Welcome to the Teaching & Learning Symposium
Engaging All Learners Everywhere! F R IDAY, N OVE MBE R 4 , 2022 | HYBRI D EVEN T 9:00 - 11:45 AM | Virtual Morning Session Click to Join Interactive Zoom Presentations Passcode: TLS2022
12:00 - 2:00 PM | Luncheon
ACAD 300 2:30- 4:00 PM | Virtual Keynote Session Click to Join Virtual Keynote Workshop Passcode: TLS2022
or GSB Tour Room for Virtual Viewing and Refreshments
Conference Schedule VI RTUA L MORNING SES S I O N TIME
9:00 - 9:45 AM
DE S CR IPTION
P0: Opening Session - Learning Continuity at UHD: Leveraging the Quality Matters (QM) Rubric.
PRESENTER(S)
CTLE
Interactive Presentations | Round 1 Presentations with Opportunities for Q&A/Dialogue
10:00 - 10:45 AM
P1: “Student Mid-Course Progress: Beyond Grade Reports”
L. Burks
P2: “Service Learning During COVID”
A. Chadha
P3: “Creating an Open Educational Resource (OER) to Engage All Learners: A Collaborative Experience”
A.Goins, & S.Bonario
Interactive Presentations | Round 2 Presentations with Opportunities for Q&A/Dialogue
11:00 - 11:45 AM P4: “Engaging Dialogues – Virtual Conversations between Teacher Candidates and Scientists through Skype-A-Scientist”
F. Allaire, & T. Jeffery
P5: “The Service Learning Teaching Circle: Aims for Student Success, Student Engagement, and Student Retention”
Z. Mitha
P6: “Polling Practices for Increased Online Engagement and Student Learning Outcomes”
D. von Biedenfeld
I N PER SON LUNC H SESS I O N TIME
DE S CR IPTION
PRESENTER(S)
12:00 - 12:30 PM Welcome and ACUE Celebration Teaching Café: RoundTable Quick Talks
Presenters speak for 10 minutes in a breakout room, address questions for 5 minutes, then everyone changes to another room, repeated 3x
12:30 - 2:00 PM
QT1: “A Game-Changer: Digital Badges in Higher Education”
K. Gehring
QT2: “Re-engaging Students Back into the Classroom with Strategies that Are Less Instructor and More Student Driven”
K. Gleason
QT3: “Engaging the Virtual Learner: Visually, Organizationally, and Economically”
K. Mhoon
QT4: “Course Redesign with the Student In Mind”
B. Mueller & M. Fernandez
QT5: “Teaching Mathematics through Inquiry in a Steelcase Active Learning Classroom”
T. Redl, J. Quander, & J. Hallaway
QT6: ”I3D-TC: 3D Makers Enhance Teaching to Engage Learners in Natural Science”
C. Standlee, S. Heinlein, & J. Martz
VI RTUA L KEYNOTE SESS I O N TIME
2:30 - 4:00 PM 2
DE S CR IPTION
Keynote Workshop: Embodied Learning Strategies to Create Human Connection and Engagement
PRESENTER(S)
Dr. Susan Hrach
9:00 - 9:45 AM
Opening Session Learning Continuity at UHD: Leveraging the Quality Matters (QM) Rubric In addition to an overview of the symposium sessions and CTLE resources, we will be covering course design strategies aligned with key learning continuity objectives that are applicable across modalities. This interactive presentation will cover how to enhance course design by leveraging best practices for digital learning outlined in the Quality Matters rubric. In addition, we will touch on key course components and tools that can be leveraged within a Learning Management System (LMS) toward the goal of enhanced learning continuity.
