Presentations

Gamification utilizes game-based elements to foster motivation, engagement, and collaboration among students. By combining interactive activities, such as play and collaboration within the classroom environment, you can promote learning and transform a traditional course into a positive learning experience for students. In this session, you'll hear from a faculty member and instructional designer who collaborated to rethink the structure of a graduate-level comprehensive course to enhance the learner experience. Come discover the various game-based methods and strategies implemented throughout the course, as well as the student response and benefits they have seen as a result.

Gaps in quality care and errors plague industry with costly repercussions. Interprofessional approaches are a promising solution to addressing these quality issues. Intentional interprofessional teamwork has been shown to improve quality outcomes and students need to be taught how to successfully work as a team. An escape room is an innovative, active learning strategy that can be used to create interprofessional learning by solving puzzles and riddles using clues. Incorporating the escape room concept to engage interprofessional learners to work together for quality improvement employs a fun and novel method of teambuilding, while educating learners about various roles and responsibilities

Few would debate the value of improving student conceptual understanding in STEM disciplines. Most classroom assessment tools, though, cannot accurately capture conceptual learning. What evidence could you provide to yourself, your department chair, or Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) that your students improve their conceptual understanding in your course? How could you assess whether or not a change in your instruction makes a meaningful difference? This presentation discusses what concept inventories are and why they are valuable tools to assess conceptual learning gains and inform your teaching.

This presentation shares the story about the conversion of a large lecture course into a hybrid active learning experience. This presentation describes the active learning sessions, explains how teaching assistants effectively graded in real-time using rubrics, and provides concrete ways to tackle difficult lecture material in order to enhance student understanding. Exam performance and belonging attitudes are compared between the traditional lecture format and this new structure. This course structure can be easily adopted by other introductory courses by the insertion of active learning elements, keeping existing lecture experiences intact and without adding additional readings/homework.

Large lectures seem to require techniques antithetical to good teaching, like multiple choice tests. A different approach to the large lecture will be described, along with how the approach adheres to major pedagogical principles of Thomas Jefferson and Maria Montessori: considerable free choice and active engagement. This method uses short essays and a combination of other assignments with specifications grading; essay grading was done with sampling techniques making the workload manageable. Student and instructor response to the method will be described.

Do you use an LMS? Do you teach online? How do you support students with learning the routines and key features of an online classroom?

This session will provide takeaways from a Scholarship of Learning and Teaching (SoTL) research project, which explored how providing onboarding instruction may impact students’ confidence with online learning. During this session, you will tour an example of onboarding instruction, reflect on your instructional practice, and brainstorm practical applications for future use.

In this session, participants will learn practical strategies, tasks, and feedback tools related to the cognitive, affective and managerial tasks involved in online instruction. We will share our successful experiences designing asynchronous and hybrid web-based learning for graduate adults in the M.Ed. reading education program, a fully online graduate program. We will also discuss what works and what doesn’t in fostering vibrant and interactive online communities. Participants will have access to a "dummy online class" via the Canvas LMS platform to try out suggested strategies.

Our choice of course materials influences both what students learn and how they learn it. Using relevant, flexible materials that complement a course’s design can support the goals of including, engaging, and educating all students. Instructors feeling constrained by existing materials may find opportunities at the intersection of Open Educational Resources (OER) and open pedagogy. In this presentation, we will explore the potential of OER and associated technologies in enacting the principles of open pedagogy in learning material design. We spotlight H5P as a tool for authoring interactive, open, engaging learning materials.

Open Educational Resources (OER)–free, openly licensed educational materials–are uniquely suited to address issues of equity, inclusion, and accessibility in higher education. Because OER eliminate cost barriers, the opportunity for academic success increases, particularly for students from underserved groups. Through careful OER design, faculty can customize materials to center diversity in topics, texts, contributors, and formats. OER can be designed in multiple formats and adapted for accessibility for students with diverse abilities. This presentation shares the work and lessons learned from the first stage of a multi-year project of OER creation in 8 Spanish courses at UVA, funded through a 2021-22 Learning Technology Incubator (LTi) Grant. Participants will leave with a better understanding of what OER are, how OER can be a powerful tool for DEIA work, recommendations for planning an OER project, and resources to find existing OER materials in various disciplines.

Cognitive engagement is essential for learning, but challenging to promote in students’ asynchronous course interactions. In this session, we describe a qualitative scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) study in which we analyzed discussion post responses to explore how cognitive engagement varies between written and video responses, and the associations between the assignment prompt and student responses. Our session will include a brief overview of the Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential (ICAP) theory and why engagement is important, describe the results of this research, and provide implications of what can be learned and applied to discussion assignments to promote deeper cognitive engagement and learning.

Pre-laboratory assignments have been created for the organic chemistry laboratory courses using H5P, an open source tool for creation of interactive web content. These mastery-based, graded activities are completed by students prior to the laboratory session, as part of the preparation for the experimental work. Our presentation will focus on the features of the H5P created modules vs. traditional pre-lab assignments and the impact of these activities on students’ experimental skills and proficiency in the laboratory. Our study, conducted to determine the effectiveness of these activities on students’ learning and readiness for the laboratory work, has shown that the majority of the students felt better prepared for the experiment after completing the corresponding interactive prelab assignment.

This presentation synthesizes the lessons learned from the experience of co-developing and co-teaching a case study-based course of Construction Engineering and Management (CEM) with industry partners. Partners were involved in the design of the course, the case preparation, and delivery, but more importantly, they were the main characters of the cases. We studied, analyzed, and compared the participants’ reflections and experiences throughout the course to identify the factors that may foster/hinder students’ learning and potential opportunities/challenges of interacting with industry practitioners when using Case-Based Learning as the core teaching strategy in a CEM course.

According to the National Science Foundation, the rates of science and engineering course enrollment for women shift at the undergraduate level and gender disparities begin to emerge. Such gender inequality in STEM fields has pervasive effects. We designed and implemented a library makerspace program called Women’s Maker Program in 2020 to help increase female undergraduates’ confidence, improve their sense of belonging in STEM, and better prepare them for future careers in the STEM workforce. This session will share a number of effective strategies that instructors can adapt to help retain women in STEM majors at UVA.