Welcome to the UW-Green Bay Instructional Development Institute (IDI) registration and main information page!
The Instructional Development Institute will take place on Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2024, and is hosted by the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL) and the Instructional Development Council. The 2024 IDI is a one-day, completely virtual and free teaching and learning conference that will feature live presentations by expert faculty, staff, and UWGB community members on the theme of “Thriving in Higher Education.” We are pleased to have Dr. Kevin Gannon as the conference keynote speaker, author of the book Radical Hope. In addition to his address on the conference topic, Dr. Gannon will lead two workshops, one focused on sustainable online teaching practices and the other centered on fostering belonging in both virtual and face-to-face learning environments. Register to attend the 2024 IDI today and stay tuned for more updates regarding the conference schedule coming soon!
About the Conference Theme: “Thriving in Higher Education”
Higher education has witnessed substantial challenges in recent years. Instructors and students faced COVID-19, the ensuing dramatic shifting to pandemic pedagogy, and all that came with it. Institutions confronted budget, enrollment, and political pressures, and they are now grappling with emerging generative AI technologies and their impact on education. Amid such disruptions, it can be easy to approach our work with a mentality of survival. This year’s Instructional Development Institute instead challenges you to consider what it would mean not simply to survive, but to thrive in higher education. While there are no easy answers, we can work together as educators to set goals, support one another, surmount obstacles, and achieve at a high level, similar to the expectations we have for our students.
Keynote Speaker
Kevin Gannon is Director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence (CAFÉ) and Professor of History at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina. He is the author of Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto (West Virginia University Press, 2020), and his writing has also appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vox, CNN, and The Washington Post. In 2016, he appeared in the Oscar-nominated documentary 13th, directed by Ava DuVernay. He is currently working on a project centered around reimagining introductory and survey courses in higher education.
Keynote Address: Hopeful Teaching in Less-Than Hopeful Times
Let’s not mince words: these are almost overwhelmingly difficult times to be in higher education. After (barely?) surviving multiple years of “pandemic pedagogy,” we find ourselves on a landscape marked by faculty burnout, student disconnection, fiscal shenanigans, and an external climate that seems to get more foreboding by the day. How, then, is it possible to bring any meaningful sense of hope to our work in teaching and learning? And how might we imagine a context where we’re not simply surviving, but where we and our students are actually thriving? This session will not claim to provide all the answers, nor will it simply throw out empty inspirational quotes like one of those motivational page-a-day calendars. Rather, we’ll focus on agency as a foundation for hopeful teaching, and consider the ways in which we might help our students discover, develop, and value their own agency as learners. In doing so, we’ll look at some promising strategies which evidence suggests will be helpful in this work. Participants will leave this session with specific ideas which they can incorporate into their own teaching.
Keynote Workshop: Sustaining Our Students and Ourselves in Online Teaching and Learning
This session will explore strategies by which we can make the workload involved in online teaching both manageable and sustainable. We’ll use the idea of “presence” from the Community of Inquiry framework as a way to interrogate our own practices and consider what alternatives might exist. We’ll then look at examples of tools and practices which can both enhance presence in our courses and make our workflow more manageable.
Keynote Workshop: (Re) Connecting with Students after “Pandemic Pedagogy”
One of the most prevalent observations from faculty in recent months has been how difficult it is to connect (or reconnect) with students since the disruptions of the pandemic. What are the reasons for this attenuated sense of connection? Why does engagement seem so difficult now? How do we deepen student engagement in our courses without adding unsustainable amounts to our workload? This session will explore the sources of this disconnect, and consider some specific ways in which we can foster meaningful engagement from students—with both course material and one another.