It's my pleasure to announce that the Instructional Design and Access team, which is part of the Media Resources Center, will become the Office of Instructional Resources, or OIR.  The OIR will be a hub of instructional training, resources, and support for anyone with an instructional role at Wichita State. This change recognizes the growing importance of instructional technology and design to Wichita State's success in providing excellent teaching and learning experiences for all during the Covid-19 pandemic.  The work of the OIR will be central to supporting quality instruction to improve student persistence and graduation rates as laid out in our strategic enrollment management (SEM) plan.      

Dr. Carolyn Speer will continue to lead the team as the Director of the OIR. Her team will continue to empower WSU's instructors as we strive to offer top quality teaching across our colleges.  The team will continue to build on their expertise and technical skills,  sharing those skills through training opportunities to all instructors and promoting high quality instruction in all modes.

A key initiative of the Instructional Design and Access team, the Academic Resources Conference, will continue under the OIR, serving as an important professional development opportunity three times/year.  This event has been a critical engine of shared ideas and skill-building, and the pandemic has only made this sort of training resources more critical.

Introducing Your OIR Staff

What Does OIR Do?

The development of the Office of Instructional Resources is a natural progression of the work of Instructional Design and Access.  Nevertheless, the transition provided us an opportunity to stop and think about who we are and what we do for the university. As part of that process, we developed a charter outlining our values, vision, purpose, and core functions.  Over the next year, you will see OIR settle into these new roles as we work to improve our webpages and increase the amount of training we make available to WSU instructors.  All of our efforts will be guided by our core beliefs with the intention of meeting these goals:

• Maintain and grow expertise in trends in higher education and adult education
• Maintain and grow expertise in higher education and adult education pedagogy, course design, instructional methods and techniques
• Create and maintain our own, "home grown," course quality program for WSU instructors to use on a voluntary basis as they see fit
• Identify, maintain, and support educational technologies
• Offer regular "live" and "on demand" training for WSU instructors and interested others, both in our own core areas of expertise and in partnership with other offices
• Bring Shockers and others together to share expertise around these goals 

What to Expect as We Transition

Our immediate goals for OIR include revamping our website so it is easier for instructors to find our trainings.  The training demands caused by the pandemic led us to develop hundreds of webpages with training, but unfortunately the pace of development led us to having a web presence that is in need of better organization (and, frankly, some spell checking!). Over the next few months, we will be updating our training and moving things to a new home under the "OIR" umbrella and away from IDA.  Don't worry! As we move things, we will test links, update short URL's are focus on the usability of our site.  With luck, the only thing faculty will notice is a general improvement in our resources and organization.

In addition to website cleanup, OIR will also be working to prepare the campus for our eventual transition from our current Blackboard Learn online environment to the much improved and streamlined Blackboard Ultra environment. This will be a gradual process as well, and we will provide support and training all along the way. 

Finally, another big early task for our office will be the development of a "home grown" course quality program. This program will replace the Quality Matters program with something that is more flexible and better-suited to courses here on our own campus.  Like with QM certification, our new quality program will be entirely optional for interested faculty.

Thinking about Metacognition

As a part of ARC21Jan, Dr. Moriah Beck spoke on her efforts to improve student learning through training around metacognition. She was inspired to try this technique after reading the book Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation by Saundra Yancy McGuire, and thanks to the efforts of the great people at University Libraries, you can now get the book electronically. You can also view Dr. Beck's ARC21Jan session here:

Why Do Things Change So Much?

From time-to-time we receive the general complaint that things like Blackboard and other educational technologies "change too much" from semester-to-semester. Why, the complaint goes, does WSU change things around all the time? 

Sadly, the answer is that we are actually not in control of the pace of change in educational technologies. Technology itself is simply evolving very, very rapidly.  All we can do is to work to keep up.  We are empathetic to the pain that this pace of change causes on our campus, and we try to insulate folks from the worst of it by providing as much notice and training as we can. We are open to hearing suggestions about how we can improve in these efforts, so please let us know your ideas by sending an email to IDA@wichita.edu. 

Blackboard Ultra is Coming Soon

Speaking of change, starting with the major Blackboard upgrade we went through in late December, Wichita State has begun the very slow and deliberate process of moving from our current Blackboard Learn environment to the much-improved Blackboard Ultra environment. Our first big change that people will notice will come in late May as we change the look and feel of our Blackboard landing and course pages.  After that, interested faculty will be able to choose to use the old Blackboard Learn interface for their materials or transition to the new Blackboard Ultra area.  These will coexist for well over a year before we all move to Ultra permanently, so there will be lots of time to see the new area, get trained, and to transition your classes. Our current target is to have all classes in Ultra by December 31, 2022. 

