Other Online Faculty Development Opportunities
Modules
Classroom Management
- How Do I Address Teasing and Bullying Behavior in the Classroom?
- How Do I Stay Calm When Students Push My Buttons?
- What Should I Do When a Student Challenges my Authority?
Course Design
- How Can I Assess Critical Thinking with Objective Items?
- How Can I Assess Critical Thinking with Student-Created Work?
- How Can I Effectively Teach Unprepared Students?
- How Can I Effectively Use Class Preparation Assignments?
How Can I Improve Lessons with a 4-step Plan? - How Can I Make My Course Content More Accessible?
- How Do I Develop a High-Impact Capstone Course?
- Is Your Syllabus Sending the Wrong Message?
Faculty Development and Support
- How Can I Be an Effective Mentor?
- How Can I Use Student Feedback to Improve My Teaching?
Grading and Feedback
- How Can I Create Meaningful Assignments for My Students?
- How Can I Make My Exams More about Learning, Less about Grades?
- How Can I Transform My Tests into Learning Tools?
- How Can I Use Frequent Student Feedback to Improve My Courses?
- How Can I Use Low-stakes Quizzing to Enhance Learning?
Leadership
- How Can I Better Manage Difficult Conversations with Faculty?
- How Can I Evaluate Online Teaching If I Haven't Taught Online?
- How Can I Identify and Overcome Obstacles to Change?
- How Can I Use Peer Mentoring to Improve Online Teaching?
- How Do I Monitor and Support Online Faculty?
How Should I Coach an Under-performing Colleague? - How Should I Manage Conflict Within My Department?
- What Do Adjunct Faculty Need to Be Successful in the Online Classroom?
Student Engagement
- How Can I Capture Students’ Interest in the First 5 Minutes?
- How Can I Communicate to Engage Students and Encourage Learning?
How Can I Get Students to Take Responsibility for Their Own Learning? - How Can Objects and Analogies Improve my Teaching?
- How Do I Build Community in My Classroom?
- How Do I Create a Climate for Learning in My Classroom?
- How Do Master Teachers Create a Positive Classroom?
Teaching Online
- Beyond the Discussion Board: How Can I Engage Online Students?
- How Can I Use Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) Online?
- I’m Teaching Online Next Term. What Do I Have to Know?
- Linking, Embedding & Streaming: What’s Legal? What’s Not?
Teaching Strategies
- How Can I Give Negative Peer Feedback that Leads to Change?
- How Can I Structure a Flipped Lesson?
- How Do I Get Students to Come to Class Prepared?
- Learner-Centered Teaching - Where Should I Start?
- What Are 5 FAQ's About Faculty Roles in the Flipped Class?
- What Can I Do to Increase Student Retention?
Teaching with Technology
- How Can I Create Effective Mini-lectures?
About the Faculty Development Course
Short on time for attending faculty development sessions? Do you find your schedule conflicts with the time sessions offered?
This course is comprised of 20-minute videos from experts in their fields. (See titles and descriptions below.) Once you have registered for access and have received confirmation, you will have access to all of the videos listed below. Earn credit for each video you watch by taking the accompanying quiz. Quizzes are graded at the end of each month, and completion information is recorded in the PDI database. After that time, individual modules will show up on your transcript.
Complete the registration form to get access to this online faculty development opportunity. Because we have to add participants manually, access will not be automatic. Once you have been added to the course, you will be sent a confirmation email and instructions for accessing the course. If you miss the confirmation, you can always check in Blackboard to see if the course shows up.
Faculty Development Module Descriptions
Classroom Management
How Do I Address Teasing and Bullying Behavior in the Classroom?
Bullying and teasing takes many forms, but none of them are acceptable in higher education classrooms. Brian Van Brunt, Ed.D., an experienced educator and counselor, shares a resolutely practical approach, developed to help you confront the issue of bullying or teasing in your classroom.
How Do I Stay Calm When Students Push My Buttons?
College students’ behavior can be rude, arrogant, and insulting at times. This timely and targeted session will help you develop reasonable responses to students with unreasonable behavior. You will be able to keep your cool and handle any situation with a level head.
What Should I Do When a Student Challenges my Authority?
Students can challenge your authority in all sorts of ways. Some are overt (is he actually snoring?!), and some are not (that gentle pitter-pat you hear is most likely not rain on the roof … it’s texting). This content-rich program examines effective and appropriate responses when students cross the line.
Course Design
How Can Backward Design Make My Courses More Accessible?
Backward design is an effective tool in supporting accessibility. Focusing on what you want students to get out of your course, through backward design, will help you develop creative and accessible assignments that help all students, whether or not they have a disability.
How Can Educational Programs Use Backwards Design to Drive Learning and Student Success?
