The CTE is offering a variety of workshops and brown bag sessions during March. Workshops are an opportunity for faculty to both explore topics and share practices across disciplines. Our Friday Brown Bags provide an opportunity for a more informal conversation to take place between faculty on subjects of topical interest.

Read more below about our March workshops in the areas of Learning-Centered Teaching, Enhancing Teaching with Technology, and Teaching with Blackboard, as well as our upcoming Brown Bags.

For more information and registration, check out our CTE Workshop Calendar.

The CTE is highlighting some of the final reports from our Small Grant Program, 2007-2008. The Small Grant Program supports faculty in their efforts to improve teaching; reports from the participants are due in August, at the conclusion of the grant cycle.

This report comes from Dixie Bowman in the Department of Physical Therapy, School of Allied Health Professions. The aims of her project were to bring a standard patient program to the Physical Therapy Department and increase collaboration between that department, the School of Medicine, and the Eastern Virginia Medical School’s Theresa A. Thomas Professional Skills Teaching and Assessment Center. The standardized patients were used to assess student physical therapists’ skill performance and clinical decision-making ability.

You can find her report here.

The participatory web has allowed groups with common interests to organize and collaborate in ways that were not possible just five years ago.

In this episode, Dr. Jonathon Becker, professor of Educational Leadership in the VCU School of Education, is joined by Jeff Nugent, Bud Deihl and Britt Watwood of the VCU Center for Teaching Excellence. Jon and Jeff share their perspectives surrounding their attendance at EduCon 2.1, a "conference" organized and run by teachers and students without a supporting national professional organization. Jon attended physically and presented, while Jeff attended from his home on a weekend via streaming video and social media. It provided a rich example of networked learning and formed the basis for subsequent discussion into the changing nature of professional development...and learning.

Show Notes
Links mentioned during the podcast:

EduCon 2.1 - Conference wiki

K12Online Conference - Conference website and links to presentations

Shirky, Clay (2008) - Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Malcolm Gladwell's TED Talk - What we can learn from spaghetti sauce

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As faculty continue to explore ways to take advantage of the learning opportunities afforded by the participatory web, they face new challenges about how to assess student learning in a context that values collaboration and shared knowledge building.

In this episode, Dr. Kathryn Murphy-Judy, professor of French in the VCU School of World Studies, is joined by Britt Watwood, Bud Deihl and Jeff Nugent of the VCU Center for Teaching Excellence. Together they discuss changes they have implemented in their classes using wikis, blogs and other forms of social media. While they acknowledge the learning potential of these new tools and practices, they also share their challenges in working with students in these spaces, and in assessing individual student learning in new collaborative contexts.

Show Notes
Links mentioned during the podcast:

Britt Watwood's blog - Learning in a Flat World

Tagg, J. (2007) - The Learning Paradigm College

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The New Media Consortium in collaboration with EDUCAUSE, recently released the 2009 Horizon Report. Now in its sixth consecutive year, the annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the NMC’s Horizon Project, a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education.

Each year, the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years. You can download a copy of the 2009 report here.