All posts by Erin Kasprzak

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About Erin Kasprzak

Erin Kasprzak is an Instructional Technology Consultant and also teaches online for DePaul’s School for New Learning. She began working in higher education in 2006, primarily in instructional design and technology positions, and has been at DePaul since 2011. She is also a co-lead of DePaul’s Mobile Learning Initiative.

Erin has a B.A. in English and History from Bradley University and an M.A. in Modern East European History from Indiana University, Bloomington. She spends as much time as possible on a bicycle—commuting, on a weekend group ride, or racing.

Collaborative Efforts in DEI: Reflections on a Universal Design for Learning Faculty Development Program
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Collaborative Efforts in DEI: Reflections on a Universal Design for Learning Faculty Development Program

Sometimes, serendipity plays a remarkable role in our professional journeys. After years of championing Universal Design for Learning (UDL), offering one-off workshops, and engaging in accessibility initiatives for our courses, the perfect opportunity can unexpectedly fall into your lap through unforeseen partnerships. This was precisely the case with our recent faculty development program on Inclusive and Accessible Course Design. Although I had been advocating for UDL for years, it was a conversation between a member of our Center for Teaching & Learning and the Associate Provost for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) that actually led to the creation of this program.

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The Benefits of Making Small Changes in Your Course Design: An Introduction to the Plus-One Approach
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The Benefits of Making Small Changes in Your Course Design: An Introduction to the Plus-One Approach

One Small Change…

Iterative design isn’t a new concept. It’s been one of my favorite approaches to course development and teaching since my earliest days as an instructional designer. You probably do this in your teaching practice without even thinking – when you tweak something from one term to the next based on how an activity went, or how well students responded to a prompt.

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Group Work: The Importance of a Great Team

Cycling Team Time TrialFor the first time in my working life, I am going to be out of the office for three consecutive weeks. Planning for this time away has not only forced me to be as efficient as possible in the time leading up to my vacation, but also has gotten me thinking about the importance of a great team.

Bear with me a minute for a quick sports analogy. In professional cycling, there’s an event called the team time trial where an entire team (in this year’s Tour de France, 8 riders) works together by “drafting” in the aerodynamic slipstream of the riders in front of them, each rider taking a turn at the front and then rotating out of the line. If the team works well together and has a plan, it’s a beautiful event to watch. The first rider in the line does the hard work while the riders behind are able to save a ton of energy, and the team is able to go much faster than any individual rider could go on his or her own.

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Toward a More Inclusive Design Approach

Without setting out to do so deliberately, I’ve developed a strong interest in accessibility and universal design over the last year. Last June, my buddy in the ELI/Penn State ID2ID program suggested that we collaborate on an accessibility project for a faculty audience. Then, in July, I attended the annual Distance Teaching & Learning conference in Madison, which had an unofficial “accessibility track.” After returning from the conference, I started talking with my colleagues and found that several of us were on the same page, so we have formed a working group to begin exploring how we might support implementation here at DePaul. Over the next two posts, I’m going to give an overview of the work our group has been doing.

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Poll Everywhere: Students, Take Out Your Phones.

I know that classroom mobile phone policies can be a fraught subject. Student distraction is a real concern, and handheld technology gives students a tool that introduces a constant stream of outside input (social media, news alerts, games) that often seem far more interesting than the class material or activities. One way to combat this is to make the phones or devices part of the learning experience.

During the 2016–17 academic year, the Mobile Learning Initiative (MoLI) conducted a pilot of Poll Everywhere as a classroom response system. Poll Everywhere is a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) clicker system used primarily to poll or quiz students in a face to face classroom. Poll Everywhere allows students to answer questions in class on their personal device (phone, tablet, or laptop) and visualizes their responses in real time. It’s an easy way to engage students, build more interaction into your teaching, and gauge student understanding. It’s also a great tool to use for “fun” in the classroom, from a quick icebreaker to a complex trivia competition.

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Give the Students What They Want

Getting good feedback from students can be a challenge. Gone are the days where someone from the academic department came into your class and distributed paper course evaluations to every student. Response rates for online course evaluations are abysmal, and the students who respond usually represent the extremes—they either tend to be really happy with the course or decidedly unhappy. So what to do?

Recently the college I support conducted two focus groups for our online students. I didn’t facilitate the focus groups; I have to give credit here to our great online operations team and the researchers who support the college Teaching, Learning and Assessment committee. In these focus groups, our adult students were asked “If you had the opportunity to design your ideal online course experience, what are the features you would include?”

So what did they tell us?

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Tracking student writing with Google Forms

DePaul’s School for New Learning has an annual initiative called the Month of Writing (MOW) every October. The initiative is loosely based on National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and challenges the school’s students, faculty, and staff to write as many words as possible during the month.

This year I worked with a faculty member developing an online course designed to coincide with the MOW, where one course objective is to complete 25,000 words of a designated writing project by the end of the five week course. The emphasis here is on the writing process—on quantity over quality—to get students over the idea that every piece of writing must be perfect, and just start writing.

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