2014 Program
2014 Program
[September 23, 12:00-1:00 PM] Panelists with diverse perspectives (student, student life, faculty, institutional assessment) will examine the nature of student success, and the impact of engagement, learning and faculty presence as major factors in student success.
Panelists: Promise Grace, Jim Hatton, Danielle Mancuso, Elizabeth Whitman; Facilitator: Jody Waters
[September 24, 10:30-10:55 AM] Every student has a story about an experience that created a sense of connection and student engagement. While you take a break before the plenary, mingle with your Student Life colleagues and learn some stories about people and resources that helped create that sense of connection and contributed to student success.
[September 24, 11:00-12:00 PM Meese Room Library 305] What does it mean to be “present” to your students? What does it mean for your students to be “present” to the class? Current research shows that where there is a sense of presence, students are more likely to be engaged with their fellow students, their instructor, and the material. Dr. Vicki Suter, the new Director of the Center for Instructional Support, will explore design principles that promote a sense of presence, based on her own research and teaching practice. Participants will reflect on their experience of presence, and examine how the principles can be applied to their course design and teaching practices (and learn a little bit about the Center’s services and programs that support faculty presence, one of the roots of student success).
Featured sessions are 90-minute discussion sessions which begin with exploration of key questions by panelists, followed by small group discussions that provide participants an opportunity to engage with the questions (and new questions of their own) more deeply.
[September 23, 2:30-4:00 PM] Retention research supports the idea that engagement of students in the first few weeks of the term is key to their retention. Panelists will explore what the research indicates, how it might apply to SOU students, and practices in and out of the classroom that can contribute to student engagement in the first three weeks.
Panelists: Deb Brown, Jennifer Fountain, Matt Stillman, Craig Stillwell; Facilitator: Vicki Suter
[September 24, 9:00-10:30 AM] A multidisciplinary panel will discuss the types of problems people are posing for their students AND the strategies used to motivate students to approach the problems in a way that teaches critical thinking and problem solving skills.The panel will discuss whether there may be some shared approaches to setting up problems and motivating students, regardless of discipline. There are also approaches that seem very different. Panelists will explore questions common to all strategies; for example, “How do we arouse curiosity in our students? How do we work with students to help them approach and persist in tackling problems that seem 'impossible'"?
Panelists: Adam Elson, Dennis Jablonski, Irving Lubliner, John Taylor; Facilitator: Vicki Suter
[September 24, 9:00-10:30 AM] Members of a multidisciplinary panel will share their experiences in applying social media for professional use (and for teaching), followed by a hands-on “tweetfest.” Participants will establish a Twitter account, practice using Twitter to discover people and activities relevant to their discipline and interests, and evaluate some potential uses of Twitter for improving student engagement and learning.
Panelists: Ed Battistella , Al Case, Andrew Gay, Brandon Givens; Facilitator: Erik Palmer
Bring an assignment from one of your courses to share with other faculty in the session. We will discuss principles of good assignment design, critique assignments, and apply these principles to your own assignment.
Facilitator: Kristin Nagy Catz
Blendspace promises that you can “Create Lessons in 5 Minutes.” It might not take that long and it’s engaging for students. Learn how to collect web resources in one place and share with just one link, engage project-based learning, create differentiated instruction opportunities, and create collaborative research presentations.
Presenter: Mike Rousell
This session will provide an overview of the 2014-15 Campus Theme, REVOLUTION, and ways in which to participate and collaborate.
Presenters: Prakash Chenjeri and Dan Morris
SOU has an established culture of supporting students and reporting concerns through SOU Cares. Learn about new reports, including Title IX, bias, and academic concerns. Discuss the use of SOU Cares as a tool for early academic intervention and retention. Find out how using SOU Cares supports our students and you as the reporter.
Presenters: Taylor Burke and Marjorie Trueblood-Gamble
We will remind ourselves why we chose to teach, who we are as learners, and in that context, deconstruct teaching challenges that we are facing. Bring a problem or barrier you have encountered in your class, and we’ll use a systematic method for deconstructing the problem into its constituent components, identify resources that might help, and share solutions.
Facilitators: Margaret Perrow and Vicki Suter
SOAR is a celebration of faculty and student research, performance, and artistic activity. Because SOAR offers an opportunity for students to frame their work for multiple audiences and to demonstrate the value of their work inside and outside the classroom, leveraging SOAR participation as a formal learning activity can provide powerful learning experiences for students. Faculty who advised students for SOAR 2014 will discuss their experiences about the impact on student learning, and provide advice about successful practices. The conversation is also designed to inform planning for SOAR 2015.
