Upcoming Conversation on Teaching: Teaching with Chat & Channel Apps
Jan. 7, 2021—Teaching with Chat & Channel Apps With the move to remote and online teaching in 2020, faculty and other instructors experimented with a wide variety of tools to foster and maintain social presence with their students. Some tried using group messaging apps like Slack, Discord, and Teams as a way to connect and communicate with...
Upcoming Teaching Workshops
Jan. 6, 2021—As we look ahead to another unusual semester in the spring, we are offering a number of workshops to help you prepare. The extended winter break will be a good time to learn about various technologies and strategies for your face-to-face, online or hybrid class sessions. An Introduction to Online and Hybrid Teaching...
Upcoming Conversations on Teaching
Jan. 5, 2021—Conversations on Teaching focus on emergent teaching and learning issues in an informal, discussion-based format. These sessions provide members of the Vanderbilt teaching community a chance to share their teaching experiences and learn from each other. Teaching with Chat & Channel Apps With the move to remote and online teaching in 2020, faculty...
Lessons from teaching in Fall 2020: what to keep, what to ditch, and what to change
Dec. 18, 2020—by Cynthia Brame, CFT associate director This fall, I got the opportunity to teach online for the first time. I had been thinking about online teaching for several years because of my work in developing Vanderbilt’s BOLD (Blended and Online Learning Design) Fellows program. But although I read about, thought about, and helped others with online teaching,...
Instructional Design Consultations through iDesign
Dec. 17, 2020—Vanderbilt University has partnered with the instructional design firm iDesign to make available a number of services to help faculty and other instructors prepare for online and hybrid teaching this fall. iDesign learning specialists are on-hand to assist with your course design and teaching effectiveness questions. If you have a question relating how to best...
Spring Journal Club: Investigating Student Learning
Dec. 15, 2020—In this journal club we will explore different approaches that college instructors can use to investigate how and what our students are learning. We will discuss research articles that illustrate how a range of methods can be used to understand our teaching and our students’ learning, considering benefits and limitations of the methods for answering...
Brightspace Updates
Dec. 14, 2020—Most of us are using Brightspace more than ever in our teaching. These recent additions and reminders will help you get even more out of your online teaching with Brightspace. Our most recent Brightspace update includes a new quiz setting that will allow students to retake a quiz but only retake the questions they answered...
Leading Lines Podcast Featuring James Lang
Dec. 10, 2020—In this episode, we talk with James M. Lang about distraction and attention, the subject of his new book. He is a professor of English and the director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University in Massachusetts. Jim talks about laptop bans and classroom norms, the ethics of attention and cognitive diversity, and...
Come Work at the Center for Teaching!
Dec. 9, 2020—Each year the Center for Teaching (CFT) hires a number of graduate students as part of its efforts to mentor and train graduate students, including those serving as teaching assistants or instructors of record here at Vanderbilt as well as those interested in developing teaching skills for future faculty careers. The CFT has several types...
Making the Most of In-Class Reading Days
Dec. 8, 2020—by Derek Bruff, CFT Director Last week, the university approved four “in-class reading days” for the spring 2021 semester: February 23-24 and April 7-8. These days in the undergraduate and graduate school schedules are meant to encourage students and instructors to practice self-care and avoid burnout during this exceptional academic year. In this blog post,...