Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons^™

Course Master Planning, Haroon Stephen, Jee Woong Park

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Our specific teaching practice is to use a course master plan, which is a comprehensive document that provides the embodiment to the course skeleton often given in the syllabus. The master plan strategy addresses the need to provide multi-level perspectives of the course. The master plan provides a one-stop source of information and enables a consistent course delivery in case of multiple instructors assigned to a course in the same semester or on rotation.

Science In Your Naturehood, Alison Sloat

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Engaging students in hands-on scientific research in their NatureHoods, or local neighborhoods, improves student outcomes, learning, and success in remote learning environments.

Reflections Drive Online Course Quality, Nicole Hudson

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

The teaching practice that the department found helpful was self-guided reflection and assessment of professional development needs to improve course design and delivery. Professional development opportunities included cohort experiences, webinars, and self-paced trainings on online best practice including: course organization, student engagement, content delivery and assessment.

• 630 UNLV faculty participated in the Summer Course Improvement Program. The first step was to self-assess their online teaching practices and identify their professional development needs and goal. 262 chose to enhance a skill and 368 chose to incorporate a new strategy in their course
• 523 UNLV faculty attended one or more professional development …

Mid-Semester Reset: Approaches For Student Self-Assessment, Self-Efficacy And Support, Paige W. Johnson Ed.D.

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

A full college semester, like any long-term project, benefits from periodic reflection, and reconfiguration to make it to completion successfully. This is the thinking behind creating a mid-semester reset framework for first-semester students aligned with lessons on health and wellness. Students asked to reflect on themselves personally, each class during the semester and create an actionable plan was useful in helping to find their power, remember and reconfigure their motivations and see what they're doing right and well as what they can improve.

Accessible Equations And Other Stem Content, Jerra Strong

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Equations, Formulas, and STEM Content can pose barriers to students with disabilities, but free tools available to UNLV make it much simpler to create accessible equations and math content.

Teaching Challenging Texts And Encouraging Inquiry Remotely, Aisha Ratanapool

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Creating a culture of inquiry in non-research based courses helps students enhance their skills in critical thinking, reading, writing, collaboration, and argumentation. In English 101, some students feel like not having all of the answers about a text after a first read is unacceptable. This practice is designed to help college students understand and confidently discuss complex texts in a remote course.

Using Social Justice Issues To Engage Students, Sandra L. Candel

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

The Social Justice Issue is a project-based assignment in which students organize in groups to address a social justice issue of their choice. In addition, students are asked to connect theory and practice (praxis) by looking for resources in their community to offer possible recommendations, solutions and resources.

Topics researched include: Voting Rights; Sexual Assault At Colleges; The Racialization of Cannabis Use; Mental Healthcare; Legalizing Prostitution; Gender Pay Gap; Black Lives Matter; LGBTQA Rights Stigma Suicide & Homelessness; Japan's Patriarchal Society; RBG - Open Supreme Court Position; ICE Inhumane Treatment of Immigrants; Universal Healthcare; and Mental Health Stigma.

This teaching …

Embedding Quizzes In On-Line Prerecorded Lectures, Joshua M. Polanski

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

As we transitioned to on-line education, the problem arises as to how to keep students engaged while listening to a prerecorded lecture. Listening to an hour to two hour lecture and watching a screen is not particularly engaging for the student. To this end, I embedded quizzes periodically within my prerecorded lectures of my DEN 7162 nutrition class for 1^st year dental students that forced the students to engage with the lecture material.

A Learning-Centered Approach To Remote Learning, Michelle A. Arroyo

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Although faculty frequently update the content of their courses, they rarely modify their teaching methods. Many faculty continue to teach as they were taught. During remote and online learning, modifying teaching methods is not only a necessity, but critical to student success. Learning-centered teaching focuses on what and how students are learning. Learning-centered instructors create safe, respectful, and inclusive environments that facilitate student learning. Learning-centered teaching is not a single teaching method, but rather emphasizes a variety of techniques and pedagogies than encourage instructors to create an environment that facilitates students learning online and remotely. As a result, students acquired …

Web-Based System For Students Engagement In The Math Remote Learning Classes, Aleksei Talonov

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

We would like to present practices of using Web-based systems to enhance interactive learning activities in the Math Remote Learning Classes. We mostly concentrated our attention on PreCalculus and Calculus classes. During the last couple of years, we developed a set of course specific materials in the form of lecture notes and out-of-class assignments. Each major assignment is accompanied by clear and coherent guidelines explaining what kind of skills will be attained by practicing this assignment, how it can be done, what amount of time can it reasonably take, when is it due, and where to get help. Speaking of …

Promoting Discussion And Community In Online Synchronous Courses, Nathan M. Slife, Gillian Bowden

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

It can be challenging to engage students in class discussion and build community in synchronous, online courses. This teaching practice addresses these challenges by scaffolding synchronous in-class discussions with asynchronous discussion posts. This practice engenders community and promotes student engagement.

