From living rooms and campus offices, more than 200 attended the fall Teaching and Learning Symposium hosted by the Center for Transformative Teaching and the Executive Vice Chancellor's Office. This semester’s symposium was conducted online for the first time and featured online teaching expert and guest speaker Jesse Stommel, Digital Learning Fellow and Senior Lecturer of Digital Studies at the University of Mary Washington.
Stommel kicked off the symposium with his keynote, Start by Trusting Students: Active Learning and Inclusive Pedagogies in Moments of Crisis.
"There has been much talk over the last several months about maintaining continuity of instruction and assessment, but less discussion about how we maintain the communities at the heart of our educational institutions,” Stommel said. “That is the design challenge before us.”
Stommel, who has been teaching in higher education since 1999, began teaching online in 2006. Initially, he couldn’t stand teaching online but learned to love it in 2012.
“I kept teaching online because of the opportunity to work with students who desperately needed education,” Stommel said.
Stommel spoke at length of the many problems that are facing students today when it comes to learning synchronously or asynchronously and that there’s not always a “one-size-fits-all practice” for building a learning community.
“We have to start by finding out who our students are, what they need to be successful, and how our institutional mission does, and sometimes doesn’t, align with our practices,” Stommel said.
Following the keynote speech, Stommel and Nick Monk, director of the Center for Transformative Teaching, held a townhall style meeting and reviewed some of the most asked questions that revolved around three many categories: engagement, equity, and technology.
Faculty members joined the conversation with further questions and personal experiences that lead to a rousing discussion about education today.
The symposium ended with Stommel’s workshop Building Community in Online Hybrid Courses, which explored practical solutions for building inclusive learning communities online.
“I thought our dynamic and thoughtful guest [Stommel] opened a space for us to reflect on our pedagogy in refreshingly different ways and generated ideas that will sustain us well beyond the event itself,” Monk said.
Also included in the symposium were poster sessions from one dozen UNL faculty members, which gave an overview of different teaching methods that can be synchronously and asynchronously used.
The symposium sessions, along with the poster sessions, are available online.
The Teaching and Learning Symposium provides an opportunity for faculty to engage in conversations about teaching and learning and to hear from experts on emerging issues. The next symposium will be held in February.
More details at: https://go.unl.edu/symposiumsessions