CENTER FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF TEACHING & EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE
THURSDAY, MAY 12, 2011 8:00 AM-4:00 PM
COFFEE & REGISTRATION: 8:00-8:20 AM
HEALEY LIBRARY, 11 th Floor
OPENING REMARKS: 8:20-8:50 AM
Anne Agee, Vice Provost for Information Technology
Daniel Ortiz, University Librarian and Director of Libraries
Vivian Zamel, Director, Center for the Improvement of Teaching
Winston Langley, Provost & Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
SESSION BLOCK 1: 9:00-10:00 AM
LibGuides for Courses Across the
Two Markets, Two Universities,
Curriculum (CLI, Healey 4)
George Hart, Associate University Librarian,
Healey Library (UMass Boston)
This session will demonstrate LibGuides, the most popular content sharing platform for libraries; and
LibAnswers, an innovative reference Q&A platform with examples from materials created for the
College of Nursing and Health Sciences. The presentation will show applications that help us share knowledge and connect with faculty and students online.
Adam Overbay, Christine Sands, and Katherine
Unruh, (UMass Boston Students); and Alex
Mueller, English (UMass Boston)
A professor and his Arthurian literature students will examine the ways online role-playing and fan fiction enrich the study of literary texts.
One Blackboard Course Shell
(P3,Healey LL)
Edward Romar, College of Management; Alan
Girelli, Distance Learning Program Coordinator;
Irene Yukhananov, Instructional Designer;
Teodora Hristov, Graduate Student (UMass
Boston)
The panel of speakers will discuss the challenges and experiences of an experimental online marketing course offered in the Fall 2010 semester. The course, in which students from
UMass Boston and the University of Pannonia in
Veszprem, Hungary worked successfully in crosscultural virtual teams across several time zones, used Blackboard as a main delivery platform enhanced by synchronous online conferencing technology (Wimba) and other collaborative work spaces.
Questioning Identity Paradigms in the Classroom (Conference Room,
Healey LL)
Kevin R. Morrissette and Shea Mullaney,
English (UMass Boston)
The presenters discuss methods to engage faculty and students in discussions of confronting the
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Transforming Teaching and Learning unfamiliar, including academic discourse and the teacher/student paradigm. forum for participants to discuss strategies that work in this challenging situation.
Death by PowerPoint: Engaging
Writing Out Loud (MVR, Healey 3)
Duncan Nelson, English; and Andrea Dawes,
Keira Simonoff, Luke Wilson, Katie Halowak,
Diverse Students in the Large Lecture
Mandy Wang, Students (University of
(P2, Healey LL)
Amy Rex Smith, College of Nursing and Health
Massachusetts)
Students share their experiences in writing “an
Sciences (UMass Boston)
This session will describe strategies to augment power point in order to engage diverse students in the large lecture course. It will further provide a account”—with emphasis on one-on-one editing conferences, on “accuracy, clarity, and being ‘on voice’”; on willingness (even eagerness) to fall, à la
Alice in Wonderland, into “rabbit holes.”
SESSION BLOCK 2: 10:10-11:10 AM
at UMass Boston (CLI,
Healey 4)
Andrew Elder, University Archives (Healey
Library, UMass Boston) and Rita Poussaint
Nethersole , Associate Dean of Graduate Studies
(UMass Boston)
In 2010, the Office of Graduate Studies launched its new Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) submission site, through which all UMass Boston theses and dissertations are submitted electronically and eventually made freely available for viewing online through ScholarWorks@UMass
Boston. Presenters will demonstrate the new theses/dissertation process at the University of
Massachusetts Boston including options for embargos and theses/dissertation access.
(P1,
Healey LL)
Lynnell Thomas, American Studies (UMass
Boston), and Mara Earley, English/ESL (UMass
Boston)
What happens when students’ work is shared online with others in the classroom community?
