OFD Newsletter: April 13, 2020

Three Ways to Support Students During COVID-19 Remote Instruction

• Tuesday, April 21, 9:30-10:30 a.m. on Zoom (REGISTER)
• Wednesday, April 22, 3:00-4:00 p.m. on Zoom (REGISTER)
• Presenter: Thomas J. Tobin, PhD, MSLS, PMP, MOT, CPACC

The Office of Faculty Development is pleased to once again partner with our keynote speaker from the 2020 Teaching and Learning Symposium, Dr. Thomas J. Tobin, for a session on how to support students during this period of remote instruction. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we moved our face-to-face courses to remote instruction—in a hurry and with “good enough” as our benchmark.

As we prepare for fully-remote summer sessions, we must find ways to interact with our students that:

1. Support their continued learning,
2. Show compassion & flexibility for their varied circumstances, and
3. Fit within our existing time and prep demands.

This webinar will share three low-effort do-them-right-now techniques for remote instruction that will reduce student anxiety and pressure, reduce your own instructor frustrations, and allow you to focus on the interactions that you want to have with your students.

We will discuss three new-normal practices for:

• Assessment techniques: testing, grades, and feedback;
• Access to materials, interactions, and people (in the course and beyond); and
• Equitable and inclusive practices that honor your students’ circumstances.

Bring your questions and ideas, too: most of the webinar time will be devoted to an open ask-the-expert format where you can get help with your own specific challenges and plans. Even if you are unable to attend for the full hour, feel free to register and join briefly to ask Dr. Tobin a question!

Transforming Graphs Into Accessible Data Visualizations

• May 7, 2:00 p.m. on Zoom (REGISTER)
• Sponsored by OIT

Graphs on Web pages are difficult to make accessible, much less actually useful for people with disabilities. Usually the best that can be accomplished is providing a short phrase describing the graph, or a dump of the data is given to let the user wade through it and try to make sense of it.

Using freely available software from SAS, anyone can create alternative presentations of graphs so that users with visual impairments can fully explore and understand data visualizations. In this Webinar Greg Krauss from SAS will walk you through how SAS Graphics Accelerator can be used to create accessible data visualizations using CSV files or HTML tables representing the data in the original graph.

Recent Posts on Faculty Forum

Check out some recent posts on OFD’s blog, Faculty Forum:

• Do You Really Need a Proctored Exam?: An Invitation to Rethink Assessment
• Teaching the Skill of Well-Being To Students

Upcoming OFD Events

Monday, April 13

• Mindful Monday, 12:00 p.m.

Monday, April 21

• Mindful Monday, 9:00 a.m.
• Mindful Monday, 12:00 p.m.