Faculty are exploring Apple’s new IPad Pro and its companion Pencil for teaching, presenting, grading and even classroom activities. Initially prompted by a faculty member in Swarthmore’s French section, Technologist Alexander Savoth has been exploring various ways to incorporate these new technologies into the classroom. The following video is a brief screencast, which highlights three particularly useful apps.
https://youtu.be/2hgcngaWwYo
LACOL 2017 Session 9: Visualizing student storymaps on the web
Presenter: Mary Ann Cunningham, Associate Professor of Geography, Vassar College
Date & Location: June 16, Vassar College
Web maps, map apps and other emerging applications are making it easier to visualize, share, and publicize spatial data. A principal advantage of these approaches is that we can make visible the issues that matter to us, and that we discuss in classes, from digital access to energy resource impacts to neoliberal development policies. In this talk Mary Ann Cunningham discusses how students in her spring 2017 Geography course, Web Mapping, developed story maps to aid in making visible a variety of issues they wanted to share. In the process of finding and processing data, they developed their data management abilities, and in the app design they practiced prioritizing and organizing narratives.
https://youtu.be/1XvpRJ1Q9KI
LACOL 2017 Session 7: From Blended Learning to Digital Pedagogies in the Liberal Arts?
Presenter: Jennifer Spohrer, Manager of Educational Technology Services, Bryn Mawr College
Date & Location: June 16 at Vassar College
When Bryn Mawr College first proposed experimenting with “blended learning in the liberal arts” back in 2011, we conceptualized it as a combination of “traditional,” face-to-face, liberal arts instruction and online tutorials that assessed and gave students feedback on learning. However, in the initial calls for proposals, it became quickly apparent that liberal arts college faculty were incorporating other types of digital technologies into their teaching, and doing so ways we had not anticipated. This presentation surveys the digitally enabled teaching approaches that have been included under the “blended learning” umbrella since 2011 and identifies “digital pedagogies” that might connect them.
Presentation Slides: PDF
LACOL 2017 Session 7
Speaker: Steven J. Miller, Assoc. Professor of Mathematics, Williams College
Date & Location: June 16, Vassar College
Related Links:
As small institutions cannot always offer the classes our students need at the time they need them, several people at various LACOL schools have been exploring how to remotely share classes. While there many not be enough demand at any one place for a certain topic, by combining students from several schools we can have a course. There are many challenges, especially keeping the small liberal arts feel and having all students engaged. We report on the beta test, Miller’s Problem Solving class at Williams. We’ll discuss the technology used, emphasizing how the content was delivered and connections were made between students and faculty, and the challenges in coordinating a course across several campuses.
https://youtu.be/ll2wipJjoEc
Session 9: Adaptive Learning (and Adaptive Teaching) in a First Course in Applied Statistics
Speaker: Denny Garvis, Professor of Business Admin & Mgmt, The Williams School at Washington & Lee University
Date & Location: June 16 at Vassar College
This presentation serves as a practical follow-up to the Candace Thille keynote from LACOL 2016. Specifically, adaptive learning courseware originally developed in the Online Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University has been used in the Applied Statistics course in the Williams School at Washington and Lee since 2014. Pedagogical advantages, trade-offs in teaching, and student learning outcomes from using the OLI Statistical Reasoning courseware, now hosted by Stanford EdX, will be discussed.
Additional Resources:
LACOL 2017 Session 5: Group Brainstorm
Presenters/Facilitators: Sean Fox, Brian Alexander
Date & Location: June 15 on the Campus of Vassar College (see program details)
Open educational resources and shared collections are hot topics; at the same time, these concepts have been with us for years. For LACOL, opportunities to develop shared resources (repositories) are frequently proposed … but how can we develop useful collections while avoiding common pitfalls? In this brainstorming session, Sean Fox, Technical Director of the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College will frame the issues as we invite all workshop participants to brainstorm on the what, the why, and the how of shared collections.
Key questions include:
*these questions are pressing for the QS and Language Instruction working groups, but other opportunities exist for LACOL. What do YOU think?
Picking up from last year’s wildly popular 2016 Tech Lightning Round at Haverford College, this year’s consortium-wide workshop LACOL2017 at Vassar College will feature THE RETURN OF THE LACOL LIGHTNING ROUND over lunch on Thursday, June 15.
2017 Lightning Round: The Lineup
Moderator: Steve Taylor, Director of Academic Computing Services, Vassar College
In the lightning round, LACOL faculty and staff are invited to share an idea for a short pitch – JUST FIVE MINUTES EACH – on a digital tool or technique you’re trying in your online/hybrid classroom.
