of publications and presentations on the project and their findings. The main recommendation from these findings is for teachers to look carefully at the learning experiences provided for students, whether these experiences encourage "deep" learning as opposed to surface skill-based practice and whether student-level assessment can support targeted support for student misconceptions. With the right framework, teachers can find the right balance between academic challenge and enriching, engaging student learning experiences.


Keep updated with OFE:

Evidence for Teaching Excellence Webinar

Beyond the ISQ: Evidence for Teaching Excellence
Tuesday, May 24, 2016, 12:00 noon to 1:15 p.m.
Location: Online (webinar through BlueJeans technology)
Pre-registration is required: contact ofe@unf.edu

Each semester, students complete the Instructional Satisfaction Questionnaire (ISQ) regarding their experiences with the instructor and the course. Faculty frequently find additional information necessary to fully evaluate their teaching practice. Current conversations regarding annual evaluations as well as around promotion and tenure have resulted in a desire to provide evidence of teaching excellence that extends beyond these student satisfaction questionnaires. In the current webinar, Dan Richard, Director of the Office of Faculty Enhancement, and Krista Paulsen, Chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, will discuss options for using alternate forms of evidence for teaching excellence and will provide some examples of how these alternative forms can be used in annual evaluations, promotion and tenure, and other aspects of continuous improvement.
Pre-registration for the webinar is required.
For instructions and connect codes, contact ofe@unf.edu.


Keep updated with OFE:

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?


Keep updated with OFE:

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.

UNF SoTL Symposium - Call for Proposals

SoTL Symposium - Call for Proposals 

The Office of Faculty Enhancement is pleased to announce its 

3^rd Annual Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Symposium.

The Symposium will be held on Monday, April 11^th, 2016, in the Student Union. The SoTL Symposium will be held in conjunction with the 2016 Research Week (April 11^th-15^th), highlighting faculty and student research and scholarship at UNF.

Call for Proposals:

The Office of Faculty Enhancement invites proposals for the 3^rd Annual Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Symposium that fit the theme of “Transformational Learning.”

The deadline for submitting 250 word summaries is March 15^th, 2016.

Submit your proposal summary online athttp://bit.ly/2016SoTLUNFsub

Transformational learning helps students adopt new perspectives, develop complex representations of the world, and find new ways of interacting with others who are different than them. Transformational learning practices may take students to places they had never been before, to see things they had never seen, and to imagine concepts they had never considered. The outcomes of such experiences are integrated connections across disciplinary boundaries, the ability to use complex frameworks, and self-knowledge that supports professional and personal growth. The SoTL Symposium will highlight transformational learning at UNF and invites all faculty who have used these strategies to submit a proposal to present at the symposium. The University of North Florida through the Undergraduate Dean's office has supported Transformational Learning Opportunity (TLO) grants for the past 10 years. Grantees are especially invited to submit a proposal, but receiving a TLO grant is not a requirement to present. Presentations can focus on any area of transformational learning including study abroad, undergraduate research, community-based learning, field experiences, co-op experiences, learning communities, leadership experiences, and others.

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is the systematic investigation of questions related to teaching and student learning characterized by clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate methods, outstanding results, effective communication, and a reflective critique.

In sum, SoTL is about bringing a scholarly approach to teaching practice and student learning.

The deadline for submitting 250 word summaries is March 15^th, 2016.

Submit your proposal summary online at
http://bit.ly/2016SoTLUNFsub

 

More on SoTL:

Hutchings, P., & Shulman, L. S. (1999). The scholarship of teaching: New elaborations, new developments. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning,31(5), 10-15. 

Glassick, C. E., & Huber, M. T., (1997). Scholarship assessed: Evaluation of the professoriate. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. SF: Jossey-Bass.

http://www.unf.edu/ofe/teaching_learning/SoTL.aspx​

Keep updated with OFE:

Student Evaluations of Teaching Useful - in Context

Students' evaluations of professors have great value for administrators who seek an accurate
assessment of the quality of teaching at their universities. This is in turn drives their decisions regarding faculty promotion, pay rates, and termination.

One of the problems with placing such heavy weight on student evaluations in making decisions about faculty employment is that students don't always give valid feedback. Students, like most people, don't always play fair. Students will sometimes give poor scores (not to mention rude comments) in evaluations, not because the scores are warranted, but because they felt the class was too challenging or made them work too hard. When these ratings are included in aggregate, they punish professors who simply teach difficult courses or demand high standards from their students.

