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Spring 2024 Teaching Symposium

Join us January 9, 2024 for our Annual Spring Teaching Symposium. Our keynote speaker will be Flower Darby!

Posted in: Faculty Development, ITDS Events

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The Spring 2024 Teaching Symposium

The Annual Spring Teaching Symposium is a virtual faculty development event that will look ahead toward the start of a promising new semester, while reflecting on lessons learned from the fall. It includes external speakers, faculty presentations, instructional technology workshops, and much more.

This year’s event will kick off with keynote speaker Flower Darby’s talk: The Three Es of Teaching With AI: Ethics, Equity, and Empowerment. Flower Darby is the Associate Director of the Teaching for Learning Center at the University of Missouri. She celebrates and promotes effective teaching in all modalities to advance equitable learning outcomes for all students.

Date: Tuesday, January 9, 2024
Time: 9:00am – 3:00pm
Location:
Online

Keynote Presenter: Flower Darby

Topic: The Three Es of Teaching With AI: Ethics, Equity, and Empowerment

Description: The advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and tools such as ChatGPT present both challenges and opportunities for teaching and learning in higher education. In this session we will explore a range of issues and practical approaches including how to understand what GenAI means for us and our students, the ethical and equity-focused concerns of teaching with AI, how we can encourage students to do their work with integrity, and how we can empower ourselves and our students to adapt to our rapidly changing school and work settings with the skills needed. As we make the case for teaching and learning with AI, we’ll consider strategies and examples across class modalities and disciplines for how to meaningfully do so.

Bio: Flower Darby celebrates and promotes effective teaching in all modalities to advance equitable learning outcomes for all students. She’s an Associate Director of the Teaching for Learning Center at the University of Missouri. Prior to that, she held roles such as Assistant Dean of Online and Innovative Pedagogies, Director of Teaching for Student Success, and Senior Instructional Designer. These roles have allowed her to build on her experience teaching in person and online for over 27 years in a range of subjects including English, Technology, Education, Leadership, Dance, and Pilates. In her current work and publications, Darby empowers faculty to teach inclusive and equity-focused classes in all modalities. Her recent books include The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching (2023) and Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes (2019), and she’s an internationally sought-after keynote speaker.

Spring 2024 Teaching Symposium Agenda

 

Time Session
9:00 –  10:15am Welcome and Keynote Presentation: The Three Es of Teaching With AI: Ethics, Equity, and Empowerment with Flower Darby

The advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and tools such as ChatGPT present both challenges and opportunities for teaching and learning in higher education. In this session we will explore a range of issues and practical approaches including how to understand what GenAI means for us and our students, the ethical and equity-focused concerns of teaching with AI, how we can encourage students to do their work with integrity, and how we can empower ourselves and our students to adapt to our rapidly changing school and work settings with the skills needed. As we make the case for teaching and learning with AI, we’ll consider strategies and examples across class modalities and disciplines for how to meaningfully do so.

10:30 – 11:15am Getting Started with InSpace, the Virtual Meeting Tool Built for Education

Don’t miss the exciting opportunity to enhance your teaching effectiveness and student outcomes in our InSpace Orientation. InSpace is a video-conferencing tool that mimics the physical classroom. In this hands-on session, participants will explore InSpace’s innovative features and learn how to make your virtual sessions more collaborative and memorable. With InSpace’s ability to foster a social learning environment, this orientation is not just a tech tutorial, but a gateway to a more dynamic and engaging educational world. Regardless of your schedule, rest assured that we’ve got you covered, as the session will be recorded and a wealth of resources will be provided afterward.

Let’s Engage: Hands-on with Student Engagement Technologies and Strategies

Looking to try something a bit more active this semester? Join us for a hands-on session that demonstrates how you can integrate opportunities for student engagement in your courses, whether teaching online or in-person. We’ll try out a student engagement strategy while demoing four versatile technologies you can integrate into your courses: Padlet, Hypothesis, Poll Everywhere, and Miro. We’ll also demonstrate some ways you can use InSpace backgrounds to further engage your students, and wrap up with a brief discussion about motivation and considerations for designing your own student engagement experiences.

11:30am – 12:15pm ChatGPT & Artificial Intelligence: Keeping Up & Responding with Effective Instructional Design

The use of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) able to produce written work that sounds convincingly human-produced, exploded in popularity in late 2022 and poses many questions in higher education related to academic integrity and authenticity of work produced by our students. This workshop empowers faculty with a demonstration of the tool, opportunities to explore it within your own subject matter, strategies and approaches for responding to it in your classroom, and considerations on leveraging the tool and its potential benefits. We’ll conclude the session with an exploration of some of the latest ChatGPT developments and overviews of other relevant AI technology.

12:15 – 1:00pm Lunch Break
1:00 – 1:45pm Course Design Best Practices for Online and Hybrid Courses

The iterative process of course design relies on the growth and development of faculty’s comfort with technology and utilization of sound pedagogical strategies. In this session, Instructional Designers share the course design process promoted by the Instructional Technology and Design Services group to enhance the teaching and learning experience for faculty and students alike. Participants will explore the key components of the backward design and apply research based best practice to the course design.

Mastering the Canvas Gradebook

Learn how to set up the Canvas Gradebook, weight assignments using assignment groups, enter grades and provide student feedback. This workshop will also demonstrate how to hide/unhide grades from students, set grading policies and see the gradebook from a student’s point of view.

2:00 – 3:00pm Canvas: Ready, Set, Go! Preparing Your Courses for the Spring

From creating an announcement to designing a course landing page, this session will give you all the tools you need to build a solid, accessible Canvas course.  We will also share Canvas tips & tricks to ensure you have everything you need to effectively and efficiently prepare your Spring courses.

Keeping Up with What’s New on Canvas

We have put together a series of Tips & Tricks to ensure you have everything you need to effectively and efficiently prepare your Spring courses. Whether you are new to Canvas or not, there may be some tricks you are unaware of or even possibilities in teaching your course that you have not yet considered.


For a view of the 2023 agenda, please visit our Past Spring Symposiums page.