CTL Happenings - Message #491

OLC Innovate: Virtual conference is open to all IU faculty and staff. Join your colleagues across IU to help shape the future of online education by attending the OLC Innovate 2020 virtual conference held June 15–22. Registration is now open and at no cost to IU faculty and staff. 

OLC Innovate 2020 will feature live-streamed, on-demand recordings, as well as keynote sessions, featured sessions, education sessions, and industry showcases. Topics will include teaching and learning practices, effective tools and technologies, online learning research, and much more. Check out the general program and list of sessions for full details. 
IU’s Office of Online Education is offering unlimited, no-cost registration to IU faculty and staff on all campuses. Go here to sign up and for more information.  

Will you be a new graduate teaching assistant (TA) in fall 2020 and/or spring 2021? Register for the 2020 TA Orientation, to learn about the expectations and responsibilities of your new position, and develop strategies to confidently and effectively interact with faculty and undergraduate students in face-to-face and online classes. Click here for more information and registration details.

A syllabus is often the first impression that students form of a course, and it serves both faculty and student as a guide to and contract for the semester. A well-designed and personalized syllabus can help faculty set the proper tone while simultaneously helping them avoid having to repeatedly answer basic student questions about expectations, policies, and deadlines. This webinar will offer tips and considerations for effective syllabus design and show examples of syllabi from various disciplines in face-to-face and online classes. 

This webinar is part of the Center for Teaching and Learning’s online mini-workshop series focused on foundational teaching skills, Teaching@IUPUI. Designed for new faculty, adjunct faculty, graduate students, and those looking for a refresher on good teaching practices, the webinars are short, with a brief presentation interspersed with opportunities for interaction and questions. Grounded in current research, the workshops address various teaching topics and provide participants with strategies and resources to make instruction more effective, efficient, and enjoyable. Sessions are scheduled with the time of semester in mind, to keep topics relevant for faculty needs at that time.

Looking for a way to build your Canvas course without starting from scratch? The IU Course Template for Canvas will soon be available to use in all Fall 2020 courses. 

This optional template includes suggestions for how to use Modules, Syllabus, and other frequently-used Canvas tools to build your course in Canvas. During this workshop, plan to learn more about what the template offers you, how to apply the template to your course, and receive answers to your questions about how to individualize the template to your personal teaching style.

Documenting a teaching practice becomes much easier if the faculty member can situate the teaching practice amidst best practices, identifying when and how student learning occurs, and identify the kinds of evidence needed to document and measure student learning outcomes. This webinar helps faculty describe learning events for two major categories of student learning experiences. Webinar participants will take first steps to articulating a sequence of learning events for particular assignments. Afterward, faculty members may work with CTL consultants to continue planning efforts to document teaching practices.

This webinar is the 2nd webinar in a 3-webinar series designed to introduce faculty and graduate students to the process of creating, refining and documenting one’s teaching practices.

This webinar will help instructors review and revise their course and session learning outcome statements to be effective, meaningful, and measurable and use them to guide instruction and learning. Participants will analyze examples of student learning outcome statements, write their own, and begin to complete a course map that articulates the alignment of their course learning outcome statements with learning activities and assessments. 

This webinar is part of the Center for Teaching and Learning’s online mini-workshop series focused on foundational teaching skills, Teaching@IUPUI. Designed for new faculty, adjunct faculty, graduate students, and those looking for a refresher on good teaching practices, the workshops are short, with a brief presentation interspersed with opportunities for interaction and questions. Grounded in current research, the workshops address various teaching topics and provide participants with strategies and resources to make instruction more effective, efficient, and enjoyable.  Sessions are scheduled with the time of semester in mind, to keep topics relevant for faculty needs at that time.

The SEA Change Institute will be hosting five, short online learning events with the authors of Talking about Leaving Revisited. Each event will focus on specific implications of TALR, and the authors of will provide an overview of their findings and answer questions from participants. Registration for the TALR events is open to all who are interested – SEA Change Membership is not required to participate in this SEA Change Institute offering.

Please follow the links below for to register for each event individually. 

Webinar 2: Entering an uneven playing field
Tuesday, July 21, 2020, 11 a.m. -12:00 p.m. EST

Webinar 3: STEM learning experiences and their consequences
Tuesday, August 18, 2020, 11:00 a.m. -12 p.m. EST

Webinar 4: Dysfunctions of the STEM weed-out system
Tuesday, September 22, 2020, 11 a.m. -12:15 p.m. EST

Webinar 5: Dimensions of STEM persistence
Tuesday, October 27, 2020, 11 a.m. -12:15 p.m. EST

Dates: June 11, June 18, June 25, July 2 
Time: 10:00 – 11:00 a.m. 
Connect Via Zoom here

Open Educational Resources (OERs): Don’t reinvent the wheel! Open Office Hours are 10:00 – 11:00 a.m., Thursdays, starting June 11. 

Did you know that there are thousands of open educational resources available freely for every discipline? These include textbooks but also question banks and interactive content. As you’re thinking about putting parts of your fall classes online, OERs can provide digital instructional materials that you can use and adapt to fit your needs. 