How can student evaluations be more useful? A recent article outlines some suggestions on using student evaluations of teaching more effectively. The best ideas seem to revolve around cross-checking teaching quality using measurements other than student evaluations alone. For instance, finding innovative ways to assess how much students are learning by the end of their courses, rather than asking them to solely self-report how much they liked the experience of the course, is one way to supplement assessment. Other ideas that have been successfully implemented include classroom observations (both scheduled and surprise) by administrators or senior faculty, spot-checking faculty practices feedback on assignments, and including multiple iterations of student evaluations throughout the semester to give professors a chance to adjust their strategies. The Office of Faculty Enhancement at UNF provides a number of alternatives to end-of-semester student evaluations.

Context is very important in using results from student evaluations, especially because research has shown positive correlations between students' expected grades and their evaluation scores. Essentially, student evaluations are important because they provide direct feedback on how students feel about their professors' ability to educate them. However, they do not tell the whole story, must be taken in their rightful context, and need accompaniment to be used as a key metric in faculty assessment.

Testing Critical Thinking using Multiple Choice Questions - Part 2

The General Education Program and the Office of Faculty Enhancement invites faculty to a continuing discussion and workshop on using multiple-choice questions to assess critical thinking. 

Teaching and assessing critical thinking in student work is a priority for many faculty. Faculty typically assess critical thinking through essay test questions and lengthy assignments, both of which are time consuming to grade. Multiple choice questions are quick to grade but typically are constructed to test recall and comprehension. 

In the first workshop of this series, participants evaluated multiple-choice questions on whether they assessed two important skills associated with critical thinking, analysis and evaluation. 

In this workshop, participants will work collaboratively in crafting multiple-choice test items that assess analysis and evaluation. This event will be especially helpful to those teaching General Education courses that satisfy the Critical Thinking requirement. Participants are encouraged to bring with them 3-5 multiple choice questions that they would like to convert to critical thinking questions or that they would like to modify and enhance to assess critical thinking. 
RSVP is required, email ofe@unf.edu 

Testing Critical Thinking using Multiple Choice Questions
Friday, December 4th, 2015, 11:30-1:00 p.m.
COAS Dean's Conference Room, Bld 51, Room 3201
RSVP required, email ofe@unf.edu

Is Your Grading Biased? Beware the Halo Effect

Humans are prone to taking mental short cuts, it's part of the physiology of our brains. We are exposed to so much information throughout our lives and from day-to-day that it is necessary for our brain to utilize mental short-cuts (i.e., heuristics) to help sort information and to determine what should grab one's attention. Heuristics are mental guidelines you create from your experience to help you reach an answer more quickly than by algorithm searching through every possible answer. The only problem is that this quick thinking can also bias cognition and decision-making, and grading is no exception.

The Halo effect is one form of heuristic bias that impacts everyone's decision making. It happens when we find good qualities in an individual and, through experience, incorporate those good qualities as part of our perception of the person. This biases the way we perceive their actions, whether good or bad. For instance, attractive individuals are often perceived to be more intelligent, talented, and generally good more often than individuals of average attractiveness.

The Halo effect can produce biases in grading just like any other area of judgment. In a previous post we discussed briefly how faculty will frequently grade students based on their personal characteristics and past performance rather than solely on their performance on the work in question. Faculty may begin reading an assignment, stop and think, 'so-and-so usually does great work' and allow that judgment to alter the way they grade the assignment.

This bias in judgment and decision-making process is exactly what researchers found at work in a study examining the Halo effect in subjective student assessments. The researchers randomly assigned faculty to observe a student perform either very poorly or very well on an oral presentation, and then graded the student on a written assignment. When grading the exact same student on the exact same writing assignment, faculty members gave substantially higher grades when the students had done well in a presentation before being graded and lower grades when the students had done poorly before being graded. Other than giving either a poor or good oral performance, the student was the same and the quality of the written assignment was the same. And yet the grades were different. Prior experience with students will bias the way faculty members grade students on future assessments, but by being aware of this "Halo effect", faculty can more effectively protect against bias. Making student assessments anonymous is another effective was to reduce biased grading.

