With a little more than a month left to prepare for the fall classes, we all may be looking for help on just how to make all this work — whether you’re teaching in-person in a socially distanced classroom, fully online, or some hybrid permutation of in-person/remote.
FDI Recordings
The June Track One Faculty Development Institute ran over two weeks and included a daily coffee hour, workshops, readings, and assignments — a good model of a mix between the synchronous and asynchronous online learning. More than 150 faculty from the NY6 schools participated, including nearly 90 from Union. If you were unable to join us for those sessions, recordings of the workshops are available here.
NYU Steinhardt called Teach Camp
Teach Camp is a 3-day (August 11th to the 13th), conference-like event intended to prepare and excite instructors for the unusual fall semester heading our way. The roughly 30 “camp classes” range from the more technical like how to use the Learning Management System, to more exploratory and pedagogically-focused discussions on how to stimulate student participation in the remote environment, or how to create dynamic and cooperative group-learning experiences.
Here are some examples of our upcoming camp classes:
- Accessible Teaching in the Time of COVID-19
- Experiential Learning: Creating “Field Trips” in the Remote Environment
- Interactive Improvisation for Community Building
- Tips For Giving Great Online Presentations
We would like to extend this opportunity to the Faculty Resource Network, and welcome you to join any Teach Camp class you might find intriguing. If you’d like to see the full lineup of courses, please complete this form and to be added to the Teach Camp website (which is protected behind the NYU domain). All you need is a zoom account to register for these classes. Registration opens on July 31st and has no participation cap!
Any questions about Teach Camp should be directed to Kelsey Buttendorf, kab716@nyu.edu.
Skidmore Sessions
Our neighbors to the north have invited us, along with other NY6 colleagues, to participate in several sessions this summer and early fall. The first of these is a repeat of Derek Bruff’s workshop on Active Learning in Hybrid and Physically Distanced Classrooms. I attended the first of these in late July and found it quite helpful. The second session is being run by Flower Darby who is the coauthor with Jim Lang of Small Teaching Online. Both events require registration.
August 11 from 1:00-2:15 pm: Active Learning in Hybrid and Physically Distanced Classrooms with Derek Bruff
This fall, many of us will be teaching in classrooms where some of our students are in the room, but sitting six feet apart and wearing masks, while others participate in class through video-conference. Although this is a challenging teaching environment, there are some strategies we can use to engage our students, both in-person and remote, in active learning. In this online workshop, we will explore (and practice!) teaching approaches and technologies for making the best of hybrid and physically distanced classrooms.
Register here: https://sched.co/dUFn
September 23 from 10:00-11:00 am: Emotional Presence in Online Teaching for Increased Student Engagement, Persistence, and Success with Flower Darby
Online classes have a reputation for being dry, boring, and unengaging. Both faculty and students struggle to create and participate in highly interactive online learning experiences, which in turn negatively impacts engagement and motivation to persevere for all involved. Emotion science offers a powerful tool to address this challenge.
We’ll examine the research on how emotion and cognition are linked and how emotions impact our online teaching and learning experiences, based on the Community of Inquiry framework. We’ll remind ourselves that emotions move us, and we’ll explore ways in which emotions are powerfully interrelated to cognitive processes such as attention, motivation, and memory. We’ll present practical strategies for putting the power of emotions to work for us in online classes to help us capture and hold our students’ attention, better engage our students in their learning, and ultimately help them persist and succeed.
Register here: https://sched.co/dZWP
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Teaching Newsletter
Among many other sources I’ve found these weekly newsletters from the Chronicle quite helpful in thinking about how to design courses and experiences for the coming year. You may want to subscribe.