Category: Articles

Welcome to the Winter 2022 term! Although we have resumed our classes in their regularly scheduled format (i.e., in-person, hybrid, and online), we continue to practice flexibility in our teaching due to the recent surge of the Omicron variant of COVID-19. Over the 15 years that Marti Snyder, Ph.D., PMP, SPHR has worked at NSU, she has had the opportunity to teach face-to-face, online, and blended courses to undergraduates, master’s, and doctoral students. Here are 15 strategies that she uses most often in these various formats to engage her students. Many of these strategies overlap and can be used regardless of delivery mode. 

This was a year of transition and dynamic change. With the global pandemic, and with the return to our campus, faculty made the heroic effort to transform their classroom experiences from the BlendFlex model to the face-to-face classroom in a very short time. The Learning and Educational Center (LEC) hosted a series of workshops, deeply rooted in teaching pedagogy, organized training for faculty, published articles, and created videos to support our mission to improve the quality of teaching and learning at NSU. Towards the end of the year, our Brand New LEC Faculty Studio was brought to life! Finally, we were able to implement the Thank-a-Professor Program to allow our NSU Students to send Thank-You notes to our Teaching Faculty for the amazing work that you do in your classroom! In case you missed these, below are links to some of the articles, Shark Notes, and videos along with some data on the workshops that we hosted and co-hosted with some of our university partners in 2021.

The LEC published several articles in 2021 ranging with topics from Classroom Management, Teaching, and Instruction, BlendFlex, Instructional Strategies, Accessibility, Writing Course Objectives and took a deep dive at the Role of Motivation in Online Learning. If you missed them, here are some of the articles we published throughout the year.

The Learning and Educational Center built and equipped a Faculty Studio in the Carl DeSantis Building. In this studio, you can film videos and record audio for course content. A highlight of this studio is the new 66” lightboard that will allow you to craft engaging content and illustrate concepts while maintaining a connection with your audience. This year the LEC introduced the MAKO Commons, a virtual community of practice for faculty to come together and share their teaching and learning practices and research. Additionally, the LEC was inspired by an idea brought to us by Dr. Emily Schmitt of the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences to create the LEC Thank-a-Professor Program. Thank-a-Professor seeks to recognize faculty members who create meaningful and impactful experiences in the classroom. So far we have received over 2,000 thank-you notes and we cannot wait to highlight and begin sharing them in 2022. Capping off a busy year of initiatives, we also launched the LEC Advisory Council to provide guidance and strategic planning support for how the LEC can best serve the faculty.

The LEC published brief summaries of article highlights that you may find helpful. We reviewed these articles and shared them with you. You’ll find articles on The Role of Tempo in Good Teaching, Creating Online Field Labs, How to Structure Your Online Class for Inclusion, Encouraging Self Advocacy, and Using Inclusive Teaching Strategies to Promote Greater Success Among Minority Students.

Creative thinking tends to play a crucial role in the progression of humanity. Examining situations through fresh perspectives can often lead to finding better solutions or gaining a deeper insight into what already works well and why. However, creative thinking can also require a greater amount of effort when trying to do something new or something different. Over the past two years, hybrid and blended learning models morphed into a universal large-scale learning experience galvanized by technology. Instructors and learners had to quickly invent and adapt to new classroom practices using digital tools. Since expectations have changed, we thought it would be helpful to explore some creative approaches to leveraging technology in blended learning experiences.

Did you know that you have access to resources that you can use to make your course content more relevant and interesting? Sometimes available resources get lost in the mix, so we’d like to highlight a few of them for you now. 

The LEC is proud to share its recently launched Thank-a-Professor program!  Students can choose to write thank-you notes via a webform submission and let everyone know how their amazing professors have created meaningful classroom experiences and helped them achieve learning goals.  Through this program, we will recognize instructors for their efforts by publicly sharing student thank-you notes.  This is a celebration!  We look forward to hearing all about our outstanding faculty through the experiences of our students. 

After a year of online synchronous video communication via web conferencing tools such as Zoom, Skype, and others, it is likely that we are tired of the hours and hours of synchronous video. As we transition from remote instruction back to more traditional forms of teaching and learning and using technology to help facilitate our face-to-face, blended, and online courses, we can leverage the benefits of video in asynchronous environments. In particular, video is becoming more popular in asynchronous discussions as a way to create an online community, construct knowledge, have meaningful discussions, and strengthen student-to-student and student-to-instructor interactions.

The Learning and Educational Center supports all instructors in the development and advancement of their courses. We developed a checklist based on the Quality Matters Rubric and adapted it from a similar checklist from Western Kentucky University which allows instructors to quickly determine their course readiness as it relates to the Quality Matters (QM) Rubric. The Course Readiness Checklist was designed and aligned with the 8 Standards of the Quality Matters Rubric.  For reference, we have documented the relevant QM Standard in the checklist.