Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons^™

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 …

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.

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.

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 …

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

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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.

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 …

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 …

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.

Motivating Autonomous Knowledge Exploration, Yvonne Houy

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Flow Learning Design: Autonomous Knowledge Exploration The feeling of “Flow” — forgetting time — while exploring online media is common: As online instructor & instructional designer I want to encourage Flow in my students as they interact with my online learning materials. Inspired by research on student motivation and autonomous learners, I developed learning activities allowing students to choose learning paths with increasing freedom, while emphasizing core disciplinary skills and student learning outcomes. In an online social history course, I emphasized high interest topics such as the devastating effects of the Black Plague, and how sugar, coffee, and syphilis changed …

Web Based Classroom Management Enhanced By Personalized And Experiential Learning, Cecilia Turman

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The purpose of this practice is to promote experiential and personalized learning in online instruction.

Developing A Teaching Philosophy Statement, Steve Hayden

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

In the college of education it is common practice for students to write multiple versions of a concise and direct teaching philosophy statement (1,000-1,500 words).