Study Suggests Student Self-Assessment Is an Untapped Resource

RM Tamrakar; https://flic.kr/p/eiUxP1

Students are constantly being academically assessed,usually by professors, in the form of exams and quizzes. Students are rarely given the opportunity, however, to assess their own work. Researchers found that students who voluntarily self-assess become better able to make accurate judgement about their own work. A recent study showed that, as students continued to voluntarily self-assess their work, the judgments they made about their work became more closely aligned with those of tutors who were experts in assessment for the particular subject.

What does this imply for higher education faculty? It looks like it is a good idea to allow your students to self-assess more often. Although this study evaluated voluntary (self-selected) student self-assessment and not the effects of student self-assessment overall, it is theoretically likely that self-assessment would improve students' academic judgments of their own work regardless of whether they have chosen to self-assess on their own. Asking students to assess their own work in class or on assignments gives them a chance to develop assessment skills that they would otherwise have no opportunity to practice.

Self-assessment practice pays dividends post-graduation, when evaluation of one's own task performance does not come until after the performance is completed and cannot be taken back. Being able to accurately assess the quality of one's own work before putting it into action is critical in the real-world, where there are few second chances. Better self-assessment in college work could save professors more time, as students are better able to determine what areas need improvement before turning in completed work. 

Post-graduate Well-being, Engagement, More Impacted by College Experiences than by College Type

"College is what you make of it" they say. Recent data from Gallup suggests that the qualities of universities where students enroll, such as whether they are public or private, large or small, very selective or less selective, have less impact on students' lives after graduation than is often thought. In fact, what seem to have the greatest impact on students' post-graduate levels of well-being and engagement in their work are six elements of the college experience in particular.

The quality of interaction between faculty and students was important for life after college, with the following experiences being the most highly related to positive long-term outcomes: graduates feeling supported by professors who cared about them, having professors that made them excited for learning course material, and having professors who encouraged their goals and dreams. Other impactful experiences seem to center more on translating knowledge learned in the classroom to practical settings, such as working on a long-term (at least one semester) project, having an internship or job that allowed them to apply what they had learned, and being actively involved in extra-curricular activities. Unfortunately, only 3% of graduates polled claimed to strongly agree that they had had all six of the most impactful experiences during their time at college.

Given this data, it seems that many collegiate measurements traditionally associated with well-being and work engagement of graduates, like rejection rates or student/faculty ratios, may be missing what can make college effective in preparing students for happy and productive lives post-graduation. Beneficial long-term outcomes stem from richness and depth in areas of the college experience like support and connection with faculty and hands-on opportunities that bridge the gap between classroom learning and practical application.

For STEM Instructors, Impartial Observation May Bring Needed Perspective

In any professional pursuit, it is often very difficult to improve performance without some form of assessment from an impartial observer. Receiving feedback from a colleague who is knowledgeable, yet not so deeply entrenched in the everyday context or style of a practice is essential to genuinely assessing strengths and weaknesses.

Instructors of STEM courses can benefit from this practice as well. In fact, third party observation may be especially important for STEM professors. STEM material is notoriously difficult to learn, and because of the difficulty of the material, the difference between effective and ineffective teaching may be more noticeable and result in greater changes in performance compared to other fields. Asking a colleague to provide perspective by sitting in on a class and observing your teaching methods, without necessarily even providing evaluation, may be eye-opening for some instructors. Using a set of classroom observation protocols for undergraduate STEM courses is a step that can help instructors breathe fresh life into their communication of STEM material and provide students with a better learning experience. When instructors discover what beneficial or detrimental habits that they were previously unaware of, they can begin to take action and adjust their teaching style for the better.

Exam Cramming Common, But Ineffective

Photo: D. Sharon Pruitt 

When it comes to undergraduates' plans for preparing for exams,
the strategy is often to ignore the "problem" of studying until the test is imminent. Students then study as much as possible in the span of one or two days to "learn" the material in time for the exam. The problem with this practice, called cramming, is that it does not work very well. This is especially true for students who are inconsistent with class attendance, as they really are left to learn all the covered material in the day or two prior to assessment.

