Learning Design Newsletter

Volume 2, Issue 25 | March 26, 2020

Our Mission

We champion excellent teaching and build connected community to promote meaningful learning.

Center for Teaching and Learning

Greetings, fellow faculty. I hope everyone is getting settled into the new exclusively online routine and panic-mode is beginning to subside.

We’ve all got a lot of work to juggle, but if you’d like to take a few minutes off from classwork here are a few faculty voices on handling this unprecedented situation.

Community In A Time of COVID-19 addresses the importance of communication and community while social distancing.

In “ Please do a bad job of putting your courses online ,” Rebecca Barrett-Fox reminds us that our classes are not going to be the highest priority for many of our students, and we should also cut ourselves some slack.

In Teaching in the New Normal, we’re reminded that we focus on the minutia because that’s what we can control and offered some different perspectives on what is and is not important when teaching during a crisis.

The CTL will continue collecting resources via the Online Resources for Faculty form, and those resources will always be available in the spreadsheet. The form and the spreadsheet are also linked in the COVID-19 Instructional Technology Resources document.

As always, the CTL is open to suggestions and queries.

Take care, everyone.

CTL Advisory Board:

Faculty Chair: Julie Dillon

ASE: Gloria Johnson

ASE: Joey Cook

BETS: Ricky Swing

Davie: Dee Edwards

Office of Learning Design: David Whitehead

Faculty Cafe

Digital Media Production Posters for Farmer's Market

Digital Media Production instructor Jeffrey Pubantz speaks at the unveiling of the posters.

Digital Medial Production Instructor Jeffrey Pubantz

On March 5 ^th, Jeffrey Pubantz’s Digital Media Production students presented advertisement posters for this year’s Lexington Farmer’s Market. The posters are capstone projects for the students, and this year there were 7 who completed the project. The students from this year’s class were Elijah Toney, Sara Winsmith, Caleb Kluttz, Jeffrey Fletcher, Camryn Cottrell, John Pettit, and Kaitlyn Brooks.

During the open class, they discussed their poster from the earliest moments of inspiration to the finished product. Each poster was unique, and artistically pleasing, making the decision as to which to choose to represent the Farmer’s Market a difficult one. To help give the audience a view of how the posters would look in shop windows, students took pictures of their posters in Uptown Lexington stores, and they all displayed well.

Read about the winning poster in the Faculty Cafe .

Google Calendar Tip

Virtual Office Hours

Want to set up virtual office hours that students can access every week from the same link? It's as easy as setting up a regular meeting in your Google Calendar. Learn how in the Create Recurring Virtual Office Hours video .

VidGrid Captioning

Are you using VidGrid for your course videos? Do you know how easy it is to caption videos in VidGrid? Check out Adding Video Captions to find out. Just a note--the video shows two options: Machine or Professional captioning. For your videos, choose Machine Captioning. It's remarkably accurate, even for David Whitehead's South Carolina accent.

Editing captions for the occasional inaccuracies or technical terms is also very easy. The Editing Your Captions video shows you how.

Remember that captions and transcripts are used by many more viewers than just those with hearing impairments. Students who need to work in a quiet environment, whose first language is not English, and who may need help with technical terms find captions very helpful. Many students use transcripts of instructional videos as study guides.

Need additional help? Submit a request through the Faculty Help Request Form .

Home Offices

Christie Bundy shares an office with her cat .

Send us your office pictures!

Many faculty have had to create make-shift offices over the past couple of weeks. Pets are often less than pleased. Please share your own pictures of your office space, and look at the pictures of others. Look for the "Add to Album" icon to upload your own home office picture. We've already got a few in our album and would love to see yours!

Got a great teaching idea, tip/trick or tool you use?

Please share it with us and we'll feature it in the newsletter!

Resources

COVID-19 Instructional Tech Resources

Spreadsheet for Faculty Resources

We Want To Hear From You!!

If you have ideas for our next issue, please contact anyone from our team.

Suggest a faculty to spotlight
Share a favorite course design or teaching technique
Showcase a favorite instructional strategy/tool

The Office of Learning Design Team

Office of Learning Design, located in Briggs 225