We found 605 results that contain "community engagement"

The Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology supported a new Online Engagement & Community Building workshop on March 12, 2021. This workshop was led by Dr. Ellie Louson (Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology and Lyman Briggs College) and Dr. Melissa Usiak (College of Education). During the workshop, participants had the opportunity to learn more about engaging their students in the online environment and creating a community online. Facilitators answered questions and shared resources. You’ll walk away with at least one strategy to try in your course. For anyone who previously completed SOIREE, this workshop will go more in-depth and build on the strategies covered in SOIREE. 
 
If you have questions related to the SOIREE workshops, please reach out to Ashley Braman (behanash@msu.edu) for additional support.Do you have tools, tactics, or approaches that have worked for you in building community online? Please share them in the comments below!

Increasingly, students are looking for and benefiting from learning experiences connecting them with the community beyond textbooks and tests. Engaging students with communities outside the classroom can provide students with opportunities to learn more about what is immediately around them, help them understand why particular problems exist, and teach them how they can be active participants in communities. Depending on intent of the course, the community of focus can range in scale and scope from students’ own communities on campus to local and international communities that they may have never been engaged with before. Added benefits to students who participate in community-engaged courses include better performance on assessments, increased student retention, and increased political awareness and civic engagement (Reed, Rosenberg, Statham, & Rosing, 2015; Simons & Cleary, 2006; Strage, 2000). Representatives of community partner organizations have also indicated that under ideal conditions, engagement between students and communities can support client outcomes, organizational and community enrichment, and foster the growth of social justice (Sandy & Holland, 2006).
The Spectrum of Engagement
We visualize the types of community engagement on a spectrum, ranging from the least resource-intensive to the most resource-intensive activities (see image below). These resources include instructor, student, and community partner contribution. Course topic and learning objectives help determine the level of engagement and community settings appropriate for your class. As an instructor, you can even immerse students in community issues without leaving the classroom through articles and videos, or by bringing in a guest speaker who is a part of the topic being presented. More resource-intensive activities include asking students to do observations in their communities, interviewing community members, participating in aphotovoice project, or working with a community partner on a service learning project.  Full immersion of students in a new community might include participating in a study abroad program.

Four Ways to Determine How Community Engagement Fits Into Your Course
The prospect of engaging students outside of traditional textbooks and classroom instruction can be exciting. But incorporating community engagement into a course can feel daunting and like a lot of extra work. But it doesn’t have to be.The following can help you through the process:

Ask yourself why you want to engage students with  the community. Reflecting on your own reasons for the importance of community engagement can help you prioritize and decide the amount of time and effort you are willing to put into incorporating community engagement.


Decide on the amount of added time and resources you want to put into community engagement. Using the spectrum of community engagement, you may decide that for your first course you have minimal time and resources to commit to engaging students with the community, but can find meaningful articles and videos, enhanced by a knowledgeable speaker to engage students on a specific topic covered in the class.


Assess the community’s ability & interest to be engaged. Connect with community members about the activities you would like to do and determine their willingness and ability to engage with students. Be prepared to modify your original plan in order to meet your community partners’ needs.


Incorporate student and community feedback into the engagement activity. Consider doing a brief evaluation with students after the activity to find out the extent to which it was helpful to them. If your students are engaging directly with community members or organizations, seek feedback from individuals in those settings as well. You can close the feedback loop by reporting out to students and community members about what you learn and the aspects of the experience you plan to approach differently in the future.

Now that community engagement has your attention… stay tuned for the next two blog posts where we will  describe the activities we’ve used in our own classrooms and how you can implement them too! In the meantime, tell us what you think: What factors do you take into account when incorporating community engagement into your course? For those of you considering community engagement, what are the challenges you foresee? Seasoned community engagers, what are your rock star success stories? Post in the comments below!
 

 
Originally posted at “Inside Teaching MSU” (site no longer live): Lawlor, J. and Gregory K. Building Community Engagement into Your Course: Preparation. inside teaching.grad.msu.edu

