Online Classroom: How to Engage Students with Interactive Online Lectures

Have you heard about VoiceThread? It’s an easy-to-use collaborative tool with some truly exciting possibilities for use in both online and face-to-face classrooms.

You can learn more about it from one of the most respected voices in learning technology during this seminar.

John Orlando, Ph.D., is currently program director for two of Norwich University’s online master’s programs. In addition, he’s a consultant, course developer, lecturer and veteran of more than a decade in education technology.

In How to Engage Students with Interactive Online Lectures, Dr. Orlando will explore how VoiceThread brings an unprecedented level of student involvement and collaboration to online learning.

At its core, VoiceThread is a tool for combining lecture with discussion in rich ways, using an interaction structure roughly similar to social media. It allows faculty to create presentations based on slideshows, video, text and/or other media, to which students can respond, comment and append things (using the same variety of media) for sharing with both the instructor and fellow students.

In his 75-minute CD, Dr. Orlando reviews:
•The innovative ways VoiceThread facilitates participation.
•The wealth of feedback tools VoiceThread supports – video, text, phone, “doodling” and more.
•How VoiceThread builds a strong sense of community among students and faculty.
•How students can use VoiceThread to actively help build and support lecture content.
•How to set up and deliver in-class polls using smartphones.
•How student contributions can be used as legacies, passing their learning on for future classes to build on.
•How related technologies, including Video Ant and Windows Movie Maker, can further enhance the students’ learning experiences.
•And much more.
Whatever your discipline, you’ll leave the presentation brimming with ideas and excited by the possibilities of bringing VoiceThread to your classroom.

It only costs a little to learn a lot
Magna seminars are famously good values, and this one is no exception. The price is a modest $259 – far less than it would cost to attend an off-campus presentation. Even better news for your budget – you can invite colleagues to share in the seminar at absolutely no extra cost. Just project the CD in a lecture hall, conference room or other facility that will accommodate your group.

Who will benefit
•Faculty members
•Department chairs
•Instructional technologists
•Adjunct instructors
•Distance learning staff
If you’re interested in discovering new ways to create a deep, hands-on learning experience for your students (and a rewarding teaching experience for yourself), don’t miss this chance to learn about the possibilities of VoiceThread. Purchase this seminar today!

Now includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators
Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar now includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

Description Price
Seminar CD only $259
Seminar CD w/ Campus Access License $459

Online Classroom: How to Engage Students with Interactive Online Lectures

Association of American Colleges and Universities 2011 Summer Instituties

Summer Institutes
AAC&U Summer Institutes offer campus teams a time and place for sustained collaborative work on a project of importance to their campus. Our three annual institutes include the Institute on General Education and Assessment; the Engaging Departments Institute; and the Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success, which is the “next generation” of the former Greater Expectations Institute. A description of each is below, with additional information available on those Institutes’ Web pages.

AAC&U occasionally sponsors project-based summer institutes. Information about those institutes will be posted when applicable.

2011 SUMMER INSTITUTES
Institute on General Education and Assessment
June 4-8, 2011
San Jose State University, California

About the Institute
The Institute on General Education and Assessment provides campus teams of faculty and administrators with opportunities to refine and substantially advance campus projects on general education and its assessment. Through exploration of general education models; processes for redesigning general education courses, programs, and requirements; and successful implementation strategies, the Institute on General Education and Assessment facilitates the building of a campus learning culture based upon clear goals, intentional curricula and co-curricula, powerful instruction, and assessments to improve learning.

Who Should Attend
The Institute on General Education and Assessment is designed for any campus, system, or group of campuses engaged in redesigning general education for students. Campuses can be at any stage in the process of rethinking general education approaches and issues emerging from their respective needs and circumstances. Campus teams typically include a senior academic officer and faculty members working on general education committees or teaching general education courses.

Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success
June 14-18, 2011

The University of Vermont
About the Institute
The Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success—formerly the Greater Expectations Institute—is designed to help campuses develop high-impact practices, activities, and strategies that are engaging to students and effective at improving both persistence and essential learning outcomes, with particular benefit to students historically underserved by higher education. The curriculum is built on the latest research on practices that work for all students and offers innovative models of campus implementation and methods to document the progress of all students. It provides leadership development for campuses and state or state-system collaboratives dedicated to shared work for all students’ success.

