Search DU CTLAT Blog

Monday, April 5, 2010

Innovative Educators: Designing Transfer Student Orientation Programming to Cultivate Transfer Student Success

Designing Transfer Student Orientation Programming to Cultivate Transfer Student Success
Tuesday, May 4th ~ 3:00-4:30pm
Webinar Description

Noting that over half of today's students have attended more than one institution during their college career, coupled with a push from educators to assist students towards attaining a four-year degree in a timely manner, educators must facilitate initiatives to support transfer students through transitions. Intentionally designed orientation programming helps cultivate transfer student success. This session will explore the critical elements and considerations of transfer orientation programming. Participants will begin to develop an action plan for building an intentional transfer student orientation program on their campus.


Objectives

Participants will learn how to :
• As a result of participating in the session, participants will be able to:
• Articulate the purpose of transfer orientation programming
• Compare and contrast the needs of first-year students and transfer students
• Identify transfer orientation program stakeholders and constituents
• Identify transfer orientation program format and timing considerations
• Identify transfer orientation program components
• Identify transfer orientation program staffing considerations
• Articulate initial considerations for implementing intentional transfer orientation programming on their own campus


Who Should Attend?

Staff and faculty responsible for developing, refining and facilitating orientation programming to assist transfer students and their families acclimate to the academic, social, and institutional culture of the new campus community. Graduate students are also encouraged to engage in the webinar.

Who is the Speaker? Shandol Hoover
Hoover is the Associate Director of New Student & Carolina Parent Programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has worked with new student programs at The Pennsylvania State University and Purdue University, and also worked in the areas of residence life, academic advising and admissions. Hoover is the NODA Transfer Student Network Co-Chair and has facilitated conference presentations and written articles related to designing effective transfer orientation programming. Hoover received her bachelor's degree from Purdue University and a master's degree from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Mike Knox, University of Texas at Arlington
Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs, Director of Orientation
Share/Bookmark

Campus Technology Free Webinar: Taming the PC Infrastructure with Desktop Virtualization

FREE 1-hour webinar
Date: Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Time: 11 AM (PST), 2 PM (EST)
Donna Independent School District faced a daunting challenge. They needed to replace their aging PC infrastructure, increase the number of desktops per classroom and add instructional labs for their growing district. But when replacement costs were estimated at a staggering $5 million, the district decided to head a new direction: virtual desktops.


Discover how desktop virtualization enabled Donna ISD to optimize their resources, become more energy-efficient and double the number of classroom computers while slashing maintenance costs in half. Experts from Donna ISD and Parallels will share how desktop virtualization allows you to:
• Install applications district-wide with a click of a mouse
• Improve desktop availability while cutting platform maintenance in half and dramatically reducing desktop support activities
• Centrally manage thousands of desktops and securely delegate administrative responsibilities among your IT staff
• Allow students to work from home through a secure desktop portal

Presenters:
Richard Weaver, lead systems administrator, Donna Independent School District
Jamison Moore, senior sales engineer, Parallels

Moderator:
Matt Villano, contributing editor, T.H.E Journal

Meet the PC demands of your campus with virtual desktops-and save. Register today and come armed with questions for our presenters. T.H.E Journal's Matt Villano will moderate an interactive Q&A session immediately following the live presentation.

Campus Technology and Parallels

Follow Campus Technology on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Campus_Tech
Share/Bookmark

Campus Technology Free Webinar: Move Beyond Lecture Capture to Content Capture

From Lecture Capture to Content Capture: Moving Beyond the Traditional Approach FREE 1-hour webinar
Date: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 / Time: 11 AM (PST), 2 PM (EST)

Get creative and go beyond the traditional use of lecture capture. Join us for this FREE webinar to learn how Eric Coffman from West Virginia University and David Wicks from Seattle Pacific University are using lecture capture technology, Camtasia Relay to:
• Turn classroom discussions into on-demand teaching aids
• Move from traditional classroom recordings to the creation of `hybrid courses'-where some lectures are pre-recorded and shared
• Empower students, colleagues and customers by providing the information they need, when they need it

Anyone and everyone at your organization can record live lectures, presentations and meetings from a Mac or PC and publish it for all to view on the web or mobile device. Also, there are no technical decisions for the presenters, all the heavy lifting is done at a central server.

