NED Teaching and Learning Conference: Innovation and Evolution

This presentation combines the anti-racist, trauma-informed, and feminist pedagogies and argues for addressing community-based levels of traumas as an equitable practice among students from underrepresented backgrounds.

In classrooms, students arrive with their entire beings, including bodies, emotions, and neuro-systems, often carrying traumas from microaggressions, racism, and conflicts. Instructors play a vital role in addressing these issues to create an inclusive learning space. This presentation explores the social and cultural construction of emotions and traumas, fostering a deeper understanding of students’ diverse experiences. It also highlights the importance of recognizing that instructors bring their dynamics into the classroom, which can unintentionally discriminate against traumatized students. An anti-racist, trauma-informed, and feminist approach to embracing diverse bodies in the classroom is introduced, emphasizing the roles of triggers and traumas. Redefining educational dynamics promotes inclusivity and a deeper understanding of the diverse perspectives brought by both students and instructors. This session invites participants to consider how addressing these behind-the-scenes issues can create a supportive environment that benefits all learners.

The Student Review process at Lake Superior College has provided thorough, insightful, and game changing information for faculty in how best to make online courses easy to navigate, clear in their presentation of resources, accessible, and inclusive. This presentation will describe both the process used in recruiting and training the students reviewers, performing the reviews, consolidating the information, meeting to provide faculty feedback, connecting faculty with training, and the changing of the courses after the reviews. The D2L course shell created for the project will be shown and the documents used for various activities will be available to the participants. It will also describe some of the more general feedback that has come from those reviews that can be applied to any online course to help improve student satisfaction.

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools are becoming increasingly commonplace in education and many workplaces. For example, in the field of chemistry, use of GAI is forbidden for some tasks (such as NIH and NSF peer review), but many professionals are using it for writing, research help, and augmentation of some practical laboratory tasks. Surveys by our department suggest that many students lack basic knowledge about these tools, and student views of them are mixed. During the 2023-24 academic year we developed several assignments designed to inform students about GAI and help them assess its usefulness for writing and research tasks. We evaluated the success of these exercises using students’ submitted work and anonymous surveys. This project builds on our previous work assessing ChatGPT version 3.5’s ability to generate laboratory reports across the Chemistry curriculum. (West et al. 2023) In this session, details and results from our research will be presented. Although this research was done in the field of chemistry education, content is applicable to other areas. Participants will discuss where they see GAI being used by professionals working in their own disciplines, what they believe students should know about these tools, and their own ideas for assignments incorporating GAI.

Discussion boards can be a powerful modality for students to strengthen critical thinking regarding the course content. This is particularly important for future mental health and behavioral providers. Furthermore, to encourage connection, collaboration, and sincerity, instructors might need to arrange discussion boards differently. The purpose of this project was to adjust discussion boards for graduate students in applied behavior analysis. First, the instructor asked students to submit video-based responses throughout the semester, alternating every other week with text-based discussions. Second, the instructor developed a structured rubric for evaluating discussion responses to determine the extent to which students are culturally responsive in their submissions. Finally, we evaluated students’ preferences for the adjusted discussion boards. Graduate students preferred the video-based discussion boards; minimal increases in culturally responsive conversations (as measured by a rubric) were present. Implications of the effectiveness of these teaching strategies will be discussed as well as future directions.

In this panel, faculty from across the system will share their experiences with Flexible (HyFlex, multi-modal, bimodal, trimodal) teaching and learning. Panelists will have the option to answer questions on benefits and challenges, course delivery strategies, participation, skills and knowledge, technology and accessibility, and lessons learned. Panel members who were involved in the May 2024 Exploring Flexible Course Delivery opportunity will also share highlights from the training, to include ideas, strategies, and resources. Attendees will also be invited to share their experiences and perspectives on multi-modal teaching and learning.

This session will focus on the research, planning, and implementation of “Educator Learning Communities (ELC)” at Metro State University.

These ELC’s are composed of faculty and staff who agree to meet three or more times each semester to study a common topic of interest (e.g., anti-racist grading, improved online instruction, microaggressions), aligned with improved teaching and learning. It will share the articles read by the advisory committee (pre-implementation), the structure of ELCs, the rollout, the implementation (including resources), and the lessons learned along the way. This hands-on workshop will also give attendees an opportunity to participate in an abbreviated ELC of their own!

Applicability: This ELCs model is inherently flexible and adaptable. It can be tailored to suit the needs of diverse disciplines and can be implemented in both large universities and smaller colleges. The Educator Learning Community allows for the scalability and versatility of the learning circle, community-building model, one that should resonate with a wide range of conference attendees.