This Week in the LEC

There has been a lot of discussion about how generative AI has impacted higher education’s teaching and learning, research, and professional practices. There are many ways faculty can apply generative AI to support their daily work activities such as writing and research, course design, and personal learning. In this session, we will identify some commonly used generative AI tools, explore how they can be used to support professional practice, and discuss issues related to responsible and ethical use.

SharkMedia has been enhanced with an exciting feature from Kaltura called Interactive Video Paths. Interactive Videos enable you to create a more personalized, “choose your own adventure” learning experience by adding choice-based learning paths to your videos. Interactive videos are well known for their ability to increase viewer’s participation, reduce cognitive overload, maximize retention, and provide real world learning experiences.

Podcasts are a creative and fun way to engage with important concepts and course-based knowledge. They offer a different approach to foster and demonstrate learning and can engage students who may otherwise have a low level of interest. In this workshop, we will show you how to develop an assignment where your students create a podcast. We will cover the equipment and software needed (spoiler alert: it’s free and easy), podcast formats, how to guide your students through the steps, and how to publish or share the results.

Engaging students at a distance and in the classroom can present challenges. Poll Everywhere provides a way to interact with your students with activities designed to ask questions, drive participation in group activities, and encourage students to share thoughts and insights from their phones or computers.

Group assignments can be very beneficial to student learning. They can teach students to work in a group, as well as how to plan and organize projects in a way that reflects the professional world. They can also be a challenge to organize, carry out, and grade, and they can sometimes elicit negative feelings on the part of both instructors and students. In this workshop, we will go over strategies and techniques that can improve the process and make group assignments more effective and rewarding. We will also highlight various features of the Canvas LMS that may help support the process.

During this fast-paced workshop, we will share unique features about the tools that you use every day but may not know everything about. We will demonstrate and discuss use cases for the following Zoom features and tools including: Immersive View, Poll Everywhere, Whiteboard, Avatars, and Zoom Apps.