UCITE

UCITE Events

Fall 2009
(Previous Events)

The following seminars are from 12:00-1:00 pm in the Herrick Room of the Allen Memorial Library Building (located at the corner of Euclid and Adelbert.) The Herrick room is on the ground floor, immediately on the left if you enter through the Euclid Avenue revolving door.

Pizza lunch and sodas will be provided at each session. To help us estimate the amount to order, please let us know if you plan to attend by sending an email to (ucite at case dot edu).

Handouts, if available, will be linked in the event description, and will be uploaded after the end of the session.

Are you planning to do a lot of writing over the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks? Perhaps catch up on all the scholarly work that you had planned to do this past semester but somehow found that the time just slipped away?

Maybe that was not a one-time phenomenon. Look back over a longer period with a critical eye. Do you see a pattern in which the periods of intense activity that you envisaged did not actually materialize?

At this UCITE session, we will look at the factors that might be preventing people from being as productive in their writing and other scholarly activities, and the practical steps that can be taken to rectify that situation.

Thursday, September 3: Better lectures and discussion classes
The most common forms of teaching at the college level are the lecture and the discussion and some hybrid of the two. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages, each one is appropriate in certain situations and not in others, and each has its challenges that instructors need to be aware of and consciously address if their students are going to benefit from that mode of instruction.

At the next session we will discuss how to improve the way you give lectures and handle discussions. In addition to being helpful in your teaching, it will also help when you give professional presentations or run meetings.

Thursday, September 10: Student motivation and incivilities
The old proverb that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink is very apt for the classroom. However much effort teachers may put into preparing for their classes, however much enthusiasm they may have for their subject, if the students are not interested or willing to put in the effort, everything can go to waste. Learning is, at its heart, a voluntary act and the teacher can no more coerce a student to learn than he or she can force the proverbial horse to drink.

But what makes some students want to learn and others not is not, as some might think, a property that belongs exclusively to the student and outside the control of the teacher. While there is an element that we call 'personal interest' that is something the student brings with them, there is also something called 'situational interest' which is produced by the nature of the classroom experience over which the instructor has a lot of control.

This UCITE session we will discuss how you can create classroom experiences that can enhance the situational interest and thus, at least partially, overcome any deficiency in personal interest.

Thursday, September 17: Getting students to read better
However much we may esteem our own teaching abilities, we have to be realistic. We cannot teach our students everything they will ever need to know. The time we have with them is too short and however much we try to compress material and speed its delivery (neither of which is good teaching practice anyway), the number of classroom hours we have them is never enough.

Students need to read. Reading has to be an important element in developing deep understanding of any topic. Listening to lectures, however good they might be, is not sufficient.

But a common complaint of faculty is that students don't read at all or don't read enough or read too shallowly or misunderstand the purpose of reading. While it is tempting to put this down to a lack of desire to read or to an inability to understand the content at the level we require, there may be other factors at play over which we as instructors have some control. One important factor to bear in mind is that reading technical and academic literature is a specialized skill that some acquire spontaneously but others require guidance to master.

Helping our students to become better readers of the scholarly literature may be one of the most valuable lessons we can impart. It will not only help them to learn the material in our courses better, but also enable them to keep learning efficiently after they graduate, when they will inevitably encounter novel situations and have to learn new things in order to respond to them.

During this UCITE session we will discuss how you can improve your students reading skills.

Thursday, September 24: Experiential learning
Those who have been following developments in the educational mission of our university over the last decade will be very familiar with the phrase 'experiential learning'. It was highlighted in the White Paper, formed an important part of the original design of the SAGES program, and it also forms the basis for many educational programs worldwide, as can be seen in the website Learning From Experience.

What many may not realize is that David Kolb and Alice Kolb, who have been key developers the theory behind experiential learning and how it can be implemented in the various academic disciplines, are both based here as Professors of Organizational Behavior of the Weatherhead School. They are known worldwide as leaders in this field and their book Experiential Learning and their many papers have been hugely influential.

During this UCITE session, the Kolbs will share the history of experiential learning and its applications. The format will be interactive, with opportunities for people to engage the Kolbs in discussions on its many aspects.

Thursday, October 1: Getting and using useful feedback from students
The best time in the semester to get feedback from your students as to how your course is going is around now, after the students have had enough time to become familiar with the course, the instructor, and their fellow students, while allowing the teacher enough time to make meaningful changes based on feedback that can really improve the course.

The kind of formative feedback asked for at this stage of the semester is quite different from what is asked after the course is over (called summative feedback). Formative feedback questions should request information that is fairly narrowly targeted and the questions used should seek to elicit responses that can be accommodated within the framework of the existing overall course structure.

After all, there is no point in asking questions for which the response might be that the students really would like to have a different course (or different instructor) altogether!

At this UCITE session, we will discuss what kinds of questions might be appropriate and the many mechanisms which one might utilize to get feedback.

Thursday, October 8: Group work and cooperative Learning
More and more faculty are realizing the valuable role that group work and collaborative learning can play in enhancing the learning experience for students and achieving important learning objectives. Some faculty use it informally as a way to increase engagement in the classroom while in other courses a group project is the main learning and assessment component.

But whatever the level of importance assigned to the group work, the effectiveness of this technique can be substantially increased if faculty plan ahead before implementing group work, by taking into account the various problems that might occur and taking steps to preemptively deal with them. This is one of those areas that a little advance planning can lead to huge benefits.

