Beyond the Classroom:
Engaging Students, Building Community
Thursday, January 16th, 2025
The Office of Faculty Development, CITS Instructional Development, and Online and Continuing Education have partnered with colleagues across campus to host a full-day, on-campus conference. Join us to…
- discover new assessment and engagement methods.
- network with your peers from across campus.
- showcase innovative teaching and learning practices taking place at UMass Dartmouth.
A light breakfast and lunch are included with registration.
Conference Agenda:
8:00 am – Check-in & Complimentary Breakfast
Charlton College of Business Lobby
8:45 am – Welcome Remarks
CCB 149
Keri Green, Director of Instructional Technology
Michael Sheriff, Interim Director of the Office of Faculty Development
9:00 am – Concurrent Sessions
Covering Your @$$ on All Things Copyright and AI
CCB 240
Lorraine Heffernan, Kari Mofford, Sonia Pacheco, Emma Wood
The Research & Instruction librarians will demonstrate how to handle copyrighted materials and those produced by artificial intelligence. Some common goals of selecting course materials are to identify relevant, inexpensive (preferably no cost to the student), and easily accessed articles, chapters, videos, etc. UMassD is fortunate that so much material is digitized so that reserves held here in the library are very much reduced! Now is a good time to review the options around the fair use of copyrighted materials to ensure that students have easy and timely access to needed course materials which are most conveniently accessed through the learning management system or links in a syllabus. Librarians will review best practices, describe how to find alternatives, describe how to link directly to articles and ebooks held by the library, describe how to limit access to streaming videos, and describe how to license materials that we do not hold or how to make best efforts to acquire permissions or licenses. Explore their efforts to properly identify and cite materials produced by AI models and offer guidelines for AI acknowledgment. Did you know the UMassD library recently acquired a campus-wide New York Times subscription and an Atlantic Monthly subscription to protect all of the articles being sourced from those publications?
Building Inclusivity One Step at a Time
CCB 247
Elisabeth Arruda, Gerri-lyn Boyden, John R Buck, Anna Dempsey, Ana Doblas, Md Habibor Rahman, Martha Whitfield
In addition to providing a short list of strategies to make our classroom more inclusive, we hope that our session will catalyze a larger conversation with the audience about promoting inclusivity in our courses. Highlighting the impact of small, incremental changes should reduce perceived barriers to implementing inclusive teaching practices. We hope the session will inspire faculty to increase students’ sense of belonging by adopting inclusive teaching practices.
Tips and Tricks to Make Your Life Easier When Switching from Blackboard to Canvas
CCB 248
Firas Khatib, Nicole Sheahan
The session is designed for those who want to make their transition from Blackboard to Canvas as smooth as possible. We will go through specific examples of tasks that you are used to performing in myCourses, and how to accomplish them in Canvas… as well as additional features that myCourses did not have. This session will showcase input from faculty who piloted Canvas in Fall ’24, Instructional Development staff who have been helping faculty all semester long with Canvas questions, and feedback from students who experienced Canvas in their Fall ’24 courses. The goal will be for new-to-Canvas faculty to come away with a “cheat sheet” of Canvas tricks that they can refer to once they start teaching with Canvas.
10:00 am – Concurrent Sessions
Publishing “WITH” Your Students or Publishing “YOUR” Students?
Embracing Students’ Research Agendas Rather Than Using Students to Further Your Own
CCB 240
Nikolay Anguelov
As more non-traditional students enter universities, their life experiences, work duties while in school, and unique cultural knowledge bases are defining their research aspirations. Technology innovations have enabled research quality to transcend academic hierarchies, allowing more and more sophisticated queries to be executed by those without PhDs, or at least to be involved in co-authorship. How to harness these changes and see them as opportunities for faculty to diversify their research agendas and inspire their students toward research that is meaningful for the students? Mentoring such research should be a logical goal for professors, but it seldom actually gets out into the academic press. This presentation focuses on the reasons why. It discusses the synergies or lack thereof between professor and student research goals in terms of incentives and disincentives for faculty to embrace student research ideas. Academic cultures, faculty tenure and promotion policies, faculty focus on their branding, as well as faculty ability to get resources to support student research are some of the main challenges. They are especially strong deterrents when student research ideas are not aligned with the faculty’s own research goals. The presentation will also offer examples of successful publications of research that are student-generated rather than faculty-generated and offer the stories of the students’ unique roles in the research process from idea generation to galley proofs.
Artificial Intelligence and Generative Artificial Intelligence
CCB 247
Course Materials Prototype Development with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Agentic AI, and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs)
Eiichiro Kazumori
In a world characterized by inequalities and polarization caused by skill-biased technological change and globalization, education to equip students with skills is crucial to help them escape the poverty trap and obtain jobs with upward mobility. Nevertheless, the current method of using textbooks and homework from textbooks faces significant challenges. As students have diverse backgrounds and preparations, especially in quantitative areas, it may not be effective to provide the same teaching materials to all students. As the world changes, textbooks and homework can become outdated and may not be up-to-date, especially in social science fields. Answers to homework questions from textbooks are reused many times, and students can find answers on the Internet. The crucial novelty of this project is to develop course material prototypes using recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) that address these challenges by further extending Kazumori (2024). We utilize new technologies and developments such as (1). Retrieval-Augmented Generation to provide course materials to LLMs. With prompt engineering, we can develop course materials tailored to the needs of the class and students from LLMs. (2). Agentic AI: Each LLM has its strengths and shortcomings. We employ multiple LLMs in different roles, such as one LLM developing a draft and another LLM reviewing and revising, to develop higher-quality materials that meet students’ needs. (3). Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs): We use not only written textbooks but also video materials such as online lectures on YouTube to create materials that are more up-to-date and relevant and that students cannot reverse engineer. We can also obtain not only text outputs but also audio and videos that fit students’ needs and preferences. We will provide demonstrations of these methods with applications to our teaching experiences in the Charlton College of Business and the College of Arts and Sciences. In closing, recent advances in AI and LLM technologies allow us to develop course material prototypes that fit students’ diverse backgrounds and preparations, are up-to-date and relevant, and that students cannot find answers to on the Internet. This approach can significantly enhance students’ skill acquisition and support their career development.
