Education 20/20
Abstracts
Abstracts will be posted soon . . .
Students as Producers: Creative Digital Assignments for Transformative Learning
Dr. Derek Bruff
In the courses we teach, we have the opportunity to engage our students not only as consumers of information, but producers of knowledge. Usually this means moving beyond the five-page paper to less traditional assignments and projects. In this introduction to the “Students as Producers” approach to course design, we’ll consider assignments that encourage students to tackle open-ended problems, to operate with a high degree of autonomy, and to share their work with wider audiences.
All Skate: Active Learning in the University Classroom
Dr. Derek Bruff
How can we make the most of the relatively limited time we have with our students during class? Educational research is clear: engaging students in active learning in the classroom leads to improved learning outcomes over “continuous exposition by the teacher.” But what is active learning? Why does it work? And how can we engage all of our students in active learning during class? In this keynote, we’ll explore teaching strategies, learning principles, and digital technologies for creating active learning environments in our classrooms—and inviting all our students into deeper learning.
Using Digital Storytelling to Promote Student Engagement
Dr. Bernard Robin
Digital storytelling is the practice of creating a short movie by combining digital artifacts such as images, text, video clips, animation, and music using a computer-based program. As with traditional storytelling, digital stories revolve around a theme, often contain a particular viewpoint, and are typically just a few minutes long. In this session, we will explore how a digital story can be created based on just one picture, a family photograph taken in 1926. We will examine how using web-based search tools to investigate different items in the photo can lead to deeper explorations in subjects such as history, economics, advertising, immigration, entertainment, culture, and more, and how this type of activity can be used to engage students and promote learning.
Humanizing Online Learning Experiences Leveraging the Affordances of Emerging Technologies
Dr. Whitney Kilgore
Technology is supposed to make things easier but do we lose the human touch when our teaching and learning experiences are online? In this session we will discuss the affordances of technology to allow us to be our most authentic self, connect with our students in deeply meaningful ways, and to provide learners with the support they need in order to be successful while still maintaining our sanity!
Experience the MeTEOR Classroom of the Future
Jeff Thein, MeTEOR Education
MeTEOR’s Classroom of the Future has been designed with modern methods, tools and environments in mind – all factors that combine to create High Impact Learning Experiences -- working in concert to support effective relationships. Filled with carefully selected furnishings designed to support collaboration and engage learners, the classroom can be rearranged for a variety of uses and a diverse range of challenging tasks. And through collaboration with Dell Education Solutions, MeTEOR and the University of Houston will integrate cutting-edge technologies to enhance the learning experience and help participants discover new ways technology is changing the way we learn.
Video, Voice, and Variety: Ways to Engage Students through Online Course Discussions
Susie Gronseth, Haoyue Zhang and Waneta Hebert
When used effectively, online course discussions can provide students with a means to make their thinking visible and can promote community and social presence within courses. They are not limited to text-based discussion forums within a Learning Management System; instructors and course designers can incorporate visual and auditory elements into discussions as well. Engaging students in online discussions is a worthwhile goal to pursue, as greater learner involvement in course discussions can positively impact student success. A variety of online discussion tools will be explored in this session, including digital bulletin boards, group chats, and video and virtual reality (VR). We will offer guidelines for designing, monitoring, and assessing discussion activities. Strategies for instructor feedback during discussions, including recommendations for guidance, scaffolding, and evaluation, will also be discussed.
Dr. Page Dettmann
The Effective Trifecta of High Impact Learning Experiences
This talk will address three principles of High Impact Learning Experiences:
- Teaching and learning program
- Innovative learner-centered microenvironments
- Purposeful integration of technology to enhance student engagement
Dr. Vanessa Dennen
Engaging Learners with Social Media Knowledge Activities
The world of online learning is sufficiently developed to have a status quo: video lectures, asynchronous discussion, quizzes, and maybe chat or webinar sessions, all delivered within a learning management system. Blended learning and flipped classroom approaches also incorporate many of these approaches. However, there are ways to take greater advantage of the wealth of resources (human, informational, and tool) available in online settings by using a variety of social media and Web 2.0-based learning activities to engage students in active learning. (And no, I’m not suggesting that you become Facebook friends with your students!) During this session, we’ll discuss the social media learning mindset and then focus on the six knowledge activities that promote active learning in social media environments. We’ll also discuss tools – some familiar and some likely not-so-familiar – that support this kind of learning.
Death by Discussion Board: Tools to Get Students Talking
Courtney Wilson
In this session, we will cover how the Graduate College of Social Work's online MSW program courses are built to maximize participation and learning. We use a variety of tools to differentiate the learning and avoid death by discussion board. We will demonstrate and offer participants an opportunity to touch some of our most well received tools to foster dialogue in the online class. These include Voicethread asynchronous presentations, Zoom break-out rooms, and group work spaces. We build our courses on three principles of consistency, synchronicity, and community. In this presentation, we will share our strategies for building consistency across all online courses to ensure students are familiar with the online classroom, establishing synchronicity at a distance that fosters faculty presence and student dialogue, and growing a community of learners destined for success in the online program.
Ways to Gamify Your Course
George Zhang and Erwin Handoko
Gamification is the use of game elements in non-game contexts. When applied to the educational context, gamification can be a useful tool to motivate students to explore an educational content and engage in a more meaningful learning process. In this session, will discuss the basics to gamifying a course by showcasing an online course that we gamified by incorporating an inter-galactic mission-based narrative, avatars and a leaderboard, and other exciting elements to make the course more engaging for our students. In this discussion, we will also introduce various tools that could be used to gamify your course.
Social Media: Tools and Activity Frameworks
Dr. Vanessa Dennen
During this breakout session, we’ll focus a handful of well-known and lesser-known social media tools that can be useful for learning. For each tool, we’ll go review features, strengths, and weaknesses, and cover a few activity frameworks that you can use to develop social media-based lessons for your own classes. Come with requests and needs — I’ll be looking for some real class examples so we can match up and/or brainstorm activities.
Experience the MeTEOR Classroom of the Future
Jeff Thein, MeTEOR Education
MeTEOR’s Classroom of the Future has been designed with modern methods, tools and environments in mind – all factors that combine to create High Impact Learning Experiences -- working in concert to support effective relationships. Filled with carefully selected furnishings designed to support collaboration and engage learners, the classroom can be rearranged for a variety of uses and a diverse range of challenging tasks. And through collaboration with Dell Education Solutions, MeTEOR and the University of Houston will integrate cutting-edge technologies to enhance the learning experience and help participants discover new ways technology is changing the way we learn.
Humanizing Feedback: How to Increase Student Interaction with Graded Assignments
UH Instructional Designers
A perennial problem across all educational levels is the lack of student engagement with instructor feedback. As one of the key tools educators have to provide meaningful learning opportunities for students, it is essential that we find ways to continually improve access to feedback within an LMS environment and increase the overall quality of the feedback we provide. In this session, we’ll explore some concrete ways to humanize feedback in order to raise its value and effectiveness for student learning.
Dr. Whitney Kilgore
Humanizing Online Teaching and Learning
Humanizing online teaching and learning is centered around creating a sense of connectedness in online learning environments. Like the quote from Maya Angelou “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” This talk will openly explore how we, as educators, build communities of learners. We will also explore methods and tools that enhance the sense of being present and connected in online or hybrid learning.