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10:00 - 10:45 AM
Interactive Presentations | Round 1 P1: Student Mid-Course Progress: Beyond Grade Reports Lizette Burks: Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership No matter the modality, most higher education instructors are probably familiar with the LMS option to create printable grade reports for your courses and students. Within most LMS platforms, you can create a progress report that contains grades from a particular grading period for a defined group of students in your class. As a former K-12 teacher and school leader, I noticed higher education LMS progress reports do little to lay out strengths and areas for improvement. Just as a K-12 school report card provides parents with a written record of their children’s academic progress and lays out areas for improvement, higher education, too, could benefit from a detailed report of the steps students can take to improve. In this session, come and learn more about how to combine LMS grade reports with further information to help students reflect on their mid-course progress and to create an additional pathway for equitable two-way communication between the instructor and student.
P2: Service Learning During COVID Anita Chadha: Associate Professor of Political Science During COVID, our UHD students have provided service in our community through a wide variety of projects. In this presentation, I will discuss the service-learning project in one of my political science classes, POLS 4307-Participation and Democracy in American Politics. Students worked with a local non-profit to help our community members in the Northside (the area north of UHD) register to vote for our 2022 midterm elections via phone and text banking. The expected outcome is that students learn and engage in serving our community while continuing to participate in our Democracy. I will outline how I built a relationship with this non-profit and the varied activities our UHD students have engaged in during these past 2+ plus years with COVID protocols in place.
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10:00 - 10:45 AM
P3: Creating an Open Educational Resource (OER) to Engage All Learners: A Collaborative Experience Angela Goins: Assistant Professor of Social Work Co-presenter: Steve Bonario, MILS, Collection Coordinator Librarian An OER (Open Educational Resource) is a teaching object made freely accessible to faculty and students worldwide, allowing faculty to design and meet their own curriculum objectives by drawing on a variety of sources and expertise. This process can serve as an example for Systems Theory in Social Work, which holds that engaging resources and professionals outside of the field enhances outcomes (i.e. the whole is greater than the sum of its parts). In this case, UH-D Social Work faculty member Dr. Angela Goins contacted and collaborated with UH-D Librarian Steve Bonario to work together to develop a Social Work OER module. The OER we created, Community Navigation for Older Adults, is an example of how such objects can be created, distributed, accessed, and used. In our case, we employed the THECB’s Open Authoring tool and our OER object was published to the THECB’s OERTX Repository (a freely accessible web site that provides the authoring tool and hosts the OER object). This presentation shows the result of our collaboration: a discrete OER object that can be discovered (via repository search or web search) by faculty, students, and librarians worldwide, thus engaging all learners everywhere.
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11:00 - 11:45 AM
Interactive Presentations | Round 2 P4: Engaging Dialogues – Virtual Conversations between Teacher Candidates and Scientists through “Skype-A-Scientist” Franklin Allaire: UHD Assistant Professor of Urban Education Co-presenter: Tonya D. Jeffery, UHD Assistant Professor of Science Education Skype-A-Scientist is a database of almost 6,000 scientists who have signed up to speak to classrooms, student groups, and families across the country. The presenters successfully integrated Skype-A-Scientist into their undergraduate Elementary Science Methods courses at UHD during the Fall 2022 semester. During the interactions, scientists described the research they were conducting, how they were inspired to pursue degrees and careers in science, teaching-related events that shaped their professional lives, and the struggles that came with choosing their career paths and succeeding in their respective fields. The response from students (N = 77) who participated in the inaugural experience has been overwhelmingly positive. In this presentation, attendees will here about the Skype-A-Scientist program, data from students who participated in the experience, and lessons learned from the inaugural implementation. Attendees will come away from this presentation inspired to try Skype-A-Scientist, or a similar program, to connect their students with professionals in their field.
