Presentations

Below are the presentations that have slides available. Thank you to all of this year’s presenters.

Keynote

From Unbundling to Rebundling: Designing Liberal Education for the New Learning Ecosystem

Randy Bass, Georgetown University

What would a liberal education look like if we were designing it from scratch? What kind of learning experiences are only possible now? This talk will explore the questions of transforming the undergraduate learning experience, especially to rethink the ways we engage students in designing their own education, connecting theory to practice, and knowledge of the world to knowledge of themselves. This is a critical time for universities to rethink how breadth, depth, and integration should shape the student learning experience.

Video and Slides

Lightning Rounds

Teaching the Whole Student

To better support student learning in your classroom, it helps to understand the whole picture of the Duke student beyond academics. In this lightning round presentation, Duke Admissions will give you a sense of the qualities they look for in making their decisions and how they go about choosing a class of 1700 students from a pool of over 32,000 applicants. DukeReach will discuss how they support students in distress and crisis, including how they work with faculty, administrators, and others to provide resources to students who need them. The International House will share the kinds of programming they offer to students.

Innovative Faculty, Innovative Teaching Approaches

In this lightning round, faculty members will share a snapshot of their experiences using a novel teaching method. Language instructor Sandra Valnes Quammen from Romance Studies will share online activities that replace seat time in her hybrid courses. Nursing professor Jennie De Gagne will share how she uses modes of communication and instruction beyond just text to keep online students engaged and learning. Rebecca Vidra in the Nicholas School will introduce the ways she is using video (guests and documentaries) to shake up her large survey course.

Innovative Faculty, Innovative Teaching Approaches

Exploring new technologies is a difficult gamble for faculty members with limited time. During this lightning round, hear from faculty members who are having success and see if the applications could be a win in your courses. Eric Green in Global Health will discuss how GitHub hosts his open source textbook. Drew Hilton will show his home-grown approach to coding assignments, Mastery Grading. Shai Ginsburg from Asian and Middle Eastern Studies will talk about how he is integrating game play and Slack in a new course. Minna Ng (Duke Institute for Brain Studies) will show how she uses Teammates for peer group evaluations.

Training Modules: Moving Content out of the Classroom

Students often need to gain skills to do well in a field, but it is not necessary to spend class time on them. Melanie Sturgeon (Duke Library), Devon Henry (OIT) and Willie Williamson (CIT) will discuss how an online module about applying for patents came to be. Heather Valli (CIT) will talk about training videos available to anyone who wants to use 3D printers at Duke. Finally, Genevieve Lipp (CIT) will explain how engineering labs have been transformed into ‘take-home’ projects. This lightning round will address questions such as “What does it take to make these videos? How is learning measured? What should you know to move forward?”

Presentations

Social Brains:  Using Social Media to Learn Medical Neuroscience

This session will show attendees how social media channels add unique value to online learning. Len White from the Duke Institute for Brain Science, who teaches “Medical Neuroscience” as an open, online class, will share how he uses Twitter, Facebook, Google Hangout, and most recently, an ancillary website “LearnMedicalNeuroscience.nl”, which has its own social functionality. Co-presenting is Drs. Ellen Vos-Wisse, a senior course mentor, who created the website to support the user experience in the online course. Communications Manager Courtney Lockemer will be on hand to share best practices for social media in instruction.

Making the Most of PowerPoint

Whether you are speaking in the classroom or at an academic conference, it can be a challenge to design slides that provide a visually appealing backdrop to what you are saying.  In this session, Kim Manturuk (CIT) will explain how to create slides that engage your audience and complement your content.  Attendees will learn tips for making lectures and presentations more interactive.

Open Learning for an Open World

This session is dedicated to understanding what it means to collaborate across institutions and beyond textbooks to teach. Jolie Tingen and Kim Duckett explain what Open Educational Resources (OERs) are and how they can be freely retained, reused, revised, remixed and redistributed. They will also reveal a new grant-funded opportunity at Duke encouraging faculty to explore OERs in their discipline. OSPRI (Open Source Pedagogy, Research + Innovation) is a new project at Duke that applies open source methodologies and principles to teaching and learning, communicating, and creating within and beyond educational institutions. Aria Chernik, Director of OSPRI, will highlight how open learning environments empower student agency and better prepare learners for a culture that is rapidly shifting towards collaboration, sharing, and open exchange of ideas and services.

CIT Program Update

Not sure what the Center for Instructional Technology does beyond the Showcase? Did you know that we have programs and expertise that can help you integrate active learning, team-based learning, a “flipped” classroom, and other strategies into your teaching? Or that we help fund, design, and build online courses across a variety of platforms? This session will describe the breadth of CIT projects and resources that are available to faculty and highlight some past projects. We will also reveal upcoming opportunities and talk about how you can get involved.

Workshops

Ideas for Great Group Work

Do your students hate group projects and working in teams? Do you think your students could be more engaged or achieving more in group work? This workshop, led by Randy Riddle (CIT), will look at the most common problems with in-class and longer-term group and team assignments in classes and concrete ideas from faculty colleagues to make group work a highlight of your class.

Improve Your Teaching With Meaningful Student Feedback

Students can help you improve your teaching. In this workshop, Haiyan Zhou and Andrea Novicki (CIT) will introduce several different ways of gathering actionable feedback from students. Participants will be introduced to methods for gathering student opinions (such as minute papers and mid-semester surveys) and will learn how to most effectively use this feedback to improve their course.

Why Ed Tech Works (and Why It Doesn’t)

Like any instructional approach, technology works best when it’s used intentionally within the pedagogical context of the lesson. But how do you know when your use of technology is a good idea? In this session, Michael Vaughn, an instructional technologist from Elon University, will provide you with a framework for analyzing technology integrations to quickly estimate their effectiveness.

Demos

Portfolios and Beyond: A Look at PebblePad

Professors Denise Comer (Thompson Writing Center) and Kristen Stephens (School of Education) have assigned portfolios for years to capture students’ self-reflections on learning, as well as to formally assess competencies. Now they have the role of faculty mentors for the implementation of PebblePad here at Duke. They will share how they are using the tool in their courses, research projects, and for career development. Christian Ferney, from the Kenan Institute of Ethics, will also share his use of PebblePad as well. Attendees will get a good sense of the ways PebblePad can be implemented by other departments, certificates, and schools. For more information about PebblePad, please visit bit.ly/pebbleduke

Tools for Transforming Teaching

This session focuses on the power of digital tools in teaching. Hannah Jacobs from the Wired! Lab for Digital Art History & Visual Studies will showcase courses that teach historical content through collaborative digital projects. She will show examples of student projects and teaching materials for integrating visual storytelling, mapping, and 3D modeling into existing courses.

PlayPosit, an interactive video platform, makes instruction with videos you’ve created or found easy and accountable. Founder Susan Germer will showcase the ways PlayPosit can empower instructors including: jump-to functionalities, discussion options, powerful analytics, asynchronous or in class delivery, student-created lessons, and full integration with Sakai and Warpwire.

Put a Chip in It!

Smart Water Bottles! Wifi Connected Refrigerators! Smart Floss Dispenser! Everything seems to be getting a chip and a wifi connection these days as part of what is being dubbed the “Internet of Things.” In this presentation, Michael Faber (Innovation Co-Lab) and Pedro Lasch (Art and Art History) will discuss what exactly that means, why it’s powerful and important (and also why it’s ridiculous sometimes), and how it’s relevant to higher education.