OFD Newsletter: April 27, 2020

April 27, 2020 jphollow 4-min. read

OFD Office Hours

Are you contemplating:

How to create more authentic assessments?;
How to align your objectives with your assessments?;
How to create group assignments and assessments?; or
How to make time for yourself?

If you have any questions about remote instruction or other faculty work and are looking to chat, we invite you to schedule an OFD Office hour.

Dr. Diane Chapman, OFD Executive Director will be available for OFD Office hours using this link: https://calendly.com/dianechapman Dr. Chapman has over 20 years of online teaching experience and is an expert in instructional desi.gn and evaluation.

Come with your questions and concerns about remote teaching, course design, assessment or any topic related to your faculty work. If you want to talk, but don’t have a specific need or if you just want a sounding board, that’s fine too. Meeting options are available for 15-minute, 30-minute, or 1-hour increments.

We want to make the expertise in the Office of Faculty Development even more accessible to all faculty, and while we may not have all the answers, we can get you pointed in a direction to get your questions addressed.

NC State Captioning Grant

NC State has established a Captioning Grant to assist faculty in creating captions for videos.

The grant provides funding for captioning video when:

A student with a disability requiring this accommodation registers in a course using video, or
An instructor wants to proactively create captions for a video.

To apply for the grant, faculty should complete the Captioning Grant Application Form.

Please contact accessibility@ncsu.edu if you have any questions.

Bandwidth Depletion and Recovery in COVID-19 Remote Learning

Tuesday, April 28, 9:30-10:30 a.m. on Zoom (REGISTER)
Wednesday, April 29, 3:00-4:00 p.m. on Zoom (REGISTER)
Presenter: Cia Verschelden, MSW, EdD

Each of us has a finite amount of mental bandwidth – attentional resources – for all the tasks in our lives. The realities of this public health crisis distract all of us and threaten our ability to concentrate our cognitive resources on school and work. These are uncertain times and uncertainty is a huge bandwidth stealer.

Although people from all walks of life, social classes, and identities have contracted COVID-19, the devastating effects of both the illness and the shutdown of much economic activity have disproportionately affected people of color and those living in poverty. Our students – and some of their instructors – have been challenged to find the cognitive capacity to focus on their courses and their learning.

For many of us, stay-at-home orders meant that we could shelter where we were safe. We could do our work from home and continue to get paychecks and be able to pay our bills and feed ourselves and our families.

For many of our students (and possibly some of our staff, including part-time instructors), the stay at home order may have meant:

Loss of hourly wages
No breakfast and lunch programs for school children
The extreme stress of being confined at home in neighborhoods where it’s not safe to be outside
Added responsibilities of childcare and home-schooling with few resources
Illness and threat of illness with inadequate or no health insurance
Dependence on public transportation where social distancing is compromised
Lack of the technology needed to keep up with classes transitioned to online

And all this in addition to the everyday bandwidth depletion from poverty, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other social realities.

To help students recover a bit of bandwidth for learning, we need to acknowledge that the regular learning challenges that were already unequal are now even more so. When students are fearful and uncertain, the bandwidth available for learning is severely limited. In this webinar, we will discuss several strategies that can be used in classrooms and by the university in support of students to increase certainty and help students recover bandwidth.