Outstanding educators innovate

February 10, 2015

Marissa Carl

 

By Chris Lott
UAF eLearning associate director of teaching and learning

Today’s Teaching Tip, our 142nd, also commemorates UAF eLearning’s third year of publishing weekly tips with only the occasional break for the holidays. It feels fitting to celebrate by sharing some of the interesting work being done by the outstanding educators we’ve had the privilege of working with.

• Rorik Peterson, College of Engineering and Mines associate professor and 2014-15 CITE Fellow, has explored the use of Socrative to obtain rapid feedback from his engineering students using their own laptops, tablets and mobile devices and has shared a brief how-to guide and tips based on his experience: http://elearning.uaf.edu/go/itu-socrative


• Greg Finstad, School of Natural Resources and Extension assistant professor, is giving his students the option of conducting their own field necropsy to identify organs and their functions, as well as collect tissue samples as part of a course on domestic animal health.


• Sean McGee, School of Management term instructor and 2015-16 CITE Fellow, is using professional design templates to create syllabi that are more engaging and readable for his professional students.


• Rob Prince, College of Liberal Art assistant professor and 2014-15 CITE Fellow, “gamified” his Journalism 101 class. Students start the course as mail clerks in a fictional publishing company and work their way up (and down) the corporate ladder — and receive rights and privileges — as they complete their writing and editing tasks.


• Walter Skya, CLA associate professor, is putting reverse-design to work, setting his students to work on the big questions in his East Asian Civilization class. For example, he asks, “Although Marxism is an atheist ideology, how might you argue that communism is a religion?”


• Katherine Bouta, Christie Hinrichs, Romina Kline, Johnny Payne and Jennifer Popa, all of CLA, are using the UAF eLearning-supported community publishing platform to create a public audience for, and promote pride and ownership by, student writers and their work.

Like UAF eLearning’s services, this brief selection runs the gamut of offerings, from e-learning to face-to-face, engineering to liberal arts, simple to complex, and large classes to small. Our support and faculty development efforts are not limited to online courses, because it is our mission to advance teaching — and nurture innovation — regardless of the method of delivery.

In future tips, we will share more, and more deeply, about these and many more of UAF’s leaders of teaching and learning. Until then, we hope you continue to learn from these tips as well as the various faculty development opportunities, online and off, UAF eLearning provides, all of which you can learn about at iTeachU.