Happy Thanksgiving! This week we're sending you a cornucopia of tips. Also, scroll down to learn about our December 15th "Seminar of Awesomeness: Celebrating Successes and Sharing Takeaways from Fall 2020."

Quick Tech Tip

Use the Student View feature in Canvas to see what students see. For example, assignments, modules, pages and files may be unpublished without your knowledge. Use Student View to troubleshoot or verify what the students can or can’t see.

More Tips

Visit SSU's Open Educational Resources library guide to find free materials for the OER "Zero Cost" Mini Grant application, organized by discipline.
Still tweaking your final assignment? Consider an UnEssay, where students demonstrate their learning non-traditionally. For more examples, see #UnEssay and #UnEssays.

Main Article: Tiptoeing Beyond Lectures

During the pandemic, many faculty are re-thinking lecture-centered approaches. Students may struggle to focus on Zoom, and research shows that active-learning strategies improve student outcomes. Small changes can be powerful for students; check out these ideas to experiment with active-learning approaches:

If you're ready for a simple change, consider some of our quick engagement strategies for Lectures and Large Courses.
Pre-record and share 10-15 minutes of your lecture, or create a handout and assign as homework. Do not cover this material in class; use a quiz for accountability.
Use the class time you save to be interactive:
- Review sample test questions. Have students select answers in Zoom chat or polls, then discuss.
- For more complicated problems, have students work in groups. Use a collaborative document like this Google sheet to record answers.
- To teach reasoning with evidence, have students review a text in groups, selecting key passages to analyze and share. Alternatively, have students take a position on an issue, break into groups, and search class texts/resources to support their stance.
- If you're assigning a final project, use class time to look at past examples. Discuss strengths and weaknesses, or work together to create a rubric to grade them.

Hopefully this will give you some ideas to get started trying out active learning. Remember, small steps are a great way to start!

Save the date! Seminar of Awesomeness Tuesday, Dec. 15th at 11 am. SSU Faculty will celebrate successes and share takeaways from this fall. Please complete our registration form if you plan to attend. Interested in sharing your own mini-case study? Submit an application via our Google Form.

To share a tip or suggest a future topic, email us at its-facultysupport@salemstate.edu.