Faculty Commons Newsletter | October Edition

10 MINUTE TUNE UP

Things you can do in 10 minutes or less to improve your course.

• Try a community-building exercise to help students connect before midterms hit. Check out these great, easy to implement suggestions. You’ll want to start by considering how to incorporate these exercises with respect and safety as your priority.
• If you’ve been assigning and evaluating student writing this semester, the Director of the University of Delaware Writing Center has some suggestions and resources to support your online writing instruction.
• Make time to review your mid-semester feedback and make a plan to discuss it with your students. If you polled your students on how they were doing in your course, you will want to communicate with them about your plan to address that feedback.
• Remind students about the value of office hours, or even just brief email check-ins. Maintaining connections during the stress of midterms is an important way to ensure students are getting the support they need.
• Reconnect with your own community of educators by joining in a virtual event listed below!

NEED A BREAK?

Social Studies Education and ATS

Check out how Newark and AAP-Dover students enrolled in HIST316, Civic Engagement in America, used Zoom to mobilize and transform their interactions with middle school and high school students during the pandemic.

Continue reading.

Guess whose pet this is!

We’ve polled our partners and asked them to share their pets with us. Can you tell whose pet this is?

Say hello to Brody and Toshi!
Answer.

BEFORE YOU GO

Save the date: Winter Institute on Learning 2021

The Winter Institute on Learning returns, virtually! Save-the-date for workshops to help faculty develop or refine (a) academic program educational goals and (b) a sustainable and meaningful assessment plan for those goals.

Learn more about the program.

Save your content

Don’t forget to save any recordings saved to the Zoom cloud before November 2.

See what actions you need to take.

Syllabus template updates

CTAL’s syllabus template has been updated to include important information about Canvas’s default grading scheme.

Learn more about the updates.

Formal mentoring at UD

Hey UD faculty, interested in mentoring opportunities?

Learn more about the faculty mentoring program.

Upcoming closures

ATS and the Faculty Commons Virtual Welcome Bar will be closed:

• Nov. 23 – Nov. 27
• Dec. 21 – Jan. 1

Winter Course Materials

Need course materials for your winter course(s) that are afforadable and available? The UD Library, Museums and Press can help!

See their recommendations and get support.

Poll Everywhere

An alternative to Zoom polls or iClickers, Poll Everywhere is an online polling platform that collects real-time responses using any device with internet access.

Learn more about this tool.

November 6: “If I had known”: Education, Performance, Activism

If I Had Known is a virtual symposium dedicated to the multifaceted legacy of teacher, writer, poet, and activist, Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935). The University of Delaware Library currently houses Dunbar-Nelson’s personal papers, which stands as one of the most actively used collections among its holdings.

Learn more about this special event.