2024 Innovations in Teaching and Learning Conference

OD Resource 9 - Building Bridges, Not Barriers - Sanja Avramovic, Abdul Hafeez

Topic: Building Bridges, Not Barriers: Tailoring Instruction for Diverse Learners in Health Informatics. Health informatics classrooms often embrace diverse learners. Traditional instructional methods can leave some students behind. This session explores a dynamic teaching approach presenting strategies like tiered explanations, real-life examples, varied assessments, and peer-led instruction, all aimed at promoting student success regardless of background or learning style.

Audience: Health informatics classrooms often embrace diverse learners, including traditional but also contemporary students: transfer students, active-duty military personnel, veterans, international students, returning parents, and career-changers. While this diversity fosters a vibrant learning environment, traditional instructional methods can inadvertently leave some students feeling discouraged and unsupported. The presentation will explore different strategies designed and tested in Health Informatics class to bridge learning gaps and empower all students to thrive. Our strategies include: Tiered Explanations, Real-World Applications, Differentiated Assessments, Peer-Led Learning, Self-Reflection and Improvement, and Use of Generative AI for teaching and auto-grading.​​​​

Takeaway:
Participants will be able to articulate the challenges faced by diverse learners in health informatics education.
Participants will be able to design and implement differentiated instructional strategies, such as tiered explanations and real-world applications, to cater to varying learning styles and backgrounds.
Participants will be able to develop and utilize diverse assessment methods, such as peer-led tutorials and interactive discussion boards, to effectively evaluate student learning and promote student-to-student support.
Participants will be able to incorporate peer-led learning activities, such as ""teaching videos,"" into their curriculum to foster collaboration and deepen student understanding.
Participants will develop a plan for implementing one or more differentiated instruction strategies in their own teaching practice to create a more inclusive learning environment for all students.
Participants will provide feedback to the instructors to ensure the effectiveness of the instructional strategies and that the efforts of inclusion and diversity are ongoing and responsive to the changing needs.
Participants will appreciate the use of generative AI for personalized learning and instant feedback through auto-grading for an accelerated learning trajectory.

Content Based Rubrics - Chelseann Christopher: https://osf.io/yutnw/

The included artifact is an example of a content based rubric that was created to align to a paper assignment for an early childhood education class. Content based rubrics provide many benefits for both educators and students. Students are able to easily glean the expectations for their work when using this type of rubric, thus lowering their anxiety and increasing the likelihood that assignments will be completed to the appropriate expectations of higher education. Additionally, students are able to easily discern areas of improvement once an assignment has been graded, thus allowing for more specific feedback that does not require the explicit commentary of the educator. Content based rubrics allow educators to objectively evaluate the content of student work, ensuring that students are receiving equitable and fair grading practices. By aligning these rubrics closely to syllabi assignment guidelines, educators are able to ensure student success by eliminating the stress of open ended prompts and providing scaffolded support to guide learning outcomes and products. These rubrics afford less intensive grading time, as they can be embedded in Blackboard and focus on the content of the work, not the quality of the writing. All disciplines, modalities, and levels would benefit from this session. Attendees will be able to view an example of this type of rubric, as well as the original syllabi description, and Blackboard embedded example so that they are able to recreate this for their own classes. ​​​​

OD Resource 6 - DEI Resources in Transdisciplinary Context - Kimberlie Fair

Mason Korea provides a unique interdisciplinary teaching and learning environment for faculty to regularly interact with other faculty outside of their disciplines on issues of student engagement and success. This collaborative interdisciplinary environment creates an opportunity for faculty to exchange effective strategies for integrating DEI principles into classroom practices among faculty members from diverse academic backgrounds. This session will showcase the impact of sharing Anti-Racist Inclusive Teaching (ARIT) resources from faculty members across various academic programs and disciplines. Drawing from the ARIT initiatives that five ARIE faculty members representing multiple disciplines, including Business, History, Computational and Data Sciences, English for Academic Purposes, and Sociology, the session will illustrate how these initiatives have facilitated meaningful conversations among program coordinators from various academic programs and have normalized these practices for many faculty members across the campus. It is expected that the demonstration of these cross-disciplinary teaching resources will broaden instructors’ understanding of DEI, sensitizing them to the diverse needs of multilingual and multicultural students, and refine their approaches to inclusive teaching. Moreover, this session aims to provide valuable insight into inclusive teaching practices for full-time faculty engaging in an interdisciplinary program or faculty representing diverse disciplines within and across academic units/departments. By showcasing concrete examples of how faculty members across disciplines have integrated DEI into substantive active learning and pedagogical strategies, the audience will gain practical knowledge to cultivate their own teaching practices.    

On Demand Resource 1 - GenAI for Multilingual Composition Students 
Link: https://osf.io/f5z2b

Our project involves creating a selection of teaching materials that encourage the ethical use of generative AI (GenAI) models in the instruction of first-year composition to multilingual students. Artifacts include annotated strategies, in-class activities, and prompts, all of which can be adapted by instructors to their specific courses and student levels. The strategies and materials address the challenges and opportunities presented by GenAI in composing research questions, refining thesis statements, focusing broad topics, constructing language revision prompts, and critically analyzing GenAI content.

