Monthly Archives: January 2022

Creative Connections 2022 Recap

On Thursday, January 6th 70 faculty and staff gathered on campus and online to celebrate excellence and innovation in teaching at Elizabethtown College. The event kicked off with a discussion on “Mindful Scaffolding,” an original framework for course design developed by Crystal Donlan, Instructional Designer and Online Learning Specialist.

Presenters shared their insights, perspectives and teaching tips in panel presentations, workshops, roundtable discussions and poster sessions. The program featured presentations from full-time professors, instructors, and college staff members. Click here to view the program.

Throughout the day, the studio team collected resources and handouts from the presenters and archived them here. You can also view three presentation videos we’ve uploaded to the archive folder.

Let’s continue the conversation. If you’d like to learn more about the content that was shared at Creative Connections 2022, reach out to us at studio@etown.edu.

Using Discussion Forums for Active Learning Across Modalities

Because discussion helps students process information, it remains important to learning across all academic disciplines and delivery modalities. With the goal of getting students to practice using the concepts they are learning through the course material, designing a discussion requires skills different from giving a lecture. Online forums embedded within the course LMS are an accessible way to facilitate class discussion, regardless if your course is face to face, online, or hybrid/hy-flex. Not only does an online discussion engage students with course material before coming to class in person, it also helps them reflect on material they have learned while also giving them time to absorb content and articulate responses.

Discussion-based teaching focuses on active learning principles and prioritizes discourse rather than passivity. Through an active learning approach to discussion, important concepts and skills are reinforced and explored through the community of inquiry. This interchange provides students with opportunities to think about, talk about, and figure out course material through guided practice and scholarly exchange.

Some additional benefits of online discussion for learning is that it increases students’ interest, comfort level, and sense of belonging. Through engaging in discussion, students get different perspectives on the topic. Good questions and thoughtful answers can get students to think deeply and make connections; this empowers learners and fosters greater agency and autonomy. The online discussion forum approach to engagement also helps students who might otherwise struggle to speak up in a face-to-face class because it provides them an opportunity to concentrate and formulate responses before interacting; this “buffer” allows learners to reflect on the topic and to think about the material in critical ways.

Providing open-ended prompts for discussion that elicit critical reflection, communicating clear expectations on both assignment and assessment, and allowing the community of inquiry to unfold organically are vital aspects of the mindful scaffolding approach to safeguarding the learning environment across modalities. A student’s ability to synthesize, to question, to engage, to utilize concepts, and to hypothesize can be optimized through these high-engagement/low-stakes learning opportunities.

If you would like additional guidance on designing effective and engaging discussion activities, please reach out to the Teaching and Learning Design Studio – and check out these helpful resources:

The Art and Science of Successful Online Discussions

Constructing Effective Online Discussions

21 Ways to Structure an Online Discussion, Part 1

21 Ways to Structure an Online Discussion, Part 2

21 Ways to Structure an Online Discussion, Part 3

21 Ways to Structure an Online Discussion, Part 4

21 Ways to Structure an Online Discussion, Part 5

Quick Tips: Updating Your Syllabus in Canvas

Many of you probably had a syllabus uploaded into Canvas before the semester date changes were announced.  It’s quick and easy to replace that syllabus with a new one. To do so:

Pop back into the syllabus page, click the Syllabus button in the upper left, and then click Edit.

edit location for syllabus in canvas

Once you do that, there is an option to Replace.

Be sure to communicate to students that you have changed the syllabus — it is easy for students to download the syllabus and some may not think to go back into the Canvas location and check for changes.

Book Review: RESCUING SOCRATES by Roosevelt Montás

Periodically, we like to share more about what are reading in the Studio. If you’d like to find a good book, you can peruse our lending library. We are routinely refreshing the lending library. Bookmark the page and let us know if you can’t find a title you are looking for. This book review is on a title that we don’t have in our library yet, but it is one that we think you will really like.

Roosevelt Montás, a professor in American Studies at Columbia University, recounts his time as an undergraduate at Columbia University in his book titled Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. The book focuses on those initial opportunities he had to read and discuss great books like The Confessions by St. Augustine and Homer’s The Illiad. Each chapter in this concise autobiography explores the timeless lessons found in the work of Freud, Socrates Gandhi and the aforementioned St. Augustine. With powerful imagery, readers join Montás on a journey relived as he unfolds his experiences as a Dominican immigrant in New York City, a candidate in the Higher Education Opportunity Program of New York, a graduate student and a college professor.

Embedded in Montás’s personal stories of academic setbacks and success is a serious and pointed conversation about the challenging questions facing higher education in our deconstructionist, post-postmodern era. Montás’s guidance is steeped in his experience as an immigrant in the American collegiate system as well as his profound love for the humanities and a crystal clear sense of the power found in education. In distinguishing this power he believes our understanding of education is, perhaps, misplaced. Teaching isn’t, in his words, “putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes.” Instead, Montás suggests “Education takes for granted that sight is there but it isn’t turned the right way or looking where it ought to look and tries to redirect appropriately.” Students in all contexts can “see,” and we have a tremendous honor and opportunity in educational settings to shed light on new perspectives and introduce students to new directions. 

In Rescuing Socrates, Montás outlines the importance of a general education frameworks that equip students to first understand the world as it is in order that they may navigate it with confidence and improve it.

If you’d like to read more, you can find Rescuing Socrates on Amazon or Audible.