Be and Ultra Pilot Pilot Participant

Those people who would like to take their time learning about Ultra will have that opportunity, but what if you are an "early adopter" and want to get started right away?  Well, for those interested few, we are offering an "Ultra Pilot Pilot" program. Simply put, we will provide Ultra accounts in our "Test" environment for any instructor (of any rank) who would like to play around in Ultra in advance of our official piloting of the system in the fall term of 2021.  Yes, this is a pilot before the pilot... or the "Pilot Pilot" program! If you are interested and would like to get an account in our test environment, send a request to IDA@wichita.edu. We ask that anyone who participates in the Pilot Pilot also be sure to join our Facebook group too, as that is where we hope to share a lot of information about Ultra with each other and with the larger university community.

Learning to Love Online Teaching Too

One year ago, many faculty were "forced" into online teaching as an emergency response (remember how shocking this page looked last year?). Now, one year in, we still have the emergency, but we also have more time to reflect and plan.  Teaching remotely has many new things to learn, and can lead to even more ways to appreciate how developing the craft of teaching is a rewarding, lifetime goal. Your University Libraries are here to help you find the resources you need to grow in your mastery and love of online teaching.  To get started, check out this Libguide for teaching online and then have a look through this OneSearch listing of recent online pedagogy resources available full text/online. Maria Sclafani, Coordinator of Library Instructional Services also recommends several Chronicle of Higher Education articles such as How to Recover the Joy of Teaching After an Online Pivot and 8 Strategies to Prevent teaching Burnout.

First Year Students are a Joy

From Aaron Rife, First Year Seminar Facutly Coordinator:

Whether we call them “freshmen” or “first-year students,” every year we receive a cohort of new students at WSU, which is just fantastic (and kinda the point of our existence, right?!).  I would like to briefly highlight a few joys inherit in teaching students who are new to university.  I have had the opportunity to teach a class for first-year students (First-Year Seminar plug here!) over the last five years; here is what I have noticed:

• New students are overwhelmingly excited to learn. Sure, not everyone, I am realistic!  But let us remember that students are choosing to come to our university, they want to be here.  (I was a high school teacher for seven years, teaching college freshmen is not the same as teaching captive high schoolers, so let us drop that canard.)  New students at WSU have continually proven to be intellectually curious and have often surprised me with their willingness to tackle difficult material.
• New students work hard. Again, sure, some students work harder than others, absolutely.  Honestly, the juniors and seniors in my other courses are hard workers too.  My favorite thing about Wichita State is that I get to work with and teach highly motivated students who in many cases are working their way through an education and/or are the first people in their family to go to college.  I very much appreciate how I can throw (with support!) challenging material at my students, and they will handle it and grow in their ability and knowledge.
• There are no stigmas for new students not knowing how to do something. I spend a good chunk of time in my FYS course teaching students how to navigate electronic databases, find peer-reviewed sources of information, then consolidate those sources to make an informed argument about a topic.  For the most part students do not know how to cite, how to write a bibliography using APA or Chicago formatting (sorry MLA, I have beef with you); they struggle knowing when to paraphrase and when to quote.  Which is great, because I get to help them, with no guilt or embarrassment.  Sometimes, we teach students who do not demonstrate the skills they need to do well in our classes. With first-year students, we get to introduce skills and provide foundations to build on throughout their college careers, without students feeling shamed for not knowing how to do something.
• New students do not work the system. Again, sure, some students do.  But by and large, first-year students do not know the system and they have not picked up manipulative habits, such as the infamous dead grandmother/large exam correlation.

The general theme here is that new students are special, in part because they are new!  With support and encouragement from those of us who teach, new students gain skills, knowledge, and even passion for a field of study.  And that is a pretty great thing to get to be a part of. If you are interested in resources available on our campus and aimed at helping new students become successful at WSU, whether you teach a First-Year Seminar or not, check us out online.

Come Chat With Friends

Do you miss chatting with your colleagues in the hallways? Do you miss hanging out with peers at Shocker Hall?  Gery Markova, Director of Faculty Advancement, has just the thing for you! Every Thursday at 11:00am starting February 18, she is hosting "Teaching Talks on Thursdays," a virtual get-together where you can ask questions, tell stories, and have some time with your friends and peers. So, "save the date" and the Zoom link and plan to drop in on Thursdays!

Put a Bird (or a heart?) on It!

Looking for a ❤ emoji to send someone on Valentine’s Day?  Use the command Windows key + ; to reveal a list of emojis on your Windows machines... On your Mac, use Ctrl + Command + Space. Try this in your favorite applications. This trick will work almost anywhere you can enter text (including the Blackboard text editor!).  💕🦉💖