Backwards design is a straightforward process that provides value to both learners and instructors by creating alignment between objectives, class format, and examination questions. This method can assure student success by focusing on the outcomes first and ensuring that the course content aligns with those outcomes, while also creating a better process for instructors by allowing them to focus on their own content more efficiently.
How Can I Assess Critical Thinking with Objective Items?
Learn how to assess most critical thinking skills using an assortment of methods, such as true/false, matching, multiple choice, and multiple true/false tests. Receive step-by-step instruction for designing objective items to assess particular cognitive operations in critical thinking skills for a wide range of disciplines.
How Can I Assess Critical Thinking with Student-Created Work?
Gain a portfolio of guidelines for assignments that test student constructed responses. You will learn the keys to defining learning goals, creating assignments, and drafting rubrics to boost and measure critical thinking outcomes.
How Can I Effectively Teach Unprepared Students?
Learn principles and practices you can implement immediately to provide learning opportunities for unprepared students and motivate them to become engaged learners. This program takes a broad-spectrum approach, addressing motivation, responsibility, and communication practices and provides tested techniques to address these key issues.
How Can I Effectively Use Class Preparation Assignments?
Class preparation assignments, or CPAs, enable you to use your class time more effectively and move students toward higher levels of learning. This program prepares you to create class preparation assignments that will transform the classroom experience for you and your students.
How Can I Enhance Class Using Story, Popular Media and Objects?
This practical and focused session is grounded in learning theory, such as idea-based, brain-based and situated learning, to give you a framework for ongoing exploration and innovation.
How Can I Improve Lessons with a 4-step Plan?
Lesson planning is a complex process that can take hours and hours of your time. You need to answer the question, “What are my students going to learn today?” Mary Clement, Ed.D., has mastered the lesson planning process and developed a four-step plan that simplifies how you plan and creates even stronger, more engaging lessons.
How Can I Make My Course Content More Accessible?
Learn the drawbacks inherent in the most common ways of presenting course content and specific techniques for making material more accessible. After watching, you will be able to enhance student learning, help students better prepare for class, and promote student success with assignments and assessments.
How Can I Make My Exams More Accessible?
Exams created with accessibility in mind can help you improve your assessment of student learning for all students, whether or not they have a disability.
How Can I Plan (or Revise) My Courses More Efficiently?
This 20-minute video provides a four-step model considering the big picture goals, major content areas, calendar implications, and assessments.
How Do I Develop a High-Impact Capstone Course?
Capstone courses help students synthesize their college education before they embark on professional careers or graduate studies. This 20 Minute Mentor shows you how to construct a capstone course for specific learning outcomes.
Is Your Syllabus Sending the Wrong Message?
Your syllabus and classroom policies set the tone for your class, but they may not be creating a welcoming learning environment. Learn tips designed to help you use classroom policies to support student engagement and a smooth-running classroom.
Faculty Development and Support
How Can I Be an Effective Mentor?
Learn the essential principles to effectively advise and coach junior faculty while meeting all your other responsibilities. This program will show you how to start your mentoring relationship off on the right foot and carry it through to a successful conclusion.
How Can I Most Effectively Fulfill My Citizenship Requirements?This program helps faculty determine how to be more effective in citizenship responsibilities and take an active role on campus.
How Can Preparing to Teach Online Improve My Face-to-face Teaching? In this 20-minute session, learn how the process of teaching online can improve your face-to-face teaching.
How Can I Use Student Feedback to Improve My Teaching?
Student evaluations can affect promotions, tenure decisions, and departmental dynamics. This program will show you how you can employ student feedback to hone your teaching, improve student learning, and create a more positive classroom environment.
How Do I Move from Mentoring to Coaching in Faculty Development?
In this 20-minute session, learn three learning objectives that will help with your mentoring and coaching processes.
Is Coaching a Good Fit for My Faculty Development Program?
In this 20-minute session, you will Identify next steps to implementing coaching, whether there is currently a mentoring program in place at your institution or not.
What are 10 Tips to Collaborate with Colleagues?
In this 20-minute session, the goal is to help consider ways to improve collaboration with colleagues. Faculty will explore how and where collaboration is appropriate, and how to get the most out of collaboration.
What Culturally Responsive Teaching Techniques Can I Use to Improve Learning?
In this 20-minute session, faculty become more aware of cultural differences as well as the intersectionality of all different cultures represented in the classroom to engage with students on a deeper level.
What Is the Best Teaching Advice I Ever Received?
For faculty who are interested in becoming a better teacher, this presentation shares teaching advice collected from outstanding research professors.
Why is Intercultural Competence Important and How Can it Improve my Teaching?
In this 20-minute session, participants learn to reflect on their own assumptions that they bring to the classroom, as well as strategies to overcome assumptions and foster a more culturally responsive approach to teaching.
Grading and Feedback
How Can Grading Policy Options Influence Student Learning?