Improving Engagement Of Online Learning With Live Lectures, Jorge Ramon Fonseca Cacho

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Online courses have historically been self-taught or a form of independent study. However, with the 2020 Pandemic a renewed focus on remote/online learning has forced the academic community to revisit what works, and does not work, with online classes. I propose that providing a livestream of a class and uploading the recording to a media sharing website, like YouTube, is more engaging to students than posting a pre-recorded lecture (text or video). I propose that doing this motivates students to keep up with the lectures rather than attempting to binge before an exam, or an assignment is due, and improves …

Virtual Hands-On Lab Exercises, Ed Jorgensen

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Development and deployment of focused topic specific hand-on exercises for upper division technical courses.

Covid-19, Distance Education, And Students Needs, Shahla Fayazpour

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

COVID 19 was an unexpected situation, and it has a negative impact on students. College students' education has been an increasing concern especially during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Research shows the vital need to develop interventions and preventive strategies for all students including college students (Son et al., 2020). Many instructors had to adapt their teaching strategies with little preparation. Having a clear syllabus, creating new assignments based on students' needs, engaging students for more participation, and providing a positive communication have been essential factors in rapid transition to distance education especially during the Pandemic.

Utilizing Plastinated Head And Neck Dissections For Doctorate Of Dental Medicine (Dmd) Anatomy Laboratories : Observations From The Den 7109 “Guinea Pig” Course, Jessica Immonen

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

This poster documents use of digital dissection tutorials in place of in-person laboratory time for a gross anatomy course in a dental medicine doctorate (DMD) program. Tutorials were developed with a standard digital camera and Camtasia video editing software. Plastinated head and neck specimens prepared by the Von Hagens company in Germany were used in place of standard, embalmed cadaveric donors. Initial student feedback (N=40) indicated that the tutorials were helpful/very helpful (100%), clinically relevant/very clinically relevant (97.5%), were impactful on content retention (100%) and were appropriate/very appropriate with respect to length (3-8 min; 97.5%). After these initial findings were …

It's Like A Video Game: How To Use Twine To Create Scenario Based Learning Online, Amanda Mapel Belarmino

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

How can you engage students online by utilizing the online environment? Solution: a choose-your-own adventure style game. As an Assistant Professor of Hospitality Management, I teach a class in Strategic Management where I used a software called Twine to create a choose-your-adventure type scenario where the students make their own decisions for a business scenario and then see the consequences of their decisions.

Embodiment As A Lens For Learning, Nanette Hilton

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Regardless of the discipline, applying an embodied rhetorical lens to course material is a productive way for students to assess and gain new knowledge. Our experiences as creatures in bodies affect both how we create a text and how we receive a text (a text and rhetoric being any form of communication whether in written, visual, or performative form). For this reason, both reading and writing a text is a self-reflexive activity.

Student Group Podcast And Infographic Presentations, Bill Doyle

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

The podcast and infographic presentations developed from a move to remote instruction and my desire to transform traditional, PowerPoint-based student presentations into something that would lead to more meaningful collaboration within groups, more engaging post-presentation discussions among the class, and more significant engagement with class readings and their contexts.

Recruitment Of International Students Through A Synthesis Of English As A Second Language Instruction, Social Justice, And Service Learning, Daisuke Akiba

Publications and Research

Universities across the U.S. have increasingly emphasized internationalization, leading to rising numbers of international students attending U.S. institutions of higher education. However, these students tend to gravitate toward larger research-intensive universities with many other institutions seeing no increase in international student enrollments. Little is known concerning how to attract international students to regional institutions lacking name recognition. To address the above and promote internationalization through increasing the presence of students from abroad, an academic department at a regional public U.S. college used needs analysis to develop a pilot program for Japanese university students (N = 13). The program involved a …

Using Discord To Facilitate Student Engagement, David Schwartz

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

With the move to remote instruction, many students feel disconnected if there is no synchronous component, while others feel self-conscious about using WebEx as a group discussion platform, particularly if they have to turn on their camera.

Additionally, streaming platforms like WebEx do not yield a permanent record of the chat discussion.Instructors must rely on students taking notes or email them pertinent material afterwards.

Discord is a platform that originally came to prominence in video game communities for its adaptability and ease of use. Many students already have accounts and are adept users.

Incorporating a synchronous Discord element into your …