Effective course design has been called “the most significant [factor]” in improving teaching and learning in higher education (Fink, 2003). Course design is the intentional, systematic planning of a course to help students learn. Sound planning makes life easier—and teaching and learning richer—for both teachers and students. Participants will work on design activities for one of their own courses.

Research confirms that teachers who convey genuine interest in students’ success cultivate more productive learners. Further, students rate a professor as “exceptional” if they perceive that the professor cares about their learning. This workshop will support your efforts to demonstrate genuine concern in your students and in their lifelong learning.

You could approach learning outcomes as a bureaucratic requirement, or you can make learning outcomes work for you. This workshop will help you achieve the latter. Bring your questions about learning outcomes; bring something to write with (including laptops); and leave with learning outcomes you can live with.

Projects, papers, presentations, and group work are critical aspects of student work that reflects their learning. These assessments can be daunting to plan, implement, and evaluate. We will discuss how we can efficiently design and use rubrics to quickly evaluate student work, provide learning-centered feedback, and record evidence that supports learning outcomes.

Students are a great source for feedback on teaching. But it is not always clear how to elicit helpful student feedback or how to effectively use this feedback once it is received. This workshop focuses on how to prompt useful feedback from students through Student Ratings and Mid-course Evaluation, and how to analyze, interpret, and use this feedback to improve teaching (and student ratings!).

If you just want students to memorize what you tell them, don’t come to this workshop. If you want students to engage more deeply with the subject, then this is the workshop for you. We will briefly discuss the basics of engaging learning activities; then we’ll apply them to real situations. Come prepared with a topic, concept, unit or course that you want to make more engaging.

Have you ever wondered which technologies would enhance different aspects of student learning? This seminar will provide a hands-on opportunity to apply instructional technologies to meet a variety of learning needs. Plus, this seminar will outline strategies for staying up-to-date with instructional technologies.

At critical points within the learning activities, we can quickly assess whether or not students can work within the content they are learning. This workshop will focus on a variety of effective assessment opportunities in class and how they can be used to evaluate and grade student learning.

PowerPoint is good for more than bullet points and text. This workshop will show you how to use PowerPoint to create animations, to record presentations for later playback on the Web, and to apply other advanced features.