2019 Agenda and Program

Jesse Stommel

University of Mary Washington

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes, "To sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery."

Ultimately, the future of education is humans not tools, and our efforts at hacking, forking, and remixing education should all be aimed at making and guarding space for students and teachers. If there is a better sort of mech- anism that we need for the work of teaching, it is a machine, an algorithm, a platform tuned not for delivering and assessing content, but for helping all of us listen better to students. But we can’t get to a place of listening to students if they don’t show up to the conversation because we’ve already excluded their voice in advance by creating environments hostile to them and their work.

Any authority within the space of the classroom must be aimed at fostering agency in all the members of our community.

Patrick Starvaggi

The University of Akron

It is hard to dispute is that there are differing opinions when it comes to assessment. What are its benefits, and is it possible it can take away from broad-based learning? I do not want to discuss these important issues. Instead, the purpose of this talk is to point out a few ways in which assessment can be beneficial to one's own teaching. The main points are that assessment should be simple, it should be consistent, and it should be based on measurable learning objectives that are clearly communicated to the students.

A useful form of assessment is a simple quiz with each problem graded as correct or incorrect. This has many benefits. It makes the grading easier and more objective, and one can argue that it also makes the data more meaningful, especially when collected over many years. The questions one chooses to include should be based on the key outcomes of the course. You should identify these and limit the number to 3 or 4. In many computational and scientific courses, e.g. mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc. learning objectives can involve solving a particular type of problem or computing a particular quantity. In other types of courses, more open-ended responses may be used. In any case, one should create questions that can be easily marked as correct or incorrect.

This data should be kept internal. It is no secret that assessment is being used to measure the effectiveness of teachers. There are many pitfalls, concerns, and nontrivial statistical questions that emerge once this happens. When self-reported assessment data is collected by any outside entity, be it departmentally or from the administration, bias inevitably emerges. This is a result of the fact that individuals consciously or subconsciously feel the assessment reflects their teaching abilities.

The final point is that assessment, in the form described here, is for the benefit of the teacher, not the student. Many people may choose to grade the quiz given for assessment twice. Once without partial credit for assessment data, and once with partial credit to count as a grade in the course. Students gain a lot of information about how they are doing from their grades in the course. This small bit of data is for you to analyze how you are doing with the 3 or 4 key concepts you want students to take away from your class.

Molly Hartsough

The University of Akron

Erin Andro

Kent State University

Kaitlyn Root

The University of Akron

Eric Victory

The University of Akron

This session is an active participation session in which we, the presenters, invite others with concerns about teaching sensitive topics and dealing with difficult student situations to share their experiences with these sorts of issues and how they have successfully managed them to the benefit of all students involved. We especially encourage more experienced instructors and faculty members to share their classroom struggles and triumphs. The aim of this session is to collectively develop a series of best practices for all in attendance to refer to when faced with challenging situations in the classroom or with a student.

Michele Thornton

The University of Akron

Have you ever wished that your learners put as much time and engagement into your online class discussion as they do with their social media accounts? What would happen if you tried out an education tool which functions like social media to engage learners and enhance learner course interaction? That is what one instructor tried to find out using a tool called YellowDig. This session will discuss the functionality and lessons learned by integrating YellowDig into the LMS for online class discussion.

Jodi Henderson-Ross

The University of Akron

Amanda Booher

The University of Akron

Terry O'Sullivan

The University of Akron

Seher Christin

The University of Akron

This workshop is designed to engage participants interested in innovative pedagogical practices within higher education. This is an open session hosted for the purpose of continued dialogue around the concept of the "unclass". This concept provides a framework for stretching the boundaries of discipline-specific teaching by inviting faculty and students to disrupt traditional classroom practices through meaningful engagement with authentic learning experience. Unclasses have been offered for several semesters at The University of Akron with the support and leadership of the EXL Center for Experiential Learning. Along the way, faculty have supported each other in this work through a community of practice dedicated to pedagogical innovation. We invite all attendees to join us in this emergent session where faculty will share experiences, collectively brainstorm and continue to build momentum for the shared commitment to the development of rich learning experiences. No prior experience necessary. Please join us to learn more about this work and to help further the scope of the community of practice.

