By Natalie Krivas (English) & Stacy Hoult (World Languages & Cultures) For the past year, a group of Valpo faculty and staff have been meeting as a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) to discuss Fostering Community and Student Engagement. FLC members learned about and experienced the Solutionary Process, to “identify inhumane, unsustainable, and unjust systems and […]
Tag: instructional design
Inside-Out Prison Exchange – A Class Like No Other
By Dawn Jeglum Bartusch, Department of Sociology and Criminology In 1995, Professor Lori Pompa from Temple University took 15 students to a prison in Pennsylvania for a tour and conversation with incarcerated men. My colleague, Danielle Lavin-Loucks, and I have been doing similar prison tours and conversations with our Valpo classes for many years. The […]
Talking is Teaching
By Abbie Thompson, Department of Psychology In this article Abbie Thompson (Psychology) describes how students in her service-learning courses support new mothers in Porter County to teach our youngest learners: babies and young children. The name says it all. Talking is teaching as many of us faculty know. We share nuggets of our knowledge with […]
Saving Your Students Money By Using OERs
By Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development, CITAL Jon Bull decided to make using open educational resources (OERs) a priority for his work at VU in order to help with student retention. That is why Jon instituted the OER Development Awards. This program, now in its sixth year, awards faculty from $500-$2,000 to move their […]
Why Quality Matters Matters
By Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development We all know that enrollment in traditional in-person university classes has declined across the country. But did you know that there has been a corresponding increase in enrollment in online and hybrid courses? Despite this growing demand, many faculty have little or no experience designing online and hybrid […]
Valpo Faculty Perspectives on Simple Syllabus
By Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development, CITAL This fall Simple Syllabus debuted university-wide. For our students this means consistent syllabus navigation across all their courses and the ability to easily access their syllabi via Blackboard or SS directly using their device of choice. A print option is also available for students who prefer a […]
Valpo Faculty Respond to Generative AI
By Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development, CITAL At the faculty workshop this August, our keynote speaker Derek Bruff spoke about four possible faculty responses to AI: Red Light: I’ll prohibit the use of AI. Yellow Light: I’ll permit the use of AI, but with limitations. Green Light: Let’s see what AI can do! No […]
Two Perspectives on ChatGPT
By Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development, CITAL This past winter there was a veritable explosion of news stories about ChatGPT, a technology that lets users put in prompts to generate text that reads like it was written by a human. Some decried it as the end of the college essay, others saw it as […]
What to Do for the Last Week of Class
By Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development, CITAL Does your last week of class look like every other week of the semester? If so, you may be missing a chance for a memorable finale that will fix the semester’s learning in your students’ minds. In this article some of your colleagues share their ideas about […]
The Humane Syllabus
By Cynthia Rutz, Director, Valparaiso Institute for Teaching and Learning (CITAL) As we know all too well, both faculty and students have been worn down by the pandemic. In particular, the mental health of our students has suffered. Even before COVID, the teen suicide rate had increased so much in the last decade that it […]