Strategies to Improve Student Success and Engagement: A Faculty Workshop Overview

Concurrent Session 9

Session Materials

Brief Abstract

Discover how College of DuPage adjunct English faculty were introduced to concepts of user-experience, community-building, and assignment design through an in-house, grant funded workshop. Find out how we secured and spent the grant and talk to us about how our workshop approach might be applied to your particular faculty development needs.

 

Presenters

Lead Presenter: Jason Snart, College of DuPage

Dr. Jason Snart is Professor of English and Chair of Literature, Creative Writing, and Film at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, IL. He earned his Ph.D from the University of Florida and his research interests include hybrid/blended learning, 1-1/BYOD teaching models, and mobile learning. His books include Making Hybrids Work: An Institutional Framework for Blending Online and Face-to-Face Instruction in Higher Education (NCTE, 2017); Hybrid Learning: The Perils and Promise of Blending Online and Face-to-Face Instruction in Higher Education (Praeger, 2010); and The Torn Book: UnReading William Blake's Marginalia (Susquehanna UP, 2006).

Co-presenter: Timothy Henningsen, College of DuPage

Timothy Henningsen teaches literature, research, & writing at the largest community college in the state of Illinois. His academic training is in transnational literary studies with a focus on Anglophone Caribbean literature, but has taken a keen interest in recent years in the pedagogical effects of 21st century teaching techniques.

Extended Abstract

Session Description

In Spring of 2021 College of DuPage English co-chairs Jason Snart and Timothy Henningsen were awarded an Illinois Community College Faculty Association (ICCFA) grant to develop and conduct a workshop, for adjunct Composition instructors (teaching primarily online), that focused on 3 key concepts: user-experience and user-centered design; building opportunities for multiple presences (teaching, cognitive, and social) in courses; and effective, student-centered assignment design.

We are proposing to share our grant application process, budget management, and of course workshop materials with Discovery session participants. The Discovery session is our preferred format because in addition to sharing out our fairly discipline- and institution-specific approach, we are equally interested to hear from attendees how some of our strategies might be applied in other institutional and disciplinary contexts. So we are not looking just to replicate the workshop itself. Nor are we looking to just report out our work and findings. Instead, we want to expand the possible application of our workshop development and delivery experience.

The grant-funded workshop itself was offered onsite (though with a focus on online instruction) in Spring of 2021 for a single, half-day session. Our time was divided into three key parts: 

Workshop Part 1 - UX/ UCD Principles and Practice

Here we covered some UX / UCD readings and basic principles and did an activity we called “evaluating common web experiences” (using a tool called Padlet). 

The goal here was to surface existing “web design” knowledge and experience that our instructors already had, even if they didn’t know it, in order to improve their own course design strategies and thus to improve their users’ - i.e. their students’ - learning experience.

Next came Workshop Part 2 - Building Community and Opportunities for Presence

With reference to the Community of Inquiry framework we explored the concepts of social, cognitive, and teaching presence. Workshop attendees completed a “Problem-Solution” activity, working in groups to determine a specific “community-building/presence” opportunity they would like to create in their classes (the “Problem”) and doing some research to find appropriate digital tools (the “Solution”) to achieve those goals. We paid special attention to aspects of implementation in our LMS (Blackboard): is the proposed digital tool native to Bb? How/where will you provide students instructions on use? What potential barriers to entry/use might exist (account sign up, limited “free” options)?

And then finally, we tackled assignment design using this basic rubric:

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Assignment Design - Instructor’s Checklist

For each aspect of an assignment, consider whether you are making rhetorical choices or if students are making rhetorical choices:

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Assignment Element      Instructor Mandated      Student Choice

Audience

Genre

Subject/Topic

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(The actual checklist/rubric does not translate so well in this text editor, so it's a little more robust and professional than what is represented here.)

We challenged workshop attendees to take any one of their assignments and consider what aspects of that assignment were mandated, or constrained, by the instructor (and to what degree) and what was left to student choice. We prompted attendees to revisit assignments that offered limited student choice and work towards greater student autonomy and decision-making.

So again, our goal is not to reproduce the workshop for an OLC crowd, but instead to share elements of our approach and talk through, one-on-one, what implementation might look like for other institutions and other disciplines.

This will hopefully give attendees ideas to take back to their home institutions but of course it ideally gives us ideas for possible implementation in other departments at the College of Dupage. Win-win!

As part of our Discovery session we will have handouts for attendees and of course provide access to the workshop itself (including behind the scenes grant material, if attendees are interested). We also have post-workshop survey data from participants to share as well.