Given the current prevalence of digital tools, how do we scale up training on teaching with technology to meet instructors' needs? This session will present current methods at Stanford University and elicit your ideas on scaling up opportunities to disseminate best practices and support teaching with digital tools.
Teaching with digital tools has become the norm in current higher education learning environments. Whether it’s a classroom management system, an online discussion forum, a digital tool to poll students in or out of class, or a fully online course, to highlight just a few, instructors’ use of digital tools in their teaching is widespread. Our professional development opportunities need to reflect this and provide information on how to successfully implement teaching with technology for our current and future instructors.
The Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching & Learning (VPTL) at Stanford University pursues several avenues to provide opportunities for faculty, instructors, and graduate students to learn about teaching with technology. These opportunities include course development workshops that incorporate discussions about and use of technology, online training materials for online courses, one-on-one consultations with instructors, and most recently, a new, multi-day Teaching with Technology workshop. All of these events are primarily delivered through in-person workshops with online components.
In the Teaching with Technology workshop, faculty and instructors explored how digital tools could be used to meet a pedagogical challenge in their own course. To do this, instructors learned about aligning technology with instructional goals and they collaborated with VPTL staff to explore, design, and implement solutions. This model successfully connected instructors with pedagogy during in-person workshop days, provided consultation time with VPTL staff to craft customized solutions for their particular challenge, and was followed by an on-campus event to showcase their solution and findings.
While the Teaching with Technology model was successful in helping a small group of instructors develop and implement digital tools in their learning environments, how can we scale up our efforts, like this Teaching with Technology workshop, to meet the needs of more of our current and future instructors? How can we utilize in-person, blended, and fully online approaches to deliver pedagogy surrounding teaching with digital tools to support all those who need it? How can we evaluate the effectiveness of our workshops in implementing new innovative teaching practices? During the discovery session, we will explore these questions to develop ideas for professional development opportunities on teaching with digital tools in higher education.