P5: The Service Learning Teaching Circle: Aims for Student Success, Student Engagement, and Student Retention Zeenat Mitha: UHD Lecturer of Arts & Communication At UHD, Service Learning is about student engagement with the greater Houston community. This fosters student success and enhances student retention, because when you make learning insightful, creative, challenging, and yes, fun, students stay in the course, and put in the time to make it work! My name is Zeenat Mitha, and I have taught using Service Learning at UHD for ten years. I wanted to provide students with learning opportunities that would expose them to both theory and practice, while helping them learning something new and give back to the community. Over the past decade, students have worked with or engaged in programs with many remarkable non-profit organizations, including Asia Society Texas Center, Child Advocates of Fort Bend, Crime Stoppers, Literacy Council of Fort Bend, and Pangea Network. In my courses, students typically work in groups and come up with presentations on a theme they found appealing to present to the community. For many of our students, this was the first time they had to speak publicly to an external group, and for most, this was the first time they were using their classroom knowledge of public relations for the benefit of the greater Houston community. Come hear more about the value of incorporating Service Learning into your course. 6
11:00 - 11:45 AM
P6: Polling Practices for Increased Online Engagement and Student Learning Outcomes Dietrich von Biedenfeld: UHD Assistant Professor of General Business, Marketing, and Supply Chain Management Polling is an effective method of collecting statistics or other data on learners. With the appropriate wording, focused expectations, and flexible approaches, polling can become a valuable tool in our quest to reinforce information, increase retention of content, and break out of routine patterns of thinking and behavior. During this session, attendees will participate in two (2) polls during the presentation. The first poll offers an example of the survey and progress evaluation benefits of polling. The second poll will show some of the class discussion and collaboration benefits of the tool. Increasing online engagement, improving student learning outcomes, and the practical value of alternating interaction modes/methods to avoid brain fatigue are all benefits of using both polling styles.
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12:00 - 12:30 PM
Welcome and ACUE Celebration
About ACUE The Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence (CTLE) partners with the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) to offer the Course in Effective Teaching Practices to UHD faculty participants. The Course is the first designed for higher education faculty that leads to a nationally-recognized Certificate in Effective College Instruction endorsed by the American Council on Education (ACE). The Course includes 25 modules that include teaching techniques for both face-to-face and online instruction from the following five units of study: 1. Designing an Effective Course and Class 2. Establishing a Productive Learning Environment 3. Using Active Learning Techniques 4. Promoting Higher Order Thinking 5. Assessing to Inform Instruction and Promote Learning Course-takers complete the modules online, working with a cohort of other faculty over the course of two long semesters. A key component of the course is weekly implementation of strategies in the classroom and submission of detailed reflections on that implementation. Past participants note that course is intensive, but that they benefit greatly from the content, interaction with their colleagues, and focus on implementation
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12:00 - 12:30 PM
ACUE Course Takers AY’22-23 Esther Castro
Victor Coronado
Kathleen Curran
Glenn Hilman
Tahereh Jafari
Priya Jayasankar
Zahir Latheef
Carlos Luna
David Maldonado
Theresa Case
Cynthia Colbert
Jeff Jackson
Michael Lemke
Ashleigh Petts
Saveena (Chakrika) Veeramoothoo
Linsey Belisle
Shannon Fowler
Antonio Hernandez
Abdelnasser Hussein
Clete Snell
Fei Yang
Maria Benavides
Chris Bolden
Maria Gabriela Bowden
Joyce Hallaway
Charlet Jose
Robin Jose
Connie Kang
Iride Lazo
Xyanthine Parillon
Rachna Sadana
Lydia St. Hill
Padmaja Vedartham
ACUE Course Completers AY’19-20 Paul Fulbright
Adnan Javed
Caroline Smith
Pamela Auburn
Katharine Jager
Bonnie Lucero
Mari Nicholson-Preuss
Gene Preuss
Laura Ruth Parker
Rhonda Scherer
Wayne Schmadeka
Julie Wilson
Matt Fugate
Krista Gehring
Raymie Hairell
Dawn McCarty
Eve Zehavi
Lisa Morano
Timothy Redl
Alicia Yancy
Jorge Tito-Izquierdo
Adriana Visbal
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Faculty Fellows
Overview of Faculty Fellows Program Faculty Teaching Fellows are UHD educators selected to engage in CTLE or college/departmentlevel projects related to improving student success at UHD through promoting teaching excellence. Fellows usually each serve as a liaison between the CTLE and their respective college while also filling a unique role based on the fellow’s specific interests. Fellows receive a course release to offset time spent on related projects and a travel stipend to attend a teaching and learning related conference. This year, the four fellows representing different colleges are working on a joint project to create a Teaching Orientation and Café series geared toward new, junior, and adjunct faculty members. We in the CTLE are excited to introduce this year’s fellows to you. If you have questions about CTLE programs or teaching related resources in your college, please feel free to reach out to one of the Faculty Teaching Fellows.