Compared to the strategy of incremental learning, where students study recently covered material in a smaller amount every night or several times a week, cramming simply does not produce preferable short-term nor long-term results. The larger differences between incremental learning and cramming are found in performance is in long-term retention. When students cram, they are not adequately elaborating on the material they want to learn. Rather, they are only doing what is necessary to keep the material fresh in their minds for a short time. Once they have finished their exam, that information is no longer elaborated on with any additional repetition and, thus, disappears from memory fairly quickly. Incremental learning is done with more manageable amounts of information  across many repetitions, and on a much larger time scale, allowing for elaboration and consolidation that makes information much more likely to be assimilated into long-term memory.

Students will always be drawn to cramming, as it often get results that are "good enough." Students may benefit from instructors encouraging students to abandon cramming so that the students remember material from their course after final exams are turned in.

Testing Critical Thinking using Multiple Choice Questions

Teaching and assessing critical thinking in student work is a priority for many faculty. Faculty typically assess critical thinking through essay test questions and lengthy assignments, both of which are time consuming to grade. Multiple choice questions are quick to grade but typically are constructed to test recall and comprehension. This workshop will provide guidance and practice in crafting multiple-choice test items that assess higher-order and critical thinking skills of analysis and evaluation. 
Testing Critical Thinking using Multiple Choice Questions
Friday, October 30th, 2015, 1:00-2:00 p.m.
Biology Building 59, Room 2701
RSVP to ofe@unf.edu

This event will be especially helpful to those teaching General Education courses that satisfy the Critical Thinking requirement. 
Participants are asked to post (up to 5) example critical thinking multiple choice questions prior to joining the workshop. Contact Dan Richard drichard@unf.edu for details.

Transformational Learning Workshop

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 2016-2017 (July 1 2016 - June 30, 2017) is Friday, October 16, 2015 by 5:00 p.m. Find more details on the TLO Application webpage.

Designing Successful Transformational Learning Opportunities (TLOs)

Wednesday, September 23, 2015, 3:00-4:30 p.m.

Student Union, Building 58W, Room 3805

RSVP to ofe@unf.edu

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 Measurement of Transformational Learning

Wednesday, September 30, 2015, 2:00-3:30 p.m.

Student Union, Building 58W, Room 3805
RSVP to ofe@unf.edu

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.

Beyond the ISQ: New Models, New Methods

Beyond the ISQ: New Models, New Methods
12:00 noon - 1:30 p.m., Friday, April 10, 2015
Building 12, Room 2405
RSVP to ofe@unf.edu
Admission is free. Lunch provided for those who RSVP

Instructional Satisfaction Questionnaires (ISQ) are used ubiquitously in evaluating teaching effectiveness, yet may people question the validity and usefulness of such instruments in assessing quality teaching and learning. Moreover, in the Fall of 2013, UNF moved to a fully online ISQ process. The online administration of the ISQ raised concerns about response rates and the validity of this form of administration. In this session, the Office of Faculty Enhancement (OFE) will present evidence from a comparison of online administration to face-to-face administration of the ISQ. In addition, faculty will discuss different ways to demonstrate teaching effectiveness and student learning that go beyond the use of the ISQ. Topics will include quantitative approaches to learning data, pre-post strategies, and qualitative assessment of evidence of student learning. Participants will be encouraged to find strategies that will work in their own courses to demonstrate teaching effectiveness and provide assessment of student learning. Faculty are encouraged to come and join the discussion. Lunch will be provided for those who RSVP to  ofe@unf.edu.
12:00 noon - 1:30 p.m., Friday, April 10, 2015
Building 2, Room 2002
RSVP to ofe@unf.edu
Admission is free. Lunch provided for those who RSVP

Higher Order Thinking: Testing Deep Learning with Cognitive Maps

The Office of Faculty Enhancement invites faculty to attend an upcoming workshop on higher order thinking. 

Higher Order Thinking: Testing Deep Learning with Cognitive Maps
Monday, February 9th, 2015, 3:00-4:30 p.m.
Student Union, 58W, 3804
RSVP at ofe@unf.edu
An essential quality of higher education is providing opportunities for students to develop higher order thinking as they approach a variety of topics. Faculty construct assignments that will challenge students to think beyond the obvious and construct complex, evidence-based, and reflective products that demonstrate this higher order thinking style. It can be difficult and time-consuming to detect subtitles of higher order thinking in student work. In this workshop, faculty will share models of assessing higher order thinking through concept maps and structured observation. Come and share your ideas about higher order learning and pick-up some time-saving tools for evaluating complex learning. 
RSVP at ofe@unf.edu

SoTL Symposium - Call for Proposals

The Office of Faculty Enhancement is pleased to announce its 2^nd Annual Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Symposium. The Symposium will be held on Wednesday, April 15^th, 2015. The SoTL Symposium will be held in conjunction with the 2015 Research Week (April 13^th-17^th), highlighting faculty and student research and scholarship at UNF.