Discover new, innovative ways you can incorporate lecture capture into your curriculum.
Campus Technology and TechSmith Corporation
Follow Campus Technology on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Campus_Tech
Share/Bookmark

The Teaching Professor: Strategies for Teaching What You Just Learned Q&A with Dr. Huston

Featured Higher Education Presenter: Dr. Therese Huston
Date: Wednesday, 04/28/10
Time: 12:00 - 1:15 PM CDT
Cost: $249 ($274 after 04/21/10)
The prospect of teaching topics outside one’s area of expertise can be unsettling for even the most confident faculty member. Nevertheless, due to factors such as budget cuts and curricular changes, faculty are increasingly being asked to teach in unfamiliar territory.

To learn how to survive teaching under these challenging circumstances, join us on April 28 for Strategies for Teaching What You Just Learned, a new online seminar led by Therese Huston, director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Seattle University and author of Teaching What You Don’t Know (Harvard University Press, 2009). In an email interview with The Teaching Professor, Dr. Huston touched on some of the topics she will address during the seminar.

TP: Are there advantages to teaching content that’s new to you?

Huston: Thankfully, there are advantages. The primary advantages to the instructor include:
• learning something new and interesting, and most faculty love to learn new things
• it gives you an excuse to read texts you’ve been meaning or wanting to read
• if it’s an interdisciplinary course, you can connect with faculty outside your department by seeking out people who know this content well
• for graduate students or new faculty who plan to be in the job market, it’s a chance to add new courses to your CV, which make you more versatile to other departments
• discovering a new area of research. Some of the senior faculty I interviewed said that one way they start a new line of research is to teach a seminar on the topic.

TP: What advice do you have for preparing to teach new content on short notice?

Huston: This is a really tricky situation, obviously. The most important step is to find out what students must know. You can ask why the course is being offered to a certain group of students, at a certain point in the curriculum. If there’s a pre-existing syllabus in the department, sit down with another person in the department, ideally the department chair if that person will be supportive, to discuss what’s most important for students to learn in this course. Looking at the course objectives on the syllabus can help you, but you’ll gain much more from a conversation from a colleague who wants to make sure students leave your course with the tools and knowledge they need to succeed in other courses.

If there is no pre-existing syllabus, find one online that makes sense to you, ideally from a similar type of institution. Even though it might have the same course title, a syllabus from a community college course will probably look very different from one used at a research university that enrolls 200-300 students.

TP: Are there specific teaching methods that work best when teaching something out of one’s area of expertise? It seems that a learner-centered approach might be the way to go. On the other hand, some instructors might be tempted to fall back on tightly scripted lectures.

Huston: The temptation, sadly, is to fall back on tightly scripted lectures. In my interviews, it was clear that junior faculty often resort to lectures when they are teaching something they just learned. And it makes sense. There are lots of reasons that lectures are more comfortable. Compared to a discussion, lectures give you, the instructor, a much greater sense of control, which is comforting when you’re teaching outside your comfort zone. Lectures also decrease the likelihood that someone will ask a question you can’t answer (which may not be a conscious reason you prefer lectures, but it’s a reality).

It seems like a contradiction at first–why would you want to be the know-it-all lecturing at the front of the class, when at best you’re a know-a-little? One person I interviewed, Eric Mazur from Harvard University, observed that one of the reasons people probably lecture on unfamiliar material is that the process of saying it aloud helps them learn the material. That’s good for your learning experience, but doesn’t mean the students learn as much.

Then there is the time factor. It takes time to step back, synthesize the information, and generate content-specific learner-centered activities, and time is a luxury people don’t always have when teaching outside their expertise.

All of that being said, a learner-centered approach is a much better way to go. A good compromise for the overwhelmed among us (and who isn’t at some point?) is to plan a lecture with brief but powerful active learning strategies sprinkled throughout that lecture. Some active learning techniques, such as Think-Pair-Share or Comparative Note-Taking, take very little time for the instructor to prepare, but lead to impressive gains in what students learn. Likewise, an instructor could use clickers and Peer Instruction periodically throughout a lecture to engage more students.

TP: How do you suggest instructors handle a situation in which a student or several students are more knowledgeable on the course content than the instructor?

Huston: We’re all bound to face this dilemma. First, be proactive. It’s valuable to find out how much students know about a topic. In the first week of a course, you could pass out note cards where students write their names, contact info and any previous courses, interests, experiences they have related to the topics in your course. Then you can draw upon these students for examples later in the course. It’s unsettling to be surprised by an expert sitting in the back row who starts heckling you in week two.

Once you’ve identified these students, and you’ve checked with them to be sure they still want to take the course, ask if it’s okay to call on them occasionally to offer their input, experiences, or examples.Students often enjoy the attention and will be more challenged in a course that’s otherwise addressing some familiar concepts.