Furthermore, the many easy-to-use technological services the university now provides removes many of the impediments that hindered earlier attempts, such as the difficulty for many students to meet as a group outside of class and to coordinate their projects and reports.

At this session, we will provide tips on how to prepare students for collaborative group work and how to structure the groups and the projects for maximum effect.

Thursday, October 15: Teaching students to be good students
Good teachers realize that they should be simultaneously teaching on three different levels. The surface level is at the cognitive one and consists of the content knowledge they seek to have their students learn. The second level consists of helping them acquire the skills necessary to acquire that content knowledge in the specific classroom situation. The third level is metacognitive, teaching students how to monitor their own learning to see what learning strategies are working and what are not and adjust accordingly.

At the next UCITE session, we will focus on developing ways of teaching the second (skills) level. What this means is that there are certain skills that will help students learn better in certain teaching modes. For example, in a lecture class, students need to know how to focus attention on the speaker for extended periods of time, how to take notes, and how to not get distracted or disengaged when material they do not understand zips by them. In a discussion-based class, students need to learn how to identify the key learning threads in a discussion that on the surface may seem to be veering from topic to topic without much direction.

Thursday, October 22: Thursday, October 22: Statistics, GIS & Research Guides
A picture is worth a thousand words, and so holds true for maps. Displaying data and statistics on maps allows trends and interrelationships to be revealed that would be very difficult to discover in tabular format. Much data and statistics have a spatial (where) component, which lends it to be quantified, analyzed, and displayed through GIS (geographic information systems). Addresses, census tracts, place names, and longitude/latitude are examples of spatial location.

GIS is a versatile research tool and powerful teaching aid that can be used in almost any discipline. Hundreds at Case have already used the technology to create maps and analyze data, from undergraduates working on class projects to faculty and graduate research. Why more do not use it may be simply because they are unaware of its potential.

At the next UCITE session, Anne Holstein and Brian Gray of the Kelvin Smith Library will introduce you to GIS and show examples of how you can use it for your research or incorporate it into your teaching. Additionally, we will introduce two valuable resources provided to the Case community by the Kelvin Smith Library such as:

1) ICPSR (Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research) - Case is a member, which allows for unlimited access to a diverse and expanding range of statistical data sets and research studies, primarily for the social sciences.

2) Research Guides - online guides or tutorials prepared by Case librarians for a subject, specific course, project, resource, or assignment. Materials have already been specially prepared for many courses. Find out how these materials can be obtained for your class.

Handouts for Statistics, GIS & Research Guides #1

Thursday, October 29: Blackboard

The university's Blackboard course management system has many features that can make life a lot easier for both instructor and student, by enabling easy access to course information and better communication. Because the instructor can put a lot of time-consuming course house-keeping chores online, it enables much more efficient utilization of valuable classroom time.

At the next session, Genevieve Mathieson from ITAC will walk us through some of the main features of the system including its assessment tools and the new Grade Center, and will answer questions about its features.

There are already examples of this trend, the University of Phoenix being the most well known. But Kevin Carey in the September/October 2009 issue of Washington Monthly describes a plan that ups the ante dramatically, offering a college education at the flat rate of $99 per month.

While the pricing principle is similar to that of an all-you-can eat buffet, the article sparked a heated discussion online with some arguing that what students would be served with is the educational equivalent of junk food but not caring as long as they get the credential. Others argue that after newspapers, colleges will be the next victim of the internet.

Are these Cassandras just the latest in the long list of doomsayers that have erroneously forecast the end of universities as we know them? Or is this something that should be taken seriously by us in academe who value quality education and feel that a response is needed?

What do you think? This UCITE session will be one of our occasional journal clubs to discuss important issues in education.

The use of technology in teaching is increasing rapidly, having come a long way from the early days of email as a means for communicating with students and course websites as repositories of information.

CWRU has from the beginning been in the vanguard of finding ways to incorporate technology in teaching, triggered by the fact that we were the first to create a campus-wide fiber-optic network. We now have video of lectures on demand, eBooks, online distance learning courses, clickers, simulations, and the like. The use of PowerPoint has become ubiquitous.

But is it all for the good? Is the cost of building the technology infrastructure worth the benefits obtained? Are we going overboard in our embrace of technology in the classroom and in the process losing some of the virtues of the more traditional teaching methods? What do students feel about it? A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Learning described a backlash by some faculty member, leading them to try 'teaching naked', i.e., rejecting all technology in the classroom altogether.

This year's Faculty Forum, organized in conjunction with the Office of Greek Life will look closely at these and other questions.

The panel that will discuss this issue and take questions consists of Lev Gonick (Vice President for Information Technology Services and Chief Information Officer) as moderator, faculty members Christine Hudak (Nursing), Anne Helmreich (Art History), Michael Kenney (Chemistry), Daniel Cohen (History), and student Madeline Kraizel.

Are you planning to do a lot of writing over the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks? Perhaps catch up on all the scholarly work that you had planned to do this past semester but somehow found that the time just slipped away?

Maybe that was not a one-time phenomenon. Look back over a longer period with a critical eye. Do you see a pattern in which the periods of intense activity that you envisaged did not actually materialize?

At this UCITE session, we will look at the factors that might be preventing people from being as productive in their writing and other scholarly activities, and the practical steps that can be taken to rectify that situation.

Thursday, December 3: TBA