Teaching and Learning at Vol State

Differentiated Instruction in an Online College Classroom Differentiated Instruction: Providing students opportunities to learn content using different resources, employing varied strategies, and/or allowing students to demonstrate their learning in different ways based on their individual learning needs and interests. --Natalie Milman, Differentiating Instruction in Online Environments Are we still thinking about differentiated instruction now that we're online? It's a core instructional principle that we all believe in, but in an overwhelming race to digital learning, it can easily be pushed to the side in a to-do-later-pile by even the very best and the brightest. How can we make an online learning environment engaging for our students while maintaining the integrity of the academic content and without further complicating the process? Creating an engaging course is as easy as focusing on the 3 main principles: Course Clarity, Student Communication, and Timely Student Feedba...

Almost all disciplines have long-standing traditions within their field that are the most widely accepted methods of conveying information to students. In a few specific traditional lecture courses, particularly Art History lectures, there is usually little room for discussion. Instead, there is one room, one projector, and an onslaught of slides and images all shown in the dark which only helps to create a comfortable environment for students to drift off and wake up suddenly when the light switch is abruptly flipped at the end of class. In addition to this issue, there have been many concerns as to how those images are chosen, how the information is presented, and which parts of the art history timeline are given more attention than others. This seems to be of importance for many areas of study, however these issues came to light for me through teaching Art History. Hip Pendant Representing an Iyoba Queen (‘Queen Mother’). 16th century. Nigeria, Court of Benin, Edo culture. (Metrop...

This past August faculty members from VSCC attended the University of Wisconsin’s Distance Education Teaching and Learning Conference. Like so many other conferences being held during the time of the pandemic, this four-day teleconference offered a large variety of online sessions, interactive and streaming, focused on the how to best meet college students’ needs to help them be successful during these challenging times. One of the most refreshing and valuable aspects of this year’s conference was the focus on how online higher education and educators are working hard to meet the moment of our current national situation. Not only did keynote addresses and session discussions center on the challenges of distance education during the pandemic, but also many discussed the ways to create antiracist curriculum as we address concerns voiced by the Black Lives Matters Movement. The keynote speaker, Dr. Newton Miller, focused on how faculty can connect real-world issues to our teaching, remin...