Who Should Attend?

You’ll find the common theme and core elements of this seminar apply to a broad field of instruction. In investigating this subject, our presenter worked with faculty from a wide range of disciplines at institutions large and small, public and private.

Highly recommended for:
• Lecturers
• Instructors
• Visiting professors
• Assistant/associate professors
• Professors
• Adjunct instructors
• Directors
• Assistant/associate directors
• Teaching fellows
• Program directors
• Associate provosts
Share/Bookmark

DU SU And Fall2010 Advising And Registration

Greetings and Welcome Back!

I am writing to share the following information. Please feel free to contact me with any questions. Have a great week!

 
SUMMER AND FALL 2010 REGISTRATION (see attachment below)
There’s NEW news about registration: Students can get advised and complete their registration in one visit! Faculty are reminded to contact their advisees, post a sign-up sheet on the door and check MyDU on a regular basis to ensure that all assigned advisees are registered.

 
ADVISING WEBINAR – Thursday, April 8th, 1:00pm, Location TBA
"Breaking Bad News: Delivery Techniques that Help Students Make Good Alternative Choices”
If you have a student who is determined to go to Medical School, but doesn’t like science, or a student who wants to become a lawyer, but doesn’t like to read….this is the session for you. Join this NACADA webinar to reinforce your knowledge about the best ways to advise students according to their strengths.

 
STUDENT EVALUATION OF FACULTY (April 5 – 9)

• Fall 2009 Reports will be available this week. Please use your results to build upon areas of strength as well as those areas in need of improvement.

 
• This week (April 5 – 9) is Spring 2010 Student Evaluation of Faculty week. Instructors with small classes should encourage all students to complete the written evaluations, at a minimum.

 
NATIONAL SURVEY OF STUDENT ENGAGEMENT (NSSE): Deadline is April 30th
Freshmen and Seniors are encouraged to visit their Dillard email to access and complete NSSE. This survey asks students about areas that are important to them: “level of academic challenge,” “student-faculty interaction,” “active and collaborative learning,” “ supportive campus environment” and “enriching educational experiences.” Remind students that their feedback will help us celebrate our strength and target areas for improvement.

 
• COLLEGIATE LEARNING ASSESSMENT (CLA): Deadline is April 15th
As part of the QEP (Communication Skills Enhancement Grounded in Critical Thinking), seniors are asked to participate in the CLA. The survey provides real-life examples and allows students to complete questions based on their knowledge and experiences. Students receive, later in the summer, a report of their results and the institution will use the data as well.

 
• FACULTY SURVEY OF STUDENT ENGAGEMENT (FSSE): Launches mid-April
FSSE asks professors a selected group of questions from the NSSE. The FSSE/NSSE combined report aligns students and faculty members’ responses, providing an illustration of the areas of agreement and differences in perceptions. The combined report is great for discussions about student learning, academic excellence and institutional improvement.

 
FALL 2010 SOAR
Academic Roundtables
The SOAR Committee has been working diligently to ensure that this year’s SOAR is an exciting and efficient event. The Academic Roundtables will resume this year, so faculty should submit a (1) title – something catchy, please and a (2) two-sentence summary by April 30th.

 
Other Academically-Related Sessions
Academic Affairs plans to host sessions such on Academic Advising, Assessment, The Core and The QEP (these are just examples). Feel free to offer additional suggestions.

 
Calling Potential Fall 2010 Students
If faculty members in a division are interested in contacting and encouraging students to consider/confirm with Dillard, please contact Mr. Roberto Diaz Del Valle (Admissions) for a formal presentation on the proper guidelines for doing so.

 
• CENTRALIZING ASSESSMENT EFFORTS: Deadline is this Friday
The Assessment Committee held its first meeting today. One of our first action items is to strengthen the structure and communication strategies for assessment-related activities. Let us begin by sharing all assessments (i.e., institutional, program and course-level). Click on reply, complete the table below and email it back to me by Friday of this week.

