Winter Teaching Institute Storrs 2008

The Institute for Teaching & Learning held its first annual Winter Teaching Institute. Nearly 90 faculty and administrators drawn from all of the UConn campuses, as well as the University of Connecticut Health Center (UCHC), gathered in Storrs, Connecticut on January 18th, 2008 for a day of seminars and workshops on teaching and learning in undergraduate education. The Institute focused on issues of both pedagogy and technology.

The Institute for Teaching & Learning sponsored the Winter Teaching Institute with support from the UCHC. Participants included staff from the Health Center, the departments of Nursing, Pharmacy, Psychology and Communications, to name a few, as well as faculty from 4 of the 5 regional campuses.

One of the goals of the Winter 2008 Teaching Institute, beyond offering a good selection of workshops to engage faculty in thinking about all aspects of teaching, was to create a community of practice among UConn faculty. We invite you to join in this project even if you didn’t attend on Jan. 18th—just have your students respond anonymously to this prompt:

"I learn best when my professor…" [for more info click here]

WTI 2008 Overall Survery Results

Recorded audio comments from WTI participants

Assessment Tool in HuskyCT: Beneficial Uses for Instructors and Students

The Assessment Tool in HuskyCT makes it easy to administer quizzes, surveys, and self-tests online. This versatile tool can be used to collect data for a class project or discussion, obtain feedback on class activities, deliver practice tests, or submit homework answers. Workshop participants created short quizzes and learned how to view submissions and download reports.
Presented by Janet Jordan.

Course Design Strategies: A Structured Approach to Integrating Technology

As more faculty begin to integrate technology into their classrooms, it is appropriate to review a structured approach to course design that affords opportunities to evaluate the teaching and learning process. Topics included writing goals and objectives, developing appropriate assessment instruments, selecting appropriate media, materials design and formative/summative evaluation.
Presented by Dan Mercier.

Engaging Students in Large Classes

This session has a single objective and two foci. The objective is to help us identify the characteristics of teaching and learning in a large class environment with a view to helping students be successful. The two foci stem from the actions and activities for which the faculty are directly responsible and the directed advice that an instructor can offer the students for which the latter are then responsible.
Presented by Keith Barker.

Session Handouts

E-Portfolio

This session explored the pedagogical and technological aspects of ePortfolio, a secure, password-protected on-line digital storage portfolio for students to collect and reflect upon their academic experience.
Presented by Kim Chambers.

Podcasting: The Basics

What exactly is a podcast? Is podcasting appropriate for my class? How do I get started? Specifically designed for beginners, this workshop defined podcasting at its most basic level. Topics of discussion included the use of pocasting in higher education, production hardware, feed creation and distribution.
Presented by Lisa Kempter & Gordon Daigle

Best Practices in Online Teaching

This session explored research based standards for teaching and delivering fully online courses. Participants reflected on methoods of applying these standards to fully online courses.
Presented by Desmond McCaffrey

Quick and Easy Ways to Add Dynamic Content to your HuskyCT site

All it takes is a quick “copy and paste” to add an RSS feed for science news in the New York Times, political news from the Wall Street Journal, NASA podcasts, a set of references collected in RefWorks, or links to web resources you’ve organized in Del.icou.us. In this hands on workshop you will learn how to find or create an RSS feed with resources of interest, generate the JavaScript needed to import the feed, and then add that link to an html page in HuskyCT. Participants practiced embedding a YouTube playlist in your HuskyCT site.
Presented by Janet Jordan

Teaching Every Student

For faculty in higher education today, the challenges of finding sound pedagogical methods that work with incredibly diverse student bodies while creating inclusive classrooms can be daunting. In this workshop we will discuss guidelines, techniques and approaches that will help faculty meet this challenge. Faculty discussed how to incorporate these ideas into particular teaching contexts such as large lecture courses or graduate seminars, as well as how to make them discipline relevant.
Presented by Catherine Ross.

Session Handouts

Test Anxiety

This session explored ways faculty can help students prepare for examinations by introducing proven strategies which decrease test anxiety.
Presented by Keith Barker & Kevin Sullivan

Session Handouts

Testing and Grading: The dark side of teaching or the path to enlightenment?

In this workshop faculty considered the purposes of testing and grading both from within the institutional context and the individual perspective of teacher and student. Finding the balance in the seemingly conflicted roles of mentor/teacher and taskmaster/grader can be very difficult but with some basic considerations in hand, faculty can achieve the balance they want for themselves and their students.
Presented by Catherine Ross.

Session Handouts

Using Clickers (CPS) for Classroom Feedback

In this session participants discussed the use of "clickers", Classroom Performance System (CPS), to effectively promote student learning. Pedagogical implications were discussed and the steps UConn instructors would follow to effectively implement a clicker system in their classes were outlined.
Presented by Dan Mercier and Desmond McCaffrey.