April DOLCE 2021, Recording is Now Available

Thanks to all faculty colleagues who joined us on April 2 for our monthly DOLCE event. Our speakers included John Marx, English Department Professor and Aggie Square Faculty Liaison, and Dr. Emily Merchant, Assistant Professor Science and Technology Studies. The video recording of the event is now available.

Dr. Marx introduced us to the teaching mission of Aggie Square and the ways that faculty research interests can contribute to that mission. Dr. Marx highlighted the experimental learning elements of Aggie Square, including the new venture provides opportunities to test ideas and hands on-learning for students. He also highlighted the scope of the learning audience, pointing out that community college students, undergraduates, and professionals would benefit from the offering of this new initiative. To learn more about  Dr. Marx’s reflections on Aggie Square, please refer to this Inaugural column. 

Then, Dr. Emily Merchant shared her experience of teaching a class on Advancing Health Care Equity at Aggie Square. The curriculum included a speaker series featuring UC Davis and CSU-Sacramento faculty and community leaders. Dr. Merchant discussed how the move to remote learning (Thanks, Zoom) required adjustments for the course structure. One silver lining of this modification was the opportunity to open up the speaker series to outside audiences. She also talked about educational tools they utilised for student engagement, such as Perusall and Mentimeter.

Dr. Merchant shared that the strategies that worked for her students included research librarian visits, bi-weekly community building events such as playing games with the concepts learned in class, questions and answers, and encouraging students to connect discovered content with that covered in other Aggie Square classes. Challenges included uneven levels of engagement from students and from community partners, and the encouraging of mutual accountability that all of us are familiar with when teaching with a project-based learning approach 

After Dr. Merchant’s remarks, I shared my new collaborative curriculum project that I have launched in my advanced journalism class this quarter. My aspiring journalists are sharing with peers an always-growing interlinked Google Doc that records their self-directed reading assignments in major newspapers and journals. With this assignment, I hope to encourage student curiosity about class topics and to strengthen the intellectual community that has been formed in our synchronous Zoom meetings. 

At the end of the event, ATS Instructional Technologist Fernando Socorro reminded us how iClicker and other personal response system tools can support remote teaching. He suggested faculty take advantage of one-on-one support from iClicker available at  https://go.oncehub.com/iClickerOBrien, as well as the iClicker-run webinars: https://learn.iclicker.com/iClickerPedagogicalWebinars_Clients.html. Stating that the cloud app is a great way to engage students, Dr. Socorro shared the following link. https://macmillan.force.com/iclicker/s/article/How-to-Invite-Students-to-Your-iClicker-Course-Using-Quick-Join

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. Please join us at our next Faculty Forum event on April 16 at noon. Our theme this month is “Community Based Instruction,” and we will feature revelations and insights from Dr. Milmon Harrison from African and African-American Studies.

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