Lauren Rogers

Case Western Reserve University

Traditional learning spaces with fixed furniture and immobile instructor lecterns can make creating an engaging learning experience challenging. A proposed solution? Mobile technology in traditional spaces to enable active learning and collaboration. In Spring 2018, the Teaching and Learning Technologies team at Case Western Reserve University implemented an iPad loan initiative. Faculty were invited to submit proposals that reimagined what collaborative learning could look like in a traditional lecture hall with iPads. By utilizing mobile technology and classwide screen sharing, instructors were able to build collaborative, active learning activities into their large-scale lecture classes. Students reported that having the device for the semester helped them learn more course material and be more successful in all of their classes. This LEARN session will cover the possibilities of utilizing mobile technology to improve pedagogy in traditional classroom environments. In addition, it will outline some lessons learned, disasters averted, and plans for future iterations of the initiative. Finally, attendees of this session will receive tips, tricks, and advice for implementing their own mobile technology loan program.

Suzanne Healy M.Ed.

Case Western Reserve University

Justin Lonis

Case Western Reserve University

In 2014 Michael Goldberg from Case Western Reserve University launched a MOOC focused on Entrepreneurship in transitioning economies. The MOOC received global attention with Professor Goldberg receiving initiations not only to present in multiple countries, but also from State Departments around the world that wanted to modify his course for use in their own countries. The course included not only asynchronous learning for students, but at that time weekly synchronous panel discussions. In 2016 Professor Goldberg began to offer a version of his MOOC as an undergraduate seminar course. The campus students registered for the MOOC and took that course alongside anyone who had registered for that MOOC session. There was no intentional effort made to encourage students to actively engage with these external participants, and students would submit their work within the campus LMS. In 2018 Professor Goldberg decided to take this one step further, and through his international contacts, recruited a group of 40 participants in Syria to participate in his campus course alongside his Sages students. In this iteration, rather than accessing the MOOC content through Coursera the external participants were brought into the campus LMS. External participants had to apply for participation, and one of the requirements was that they were engaged in entrepreneurial activities in their local community. Case students were put into groups with the external practitioner participants to work on group assignments together. Additionally, there were five assignments over the course of the semester that required peer review. This gave the Case students an opportunity to engage, in a very meaningful way, with practitioners in a transitioning economy that were struggling with the issues covered in the course on a daily basis. The hope was that students would have an increased level of cultural competency and be better prepared to work as part of diverse virtual teams. A research project is currently being developed to determine if that hope was realized – and preliminary data will be available at the time of the NEXT Conference. This proposed LEARN presentation will introduce the development of the partnership that led to the recruitment of the practitioners, how they were folded into the course with campus students, and discuss the preliminary results on student impact.

Sydney Chinchanachokchai

The University of Akron

Alexa Fox

The University of Akron

In our experience, students learn best when they have an opportunity to apply course content to work on a project. Therefore, we believe in experiential learning and high-impact practices. In our Digital Marketing and Social Media Marketing courses, the students work with local businesses in Northeast Ohio to develop online promotional campaigns. We will discuss the benefits and challenges of working with local businesses as clients in our courses, including feedback from students and clients, how incorporating local businesses can benefits students' learning experiences and outcomes as well as the Northeast Ohio region, and best practices for successful navigation and implementation of enriching students' academic experience with industry.

Richard Reynolds

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Tim Hurt

Warrensville Heights City Schools

This presentation examines the impact of culturally responsive problem-based learning on the engagement of African American students in an urban high school setting. The study explores how culturally responsive teaching and problem-based learning have individually impacted student learning outcomes, while arguing for the value of combining the two frameworks into one singular approach. Though the original study addressed the needs of African American students in an urban setting, the presenters propose that it is the knowledge of students and the creativity of the teacher that will allow educators to develop CRPBL activities for all students. Attendees at this presentation will participate in a CRPBL activity to experience the level of engagement that their students will experience.

