School of Life Sciences is a wonderful community focused on improving teaching, sharing new ideas, and working together to find solutions for our students. Join us for a minute to reflect back and lift up the many voices in this community. Here are some of the key ideas and popular posts shared last year from our SOLS Community: Faculty Contributions: Our blogs covered a number of different ideas generated by the strong relationship between instructional designers and faculty. Often new ideas are tested and written about from courses. Some of the highlights this year were seen here: In How Active Learning is Implemented , Sara Brownell, shared various questions about how instructors help or hinder students when implementing active learning strategies. Gillian Clark shared her experiences with using specifications learning and shared the benefits and challenges in Adventures in Specifications Gradin g Reimagining classroom collaboration activities and teams became a topic for both bl...

Higher education today is filled with information about inclusive practices for our classrooms and schools that need to be discussed from multiple perspectives, and do not have simple solutions. A quick Google search will lead to hundreds of education events focused on inclusion for nearly every day of the year. These webinars are informative, use highly qualified speakers, and share new ideas and perspectives. However, studies have shown that although webinars are great ways to give faculty information, they do little in terms of changing behaviors or decisions by educators in the long term. A quote from Nancy Dana, author of “The PLC Book” states “While we may have been intrigued and even inspired, the next day we would all return to the hectic pace of our classroom routines, and whatever was learned during that one “in-service” day, quickly faded from our memories.” Dana goes on to promote PLCs (Professional Learning Communities) as a way to follow up information workshops with oppo...

Donald Meeks, a student at Arizona State University, and creator of "Go Native" , a video game aimed at teaching people how to speak and interact in different countries, opened our webinar on Tuesday, May 3. His comments helped faculty understand how games impacted the way he learned, and how they have the ability to teach new skills by engaging students in problem-solving and immersive environments. (Click here to see Donald's talk) Faculty went on to review research on games and education, define game "elements", and connect what they are already doing in traditional classes with games. Finally, they reviewed 3 case studies, from a fully converted course from Andy Petroski from Harrisburg University into a game, to some of ASU's courses that are making small changes in course assignments and activities to integrate gaming themes like:   "Spore Controversy" - where students play a "science" game and then discuss what it got w...

At yesterday's information session, we shared a number of resources to help faculty participate in the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement . Faculty and Grad Students discussed the many challenges of awareness and finding the right open materials. However, all agreed that with ASU's "inclusive" environment, the use of OERs in the classroom would continue to develop in the future. Our ASU Life Sciences Librarian, Rene Tanner, discussed the benefits of submitting papers to the ASU Digital Repository as an important step in increasing the impact of scholarly work. Making pre-publications, post-review publications, white papers, and data available in ASU's Digital Repository will make it possible for others to find, use, and reference your work without paying a fee. More information can be found on the ASU Library Guide for Open Education . Some other highlights of the session were: Defining OER, Open Access, and Open Pedagogy with this 4-minute video by...

Millennials watch 11.3 hours of online video a week! With the average YouTube video at 4 minutes long, that means they are watching about 171 videos per week. Educators need to take note of this trend, and take some tips from the "TubeGurus" on how to create engaging videos for their courses. Our webinar on March 2, 2016 talked about a number of topics from the use of humor, to how to get started with ideas. We shared and discussed some of the best practices below, and applied them to videos for online and flipped courses.  Some of the best practices included: Shorter is Better Use the 5A's of Emotion Tell a Story Call (Students) to Action Create a "Viral" title As always, the best way to get started is to meet with an instructional designer, with your objectives and a few sketches on what you want to do.  Below is the summary video, slides and resources. Resources: Summary video PowerPoint slides Frame-by-Frame Template Video Idea L...