The pivot to online learning requires faculty to gain additional pedagogical tools to engage learners. It is easy for students to hide behind the screen and get lost in the cloud. However, creating a sense of belonging in your classroom can encourage students to come out of hiding. Based on research and personal experience, this workshop shares practical ideas that help faculty create a sense of belonging in the online environment from the beginning to the end of the semester. Creating an inclusive classroom allows students to feel valued, appreciated, and part of the learning community. Maya Angelou states, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Join the facilitator as she shares strategies for creating a positive, inclusive learning environment for students.
Since the founding of the first American community college in 1901, community colleges have served the important purpose of bridging the gap between the academic skills students bring to the table and the academic rigor required to be successful in college. Although research has indicated a positive correlation between academic support and learning, many students are unable to take advantage of such services due to outside obligations such as family care or work, being unaware that such services exist, or because they’re afraid of being deemed inferior for needing extra help. Due to these obstacles, it is imperative that educators tailor their curriculum to the needs of their students.
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.
Students are often tasked with navigating their work/life balance without fully realizing the community resources that are available to assist them. Faculty and staff are on the front line to assist and identify students who have greater needs as they navigate their pathways to success. Unfortunately for some students, their needs extend far beyond the help of classroom assistance. Often, faculty and staff do not know about the community resources that can assist students along their journey. Participants in this workshop walk away with an understanding of the key resources available to assist their students.
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.
Do you want to grow and develop professionally but are not sure how? Do you feel stuck in your position or career? Do you feel that you have unfulfilled potential? It is easy to get comfortable with your current position, be overwhelmed with the thought of shifting to something new, and feel scared about getting out of your comfort zone. Through John Maxwell's 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, the facilitator discusses growth-identifying intentional actions you can take. The facilitator works with you to develop the right attitude, help you learn your strengths, find your passion, identify your purpose, and develop your skills so you can be all you can be.
The Leadership Program to support faculty development is designed to present information on higher education qualification standards, leadership competencies and skill sets, activities to develop these competencies and skill sets, and an introduction to an individual learning plan.
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.
Now more than ever, students are choosing to take their courses online, often enticed by access, flexibility, and the desire to continue their studies while working and raising families. As institutions and individual faculty members, we can collectively respond to this trend with well-designed courses that are delivered in engaging ways and that leverage evidence-based pedagogies for the virtual learning environment. During this workshop, specific approaches to structuring online courses that align with best practices for quality online teaching are shared. These approaches traverse Learning Management Systems such as Canvas, Blackboard, and D2L. Through hands-on activities, participants are exposed to examples and models that highlight several relevant and engaging delivery methods. The workshop ends with a summary of the next steps via an action plan that details what faculty can specifically do to develop their online courses.
Through four separate workshop modules, participants gain knowledge and skills to build their own HyFlex course using specific learning theories, instructional design models, and assessment frameworks that align with the flexible course modality. This workshop is designed for HyFlex beginners, but will be differentiated to also provide valuable insights to instructors who are already implementing the course modality. The goal of the workshop is to equip participants so they leave confident and satisfied they can effectively and efficiently implement HyFlex within their own courses.
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.
Would you like to explore some strategies for fostering inclusiveness in online pedagogy? A growing body of literature highlights the need for faculty-student and student-student interaction in order to create an inclusive atmosphere and to establish a sense of belonging in the classroom. Differences in communication styles often pose some challenges in class participation, collaboration, and interpretation of information in an online environment. Cultural factors have a significant impact on students’ self-learning, group interaction, and communication styles. By creating an inclusive atmosphere, faculty can promote greater self-awareness, deepen intercultural sensitivity, and encourage meaningful interaction and collaboration among diverse groups. An understanding of diverse communication patterns is critical to the academic success of culturally and linguistically diverse student population.
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.
Have you ever wished you could change your students’ attitudes toward more positive engagement in their learning? YOU CAN! The secret rests in appreciating that all of us have a profound impact upon the emotional state of the students that we engage with every day. Whether interacting with individuals or groups, the neuroscience is clear: The affective domain powerfully impacts student cognition, persistence, motivation, efficacy, and performance. During this multidimensional, highly-interactive, experiential, and fun workshop, participants explore ways to promote positive, enthusiastic, and engaged collaboration with their students. We also explore how to encourage student learning in a manner that maximizes motivation, a sense of inclusion, and improved equity within the learning environment!
Have you been scratching your head about how to rekindle students’ excitement about learning and increase their engagement with your course? This workshop not only expands participants' understanding of intrinsic motivation but also invites them to leverage this knowledge to best support their students. Participants walk away with a repertoire of quick, high-impact strategies that they can immediately implement in their college classrooms to activate autonomy, cultivate confidence, and boost belonging.
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.
In addition to the opportunities and challenges that we experience by working in higher education, for the past two-plus years we have collectively experienced a global pandemic that changed the way that we work and live, often blurring the lines between work and "not work." The workshop facilitator, a behavioral neuroscientist and community college administrator, begins with an introduction to the origins of stress research and how the underlying biological mechanisms of stress impact our behaviors, moods, and health. By understanding that our bodies have evolved to deal with threats acutely, yet we have found ways to activate the same systems chronically, participants explore strategies for disrupting the maladaptive results of chronic stress. They also explore ways to adapt to successive Zoom meetings and sedentary work environments, engage in relaxation techniques and exercise, and plan their days to include self-care.
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.