Learn the positive results-empowering students, motivating them, increasing their engagement, achieving better learning outcomes-that can be realized through strategic decisions you make about your grading policies.
How Can I Create Meaningful Assignments for My Students?
Assignments are where students get to practice, engage with course content, demonstrate their growing mastery, and alert you to problems. Learn 16 research-based strategies proven to support student learning and how to apply several of these techniques when designing your course assignments.
How Can I Make My Exams More about Learning, Less about Grades?
Learn how you can transform exams into enhanced opportunities for student learning with practical solutions to the three core problems with exams today. Making exams better suit your learning goals requires student participation at every step of the process. Your presenter, Maryellen Weimer, Ph.D., shares real-world, tested guidelines for integrating student input.
How Can I Transform My Tests into Learning Tools?
Tests and other assessments are effective tools for determining how well students learned (and how well you taught) earlier in the semester. But they don’t really do much to help students learn in the present, or as the semester progresses. This fast, focused program will provide you with an assortment of tools and techniques to promote better learning.
How Can I Use Frequent Student Feedback to Improve My Courses?
If you are only asking for feedback at the end of the semester, there’s not much you can do to improve the learning for your current students. That is why it’s important to get student feedback early in the semester - and multiple times throughout - to understand your students and meet their learning needs. We share the five times in the semester when getting student feedback is valuable and provides practical ways to obtain that information.
How Can I Use Low-stakes Quizzing to Enhance Learning?
A frequent, low-stakes FLS grading strategy, when used correctly, can decrease your workload while increasing student motivation and confidence. As an added benefit, it helps ensure students arrive to class prepared and ready to learn. The idea behind FLS is simple: you give many grades with lower weights. Learn how this technique can benefit your classroom in this 20-Minute Mentor.
Leadership
How Can I Analyze Department Data and Move Towards Closing the Assessment Loop?
This program explores the steps that should be considered once assessment data has been collected at the departmental level.
How Can I Better Manage Difficult Conversations with Faculty?
Is there a conversation you should have with a faculty member that you’re putting off because you’re afraid of how she or he will react? A technique called motivational interviewing is the key and you’ll learn how it could help you do a better job of navigating the rough spots of academic life in this program.
How Can I Build a Mindset for Assessment in an Academic Department?
This program gives you tools to create a transparent and effective assessment process for your department.
How Can I Evaluate Online Teaching If I Haven't Taught Online?
Learn the difference between the design elements of a course and the instructional interactions done in the online classroom that count as teaching practices. Identify the five key online teaching behaviors from your Learning Management System.
How Can I Identify and Overcome Obstacles to Change?
This program shows you how to identify obstacles to change and then remove them, identify information gaps and eliminate them, and identify unsupportive peers and enlighten them both before and during your change process.
How Can I Use Peer Mentoring to Improve Online Teaching?
Explore the features of a holistic approach that aligns the selection, training, support, and evaluation of online-teaching peer mentors. Learn about the considerations of working with adjunct and/or geographically remote faculty and how to address their particular concerns.
How Do I Monitor and Support Online Faculty?
Learn how to communicate with faculty about expectations for their performance. Examine how the hiring, training, development, and evaluation of online faculty can come together in a holistic approach that reinforces these teaching competencies.
How Should I Coach an Under performing Colleague?
In higher education, supervisors are also colleagues, which makes dealing with faculty who aren’t meeting expectations particularly challenging. Get guidance on handling poor performance. You’ll learn how to understand what causes poor performance and concentrate your energy where you can do some good.
How Should I Manage Conflict Within My Department?
This presentation focuses on how building relationships and clarifying leadership roles can limit the development of disagreements and set the stage for successful resolution when conflicts do arise. Learn how to take a proactive approach to behavior that is less than collegial.
What Do Adjunct Faculty Need to Be Successful in the Online Classroom?
Learn just how much information adjuncts require about your institution, your administrative processes, your pedagogical expectations, and their developmental opportunities.
Student Engagement
How Can I Capture Students’ Interest in the First 5 Minutes?
We show you how to make the most of that first meeting with your students. Teaching and learning depend on building and sustaining student interest and strong course openings get it all started. You learn to draft your own “enthusiasm statement” to use in your own courses to draw students into the subject matter.
How Can I Communicate to Engage Students and Encourage Learning?
Learn how to self-assess your communication skills in the instructional context to see what works best for you and your students—and pick up new techniques to broaden your abilities.
How Can I Get Students to Take Responsibility for Their Own Learning?
Learn how incorporating findings from cognitive and educational psychology research can help you encourage students to take charge of their own learning. Discover techniques you can use to increase student responsibility and establish a learning-centered environment in your next course.
How Can Objects and Analogies Improve my Teaching?