Community engagement can be a powerful tool for both connecting classroom learning to real life experiences and supporting community change efforts. In this our last post on community engagement in teaching, we want to address two questions: : 1) How can teachers attend to ethical concerns that may arise throughout community engagement projects?; and 2) How can teachers integrate routine reflection as a strategy to assess student learning throughout community engagement projects? Reflective activities create a critical space for us to capture the ethical issues arising with students and to reflect on our own ethical practice as instructors for community engaged courses. And we could not discuss ethical concerns without students being able to reflect about specific issues. For this last post in our community engagement series, we will focus on the ways we made sure to support student learning by exploring potential ethical issues and creating regular reflective opportunities.
Ethical Considerations When Engaging Communities
The ethical issues you must attend to are both community- and student-focused. Returning to  the community engagement spectrum from our previous two posts (Preparation and Implementation), the ethical considerations broaden as students become more immersed in communities. For example, we both had concerns about communities being exploited for the sake of students’ learning. To address this concern, Jenny (service learning) spent time with community partners prior to her course to gain an understanding about what would make the project meaningful to them and built mechanisms into the course to attend to those needs. Katie (photovoice) built guidelines for students’ photos into her photovoice rubric, spent time in class talking to students about ethical photography, and encouraged  students to ask questions they may have about their photos.
We both felt it would be unethical for students to engage with communities without first considering the impact their own identities and expectations on their work. We made sure students thought about privileged and oppressed identities, assumptions they hold  about communities that they might engage with, and how they might manage or interpret challenging experiences. Overall, we focused students on reflecting as an ethical imperative to ensure the experience worked well for community members and for students, but also as an assessment process to enhance student learning.
Reflection for Learning in Community Engagement
Reflection can be a useful tool for both students and instructors to more fully understand learning during community engagement activities. We both used multiple tools for reflection based in course objectives, both formal and informal, and creatively responding to the unexpected elements of this work. Below, we highlight how you can prepare to incorporate reflection into your community engagement efforts, along with some helpful tips for doing so that we derived from our own work
A) Reflect Flexibly Toward Course Objectives
If you’ve already elected to use community engagement as part of your course, you should consider how it will match up with course objectives. This can be very direct if you’re reading an article or bringing in a speaker about a particular topic, but may require more scaffolding if you’re integrating an experience like photovoice, service learning, or study abroad. Here, it’s essential to anticipate multiple student experiences of community engagement work. Make sure that reflection prompts are broad enough so that all students can participate, but still focused enough they are reflecting back toward the overall project and course objectives. For example, in Katie’s course, she had a full class dedicated to reflection incorporating definitions, examples and an assignment using a reflection tool called the “Ladder of Inference.” These activities taught students how to identify their own learning and thinking changed about particular issues, preparing to do deeper reflection in their photovoice project, and further connecting back to the overall course objectives of examining how concepts of power and oppression relate to social issues.
B) Reflect Informally and Formally
It’s essential to provide a spectrum of ways students can reflect on their learning. This spectrum builds a comprehensive culture of reflection in your course and provides multiple windows into student learning during community engagement and beyond. Providing informal reflection spaces help students build up to more formal, graded reflections on their work. These informal reflections could include short discussions, posing quick questions to students after explaining something, and/or having students keep a journal of their thoughts during community engagement work. And eventually building formal reflection into the course provides a culminating space for student to think about their learning across community engagement experiences. Final papers or projects can  provide a powerful picture of what students experienced and continue to validate both the community engagement work and the importance of regular reflection in connection to it. Whatever mixture of formal and informal reflection you decide on, make sure to integrate the results of the student reflection into your instruction moving forward. Through lectures and learning activities, demonstrate you’ve heard and are thinking about what students said.
C) Reflect Creatively
Reflective activities and assignments don’t have to fit within the bounds of traditional assessment strategies. There is plenty of room for creativity in setting up these activities.For example, Katie hosted a photovoice gallery in her classroom where students could explore their peers’ interpretations of the activity. Then, students had the opportunity to engage in discussion to reflect on what they’ve learned as a group from participating in the process. Doing this in both a big group and individually can speak to multiple learning styles. It also provides a space for students to generate new understandings of their experiences.
D) Reflect on the Unexpected
Realize that reflections may go beyond the scope of your course objectives and be prepared to facilitate learning that departs from expected directions. Community engagement can be both messy and beautiful. Leave space for unpacking the complexities.
We hope this series of blog posts helped remove some of the mystique regarding community engagement in the classroom. Getting students to connect course topics to what is going on around them can be rewarding and exciting! As you continue to consider incorporating community engagement into your own work, what ethical concerns do you need to consider? How important is reflection in your course? What reflective activities could you do to prepare your students for engagement and to assess their learning? We are always looking for new ideas so please share with us in the comments below!
 