Audience: This session will be most beneficial for faculty teaching multilingual learners in first-year composition courses, but the resources can be adapted for other research and writing courses across disciplines.

Takeaways: Instructors will be introduced to strategies and materials that address ethical concerns with student use of GenAI for writing. These strategies and materials can be used to understand how to prompt GenAI ethically and effectively to avoid commonalities and foster critical thinking by examining ‘bad examples’.

OD Resource 7 - Idea Tournament Discussion Board - Laurie Meamber

This assignment utilizes the structure of an innovation tournament popular in new product development within a standard LMS text based discussion board. It can also be adapted for use in other discussion board formats, such as video discussion boards. The instruction sheet follows the TILT model, describing the purpose of the assignment in relation to the course – including skills and knowledge, the tasks involved, an example, and the grading rubric. The assignment is broken into two parts – an initial posting and a reply. The initial posting is completed in teams and the reply is individual. The first part of the assignment asks teams to craft a descriptive name for the idea/post, to give a brief description of the idea as connected to potential customer/user for the idea, and statement on the problem the idea solves. The second part asks individuals to view the submissions and to respond to how well the idea addresses a meaningful customer/user need and the opportunity to offer additional comments. Learners practice creative thinking, presenting ideas, and giving and receiving constructive comments. Students also progress towards choosing an idea to carry forward as part of the course project. This type of assignment can be used across a variety of courses and contexts when asking individuals to generate ideas (thoughts, concepts), present them to others, and (give) gather useful feedback in order to further refine them. Attendees can benefit from reflecting on the assignment sheet and how best to adapt it for idea generation in other disciplines.

OD Resource 4 - Programmatic Linguistic Diversity Teaching Initiatives - Courtney Wooton
Links: https://osf.io/za3uj/

This digital poster offers participants interested in programmatic inclusive teaching initiatives an overview of one program’s long-term efforts to support faculty professional development and develop curricular changes.

Mason has the most diverse student population of any four-year college or university in Virginia, with its students coming from over 130 nations and speaking over 80 languages. Linguistic diversity--the diversity of languages and the variations within a language (e.g. Black English, Chicana English, accented English)—is a significant component of our students’ experiences and campus culture. Linguistic justice is an orientation to language that acknowledges that standard language is a myth and that privileging some forms of English over others is tied to the racialization of English speakers’ identities and replicates forms of systemic racial oppression (Lippi-Green 2011; Alim, Rickford, and Ball 2016). Thus, linguistic justice is an important part of inclusive teaching at Mason’s campus and serves as one type of inclusive teaching development that can occur within a program.

The digital poster describes how presenters from Mason’s Composition Program built a scaffolded approach to helping its approximately 100 faculty - term, adjunct, and GTA - engage with linguistic justice scholarship and develop approaches to linguistic diversity that support Mason’s students and their in-progress curriculum revision process building on this work.

OD Resource 8 - Scaffolding intercultural/civic engagement goals - Mika Endo, Sharon Doetsch-Kidder, Mohamed Mohamed
Links: https://osf.io/9gk8c/

These materials are the result of a Curriculum Improvement Grant-funded collaboration between faculty from INTO Mason, CHSS, and Mason Korea. The project aimed:

1) To integrate and align civic engagement and antiracist and inclusive excellence (ARIE) learning goals throughout the Undergraduate Pathways curriculum

2) To redesign key courses to ensure that they suit the linguistic and cultural needs of International Pathways students and direct entry international students at both Fairfax and Mason Korea campuses

We will share a curriculum map of revised Learning Outcomes along with sample assessments and activities tailored to the needs of international and multilingual students. Our redesigned courses help international pathway students engage in campus conversations around racism, equity, and inclusion, and civic life, and develop a sense of belonging to the Mason community.

These materials may be useful for all ranks of instructors redesigning their curricula, course syllabi, and Learning Outcomes to meet the new Global Contexts or Just Societies requirements for Mason Core and any instructors teaching to diverse backgrounds of students in a multi-cultural environment. Viewers will see an example of scaffolded learning outcomes, assessments, and activities related to antiracism and inclusive excellence and civic engagement tailored to culturally diverse students.

OD Resource 10 - Multilingual Students’ Oral Communication in English - Shelby Broberg

This resource is a training module designed to enrich understanding about oral communication of multilingual clients with first languages other than English. This online module is developed for training communication centers’ consultants on the key concepts related to English pronunciation, but can be used by Comm 101 instructors and other faculty who work with multilingual students. Users will gain an informed perspective on accented speech and be introduced to research-based techniques to support the multilingual students they work with in improving the understandability of their English speech. The module includes information, activities, and prompts for reflection on topics such as comprehensibility, accentedness, intelligibility, segmental/suprasegmental features of English pronunciation, and client-consultant interactions for a successful consultation. While the module is designed with multilingual clients in mind, it is helpful for understanding speech by speakers from all linguistic backgrounds to enhance their linguistic skills and verbal delivery. This module has been piloted by communication center consultants and revised for content, accessibility, and audience engagement. It is widely accessible to all educators to provide them with ideas to promote equitable and inclusive education to students from diverse linguistic backgrounds.