2022-2023 Faculty Fellows KRISTA GEHRING College of Public Service gehringk@uhd.edu
TIM REDL College of Sciences and Technology redlt@uhd.edu
KIMBERLY GLEASON Marilyn Davies College of Business gleasonk@uhd.edu
BRIDGET MUELLER College of Humanities and Social Sciences muellerb@uhd.edu
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12:30 - 2:00 PM
Teaching Café: RoundTable Quick Talks Presenters speak for 10 minutes in a breakout room, address questions for 5 minutes, then everyone changes to another room, repeated 3x.
QT1: A Game-Changer: Digital Badges in Higher Education Krista Gehring: UHD Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and CTLE Teaching Fellow Digital badges have emerged in the past decade as a game-changer, both in higher education and the world in general. Simply put, digital badges, or digital certifications, are the digital version of traditional paper educational certifications. This discussion will focus on what digital badges are and how they can be used in higher education to motivate students and provide recognition and evidence of their learning activities.
QT2: Re-engaging Students Back into the Classroom with Strategies that Are Less Instructor and More Student Driven Kim Gleason: UHD Lecturer of General Business, Marketing, and Supply Chain Management and CTLE Teaching Fellow
The pandemic has had a significant social and emotional impact on students. Re-engaging students by motivating them through more student-driven activities will help facilitate learning intrinsically and developing better social and critical thinking skills.
QT3: Engaging the Virtual Learner: Visually, Organizationally, and Economically Kendra Mhoon: UHD Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics As a 4-time OCDI grant awardee designer, I have had the opportunity to learn and implement numerous techniques to improve the virtual course environment of my students. Visually, the course should grab their attention and be inviting to students. Secondly, a strong organizational structure that the student can rely on increases their confidence for completing the course requirements. Furthermore, finances are often an obstacle in the path of student success. Therefore, creating and or using economical resources will increases student retention. Our goal should always be to engage all learners everywhere. The goal of this presentation experience is for session participants to have actionable techniques to quickly improve the virtual environment of their courses.
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12:30 - 2:00 PM
QT4: Course Redesign with the Student In Mind
Bridget Mueller: UHD Lecturer of Arts and Communications Co-presenter: Manuel Fernandez, Instructional Designer, University of St. Thomas Faculty are often inundated with the latest buzzwords on student engagement such as inclusivity, OER, and accessibility. How do we make sure that our focus is on maximizing the student learning experience? With our upcoming changes in technology here at UHD, now is the time to consider course redesign with the student in mind. In this session, we will demonstrate our process of redesigning a core course with multiple instructors to engage learners in an online asynchronous model. Learn how we enacted a collaborative partnership with UHD’s Bb Learn Team, an Instructional Designer, the CTLE, and the ITV Department to redesign the course from the ground up. We successfully introduced innovative technology, built closereading activities, discussion boards, implemented OER resources, and designed a welcoming environment and presentation template for each learning module. We will discuss the benefits of our course design, focusing on the needs of our students and real-life applications in the communities where they reside.
QT5: Teaching Mathematics through Inquiry in a Steelcase Active Learning Classroom Timothy Redl: UHD Professor of Mathematics and CTLE Teaching Fellow Co-presenters: Judith Quander, Associate Professor of Mathematics; and Joyce Hallaway, Lecturer of Mathematics
In June 2020, the University of Houston-Downtown was one of only four schools to be awarded an Active Learning Center Grant from the approximately 400 schools that applied. Through this grant, UHD was provided with installation of a Steelcase Active Learning Classroom (ALC) valued at $82,000. The ALC accommodates math faculty implementing an active learning strategy called Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL). According to the American Mathematical Society, IBL is “a form of active learning in which students are given a carefully scaffolded sequence of mathematical tasks and are asked to solve and make sense of them, working individually or in groups”. With this approach, student discovery and collaboration are at the center of the learning process, with the instructor taking on the role of facilitator. In this QuickTalk session, we will introduce participants to some key components of the ALC, elaborate on the project research questions, and invite participants to share ways in which an ALC can benefit faculty and students in mathematics courses, as well as courses in other disciplines, all the while creating a more inclusive teaching and learning environment for all.
