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center for INNOVATION in teaching, assessment, and learning
cital newsletter
february 27, 2024
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Dear Colleagues:
Welcome to our last newsletter before Spring Break. As always, we are excited to bring you some useful tips as you continue navigating the remainder of the semester. We start with an excellent blog on “Fostering Community and Student Engagement” by Natalie Krivas (English) & Stacy Hoult (World Languages & Cultures), followed by highlighting a new tool in Simple Syllabus to help faculty create content that is accessible for all students. We round out this issue with some useful tools in Blackboard for assessments and grading, and professional development opportunities from Quality Matters and Perusall. We have included a reminder to complete the Open Educational Resources Survey being conducted by the Christopher Center Library. As always, thank you for all you do. Have a wonderful break.
Sincerely,
The CITAL Team (Ed, Gina, and Cindy)
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Fostering Community and Student Engagement
By Natalie Krivas (English) & Stacy Hoult (World Languages & Cultures)
For the past year, a group of Valpo faculty and staff have been meeting as a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) to discuss Fostering Community and Student Engagement. FLC members learned about and experienced the Solutionary Process, to “identify inhumane, unsustainable, and unjust systems and then develop solutions that are healthy and equitable for people, animals, and the environment” (Weil, 2021).
To read the entire article, click here: Fostering Community and Student Engagement
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Creating Accessible SyllabiWe all want our syllabi to be user-friendly for every student. Simple Syllabus is piloting a new tool to help make this easier.
You’ll learn how to use the Simple Syllabus accessibility checker to solve some of the most common issues preventing students from fully engaging with syllabus content.
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SafeAsign, SmartView, & Test Pools
Whether you are having students take midterms before or after spring break, here are how-to articles and videos about some tools you may want to consider using now or for finals.
SafeAssign Checks submitted assignments for originality and compares student submissions against multiple sources to identify areas of overlap between student work and existing publications.
SmartView: When a Grade Center includes many students and columns, you can use SmartViews to find data quickly. In courses with multiple instructors, you can assign specific groups of students to each instructor, making it easier for instructors to find students and provide feedback.
Test Pools: A question pool is a collection of questions stored for repeated use. You can use pools to create tests and surveys. You can also export and import pools for use in tests in other courses.
If you would like help to implement any of these tools in your Blackboard course, please reach out to the CITAL Help Desk.
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QM's Online Learning Engaging Science Learners From the Start
A professor from Columbus State Community College discusses techniques for keeping students engaged in online science classes.
You will learn about onboarding strategies for majors & non-majors, building connections between classmates, encouraging question-asking, and how to use surveys to get honest feedback.
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What's Your Opinion of OERs?The Christopher Center’s Scholarly Communication Committee wants to know what instructors think of Open Educational Resources, a.k.a. OERs or Open Textbooks.
To learn more about OERs, click here.
The Committee invites instructors to participate in a short survey (button below), which will help gauge the interest and usage of OERs on campus. The survey will remain open through March 1. If you have any questions, please get in touch with Jonathan Bull ( jon.bull@valpo.edu).
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What is the Exchange?
It's a FREE annual virtual community conference that has both synchronous and asynchronous opportunities for participation via the Perusall platform.
Register Here!
You are also invited to share your observations, insights, and innovations on how generative AI has transformed your courses. To submit an abstract, please click the link below. Submit an Abstract, Due March 5th, 2024!
Presenters will engage in thoughtful conversations with over 2,000 attendees from all over the world.
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