The Video is Now Available: Relive the February, 2021 Faculty Forum on “Bringing Your Research into your Remotely Taught Classes”
Dear Faculty Colleagues,
Thank you so much to all of you who joined us for our February Faculty Forum, where we were invited to listen in on three different approaches to innovative and effective teaching. Katia Vega, Assistant Professor of Design, Laci Gerhart-Barley, Assistant Professor of Teaching at the Department of Ecology and Evolution, and Communication Professor Narine Yegiyan shared ways they successfully incorporate their research interests into their classroom. The recording of the event is available.
First, Dr. Vega shared her research interests with faculty, presenting examples of projects on beauty technology such as eyelashes that can launch drones (!), hair extensions that enable users to send messages, fingernails that have been embedded with microchips, and other such remarkable technologies. In addition to sampling the future as science fiction authors or pioneering inventors do, in her classes Vega uses storytelling and collaborative projects to enhance engagement with technology and design topics.
Noting how Dr. Vega’s research speaks to the unifying nature of technology, Dr. Yegiyan shared that technology more typically serves to distract. An expert on attention and emotion, Yegiyan uses multiple teaching modalities, such as lectures, visuals, chat rooms, and invited speaker lectures, to observe and measure cognitive and emotional changes in the student participants in her Zoom classrooms. “Teaching has become a lab for me,” acknowledges Dr. Yegiyan. As we learned at SITT 2020, her efforts have resulted in motivated participation from her students.
A frequent participant in ATS faculty forums, Dr. Gerhart-Barley reminded us how she teaches her lucky students with enthusiasm and expertise. Mindful of the complexity of our student’s learning conditions, Gerhart-Barley records her lectures, thus reducing student stress about missing class/information. A former keynote speaker at the Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology, Gerhart-Barley also shared how she leads students in successful explorations of participatory/community science.
Academic Technology Services offers DOLCE (Discussing Online Learning and Collaborative Education), on the first Friday of every month, and Faculty Forums on the third Friday of the month during the school year. Featuring Anthropology professor Randy Haas and others, our next DOLCE will take place on March 5, 2021 at noon. Please join us at this event by registering via this link.
If you have questions about Instructional Design at UC Davis, please contact our ATS senior instructional designers at instructionaldesign@ucdavis.edu.
Best,
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