Online Learning – Teaching Hub

Teaching how to do college: helping students read for learning

January 31, 2023

old desk with feather pen in an inkwell beside a tattered notebook.

Nathan Loewen, Department of Religious Studies Learning to read is a crucial skill for higher education. Student reading has changed due to the shift, and back, from going entirely online. When you order textbooks for your courses, are they mostly digital? (e.g. Access granted) Or, to make your course affordable and expose students to cutting-edge scholarship, do you forgo textbooks and post all your readings in Blackboard? When your students do research, are they using the Libraries e-book holdings or journal […]

Teach Your Students Active Reading: Assign Texts in Blackboard with Hypothesis

December 6, 2021

by Lauren Horn Griffin, Department of Religious Studies Your Blackboard course menu includes Hypothesis on your “build content” menu. Hypothesis works with files you add to your course. It also works with any website. Hypothesis is a teaching tool that allows you to have your students “show” how they are reading your course content. With the Hypothesis tool, anyone in the course may add annotations with text, images, websites, and LaTeX equations. Anyone in the course can reply to those […]

Webcameras that Facilitate Better Conversations Virtual Guests: Perhaps “OWL” Being See You…??

November 8, 2021

by Nathan Loewen, Department of Religious Studies What is this? Have you tried using a basic computer web camera to capture conversations in a classroom? Prof. Loewen has experimented with dozens of methods since 2009. With the arrival of the REL digital lab at UA’s Department of Religious Studies in 2021, things have changed. Among the digital tools being collected by Prof. Jeri Wieringa is the OWL Pro, which is a 360-degree camera, mic, and speaker combined into one device. […]

Using Flipgrid for Class Discussions: Tips and Precautions

May 20, 2021

by Nathan Loewen, A&S Faculty Technology Liaison Melissa Green recently hosted a Blackboard RoundTable where she remarked that Flipgrid is now among the UA-licensed platforms. Anyone can use their UA email (username@ua.edu or username@crimson.ua.edu) on the Flipgrid Sign Up page to “Sign up with Microsoft.” My colleague Jennifer Roth-Burnette suggested I contact members of the Instructional Design Team at the College of Continuing Studies. Here are some excellent tips and precautions for successfully using Flipgrid from Miranda Webster, Alison Lewis, […]

Preparing Today’s Students for Tomorrow’s Workforce: An Adobe Creative Campus Collaboration Recap

May 18, 2021

infographic sketch of Bennett and Loewen's presentation

by Nathan Loewen, Department of Religious Studies Meagan Bennett and Nathan Loewen presented remotely to the Adobe Creative Campus Collaboration event. They discussed some aspects of how UA approaches the extraordinary conditions of 2020-2021. If you scroll down a few paragraphs, you will see what Sebastian Distefano took away from our presentation, he wrote, “Knowing the importance of a creative and digitally literate workforce, leaders from the University of Alabama (UA) explored how they are preparing students for our changing […]

Creating Learning Communities with WordPress, Slack, and Adobe Creative Cloud

April 15, 2021

Presented by Nathan Loewen at the 2021 Adobe for Education’s Creative Campus Collaboration on April 14, 2021. Two Perspectives I wish to talk about specific methods I and my colleagues adopted for pre-, inter and post-pandemic teaching.* I come at this with two perspectives: Teaching – As a freshly-tenured professor of religious studies at a public, R1 university (University of Alabama). My current research coordinates and publishes research with the Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion project. Administration – As the faculty technology […]

Using Discord + GitHub to Organize Small Group Active Learning

March 29, 2021

by Nathan Loewen, Faculty Technology Liaison & Department of Religious Studies Based on an interview and materials shared by Dr. Traci M. Nathans-Kelly, College of Engineering at Cornell University I recently spoke to Dr. Traci Nathans-Kelly, who is a partner teacher for Games Design courses at Cornell University, where they have used Discord for Spring 2020 and 2021. This was a unique challenge for these courses that rely heavily on in-person teams and live playtesting. Dr. Walker White is the instructor […]

Discord App Adds Options for Remote Learning & Teamwork

March 15, 2021

by Nathan Loewen, Faculty Technology Liaison & Department of Religious Studies Someone responded to the survey for Last Week’s Teaching in 2020 with a comment about the Discord app. It turns out plenty of people use Discord for teaching and learning (Several teachers in France and Quebec are adopting Discord). Here are the experiences of four people at UA. (Please continue to share your ideas and experiences here, and your entry could spark another cross-campus search for teaching innovation!) Creating […]

16 Community-Building Ice-Breakers for Zoom

January 13, 2021

by Nathan Loewen, Department of Religious Studies Among the many objectives for the first day of class, for some teachers, is to create a sense of community. Many of the strategies used face-to-face may be adapted to the online environment. Here are some ice-breakers that have worked in the past. They may be adapted to Zoom, too! These ideas work for seminars as well as larger courses (e.g. using breakout rooms). Two truths and a lie is a classic. Ask […]

Three Ways to Construct Supportive Online Courses

January 7, 2021

by Jaimie Choi, Department of Psychology As COVID-19 swept the country, many of us have transitioned to virtual teaching, using diverse platforms that deliver online lectures. Unfortunately, despite the convenience of being able to lead a lecture in our pajama pants, there are many studies that cast light on the psychological pitfall that follows being trapped in a rectangular virtual space for an extended period of time. One of the neglected elements from a student’s perspective is that they lose […]

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