The November DOLCE Video Recording is Now Available!

Dear Faculty Colleagues, 

Thanks to so many of you for joining us at our November DOLCE (Discussing Online Learning & Collaborative Education) titled, “Active Learning, Gamification and Content Mastery, and Multimedia Textbooks.” We enjoyed presentations from three faculty speakers: Dr. Dina Zhabinskaya, Lecturer in the Department of Physics; Dr. James Carey, Distinguished Professor of Entomology from the Department of Entomology and Nematology; and Dr. Arnold J. Bloom, Distinguished Professor and John B. Orr Endowed Professor in the Department of Plant Sciences. The DOLCE video recording is now available for your review.

Our three faculty speakers discussed creative modifications to course designs, instructional activities, and educational materials in order to engage and support students in remote learning environments. Dr. Dina Zhabinskaya from the Physics Department introduced DOLCE attendees to Physics 7, a one-year introductory and laboratory physics course intended for students majoring in the biological sciences. Dr. Zhabinskaya shared strategies and technologies leveraged by her teaching team in meeting the course goals in a remote setting, which include preserving the active learning environment, covering similar content and hands-on activities, encouraging academic integrity, and promoting equity and inclusivity in the course. 

Dr. James Carey leveraged gamification to offer bonus points that incentivize students to develop further mastery of a subject or skill, such as the real-world skill of formatting documents and tables, and provide opportunities for students to work towards a higher grade. 

Finally, Dr. Arnold J. Bloom from the Department of Plant Sciences reflected on the connections between his hybrid and online teaching and over a decade of experiences developing and updating a transdisciplinary, multimedia textbook to support a wide range of instructors teaching climate change and address the limitations of physical textbooks.

For more opportunities to meet with faculty colleagues to discuss teaching and technology, register and mark your calendars for these upcoming events. Plan to join us this Friday the 20th at 10:30am PST for a PlayPosit webinar titled, “Getting Started with the PlayPosit Analytics Monitor.” On that same day at 12pm PST, faculty will participate in the November Faculty Forum “Remotely Teaching with Collaborative Documents.” December 3rd and 4th are the dates of the 5th Annual Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Conference, hosted by the UC Davis Center for Educational Effectiveness. The last ATS faculty event of fall quarter will be the December DOLCE, taking place Friday the 11th at 12pm PST and featuring tech topics such as online discussion forums. 

To stay tuned about these and future teaching and technology forums, please subscribe to The Wheel e-mail updates, or follow @ucdaviswheel on Twitter. If you have questions about Instructional Design at UC Davis, please contact our ATS senior instructional designers at instructionaldesign@ucdavis.edu.

Best regards,

Dr. Andy Jones Academic Associate Director, Academic Technology Services Editor in Chief of The Wheel: The Instructional Technology Blog of UC Davis University of California, Davis