Three lessons learned from a Bass instructional fellowship
Their eyes were upon me, and I was stuck. I had just given students a worksheet that had them calculate the relatedness of haploid-diploid bees. In my ideal lesson plan, the students would have worked together to discover that female bees may actually be more related to their sisters than their own offspring. Instead, the students told me that they didn’t know how to calculate relatedness in humans, yet alone weird bees. I had made an incorrect assumption about their prior knowledge, and now I was struggling to figure out how to best teach the basics before making things more complicated. (more…)
Graduate students talk about their MOOC experiences
Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) blog recently featured two PhD students in a post in which they talk about their experience taking a massive, open online course (MOOC) as part of their Bass Instructional Fellowship. Over the coming 14-15 academic year, they’ll be applying some of this experience as online apprentices in CIT.
Read more: Keri & Giuseppe tell all!
Dr. Hugh Crumley (http://www.hughcrumley.com) directs the Certificate in College Teaching and teaches courses in teaching, technology and design in The Graduate School.
Starting to teach online
There was an interesting post recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog ProfHacker. This post, Adventures in Synchronous Online Teaching, details one faculty member’s first foray into developing and teaching an all online seminar, including some of the initial quirks and struggles she faced. You may find this a reassuring read if you are also looking at making the leap to teaching an online or hybrid course and find this a daunting prospect. By the way, if you are looking at a faculty career path and are not reading ProfHacker already, you really should be.
If you happen to be here at Duke and are interested in online teaching, you might find the Bass Online Apprenticeship a great opportunity to get started.
New Graduate Bass Teaching Fellowships
We are so very pleased to announce that the newly restructured Bass Undergraduate Instructional Program for Duke PhD students has made its first awards. Thanks to a generous endowment gift from the family of Anne T. and Robert M. Bass, this program is able to support teaching experiences where normal means of funding are unavailable, and to help students become knowledgeable in online college teaching.
The fellowships come in several varieties: Teaching Fellows, who will either be a TA in another department or teach their own course as instructor of record (IOR), and Online Apprentices (OAs) who will take the new class GS 762 Online College Teaching and then apprentice in the Center for Instructional Technology to support Duke’s growing roster of online or hybrid courses.
This year’s recipients of Bass Teaching Fellowships as TAs: (more…)