Who Should Attend
The Institute is designed for both campus practitioners and institutional leaders, addressing the challenge of leading change efforts in an era of austerity. The Institute will be of particular interest to campus-wide or cross-functional teams that connect programs or sectors such as student affairs and academic affairs; state and state-system collaborative teams; and teams addressing institution-wide change for student success.

Engaging Departments Institute
July 13-17, 2011
The Hotel at Turf Valley, Ellicott City, Maryland

About the Institute
The Engaging Departments Institute is designed with the understanding that faculty members typically identify strongly with their discipline, department, or program, and that students typically engage in their most complex and sophisticated academic work in their majors. The Institute helps campus teams move from academic “homes” toward a more intentional collaboration among departments, as well as toward effective educational leadership, in order to achieve discipline-specific program and institution-wide learning outcomes for all students.

Who Should Attend
The Engaging Departments Institute is intended for campus teams of deans, department chairs, and faculty members working to create more intentional student learning within major programs and in relation to other curricular components. The Institute will be of particular interest to campus leaders concerned with assessing student achievement of departmental, programmatic, and institutional goals and outcomes, and those interested in cultivating institution-wide educational planning and diminishing the negative impact of academic silos.

PKAL Summer Leadership Institutes for STEM Faculty
July 12-17, 2011 and July 19-24
Baca Campus of Colorado College, Crestone, Colorado

About the Institute
The PKAL Summer Leadership Institutes for STEM Faculty are five-day intensive institutes that provide faculty participants with the theory and practice required to act as agents of change in their home institutions or professional societies. This year is the 13th summer PKAL has run the Summer Leadership Institutes. Each institute will consist of up to twenty-five participants and ten mentors who are leaders in STEM education. The Summer Leadership Institutes are designed around a carefully coordinated blend of theory and practice, weaving discussions of issues of national import with experiences about the politics of change together with time for conversations and reflections with mentors. Institute mentors play a key role in guiding the conversations, as they bring to the table first-hand experience in leadership in institutional change at the local and national levels. The institute utilizes a variety of approaches that include case-studies, role-playing, field trips and collaborative problem-solving exercises. Experiential learning is a significant part of the institute. Mentors will work with participants during the institute in shaping a personal agenda for leadership and action, continuing to serve as mentors during the year following the institute.

Who Should Attend
The PKAL Summer Leadership Institute is designed for early- and mid-career STEM faculty engaged in leading projects aimed at transforming undergraduate STEM education in their classrooms, departments and institutions.

Association of American Colleges and Universities 2011 Summer Instituties

Tuskegee University News: Tuskegee receives over $900,000 to improve educational facilities

February 2, 2011

The U.S. Department of Education recently announced the award of $84.775 million to 96 Historically Black Colleges and Universities to strengthen their facilities and academic programs to improve education for their students. Tuskegee University received $964,802. The funds are a supplement grant for the university’s Title III program. Dr. Charlotte P. Morris, head of the Title III program, is director of the grant.

“We are pleased to receive this portion of the grant which will be directed toward construction and/or renovation projects of our educational facilities,” said Morris, who is also associate dean and professor of the College of Business and Information Science.

Grants awarded under the Strengthening Historically Black Colleges and Universities Program support a variety of activities that improve and expand course offerings, student services, campus facilities, and faculty and staff development. Funds may also be used to establish teacher education programs designed to qualify students to teach in public schools, financial and economic literacy programs for students and families, and community outreach programs that encourage elementary and secondary school students to develop high-level academic skills and interest in postsecondary education.

"HBCUs play an essential role in helping our nation boost college completion rates and achieve the president's (Barack Obama) goal for America to again have the highest percentage of college graduates in the world by 2020," said Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education. "These grants provide HBCUs with needed resources to enhance their programs and services that will enable their students to graduate and succeed in the workplace."

The awards are formula grants based on data provided by eligible institutions. To be eligible for funding, institutions must have been established prior to 1964 and have as a principal mission the education of African-Americans.