The theme for this year’s SoTL Symposium is “Spanning Boundaries.” Teaching effectively and learning much often requires both teachers and learners to reach across conceptual, relational, and social boundaries that often constrain thinking and understanding. When educators encourage students to reach across those boundaries, and when educators reach across those boundaries themselves, educators and students discover that significant learning and transformational learning is possible.

Call for Proposals:

The Office of Faculty Enhancement invites proposals for the 2^nd Annual Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Symposium that fit the theme of “Spanning Boundaries.” Proposals addressing international education, community-based learning, transformational learning, interdisciplinary approaches, and other innovative teaching strategies are encouraged.

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is the systematic investigation of questions related to teaching and student learning characterized by clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate methods, outstanding results, effective communication, and a reflective critique.

In sum, SoTL is about bringing a scholarly approach to teaching practice and student learning.

The deadline for submitting 250 word summaries HAS BEEN EXTENDED to February 17^th, 2015.

Submit your proposal summary online at 
http://bit.ly/2015SoTLUNFsub

Symposium Registration:
Register Now for the SoTL Symposium! (click or copy link below)
http://bit.ly/2015SoTLUNFReg

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More on SoTL:

Hutchings, P., & Shulman, L. S. (1999). The scholarship of teaching: New elaborations, new developments. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning,31(5), 10-15. 

Glassick, C. E., & Huber, M. T., (1997). Scholarship assessed: Evaluation of the professoriate. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. SF: Jossey-Bass.
http://www.unf.edu/ofe/teaching_learning/SoTL.aspx

Course Redesign Call For Applications - Problem-Based Learning

Course Redesign for Effective Learning (CREL) –

Problem-Based Learning Institute

The Office of Faculty Enhancement (OFE), in collaboration with Undergraduate Studies, invites full-time faculty to participate in a summer course redesign institute focused on problem-based learning. 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 2015 or Spring 2016 course (or design a new course) in ways that will maximize student learning.

Deadline for Applications: Tuesday, February 3rd, 2015  

Interested faculty should complete the online application at: http://unf.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_3sXvOhEs6L0V7q5

The focus of this year’s course redesign program will be Problem-based Learning (PBL). Problem-based learning is a teaching strategy in which students are presented with problems and issues that need to be resolved. As part of the learning process, students work actively in collaborative teams to address the issue. As a result, students not only learn broad-based content knowledge but develop deep, authentic critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

OFE invites UNF faculty who are interested in integrating problem-based learning into their course or to enhance the problem-based learning already implemented to apply for the CREL-PBL program. Such proposals could include student projects, research activities as part of a course, community-based learning, or other forms of group projects.

The UNF faculty selected to participate in the CREL and who produce a redesigned product will receive a $500 stipend. In addition, OFE will cover travel to the Worchester Polytechnic Institute’s 2015 Problem-Based Learning Institute, scheduled for June 25^th-27^th (travel starting on June 24^th). Faculty must participate in the WPI Institute to receive the stipend.

For information about the Problem-Based Learning Institute, visit the institute webpage at: http://wpi.edu/+2015institute

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. Preference will be given to faculty teaching lower division courses and for courses offered as part of the General Education program. 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-PBL Project Proposal Application

Interested faculty should complete the online application at:

http://unf.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_3sXvOhEs6L0V7q5

The deadline for applications is February  3^rd.

Engagement Scholarship Program - Call for Proposals

The Center for Community-Based Learning and the Office of Faculty Enhancement have announced a new program for community engagement research. See the announcement below.

The Engagement Scholarship Program is a multidisciplinary, professional community of practice focusing on the scholarship of engagement and concentrating on two specific categories of the scholarship of engagement: community-based research and the scholarship of teaching/learning relating to community-based pedagogy. For more information, including eligibility and the application, visit the website. The application deadline is 5 p.m. Friday, Nov. 21.

Contact: Heather Burk at hburk@unf.edu or (904) 620-3549

Website: http://www.unf.edu/ccbl/Engagement_Scholarship_Program.aspx