Whether you teach physics or philosophy, you’re probably looking for innovative ways to increase student engagement with your course material. Encouraging students to make new connections is essential in higher education, and we show you what students think about just that.
How Do I Build Community in My Classroom?
Community is an essential ingredient in the educational experience. Studies show that community building can increase retention, improve students’ cognitive intellectual development, and promote contributions to society. Find out why it’s important for you to know how to create community.
How Do I Create a Climate for Learning in My Classroom?
We’ve all encountered “toxic” learning environments–apathetic students, disillusioned faculty, an entire roomful of people waiting for class to just end, already. Keeping the classroom climate positive is the responsibility of both sides. Learn valuable concepts you can put to work right away in every class.
How Do Master Teachers Create a Positive Classroom?
There are simple ways you can liven up the classroom experience so it feels fresh. This program shows you how to incorporate creativity, optimism, enthusiasm, approachability, and humor to re-energize your teaching and create a positive classroom environment that engages students and supports learning.
What 5 Play-based Activities Can I Use to Create an Active, Learning-centered Class?
This informative program brings to life college classroom-tested games that work to build student rapport, inject new life into lecture-heavy teaching, and increase success rates among students.
Student Success
Beyond Syllabus Policies: What Strategies Help Students Take Responsibility for Learning?
In this 20-minute session, discover best practices to follow in the classroom that will encourage students to become better learners and not engage in unproductive behaviors.
How Can I Make the Activities in My Course More Inclusive?
This fast and focused session will show you a practical approach to making accommodations and promoting equitable opportunity for learning and engagement for all your students.
How Can I Promote Enrollment and Retention in Challenging Courses that Motivate Instead of Frustrate?
You'll examine the factors that impact student expectations and perceptions toward these courses, strategies for understanding why gaps in expectations hinder learning, and how to address these gaps.
How Can I Reduce Student Apathy and Increase Motivation?
In 20 minutes learn how to increase relevance in five areas of your teaching-your course design, your syllabus, your classroom, your assignments, and your exams.
Teaching Online
Beyond the Discussion Board: How Can I Engage Online Students?
Learn how to overcome common challenges of discussion boards. Examine other options for engagement in your learning management system (LMS) and engaging students outside of the online classroom.
How Can I Use Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) Online?
Learn how to use the insights gained from using CATs to adjust future lessons and target your instruction to better meet the needs of your students. Gain skills you can apply in both online and traditional classrooms.
I’m Teaching Online Next Term. What Do I Have to Know?
If you’re teaching your first online class next semester, and you’re completely confident you know exactly what to do … then you’re probably the first. If, on the other hand, you have more questions than answers, this program is tailor-made for you. We provide you with a 12-step framework for online teaching success.
Linking, Embedding & Streaming: What’s Legal? What’s Not?
It’s your responsibility to understand how copyright law and fair use regulations affect what material you can share with students and how. This program will help you understand what is and isn’t permitted in online teaching and will give you guidelines to help you find your own way when you encounter those areas that need a judgment call.
Teaching Strategies
How Can I Give Negative Peer Feedback that Leads to Change?
We show you strategies and specific practices you can use to make critical feedback conversations successful. Explore models, principles, and concrete actions to manage negative feedback effectively.
How Can I Structure a Flipped Lesson?
Learn the structure and find the confidence to flip a lesson in a course you already teach or a new course you are designing. Discover how to integrate flipped lessons into the overall course for a seamless learning experience for your students.
How Do I Get Students to Come to Class Prepared?
Unprepared students might seem to be a standard ingredient of higher education, but it doesn’t have to be that way. This program shows you what you can do to create the kind of courses that naturally encourage student preparation and eliminate some of the common frustrations of higher education.
Learner-Centered Teaching - Where Should I Start?
With learner-centered teaching, students take more responsibility for their learning. It’s an approach that focuses a teacher’s attention on what students are doing and deals with learning processes explicitly. We share three strategies to demonstrate approaches that can benefit students and teachers.
What Are 5 FAQ's About Faculty Roles in the Flipped Class?
This program will give you the confidence you need to start flipping your own courses right away. Discover the answers to the five most common areas of concern for instructors new to flipping.
What are Five Methods that Help Students Become More Effective Learners?
This program showcases the characteristics of effective learners and focuses on instructional strategies teachers can use to help students develop the learning skills they need to succeed in college and in life.
What Can I Do to Increase Student Retention?
It’s never a good feeling to learn that a student has left your class … or worse, left school altogether. Especially because it so often comes as a complete surprise; before you even realize they have a problem, they’re gone. We give you some powerful tools and techniques you can use to prevent these “unhappy endings”.
Teaching with Technology
How Can I Create Effective Mini-lectures?
Learn how to communicate with faculty about expectations for their performance. Examine how the hiring, training, development, and evaluation of online faculty can come together in a holistic approach that reinforces these teaching competencies.