Tuskegee University News: Tuskegee receives over $900,000 to improve educational facilities

Faculty Focus Defining Active Learning

By Maryellen Weimer, PhD

There’s a definitional “looseness” about many of the terms commonly used in higher education. I know, I’ve written about this in previous blogs, but when terms are bandied about assuming everybody defines them similarly, that’s a recipe for misunderstanding. Equally important, we can be using terms without having done the intellectual homework necessary to precisely understand their referents.

Case in point: active learning. Not so long ago in a workshop discussion, I asked for definitions. I gave participants a couple of minutes to think or jot notes. Here’s some of what I got, “students doing” “activities that engage students” “passive learning is an oxymoron” “teaching that gets student involved with the content” “when students participate or do group work.” Although similar, I would say that all those descriptors are different. None of them are bad or wrong; most of them are pretty superficial when compared to a definition like the one for active learning that appears in The Greenwood Dictionary of Education.

Greenwood defines active learning as “The process of having students engage in some activity that forces them to reflect upon ideas and how they are using those ideas. Requiring students to regularly assess their own degree of understanding and skill at handling concepts or problems in a particular discipline. The attainment of knowledge by participating or contributing. The process of keeping students mentally, and often physically, active in their learning through activities that involve them in gathering information, thinking and problem solving.”

I’m not proposing this as the “right” “best” or “only” definition for active learning, but I am proposing that it’s a good deal more specific than most of us would offer. Now, if we sat down and thought about active learning, if we talked about it with colleagues, I’m pretty sure that the definitions we’d develop would rival this one. But my point is we can regularly use terms like this without having done that careful thinking.

From student engagement and active learning to course design and assessment, we’ll explore the latest ideas in teaching and learning at The Teaching Professor Conference. During this three-day event you’ll have the opportunity to rub elbows and share ideas with hundreds of other educators from campuses nationwide. See the list of workshops »


Carefully crafted learning experiences
There are some things about this definition that I do like. Sometimes we think active learning is “activity for the sake of activity” without being mindful that it’s equally about what students are doing. According to this definition they are engaged in activities designed to encourage reflection, designed to confront them with their knowledge and skill levels and designed to get them interacting with information. That’s not just any old activity—that’s a carefully crafted learning experience.

Most faculty know that active learning is important even though many still lecture pretty much exclusively. Most will even go so far as to admit that students learn better when they are active, not passive. And almost all faculty report that they use active learning. But I’m hoping this discussion is making clear that there is active learning and then there is active learning.

Student engagement exists along a continuum. I think the Greenwood definition is active learning at a highly engaged and highly effective level. The nice thing about a continuum is that things can be moved along it. So, if you don’t have time at the moment to create one of those carefully crafted learning experiences, you can take an active learning strategy you currently use, say participation, and make it more active. You can do that by asking a good, thought provoking question, following it with 30 seconds of silence and follow that with two minutes during which students share their thoughts with each other before discussing the answer with the whole class.

Or, you could pause after presenting a chunk of content and tell students you don’t intend to proceed until they’ve asked at least two questions about the material. You might jot those questions on the board, type them into the computer and then let the class take a crack at answering. Write down the essence of their answers and then discuss the merits of their various replies.

Now it's your turn. What are some ways you promote active learning in your classes? Please share your thoughts in the comment box.

Faculty Focus Defining Active Learning

The Council of Independent Colleges Conferences and Events Calendar 2011

CIC's annual events calendar includes premier conferences such as the Presidents Institute and Chief Academic Officers Institute, as well as numerous high-quality workshops and seminars. View the listing by date below.

2011 New Presidents Program
January 3-4: Palm Springs, CA
If you are newly appointed to the president's role, you'll want to
join your colleagues for a day-and-a-half program just for new college leaders. You'll learn the ins and outs of a wide range of presidential issues, all from the perspective of experienced presidents and other experts.

2011 Presidents Institute
January 4-7: Palm Springs, CA
The Presidents Institute is an annually held meeting for presidents of independent colleges and universities that includes a day-and-a-half program for new presidents.

