WCU's Commons for Teaching and Learning Excellence

Greetings,

Together we've made it through the first month! Congratulations! There are many challenges ahead, and we stand beside you. Below you will find some of the opportunities we've identified that may help you in your work. Whether exploring active learning strategies, giving writing support, highlighting new classroom spaces or advertising scholarship opportunities, the Coulter Faculty Commons is here for you.

We look forward to working with you in this great adventure.

Martha Diede, PhD

Director, Coulter Faculty Commons

P.S.: The CFC is currently undergoing renovations and has temporarily relocated to HL166. Call or email to make an appointment and be certain that we have someone available to help you.

Hear how Steelcase Education is leading the charge

in the Active Learning Environment!

This presentation is being hosted by WCU's Space Management Committee, Academic Space Advisory Board, Facilities Management, and the Coulter Faculty Commons. Please join us as we share an overview of the key educational trends and issues, as well as how it relates to active learning and spaces. We'll also be discussing design thinking and what it takes to innovate for the kind of educational environment that organizations need to thrive in this rapidly evolving world. We'll show you a concept and framework that we have developed in order to support the ideas we believe are relevant and significant when thinking about learning spaces that support increased student success.

DATE & TIME: September 13, 2017, from 3:30 - 5:00pm

LOCATION: UC Theater

RSVP TO: Shelly Garren, 706-897-2611, sgarren@youngs.com

Are You Interested in Teaching in a BYOD or Active Learning Classroom?

The CFC, the Division of Information Technology, the Academic Space Advisory Board, and the Space Management Committee are hosting an introduction to the new BYOD classroom spaces in Forsyth. These classes are designed for technology-enriched active learning and traditional lecture. Come by and see what they look like, and, if you'd like, you can ask your department head to request a teaching spot in one of these spaces next semester before the Registrar's September 15 deadline.

Come see the space at the drop-in session: FO 214 -- Wednesday Sept. 6, 4-5:30pm

Fall 2017 Writing Groups

George Orwell surmised that he wrote because, “there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” And while Orwell wrote for a different audience, perhaps his purpose isn’t as different as it is for faculty. We write for publication, books, journals, and increasingly, we write for grants.

To that end, the staff at the Coulter Faculty Commons is announcing their weekly Fall 2017 Writing Groups. In order to assist you to our greatest ability this year, we will be running writing groups at three separate locations. In our first meeting we will be gathering information from you—what are your needs? How can we assist you best? We hope you will accept this invitation and join us. If you attended our Writers’ Retreats this summer and want to have support for sustaining your writing program, these groups are for you.

The dates, times, and locations for the first meetings are listed below. Please click the links to register for the individual groups:

1. Room 134 in the Camp building on September 13, at 2:00 p.m.

2. Room 361 at Biltmore Park on September 18, at 8:30 a.m.

3. Room 186 in HHS on September 20, at 11:45 a.m.

We will also be limiting the number of faculty participants as follows to allow more one-on-one consultation time: Cullowhee campus: 20 participants; Health and Human Sciences: 8 participants; Biltmore Park: 6 participants.

For additional information or questions, please contact Terry Pollard at 227-2761, or via email.

Academic Affairs Faculty Fellowship Program 2017-2018

Purpose of the Program:
The University of North Carolina System’s Division of Academic Affairs invites proposals for the third year of the UNC General Administration (UNC-GA) Academic Affairs Faculty Fellowship Program. The UNC Faculty Assembly has collaborated extensively with UNC-GA in this important effort. The purpose of this fellowship is to engage interested faculty in academic affairs issues and mentored learning opportunities, and to recruit committed faculty with expertise that can help promote the effectiveness of the system and the University’s constituent institutions. The Fellowship supports the new UNC strategic plan, Higher Expectations, especially the "Excellent and Diverse Institutions" key area, by promoting partnerships and understanding between the Fellows from constituent institutions, and between the institutions and UNC-GA.

For more information on this program, please click here.

2017-2018 Faculty Community Engagement Development Institute (FCEDI)

Are you interested in being one of 10 selected faculty members focused on learning more about and enhancing your service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) theory, best practices, assessment, and scholarship? Over five sessions facilitated during the spring 2018 semester all facets of SLCE will be addressed and applied. Upon successful completion, participants will receive a $1,000 professional development grant and NC Campus Compact conference attendance support.

