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...

The Teaching Innovation Center kicked off their SPARC* Series with a workshop titled, " Reimagining collaboration: With Professors Jon Harrison, Pierre Deviche, and Kevin McGraw" on Wednesday, September 1, 2021. The SPARC* series stands for, " SOLS Plan to Adapt and Reimagine Courses, " and is geared toward discussing the benefits, challenges, and examples of adapting and reimagining aspects of courses, both online and in-person. As classes have transitioned back to the physical classroom from distance learning in the wake of the pandemic, faculty have had to reimagine how to approach instruction. In the same sense, online courses that have continued to function online are taking a look at what works, especially in terms of engagement and collaboration. There is an opportunity to explore what has been most effective in online learning and how we can reimagine it for the physical classroom and the online sphere. The topic of this workshop was collaboration. Collabo...

Given the challenges we are facing this semester in light of the pandemic, rethinking our exams is essential for the success of our students. Stress, anxiety, and navigating a new modality creates a perfect storm that may derail many of our students and their ability to do well in our courses. This is the time to rethink the design of our assessments to ensure our students are engaged and learning the skills and knowledge we want them to learn. Recently, Josh Caulkins and Sarah Prosory examined several options for adjustments to your exams, some of which may take a small amount of time to implement but may have a big impact overall. Unpack Multiple Choice Question Exams We began with a poll: "What ways do you currently evaluate student learning in your course(s)?" Multiple choice was the leader with 89% of participants using them within their courses. A discussion followed describing the benefits and drawbacks of multiple choice questions (MCQ).  Concerns and Challenges Hig...