University Library, The Center for Teaching and Learning, and Digital Education Programs & Initiatives will have joint Zoom Open Office Hours on Thursdays from 10:00 – 11:00 a.m., June 11 through July 2. Feel free to drop in with questions, to discuss your project ideas, or just to learn more about OER at IU! People will be available to talk with you about adding open content to your course using Canvas or Pressbooks and help you discover OERs in your content area. 

Digital course materials save money and ensure all students have their required course materials on the first day of class.  In preparation for the Fall 2020 semester, the IU eTexts ordering deadline has been extended through July 2 to allow faculty to order low cost digital course materials for their fall courses.

With more than 35 publishers available, IU eTexts are affordable, convenient, and promote academic success. Digital learning materials can be accessed via Canvas, incorporate student and instructor mark-up tools, and provide analytics to guide instruction.

Want a quick introduction to IU eTexts? Register for a Getting Started with IU eTexts webinar scheduled for Tuesday, June 16, at 12:15 or 2:00 p.m. For more about IU eTexts and ordering procedures, see IU eTexts.

The Inequalities Behind COVID-19 Disparities for African Americans in Indianapolis
The Polis Center at IUPUI published research outlining the inequities that black Indy residents face and that contribute to increased positivity rates of COVID-19 for black residents. As you know, black residents of Marion County have tested positive for COVID-19 at a rate nearly twice that of white residents, like other cities across the US. Analyzing SAVI data, we learned that because of historic and systemic racism, inequities in our society put many black individuals at higher risk for exposure to the virus, having a serious case or dying, and suffering from the economic impacts compared to white residents. An interactive map allows you to view risk factors by Marion County neighborhood. These increased risks are a result of the fact that black residents, when compared to white residents, are:

• More likely to be exposed to coronavirus because of factors like working in front-line essential sectors, living in denser neighborhoods, and working in jobs that cannot be performed from home.
• More likely to have a serious case because of increased rates for some underlying health conditions, a higher likelihood of living in neighborhoods with high risk from air pollutants, and a lower likelihood of having health insurance
• More likely to suffer from economic impacts because of already high. unemployment rates, lower average incomes even before the crisis, and lower access to good-paying jobs due to disparities in educational attainment.

Please check out the detailed analysis here.

NOTE: This study is a continuation of neighborhood-level research on COVID-19 issues we add to the  SAVI Coronavirus Data Hub  regularly. The Polis Center at IUPUI created the hub to show the latest local data and research on COVID-19 cases, risk, and impact. We track Indiana county-level cases and risks and national COVID-19 cases. In addition to the research described above, the hub provides a senior social isolation index, emergency food/meal locations in Marion County, and neighborhood risk maps for Indianapolis, Bloomington, and South Bend.

SAVI data literacy training empowers you to find, use, and understand data. The next class are as follows: 

• Make Decisions with Data | June 18,  10:00 a.m. -  12:00 p.m. - Register

Teach, Play, Learn, IU’s annual academic conference on game-based teaching and learning, will now take place online June 26, 10:00 a.m.- 4:00 p.m. Registration is now open and due to the change, there will be no cost to attend.

Teach, Play, Learn conference explores how games and play can be effective tools for learning. This year's topics include: 
• Changing technologies and pedagogies in the quickly evolving area of educational games and playful learning 
• Benefits of using games as part of classroom education 
• Practical solutions for the design and implementation of games in the educational context 

Go here to register to attend this online conference.

The general application period for the Community Engagement Associate's program is open, and applications are being accepted through June 30th. Given the various possibilities for Fall regarding courses and programming, we will be asking all applicants to include information on whether or not their funded work can be done virtually or remotely. This will be an important consideration for all funding decisions for next academic year.

Please consider how funding for a CEA project can benefit or support your engaged work in this way, even if the program, course, or experience you originally planned cannot continue in a virtual or remote format. We will need to consider a variety of possibilities for Fall and Spring programming. 

If you have any questions or want to talk further about how this program can benefit your engaged work contact Morgan Struder, IUPUI Center for Service and Learning. 

The deadline for FACET/Mack Center SoTL Travel Grants for travel to present SoTL research in the Fall 2020 is July 1, 2020. Grants are for allowable costs as delineated by IU Travel Management up to $750, faculty are encouraged to combine this funding with other sources. Look here for more information.

Teaching for Student Success: An Evidence-Based Approach is a new module series developed in response to President McRobbie’s call for supporting excellence in teaching and learning at IU. 

Created expressly for IU faculty, by members of the IU faculty, this professional development series provides a framework for education grounded in empirical research, combined with opportunities to document evidence-based practices
Module topics include:

1. Course Design
2. Assessment
3. Science of learning
4. Active and interactive learning
5. High-impact practices
6. Creating positive first impressions 

To learn more about the module series click here.

Bensimon, E. M. (n.d.). Syllabus Review Guide. Retrieved from http://cue-equitytools.usc.edu/. 

The recent protests have highlighted the institutional racism that people of color experience on a daily basis and the importance of educating ourselves in antiracist practices. As instructors, we have a responsibility to develop courses that are equitable and anti-racist, beginning with the syllabus. This syllabus review guide provides a framework for you to review your syllabi through a race-conscious lens to identify areas that can be leveraged to promote racial equity.