Where Do You See Yourself in 5 Years? A Look at Strategic Planning and Your Stakeholder Goals

As part of faculty and learning support staff in higher education, the phrase strategic plan is a term central to projects to pursue, resources to allocate, and roles to identify for the university or institution. Where do you fit in the grand scheme of your institution’s agenda and vision? Does your work as an educator matter in the midst of corporate, large-scale goals? How can you support a strategic plan? If you’re a student, you may wonder how a strategic plan is supposed to benefit you in the midst of an often corporate-feeling objective. 

Since I am employed at a university with a newly minted strategic plan, and I also study at a school with a new strategic plan in progress, to ignore the significance placed on institutional priorities is unavoidable. My day-to-day work as an instructional technology consultant is framed in terms of Grounded in the Mission 2024. The support programming and resources available to me as a student are under town hall debates with the university president. If successful in its implementation and process, a strategic plan should be apparent to all stakeholders, albeit in different ways. Continue reading →

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Lights, Camera, Action: A Quick Guide to Better Lecture Videos

Have you ever made a lecture video? If so, have you watched it? What do you think about your pacing, the environment you shot in, and your performance?

More importantly, what do you think your students would say about your videos? Would they say you’re:

            Boring?

            Unfocused?

            Hard to see or hear?

            In a distracting environment?

            Verbose?

Fear not, even with the driest of materials, you can still put on a scintillating lecture. Today I’ll share with you some tried and true techniques to get the most out of your filming time, and to improve the end product both for you and for your students. Continue reading →

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Becoming an a11y: Inclusive Design in the Classroom

For years, the staff in my office have been talking about and writing about a platform of accessibility and concepts of Universal Design. Erin largely talked about a movement within accessibility called the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework. UDL focuses designing and ensuring that spaces —physical or digital— can be used by virtually anyone. Joe, built upon this idea by explaining the three pronged approach that UDL uses:

  1. Provide multiple means of engagement
  2. Provide multiple means of representation
  3. Provide multiple means of action and expression

Dee introduced some basic ways that we can implement these principles directly into our courses. However, while I was at D2L’s annual conference a couple weeks ago, I realized that we’ve done a pretty good job explaining what accessibility is, but we’ve never interrogated why it matters. Continue reading →

What a 3D Printer Taught Me About Learning

If you aren’t an ardent follower of the maker movement, or involved in it yourself, you might have missed the hype about 3D printing. 3D printing has grown from a niche market for creating small prototypes or parts into a multi-billion dollar business spanning industries from medicine to even residential home construction.

3D printer

Supporters of 3D printing are quick to point out its educational value, where students can bring their digital designs into the physical world. The most straightforward educational uses for 3D printing align most closely with the so-called STEAM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math), but there are a number of other fields, such as anthropology and history, where scholars are exploring its potential for both teaching and research.

However, my own experience with 3D printing is far more modest than, say, how some scientists are printing living cells. In fact, I’ve only successfully printed one thing in 3D: a small blue clover cup. Since then, I haven’t been able to replicate my success, which in fact was predicated by a number of failed attempts. 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 →

It’s Time to Talk About Deadlines

In September of 2018 I decided to take a leap of faith and go back to school to get an MFA in Game Design. I don’t have a background in games, my undergraduate degree is in music performance, but I’ve always loved games and when I found DePaul’s MFA in Game Design program I knew this was the path I needed to take.

This may sound ridiculous, but when I enrolled in graduate school I did not expect to be challenged by (and greatly struggle with) deadlines. Without giving the wrong impression about my overall self-confidence, deadlines have never really been a problem for me. Most of my career before going back to school was as a corporate copywriter: deadline city. If I was used to meeting tight deadlines literally every single day then surely I’d be able to handle following a syllabus and staying on top of things in school.

These are just a few of the thoughts that mocked and bludgeoned my consciousness as I fell into panic, disbelief, and about 60oz of cold brew while frantically pulling my first all-nighter to finish a project for school.

What happened? 

Continue reading →

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Can You Save Time with Checklist Grading?

I am a proponent of using rubrics to grade students’ work. This is for a variety of different reasons that could warrant their own blog post. Moreover, I strongly believe that grading is a critical element of the teaching and learning process. It is our chance as instructors to let all of our students know where they are exceeding expectations and where they might need to do a little more work to achieve our intended learning outcomes. 

As I began my grand adventure in educating college students, I committed to making grading not simply the exercise of assigning grades, but ensuring that grading was a teaching tool. This meant ensuring that grading was a formative process both for me as the instructor and for students’ in their learning. I thoughtfully and carefully constructed rubrics for every assignment I gave students, selecting criteria and then defining three to four performance levels for each criterion. When I graded, I agonized over exactly which performance level to place each individual’s work. Any time I did not assign students to the top performance level, I would take a lot of time to provide detailed feedback about what students could improve in their next assignment to achieve the top performance level.  Continue reading →

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Learning Theories & Cognitive Psychology in Higher Education

If you teach college students, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you barely have time to brush your teeth, let alone ponder how well-established learning theories and principles could improve your teaching. So, for the sake of your well-being and your oral hygiene, I’ve rounded up a few oldies but goodies and some practical tips that are relatively easy to implement. With any luck, you’ll be ready to roll out a new evidence-based teaching strategy in less time than it takes to microwave a Lean Cuisine in the faculty lounge and inhale it at your desk.

Continue reading →

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Difficulty in Academia: Limits and Benefits

How hard is too hard? Is there an optimal failure rate for learning? Robert Wilson, Amitai Shenhav, Mark Straccia, and Jonathan Cohen would say yes.  In their 2018 study, The Eighty Five Percent Rule for Optimal Learning, the researchers set out to discover the “sweet spot” for difficulty in academia. They found that the spot where the most learning occurs –one that is not too hard so as to create frustration, but not so easy so as to not warrant doing– is a 15% failure rate.  What does this mean for students?  At its most simplistic level, it means that if you get 15% of the answers on an assessment wrong the test is at the optimal difficulty. 15% wrong? Wait that is only an 85% (or a B+), won’t that mess with my GPA (and perhaps my self-esteem)!? 

While I don’t think we can go so far as to say that an 85% is the ideal grade, I do think that we can do more to design classes that both encourage and reward failure.

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3 Quick Ways to Increase Student Engagement in Your Lectures

Studies have shown that student participation in lectures leads to students having greater motivation in the classroom, becoming better critical thinkers, and ultimately, learning more effectively. For students to reap the benefits of class participation, however, they actually have to participate. This can occasionally be challenging. 

Below are three activities I keep in my back pocket to stimulate meaningful student participation. 

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