Stacey Cederbloom

University of Mount Union

Are you looking to
…motivate students to read their textbooks and to wrestle with material before coming to class?
…know what questions students have on homework before class starts and help your students know that you care about their individual questions?
…keep students engaged during class?
…build camaraderie among your students?

If you said "yes" to any of these questions, try using interactive guided notes sheets and discussion threads within a discussion-team format!

I began utilizing these techniques when I was challenged with teaching Elementary Statistics. This course is different than most math courses because it involves a lot of verbiage, making it more like a general education class than an actual math class. Now, five years later, I would never want to teach Elementary Statistics without using both guided notes sheets and discussion threads!

In this interactive LEARN session, participants will experience being on discussion teams to understand how they are designed and used. We will discuss the use of guided notes sheets and discussion threads in detail—how to design them, different ways in which they can be used, and the benefits of using them. We will also set aside time to brainstorm and collaborate with colleagues regarding implementing such techniques. To maximize this time, participants are encouraged to bring materials (lesson plan, notes, hand-outs, etc.) for a specific lesson or two from one of their courses.

Hillary Nunn

The University of Akron

Patrick Chura

The University of Akron

Jodi Kearns

The University of Akron

This panel will share insights about the use of archives and FBI surveillance dossiers to enrich traditional humanities curricula. The panel speakers will explain how they have incorporated early modern recipe manuscripts, medical files, and Cold War-era Justice Department records into college humanities courses. They will describe the aims of their class projects, which range from occupying one class session to structuring entire semesters, while also describing student responses to working directly with largely unstudied historical materials. Speakers will describe their efforts to broaden the scope of cultural studies and emphasize new connections between literary texts and "real-world" archival materials, found both online and in archives.

Dr. Patrick Chura will discuss how his courses used FBI files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) as a resource for studying the lives of radical writers and artists who were targeted for Justice Department surveillance during the Cold War. Cultural figures studied include James Baldwin, Mike Gold, Lorraine Hansberry, Pete Seeger, and Paul Robeson. Professor Chura will offer examples illustrating how FBI files may be read as literary criticism and consider how information contained in surveillance files constitutes a specialized tool for understanding U.S. radicalism in context. Dr. Hillary Nunn will describe her use of two different collections in her undergraduate classes: the Daniel Harris Papers at the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology and the Folger Shakespeare Library's digital archive of early modern recipe collections. Her students' work with the Harris papers, which contain interviews with patients undergoing tuberculosis treatment in the early twentieth century, allowed them to see the impact that a seemingly impersonal disease had not just on American culture, but on individuals. She will also outline how reading and transcribing seventeenth-century recipes has helped students understand domestic life and medicine in earlier times, while illuminating assumptions we hold about food and medicine today. Dr. Jodi Kearns will provide an overview of education services available to University of Akron professors at the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology. CCHP archivists design primary-source experiences for students by matching the collections to the professors' existing syllabi and in collaboration with professors as content experts. Surprising to many, the psychology archives holds content relevant to departments across campus in all of the humanities, arts, and sciences. CCHP archival support usually fits into one or two class sessions within the framework of the syllabus and class. An overview of the collections and the collaborative process between archivist and professor are provided.

Elizabeth Hall

The University of Akron

Recent contributions to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) have been seeking to understand how experiential learning, civic engagement, activism, and community engagement can effectively open the boundaries between the classroom and the "real world." However, much of this scholarship has not fully addressed the inherent connections between experiential learning, civic engagement, activism, and community engagement. This presentation will describe how projects focused within community-based action and civic engagement can function as a means of experiential and service learning through interdisciplinary collaborations with community partners. As a composition instructor for the College of Applied Science and Technology, I aim to discuss the ways in which these kinds of projects have taken shape in my classes at the University of Akron, especially with respect to how I am current linking my course to Terry O'Sullivan's un-class at the EXL Center, "Environmental Security: Community Renewable Energy in Akron." For this most current project, freshmen enrolled in my composition courses as well as students in O'Sullivan's "Environmental Security" un-class will participate in developing and presenting a renewable energy policy plan to present to the Akron City Council, which they will accomplish through collaborative research and communication with the Akron Solar Project, the Sustainer project, and the Engineers for Sustainability student organization. While many will argue that such projects are far too difficult to implement and may distract from the "expected" teaching and learning tasks in the majority of higher education institutions, it is clear that institutions and the communities supporting them can mutually benefit through initiating and building upon these collaborative endeavors.