Reading what others are writing can create new understandings of ways to think about assignments and can build shared knowledge in classes across the curriculum. Moreover, in writing-focused classes, the opportunity to comment on and engage directly with other students’ texts outside of the classroom can alter the ways in which readers approach writing and vice versa. In this session, presenters will share their own discoveries about what their students’ sharing contributes to their learning.
(White Lab, Healey 3)
Steve Ackerman, Biology (UMass Boston)
Camtasia, an easy-to-use classroom capture system that records classroom sessions and whatever is projected from the instructor’s computer, provides significant advantages to our students, offering them the opportunity to review lectures and classroom sessions with audio/video links. This presentation will focus on the pedagogical advantages of this tool in its current use. It will explore, as well, the next challenge, converting the
UMass Boston | CIT & Educational Technology 2011 Conference 2

Transforming Teaching and Learning audio to text so the students have a text document for their studies.
(Conference Room, Healey
LL)
Joseph Ryan (Cape Cod Community College)
At our campus there has been a heightened concern about student motivation. This workshop addresses adult learning motivation through brainbased research, educational theory, and studies on adult learning motivators.
Mary Ball Howkins, Art (UMass Boston)
SESSION BLOCK 3: 11:20-12:30 PM
Can our courses contribute, or better contribute, to intercultural understanding in this time of difficult religio/cultural and political conflict? I will discuss how I revised courses in order to weave post-orientalist Islamic history and culture into
Euro/American course content, where cultural and historical intersections naturally occur. Please bring your ideas and knowledge to engage in a fruitful exchange.
Jeese Priest, Kacie Fodness, Kristi Girdhary, Meghan
Hancock, and Michael Turner, Tutors/Instructors
(UMass Boston, Boston University)
A panel of tutors and instructors will consider ways of evaluating student reading and writing in the classroom. They will discuss their own experiences and suggest alternative ways for evaluating writing that could be used by teachers hoping to use more student writing in their classes.
Professor Ken Rothwell, College of Liberal Arts, and Andrew Elder, University Archives (UMass
Boston)
ScholarWorks and SelectedWorks are two new services provided for UMass Boston faculty and researchers to showcase any and all aspects of their scholarly work. Presenters will discuss options for faculty in the context of open access scholarship, and will demonstrate the connections between
UMass Boston’s new scholarly repository and the new university website. There will be time during the session for faculty to set up their personal
SelectedWorks page.
Susan Mraz, Hispanic Studies (UMass Boston)
This presentation will focus on using VoiceThreads to enhance oral communication in online and faceto-face classes, considering its pedagogical advantages and demonstrating the work that students can do with it. VoiceThreads is a tool that combines the ability for students to create and narrate a set of slides with images and for others to respond with voiced commentary. It can help to engage students and build shared understandings
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Transforming Teaching and Learning and community in any subject area, but it is particularly valuable to developing students’ communication skills in language-focused courses.
Planning for New Technologies across the UMass System (White Lab,
Healey 3)
Patrick Masson, Chief Technology Officer,
UMassOnline (University of Massachusetts,
Office of the President)
How do we foster collaboration and communication around educational technologies such as ePortfolios, Learning Activity Management
Systems (LAMS), and Open Educational Resources
(OER)? While UMassOnline has taken on many new technology initiatives in the past, the process in which the technology needs are identified for emerging tools had been missing until its creation in the summer of 2010. The Needs Identification
Framework for Technology Innovation (NIFTI) includes a workflow to fill-in the missing technology gaps from our campuses and allow for exploration of emerging technologies all while UMassOnline takes on the financial and technological responsibilities.
LaMont Egle, Evelyn Navarre, and Cheryl Nixon,
English (UMass Boston)
This panel examines three examples of teaching that “turn inside out” the techniques usually associated with the discussion-based classroom: limiting discussion topics, embracing multiple levels of engagement, and using the lecture format.
