UWGB Team Joins National Efforts in OER Promotion and Adoption

O.E.R.
Grafik: Markus Büsges, leomaria,
CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Building on the preliminary work for the recently funded OER Strategic Priority Initiative proposal, a small team from UW-Green Bay has been accepted to participate in the inaugural AAC&U Institute on Open Educational Resources. The team will collaborate with leaders in the open educational resource (OER) field as well as other institutions to “design and implement a campus transformation strategy to accelerate campus OER plans for large scale engagement and adoption.”

OER adoption aligns with UW-Green Bay strategic goals 3, 4, and 5, and has been shown to reduce time to graduation and student debt (Florida Virtual Campus 2018), improve student learning outcomes (Jhangiani et al. 2019), and reduce DFW rates for part-time, first and second-generation students (Colvard et al. 2018; Griffiths et al. 2020).

Instructors interested in participating in the OER Strategic Priority Initiative should look for upcoming information this fall. General questions regarding OERs can be directed to UW-Green Bay libraries, refdesk@uwgb.edu, or the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, catl@uwgb.edu.

MS Teams group photo from IDI wrap-up session

Highlights from the 2021 Instructional Development Institute

Each January the UW-Green Bay Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning and the Instructional Development Council host the Instructional Development Institute, a conference for faculty and staff that promotes the continued development and application of best practices for teaching and learning. The conference was held virtually this year on Jan. 19 and 21 and consisted of a variety of synchronous and asynchronous presentations that explored this year’s theme, “Making Meaningful Connections”. UWGB staff and faculty made up the largest portion of presenters and attendees, though we also had individuals outside of UWGB both present and attend.

Troubling Connections: Five Lenses for Teaching Toward Justice, a presentation by our keynote speaker, Dr. Kevin Kumashiro, was perhaps the most popular session this year. The session explored fives lenses for understanding and making meaningful connections in higher education with an emphasis on how we might re-imagine and democratize education to work toward equity and justice. These five lenses are: 1) naming the moment, 2) curriculum as intervention, 3) contradictions of teaching, 4) learning through crisis, and 5) movement building as a frame. Dr. Kumashiro presented each lens one by one, providing both real world examples and citations for the philosophy behind them. Many attendees commented on how they were invigorated by the presentation, with some opting to dive deeper into these five lenses in a follow-up workshop later that afternoon.

Another standout session was The UWGB Land Acknowledgment: How to Meaningfully and Respectfully Recognize Wisconsin’s First Nations. The panel, comprised of several First Nations community members and instructors that teach in related studies, gave an overview of the First Nations people groups that once resided on the land our university now occupies. Attendees were encouraged to reflect on the importance of learning about and publicly acknowledging First Nations’ history. Our panelists offered several concrete suggestions for making the land acknowledgement a more regular part of our activities both for the university at large and within our individual classrooms.

The session Student Perspectives of Learning in a Pandemic, a live Q & A with a panel of five UWGB students and the Dean of Students, Mark Olkowski, also had high attendance. The panelists addressed instructor questions, offering honest feedback on topics like group work, discussions, virtual classroom settings, and instructor communication. The students often acknowledged the challenge of balancing academic rigor with a necessary level of flexibility to meet student needs during a pandemic when making their suggestions. The ability to honestly and openly engage with our students about teaching was a valuable experience for panelists and participants alike and we have already received requests to include student panels at future conferences.

In addition to these and many other live sessions, the Institute also included asynchronous “on-demand” sessions this year that span a range of topics from course accessibility to assessment of teaching. These asynchronous sessions come in the form of pre-recorded videos, PowerPoint presentations, and Canvas pages, paired with interactive elements like quizzes and discussions. During a time when it is understandably difficult to coordinate events synchronously, we were excited to have an opportunity to include more submissions in this way and hope to continue offering asynchronous options in the future.

If you were unable to attend this year, or attended but missed some of the sessions, it’s not too late to partake in what the Institute has to offer. Session recordings and other asynchronous content are now accessible in the Canvas course and will remain there until the end of spring semester. We highly encourage you to continue engaging with the materials there as you have the time and space. Consider also posting a comment or question in the session discussion boards to show support to your colleagues and contribute to these important conversations.

The Instructional Development Institute was made possible in great part through the hard work and participation of many of our faculty, staff, and students, so a huge “thank-you” to all that contributed to making this year’s conference a success. We very much enjoyed our time together and hope that you continue “making meaningful connections” in all that you do!

Exam Conversions Available

In response to the added challenges of the semester, CATL has procured limited access to a tool for converting and importing quizzes (or exams) to Canvas. The tool converts a formatted text document (.txt, .rtf, or Word) into a Canvas quiz. Details of the formatting required can be found in this document (downloadable PDF).

Use this form (instructor login required) to submit a link to the intended course and your documents of 20 or more questions for CATL to convert and upload. Note that depending on the volume of requests, it may take up to a week for CATL to process your document. Submitting an incorrectly formatted document may result in additional delays in the processing of your request, so please read the formatting guidelines carefully.

