NITOP in Review: Part 3

The Novice Professor Team at NITOP 2019. Left to Right: Karly, Ciara, Jen, Brian

This year was my 4th NITOP and each and every year my experience is a little different. This year was especially different as I went in with new eyes as an established blogger! Here are my top three takeaways:

1. A major theme from the sessions I attended focused on the importance of interacting with our students and the best ways to do so. In terms on online teaching, Jason Eggerman led a PIE on the federal guidelines for an online class which includes the term “regular and substantive interaction”. In this discussion, I learned about some ways in which we can ensure that our online class is more than a correspondence course by making sure that instructor presence is built in to the course design, whether through presence in online discussions or through individualized (beyond the rubric) grading in assignments. The discussion provided some excellent practices for both options. There were also opportunities to learn about framing office hours (see Karly’s teaching slam) and mandatory meetings (see Brian’s poster). I also attended Diane Finley’s (@DrFOnline) workshop “Through the Looking Glass: Lessons for Online Teachers from Alice and Wonderland” where she shared that student-professor interactions are the best motivator in online learning environments (for more from this workshop, check out my live-tweets here).

1. One of my favorite sessions was led by Morton Gernsbacher (@GernsbacherLAB) who shared her “Open-Access, Active Learning, Online Undergraduate Research Methods Course”. She shared background on why the course was developed and the driving forces behind its ultimate design, developing students as research consumers rather than research producers (she provides great evidence as to why this is important). As a Research Methods instructor this was really exciting. It was particularly awesome because its an open access course that anyone can look at and incorporate into their own courses. Her course can be found here. I am looking forward to diving into the course myself this summer and will definitely be applying her ideas into my own redevelopment!

 

1. As if you haven’t heard this enough from Jen and Brian, but NITOP was a great place to make connections. In my previous attendance at NITOP I had did a little networking, but this year as an established blogger I made myself push past my innate introvertedness (totally a word right!?) and introduce myself to more people and just have discussions. There were several times I got involved in conversations that ran well into another session or over the next meal. The best part was that many of these conversations will lead to research partnerships or opportunities to highlight and share the work of our colleagues here on the blog! So look out for several new guest contributors this year, many of whom we met last week!

 
  Check out more live tweets from NITOP with #nitop or click here for my specific tweets.
 
Written by Ciara Kidder