In this session, we will examine simple yet powerful steps you can take to effectively make your online course content and other communications accessible for all regardless of ability. We will explore how you can make your web content, emails, documents (including PDFs), images, and videos interact smoothly with assistive technologies like screen readers. We will also provide resources where you can get further information.
Facilitators: Kevin Andrews, Emma Craswell, Michelle Ohnona
Although many of us rely on inquiry as a pedagogical mode and motivator, we do not always apply the same philosophy to the media we produce — whether for online courses, flipped classroom videos, or student media projects. When preparing to share what we know — either as a teacher or a student — we often forget all that we instinctively know about storytelling. Those compelling anecdotes we might share in a lecture or conversational context get lost because we don’t have the same real-time feedback we rely on from our audience. In this session, we will discuss pedagogical research that supports inquiry-based digital storytelling and dissect exciting examples of educational media. Participants will apply hands-on outlining and drafting techniques to rethink their digital media assets and assignments with inquiry in mind.
Facilitators: Joe King, Meghan Modafferi
Students have gained new insights over the last year and a half about how learning works, including about how their own approaches and practices facilitate learning. In this panel, three Georgetown students will reflect on their experiences with learning during the pandemic and articulate the insights they have gained. Together with one of their professors, they will suggest some ways that faculty can help students recognize and make use of the lessons about learning emerging from the COVID era.
Facilitators: Sophie Grabiec, Sherry Lee Linkon, Isabel McHenry, Lily Nagengast
The first-year students whom we will be welcoming to campus this fall come to us from a high school experience unlike any other. What strengths will they bring? What needs will they have? We are joined in this session by three high school teachers whose insights from the past year can inform our efforts to help these students adapt to the transition and thrive in our community. All are members of The Pivotal Network – a Georgetown initiative focused on learning from and expanding the impact of outstanding high school teachers who have demonstrated success helping students reach college.
Panelists: Allyson Eve: History Teacher, KIPP University Prep High School, San Antonio, TX; Antonio Gamboa: Science Teacher, Garey High School, Pomona, CA ; Anne Severson: English Teacher, Excel High School, Boston, MA
In this session, undergraduate students and faculty members reflected on the past year. This conversation surfaced key insights into student learning, inclusivity, course format and teaching technologies, and pedagogical successes and innovations. This collective debrief will help use and explore our experiences as we design learning experiences for next year.
Student Panelists: Grace Rector, Esther Wroth
Faculty Panelists: Patrick Johnson, Elizabeth Velez, Christian Wagner
Discussions of alternative forms of assessment and grading are everywhere in higher education—with discussions ranging from institutional innovation to student activism to individual faculty creativity and success. This panel will showcase three different approaches in three different disciplines, each centered on maximizing student learning and accountability, while situating grading within a holistic approach to course design.
Facilitators: Andreas Kern, Erika Seamon, Milena Santoro
This interactive session will offer strategies and best practices for supporting LGBTQ students inside and outside the classroom.
Facilitators: Amena Johnson
This panel discussion will share findings from a preliminary study on the assessment of academic engagement in STEM courses, including: 1) its potential implications, including whether these results have any predictive capacity for the student experience of any asynchronous and/or synchronous in-person and remote components of the course in AY 21-22; 2) our recommendations for those interested in assessing academic engagement in their own courses, and 3) an open conversation with attendees.
Facilitators: Ted Nelson, Jason Tilan
Is there a best way to share course recordings with students? YES! We’ll talk you through the issues to make sure that you do not run out of storage space midway through the semester, so you don’t accidentally share to outsiders unenrolled in your course, and how you can continue to protect your teaching and your students’ privacy after the course is over.
Facilitators: Peter Barbee, Ken Mayer
Now that we are returning to campus and in-person teaching, Canvas can continue to support and augment your teaching and your course. This session will help you ensure that your students understand your strategies for organizing your course materials, allow them to easily access your syllabus, assignments, and other resources. We will also discuss–through faculty examples–how faculty have chosen to set up their courses through Modules or Pages, how they use their course sites as communication mechanisms with their students, and how some asynchronous Canvas features can be used effectively during synchronous class sessions.
Facilitators: Lee Skallerup Bessette, Peter Janssens
This past year highlighted the need for both technological and pedagogical innovation. Much of what worked was new to individual educators, even if it wasn’t new to higher education—but whether new or familiar, it inevitably took creativity and careful implementation to make these tools work for students. This session will highlight the experiences of four veteran educators who found success using new or revising familiar tools—including screencasts and podcasts, student-faculty collaborations, and active learning techniques. Their experiences offer promising possibilities for the coming year.
Facilitators: Stefan Eich, Robert Laws, Donatella Melucci, Charisma Howell
In the Spring of 2021, Georgetown conducted a cultural climate survey to better understand racial dynamics and the experience of marginalized communities on campus. In this session, Rosemary Kilkenny, Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Georgetown’s Chief Diversity Officer, and Drew Allen, Associate Vice President of Institutional Data Analytics, discuss the results of the survey and implications for student learning.
Panelists: Rosemary Kilkenny, Drew Allen
Staff play a critical educational role at Georgetown; often they are privy to co-curricular and deeply personal components of the student experience. Their insight will help round out the picture of student successes and needs as we seek to understand and teach to the whole person.
Panelists: Erika Cohen Derr, Javier Jimenez Westerman, Jim Wickman, Don Undeen
Staff Reflections on the State of Cura Personalis from CNDLS on Vimeo
This session will demonstrate how to use the upgraded classrooms’ capabilities to achieve your teaching and learning goals. CNDLS staff will cover baseline operations for fully in-person teaching, including joining Zoom for recording, connecting devices, and working with the room’s AV system. This live tour of an upgrade GU classroom will cover step-by-step how to conduct class, including advanced scenarios in which you may have synchronous online students.
Panelists: Molly Chehak, Peter Janssens, Lee Skallerup Bessette
