LVAIC Seminar on Educational Technology, Campus Culture, and the Roadblocks to Innovation

May 21, 2018, @ 8:00 AM

Keynote speaker Lauren Herckis, PhD., addresses the group of faculty and staff participants at the LVAIC Seminar on Educational Technology, Campus Culture, and the Roadblocks to Innovation on May 17, 2018 at Lafayette College.

The LVAIC Teagle Blended Learning Grant presented a seminar on Thursday, May 17, 2018 at Lafayette College on Educational Technology, Campus Culture, and the Roadblocks to Innovation to showcase the efforts and challenges on hybrid teaching and learning. This event featured keynote speaker Lauren Herckis, Ph.D., Simon Initiative Research Faculty, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, School of Computer Science, Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Herckis also facilitated the workshop following the keynote.

Herckis’ address focused on her year-long study of four faculty projects regarding hybrid teaching and learning. Each stage of her research focused on the challenges she encountered, which affect most faculty and staff when facing changes in their curriculum during the transition to a flipped classroom. These difficulties included pieces of both physical challenges, such as campus leadership deciding to phase out different technological tools that faculty are still utilizing to teach their courses, and emotional challenges, such as shying away from potential embarrassment in the chance that the faculty member will not know how to operate different technologies in front of a classroom of students. Faculty may also fear that major changes to flipping their classrooms will result in more inconvenient situations for students while “working out the kinks” in the transition; students will thereby share more negative feedback in course evaluations at the end of the semester that could potentially jeopardize promotion and tenure opportunities.

Following this address, Herckis allowed attendees to work independently and in groups to analyze and address solving some of these challenges. Participants were asked such questions as to what the top objections are for their personal course transitions, whether from a faculty or staff perspective; they were also asked to work through potential answers to these questions with other participants in the session. Throughout this process, attendees not only had the opportunity to focus on proactive solutions to these roadblocks, but also had the chance to network with other faculty and staff facing the same or similar obstacles across the LVAIC community.

“This workshop was truly a showcase of the work that the LVAIC Teagle Hybrid Learning grant has been realizing over the past three years,” explains LVAIC Teagle Project Manager, Jennifer Rao. “Faculty and staff both face major obstacles when transitioning to hybrid classrooms, and working together to overcome these challenges is what makes courses successful learning environments for students and productive spaces for all members of campus.”

This is the final year of the three-year LVAIC Teagle Hybrid Learning grant. For more information on the LVAIC Teagle Hybrid Learning grant, please visit the Teagle page of the LVAIC website.