OTEAR Workshops & Consulting Services

Interpreting and Utilizing Student Feedback for Change: This workshop explains the process for distributing a customized midcourse survey to obtain student feedback. The process for conducting a midcourse survey will be explained whether through Blue or another platform like Google Forms. Quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the data obtained from the survey will be discussed and templates provided. How this analysis could be extended to other forms of student feedback will also be discussed. The underlying focus will be how to make course improvements while addressing student concerns.

Adding Questions in Blue for Faculty: This short session brings instructors through the process of additional questions to their midcourse surveys or SIRS. Best practices for question design, communication of the survey, and monitoring the progress is also explained.

Teaching Portfolios: The Teaching Portfolio is best thought of as a documented statement of a faculty member’s teaching responsibilities, philosophy, goals and accomplishments as a teacher. It is a flexible document, and can be used in a number of ways, depending upon the needs and interests of the faculty member. It can be an extensive collection of information, or something much more compact and limited. The essential structure and elements to be included will be presented.

Peer Review of Teaching: This workshop provides an overview of the peer review of teaching process and is designed to help departments understand best practice and develop a robust teaching evaluation process to support reappointment, promotions, and tenure decisions.

Peer Review of Online Teaching: Peer review of teaching is important for online courses so that faculty can have documentation of their successful teaching to use as evidence in teaching portfolios, and departments can better understand what is happening in virtual or partially virtual classrooms. For many instructors, the process of peer review of online teaching is entirely new. In this workshop, OTEAR discusses how to conduct online peer review of teaching, how to develop a rubric or guide that matches best practices for online teaching, and what to expect if someone will be reviewing your online course.

Engaging Students in Asynchronous Sessions: Engaging students in the learning environment is one of the biggest challenges faced by instructors, especially when teaching remotely or online. From our surveys, we know that both faculty and students desire the engagement they are familiar with through face-to-face teaching. Faculty have mentioned the limitations of online classes and their frustrations because they cannot gauge student learning via body language, alertness, and facial expressions. These problems are magnified when faculty must teach large classes. Students appreciate the spontaneity of synchronous classes but value asynchronous recorded content so that they can review the material. In this workshop, we review the literature on the effectiveness of engaging students online, and explore best practices for building engagement opportunities into asynchronous sessions. We provide training on how to use some of our favorite tools including PlayPosit and VoiceThread.

Engaging Students in Synchronous Sessions: Engaging students in the learning environment is one of the biggest challenges faced by instructors, especially when teaching remotely or online. From our surveys, we know that both faculty and students desire the engagement they are familiar with through face-to-face teaching. Faculty have mentioned the limitations of online classes and their frustrations because they cannot gauge student learning via body language, alertness, and facial expressions. These problems are magnified when faculty must teach to large classes. Students appreciate the spontaneity of synchronous classes but value asynchronous recorded content so that they can review the material. In this workshop, we review the literature on the effectiveness of engaging students online, and explore best practices for building engagement opportunities into asynchronous sessions. We provide training on how to use some of our favorite tools including PlayPosit and VoiceThread.

Grading Schemes that Support Student Success: Grades have historically served a variety of purposes, from ranking students among their peers, to identifying high performing students who might excel in further study. However, scholarship of teaching and learning suggests that an instructor’s grading scheme can significantly impact student learning. In particular, two related approaches to grading, Master Learning with Competency Based Grading, and Specifications Grading, align grades with learning objectives, and promote greater mastery of course material. In this workshop, OTEAR introduces different grading schemes while also reviewing general best practices for promoting grading transparency and reducing grade challenges including clear weighting, use of gradebook options in the LMS, and development of appropriate rubrics.

Improving Education with the Science of Learning: The Impact of Culture, Beliefs and Memory: One reality unites educators across disciplines as diverse as Dance, Medicine, English, and Engineering: the point of instruction is to ensure that students learn from our expertise. Fortunately, current neuroscience research on learning has established a common foundation that transcends content and setting. Follow up by delving deeper into the science of learning to focus on the impact of culture, beliefs, motivations, and mindset to learning.

Managing Large Online Classes: Teaching online is especially challenging when managing large classes because many activities that work with smaller groups are unwieldy when teaching to 100 or even 400 students. In this session, OTEAR examines how to manage students, assessment, and engagement in large classes. We cover creating and evaluating discussions in discussion forums, developing meaningful assessments that are possible to grade in a time-efficient manner, hosting and managing synchronous sessions using Zoom, and incorporating tools such as iClicker or TopHat to enrich content.

Personalizing Learning to Improve Outcomes: The constructivist approach to pedagogy affirms that learning is an individualistic practice and that new knowledge is always built on an individual’s prior understanding and experience. Personalized learning is an educational approach where instruction and assessments are aligned with individual students to address their diverse cultural backgrounds, interests, strengths, and learning needs. While it can be challenging to tailor activities for each individual in a course, students learn more when instructors create personalized learning environments. This session provides suggestions to move in this direction ranging from quick and simple strategies to more time-intensive approaches.

Preparing a Diversity Statement for Academic Employment: This workshop explores the purposes of a diversity statement for academic employment, reviews pedagogy practices for teaching diverse students, and examines how scholars can talk about diversity in their teaching and research. Armed with this information, participants review and critique sample diversity statements before work-shopping their own ideas and drafts of the diversity statement. Participants should bring any materials related to the diversity statement that they have already prepared.

Writing Exam Questions that Measure Student Learning: This workshop covered how to write valid and reliable multiple-choice questions, how to develop essay questions, and how to write rubrics to evaluate open-ended questions. The workshop provided special focus on challenges associated with the remote learning environment, such as developing questions appropriate for an “open book” environment.