The Commission on College Teaching is pleased to announce the 2020 Excellence in Teaching Conference sessions. This year, the Conference will be a series of INDIVIDUAL SESSIONS in a remote webinar format. Certificates will be issued for each LIVE session attended (except for the book discussion and poster session).

Schedule

Monday, September 14th

11:00 - 11:50 | Faculty Panel: Lessons Learned from Spring 2020 | Hosted by Ben Bunting

VIDEO

There is no going back from our experiences from the spring of 2020. While we all had to manage disruption and quickly learn how to offer our courses remotely, most of us acknowledge that our eyes were also opened to new possibilities of teaching and engaging students. Join us for this first session of the CCT Conference where a diverse panel of faculty will reflect on and discuss the successes, experiments, epic failures, surprises, and student reactions from the spring of 2020.

12:30 - 1:20 | Making the Move to Open Educational Resources | Dawn Lowe-Wincentsen

VIDEO

OERs (Open Educational Resources) replace expensive course materials with free or low-cost materials. Looser copyright also allows professors to adapt and edit materials, making them fit their course objectives better. Along with costs, Covid-19 and changes to the USPS and shipping priorities are barriers that students currently face when it comes to accessing traditional printed materials. This session is an introduction to Oregon Tech's movement to offer students free or reduced-cost materials. The basics of OER, copyright rules, the options for adopting materials and creating materials, universal design considerations, and more will be discussed.

2:00 - 2:50 | Rockin' the Virtual Classroom: Building an Engaged Community of Student Learners | Laurie Yates

VIDEO

Do you detect a sense of isolation and disconnect among students in your virtual classes? Does the learning experience lack engagement and energy? Too often our online venues seek to imitate live classroom experiences using passive technology. We recognize that the loss of traditional forms of communication, both verbal and nonverbal, presents challenges that are much less problematic in a synchronous, in-person venue. Different challenges call for different solutions. This session will emphasize a collaboration of ideas and practices that instructors can adopt to overcome these challenges, with a focus on engagement. It is not a forum designed for “techies,” but instead, a sharing of ideas and tools that can easily be learned and adapted to any teaching environment, whether online, hybrid, or live. The end result can be an engaged, lively, and spirited learning community; one in which both student and teacher thrive.

3: 30 - 4:20 | Accessibility = Winner, Winner Chicken Dinner! | Christine Ward

VIDEO

Creating an accessible course in Canvas is not as hard as you might think. Universal Design embraces the way learners are engaged in learning and addresses the accessibility of materials, tools, and practices. This session will provide an overview of the guiding principles of Universal Design and highlight a wealth of resources to help faculty recognize ways that instruction, materials, and environments can be optimized for all learners. This win-win approach will make everyone hungry for more!

Tuesday, September 15th

11:00 - 11:50 | Student Panel: Perspectives on Student Learning | Hosted by Sharon Beaudry

VIDEO

Most of us had to make significant changes to our pedagogy on very short notice going into spring term. We made these changes in the hope of achieving a balance of effectiveness and accessibility that would benefit our students in the face of truly unique circumstances. There has already been much formal and informal discussion of what worked and what didn't among our faculty. But what did spring term look like from our students' perspective? What remote teaching practices helped them learn? What practices were perhaps less than helpful? Were there ways in which remote teaching made for a better "classroom" experience? What things would they have changed about the remote learning experience? In this panel, a diverse group of Oregon Tech students will speak to their experiences of spring term 2020, so that we faculty can better understand how to continue to provide them with a quality learning experience in this forever-changed educational landscape.

12:30 - 1:30 | Poster Session

Join us for the ever-popular CCT poster session in the new virtual format. This session will feature your colleagues presenting a host of topics tied to teaching and learning. Posters include work on teaching techniques, cross-disciplinary collaborations, research on teaching, and teamwork best practices. Poster presenters will share their work in a digital poster via Zoom.

2:00 - 2:50 | Book Discussion - Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? by Michael Sandel | Jessie Kinder, Terri Torres & Yasha Rohwer

VIDEO

What exactly is the right thing to do? This is a harder question than you might think, and the answer is often, "It depends." In this session, we will explore different ways to address complex questions we face in our world today as we discuss Justice. Author Michael Sandel is a highly regarded professor at Harvard, where his "Justice" course is one of the most influential and popular. Dr. Yasha Rohwer, our own resident expert on ethics and political philosophy, will join us as we discuss the book and how we can apply it inside and outside of the classroom.

3: 30 - 4:20 | Quality Teaching for Online & Remote Learning Environments | CJ Riley & Jesse Kinder

VIDEO

It is often said that while college professors are experts in their field, most of us learned how to teach by being thrown in the deep end. We often revert to methods that we observed as students, which might fall short in meeting the needs of today's learners. In this session, we will review the foundational principles of quality teaching as described in the Oregon Tech Excellence in Teaching Model. We will also share how these principles can be applied in any environment to meet the needs of our students, evoke intellectual excitement, and develop interpersonal rapport.