Many community college students face a number of barriers that threaten their ability to meet academic goals, including work, competing obligations with family and friends, and bills that make paying for college difficult. Yet, with hope, they enroll at community colleges with a desire to change the trajectory of their lives, only to be met with policies that exacerbate the pressures they already face. Many times, the syllabus paints the class as one more problem they must overcome, lengthening the path to their success rather than providing a roadmap for its attainment. This webinar helps instructors recognize some of the barriers created by the tone and policies in the syllabus and provides strategies for using the syllabus as a tool to create a clearer path to students’ success.
During this webinar, the Research Institute at Dallas College brings together faculty, staff, and administrators to explore how data dashboards can help build a data-informed culture, communicate actionable research results throughout an institution, and guide strategies at every level, from classroom instruction to executive leadership. The facilitators share best practices for dashboard users and creators (no research experience required!) and provide robust tools that participants can use at their own institutions. Within the spotlight topic of an institution’s value proposition to its students, we’ll highlight key findings on academic and career pathways, as well as the financial return on investment to students. We’ll present interactive dashboards that help practitioners easily digest complex data and customize their analyses in a way that is most useful in their work as instructors and/or academic leadership.
This webinar demonstrates the urgent need for enhancing excellence in higher education in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants learn how to outreach more effectively to a diverse array of persons and institutions, including: Students, families, administrators, politicians, businesses, and citizens. Community college educators are highly trained professionals whose expertise enhances the citizen skill base and their understanding of the function and value of democracy in a civil society. It is vital to communicate the urgent need for narrative and funding support to ensure the success of community colleges.
Students in online courses often don't have the option to interact live with instructors and other students. With more students taking online courses in the post-COVID era, creating opportunities for such interaction becomes problematic. To address this issue, I have used the free GroupMe app to engage in weekly chat sessions with students in my online courses. With this app, students in a particular class can interact with one another and the instructor through text messaging, a communication format that they are comfortable using. The GroupMe app has a polling feature, which can be used to ask students questions regarding the weekly reading assignments. Through the app, the instructor can post links to a Google Jamboard or a Padlet, where students can post written responses to an instructor's questions. Instructors can post links to Kahoot and Quizizz and allow students to compete for points by answering multiple-choice questions.
Recent studies have shown that the opportunity gap persists for students of color in community colleges. Increasingly, students of color are making community colleges their first choice in higher education to seek certification, marketable job skills, or a degree; however, they are not completing their education at the same rate as their White counterparts. While any number of factors may contribute to this gap, we cannot rule out implicit bias as a factor. Biases not only have a negative impact on students’ self-esteem, they can reduce students’ will to try, resulting in inequitable outcomes. This webinar paints a picture of what implicit bias looks like in the classroom and provides strategies for reducing biases that inevitably impact students’ success.
This webinar helps instructors effectively plan their lectures to incorporate teaching practices for adult learners as well as technology that doesn't make the student feel like a child. Using elevated K-12 teaching practices allows community and technical college educators to elicit critical thinking from students and increase student engagement.
A recent survey indicated that 65 percent of individuals working in higher education were suffering from burnout, and a whopping 85 percent were performing work at a level that was not sustainable. The field we work in is so important and can be draining at times. Taking care of ourselves often becomes placed on the back burner when in reality it should be placed in the foreground. This webinar is designed to provide psychoeducation on what compassion fatigue and burnout are, teach warning signs of compassion fatigue and burnout, and educate on ways to cope with and decrease the impact of workplace stress to overcome compassion fatigue and burnout.
Over the past few years, faculty and students have been through trauma together. Some of us may have experienced several traumatic experiences during the most stressful time of our lives. Some, like me, may have used all their protective factors and resilience stores and finally hit rock bottom, completely exhausted and cynical. This is burnout. When burnout occurs, our stress in the workplace or classroom feels unmanageable. Once at this broken level, we are prone to experiencing a moral injury. This webinar shares essential practices for climbing back up the spiral and finding joy again.
Escape rooms require players to complete tasks, retrieve clues, and solve puzzles in order to escape a locked room. Digital escape rooms function much like their physical counterparts except they take place entirely online. Because digital escape rooms don’t require any physical equipment, they have become a popular way for instructors to engage their students online. In this webinar, participants engage in a live, digital escape room and learn how to design their own by brainstorming the concept, creating the puzzles, setting up the virtual environment, and testing the game. No matter your skill level, you will leave this webinar with the tools needed to create an engaging digital escape room for your students.
