This Week in the LEC

Virtual escape rooms have become quite popular in higher education. They’ve been used in education, business, healthcare, and many other disciplines. In general, as defined in the education context, a virtual escape room is a computer-based problem-solving activity that uses puzzle rooms and game-like components to educate and engage learners. Escape rooms are an excellent way to engage students by gamifying your lessons and making them fun to learn, while reinforcing existing knowledge. In this article, we discuss the process of planning and developing your own escape room.

This was a great year for the Learning and Educational Center. Once again, we enjoyed working with our amazing faculty on their courses, hosting a variety of workshops with University partners and NSU faculty members, and exploring new ground. Our LEC Advisory Council formed a subcommittee to host a Teaching and Learning Conference for all NSU employees and the event was a huge success. Additionally, the LEC Advisory Council helped form a competency framework for NSU educators. Our Faculty Studio continued to serve faculty who wanted to add high-quality video content to their courses and because of the tremendous response of students and faculty alike, we continued our Thank a Professor initiative, the results of which will be shared during the new year.

Team members from across the LEC drafted and published several articles in 2022 with topics ranging from Considering Course Design for Affective Learning to 15 Ways to Engage your Students. In addition to the articles, LEC team members produced short informative videos on the educational technology platforms used at NSU. We promise that you will find something new in the Learning with the LEC Video series. These articles and videos published throughout the year might deserve a second read or second look.

Thanks to the vision and perseverance of our dedicated LEC Advisory Council this year we held our inaugural Teaching and Learning Conference. We are so grateful for the commitment of our presenters and participants that made the event successful. In the coming months, you will hear more about our other new initiative, the NSU Educator Competency Framework. We also can’t wait to share the many thank you notes that students submitted for this year’s Thank a Professor initiative.