FTTC 2024: Focus on Teaching and Technology Conference

You may have been teaching online for a while, or perhaps you're teaching online for the first time! Bring your own coffee (or beverage of choice) and join me for an engaging session to demystify U.S. Department of Education's Regular & Substantive Interaction (RSI) and attendance-taking requirements for online courses. By the end of the session, instructors, developers, and program leaders will be able to identify two or more methods by which your online course likely ALREADY satisfies current, and possibly future, federal regulatory requirements.

This session showcases an in-class activity using GoogleSheets (that can occur in person or virtually) where students compete against ChatGPT for who can write the best first line to an argumentative essay. The rationale for using gamification to introduce students to the boons and pitfalls of artificial intelligence in a flipped classroom format will be discussed, along with the inclusivity and accessibility—for both types of learners and faculty across disciplines—of the activity.  

Learn about the steps and challenges involved in piloting an open access repository for assignments that challenge students to use AI in intellectually rigorous ways. Whether you’re new to generative AI or a seasoned ChatGPT user, this session will give you the tools to facilitate peer-to-peer sharing of faculty-generated and reviewed teaching activities at your institution. Ask questions and discuss potential difficulties with an interdisciplinary team of presenters, including a graduate instructor and fellow at WashU’s CTL, an award-winning professor and director of the CTL, and an experienced academic librarian and expert in digital publishing and repository services.

In this session, the presenters will describe the experience of adopting an open educational resource for a course, the motivation to adapt that open educational resource, and the steps they took to manage an OER adaptation project . The participants will be engaged with prompting questions and conversation points during each section of the presentation, and they will be given time to brainstorm and discuss the challenges, motivations, tools, and support they have at their own campuses to take on similar projects.

While “lunch and learns” and in-person and synchronous online faculty workshops still exist and serve a distinct purpose in building communities of practice in higher education, more and more faculty development happens when instructors are online, on their own time. This six-person, interactive panel seeks to explore how and why we design asynchronous faculty development opportunities for instructors at Missouri Online and Washington University in St. Louis and to share with others what we’re learning along the way.  

This faculty panel session features award-winning faculty from FTTC sponsoring institutions who offer insights and practical examples to illustrate low-tech and high-tech ways to hold students' attention and focus on learning.

Sessions Moderators: Kella Thornton and Lindsay Meador, Washington University in St. Louis

Panelists include award-winning faculty from the following institutions:

University of Missouri--St. Louis: Zac Cairns, Associate Professor, Department of Music, College of Arts & Sciences
Washington University in St. Louis: Katie Brown, Director, English Language Programs
McKendree University: Brian Frederking, Professor of Political Science
St Charles Community College: Amanda Turner, Assistant Professor of Nursing
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville: Adriana "Didi" Martinez, Professor of Geography