Once your request has been processed, we will upload your exam directly into your Canvas course in the Quizzes area. The confirmation message that the exam is available will include information on how to finish applying settings and making the exam available to students.

Event Follow-Up: Transparent Assignment Design (Apr. 15, 2019)

Faculty and staff from Green Bay, Manitowoc, Marinette, and Sheboygan joined other institutions participating in the Taking Student Success to Scale high-impact practice (HIP) project in an interactive webinar about designing transparent assignments. The session was hosted by Mary-Ann Winkelmes on 4/15/19. More information on Dr. Winkelmes’s work can be found beneath the embedded video.

Session Recording (4/15/19)

Session Resources

More Information

The National Association of System Heads (NASH) sponsored a webinar with Mary-Ann Winkelmes on Transparent Assignment Design. All members of the campus community were invited.  Mary-Ann is the founder and director of the Transparency in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Project (TILT Higher Ed).

Transparent instruction is an inclusive, equitable teaching practice that can enhance High Impact Practices by making learning processes explicit and promoting student success equitably. A 2016 AAC&U study (Winkelmes et al.) identifies transparent assignment design as a small, easily replicable teaching intervention that significantly enhances students’ success, with greater gains by historically underserved students. A 2018 study suggests those benefits can boost students’ retention rates for up to two years. In this session we reviewed the findings and examined some sample assignments. Then we applied the research to revising some class activities and assignments. Participants left with a draft assignment or activity for one of their courses, and a concise set of strategies for designing transparent assignments that promote students’ learning equitably.

Event Follow-Up: Course Crunch

In 2017, thanks to the “Becoming a Student-Ready University” Initiative, some of us on the UW-Green Bay campus were able to read a few books, and discuss them. Some common themes arose from those discussions: one of them being “The Course Crunch.” Based on the interest from last year, CATL decided to host one of our “Difficult Discussions” around this theme. We then asked a few people who deal with scheduling issues to speak on a panel:

  • Sophia Sielen, Psychology + Art Student
  • Amy Van Oss, Academic Advisor
  • Kate Burns, Associate Dean of CAHSS + Associate Professor of Human Development, Psychology, and Women’s and Gender Studies
  • Jim Loebl, Chair of Business and Accounting + Associate Professor of Accounting
  • Alissa Warpinski, Front Desk Manager of the Green Bay One Stop Shop

Thanks to our panelists, we were able to have an open discussion about how “The Course Crunch” affects our students, instructors, and staff at UW-Green Bay.

In preparation for this meeting we had asked the panelists to collect and compile questions or prompts from others in their areas. Some of the questions are addressed in the video below, but if you’d like to see all of the options we could have responded to, click on the “eye” icon to preview questions from this session.

The questions were placed in a basket, and we chose to respond to ones pulled from the basket, but in an effort to be transparent we wanted to post the rest:

How can we make course scheduling easier?

When and in what modality (online/hybrid/in-person) do students want to take classes?  How can we get their input?

Would students take more Friday classes if we offered them? Why do some programs not offer courses on Fridays, and how does that impact the overall schedule of classes?

Are there other ways to maximize our available course times (more MW times? More 3 day/week class times?  4 days/week class times?)

How can students communicate when they are experiencing course crunch to better let us know?  

 How can we help instructors strike a balance between their own availability and what is pedagogically sound?

Why do some campuses use block scheduling?

Are there other scheduling strategies that are related to block scheduling, and why do campuses use these?

When campuses adopt block scheduling/guided pathways/meta-majors for their specific program how does that affect the rest of the student’s general education course scheduling?

What kinds of resources are currently available to all students while they’re choosing their classes?

Are there potential pitfalls we can make public, so all students have a guide to use if they can’t/won’t meet with their advisor?

What is the purpose for pre-requisites in the major/minor category? Should general education courses have prerequisites, such as a major declaration?

Are there other times aside from M/W or T/R from 11-2 that are underutilized in the schedule of classes?

What are some strategies we can use to help students schedule classes during their spring semester?  

Many students don’t understand that after R&R, they are responsible for scheduling their own classes.

Do you find that instructors are scheduling their office hours on the same days they’re teaching classes?

How many seats are reserved for online students, and who maintains that number in your department?

How does the way we schedule courses impact money we get from System to build new facilities?

The major issue we have every semester is the underestimation of the number of seats/sections we need in online classes. Then, we end up adding classes at the last minute. Why not have those options for student’s right up front?

The other issue we have is online classes filling up with non-online students. I know face-to-face students want online options, but online students are specifically online because they cannot take face-to-face classes. When on online class fills with students who are capable of F2F classes it is frustrating.

When students are unaware of drop deadlines, what are their options to move forward?

I felt like this Fall, I could feel the pinch with the lack of gen ed courses. I felt like Ethnic Studies hardly had any left in summer. I also felt the pinch in Fine Arts because Intro to Theatre was an option, but the other Art courses were reserved for majors for a few months.

I am always concerned about the accelerated content in the Math 99 and 101 courses. I know the seven weeks allows students to complete two classes in one semester, but are the students being successful in those math courses. Especially, our new freshman.

Here’s the recording of the virtual session: