This Week in the LEC

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.

Experiential learning can happen in classrooms, through study away programs, service learning, research projects, and more. However, experiential learning doesn’t just happen on its own. The design of these experiences must be intentional. In this session, we will explore how to use Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle to guide the design of experiential learning coursework, and share an example of how one Honors course was designed and implemented for learners to have authentic experiences, reflect on those experiences, and apply their learning to new situations.

Generative AI (GenAI) has the potential to assist learning in many practical ways. While the tools and our understanding of how to use them are constantly developing, it is already possible to utilize them in many ways, one of which is as a method of support and feedback. This can have various benefits for students and can be a valuable way to practice skills and review course content. There are also limitations to using these tools in this format. In this workshop, we will highlight the benefits, limitations, and possibilities for GenAI to act as a personalized tutor for your students. We will also focus on developing prompts that are effective, supportive, and won’t give away the answers!

If you want to increase student engagement and personalize feedback within your Shark Media videos, the Annoto Widget workshop was created just for you. The Annoto widget is a tool that integrates with Shark Media and can be used in Canvas enabling you to add interactive elements to your videos. You can use it to create questions, quizzes, surveys, polls, and discussions that appear on the video timeline. You and your students can also use it to annotate your videos with highlights, notes, links, and images.

Videos are often the most highly engaging media in a course. Videos can be used to introduce new course content, reinforce concepts already learned, share demonstrations, simulations, and much more. You may know that NSU has a media server called Shark Media which is our branded version of Kaltura. During this workshop, we will review the many capabilities of the Shark Media platform. We will show you where you can find every function on the platform, from uploading videos, all the way to creating chapter markers and playlists for your students.

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.