All posts by Sarah Brown

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About Sarah Brown

Sarah has worked in the College of Education and with FITS since 2010. She also teaches in the Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse department. She earned her undergraduate degrees in Secondary English Education and Writing at the University of Findlay in Ohio, and after teaching at Miami Valley Career Technology Center in Dayton, Ohio for two years, she moved to Chicago to earn her MA in Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse at DePaul.

When she’s not teaching or testing out a new technology, Sarah runs, crochets, and cooks.

Turning Deadlines From Enemies to Energizers
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Turning Deadlines From Enemies Into Energizers

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece, James M. Lang and Kristi Rudenga discuss combining intrinsic motivation strategies with extrinsic motivators that have come under scrutiny, like deadlines, grades, and punitive course policies. 

These recommendations speak to the moment many educators find themselves in: We’re no longer in the acute phase of the pandemic, where instructors and students are doing the best they can amidst historically challenging circumstances that necessitated changes to many educational norms. Now, we’re grappling with a gray area that’s just as challenging, as we try to decide which educational norms need to be reinstated and which “pandemic lessons” should be integrated into our practice moving forward.

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Brain controlled by puppet strings attached to a hand
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Mind Control: Research on how what we think changes the way our bodies respond

Like many others out there, I’ve become a bit of a podcast obsessive. I know that we can’t really multitask, but when I’m able to go for a run and engage in some learning while I’m running, it almost feels like I’m able to get a two-for-one experience.

Last year, Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast introduced me to Dr. Andrew Huberman, whose Huberman Lab podcast introduced me to Dr. Alia Crum. After hearing Dr. Crum describe the different ways she approaches researching the physiological impacts of mindset shifts, I did a deep(er) dive into her work to better understand how she’s able to empirically capture the ways our bodies respond to our brains learning new information.

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Considering New Options for Responding to Student Writing

In her recent Computers and Composition article on teaching writing using Learning Management Systems (LMSs), Allison Hutchison unpacked the “wicked problem” faculty face when using an institutionally-required system. Hutchison’s literature review outlines how faculty in the field of rhetoric and composition have critiqued the technologies that mediate writing instruction; indeed, this type of scholarship has become increasingly prevalent, as digital platforms for composing seem to be ever increasing (and thus ever more frequently appearing in our classrooms).

I’ve attempted to apply Hutchison’s framework for identifying the problem, the needs, and the potential solutions (albeit in a much simpler format) to a particular strand of practice in the writing classroom: providing feedback on assignments. DePaul recently adopted two technologies that can be used for this purpose, and both contain affordances and limitations that instructors should consider when adopting. The descriptions below are perhaps more utilitarian and less of a critique, but given that this is a blog post, and not an academic article, that framing seemed more…well, useful.  Continue reading →

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Strategies for Revising Recorded Lectures

Few teaching tasks are as loathsome as re-recording videos for your online course. 

In fact, I’ve been trying to come up with potential comparisons for about 20 minutes, and the closest I’ve come is the sinking feeling in your stomach when you survey the stack of final papers/projects that loom before you during finals week. While a root canal might be preferable to re-recording course videos, here are two practical recommendations that helped me when I set out to complete this undesirable task: Continue reading →

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Change Agent Training: Part 2

In my previous post, I wrote about how a recent moving experience prompted me to rethink the parts of my job where I encourage colleagues to consider new or different teaching methods. Since I’m a “yes, let’s always turn over a new leaf!” person by nature, moving helped me gain some empathy for those who might not be as enthusiastic about change as I am.

Two key findings emerged for me: The first was that I needed to practice asking for help myself, something I’m loathe to do. Framing this behavioral adjustment as “practice” was especially helpful because practicing is low-stakes and friendly. On a recent Home Depot trip, I practiced asking for help finding something right away, and once again, that request paid big dividends in time not spent wandering aisles.

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Change Agent Training: Part 1

We know binaries can be problematic. Even if our intention is to place something on a spectrum between two poles — introvert or extrovert; risk-averse or risk-embracing; early bird or night owl, etc., — we still frequently default to binaries. The binary I want to unpack here is the idea that some people love change (enjoying the newness of things, embracing something they haven’t tried before) and others prefer steadiness and consistency.

And while I’m sure it’s true that people have dispositional tendencies towards one of those ways of being, change happens to all of us, no matter where we fall on that continuum. So can someone who falls into the “consistency, please!” camp develop the dispositions of the change embracers?

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Why don’t more online courses include podcasts?

graphic of RSS icon with headphonesWhen I was an undergrad, my “intellectual conversation crutch” was bringing up something from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. After moving to Chicago, that crutch morphed into inserting something I read in The New York Times or New Yorker.

Now? “I was just listening to a podcast about that…” is something I say with annoying frequency.

Thankfully, I’m not alone, as I notice many other people parroting back something they’ve recently heard in a podcast. But even though it feels like most of us are listening to podcasts, and most of us are learning interesting things from podcasts, I still don’t see podcasts as a top option when faculty are designing online courses. Why might that be?

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Spectre and Meltdown and The Art of Communicating Bad News

Newspaper headline "Bad News"In 2017, consumers were frequently on the receiving end of bad news: Wells Fargo continued to grapple with the fallout from fake accounts. Equifax compromised data. Apple slowed down phones.

And to kick off 2018, there are vulnerabilities in computer chips that will affect “almost all computers, servers, cloud operating systems, and cellphones made in the past two decades.” Disheartening, no?

I’ve been thinking about the nomenclature employed in this case. Calling the two vulnerabilities “Spectre” and “Meltdown” accomplishes a couple things. Taken together, the names seem appropriately technology-adjacent, but I was most interested in Spectre, which evokes something elusive, ghostlike, and therefore understandably difficult to detect—which explains how the vulnerability went undiscovered for more than 20 years.

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Upgrading to New Digication in Autumn 2017-18

Digication homepage for WRD 103 portfolio

Last summer, DePaul surveyed all faculty to solicit feedback on our two primary learning management systems (LMSs): D2L and Digication. Faculty told us that, for the most part, D2L is meeting their teaching needs.

The feedback on Digication, our ePortfolio tool, told a different story. Faculty voiced frustration with both the lack of upgrades and the usability challenges of creating well-designed portfolios. So, the Digication Steering Committee reviewed nine other digital portfolio platforms, as well as the planned upgrade to Digication, to determine which platform would best meet our needs moving forward.

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Pay No Attention to the [Instructor] Behind the Curtain: How Including Your Face in Course Videos Impacts Student Engagement and Retention

During a recent research jaunt to update some FITS resources on online learning, I stumbled across an article about the value of including the instructor’s face in course videos. If you don’t have time for the entire piece, here’s my TL;DR:

Faculty often ask me “if it matters” to include their faces within course videos. My standard response is that they should try it in the introductory video. Start the video with your face on the screen, either in full-frame glory or in a small square in the corner (depending on the software you’re using), and then transition to the other typical intro video elements, like a tour of the course or syllabus. That way, you only have to think about being “on camera” for a minute or two.

But what faculty are really asking is this: does including my face in videos either (1) make students feel more engaged with the course materials, or (2) actually result in better learning?

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