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Welcome to Take5, a Teaching Transformation series from CoFA’s Office of Instructional Continuity and Innovation and Assistant Dean Julie Schell. In Take5, we’ll be sharing teaching and learning designed to be reviewed in 5 minutes or less. While you are here, check out this clip from the jazz standard song Take Five via Deep Listening and provided by CoFA’s own, Professor Jeffrey Helmer.
(3 1/2 minute read)
How often do you return to your learning outcomes with your students throughout a semester? Many of us spend a tremendous amount of energy (sometimes decades!) developing our learning outcomes for our syllabi at the launch of a course. However, we never revisit them again until the following year during syllabus prep time. Such negligence of our outcomes throughout a course is unfortunate because they can be powerful drivers of learning throughout the semester.
Learning outcomes are so important to me that I use them to launch every class meeting and “grab” students’ attention. To do this, I open each class with a Learning Outcome Slider. I designed the Learning Outcome Slider activity to help me create an engagement habit with students at the start of the pandemic, and I’ve maintained it since. Continue Reading 1 Simple Way to Capture Students’ Attention…with Learning Outcomes
According to the UC Berkeley Center for Teaching and Learning, faculty play a key role in determining response rates for Course Instructor Surveys. “When actively promoted and discussed with students, response rates are generally higher than those in courses with little to no instructor attention paid to them” (para 1).
Tip 1: If you are teaching online or in-person, consider conducting the CIS IN THE MIDDLE of the last class, rather than at the end of the class period. Step out OR mute yourself, and turn off your camera, and come back after an agreed-upon time. You can also go into a Breakoutroom or send students into a Breakout room if you are teaching online. 
Continue Reading 3 Tips for Increasing Course Instructor Survey Response Rates – Fall 2021
See this quick demo for how to add an announcement in Canvas that is text-based.
The scripts I am referring to are located in this Box Note.
What are best practices for encouraging students to mask up in in-person course meetings?
In addition to these six best practices, you can also survey your students about their masking preferences and sort students into sections/small groups with others whose preferences are similar. Find an example survey here. You can also incentivize mask-wearing following the provost’s guidelines (under Incentives) here: https://provost.utexas.edu/aps-faculty/instructor-faqs-for-the-fall-semester/.
I needed a simple way to take attendance AND aid in contact tracing this Fall. My colleague Christine Wong used a QR code to take attendance at our new graduate student orientation. It gave me the idea to use that process for my course.
In this episode of Take5, I provide a video walk-through of how I am going to automate attendance in class and aid in contact tracing. There are probably far more elegant ways to do this, but we are short on time and my main concern is contact tracing.
Steps if you don’t feel like watching the video are listed below.
Continue Reading 1 Easy Way to Capture Attendance and Aid in Contact Tracing
