Call for 2023 OPID Spring Conference – The Joys of Teaching and Learning: Centering Students (Applications Due Monday, Jan. 9)

The UW System Office of Professional & Instructional Development (OPID) has announced the details for their annual spring conference on teaching and learning! The 2023 conference will be held in person in Madison and via Zoom on Apr. 20 & 21, 2023, and the theme for this year is “centering students.” OPID invites you to participate by submitting a proposal about your teaching and learning experiences, ideas, insights, questions, failures, and accomplishments. The call is open to all UW educators, and proposals are due Monday, Jan. 9, 2023.

Learn More & Apply

Theme

The Joys of Teaching & Learning: Centering Students

Description provided by the OPID 2023 Spring Conference on Teaching & Learning website.

From the classroom to department meetings and from learning management systems to addressing mental health and wellbeing, students are the focus of our professional lives. In the past few years, we have increased our attention to centering our teaching practices around the “whole student.” Re-examining assessment strategies, updating curriculum, exploring teaching methods and modalities while increasing flexibility and compassionate responses to students’ needs are just a few examples.

Centering Students is what we do as educators and is tied to our goals, challenges and the rewards of teaching and learning. As we deal with the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have an opportunity to explore what we have learned, and what we still need to learn, about connecting with and supporting students. How might we consider what we need in terms of self-care and care for colleagues so we can feel a sense of well-being and enable us to better care for others around us? How do we cultivate relationships and create a sense of community with our students? How do we bring student voices into our face-to-face, online, and blended learning environments? What opportunities are there to cultivate connections both within and external to our class environments? How can we meet students where they are, while advising and mentoring them to succeed beyond our learning contexts?

We invite you to contribute to the conversation about centering students by presenting at OPID’s 2023 Spring Conference. Please share your experiences, ideas, insights, questions, failures, and accomplishments so we can collaborate and learn together to explore possibilities for centering students in our teaching/learning contexts.

Read more about the theme and plenary speaker on the OPID 2023 Spring Conference on Teaching & Learning site!

Questions?

Programmatic inquiries may be directed to Fay Akindes, Director of Systemwide Professional and Instructional Development, UW System, fakindes@uwsa.edu, (608) 263-2684.

Follow-Up: PlayPosit “Replicate and Repeat” Training

On Nov. 15, 2022, PlayPosit held a training that focused on how to replicate and repeat content in PlayPosit. These features can help create a more streamlined workflow for users that would like to reuse bulb content or share bulbs with other instructors. Some of the content covered in this training includes:

  • How to duplicate/copy a bulb
  • How to reuse an interaction (question, discussion, pause point, etc.) from a previous bulb
  • How to use PlayPosit interaction templates
  • How to save an interaction or a group of interactions as a template
  • How to share a bulb with a collaborator
  • How to send a copy of a bulb to another instructor

A recording of this training is embedded below.

Questions?

As you explore PlayPosit, we encourage you to consult PlayPosit’s extensive knowledgebase of instructor guides, including this guide on building graded bulbs in Canvas. You can contact PlayPosit support directly by clicking the “Contact” link on their support site and filling out their web form. Guides on how to build a bulb, share a bulb with your students, use PlayPosit for peer review, and more, can also be found on the UWGB IT knowledgebase. 

As always, we also welcome you to request a CATL consultation if you’d like to see a demo of PlayPosit or talk through how you might use it in your course!

Evidence-Based Approaches to Promoting Academic Honesty

Academic honesty has always been a concern in higher education, but the proliferation of technology has changed the scope and nature of the problem. Students have access to more electronic means to cheat, including AI-generated papers and websites that provide access to test bank questions and answers. Meanwhile, professors can deploy competing technologies designed to search automatically for plagiarized content, lock down browsers during exams, or remotely proctor test-taking.

It should come as no surprise that there are ethical concerns about both academic dishonesty itself and the privacy and intellectual property issues raised by technologies intended to detect or prevent it. In fact, one Canadian professor recently taught an academic course on cheating, and he is a co-investigator on a large-scale study of college student motivations to pay others to do their work.

The SoTL literature on this topic often lags behind the technological advances, but there are some recent studies instructors may find helpful. Duncan and Joyner (2022) surveyed students and TAs about digital proctoring, and although their sample was not representative, their resulting article is definitely worth a read. They provide a nice overview of costs of benefits of the practice, and they also effectively summarize the literature on alternative assessment strategies faculty can employ. Another recent addition to the body of knowledge on academic honesty is a study of six relatively low-tech and brief methods to reduce cheating, such as allowing students to withdraw assignments. Again, there are some methodological issues with the research, but instructors may find the techniques and review of past research on them illuminating.

The issue of academic integrity is complex, multi-faceted, and rapidly evolving given its intersection with emerging technology. Additional examples of relevant SoTL research on the topic are included below. CATL will update this list as we are able. Feel free to contact us with suggested resources as well.

Additional Resources

Turnitin: Beyond Plagiarism Review

A feature highlight for Canvas this week is Turnitin. Although most instructors may be familiar with this tool as a plagiarism checker, it has additional impactful uses within the classroom. While checking for plagiarism is important to ensure academic integrity in student work, Turnitin can also function as a powerful feedback tool and as a self-assessment tool.  