Carla Morelon-Quainoo, PhD

Director of Institutional Effectiveness and Assessment/Advising
National Director, Global Issues Honors Consortium
LOCATION: Dent Hall, Room 109
PHONE: 504-816-4788
cmorelon@dillard.edu
  • ADMINISTRATOR
  • NAME OF INSTRUMENT
  • LINK TO SITE ADMIN DATE(S)
  • PURPOSE
  • DISSEMINATED TO? W
  • HERE ARE DATA/REPTS CURRENTLY STORED?
___________________________________________
 

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Share/Bookmark

Inside Higher Education: iPads on Campus

 
April 5, 2010
The iPad has landed. But should campuses be throwing it a welcome party?
At least two are. Seton Hill University, a Roman Catholic institution in Pennsylvania, announced this week that it would be giving Apple’s new computing tablet to each of its 2,000-odd full-time students when they arrive on campus in the fall. George Fox University, a Christian institution in Oregon, will expand its annual laptop giveaway to first-year students to offer students a choice between a Macbook and an iPad. The year after that, there will be no more choice: Everybody will get iPads.

The e-learning giant Blackboard, meanwhile, today is announcing that it is launching an app for the iPad that will allow students to access their courses from the new device.

But the arrival of the long-awaited device has also prompted questions. On Educause’s CIO listserv last week, higher-ed technologists wondered aloud about the costs and benefits of the efforts of some campuses try to seed their student bodies with the gadget du jour.

Theresa Rowe, the CIO at Oakland University, noted the “pattern” of colleges announcing high-visibility technology giveaways of laptops, iPods, iPhones, and now the iPad — each time prompting peer institutions to wonder whether following suit would be strategically wise. “Our presidents or leaders ask ‘Why not us?’ ” Rowe wrote. “And then we scramble to put together a budget and support picture.” (Rowe was one of several CIOs to authorize Inside Higher Ed to quote from her contributions to the usually private forum.)

This time, Rowe decided to crowdsource the question to her counterparts on the listserv. What she got back was a mix of curiosity, enthusiasm, light number crunching, and some pointed skepticism.

Greg Smith, the CIO at George Fox, responded, saying that universities should not worry about justifying iPad giveaways with precise cost-versus-value analyses. The shifts that are happening in higher-ed technology — particularly from bound textbooks and research materials to electronic versions — are “bigger than the iPad,” said Smith. Universities know this change is coming, he said, so they should do what they can to enable it. “The iPad appears to be the perfect device for information at your fingertips which places it in the role to ignite the change,” Smith said.

But Robert Paterson, CIO at Molloy College, was not ready to anoint the tablet as a harbinger of institutional transformation. “Apple has done it again .... created a proprietary hardware with no particular purpose, except it may be cool and then sell, sell, sell,” Paterson wrote. “....[A]nd these initiatives for students .... without any experience in how it might be used, without faculty being able to experiment or to plan how to use them in the teaching/learning process... I apologize but it seems sort of gimmicky.”

Without a firm agenda in place for how the new technology is meant to be used, 5 percent of students at most might figure out a novel use of the iPad for learning, he said — too few to justify a campus-wide giveaway. By the time a substantial proportion of students start following the examples of the early innovators, Paterson said, “multiple iterations, improvement, enhancements to the tool have occurred... So you throw away the one first adopted in favor of better and cheaper versions.”

Stephen Landry, CIO at Seton Hall University (not to be confused with Seton Hill, which is the one doing an iPad giveaway), said that while he is more confident about students’ ability to adapt new devices into their learning processes, “it is wise to have concrete learning objectives that we hope to achieve by deploying that technology” nonetheless. “We should be able to discuss this with the students and parents who may want to know why tuition is going up and with our faculty who may want to know why we aren’t hiring more instructors,” Landry wrote. For example, he said, when Seton Hall first started giving out laptops in 1998, it did so as part of an effort to redesign its first-year English and math curriculums in order to improve learning outcomes through better use of technology.

So how much would an iPad giveaway actually cost for a typical campus? As it turned out, it was Rowe, the Oakland CIO who originally queried the listserv, who did some number crunching and estimated that to purchase and distribute the devices to a 3,000-student campus would cost about $2.2 million.

Other Considerations
In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Smith, the George Fox CIO, said that, more than getting students to use the iPad toward educational ends, campuses that choose to make it standard hardware could face pushback from professors, many of whom are used to using Microsoft Office’s suite of tools — Word, Power Point, Excel, etc. — to assign and receive student work (the iPad, unlike Apple's Macbook laptop, does not run Microsoft Office). He said that having to adjust to new technologies — regardless of whether students are likely to want them — gives professors everywhere jitters. “The biggest fear starting to grip [professors] is that… e-textbooks might actually become reality,” Smith said — acknowledging that there are exceptions, but they are the minority. “If you know higher ed, you know that the biggest fear of a professor is having to change how they deliver their course.” And then there’s the observation made by a number of reviewers that the iPad is much better for consuming content than creating it — and content creation — of papers, presentations, video projects, etc. — is a big part of being a college student.
But Smith is not worried. One of the reasons George Fox is phasing out its laptop program by way of the iPad giveaway is because most students there already have laptops — or at least have access to computers more oriented to creation. Besides, if you set up an iPad with its docking station and external keyboard — both of which George Fox will be providing to students — it is basically a desktop computer, he said.

— Steve Kolowich
Share/Bookmark

Faculty Focus Free Report: Course Design and Development Ideas That Work

http://www.facultyfocus.com/wp-content/uploads/images/course-design-ideasfacultyfocus.pdf
Have you ever tried to cross a creek by hopping from stone to stone? If so, then you know how important the placement of the stones is to your ability to make your way to the other side, while at the same time keeping your feet dry.

In the article The Placement of Those Steppingstones, the University of Richmond’s Joe Ben Hoyle compares the placement of steppingstones to the educational processes teachers use to help their students get from point A to point B. Hoyle theorizes that “education stumbles when either the learning points are not sequenced in a clearly logical order or they are not placed at a proper distance from each other.”

Course Design and Development Ideas That Work is a new special report featuring 12 articles from The Teaching Professor that will inspire you to rethink the stepping stones of your courses. Download now »

Articles in the 17-page report include:
• Pairing vs. Small Groups: A Model for Analytical Collaboration
• Should Students Have a Role in Setting Course Goals?
• Large Course with a Small Course Option
• A Critique of Scaffolding
• When to Begin the End: The Role and Use of Summary in Course Design

So much of what determines the overall success or failure of a course takes place well in advance of the first day of class. It’s the thoughtful contemplation of your vision for the course — from what you want your students to learn, to selecting the instructional activities, assignments, and materials that will fuel that learning, to determining how you will measure learning outcomes.

Share/Bookmark

Magna 20 Minute Mentor: How Do I Get More Students to Participate in Class?

When it comes to classroom participation, research continues to confirm what most faculty members experience each day: A limited number of students make the majority of contributions. In an observational study conducted in multiple classrooms, only 44% of the students participated, and 4-5 students made 89% of the comments.

Although getting more students to participate is challenging, the good news is that it can be done, and it doesn’t have to involve such tactics as “cold calling” on students or resorting to a points system. In this program, Maryellen Weimer, Ph.D., describes 18 strategies that work.

During this 20 minute program, you will learn how to:
•Better encourage students who rarely participate to speak more often.
•Provide other participation opportunities, such as brief written exercises or small group discussion, to help generate contributions.
•Move beyond seeing reluctant participators as a problem.
•Limit the participation of students who speak too often.
•Find something positive to say about a first-time contribution.

The program also includes supplemental materials that feature a summary of strategies and a summary of the research on participation in college classrooms.

Learning outcomes

At the conclusion of this program, you’ll be able to choose from a wide range of approaches for increasing student participation in your classes that include:
•Knowing different ways to respond with care to wrong or not very good answers to help encourage continued contributions.
•Knowing how to use something that a student has said previously and apply it in a follow-up comment or question.
•Understanding how to have students participate in different ways, such as by doing a problem on the board, writing key comments on the board or submitting questions by e-mail.
•Knowing how to take advantage of different opportunities to interact with students outside of class to facilitate increased classroom participation.

About the Presenter:
How Do I Get More Students to Participate in Class? is presented by Maryellen Weimer, editor of The Teaching Professor newsletter and author/editor of eight books. She is a Penn State Professor Emeritus of Teaching and Learning, and the 2005 recipient of Penn State’s Milton S. Eisenhower award for distinguished teaching. Dr. Weimer has also consulted with over 400 colleges and universities on instructional issues.
Share/Bookmark

DU Mini Grant Application Spring 2010 Revised

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:
Share/Bookmark

Celebrate National Library Week - April 11th-17th, 2010


Share/Bookmark

Computers in Libraries 2010 Final Program

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:
Share/Bookmark

DU Library Toxic Lyrics Brown Bag April 15 2010

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:
Share/Bookmark

10 Simple Google Search Tricks


Simon Mackie at WebWorkerDaily has put together 10 Simple Google Search Tricks. You can use all of these shortcuts and tips in Google’s basic search field. Here are the top five tricks:

1. Use the “site:” operator to limit searches to a particular site.
2. Use Google as a spelling aid.
3. Use Google as a calculator.
4. Find out what time it is anywhere in the world.
5. Get quick currency conversions.
Share/Bookmark