 
Originally posted at “Inside Teaching MSU” (site no longer live): Gregory K. and Lawlor, J. Building Community Engagement into Your Course: Ethics and Reflections. inside teaching.grad.msu.edu

What is iClicker? 
iClicker is a student response system that allows instructors to incorporate interactive and engaging aspects of teaching and learning into their lessons. Students can participate using actual clicker remotes, or their own devices (such as phones, tablets, and laptops) via the iClicker Reef application. 
 
What is the difference between iClicker Cloud and iClicker Reef? 
iClicker Cloud is the portion of the tool that allows for instructors to set up courses and assessments. ICloud Reef is for student responses and can be accessed via different devices as long as students have internet access.  
 
Why is iClicker important?  
With iClicker, instructors can engage students throughout instruction, whether face-to-face or remote. As instructors have the opportunity to incorporate activities like polls and quizzes directly into their lessons, iClicker can be used for both formative and summative assessment. This tool also allows assessments to be graded and transferred to learning management systems such as D2L. 
 
How do I access iClicker? 
iClicker is FREE for all MSU students and instructors. The application can be downloaded here.  
 
Where can I find more information about iClicker? 
The Academic Service Technology Catalog has guidance for instructors and students on iClicker. 
 
 

This workshop is designed to help you prepare for your teaching roles by strengthening your pedagogical understandings of D2L. For us, this means understanding how to implement thoughtful, intentional, and inclusive practices. We will introduce GTAs to foundational skills and strategies necessary to create well-structured, engaging, accessible online learning experiences.  
Upon completing this session, GTAs will be able to: 

Identify key components and goals of the learner experience through design thinking exercises. 
Consider factors that may impact learners’ ability to fully participate in various modes of online learning, and develop strategies to gain a sense of learners’ digital learning contexts. 
Evaluate opportunities for asynchronous and synchronous connection, community-building, interaction, and engagement. 
Discuss and explore features for enhancing learning and improving accessibility.   
Identify resources and supports for technical aspects of D2L. 

Here is a set of resources about different aspects of student engagement and online teaching. 
 
“What Is Caring Pedagogy? An Introduction: Relationships of Reciprocity Series” by Monica B. Glina, NYU.
 
“Stanford researchers identify four causes for ‘Zoom fatigue’ and their simple fixes” by Vignesh Ramachandran, about Stanford research into the psychology of online work.
 
“8 Ideas Designed to Engage Students In Active Learning Online” by Caitlin Tucker, Pepperdine University.
 
“The Human Element in Online Learning” by Larry DeBrock, Norma Scagnoli and Fataneh Taghaboni-Dutta for Inside Higher Ed.
 
“4 Zoom-Friendly Creative Warm-ups” by Hilary Buchanan and Alexis Schuknecht, Pixel Park.
 
“Zoom Friendly Warm-ups and Icebreakers” by Eugene Korsunskiy for Future of Design in Higher Education [Medium].
 
Hybrid Learning Models with components of different learning modalities from The Linden School.
 
Image Credit: ST.art / Shutterstock.com © 2020

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Student to student interactions are a very important part in any classroom and the online setting is no exception. There are many ways students can engage with each other online - but here a few tips and suggestions you can structure in your course that can offer this connection between students.
Methods

Discussions
Group Work

Group Projects
Group Discussion
Study Groups
Group Case Studies

Peer Review
Peer Instruction
Collaborative Brainstorming

Tools

D2L Discussion Threads. Students need to be able to connect with classmates around your teaching. Provide them with discussion threads for both the entire class "i.e. General Course Conversation" and module-specific. Some students can and will use this tool. Others will only use it if it's required. But it still is a great way to be able to provide students opportunity to connect.
Microsoft Teams. Every student at MSU can use Teams for realtime group chat, individual chat, voice and video and file sharing. 
Zoom. Every student by default is able to use Zoom for voice/video/meetings. 
Google Apps: Docs, Slides, Sheets. Students can work together to create and work on files in real time.

Dip Deeper
If you would like to further explore this topic, here are some resources you could check out:

10 Tips for Effective Online Discussions 
Mastering Online Discussion Board Facilitation Resource Guide 
Zoom Breakout Room Information Sheet

SOIREE Team:
Design Lead: Sarah Wellman
Content Leads: Kate Sonka, Stephen Thomas, and Jeremy Van Hof
Content Authors: Jason Archer, Kevin Henley, David Howe, Summer Issawi, Leslie Johnson, Rashad Muhammad, Nick Noel, Candace Robertson, Scott Schopieray, Jessica Sender, Daniel Trego, Valeta Wensloff, and Sue Halick