Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons^™

Appreciative Teaching: Utilizing Academic Advising Techniques For Better Teaching And Learning Experiences In Higher Education, Paige W. Johnson Ed.D

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

The first semester of college is quite difficult for students. Add to that a global pandemic, screen fatigue, cabin fever and general uneasiness and it's a recipe for a difficult semester in a difficult time. However, through appreciative teaching, which is modeled after the academic advising framework/technique called "appreciative advising" there are little ways to create a rapport, build a relationship, and foster goodwill with your students. This, in turn, will make your role more enjoyable and allow students to become more comfortable in and enjoy their role.

Preparing Students For Their Future! A Virtual Career Development Practice, Jenna Heath

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

This is a simple practice for faculty to integrate into their courses to enhance career and professional development for their students. The “virtual document review” is an effective way for faculty to provide students a great resume, without the faculty having to be a career and professional development expert, and without the faculty having to edit each individual resume that comes in. All faculty should utilize the Career Services resources, especially right now as there are new and innovative ways to move resources online. Students resumes were significantly better after the use of this tool.

Mock Interviews In The Virtual Environment, Roberta Jo Barnes

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

The College of Hospitality is known for its experiential learning activities. In a typical semester, the college hosts a mock interview event for students in HMD 200, Hospitality Milestone course, in which students are interviewed and evaluated by a hospitality industry professional as part of an on-campus event. How can this important skill development occur when Covid-19 prevents the hosting of an on-campus event? This teaching practice provides an alternative for facilitating mock interviews in the virtual environment through collaboration with the Hospitality College’s career center, industry partners and the use of Zoom technology.

Applied Learning During A Pandemic, Roberta Jo Barnes

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Applied learning is a critical component of the Hospitality College curriculum. This teaching practice examines the development of a course providing a meaningful substitution for internship during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Build It In The Chat: Using The Chat Function In Online Platforms To Facilitate And Improve Student Writing, James Altman

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Helping college students “find their voice” as writers is challenging even without the isolation necessitated by the Pandemic. Shyness, lack of comfort with the subject matter, and fear of using the wrong word or phrase, can all keep students from expressing their ideas as fully as they, and we, would like. This can lead to non-completion or plagiarism of assignments If a student is also a non-native English speaker and/or has physical and/or cognitive difficulties, the situation can appear insurmountable. Building student writing thought by thought, line by line, paragraph by paragraph addresses the problem by allowing individuals to express …

Using Children's And Young Adult Literature In College Classrooms, Christine A. Draper

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Using a children’s book or YA novel as an introduction, or a piece to draw students’ attention to a particular topic can harness the power of emotions help our students connect with, learn, and retain course material more deeply (Cavanagh, 2016).

While the plot-line of children’s books may appear simple, the issues addressed can be quite complex. The newest wave of children’s literature addresses a wide range of socially sensitive topics such as racism, poverty, death, gender identity, police brutality, war, and immigration (Johnson, 2014) and often does so in a way that invites discussion rather than foreclosing it.

Though …

Remote Teaching Of Research Methods, Manoj Sharma

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Research Methods (PBH 360-1002) offered by the School of Public Health was taught remotely by Manoj Sharma to undergraduate students (primarily from public health) in Fall 2020. The specific teaching techniques that were used in teaching this course were delivery as remote learning, organizing the entire course in Canvas and making it available from day 1, recording all lectures beforehand in Panopto, utilizing cases studies, employing WebEx and its breakout sessions, and having skill-building activities in each module that were sequential. In this course, the fourth-generation multi-theory model (MTM) of health behavior change was utilized from a pedagogical perspective to …

Using The Reverse Case Study To Meet Clinical Outcomes In A Practice-Based Discipline, Angela E. Silvestri-Elmore, Lisa Nicholas

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

The coronavirus (COVID-19) has disrupted curricular plans at UNLV and nursing schools across the nation, and clinical instruction and evaluation were notably impacted. Nursing faculty are accustomed to direct observation of student performance in the clinical setting to inform student evaluation in clinical. Due to the pandemic, many clinical requirements are completed virtually because of clinical displacement of students. With reverse case study use in a remote clinical learning environment, the UNLV SoN has successfully met clinical learning needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Reverse case studies differ from the traditional case study in that students are involved with the development …

Engaging Students In Online Discussion Boards, Natalie Pennington

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

My best teaching practices offers four tips for engaging students in online discussion boards in the digital classroom. By identifying several ways to improve upon this commonly used classroom tool, the poster highlights how to engage students in learning in the course.

Online Collaboration Exercises Replacing Face-To-Face Student Interaction, Candice Wilcken

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Despite the default to online learning in 2020, the demand for online learning has increased over the last 3-5 years. This brings to light the acknowledgment that the traditional higher-education model is seriously challenged. With this challenge, curriculum requires integrating multiple means of engagement, interpretation, and articulation to help meet the students’ needs. The key element to meeting these challenges is collaboration, and for students, the best learning can often happen from one another.

Equity Design Framework, Lindsay J. Russell

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

The Equity Design Framework allows instructors to address student equity in their online classes by taking a critical look at their current teaching practices and find ways to enhance equitable opportunities for all students. The framework is set up so the instructor can look at their online course and determine specific aspects that they would like to assess in regards to equity. Instructors then measure their current practices and look for ways they can incorporate equity either through their own self-reflection or by building self-reflective practices into their own teaching.

Pivot To Simulation, Jen Nash

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

The global pandemic requires strategic agility from professors to provide the same quality education while minimizing risk of exposure and spread of COVID-19. To simulate patient experiences, I incorporated Simucase^TM. Simucase^TM is a computer-based simulation platform that provides students with experiences designed to develop skills such as clinical observations, interviewing clients and families, collaborating with other disciplines, administering and interpreting assessments, designing intervention plans, and implementing interventions using video-recordings of client scenarios.

Optimizing The Online Classroom For Mobile Learners, Bc Oliva

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

This poster provides a brief overview of the challenges faced by students accessing online courses via the Canvas Student app and provides instructors with methods/solutions to optimize their online classrooms for mobile learners.

Survey For Rapport, Allison Mcswain

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Survey questionnaires can be used as a tool to build rapport with students. This serves a few key purposes: 1. It allows instructors to connect with their students more deeply. 2. It gives students another way to communicate with instructors and makes them feel cared for as people. 3. It allows instructors to learn about patterns within the classroom to guide the curriculum of the course.

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 …

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.

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 …