“What if Students Don’t Like Me?”: Questions and Concerns of New GTAs

Will undergraduates take me seriously? How do you make students talk in discussion groups? How do I know how much material to prepare for one class? What if I have a student who is smarter than me? What questions and concerns do Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) bring to their first teaching experiences? To answer this, GTAs at a fall TA Orientation asked more experienced TAs anonymous questions on index cards. These 180 questions were collected and analyzed to better understand the types and prevalence of questions and concerns that GTAs have about teaching. In this session, we will share the results of the analysis. Attendees will have the opportunity to discuss common teaching questions from their own experiences as graduate students, faculty members, or mentors. Together we will explore strategies to address these concerns in order to better prepare GTAs for their first college teaching experience. Attendees will leave with ideas to implement in their own contexts. By understanding their questions and concerns, mentors of GTAs can better prepare their graduate students for their teaching assignments, help reduce anxiety, and increase their chances of success in the classroom

Microblogging to Build Community and Foster Connections

Students in a weekly, face-to-face interdisciplinary graduate seminar were given a Twitter assignment designed to promote immediate reflection and to encourage students to look for connections between class content and their experiences as graduate students and GTAs. What began as an assignment to help students become more aware of their learning through reflections and connections became a community-building resource as well—a place where students shared information about graduate life, offered resources to extend class discussions, and made personal connections between their content areas and other students\u27 interests. This session will include an analysis of the types of information students shared via Twitter, as well as their pre- and post-semester reactions to the assignment, both positive and negative. The session will conclude with a discussion about the viability of microblogging in other college classroom settings, how to handle resistance, and extensions into live, in-class Twitter feeds for larger classrooms

Using Virtual Conferences to Integrate Online Content with the Classroom

This presentation will discuss the implementation of an innovative online resource, TED.com, in an undergraduate psychology course . Students participated in a “virtual conference,” in which they viewed a series of podcasts by prominent psychologists. Students wrote brief lecture commentaries and a reflection paper in which they synthesized overlapping themes in the lectures. Data to be presented include empirical evaluation of the efficacy of this activity. Attendees will learn how to incorporate online resources like TED.com into their courses and will discuss sample commentaries and reflection papers. Particular emphasis will be placed on adapting this activity for a range of disciplines

A Tale of Two Courses: Renovating Courses for Significant Learning

Using L. Dee Fink’s model of backward course design for integrated learning (2003), nine members of a year-long faculty learning community (FLC) designed or redesigned a course. Participants initially focused on critically examining what they wanted students to know, do, think and feel ve years after taking their respective classes. Once participants established and re ned course goals, they designed teaching and learning activities and assessments to help students meet those goals. Fink’s model of course design and development provided the framework for creating and implementing these course (re)designs across disciplines. This model integrates the relationships between learning goals, assessment and feedback, and teaching and learning activities to ensure that these components are integrated and support the others. Fink’s conceptual model includes a taxonomy of “signi cant learning” that expands the de nition of what is valued as learning outcomes (for example, those traditionally championed by Bloom) to include goals of foundational knowledge, application, integration, human dimension, caring, and learning how to learn. This poster presents the results of two of the (re)designed courses, one on American literature and one on nutrition education, highlighting the goals of the (re)designed courses with an example of teaching and learning activities, and feedback and assessment that support those learning goals

Student and Faculty Perceptions of OpenStax in High Enrollment Courses

As public funding for higher education decreases and the cost to students to attend college increases, universities are searching for strategies that save students money while also increasing their chances for success. Using free online textbooks is one such strategy, and the OpenStax College initiative at Rice University is one of the most widely recognized producers of such materials. Through a mixed method approach, this article examines the student and faculty experiences of adopting and using an OpenStax textbook. With 1,299 student participants, it was found that students greatly value the quality, attributes, and the cost of the OpenStax Biology textbook, though minor concerns were raised about its online format. Faculty adoption of a free textbook provides unique opportunities for course redesign and improvement, and the approach employed in this course transformation context resulted in clearly articulated learning outcomes, a fully realized structure in the course’s learning management system, and improvements to instructional practice. The student, faculty, and course benefits of this study offer a compelling argument for the adoption of high quality open education resources (OER) in public higher education contexts