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!