Panel Members: Terry Longshore, Jessica Piekielek, Doug Smith, Carey Sojka, Erin Wilder; Facilitator: Jeff Gayton
The purpose of this session, hosted by the ePortfolio Explorations Task Force, is to begin to explore with interested faculty the following questions:
In addition, you’ll learn more about the ePortfolio Explorations Project, which is kicking off the first phase, faculty consultation and small pilots, this Fall. This session is designed for a dynamic discussion with those who attend rather than a formal panel presentation.
ePortfolio Explorations Task Force: Max Brooks, Susan Faller-Mitchell, Francisco Kuriyama, Joan McBee, Ken Mulliken, Kristin Nagy Catz; Facilitator: Hart Wilson
The "average" student looms large in the design of education - but such a student doesn't actually exist. How can we design the educational experience, both in and outside of the classroom, when we have an infinitely varied student population? How can attention to variation improve student success and retention? Do we have the time and energy to do this?! This highly interactive session gives you the tools and experience to answer these questions! You'll be able to apply what you learn for students this Fall. Some changes will surprise you with their simplicity and ease of implementation, and others require more work for a larger payoff. Audience: Faculty and staff, from novices to experts. For those who've had exposure to universal design before, you'll find this session helpful in refreshing and extending the application of UD to your work with students.
Facilitator: Shawn Foster
If you post your PowerPoint files in Moodle, adding narration is a great way to make the presentations more useful to students and to add faculty presence. This is especially helpful for online or "flipped" courses. But adding narration to PowerPoint presentations can make the files extremely large and lead to a number of issues. Fortunately, there are several free programs to add voice (and even video) narration to presentations and share them easily in Moodle or by other means. We'll try out Knovio, Metta.io, Screencast-o-matic and Brainshark. You're bound to find at least one that will help make sharing narrated presentations a breeze. PCs and a limited number of headset microphones will be provided for this hands-on session, but feel free to bring your own laptop, especially if you use a Mac.
Presenter: Cora Yockers
Information Literacy Unleashed is a unique opportunity to observe the sly and underhanded practices of the information specialists who reside in a big cool building near you and who readily admit to trying to provide simple and easy ways to access and use resources at the Hannon Library and beyond effectively and efficiently --yes, all that and more for anyone who believes that looking for stuff is not nearly as fun as finding what you want. Do you want to ensure that students are accessing quality resources for their research? Would you like your students to conduct better research? Do you need to update your own research skills? If the answer is yes to any of these questions, please take the time to join Dale Vidmar as he facilitates this hands-on overview of available library tools and how to use them for the benefit of you and your students.
Presenter: Dale Vidmar
There’s lots of talk about internationalizing our campus. Please join us in walking the talk. Explore how we can better serve our international students, encourage our domestic students to explore study options outside of this region, and how you can enrich your teaching experience on an international scale. This session provides an overview of the International Programs office which includes study away options for students, faculty-led programs abroad, international student admissions, visas, insurance, the Intensive English Program, advising, and more. Broaden your perspective on international options and learn how you can create an open international environment in your classroom. Discover the resources available for you to begin this journey. A student panel will be part of the program.
Presenter: Mary Gardiner
SOU has access to a web-conferencing system that allows faculty to have live online help sessions with their classes. The presenter will show you how he has been using it in his online classes for the past 5 years, recording them so that students can view them at their convenience (and receiving very positive feedback from students).
Presenter: Larry Shrewsbury
YouTube can be a good source of inspiring and educational videos. But how do you know your students are engaged in a video and learning something from it? Join us as we explore ways to make watching videos a more interactive experience for your students. You'll also leave with a number of practical ways to remove the undesirable and sometimes offensive distractions that can be found on YouTube. PCs will be provided for this hands-on session, but feel free to bring your own laptop, especially if you are a Mac user.
Presenter: Cora Yockers
This hands-on session will explore Moodle tools and activities designed to engage students and increase their opportunities for success. We'll take a look at using groups, introduce glossaries, and explore the use of online text for checking in with students. We'll also look at methods for sharing student work and checking student progress with completion tracking. Join us for the latest tips and tricks for making the most of your Moodle!
Presenter: Hart Wilson
Motivating Student Research is based on two student research scenarios that illustrate student research habits. How do we tell a student who feels successful that she's gone off track? How do we encourage students who are already using the resources available to continue to explore their options? Many students will shut down when criticized and may give up before they begin. By keeping students on the right track with their research, we can make sure that they follow through on their course of study. Steer students to the Reference Desk and to a librarian to help them refine research skills at the outset of their college careers. Work with librarians in targeted instruction sessions and make sure students access librarian-created research guides. Research guidance helps give students a belief in their own skills and the drive to exercise those skills toward their own success.