(P2, Healey LL)
At Your Service: Accessible Service Learning
Jeff Van Dreason and Sandra Jonas (Benjamin
Franklin Institute of Technology)
This presentation will discuss two service learning projects. One involves a Film & Society course that features a remote service learning project. The other is a psychology course that works with the
Animal Rescue League of Boston, exploring the nature of learning training dogs’ behaviors that aid adoption.
A Good Neighbor Approach to Teaching: An
Interdisciplinary Collaboration to Promote
Service-Learning and Community Engagement
Joan Arches, Carol Chandler, Susan DeSanto-
Madeyo, Annette Floreczak and Jackie Lageson
(UMass Boston)
The faculty and students from the Service-Learning
Outreach Team will present their interdisciplinary approach to working with communities. Faculty teaching five different courses met weekly to develop syllabi and plan courses that built on each other’s efforts and met community-identified needs at the Harbor Point Apartment Community.
Writing Centers as Advanced
Reading and Writing Mythbusters
(MVR, Healey 3)
Michael LeBlanc, Erin O’Brien, Michael Turner, Jesse
Priest, Joe Harris, Rebecca Katz, Khaitan Allen and
Meesh McCarthy, Tutors, Graduate Writing Center and Reading, Writing, and Study Strategies Center
(UMass Boston)
Graduate Writing Center tutors work with reading and writing by students, tutors, professors, administrators and other scholars. This privileged position enables them to understand how writing centers respond to problematic myths about advanced reading and writing.
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Transforming Teaching and Learning
Lunch 12:40 – 1:40pm
Healey Library, 11 th Floor
Keynote:
Keynote: Lessons from the Top: Teaching, Technology, and Institutional Leadership
Presenters: Chancellor Keith Motley; Ravi Lakshmikanthan (Doctoral Student in Higher Education
Administration and Assistant Dean, Heller School, Brandeis University); Andres Reyes (Doctoral
Student in Higher Education Administration and Professor of ESL and Education at Bunker Hill
Community College)
In his keynote, Chancellor Motley and two of his students from the capstone course in the Higher
Education Administration doctoral program will show the ways in which they’ve used Blackboard to create a collaborative teaching and learning environment and how that work is connected to the program’s focus on collaborative leadership in higher education.
SESSION BLOCK 4: 1:50-2:50 PM
Key Issues in Teaching with
Learning Objects (CLI, Healey 4)
Mark Lewis, Manager of Instructional Support; and
Kate Archard, College of Management (UMass
Boston)
What are some current examples of online learning objects, and how can they be easily and effectively integrated to meet key instructional objectives?
This session will consider case studies of publisherbased e-learning content that have made a difference for a broad yet distinct population of learners. Kate Archard will show how using a rich and easily adaptable pool of assessment items in
Blackboard for the Writing Placement Exam in the
College of Management was both a time-saver and a way to discourage cheating by randomly selecting items for different test administrations and consider its promise for Blackboard users across the disciplines who want to provide practice tests for their students using learning objects. Mark Lewis will show how using publisher-based multimedia objects selectively to reinforce the four language learning skills in Introductory Italian during a three year period (2007-2010) made it possible to redesign the face-to-face course as a blended course.
Using Google Analytics for
Performance Management and
Organizational Development (P1,
Healey LL)
Lisa Link, Sr. Web Designer; Barbara Graceffa,
Director of Marketing and Communications,
McCormack Grad School ; and Eileen McMahon,
Sr. Instructional Designer (UMass Boston)
Google Analytics is being used increasingly across the university to track the response of users to online sites such as college academic and research center websites or blogs. In this panel, moderated by Web Services Web designer Lisa Link, Barbara
Graceffa will share how Google Analytics along with
Google docs is being employed at the McCormack
Graduate School to as part of an overall performance management initiative to improve student recruitment. Eileen McMahon will show how she is using Google docs for OpenCourseWare, our edublogs and for our How to Wiki site and will show a model Google analytics mashup that could be used by departments, offices and research centers to see which web pages are generating the most traffic.
