Welcome to SITT Week 2020!

Dear Faculty Colleagues,

I’m writing to remind you that today marks the beginning of SITT week. The SITT team and I are hoping that you can participate in as many of our synchronous Zoom sessions on Wednesday and Thursday morning as you can, and then the wrap-up session Friday at noon. Each of them requires separate registration, so, if you haven’t already done so, please register now your intent to join us at the individual sessions.

Our Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology has five parts this summer, all of which I hope will appeal to you.

• Faculty have been scripting and recording presentations on a variety of teaching topics, all of them available today at the Recorded Events page. We hope you will be intrigued by both the high caliber of the presenters, and by the highly relevant talk titles, including “Effective Instructor Presence in Online Courses,” “Engaging Students and Building Community in Virtual Office Hours,” and “Configuring Canvas for Clarity.” Because of the useful content that may come up in conversation during the synchronous sessions, I encourage you to review these resources before the synchronous SITT sessions start Wednesday.
• This month I have recorded about a dozen interviews with faculty colleagues on teaching and technology, all of them also available at the Recorded Events page. A new format for 2020, these Zoom chats covered topics such as “Instructional Choices and Modifications: Video, Assessment, and Engagement,” “Tools and Metrics for Interactive Feedback and Skill Development,” and “Building a Sense of Community: Field Activities at a Distance.” Less formal than a presentation, these conversations allow room for senses of humor and discovery: I think you will enjoy them.
• The SITT Live Events start 9 AM Wednesday morning, July 22^nd, with a keynote by Distinguished Professor of Spanish Robert Blake, author of the book Brave New Digital Classroom, the third edition of which was published in 2019. After you review the schedule of Wednesday and Thursday morning presentations, please register separately for all the ones you can attend, for each live event has its own Zoom room. Please sign in to the live events a few minutes early so we can start right on time.
• SITT registrants will have opportunities for discussion at the end of each synchronous presentation, as well as at three different debriefs (Wednesday at 1, and Thursday and Friday at noon), where topics raised by the recorded presentations and interviews will also be reviewed. Please register for these separately at the Live Events page, and plan to join us.
• Finally, we hope the Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology will inform your future remote teaching decisions, spurring innovation this fall, in 2021, and beyond. If you are inspired by what you see and hear at SITT this year, please also propose your own short talk for a DOLCE presentation, or a topic for a faculty forum, in the coming school year. Please email me at aojones@ucdavis.edu with your proposals.

As your MC for SITT, I look forward to meeting all SITT participants virtually this week. Our lead instructional designers, Mark Wilson and Margaret Merrill, will also be on hand to answer questions at every session, including those asked of speakers via chat. I know of at least two people who will be live-tweeting SITT, using the hashtag #UCDavisSITT, so please also participate in that conversation.

On behalf of the entire team at ATS, and the advisory committee, I thank you for joining us for the 2020 Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology. See you Wednesday morning!

Andy

Dr. Andy Jones Academic Associate Director, Academic Technology Services Master of Ceremonies, The Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology UC Davis