Flipping Workshops on Blended Teaching Strategies

by Mitchell Kase

Faculty workshop participants, FCPE, Fall 2014

Earlier this semester, the FCPE received a request from Dr. Anne Mungai, Professor and Chair of the Curriculum and Instruction Department and Director of the Special Education Graduate Program, to host a series of workshops focused on blended teaching and learning. Dr. Mungai asked us to design a program that would show faculty how they can make their blended activities “more meaningful for students.”

We collaborated with Dr. Mungai to design four workshops that addressed the faculty members’ teaching needs: Increasing Student Engagement with VoiceThread, Facilitating Collaboration Outside of the Classroom with Google Hangouts, Designing Your Blended Learning Activities in Moodle and Promoting Academic Integrity with Strategic Faculty-Student Interaction.

Using a “flipped classroom” approach, participants were sent instructional resources ahead of time to provide context prior to attending in person. Resources included links to videos, articles and examples that related to each topic. The well-attended workshops were facilitated by using a series of pair and share activities that gave faculty an opportunity to collaborate, build their knowledge base and develop a learning community. The participants agreed that having the time to learn from each other was useful and looked forward to more opportunities in which they could share their teaching experiences in any modality – whether face-to-face, blended or online.

In addition to upcoming workshops on blended and online teaching strategies next semester, the Faculty Center is proud to host groups of faculty from any discipline on specialized topics. We will even host a workshop on any of the satellite campuses as long as there is a minimum of five participants. Faculty can request content-specific workshops by contacting us at fcpe@adelphi.edu. For resources on developing blended or online courses, please contact Mitchell Kase at mkase@adelphi.edu.