Presenter: Dotty Ormes
The Hannon Library has partnered with 36 other Pacific Northwest academic libraries to create a single infrastructure for acquiring, cataloging, and discovering information sources. Come learn about how all faculty and students can interact with this new and exciting information resource.
Presenters: Jim Rible and Emily Miller-Francisco
PEBB and multiple vendors will be on-site Tuesday, Sept. 23rd to preview open enrollment. PEBB is offering a session from 1:00 - 2:00 in the Rogue River Room, Stevenson Union. This will be an opportunity to hear about new benefit plan(s), and other changes that will be happening for 2015.
Facilitator: Isabel Bauer
SOU researchers Carol Ferguson and Hala Schepmann are participating in an NSF ADVANCE grant focused on professional advancement for female faculty. As part of their work they have co-founded a group, SOU X-Factor, designed to support SOU's female faculty and facilitate their professional advancement. The group explores the relationship between local and data-driven national trends. The group will be meeting at the Instructional Institute to discuss, among other topics, differences in self-confidence between the genders and its influence on women's advancement and supportive policies here at SOU. The meeting is open to all faculty members at SOU.
Facilitators: Hala Schepmann and Carol Ferguson
Please join us for this interactive session all about student health. We will discuss clinical services offered through the Student Health & Wellness Center, health promotion programs, and ways we can collaborate with faculty.
Presenters: Victor Chang and Matt Vogel
Grants & Sponsored Programs will present grant-funded projects that support student involvement in research. Talk with Principal Investigators who include students in research regarding the pros and cons and the impact on student engagement and success. Learn how to develop projects that can support both undergraduate and graduate students.
Presenters: Joanne Preston, Mark Tveskov, and Dee Southard
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has established very specific guidelines about our obligations surrounding Title IX issues. Learn about what Title IX means to you in terms of protecting students and our shared responsibility to provide them with a learning environment that is free of harassment and discrimination.
Presenter: Jay Stephens
"Utilize your resources!" is often heard in all of our resource centers here at SOU. As coordinators of our identity-based resource centers (Multicultural, Women’s, and Queer) we often help our students negotiate the ups and downs of being on campus, especially when they might be faced with additional barriers to their success. In this session you are invited to learn more about what the resource centers offer our students as well as what we have to offer YOU! Learn more about diversity scholars, the annual social justice conference, our Violence Prevention and Response Advocacy program, Circle of 6, the Bias Response Team and much, much more! Please join us. All are welcome!
Presenters: janelle wilson, Marvin Woodard, and Mary Vest
(Wednesday 1:00-3:30 PM)
Pioneered by global design consultancies such as IDEO and XPLANE, design thinking is an iterative and collaborative approach to idea generation, rapid prototyping and complex problem-solving that is helping organizations of all sizes meet the challenge of fast-paced change in the 21st century. Faculty in SOU's Emerging Media and Digital Arts program are already at the forefront of adapting design thinking techniques to teaching in higher education. This presentation will give a brief formal introduction, then demonstrate an extended hands-on example of creative problem-solving that seeks to inspire more interactive learning across our campus. The design thinking approach relies on game-design, drawing exercises, role-playing and other "playful" methods to address real-world problems. Participants should expect a dynamic and interactive experience in this session.
Facilitators: Erik Palmer, Warren Hedges and Randolph Jones
Have you ever wanted to measure students' ability to find, retrieve and use a variety of high quality information sources to support their research—in a simple, doable way? If you teach capstone, USem, or a class with a research-based project, here’s an opportunity to work with an instrument to assess the information literacy skills of your students. In this workshop, you will be able to get some practice using a rubric that has the potential to help you improve student learning and success. During this working session, small groups of participants will review the first page and bibliography of senior writing samples and evaluate them based on a customized rubric.
Facilitators: Dale Vidmar and Kristin Nagy Catz
The ability to convey information graphically is becoming more and more important. This workshop will feature a hands-on opportunity to create an infographic using online tools. In addition to working with these applications, we’ll be looking at ways students can use infographic tools to demonstrate their understanding of course concepts or to display the results of their research.
Facilitator: Hart Wilson
An essential skill for student success (and indeed, for University success) is the ability to collaborate with others to achieve a common goal. Even more importantly, collaborative learning stimulates and facilitates meaning-making. Elements of successful collaboration include accountability to group processes and goals, development and adherence to norms of effective communication and active listening, facility with a variety of conflict management skills, and appropriate application of collaboration technologies. Participants in this workshop will do a deep dive into collaboration practices and tools that make possible successful outcomes, whether in the classroom, the office, or conference room.
Facilitators: John Stevenson and Vicki Suter