According to several studies, feedback helps to further develop a learner’s cognitive abilities. Wisniewski, Zierer, and Hattie (2020) discuss how various forms of feedback have become a focus in teaching and the practice of teaching in recent years. The most impactful forms of feedback are task- and process-oriented feedback or formative feedback. Both provide students with information not only on how well they’ve met specific goals of an assignment or assessment, but also on how to improve their strategies for achieving those goals in the future.  

While feedback may not have a large impact on behavioral outcomes for learners, self-assessment and reflection activities do. Combining both feedback and self-assessment activities within an ongoing assignment opens up communication pathways within the classroom and may also help increase motivation in the learning environment. Feedback and self-assessment can also turn mistakes and errors into teaching moments for synchronous and asynchronous classes. As Terada (2020) points out both within and outside of the classroom, making and learning from errors is an integral part of the learning process. And Turnitin is one tool which can help provide those teaching moments. While we are familiar with the similarity reports produced by Turnitin, and often have used these reports for plagiarism review, studies show that Turnitin similarity reports can also be used for self-assessment. Chew, Ding, and Rowell (2013) in particular focus on how the similarity reports generated by Turnitin can be used by students to review and assess drafts of their own work or their peers’ work. With its integration in Canvas, Turnitin can be used both synchronously and asynchronously for all course modalities.  

Within the UWGB Canvas instance, Turnitin is paired with the Assignment feature and can be used in conjunction with peer review so that students can receive both a similarity report for self-assessment as well as receive formative feedback from both their peers and instructors. The Canvas SpeedGrader works with Turnitin to allow for suggestions, edits, and general comments to be provided in written, audio, or video format. For best results, a Turnitin Assignments can be paired with a Rubric, allowing students to both see the criteria for the assignment and review their drafts and feedback based on how well they met those criteria. Best practice would be to incorporate course outcomes within the rubric. This will provide transparency between instructor and students in setting and achieving overall course goals as well as expectations of the student.

To build out a Turnitin Assignment in Canvas, follow these directions.

  1. First, in your course site, navigate to the Assignments tab in the course navigation menu on the left side of the screen and click on Assignments.
  2. Next, click the + Assignment button in the upper right corner to create a new Assignment and then give the assignment a name.
  3. In the assignment Editing window, scroll down under settings and select the Online submission type, and then check the File Uploads option. This will cause a new setting option to appear called Plagiarism Review.

  4. The Plagiarism Review setting is default set to “None.” Change it to Turnitin. Turnitin is now enabled on the Assignment.

  5. To ensure draft submissions are not stored in a repository, change the setting under "Store submissions in" to Do not store the submitted papers. 
    • This setting is important for assignments that allow for multiple draft submissions. Not storing drafts into a repository means that subsequent drafts of the same assignment will not be flagged in the similarity report.
  6. Next, you can toggle on and off the different content types you want draft submissions to be compared to (student repository, website content, or periodicals, journals, and publications). 
  7. Below that, you can select what to exclude from the similarity reports generated by Turnitin. 
  8. You can also set the number of submissions to be "unlimited.”
    • This setting will allow students to resubmit drafts several times to the same assignment. For self-assessment it may be good to allow students to submit multiple drafts to review their similarity reports. Just remember to select “Do Not store the submitted papers” under the repository settings so students do not get flagged for work done on a previous draft of the same assignment.
  9. Lastly, click the button in the bottom right corner to Save and Publish your Turnitin Assignment.

Here is a general guide from Canvas discussing how to add or edit details in an assignment.

Photo of the 2019 cohort for the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars program

Call for 2023-24 Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars Program (Applications Due Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2022)

The UWGB Provost Office and the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, on behalf of the UW System’s Office of Professional and Instructional Development, invite faculty and instructional academic staff to apply for the 2023-24 cohort of the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars (WTFS) Program.

This program is designed to provide time (one year) to systematically reflect with peers in a supportive and open-minded community and, ultimately, to move from “scholarly teaching” to the “scholarship of teaching.” Administered by the UW System’s Office of Professional and Instructional Development (OPID) and directed by UW faculty, the WTFS Program is grounded in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Read more about the WTFS Program on the OPID site.

Interested applicants should submit items 1-5 below as separate attachments to one email message. That email should be sent to CATL (CATL@uwgb.edu) with the subject line “WTFS Application” by Nov. 29, 2022. The reference letter can be submitted directly to the CATL email by your Department Chair or Dean, but it is also due by Nov. 29. The full list of required materials is below:

  1. Application checklist;
  2. A letter stating your interest in and qualifications for the WTFS Program (two-page maximum);
  3. A teaching & learning philosophy as it intersects with equity, diversity, and inclusion (three-page maximum);
  4. An abbreviated curriculum vitae (two-page maximum);
  5. This budget sheet estimating costs using UW System travel reimbursement rates (Note: please use this 2022-23 form but also include $320 for an in-person, not virtual, spring conference; selected applicants will have their budget signed and approved by the Provost on a 2023-24 form);
  6. A reference letter from your Department Chair or Dean (can be directly emailed to CATL@uwgb.edu).

As always, let us know if you have any questions via email: CATL@uwgb.edu.