From Survival to Exceptional Extravaganza
On May 11 and 12, 2020, SMU faculty, along with the Office of Information Technology (OIT), SMU Libraries, and SMU Global & Online (SMU GO) convened an unprecedented two-day Zoom extravaganza designed to showcase faculty experiences and advise for how to move remote learning from survival to exceptional.
The Remote Learning: from Survival to Exceptional event provided unique faculty panel discussions, training workshops, and other sessions covering remote teaching topics such as how to foster student interactions, how to deter your students from cheating, and how to organize your online course. The vision for the event was to provide a learning opportunity to help campus efforts to equip faculty for remote teaching. Deep discussions ranged from developing modules in Canvas courses to using Peer Reviews for assessments in group projects.
“SMU’s extraordinary experience transitioning to remote teaching was only possible because of the work of our equally extraordinary faculty,” shared Jason Warner, Executive Director of Academic Technology Services. “We knew that by showcasing the work of our faculty teaching exemplars would be the most effective way to help and to reach other faculty. Faculty can best inspire and motivate other faculty by sharing hard lessons learned and how they’ve improved their courses.”
Over two days, 17 webinars were offered with 45-minute segments covering a topic that addressed the unique challenges and opportunities facing faculty with remote teaching. The event was a well-attended success with over 180 SMU faculty with most attending at least three of the webinars. By collaborating between departments, OIT, SMU Go, and the SMU Libraries were able to provide over 660 professional development hours for the University.
Recordings of the webinars are available at smu.edu/OIT/AcademicTech/Keep-Teaching/Training/Remote-Learning-Survival.
