Conversations on Teaching focus on emergent teaching and learning issues in an informal, discussion-based format. These sessions provide members of the Vanderbilt teaching community a chance to share their teaching experiences and learn from each other.
Teaching with Chat & Channel Apps
With the move to remote and online teaching in 2020, faculty and other instructors experimented with a wide variety of tools to foster and maintain social presence with their students. Some tried using group messaging apps like Slack, Discord, and Teams as a way to connect and communicate with students. These apps feature multimedia chat channels, making them useful places for sharing announcements, fielding questions, posting resources, and supporting group projects.
In this conversation on teaching, we’ll hear from a few instructors about the ways they’ve been using these apps to support student learning and engagement. And we’ll invite participants to share their own ideas for teaching with these collaboration tools.
Overcoming the ‘Busywork’ Dilemma: Creating Meaningful Asynchronous Activities for Student Engagement
The busywork dilemma is where students perceive that assigned learning activities or assessments are not meaningfully contributing to their learning. This can be very frustrating to instructors as they often put a lot of effort and time into the design and implementation of these activities. This dilemma can be magnified in online and hybrid classes when students are held accountable for learning activities in new ways. While students’ reasons for calling intentional learning activities busywork vary and some are embedded in misconceptions of learning there are some common pitfalls to avoid.
Two faculty members will share their approach for designing asynchronous assignments and how they engage with students meaningful. They will also share their successes and challenges.
Accessibility and Equity in Course Design
Are you interested in learning how to create equitable online spaces that are accessible to all students? This interactive panel discussion will bring together members of the Vanderbilt community who are experts on fostering accessibility in online learning spaces. Panelists will share effective practices and creative approaches for building and implementing accessible courses online. Participants will be invited to ask questions and troubleshoot accessibility challenges they may be facing in their own courses with the group. This will be an opportunity for all to connect with others who wish to improve accessibility in current or future online courses and create more equitable learning environments.
Group Work and Student Collaboration Online
Student collaboration looks very different in online and socially distanced settings than in our traditional, face-to-face classes. This panel discussion will bring together members of the Vanderbilt teaching community who are using group work or student collaborative projects in their online or hybrid teaching. Panelists will present their group projects, describe the challenges they have experienced, and how they have overcome those challenges in an online environment. Please join us! There will be time for group discussion, Q&A with the panelists, and opportunities to connect with instructors from across campus.
Hybrid courses: Approaches to engage your virtual and F2F students
In this Conversation on Teaching, three faculty members will share their successes and challenges in teaching hybrid courses this fall.
They’ll describe approaches that helped them engage students synchronously, whether they were attending virtually or in person, as well as asynchronous course structures that helped keep everyone moving through the course together. Attendees are encouraged to bring questions and their own teaching experiences to the discussion.
Synchronous Sessions in Online Courses
In this Conversation on Teaching, four faculty members will share their successes and challenges in facilitating synchronous sessions in online courses this fall.
Attendees are encouraged to bring questions and their own teaching experiences to the discussion.
