CTL Happenings - Message #497

The Center for Teaching and Learning will be closed for Labor Day, Monday, September 7.  If you have immediate technical issues, please contact the UITS Support Center at 317-274-4357 or email ithelp@iu.edu.

We will respond to any email and voicemail messages when we return on Tuesday, September 8.

You and your students may have navigated many unprecedented teaching and learning challenges this year due to the pandemic. We invite you to submit a proposal for a short (10-minute) virtual presentation focused on what you learned about your own teaching practices and your impact on students’ learning during the pandemic. The goal of these presentations is to bring forth promising practices and enable our campus community to develop a common understanding of challenges and solutions in the changed teaching and learning circumstances. In consideration of the many competing demands of the first week of the semester, we are extending the closing date for proposals through Tuesday, September 8. View the call for proposals for more information.

The October 9th Scholarly Teaching Symposium is an annual half-day event that fosters a culture of scholarly teaching and supports the scholarship of teaching and learning. It provides faculty with a venue to share their promising teaching practices and disseminate results of scholarly teaching interventions, such as the work of the Curriculum Enhancement Grant awardees. 

This year's AFTF discussions will be about teaching in the “pandemic classroom,” and about teaching inclusively. We'll discuss teaching challenges when engaging students in-person, through video conferencing, and asynchronously online.

Karen Dace, Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, will give a keynote address, "We're Here for You." Join us to share your teaching successes and challenges during the pandemic! The AFTF happens on Zoom on Thursday, September 24, 2020 from, 5:15 to 8:00 p.m. Registration is now open!

Organized as a series of conversations (forums), the Associate Faculty Teaching Forum offers an opportunity to join your colleagues from many departments to explore commonly encountered teaching issues and strategies at IUPUI, IUPU Columbus, and IU Fort Wayne.

Promoting academic integrity has been challenging during the pandemic, particularly for courses that have online assessments. Although online proctoring and lockdown browsers are able to mitigate cases of academic misconduct, the use of these technologies promote inequity and are not foolproof. Websites such as Chegg, Course Hero, and Courserank, which were developed to support student learning, have become widely known for facilitating academic misconduct by providing exam and homework solutions and writing support for students. It can be difficult, time consuming, and expensive to monitor these websites and track students’ usage of tutoring resources and solutions. Therefore, it is critical that we design courses to minimize incidents of academic misconduct and know how to identify and report suspected cases of academic misconduct. We recommend the following practices and resources that can help you promote academic integrity in your online assessments:

• Discuss the importance of academic integrity with your students. You can have your students enroll in the Learning with Integrity Canvas course to help facilitate this discussion. Be transparent and provide a rationale about your course policies, particularly for collaboration, use of notes and online websites for exams, etc. Build reasonable flexibility into late and make-up assignment policies.
• Use best practices for designing quizzes and exams in Canvas, writing multiple-choice questions, and developing assessments using the Transparency in Learning and Teaching framework.
• Be familiar with resources and policies provided by online websites such as Chegg to identify and remove any course materials that have been posted and investigate suspected cases of academic misconduct.

The Academic Calendar for 2020-21 introduces two 3-week online intensive scheduling blocks at IUPUI. While not every course will be suitable for delivery in this new format, with careful consideration, planning, and implementation, departments or programs may wish to offer select courses in this manner. This workshop identifies the benefits and challenges of offering intensive online courses; discusses the criteria for selecting courses to consider offering in this format; and outlines faculty, student, logistical, and instructional considerations in developing and delivering these types of courses. Resources and examples will be provided, along with an opportunity to participate in a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning project focusing on 3-week intensive online courses.

As IUPUI continues the process of reviewing general education courses, course coordinators or faculty responsible for preparing course dossiers for review may have questions about the information and materials that need to go into the dossiers. This webinar will provide an overview of the course review process, course dossier requirements, and the rubric that will be used to review the course dossiers. It will also address the option for preparing a simplified course dossier based on using a Mile Marker assignment. Examples from existing course dossiers will be incorporated into the webinar. Questions and discussion will be encouraged.

Zoom poses challenges for instructors who seek to ensure interaction and engagement among all students in a class—especially at class meetings that bring together in-person students with students joining via Zoom. In this webinar, participants will consider ways to adjust teaching practices, and to leverage Zoom features (such as polls and breakout rooms), to improve course content delivery and to support student engagement and learning.

Join colleagues for Digital Coffee Hours on the Fourth Monday Series sponsored by LEAP Indiana and hosted by colleagues from around the state who will share a brief presentation on a particular topic and then facilitate a discussion about that topic. 

Faculty who seek to refine and promote their teaching efforts may document their work through the development of a teaching portfolio, a site where faculty engage in reflective practice to measure the effectiveness of, and to refine, their teaching practices. This webinar introduces faculty to the teaching portfolio and to the several interrelated tasks that yield the teaching portfolio's elements: developing a teaching philosophy, identifying specific teaching practices to explore, document, and to improve, situating an identified teaching practices in an appropriate context, and collecting and evaluating evidence of teaching and learning.

