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...

Everyone is on Slack right now. Including me, as I write this blog! Oh, you aren’t? I’ll do my best to help you make the leap! What is Slack anyway, and what makes it different from, say, the AOL Chatrooms of yore? And even if it is special, how can you effectively use it in classrooms? It’s time to Level Up Immersive Conversation Using Slack! In Part 1 of this series, we talked about Yellowdig as an online social media platform that lives in your Canvas course fully equipped for online asynchronous discussion and immersion synchronous discussion. It has auto-grading capabilities and can help learners organize thoughts about the course around major themes. Its gamification features ensure learners stay on topic and contribute consistent and quality posts and replies. Slack is different from Yellowdig, but can also be used to enhance your classes. Here are some of the major features of Slack. Independent workspace , Slack is not a Canvas embedded tool. It’s an independent workspace for...

Group work whether online or in-person almost always begets one or more emails that read “I’d really rather not do group work. Can I complete this project alone?”. Students, limited on time and juggling a number of courses and responsibilities rarely get a thrill at the thought of a “group project”. Despite our best efforts as instructors it can be difficult to inspire in students the notion that life and work in general are often group projects, and one can rarely go at it alone. We want our students to experience collaborative and active learning, and group work is often one way of doing this on a smaller, more intimate scale ( Hesterman, 2016 ). How can we relieve the pressure and the fear that one group member feels will become their solo burden under the name “group project”? Group contracts and reflections may be a good place to start. What is a Group Contract? In several of our courses we begin group projects with a Group Contract, a collaborative document signed by all group m...

One of the great things about a project-based course is that students can bring fresh, creative angles to the standard topics in a field. Unfortunately, their contributions often don’t have a lifespan beyond the semester or a good way to reach a broader audience. Google recently revamped its aging Google Sites service, and I found it to offer an effective solution for this challenge in my course this semester, especially in combination with the rest of Google’s cloud services .  If you’re interested in sharing student projects on a public-facing site, I also found some licensing tools from Creative Commons nicely address some important concerns about credit and reuse. Engaging Students As a philosopher teaching in ASU’s School of Life Sciences, I’m always looking for creative ways to engage students with philosophy as an activity – something we can do together as a group -- rather than a bunch of theories disconnected from what they’re studying. I’ve been teaching an upper-level ...

image link Traditionally, active learning has been associated with the face-to-face classroom, and many online courses focus on more traditional activities like watching videos and taking online quizzes. However, with the push for an online biology degree at the ASU School of Life Sciences , it is vital that techniques that focus on student-centered learning and collaborative/peer engagement be integrated into our new online courses. This webinar focused on taking activities that are used in a traditional classroom, and translating them into online activities with the use of web apps and some restructuring.  One of the examples shared included changing a typical minute paper written before students left a class, into an interactive video post, asking students to answer a prompt with their own videos using FlipGrid. Another example showed participants how Google slides and Padlet could replace post-it note activities that allow students to group, categorize and make conn...

This week's TeachT@lk webinar focused on a common issue at ASU, our large classes. Often faculty have 100+ students, and are overwhelmed at the end of the semester with grading. Our objective with this webinar was to share some different ideas about assessment that might make it a bit easier. I was joined by Lynda Mae from Psychology and Jason Neenos from the University Technology Office. We started with some tips to use online exams, even for face-to-face classes, that build on Bloom's taxonomy, and some sample questions. We also shared ideas about protecting integrity by randomizing questions, limiting times, browser lockdown and passwords. One interesting tip for multiple choice exams is that research shows that 30 seconds per item prevents cheating and does not tend to lower  performance. Of course, instructors may need to modify that number depending on the type of question. We also discussed an often controversial topic of group exams. We focused on a few differe...

ASU currently has 13,164 international students enrolled, and is the #1 US public university to host international students. At our last TeachT@lk Webinar, Renee Klug , University International Educator, Sr. shared information with faculty on understanding and teaching international students. Click on image to view larger Intercultural Competence is a set of cognitive, effective and behavioral skills that support effective and appropriate interaction in a variety of cultural contexts. Renee helped faculty assess their own intercultural sensitivity by sharing 6 models, and having faculty evaluate common statements to understand what level was being used. Once faculty understood the models, she presented classroom strategies that could be used with common student challenges mentioned by faculty, including: reluctance to work in groups negotiating grades not willing to ask for help not speaking up in class not citing resources appropriately  Click on image to see l...

Today's Blog is presented by Katelyn Cooper. Katey is a PhD student in Sara Brownell's Biology Education Research lab studying ways to promote equity in undergraduate biology education. Specifically she is interested in how different social identities impact student experiences in biology. Katey is also an Academic Success Coordinator in the School of Life Sciences. Students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA) face unique challenges in active learning classrooms. Holding a historically – and in some ways currently – stigmatized social identity means that these students have to carefully navigate active learning classrooms. Although very little research has been done on this population thus far, work that I have done in the Biology Education Research Lab begins to explore how LGBTQIA students feel about active learning classrooms. ( http://www.lifescied.org/content/15/3/ar37.full ) In contrast to traditional lect...

On Tuesday, July 12, our TeachT@lk webinar on  "informal learning" looked at various examples on integrating this type of learning into our courses. Although there are some challenges for faculty that want to use informal learning like organizing group work, time limitations and assessing the work, the benefits include: Reinforcement and extension of important concepts from class Appealing to multiple learning preferences Connecting class content with a student's personal goals and motivation Giving students skills to learn outside, and beyond the classroom Helping students develop a Personal Learning Environment (Bonwell & Eison, 1991; Felder & Brent, 2009) To take advantage of informal learning opportunities, faculty can create open-ended assignments, give students choices in topics, and options for a final deliverable . For these types of projects to be successful faculty should help students identify resources, and develop a work flow, inclu...