Rachel Bell

The University of Akron

Eman Tadros

The University of Akron

Elizabeth Molla

The University of Akron

Mindfulness has been shown to reduce anxiety, increase focus and thought clarity, and produces better outcomes for students overall (Salmoirago-Blotcher et al., 2018; Schonert-Reichel, Roeser, & Maloney, 2016; Worthen & Luiselli, 2016). Mindfulness is a powerful player in various clinical aspects, however, it has not generally been applied to MFT graduate programs. In accounting for parallels between clinical and educational successes, it has become apparent that utilizing this tool in the classroom, is just as vital as in the clinical setting. Particularly, graduate students report high instances of anxiety, appetite disturbances, and depression (Beiter et al., 2015). Thus, highlighting the importance of educators encouraging self-care practices. The literature emphasizes therapist self-care, yet students are not provided opportunities to practice effective self- care strategies. In fact, it is commonly expected for students to know how to engage in it as well as model it for their own clients. Presenters will demonstrate mindfulness in the clinical classroom, share experiences, and practice mindfulness techniques.

Ben Steiner

The University of Akron

More so than ever before, it is difficult to know what the truth is. We are bombarded with dozens or even hundreds of online articles each day with claims like "a study shows" or "scientists say" and these articles often claim opposite things to be true. While statistics majors should certainly learn the theory and practice of statistical methods, non-majors taking a general education requirement would be better served by learning to recognize the myriad of ways in which others try to mislead or outright lie with statistics. It is not just for our own benefit that we should be able to critically evaluate these claims, it is our duty as good citizens to do so. There is no better place to learn how to do this than in a statistics classroom. In a statistics course designed for the information age, students will learn how to read a study and determine if the authors' conclusions are valid based on said study's methodologies. They will learn to watch for weasel words like "many" and "some" in the articles they read. If we are to be informed citizens in the Information Age, a rethinking of how we teach statistics to the masses is essential.

Diane Brown

The University of Akron

Lori Kidd

The University of Akron

Michelle Boltz

The University of Akron

Adult learners have declared preference for active learning pedagogies over passive learning that often inhabits our higher education classrooms. Drawing from adult learning theory and constructivism, teaching with simulation immerses students in experiences that mimic professional practice and draws them toward higher levels of learning. There are varying levels of simulation that can be adjusted by an educator to match the level of student, learning outcomes, and discipline, ranging from low fidelity where more imagination is required of the students, to a high fidelity simulation where the experience closely matches real life. Interprofessional or interdisciplinary education as a component of simulation elevates the learning to an even higher plane that can lead students to gain knowledge of others' professional roles and responsibilities with whom they would be expected to collaborate in future practice. In addition to gaining knowledge of other disciplines, there is also opportunity to develop an attitude of appreciation and build skills in cooperation. These knowledge, skills and attitudes are outlined in the world-recognized Interprofessional Education Core Competencies (IPEC, 2016) which can be used by educators to map learning outcomes over time and experiences embedded into curriculum.

Our panel of faculty will describe examples of how to engage interprofessional students in simulation experiences that can prepare them to perform in teams of collaborating health professionals. Some simulation learning includes advanced technology using high-fidelity interactive human manikins, while others use role-playing and team planning simulations that immerse the students in experiencing real life challenges. One example is geared toward gaining appreciation of social determinants of health by immersing them into a simulated community where they learn what it is to experience the challenges of poverty. Another example offers an unfolding simulation over three weeks that takes them through an experience of dealing with a geriatric client with Alzheimer's disease. And finally, we will offer a way to engage students in manikin simulation that allows students to perform high-risk assessment and treatments on a human-like manikin in the safety of knowing their actions will not result in danger to a real patients. We will share strategies, logistic solutions, lessons learned, and helpful strategies for using these types of teaching pedagogies in your area of teaching.