Join CIRTL at IUPUI to Build Your Resume and More.. 

Presenters from across the country share their expertise on teaching and learning topics to prepare graduate students and postdocs for future faculty careers. Sign up for a free CIRTL network account to participate in CIRTL cross-network Fall 2020 workshops, courses, and events. CIRTL events and programs provide you the opportunity to network and build connections with graduate students, postdocs, and faculty across the CIRTL network, which currently has over 41 member institutions from the US and Canada, including IUPUI.

IUPUI’s CIRTLCast series on High-Impact Practices: Register now!

As a CIRTL member, IUPUI is offering a four-part webinar series on engaging students through high-impact practices. This CIRTLCast series will showcase several ways in which future faculty in all disciplines, levels and roles can embed and assess high-impact educational practices into curricular experiences. Participants will explore the features and benefits of a high-impact practice curricular experience, including global learning and engagement, undergraduate research, and ePortfolios. Learn more and register.

Registration open for the Culturally Responsive Teaching Learning Community!

Interested in discussing the challenges and opportunities with creating an inclusive, equitable learning environment? Then join us this semester for the Culturally Responsive Learning Community where we will reflect on best practices for promoting equity in the classroom! For more information, including meeting dates, and to register by September 27.

(1) On September 11 at 2 p.m., Scott Barry Kaufman, author of Wired to Create, joins us to kick off a series of virtual events addressing our retreat theme Creativity and Experience: Enriching Teaching and Learning. Attendance to this free webinar will not be limited to the FACET membership. However, registration is required. Register   

(2) The 2020 FALCON  will be hosted online on October 24. The 25^th annual conference will feature sessions that address how student success is impacted by our ability as faculty to establish an understanding of campus culture, develop corresponding curriculum and establish a strong sense of community (belonging). Further information on registration and schedule will be announced soon. 

(3) The Mack Center Fellowship Application deadline for completed proposals is November 30. This year, we are particularly interested in proposals focused on teaching in virtual environments, including the full range of synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid virtual/ face-to-face formats. Projects investigating traditional classes will also be considered. More information or become a fellow.  

(4) The deadline for FACET/Mack Center SoTL Travel Grants for travel to present SoTL research in the Spring 2021 is December 1. Grants are for allowable costs as delineated by IU Travel Management up to $750, faculty are encouraged to combine this funding with other sources. Due to COVID-19, funds can be used towards virtual event registration. More information and application.

Marion County Evictions May Reach 34,000 or More in 2020

Indiana lost 436,000 jobs between February and April, driving the unemployment rate from 3.1% to 17.5%. While the state gained back 217,000 jobs by June, unemployment remained extremely high at 11.2%. Additional unemployment insurance payments and moratoriums on evictions have softened the impact of this economic crisis, but those supports and protections have since expired. An increase in unemployment claims could drive the eviction rate from seven percent in 2016 to 20 percent in 2020, and informal evictions may be twice that. Learn more

Upcoming SAVI Data Literacy Skills Training: SAVI data literacy training empowers you to find, use, and understand data. Classes are as follows:

• Frame the Problem | Sept. 10, 10 a.m. - 12 noon - Register
• Find Existing Data | Sept. 10, 12:30 - 2:30 p.m. - Register
• Find Meaning in Data | Sept 24, 10:00 - 12 noon  - Register
• Tell Stories with Data | Oct. 1, 10:00 a.m. - 12 noon - Register

The IU Southeast 4^th Annual Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Conference offers participants the opportunity to build community and network while enhancing their understanding and skills in the SoTL.  This year’s keynote speaker will be Dr. Claire Major, Professor of Higher Education at The University of Alabama.  Her presentation topic will be Evidence-Based Teaching.

The conference will take place on Friday, September 25, 2020, 8:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. and will be completely online.  There is no fee for attending the conference.

For more information or to register.

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 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

The 2020 STEM Education Innovation and Research Institute Seed Grants Request for Proposals submission deadline is October 1, 2020.

https://seiri.iupui.edu/doc/ssg/2020_SSG_RFP_July2020.pdf

The STEM Education Innovation and Research Institute (SEIRI) at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) is pleased to announce the 2020 SEIRI Seed Grant (SSG) competition. The goal of this competition is to facilitate and support STEM education innovation and research at IUPUI. Specifically, this opportunity provides faculty members in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments with funding to develop, implement, and evaluate the impact of pedagogical innovations across multiple IUPUI STEM courses.

As a long-term goal, this grant is intended to enable faculty competitiveness for external funding with agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), Spencer Foundation, and the National Institute for Health (NIH), or other internal funding such as the IUCRG. As such, we strongly encourage that interested STEM faculty partner with an educational research or design expert within fields related to the learning sciences, such as (but not limited to) IUPUI's Department of Psychology or School of Education.

Darby, F. (2020, August 24). The secret weapon of good online teaching: Discussion forums. Chronicle of Higher Education.

Discussion forums are an effective tool to engage students and assess their learning in online courses. This article provides six ways to lead meaningful class discussions in an asynchronous online forum.