First-year college students were high-school seniors just a few months before entering our classrooms. Even students in their second and third year of college may enroll in a class whose subject they have not encountered since high school. In addition to the disciplinary challenges students can face when taking up a subject they last encountered when they were 15 or 16, many college students grapple with the expectations around interpersonal skills, time management, and increased personal responsibility that come with college-level work. In this roundtable, our panelists will share their experiences in working with pre-service teachers in special education, training high school educators, and teaching Delaware high school students participating in our dual-enrollment courses. Participants are encouraged to come with questions for our panelists.

The ubiquity of everyday digital practices incorporated into teaching and learning like synchronous video meetings, online exams, and algorithmic study aides, as well as the pace of these advances over just the last half-decade has created an opportunity for us to (re-)examine our practices around academic integrity in a digital world. How do faculty help facilitate good decisionmaking on the part of their students when taking pen-and-paper exams? What are the ethical trade-offs in using a lockdown browser/surveillance system? And how can we teach our students that the temptation to use an advanced automated tool to write that essay with deadline fast approaching is not going to be beneficial for them in the long run? In this roundtable our panelists will discuss how they operationalize academic integrity in the classroom while sharing experiences from the teaching and learning trenches where the lines of what is and is not “cheating” are blurrier than ever before for our students.

This roundtable will be followed by a social hour in the lobby bar area of the Marriott. Hors D’oeuvres on us– cash bar for a beverage of your choice.

Making a big change to a course you’ve taught many times can be daunting, especially if that change means moving from a traditional exam to something more… alternative. Alternative assessment can take many forms, but put simply, an alternative assessment is something other than a high-stakes exam. High-stakes exams limit opportunities for student feedback and exacerbate test-taking anxieties– two big reasons, among many others, to consider a change. But moving away from exams can be difficult work particularly if you are a faculty member worried about the time you’ll have to devote to grading or giving feedback on some other kind of student work. In this roundtable, our panelists will share their motivations for making this change in their courses, as well as the successes and challenges that they experienced in moving to alternative assessments.

Join us for a roundtable featuring some of our Provost’s Teaching Fellows from the Foundational Course Initiative (FCI), a program dedicated to transforming the first-year experience through evidence-based, inclusive course design. The FCI’s 4 strategic priorities are:

1. reimagining how content is delivered,
2. fostering student community and belonging,
3. building real-world examples and assessments,
4. and supporting instructors in helping students develop effective learning strategies

Fellows have redesigned key introductory courses to better engage and support students across a variety of disciplines. During this “choose your own adventure” style session, attendees will have the opportunity to engage in small group discussions with our Provost’s Teaching Fellows about how these faculty addressed our strategic priorities in their teaching. Each strategic priority will serve as a table topic, hosted by a different group of our fellows. You can learn more about the FCI and read about the fellows on the FCI webpage.

Session Modality: Choose-your-own adventure. Three 20-minute blocks of table discussion will be offered, with each table led by a faculty facilitator. At the end of each block, attendees are welcome to switch to any other table of their choosing, or stay where they are to continue the conversation with new voices. The session will conclude with a brief full-group sharing out.

REGISTER FOR THE FEBRUARY ROUNDTABLE

Making updates to our courses can be challenging. We don’t want to lose the true essence of the course we worked so hard to design, but how do we account for changes we want to make like the incorporation of a new learning assessment technique, a move away from high-stakes exams to a series of writing assignment, or a meaningful change the way we use in-class time for students to complete weekly group worksheets? During this session, our faculty facilitator will introduce their individual teaching and course context before presenting a short overview of how they made revisions that were purposeful, assessable, and done via reflective practice. Participants will be introduced to the CTAL resource on reflective course revision and provided with ample time to explore this tool in the context of their teaching.

Session Modality: Workshop. After a brief set-up by our facilitator, participants will be given plenty of time to review the reflective course revision worksheet and apply it to one of their own Spring courses. The session will conclude with time for Q&A as well as sharing reflections about the tool. 

REGISTER FOR THE MARCH ROUNDTABLE

Have you ever wanted to formally document an innovative teaching practice and share results with peers? Did you incorporate a teaching practice into your course that yielded an insight others from your field would take interest in? Or are you a more experienced higher education researcher, interested in connecting with those who have published educational research to discuss issues specific to the UD teaching and learning context? Join CTAL and a panel of faculty colleagues for a panel presentation about conducting educational research. Our panelists will discuss conceptualizing projects, submitting human subjects research protocols, presenting and publishing this kind of work, and the benefits of contributing to the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Session Modality– This session will follow the format of a conference-style panel presentation. Each panelist will offer a formal presentation, and time will be left for Q&A from our attendees. 

REGISTER FOR THE APRIL ROUNDTABLE