Fall Into Teaching

Presented by Dr. Jeffrey Kohler and Daniel Schweitzer

Discord is a popular platform for communication via text, voice and video. This free tool proved essential during the pandemic to close the gap between students and their instructors as an alternative to in-person office hours. In a post-pandemic environment, Discord remains invaluable as a means of building learning communities within courses, across course sections, and even between departments. This presentation will cover the benefits of integrating Discord into your teaching, avoiding common pitfalls, and best practices to promote successful outcomes.

Presented by Dr. Carol Van Zile-Tamsen

In this session, participants will explore student motivational orientations and identify aspects of course delivery that engage students from each orientation.

Presented by Dr. Kathleen Kielar

Our students today tend to fill our classes with various types of learning. This presentation will discuss how to engage and accommodate all students.  

Presented by Kelly Ahuna

This presentation will explore the causes and kinds of academic dishonesty with the goal of designing instruction to best prevent policy violations. UB's academic integrity procedures will be reviewed and common cheating scenarios will be evaluated.

Presented by Mary Odden

This presentation will focus on the variety of ways that instructors can evaluate their teaching effectiveness. For example, participants will learn the value of utilizing standardized course evaluations, formative assessments from students, self-report inventories, structured observations, peer review, and teaching portfolios to better understand how their students are learning through their teaching. This presentation will provide participants with several hands-on opportunities to connect assessments of teaching to teaching methodologies and learning outcomes.

Presented by Michelle Connolly

In this presentation, we will discuss the timeline and transition overview of converting from Blackboard to Brightspace. We will take a sneak peek of Brightspace. We will discuss the top ten reasons why are we moving our LMS to Brightspace and how you can prepare for your course migration.

Presented by Rebecca Rotundo and Kevin Hittle

In this presentation, we will discuss common teaching problems identified by students and instructors at UB and identify ways to solve these problems by leveraging technology tools available through the university. The session will include practical advice to support student learning.

Presented by Dr. Courtney Doxbeck

The present study employed data visualization and statistical analysis to explore the role of learning space design, classroom renovation, and student perceptions of the classroom experience in predicting student achievement across the University at Buffalo's three campuses. Institutional data, collected from Spring 2014-2019, were analyzed using Tableau data visualization to identify classrooms across 53 buildings with the lowest average GPAs (below 3.0). Statistical analyses were employed across several classrooms to explore the relationships between gender identity, race/ethnicity, perceptions of classroom features and renovation, and GPA. Initial findings suggest that student GPA increased post-classroom renovation. Students who identified as female tended to have significantly higher GPAs than males, and minoritized students had lower GPAs than their non-minoritized counterparts. Most recent findings will be disseminated to describe patterns in student achievement across campus learning spaces and the role of student perceptions of the classroom experience and demographics characteristics in predicting subsequent GPAs.

Presented by Krista Hanypsiak and Danielle LaMarre-Smith

In this session we will explain the process for proposing new courses and revising existing ones.  We will review relevant UB, SUNY, SED policy and provide tips and tricks for successfully moving through the course creation/revision process.

Presented by Dr. Rhonda Reid

Incorporating writing instruction into your class design is a good move because writing about a subject helps students learn more deeply than just consuming and being tested upon content. However, designing writing assignments and grading them can be overwhelming. This workshop will help you to understand the developmental journey of writers, the principles of effective writing assignment design, as well as an approach to reading, responding to, and grading student papers that will create the most positive developmental impact. The good news is that these principles of assignment design and approach to student papers actually decrease your workload and alleviate the mental and emotional strain associated with grading student papers. The goal is that you will emerge from this workshop with an increased sense of clarity and lightness around writing instruction.