Philip Nelson

Kent State University

Have you ever created an assignment for students, and once the submissions started rolling in you realized that something just didn't work quite right in the communication? Maybe some of your students got the general premise, but many of them missed the boat completely. In fact, a few of them took the bus by mistake.

And remember that great assignment idea that you thought would really help measure student comprehension effectively? You spent a great deal of time creating the instructions, carefully considering the components, the outcomes, etc., and, to your credit, your students got it, they nailed it. But, when it came time to grade this fantastic venture you got nailed? The time and energy it required from you in order to sift through the brilliant ideas postulated by your students nearly cost you an entire weekend of sleep.

Well, what if you could have the best of both worlds? A well-conceived and well-designed assignment that was easy for students to complete successfully and that was also easy to grade? By leveraging the power of templates you can have just that. With a little planning and creativity, you can create templates for an assignment that take the guesswork out of what your students are required to submit, and end your personal search for the location of required information on submitted documents.

Come hear from an instructional designer from the Office of Continuing and Distance Education at Kent State University, as he relates the partnerships he has had with faculty, and shows some of the fruits of their collective efforts, in this presentation titled: "Templates for Student Success and Faculty Sanity".

Joseph Fox

The University of Akron

This workshop will provide an overview and a step-by-step process to create interactive online lectures leveraging H5P.org's tools in conjunction with a recorded lecture. Advances in online video playback technologies have added more interactive tools over the past few years, including the ability to use links, callouts, and other pieces of forced interactivity for the viewer. In an academic context, when a learner is situated in an asynchronous environment, limited optionality exist to assist in providing experiences that requires the learner input. H5P offers tools and capabilities that allow educators to overlay their recorded content with text, prompts, input, and a wide variety of other functions. This workshop will explore these features and allow participants to understand how such interactivity can be tied back into grade items for participation tracking and assist in assurance of learning.

Lingxing Yao

The University of Akron

Janet Bean

The University of Akron

When developing a new course, faculty often begin by considering what material they want to cover. In contrast, backward design starts by looking at the end: “What do I want students to know and be able to do when they finish the course?” This panel will explain the strategy of backward design using two examples, the calculus sequence and the UA General Education Program. We will also invite participants to consider how this approach can foster change and improve student success in their own courses.

Success in Calculus sequence is critical in the academic success for many students on campus, especially for those who need to pass them with better than C grade to move on to next level courses. Many students make ineffective and inefficient efforts in their study, which leads to physical and mental fatigue that eventually prevent them from gaining the knowledge and confidence needed for success. Dr. Yao will discuss two focuses that need to be emphasized to address this challenge. From the perspective of structuring the course, it is essential to adopt the backwards design principle and use a curriculum map to lay out instructional detail. Learning outcomes of each topic need to be clearly described and the design of teaching methods and assessments need to be aligned completely on those outcomes. This means the design and delivery of a class have to be consistent, so both students and instructor will be able to navigate through the course without loss of focus. The second part of the emphasis we need to address involves active interactions between students and the instructor. The purpose of this part of work is to quickly adjust both the instructor’s teaching methods and assessment on students’ work with regular feedback during students’ learning process. At the same time, instructor can provide comments and suggestions to students such that they can get positive feedback and gain confidence and focus on what they are doing well in their own learning methods. The integration of those two parts may help to create a stimulating learning/teaching environment, so both students and instructor will succeed.

The University of Akron recently revised its General Education Program using the Backward Design method. The process involved: 1) identifying learning outcomes, 2) creating an assessment assignment that addresses key learning outcomes, and 3) aligning instructional materials to the learning outcomes and assessment assignments. Dr. Bean will discuss the benefits and challenges of a backward design approach to curricular change.

