‘Online Education’
Spotlight Event: Teaching with Wikipedia
Sep. 16, 2021—Wikipedia is home to over 55 million articles. The website is a valuable source for information, but it also has systematic knowledge gaps, as well as biases toward historically privileged perspectives. Vanderbilt political scientists Brooke Ackerly and Kristin Michelitch have been working to correct these gaps and biases by engaging their students as Wikipedia contributors. Students are, in...
Online Teaching Learning Community
Jun. 21, 2021—Even before the campus-wide move to online and remote teaching last year, the online teaching group was meeting regularly to explore challenges and opportunities. The Course Development Resources site (CDR), which has grown out of the work of this group over the last two years, is a self-paced guide to designing, building, teaching, or maintaining great courses...
CFT Concludes Latest Online Course Design Institute
Jun. 16, 2021—To help faculty prepare for teaching this Summer, we offered an Online Course Design Institute (OCDI). The institute was a revised and updated version of the institute that the Center for Teaching offered in summer 2020 to more than 500 participants. Participants worked in three cohorts led by CFT Senior Staff Members Cynthia Brame, Julaine...
“We were doing all that hard work of helping students practice how to apply their knowledge together.”: Thomas Clements and Kathy Friedman talk about their synchronous sessions in their Fall 2020 online course.
Mar. 1, 2021—Thomas Clements and Kathy Friedman, both from Biological Sciences, recently joined Diana Heney and Jessica Watkins for a Conversation on Teaching about their approaches to synchronous sessions in online courses. You can see the recording of the entire session here. In the clip below, Thomas and Kathy describe the role that undergraduate learning assistants (LAs)...
“This gave them something concrete, so that when they were in small groups, they could compare and contrast, like, why did you draw this? And how does this connect to my understanding?”: Jessica Watkins talks about her synchronous sessions in her Fall 2020 online course.
Feb. 23, 2021—Jessica Watkins, Assistant Professor of Teaching & Learning, recently joined Diana Heney, Thomas Clements, and Kathy Friedman for a Conversation on Teaching about their approaches to synchronous sessions in online courses. You can see the recording of the entire session here. In the clip below, Jessica describes specific ways that she promoted small group discussion...
“One of the things that putting the course online forced me to do was to do was to go back to bare bones, like what are the goals?”: Diana Heney talks about her synchronous sessions in her online courses.
Feb. 18, 2021—Diana Heney, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, recently joined Thomas Clements, Kathy Friedman, and Jessica Watkins for a Conversation on Teaching about their approaches to synchronous sessions in online courses. You can see the recording of the entire session here. In the clip below, Diana describes specific ways that she shaped the two classes she taught...
BOLD fellow Deb Levy and mentor James Booth share findings on their online module to help build critical skills in scientific reading
Jan. 26, 2021—A difficult trade-off in scientific writing is the balance between accessibility and accuracy; scholarly science writing is often so meticulously accurate that it becomes inaccessible, while popular science writing is often so accessible that it can’t be accurate. The ability to effectively read, evaluate, and create scientific writing in all of its forms – scientific...
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,...
Liberating Zoom: Strategies for Better Online Discussions
Aug. 19, 2020—Friday, August 21, 10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Join the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities this Friday for a highly interactive, hands-on exploration of strategies that help build more inclusive and engaged teaching and research communities, online and in person. Liberating Structures, led by Anna Jackson and Fisher Qua, is a methodology grounded in the idea that the strategies commonly...
Should I record?
Jul. 30, 2020—By Cynthia Brame, CFT Associate Director This fall, we are all going to be thinking about how to ensure that our students can equitably access our courses, even when they have to miss a synchronous meeting. One of the questions we’ll have to answer is whether and when to record those meetings to provide...