A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Professor of Economics Steven Greenlaw
Professor of Economics Steven Greenlaw authored a chapter on how to teach effectively online in Mark Maier and Phil Ruder’s forthcoming Teaching Principles of Microeconomics by Edward Elgar Publishing. While focussed on teaching introductory economics, the principles described are applicable to most disciplines.
Eleven UMW faculty from a variety of disciplines worked together in 2020 as the Advocacy, Deliberation, and Civic Engagement Learning Community. The group was led by Leslie Martin and Anand Rao, representing the Center for Community Engagement and the Speaking Intensive Program. The goal of the group was for the participants to work together to develop course materials that incorporate advocacy and deliberation activities to support civic learning in their courses. Modeled after a similar initiative at VCU, the UMW faculty learning community met through the Spring 2020 semester to study the ways that advocacy, deliberation, and debate, could be used in class, and the faculty then developed materials, including activities, assignments, and rubrics, for use in college classes. The materials were collected and were recently published online through UMW Eagle Scholar. The publication is titled “Supporting Advocacy, Deliberation, and Civic Learning in the Classroom,” and includes contributions from the following faculty: Leslie Martin (Sociology), Anand Rao (Communication), Adrienne Brovero (Communication, UMW Debate), Gonzalo Campos-Dintrans (Spanish, FSEM), Steve Greenlaw (Economics, FSEM), Pamela Grothe (Environmental Sciences), Jason Hayob-Matzke (Philosophy), Jodie Hayob-Matzke (Environmental Sciences), Christine Henry (Historic Preservation), Joseph Romero (Classics), and Andrea Livi Smith (Historic Preservation).
Assistant Professor of Biology April Wynn is among the dozens of UMW professors participating this summer in Compelling Courses, a faculty learning community to help instructors design engaging courses.
To teach mitosis, April Wynn has students in her class act out the process, portraying chromosomes that divide into nuclei. The assistant professor of biological sciences hopes to replicate lively exercises like this – but virtually – in the fall.
“My goal is to promote the same level of engagement, energy and enthusiasm in an online space,” said Wynn, who, as faculty director of the University of Mary Washington’s First-Year Experience, is helping other instructors do the same for their classes.
Professors often spend their breaks on scholarly research, but Wynn is among dozens of UMW faculty members who went back to school this summer. Through a new faculty learning community called Compelling Courses, representatives from nearly every academic department have been teaching each other how to deliver dynamic online lessons and incorporate the best of the UMW experience into distance learning.
In March of this year, UMW professors – the majority of whom had never taught online – abruptly had to shift to a new method of teaching. The succeeding months have given these instructors time to tinker with and tweak tools so that they are fully prepared to teach virtually if necessary. Many, like Wynn, have found that this modality can even offer benefits.
“We believe teaching can be excellent regardless of medium,” said Professor of Economics Steve Greenlaw, who launched the group with Professor of Communication Anand Rao. “It all depends on how you design the course.” Read more.
Professor of Economics Steven Greenlaw
Professor of Economics Steve Greenlaw was recently interviewed in an article on Ed Surge entitled, “‘Better Every Semester’: How Faculty Use Open Educational Resources to Improve Courses.”
In addition to providing students with text and video content, courseware tools also have built-in nudges and assessments—sometimes personalized—that generate instant feedback about whether students are mastering the assigned material.
That data allows an entity like Lumen to “crunch the numbers and figure out where the problems are” with courseware texts and tests, then fix those problems, says Steve Greenlaw, a professor of economics at the University of Mary Washington, who has helped to produce OER resources for Lumen and for OpenStax, a nonprofit OER publisher, and who uses Lumen courseware with his own classes. Read more.
Professor of Economics Steven Greenlaw
Professor of Economics Steven Greenlaw was quoted in an article on InsideHigherEd.com entitled “Forced to Fail Students?” The article examines an accusation by a former professor at Arizona State University who says he was fired for failing to adhere to grading quotas. “Asking professors to strictly follow a grade distribution is highly unusual,” Greenlaw said. “If a professor is giving out too many A’s, that might necessitate a conversation, but not a mandate to fail a specific proportion of the class.” Read more.
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