Alan S. Kornspan

The University of Akron

Sean Cai

The University of Akron

John Roncone

The University of Akron

In recent years, scholars have become interested in utilizing new technology to assist college students in learning how to teach and coach children with disabilities (Cai & Kornspan, 2012). In particular, one approach that undergraduate pre-service teachers and coaching education students are taught is to use technological aids to modify environmental constraints for individuals with autism spectrum disorders (DiTorre, 2016). Specifically, students in physical education and coaching education programs are taught to use innovative advanced technological training aids to help students and athletes with disabilities learn motor skills (Bittner, Rigby, Silliman-French et al. 2017). Thus, the purpose of this presentation is to discuss how technological advances in sport training aids can be utilized in university adapted physical education courses and within coaching environments. The first presenter will overview the relevant research that supports the incorporation of technological training aids when teaching and coaching individuals with disabilities in the sport of soccer. Next, the second presenter will provide a discussion and demonstration of new technological equipment which can be utilized in the teaching and coaching of soccer. Next, the third presenter will describe and demonstrate how new technological training aids can be used to help college students learn to teach soccer to students with disabilities. Finally, the panel will provide the audience with the opportunity to ask questions about the techniques utilized in helping college students learn to teach soccer to children with disabilities.

Lars Dreith

Oberlin College

Emily Spezia-Shwiff

Oberlin College

Alex Jensen

Oberlin College

Marah Ajilat

Oberlin College

Serena Zets

Oberlin College

Every Sunday afternoon, a group of five Oberlin College students meet in order to maintain a program that has served tens of thousands of students and community members in the town of Oberlin, Ohio - the Experimental College. Founded in 1968, "ExCo" has provided Oberlin College students with the unique opportunity to create, teach and take accredited classes that are not traditionally offered on college campuses, allowing students to explore shared passions for underrepresented or nontraditional topics with people from various walks of life. From learning ASL and discussing the politics of Star Trek, to playing steel pan and considering the motifs of Lord of the Rings, ExCos have grown to be an integral part of the Oberlin experience.

Established at the dawn of the tumultuous 70's, the movements that defined the era cascaded onto the small, rural campus, as long-standing institutional practices extending back to the founding of Oberlin College were being questioned. The perennial question we ask ourselves is: what constitutes an "experimental" education and how can we make it accessible in an ever-changing educational landscape? The inception of the Experimental College was one response to that question, and through this presentation, we are going to share our knowledge on integrating the experimental into the traditional in a manner that is accessible to all.

Jennifer Hollinger

University of Mount Union

This presentation will overview the use of Google Drawing as a template for interactive and collaborative note-taking. The functionality of Google Drawing will be explored. Then, multiple techniques will be shared with participants to build their repertoire of ideas. Finally, participants will be able to create a note-taking template that they can take back to their course and utilized with students. Participants will be encouraged to share their template with the group in a shared folder to create a community resource.

Collaboration and interaction are key components to high quality instruction. However, I noticed that, while many of the pedagogical techniques utilized in my course supported these ideas, note-taking was often a isolated and rote task. Therefore, it was my personal goal to find a way to enhance the note taking practices in my course. To do so, I referred to the SAMR model (Puentedura, 2006). This model suggests that technology allows us to enhance and transform tasks. Enhancement simply means using technology to do a task that was once done with a low-tech tool (Puentedura, 2006). Therefore, writing with a pencil can be replaced with typing, or a dictionary can be replaced through spell check. Transformation is a higher bar, which speaks to designing a task in order to be able to do things that were were not possible before (Puentedura, 2006).Transformation was my goal for reimagining the potential for note-taking in my class. Google Drawing was found to be a flexible and easy to access to tool to allow students to interact with course material in new ways while still having concrete notes to take with them to refer to at a later time. This session will share with you what I have learned and allow you to try this technology integration method in your course.

Gain fame and fortune in this session of multiple, Pecha Kucha-length, presentations. Participants each have 6-minutes 40-seconds to wow the audience with their amazing idea. After the time is up, the buzzer will sound and the next participant is up. The audience will vote on the best idea and that presenter will win an awesome prize!