| The Center for Teaching invites Vanderbilt faculty, postdocs, and graduate students to apply to its new Online Course Design Institute, a two-week online experience intended to help participants prepare to teach an online course. The Online Course Design Institute will be offered multiple times this summer and we are now accepting applications.
During the institute participants will:
- Develop a course plan for their upcoming online course, one that integrates learning objectives with assessments, assignments, and activities;
- Build one or more sample modules for their courses, practicing the skills they will use to build other modules;
- Plan strategies for helping their online students thrive, including strategies for promoting meaningful interaction, social presence, and equitable learning; and
- Learn about the affordances of online teaching tools, identify tools that align with their goals, and develop practical skills using those tools.
How do I apply?
The Online Course Design Institute is open to all Vanderbilt faculty members with teaching responsibilities, as well as graduate students and postdocs who will be serving as instructors of record at Vanderbilt. Visit the Online Course Design Institute webpage for details and to apply.
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Did you know that
Brightspace Support
at the CFT can assist with online teaching questions beyond
technical difficulties?
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The Brightspace team has expertise in a variety of tools found in the Brightspace platform. We’d love to help with understanding how to use Brightspace tools to maximize student learning, choosing appropriate tools for your course goals, structuring your gradebook, and much more! We encourage you to reach out to the Brightspace Team at brightspace@vanderbilt.edu as you develop your online courses.
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| This May, our Blended and Online Learning Design (BOLD) Fellows shared their projects with the Vanderbilt community and beyond during an online celebration hosted by the Center for Teaching. BOLD Fellows develop online learning materials to address a teaching problem in a course taught at Vanderbilt and gather data about its implementation.
Fellows from fields as diverse as biomechanical engineering, hearing and speech sciences, psychology, and history presented their projects, which targeted a variety of learning outcomes, including development of creative historical imagination, improvement of scientific writing skills, and core coding skills. As a result of some of these projects, students were able to watch instructional videos about engineering concepts and apply these principles to biomedical applications, participate in the online annotation of peer-reviewed literature to learn effective scientific writing strategies, and use graphing software to help predict and identify assumptions in experiments.
The Fellows’ evaluations indicated that often, students were more engaged, more confident in the material, and more knowledgeable. The Fellows have described their projects, some of which are ongoing, in the BOLD gallery.
The CFT thanks the presenters
and their faculty mentors:
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The One Button Video Studio
Set to Reopen
The Center for Teaching is excited to announce that the One Button Studio will reopen on June 1st as part of the university’s phased reopening. In adherence with Vanderbilt’s Return to Campus Plan, safety procedures will be followed, including the use of masks and physical distancing.
The One Button Studio (OBS), located in Room 801 of the Baker Building, is an automated video studio that faculty and other instructors can use to easily record high quality videos without any prior video production experience. The OBS will be particularly useful for faculty who want to create online content for their courses. More information about scheduling time in the studio and an example video can be found on at https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/obs/.
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The CFT acknowledges these
junior faculty who participated
in the JFTF program this year!
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L to R: Audrey Bowden (Biomedical Engineering), Daniela D’Eugenio (French & Italian), Misty Evans (Nursing), Gautam Hans (Law), Brittany Haskell (Nursing), Allison Leich Hilbun (Biological Sciences), Clinton Leonard (Nursing),
Elliott McCarter (Asian Studies), Justus Ndukaife (Electrical Engineering & Computer Science),
Ipek Oguz (Electrical Engineering & Computer Science), Jennifer Ridgway (Nursing),
LeTizia Smith (Nursing), Kim Steanson (Nursing), Denis Zhernokleyev (German, Russian and East European Studies)
We want to thank 2019-2020 Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows for a great year thinking about teaching together, especially as we faced new teaching challenges at the end of the academic year. The Junior Faculty Teaching Fellowship provides its recipients with a structured faculty development experience that includes consultations, a course design seminar, peer observations, and dinners with senior faculty. This program intends to help Fellows develop an understanding of best teaching practices across the disciplines and to build a collaborative culture of teaching at Vanderbilt. The Center for Teaching thanks the School of Nursing for additional funding for this year’s Fellows.
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CFT Celebrates Certificate in College Teaching Graduates
Congratulations to the all the participants who completed the Certificate in College Teaching, co-sponsored by the Center for Teaching and the Graduate School, this spring! The purpose of the certificate programs is to assist graduate students and post doctoral fellows who wish to gain a clearer, deeper, more active approach to teaching and learning in higher education. For more details on the program, visit the CiCT webpage.
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