As Bryan Alexander says, storytelling just might be the most important cognitive tool of the 21st century.
This panel discussion at the LACOL2017 workshop highlighted how faculty and students at liberal arts colleges are using media-rich storytelling to spark creative expression in teaching, learning and research.
LACOL welcomed Dr. Bryan Alexander as a special guest and speaker at the consortium-wide workshop LACOL2017 held June 15-16 at Vassar College. Bryan is a highly regarded and exceptionally thoughtful futurist, researcher, writer, speaker, consultant, and teacher. He focuses in particular on how technology transforms education.
Read More
On Friday, June 16, seats are available for a Mini-Workshop entitled Digital Storytelling for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning. This hands-on, face-to-face session is open to registered participants at the 2017 LACOL consortium-wide workshop at Vassar College.
Facilitators:
Mini-workshop Topics:
On April 7, LACOL QS members are cordially invited to join a one-hour web conference with the leads of the Math Fundamentals (FIPSE) Program, Faculty PI and Professor of Physics Elizabeth McCormack and project management lead Jennifer Spohrer, Manager of Educational Technology Services, both at Bryn Mawr College.
Math Fundamentals is a multi-year, multi-campus initiative investigating the use of blended, just-in-time “sandwich” modules for math review in STEM. The research partners (including LACOL members Bryn Mawr College and Vassar College) are currently field testing several faculty-authored modules in calculus, chemistry and physics. Read More
Event: Online Pop-Up Discussion, April 4th 2017
Title: You Are the New Gatekeeper of the News
Discussion Leader: Aly Colón, Knight Professor of Media Ethics, Washington and Lee University
Audience: Students, Faculty, Staff, Alumnae/i
Background Reading: You are the new gatekeepers of the news (The Conversation, Feb 7, 2017)
Discussion Topic: News consumers today face a flood of fake news and alternative information. In this online meet-up, journalism ethics professor Aly Colón explores forces of change in the new media landscape as we become responsible for deciding how we filter what’s news and what’s not. Professor Colón frames the conversation with historical examples and point to emerging trends in the digital age of news where Velocity + Volume = Volatility. As an ethical agent of journalism, how can you cultivate a mindset of open inquiry and deepen your capacities to handle challenging or uncomfortable views, especially in online settings?
On July 27th, LACOL welcomed special guest Daniela Bartalesi-Graf from Wellesley College to share her experiences teaching Italian language and culture on the EdX platform.
Topics included:
Meeting:
Teaching Italian on the EdX Platform
(Web Conference)
Resources:
At the June LACOL workshop, Swarthmore Classics Professor William Turpin gave a presentation during the Adaptive Learning breakout on his investigations into various digital tools to support students with learning and practice of Latin and Greek. As shown in the short slideshow below, Turpin is experimenting with platforms such as Fluenz and Smart Sparrow which offer a variety of modes for presenting interactive content and adaptive drills to students.
Alongside presentations from two other speakers in the session, Turpin’s experiments sparked a robust Q&A on the useful applications for supporting student learning through adaptive tools, and also concerns regarding data and content portability when considering the use of proprietary software. It is clear that the promises and potential pitfalls of adaptive learning for the liberal arts will remain a keen focus of interest for the Consortium.
https://youtu.be/c3A7XRqExLc
Slides (no audio) from William Turpin’s investigations into adaptive tools for Latin learning.
At the June LACOL workshop, Associate Professor of Chemistry Casey Londergan demonstrated his techniques for flipping the chemistry classroom as part of a multi-disciplinary panel on faculty and student experiences with online, blended and active learning.
In a Physical Chemistry class primarily for juniors, Londergan and his colleague Joshua Schrier have experimented with a mixture of just-in-time and active learning techniques with their students in order to maximize the use of class time for problem solving work. Content delivery through readings and videos happens mostly through the LMS so more active learning can happen in the classroom. Modular videos allow students to re-watch sections of the lecture. Pre-class questions in the LMS also help Londergan adjust each class to focus on the areas where students have the most questions.
For students, the active classroom learning design pushes them to focus and improve in the most challenging areas. Using a tablet and stylus linked wirelessly to the projector, Londergan is free to move around the class and help individual students and groups get “unstuck” as they work on problems together.
https://youtu.be/yiOltLpJN-4
Prof. Casey Londergan demonstrates his flipped chemistry classroom at Haverford.
■ Multicampus Microlearning 2023
SHARED CLASSES - SUMMER 2023
■ Applied Machine Learning
■ Digital Humanities
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