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Instructor Interactivity and Student
Collaboration in Online Classes (White
Lab, Healey 3)
Katherine Kiss, Applied Linguistics (UMass Boston)
Teaching online inevitably entails an increased time commitment to grow the class community and encourage effective student collaboration.
In this session we will explore some challenges and solutions for maintaining high levels of instructor interactivity and student interdependence.
Why is it Important to Teach about
Race, Class and Gender? An
Anthropologist’s Viewpoint (Conference
Room, Healey LL)
Tara Devi S. Ashok, Anthropology and Biology
(UMass Boston)
“Race,” a word which has been controversial for a long time, has been replaced by “ethnicity”. As an
Transforming Teaching and Learning anthropologist, I will address different aspects of ethnic variability. Race, class, and gender will be seen from biological, genetic, and epigenetic viewpoints.
Exploring Philosophical Issues
Through Film (MVR, Healey 3)
Stephen E. Slaner, Government, and Meredith
Gunning, Philosophy (Northern Essex
Community College)
This presentation explores the ways in which film can bring complex philosophical issues to life for college students. Film clips to be discussed include scenes from The Matrix (Plato’s Republic) and Jonah
Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (Marx’s theory of historical development).
Composition Meeting (Healey 11)
Itai Halevi
SESSION BLOCK 5: 3:00-4:00 PM
Gene Shwalb, Sr. Instructional Designer; Carol Allen,
Nursing; and Kate Kiss, Applied Linguistics (UMass
Boston)
Quality Matters (QM), developed out of a Department of Education-funded project to ensure the quality of online programs, has set the standards for best practice for instruction that is delivered online. Based in national standards of best practice, the research literature and instructional design principles, the QM Standards are designed to promote student learning and continuous quality improvement within a faculty-driven, collegial peer review process. This presentation will focus on what has been learned through the Quality Matters peer-based course review process from the perspectives of faculty members in Nursing and in
Applied Linguistics who have had their courses reviewed and approved and from the perspective of a certified Quality Matters reviewer.
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Collaboration Online (P1,
Healey LL)
Bob Schoenberg, Creative and Critical Thinking
(UMass Boston)
This presentation will focus on ways to build effective online collaboration opportunities for students in ways relevant to either online or hybrid courses. The presentation will address models of collaboration, tools for collaboration, determining who did what or who said what, and resolving collaboration problems and it will include demonstrations and examples of student work.
Suzanne M. Buglione and Jennifer Safford-
Farquharson, CommunityBuild (Worcester State
University)
Given the changes in First Year Student culture over the past few years, we embarked on our Facebooking with
First Year Students experiment—to acknowledge and build on their backgrounds, experiences, and knowledge. Our goal was to help students negotiate their first semester with some innovative strategy that linked our pedagogy with technology with some rather cool results.
Catalin Zara, Mathematics (UMass Boston)
Transforming Teaching and Learning
WeBWork is an open source math homework tool that is being used across a number of math courses at
UMass Boston. In this presentation, the tool will be demonstrated and its pedagogical advantages for student learning and the implications of using discipline-focused e-learning tools will be discussed.
Plagiarism in a Digital Age: SafeAssign and Other Responses (P2, Healey LL)
Eleanor Kutz, English and IT Faculty Liaison, Vivian
Zamel, English and CIT, Wayne Rhodes and Stephen
Sutherland, English (UMass Boston)
Presenters will explore a variety of responses to students’ inappropriate or inexpert use of materials from the internet, from the effective use of electronic plagiarism checkers such as Safe Assign to alternative teaching strategies.
Elizabeth Stuhlsatz and Elisabeth Price, Writing
Instructors (Boston Architectural College)
What happens when you and your students are talking...but not speaking the same “language”? One of our solutions was to create an in-house dictionary. We’ll discuss how to adapt our methods to your writing center or English department.
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