This Week in the LEC: A Year in Review and Happy Holidays!

Issue Date: 12-21-2020

A Year in Review

This was a year of change. With the global pandemic, our faculty made the heroic effort to transform their classroom experiences into a BlendFlex model in a very short time. The Learning and Educational Center (LEC) hosted a series of workshops, organized trainings for faculty, published articles and created videos to support improving the quality of teaching and learning at NSU. In case you missed these, here are some of the articles and videos along with some data on the workshops that we hosted and co-hosted with some of our University partners this year. We are looking forward to ongoing and new partnerships in 2021. 

Developing Effective Online Discussions

The discussion board is a prevalent tool for online or blended learning. Online discussions offer an opportunity for students to interact with their instructor, other students and course materials.

This article explores ways online instructors can improve the effectiveness of discussion boards.

The Benefits of Using Supplemental Resources in the Online Classroom

When you plan or design an online course, it’s crucial that your assessments, objectives, and instructional materials align with each other. However, creating a coherent structure isn’t just for your own benefit. It also helps your students and other instructors comprehend why each course component is presented in conjunction with one another.  Sometimes you may inherit a previously designed course and are unsure of how much flexibility is granted in the design based on student performance, prior knowledge, and preferences. Supplemental materials can provide instructors a way to fill in perceived gaps within the prescribed instructional materials and can offer instructors additional approaches to motivate students.

Staying Connected from a Distance

There is a bright side to every situation. It is just a matter of finding it. For instance, who could predict that we would be making educational history when we embarked on our learning paths this semester? Even though the pandemic we are currently facing has brought along many challenges, it has also given many instructors an opportunity to use technology and truly see how we can stay connected with each other. Now that “we” as a culture are practicing social distancing, television networks are adapting by using videoconferencing applications like Zoom or Microsoft Teams, so their onscreen talents can work from home and for the most part, they look quite comfortable in their own milieu. Keep reading for tips on effective communication in an online course.

Tips and Resources for Transforming a Traditional Lab

Recently during a few of our BlendFlex training sessions, faculty members raised this question: How do we teach a lab course online? One of the biggest hurdles to teaching science labs, experiential, and performance-based courses online is how to incorporate the concrete experience-lab activities. Can instructors recreate a traditional lab activity into a meaningful online lab? The answer is yes. Traditional labs can be taught online, but with some modifications and careful considerations.

Strategies for Zoom Breakout Rooms

The use of Zoom to present content and collaborate with students in a synchronous environment has become very popular due to the problems faced with the outbreak of the pandemic. The challenge for instructors is to create quality student engagement in the online Zoom environment. One of the tools that can be used to stimulate engagement among students is the use of the breakout rooms.

Setting Ground Rules for Zoom Class Sessions

During these unprecedented times, many faculty have had to transition from traditional face-to-face to remote or online instruction. Nova Southeastern University uses Zoom as a primary tool to connect with students in real-time or “synchronously.” Zoom is a web-based video conferencing tool with a local, desktop client and a mobile app. The host controls the meeting, and a participant is an invitee in that meeting. For meetings to be successful, the instructor needs to be able to manage the virtual class. Therefore, setting ground rules for Zoom class sessions is critical to the success of every session. It’s also important to share the ground rules with students and explain why they are necessary for a productive class session. This article presents ten ground rules to consider when hosting a Zoom class session.

Encouraging a Trusting Environment Online

You may have heard it once or many times over: the way to help to students succeed is to forge a trusting environment and relationship with them. Although research has proven this to be true; however, teaching online is quite different from delivering lessons in face-to-face classrooms. Instructing remotely can sometimes leave both instructors and students feeling a little disconnected. No judgment here, but it can be easy to forget that percipient students do exist in the cyber classroom. So how can instructors help students stay connected in a remote classroom?

For a complete archive of “This Week in the LEC”, visit https://www.nova.edu/lec/This-Week-in-the-LEC/archives.html

Workshops

We were very fortunate to bring NSU faculty and staff valuable and timely workshops from our instructional design and faculty professional development teams, our very own faculty members, and partners such as the Office of Experiential Education, Alvin Sherman Library and the Office of Innovation and Information Technology. The LEC would like to thank the Nearly 1800 Faculty and Staff who attended a workshop or training hosted by or in conjunction with LEC partners. In addition, 265 individuals have completed the Self-Paced BlendFlex course which became available in late July.  

Workshops hosted and co-hosted with our University Partners during 2020:

Tags: LEC, Training, Workshop