2011 Information Fluency Workshop (Literature)
February 10-12: New Orleans, LA
The Information Fluency in the Disciplines Workshop is intended to help institutions move beyond information literacy in general education to information fluency in humanities majors.

2011 Information Fluency Workshop (History)
March 3-5: San Antonio, TX
The Information Fluency in the Disciplines Workshop is intended to help institutions move beyond information literacy in general education to information fluency in humanities majors.

2011 NetVUE Conference
March 10-12: Indianapolis, IN
Teams of campus leaders are invited to participate in the first biennial national conference of the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE).

Conference on Teaching World Languages: Strategies for Success
March 31–April 2: Little Rock, AR
Campus teams will gather to share methods of language instruction that have proven effective at smaller colleges, returning to their campuses with new strategies for improved language instruction.

2011 Department and Division Chair Workshops
http://www.cic.edu/conferences_events/workshop/teaching/2011Dept_Div.asp
April 7-9: Milwaukee, WI
May 17-19: Baltimore, MD
May 24-26: Louisville, KY
June 8-10: San Diego, CA
To assist independent colleges and universities in strengthening leadership at the department level, these workshops are offered to experienced, as well as new, department/division chairs. The workshops focus on the distinctive challenges of department leadership in small and mid-sized, private colleges and universities.

2011 CIC/Gilder Lehrman American History Seminar
June 12-15: New Haven, CT
This intensive four-day seminar offers a unique opportunity for faculty members in history and related fields to debate a prominent American history topic with experts and colleagues.

2011 Art History Seminar
June 19-24: Atlanta, GA
The second in a series of new seminars will take place at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA and will focus on themes that appear in Renaissance through 19th century art, with an emphasis on the Italian Renaissance.

2011 College Media Conference
June 30 - July 1: Washington, DC
The 25th anniversary of this annual conference is a major event for campus public relations and communications officers as well as representatives of higher education media. To be held this year in the nation's captial, this event is cohosted by the Council of Independent Colleges and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

2011 Presidential Vocation and Institutional Mission Seminar
July 10-13: Napa, CA
The upcoming seminar series is for prospective presidents and their spouses. It is designed to help prospective presidents, along with their spouses, clarify their own sense of personal vocation, and to weigh it in the context of the missions of the institutions they each might lead in the future.

Additional conferences and events beyond July 2011 will be posted as exact dates are confirmed.

The Council of Independent Colleges Conferences and Events Calendar 2011

Faculty Focus: The Benefits of Blended Learning Explained

January 5, 2011
The Benefits of Blended Learning Explained
By: Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti in Distance Learning Administration

Blended learning — a strategy that combines online and classroom learning activities and resources to reduce in-class seat time for students in a face-to-face environment — can be a tremendous boon for a university. It can help the institution enhance under-enrolled programs, complete faculty teaching loads, and improve cost effectiveness. However, convincing the institution’s constituents that a blended course or program is a good idea may take some work.

Muriel Oaks is dean of the Center for Distance and Professional Education at Washington State University. During the recent seminar titled New Ideas for Selling Blended Learning to Your Faculty, she offered an in-depth discussion of ways to convince administrators, faculty, and students of the value of blended learning, including:

When talking to administrators, point out that blended learning…
•impacts the entire institution.
•offers a learner-centered pedagogy.
•may integrate with the strategic plan.
•improves classroom utilization.
•can help match delivery to academic need.
•can help fill under-enrolled courses and programs.

When talking to faculty, point out that blended learning….
•gives them access to new resources.
•introduces them to online learning.
•is an opportunity for faculty development and lets them experiment with new pedagogies and techniques.
•helps meet student expectations and build student skills.
•allows for more flexible scheduling.
•retains the face-to-face aspect faculty may cherish.

When talking to students, point out blended learning…
•meets their expectations for utilizing technology.
•develops independent learning skills.
•offers increased flexibility and convenience.
•provides better access to those with job, family, or distance barriers.
•helps reduce educational costs.

Offering blended learning requires more than just setting up an LMS and telling the faculty to integrate it into their curriculum. Institutions must understand the variety of delivery modes available, investigate their potential audience, learn about the competition, and provide adequate support for both students and faculty.

Faculty Focus: The Benefits of Blended Learning Explained