More details and the application will be made available from August 14 – September 29, 2017. Continue to watch your email box for the invitation! You are an important piece of service and learning on our campus and within our communities, and we’d like to invite you to join others for deepening understanding of SLCE through the 2017-2018 FCEDI. For more information contact Dr. Lane Perry (laneperry@wcu.edu) or Associate Professor Beth Wall-Basset (ebassett@wcu.edu).

Global Learning Academy 2017-2018

The Western Carolina University Global Learning Academy (GLA) exists to develop a team of WCU faculty who work with professionals to internationalize their curriculum (i.e., integrate global dimensions into academic courses). The GLA meets one Thursday afternoon a month starting on September 14th, 2017 through April 26th, 2018, from 3:15-5:00pm. Each month there is a different guest lecturer and the topics discussed will focus on various aspects of global learning and curriculum integration. If you want to globalize your courses and curriculum, the Global Learning Academy is a great place to start. Any faculty member is welcome to attend any one of the events, for full participation, be sure to contact Dr. Ling LeBeau.

For more information click here, or to reserve a seat, please email Dr. Ling Lebeau.

Please click here to see the GLA Agenda.

Blackboard

Thank You from the LMS Team!

We would like to thank all of the faculty, staff, and students for their patience as we work through the requests for assistance. We have had an extensive backlog of work this year that is taking us longer than usual to work through. We are making progress and getting through all of the requests as quickly as we are able.

New Known Blackboard Issue

We appreciate all of our faculty and what they are accomplishing in their courses. We also appreciate when faculty let us know when the tools provided are not working as intended. It was recently brought to our attention that there is a new issue with the Display After and Display Until date and time boxes. When a faculty manually enters a date/time, upon Submit, the dates and times automatically are cleared like they were never set.

The workaround is to use the date picker (calendar icon to the right of the date box) and time picker (icon to the right of the time box) and then click on Submit. The expected correction for this issue is in December, 2017 when we perform our next upgrade.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the LMS Team at 227-2930 or via email.

Panopto

Panopto is WCU’s cloud-based hosting service that includes a video content management system for uploading, managing and sharing video and audio files. It’s a centralized, secure place for recorded lectures, flipped classroom videos, campus events, and more. It comes with built-in video analytics, a web-based video editor, the ability to insert quizzes within your videos, and automatic encoding to ensure your videos play efficiently on any device. Panopto also integrates easily within Blackboard by allowing the insertion of links that meet FERPA access regulations. For more information on Panopto, including instructional step sheets and links to informative videos, please click here.

More Resources:

CFC Automated Appointments
Quality customer service is our goal at the Coulter Faculty Commons (CFC). So, in order to serve our faculty better, we have created a new form to request an appointment with any member of our team. Please click here to request an appointment.

Course Syllabus Template
Trying to write your syllabus? The CFC has the tools and templates for you to help make the process much easier. The template provides you with all of the required elements along with an outline into which you can fill in all of your course information. To view the syllabus template, along with some other documents you might find useful as you build your course, please click here.

Blackboard Online Help
As the Learning Management System used at WCU, Blackboard enhances the quality of online and face-to-face instruction and is used to monitor, document, and manage online and classroom events and assignments. The LMS Team at the CFC has put together a handy list of resources for Blackboard, tailored to meet the needs of the WCU Community.

Highlighted Learning Videos on WCU's Panopto Features Page
We've customized the first entry landing page on the Panopto home page. We'll be putting up-to-date focused videos in this space and changing them monthly, so make sure to take a look and to suggest more content. To view the videos, please click the link above and log into Panopto.

Provost's List of Faculty Resources
The Office of the Provost provides a considerable amount of helpful information on this web page. Information concerning faculty awards and recognition, support and development, to forums, gender equity, and policy and procedures is available on this site.

CFC Resources Online
The CFC works to keep our main web page updated. We'd love to have you click in for a visit. We also have a Faculty Resources Blog where we post additional resources and announcements as we get them.

IT Training Opportunities
The Division of IT continues to provide training opportunities on Microsoft products for faculty and staff.

CFC Feedback
We would greatly appreciate any feedback you could give us about how we can improve or add to our services. We regularly monitor all inputs and try to respond to suggestions as quickly as possible. We thank you for taking the time to provide us with your constructive and formative feedback!