Jun 7, 2020 | Home Page
Teaching and Learning with Technology’s Engaging Students Series (ESS) focuses on course revisions to synchronous and asynchronous online learning environments intended to help keep students focused and participating. ESS was launched to support Penn State instructors as they prepared to teach their summer 2020 courses online and to provide them with best practices for online instruction.
The first four weeks of ESS offerings attracted over 300 attendees who took in presentations and participated in work sessions hosted by faculty, instructional designers, and other university experts. Those sessions provided critical guidelines for creating meaningful experiences for all aspects of virtual courses.
Due to ESS’s initial popularity and the continuing need for the delivery of engaging online content, the series is being extended throughout the academic year. These sessions will continue to introduce synchronous and asynchronous teaching and learning considerations, promote the alignment of technology tools with learning outcomes, and allow for revisions with support from consultants and colleagues. Bring your syllabus, exams, assignment sheets, and lesson plans for these sessions.
Additionally, the free and open access ESS Pressbook is available online. It is the home for resources and content from past ESS sessions.
Upcoming ESS presentations:
Engaging Students with Interactive Global Experiences via Multimedia
Tues., March 16: 10:00 a.m.-Noon
The infusion of multimedia within a course can deliver instructional content in a multi-sensory approach. Through curated and live experiences focused on providing global perspectives, as well as easy-to-utilize tools to create your own interactive experiences to provide global context, you can engage your students with opportunities they would not have otherwise especially given the current barriers to travel.
Jun 14, 2021 | Home Page
Born out of the Penn State Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) BlendLT program, the Engaging Students Series has been an instrumental resource for faculty to drive student engagement in the online space.
BlendLT offers a series of faculty engagement opportunities and resources that support converting traditional residential courses to a blended (face-to-face and online) format. Since its inception during the 2015-16 academic year, the program has assisted faculty-designed blended courses.
“We took the basis of the BlendLT program and adapted it to create the Engaging Students Series to help faculty figure out how to engage their students in this new online environment — especially for faculty who had never taught in an online format before,” said Erica Fleming, an instructional designer for TLT.
The Engaging Students Series was launched early during the pandemic to support Penn State instructors preparing to teach their summer 2020 courses online and was found to be such a popular and valuable resource that it has continued since. In addition, it has helped countless faculty who may or may not have already been familiar with teaching in an online environment. Past resources can be found in the Engaging Students Series Pressbook.
One such faculty member is Kelly Karpa, assistant dean of Interprofessional Education and a professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the Penn State College of Medicine. Karpa, who is responsible for engaging learners from 36 schools that have physical therapy, occupational therapy and pharmacy programs, never taught in an online format previous to the pandemic.
“Having the TLT folks walk through these different tools and options was hugely enlightening for those of us who had never taught online before and suddenly found ourselves thrust into that environment,” Karpa said. “Now, students are definitely more engaged than they would have been if it was just someone lecturing to them. There are now tools they can use to stay engaged in the course.”
Some of Karpa’s most significant takeaways from attending the Engaging Students Series sessions were learning various ways to incorporate Zoom and Canvas into courses. Before the remote transition, the College of Medicine had not used Canvas for pre-clinical courses. Other tools to drive student engagement in her courses included breakout rooms in Zoom, the chat feature in Canvas, and Google Docs for small-group collaboration.
Another faculty member new to teaching online (and participating in Zoom meetings) who sought out resources like the Engaging Students Series is Judith Newman, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State Abington. “I began teaching in 1977, so I was around 70 when the pandemic pushed us into remote teaching,” Newman said. “I was very old school in regard to technology; I had a lot to learn.”
Some of the most valuable takeaways for Newman included making Zoom polls and the resources available on online exams and academic integrity. “Finding ways to engage students was certainly more difficult in a remote environment,” she said. “But I began to get more and more confident that there were things I could do that I had not done before.”
Despite the return to normal on the horizon, TLT plans to continue to offer more workshops in the Engaging Students Series, focusing on engaging students in online environments while also incorporating more strategies for engaging students online while teaching in-person classes. TLT will be announcing dates in July for future sessions.
Fleming said, “Engaging students in online spaces does not stop when we go back to in-person classes. Faculty can take the lessons they’ve learned from the remote teaching and learning period and incorporate those to create more engaging, successful, and inclusive spaces for their students when we’re back to in-person teaching and learning.”
Feb 13, 2019 | Home Page
Immersive technologies such as 360-degree videos will revolutionize the future of forensic science, giving police and criminologists a tool to visualize different crime scenes and ultimately, become better investigators. Through the Berks Teaching & Learning Innovation Partnership Grant, Penn State Berks students in CRIMJ 210, a course on Policing in America, are learning to create 360-degree videos of crime scene scenarios.
These videos are viewed by their peers in CRIMJ 100, an introductory course to Criminal Justice, to learn about topics such as self-defense, defense of others, and defense of property.
“The project transforms student learning on two levels: It allows students to engage in creative collaboration related to a course topic, and students get to ‘experience’ the scenarios presented by the 360-degree videos created by their peers,” said Mary Ann Mengel, an instructional multimedia designer for Penn State Berks’ Center for Learning & Teaching.
During the fall 2018 semester, students were separated into five teams to research their chosen topic, brainstorm ideas for a storyboard, create the dialogue, assemble props, and select locations to film. Like good police work, careful research and attention are required to recreate crime scene scenarios that accurately represent the characters, props, settings, and timing of events.
Due to the limited examples of 360-degree storyboards, Mengel designed a template for students to visualize how their scenes would play out through the 360-degree camera. The camera’s vantage point positions the viewer within the scene, and the viewer can focus their attention in any direction. By design, minimal video editing is required.
“This should be the standard,” said Deb Dreisbach, lecturer in criminal justice. “I’m always thinking outside of the box and as we continue to come up with other ideas for these videos, we will institute them.”
Dress rehearsal videos were peer-reviewed before students produced their two- to three-minute-long final videos in November 2018. Assessment questions were written by the teams, which students in future classes will answer after exploring the immersive scenarios.
“In having to develop questions, students are analyzing it a lot differently, and enjoying it more,” Dreisbach said. Dreisbach plans to expand the library of scenarios as she repeats the assignment in future semesters.
These videos significantly enhance how criminal justice students learn. Students are better engaged in the course through extended classroom discussion and reflection.
“By experiencing 360-degree videos created by peers, students are provided a safe way to be present ‘on the ground’ at what might otherwise be a dangerous policing situation,” Mengel said. “The result is an engaging and memorable learning experience.”
Dec 12, 2023 | Uncategorized
Teaching with Technology (TwT) TLT offers a series of virtual workshops to faculty each semester that focuses on innovative uses of University-approved instructional technologies. Browse and register for SP24 offerings Workshop Format TwT’s online workshops include...
Sep 8, 2023 | Uncategorized
Asynchronous Resources Explore self-paced resources on technology-enhanced teaching practices. Learning Opportunities BlendLT Learning Path This series of Canvas modules includes an introduction to Blended Learning Transformation, a course revision guide, as well as...
