The realities of engaged learning: Balancing faculty capacity with student centered courses

In this session, you will engage in a conversation with an Instructional Designer who insisted that her faculty implement fully engaged courses. We will discuss the journey to becoming faculty & the realities of teaching “perfect and high quality course” that might include new technologies, innovative practices and high levels of student engagement. We will be working together to make a common definition in practice for the following terms:

• Quality learning
• Student engagement

We will discuss common barrier for faculty in teaching both on an institutional level, generally professional as well as personally. We will discuss how to balance the concerns of students for courses being rigorous enough or being too rigorous or hard. The majority of this session will be spent discerning methods to design courses for appropriate levels of rigor balanced with faculty capacity. We will discuss methods and tools that can be done/used with existing resources or by engaging new and innovative resources.

The session will end with the creation of a bank of ideas to allow for learning effectiveness while also creating faculty and student satisfaction with the experience.

In conclusion, in this session we will 1) define high levels of student engagement, 2) discuss quality learning, 3) discuss barriers to participation in these expectations 4) discuss ways to find the balance between faculty overwhelm and student boredom 5) discuss ways we can design courses to create a balance between capacity and student centeredness.