The November Faculty Forum Video Recording is Now Available!

Dear Faculty Colleagues,

Thanks to everyone who joined us this past Friday at our November Faculty Forum! This month’s topic, “Remotely Teaching with Collaborative Documents,” built on last month’s theme of promoting student engagement. Our discussion on collaboration was indeed collaborative in and of itself, featuring multiple faculty and staff voices who collectively brainstormed and shared insights, strategies, and technologies for promoting student-to-student, as well as faculty-to-student, communication and cooperation in the remote learning environment. The video recording of this most recent faculty forum is now available for viewing.

Participants in the forum included CEE Education Specialist Dr. Patricia Turner, who is the instructor of a graduate seminar on college teaching this quarter. Her students create collaborative Google Docs in groups that can feature outlines or diagrams on articles they read, and then they have the opportunity to teach their fellow students the content. Dr. Andy Jones of Academic Technology Services (ATS) and the University Writing Program talked about ways that he creates community with Zoom breakout rooms and Google Docs, sharing his resources “Teaching with Google Docs” and “Common Marginal Comments and their Meanings: 2020 Edition” informed by his dual career as a writing professor and instructional designer. Director of Faculty Engagement at Global Affairs, Elizabeth Langridge-Noti, reflected on current challenges and opportunities with instructional technologies for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration globally, such as experimenting with Microsoft OneDrive. We congratulate Elizabeth and her team at Global Affairs for their integral work in helping to earn UC Davis the 2020 Platinum Institutional Award for Global Learning, Research and Engagement from the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. 

We also heard from SITT 2020 faculty speakers on supporting communication and collaboration in the remote instruction of subjects such as reading and writing. Dr. Grace Delmolino from the Department of French and Italian shared the benefits of Google Docs for students engaging with faculty feedback, as featured in her SITT 2020 talk, “Feedback Loops for Time-Efficient Grading and Better Student Writing.” Dr. Emily Klancher Merchant from Science and Technology Studies presented structured Zoom breakout room roles such as facilitator, notetaker, and reporter, which students can choose or be assigned to in their reading groups as discussed in her SITT 2020 talk, “Reading Groups in Online Teaching.” Dr. Kirsten Harjes from the German Program offered her experiences sharing files for students’ collaborative and independent work using the Zoom chat, while Dr. Joe Anistranski from the Human Ecology Department discussed how he uses Google Docs to support group projects in large classes. Check out their respective SITT 2020 interviews: “Personality as a Remote Motivational ‘Tool’” (with Harjes) and “Beyond the Crisis: How UC Davis Can Improve Institutional Support for Online Teaching and Learning” (with Anistranski).

ATS Senior Instructional Designers Dr. Margaret Merrill and Mark Wilson were on standby to offer their perspectives and to answer questions about campus-supported technologies for virtual collaboration, and we introduced our newest Instructional Designer Donohon Abdugafurova, who joins from Emory University. 

For more content on collaborative documents in the remote learning environment, check out the Wheel! Two blog posts that discuss Google Doc collaborations include “Trends from SITT 2020 | Part 2 of 5: Community & Connection” authored by graduate student writer Lillian Jones, and “Let’s Just Use Google Drive? Google Doc Collaboration: Advantages and Strategies” authored by undergraduate student writer Mariana Galindo-Vega.

Remember to register and mark your calendars for the 5th Annual Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Conference, which will be hosted by the UC Davis Center for Educational Effectiveness on December 3rd and 4th. 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