PebblePad eportfolio rollout
PebblePad was adopted at the beginning of the 2016/2017 academic year as Duke’s new ePortfolio tool. PebblePad allows students, faculty and staff to create websites, blogs and reflections to share privately or publish for public audiences such as potential employers. Because materials can be gathered easily for review, instructors and advisors can develop an ongoing dialogue with students about their learning and track student progress at the course and department level. Another feature is the ability to request an alumni account after leaving the university.
All Duke users are welcome to learn how to use the tool and begin using it now.
Supporting Duke in China: Duke Kunshan University
CIT continues to support Duke faculty teaching at Duke Kunshan University. CIT provides consulting and assistance on planning courses and uses of technology, as well as support for faculty thinking about using new models of teaching (flipping the classroom, distance models, etc).
Improving learning for STEM students
CIT continues to participate in Duke’s COMPASS program, part of a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to improve learning for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) students, particularly underrepresented minorities, in introductory science courses. CIT’s Andrea Novicki serves on a team creating a STEM Teaching and Learning Collaboratory that brings together faculty, teaching assistants and learning specialists to enable all students to succeed in introductory STEM courses.
Open Education Resources
Through a grant provided from the Duke Endowment Libraries Collaboration Fund, CIT and Duke Libraries collaborated with librarians at Johnson C. Smith, Furman University, and Davidson University to offer grants to faculty to explore Open Educational Resources. Three faculty at Duke participated in the grant, two from the School of Nursing, and one from Classical Studies. The overall outcome was successful, meeting the goals of increasing OER knowledge of librarians and faculty, and gaining an understanding of the overall campus attitudes toward OER on the respective campuses. At the end of the project, faculty survey responses at all institutions reflected a willingness to adopt OERs for their courses as result of participating in the grant. In addition, all institutions who participated in the grant have plans to continue OER initiatives on their campuses.
Preparing future faculty: Bass Online Apprentices
CIT Senior Academic Technology Consultant Sophia Stone continued to manage CIT’s partnership with the Graduate School’s Bass Online Apprentice Fellowship, which provides Ph.D. students hands-on experience in online college teaching by collaborating with Duke faculty to develop online courses. To date we have offered 12 online apprenticeships. This year we provided the opportunity for three Bass fellows to work with our project teams to develop a diverse skill set for online teaching. Projects included partnering with Duke Libraries to create online materials on digital literacies in an undergraduate philosophy course and working with Duke Global Health Institute to integrate a Coursera MOOC into the on-campus curriculum of an international partner medical school. Stone also continued to teach GS 762 Online College Teaching, a hybrid course she co-teaches and co-developed with Hugh Crumley, Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs.
Distance Education Special Interest Group (DE-SIG)
Sophia Stone collaborated with Nancy Foskey (DUSON) to co-lead the Duke Distance Education Special Interest group this year, hosting six well-attended sessions. Academic staff, instructional designers, IT leaders and online learning administrators from across Duke attended meetings on a range of topics including digital copyright and online teaching, blended learning, online education initiatives (with panelists from the Duke School of Medicine, the School of Nursing, and the Fuqua School of Business) and accessibility for online learning.