Friday Fragments, Sept. 4
Various scenarios for higher ed, a white paper for faculty developers, a webinar for writing instructors & and handout on supporting student well-being.
What I’m reading/watching:
The Low-Density University: 15 Scenarios for Higher Education (Joshua Kim & Edward J. Maloney), a free online book from Johns Hopkins Press, asks us - instructors and administrators - to consider “How can changing the calendar or shifting to hybrid models of blended classrooms impact teaching, learning, and the college experience? Could we emerge from this crisis with new models that are better and more adapted to today's world? Can we devise safe and effective ways to preserve the best of ]the college] experience?”
For those interested in faculty development, this white paper, Disruption in and by Centres for Teaching and Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic, provides a thorough discussion of what various Centers for Teaching & Learning (primarily Canadian) have done over the past six months to support their faculty.
This handout, Supporting student well-being during COVID-19 from the Univ. of Michigan’s Center for Academic Innovation, focuses on strategies to (motivate and support students, and to foster student-student and student-instructor social connections.
For writing instructors, Bradley Summerhill’s webinar, The Flexible Composition Curriculum (in the Age of Covid) provides some interesting strategies for increasing flexibility and student engagement in writing tasks.
The Read-O-Meter allows you to calculate an estimate of reading time for any text you can paste into the text box. Starting over the summer, I began to providing students with more information about the expected time different tasks might take, such as listing the minutes of each video or the word count for article, and a reading time estimate is helpful.
Thanks for reading!
Upcoming (virtual!) events:
Online Writing Instruction Community’s second virtual symposium: Removing Barriers to Learning:Access, Design and Application. Tuesday, September 8 & Thursday, September 10, 3:00-4:30 EST (both days; register separately)