Skip to main content

Author

Using Top Hat to drive student engagement in asynchronous learning

Apr. 29, 2020—by Jesse Blocher, Assistant Professor of Finance When moving a class online, my observation is that most faculty’s first move is to create video. This is logical since much of what we do as faculty is lecture in some form or another. Video is an excellent communication tool and verbal communication is a cornerstone of...

Read more


Flipgrid: Empowering Voices with Asynchronous Online Video Discussions

Apr. 21, 2020—by Patrick Murphy, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese Flipgrid is a free online video tool from Microsoft that allows students to record video for up to 10 minutes.  It has a lot of fun visual effects as well as intuitive assessment and feedback options that can be included in rubric evaluation...

Read more


Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt: Chelsea Yarborough, Cross-Disciplinary Examples, and Online Covenant Building

Apr. 20, 2020—by Faith Rovenolt, CFT undergraduate intern During Spring 2020, the Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt blog series will highlight teaching innovations that CFT staff have implemented and evaluated in their own courses. Something I’ve noticed in my time as a student is the false dichotomy sometimes constructed between disciplines. The most obvious example of this is...

Read more


Pivoting to remote teaching and learning: Community health clinical hours from a distance through a weekly newsletter

Apr. 10, 2020—Brittany Haskell is a Nursing faculty member who is engaged in the CFT’s Junior Faculty Teaching Fellowship this year. She teaches in the Community Health course series, which requires that students engage in a particular number of clinical hours. During the transition to remote teaching and learning this spring, Brittany and her colleagues worked with...

Read more


Pivoting to remote teaching and learning: Community health clinical hours from a distance through parent education

Apr. 9, 2020—Jennifer Ridgway is a Nursing faculty member who is engaged in the CFT’s Junior Faculty Teaching Fellowship this year. She teaches in the Community Health course series, which requires that students engage in a particular number of clinical hours. During the transition to remote teaching and learning this spring, Jennifer and her colleagues worked with...

Read more


Additional security measure for logging into Brightspace goes into effect Monday, April 13

Apr. 9, 2020—As of April 13th 2020, all faculty, staff, TAs, and postdoctoral researchers will be required to use Two Factor Authentication (2FA) as an additional security measure for logging into Brightspace as well as several additional Vanderbilt accounts. This will change the way you log into Brightspace. First, you will need the Duo Mobile app on...

Read more


Student motivation journal club: Supporting our students’ motivation in the era of COVID-19

Apr. 8, 2020—by Cynthia Brame, CFT associate director Our student motivation journal club is ending the academic year in the age of COVID-19 and all that implies: working from home, teaching and/or taking classes remotely, reading shifting but consistently bad news each day. We are learning how to negotiate challenges of spotty internet connection, kids and animals...

Read more


Inclusive and Equitable Teaching Online

Apr. 7, 2020—by Joe Bandy, CFT assistant director   Teaching face-to-face presents many challenges, not least of which is the task of ensuring that all students feel belonging and have equal chances to thrive regardless of their abilities, identities, or perspectives. The online teaching environment suffers from all of the same obstacles to this and more, especially...

Read more


Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt: Chad Carpenter and Multi-Step Class Problem Solving

Apr. 6, 2020—By Faith Rovenolt, CFT undergraduate intern   During Spring 2020, the Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt blog series will highlight teaching innovations that CFT staff have implemented and evaluated in their own courses.   In teaching quantitative courses, it can be easy to fall into the trap of creating plug-and-chug problems for students. However, Chad Carpenter,...

Read more


Gathering feedback during remote teaching and learning: questions and tools to use

Apr. 5, 2020—by Cynthia Brame, CFT associate director As we head into our fourth week of remote teaching and learning at Vanderbilt, it’s a good idea for instructors to gather information from students about how they’re experiencing the shift. You may be doing that informally with your students by checking in via virtual office hours, email, and...

Read more