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12:30 - 2:00 PM
QT6: I3D-TC: 3D Makers Enhance Teaching to Engage Learners in Natural Science
Courtney Standlee: UHD Assistant Professor of Biology Co-presenters: Sarah Heinlein, Assistant Professor of Geology; and Jeffery Martz, Associate Professor of Geology Our interdisciplinary group of faculty has different interests and intentions for the possibilities of 3D printing. The potential outcomes of the Integrative Three Dimensional – Teaching Circle (I3D-TC) include student learning improved by enhancing their understanding of the content. The student will be using active learning while considering the Three Dimensional (3D) physical space of an object to connect with the subject matter from the written text or lectures. I3D-TC will share their insight into what we have learned in trying to establish the use of a new 3D printer in the Natural Sciences Department. Attendees will engage in backward design to envision using 3D printing in a target course or discipline. We will engage the audience with the aim to tackle the questions below. 1. How can we generate the opportunity for students to be curious and ask questions in each course, given a chance to engage with the subject matter via 3D models? 2. How can we develop opportunities for students and faculty to acquire skills to translate 2D concepts/ content to 3D figures in the classroom? This session will be used to envision discipline-specific uses of 3D models to form exemplary teaching and learning practices.
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2:30 - 4:00 PM
Keynote Workshop Embodied Learning Strategies to Create Human Connection and Engagement Recent headlines suggest we are currently experiencing a “stunning” level of student disconnection and disengagement. What can we do to motivate students and ourselves to reengage in learning? Learning demands physical energy that the body supplies for optimal brain function. We are wired for social connection and to think while moving. In this interactive session, participants will experience embodied learning strategies first-hand; from the research in my book, Minding Bodies: How physical space, sensation, and movement affect learning, I will share what science is discovering about the effect of the built environment and movement on cognitive performance.
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Susan Hrach Dr. Susan Hrach is the author of the 2022 Silver Nautilus Awardwinning book Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning (WVU Press, 2021). As an undergraduate, she spent a year studying at the Universität Innsbruck, Austria, which shaped her lifelong interests in world literature, translation studies, and global education. Her experiences teaching internationally inform her on-going research and practice. In 2022-23 she is serving as Fulbright Canada Distinguished Research Chair in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Carleton University in Ottawa.
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Center For Teaching And Learning Excellence
About the CTLE Mission The UHD Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence (CTLE) aims to support student success by providing targeted faculty support, promoting evidenced-based instructional strategies, and cultivating an innovative and collaborative learning environment at UHD. The center’s ongoing initiatives aim to achieve the student success objectives outlined in the UHD Strategic Plan and to support the University’s continual growth and development as a vibrant teaching and learning institution.
Objectives • Promote evidence-based instruction through fostering a collaborative culture of teaching excellence. • Increase success in high-enrollment courses through the Course Innovation Initiative (CI²). • Improve the quality of Online Courses.
Contact Info For more information on the CTLE, including how faculty can benefit from our services and initiatives, visit us online at uhd.edu/ctle. Faculty and staff at UHD can request to join our Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/ctleuhd/.
Upcoming Events SE ME ST E R
DAT E
DES CR IPTION
Fall 2022
11/11
Spring 2023
2/3
2022/23 Teaching Circles Preliminary Reports Due
Spring 2023
3/31
Course Innovation Initiative Proposals Due
Spring 2023
Apr 2023
Spring 2023
4/28
Online Course Development Initiative (OCDI) Applications Due
Spring Teaching Café Teaching Circles Proposals Due
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