Denise McBride

Faculty Voices Series: I’m Succeeding – CIS can help!

Denise McBride, Business Information Systems

Oh boy!  How am I going to do that?  I have to do what now?  How?   These were the questions, as well as many others, this past year.  Just when you have “it” figured out, here comes a new challenge.  I need help, but who can help?  Enter The Office of Curriculum and Instructional Support (CIS).  The first time I worked with CIS, I quickly realized I was working with a team.  My team.  My team is a group of experts that can help with any issue.  I started taking courses taught by them so that I could learn more.  A session about the new features in Blackboard?  A session about the new student opinion survey?  Chipcast?  WebEx?  They have videos and courses created before the new functionality is released.

 

As one example, I attended all 5 sessions of “The Five Students You Meet in Class” series. The content of these workshops, as well as the faculty sharing different ideas, put me in a different frame of mind when it became necessary to work with the HyFlex classes. Things I’ve incorporated include randomly injecting incentives in my classes to reward students for arriving on-time and staying for the entire class period.  A reward may be an answer on the quiz or allowing a student to write “skip” on a low-stakes assignment.  I am watching my classes change.  Students arrive on-time and stay engaged because the reward could be in the middle of the lecture.  I have a bond with the students that have earned the reward. They are eager to see what I will do next!

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