AI in Education: Bridging Technology and Pedagogy
Danielle Bazinet, Keri Green
Generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, have revolutionized how we think about writing, creativity, and problem-solving in education. While initial reactions often focused on concerns about academic integrity, the potential for these tools to enhance learning is profound. In this session, we’ll introduce the basics of generative AI and explore its transformative role in higher education. Learn practical strategies for using AI to design engaging assignments, foster active learning, and prepare students for a future where AI is integral to the workplace.
Harmonize: Online Discussions That Students Will Love
CCB 248
Elisabeth Arruda, Instructional Development
Join us to explore everything you need to take online discussions to the next level!
First-Year Students Transition to College: Lessons Learned from Success and Challenges in Teaching First-Year Nursing Courses
CCB 340
Peeranuch LeSeure
Description -To be announced…
11:00 am – Concurrent Sessions
Enhancing Distance Pedagogy Through Collaborative Faculty Peer Review of Online Courses
CCB 240
Victoria Baker, Uloma Onubogu
Join us to identify the current state of faculty peer review for distance/online courses, link framework, content, and tools needed in the course peer review process, describe collaborative peer review best practices and benefits for teaching and learning, and apply peer review findings to institutional experience. This workshop/session will allow participants to interact on the subject of the online peer review process and engage each other on their institutional experience. Educational paradigms have shifted significantly in the realm of distance pedagogy with advances in digital technology to deliver asynchronous and synchronous learning. While standards for building high-quality online courses are well established in many institutions of learning, including at UMassD, a clear standard for faculty’s teaching and instructional practices within the well-established online learning systems has yet to be structured for ongoing pedagogical effectiveness. Thus, a system to foster evaluation of instructional quality and teaching practices through a faculty peer review process is critical for effective online education. Three nursing faculty members who teach online at UMassD participated in a collaborative peer review of their fully online asynchronous courses. The goal was to pilot collaborative peer review of online courses as a vital supportive strategy for faculty to review each other’s courses and instructional practices, provide and receive constructive feedback, and engage in qualitative discussions and debriefing. A quality standard review tool, and best practices in online course review were utilized. Key outcomes of the collaborative peer review confirmed support for pedagogical effectiveness and revealed online teaching gaps, lessons learned, and recommendations to promote faculty peer course review.
Insights from Early College: Connections, Collaborations, and Community
CCB 247
Traci Almeida, Chritopher Clinton
This interactive session examines the transformative potential of UMass Dartmouth’s innovative Early College partnerships, where pedagogical excellence meets community engagement. Through our dynamic collaboration with K-12 districts, we’ve cultivated a unique vertical integration model that spans from classroom to district leadership. The session will showcase how our vertically integrated support system—connecting students, teachers, administrators, and superintendents—has become a model for systematic educational transformation, offering faculty unprecedented opportunities to study and influence the educational pipeline while strengthening academic outcomes across institutional boundaries. Faculty currently teaching in the early college program will discuss how they are connecting with students, strategies for students’ engagement, and share their experiences teaching in a high school setting.
Universal Design for Learning: Crafting Inclusive Course Sites in Your LMS
CCB 248
Keri Green
Transform your course sites into models of inclusivity and accessibility! This interactive session dives into Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles, focusing on ADA compliance within LMS course design. Learn how to create engaging, accessible course sites that empower all students, regardless of ability. Through practical tips, demonstrations, and activities, you’ll walk away ready to build a course site that supports every learner’s success.
12:00 pm – Complimentary Lunch & Chancellor Remarks
Mark Fuller, Chancellor
Claire T. Carney Library Grand Reading Room
12:30 pm – Keynote
Student Engagement in a Technological Age
James M. Lang, Ph.D.
Claire T. Carney Library Grand Reading Room
Session Description:
To be announced…
Speaker Biography:
James M. Lang, Ph.D. is a Professor of Practice at the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Notre Dame. He has authored six books, the most recent of which are Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It (Basic Books, 2020), Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2016) and Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty (Harvard University Press, 2013), and On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching (Harvard UP, 2008). He also holds the title of Emeritus Professor of English at Assumption University, where he founded and directed the university’s teaching center.
A dynamic and highly sought-after public speaker, he has delivered conference keynotes or conducted teaching workshops for faculty at more than three hundred colleges or universities in the United States and abroad. He has also consulted with the United Nations on a multi-year project to develop teaching materials on ethics and integrity for high school and college faculty.
2:00 pm – Provost’s Closing Remarks
Ramprasad Balasubramanian, Provost/Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
Claire T. Carney Library Grand Reading Room
Conference Sponsors
- CITS Instructional Development
- Office of Faculty Development
- Office of Online and Continuing Education
Please email us at tlconference@umassd.edu with any conference-related questions.