Lyba Mehdi

Welcome to the second COLRS Catch Up! We'd like to start by introducing our COLRS GA, Lyba Mehdi.

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Teaching Conversations

Join UIS instructors as they share activities, ideas, and practices that have shaped and improved teaching and learning. After sharing a brief summary of their work, presenting instructors will be available at individual tables to answer questions and collaborate with attendees. Light refreshments will be provided.

Illinois Online Higher Education Symposium

Doing Less with Less, Effectively: Illinois Online Higher Education Symposium

After a successful inaugural event, we're excited to invite you back for another engaging gathering of Illinois educators and thought leaders in online teaching and learning. Our theme, "Doing Less with Less, Effectively," emphasizes innovative strategies for impactful online education within evolving resource constraints.

The rapid emergence of generative AI tools has added new pressure to the challenges already facing higher education faculty. While these technologies can be used responsibly, many instructors are alarmed by the growing tendency of students to rely on AI as a shortcut. This practice not only raises serious questions about academic honesty but also threatens to erode the very skills higher education is meant to cultivate—critical thinking, clear writing, and independent problem-solving.

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faculty

Welcome to the first COLRS Catch Up of the year! Periodically, we will send out these emails to provide reminders or updates, share materials you may have missed, and highlight some of the amazing work our faculty is doing in their online classes.

In case you missed it

In August, our focus was getting your semester started right, and we offered three resources to help you get started:

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campus announcement
staff

Online Discussions Workshop

Online discussion are vital to building a community in an online course. In order to achieve that goal, we need students to engage in these online discussions. Join COLRS staff as we explore some strategies for making the most of your online discussions. We'll think about different thinking routines and prompts, post length, frequency, and more!

  • When: Tuesday, November 11 at 1 p.m.
  • Where: BRK 416 and COLRS Zoom
  • Duration: 1 hour

Journaling Workshop

Understanding how our students are feeling about our classes is important, but survey fatigue might prevent them from sharing those thoughts--especially multiple times in a course. Journaling is a strategy we can use to find out how our students are doing in a low-stakes and personal way (and for so much more!). Join COLRS staff to learn more about how journaling can be leveraged in your courses.

Google Assignments

Google Assignments allows UIS instructors and students to use their Google accounts to create and submit assignments. This tool is built right into Canvas assignments but provides users with all the benefits of Google Docs, Google Sides, and other documents created in Google Drive.

Register Now! Harmonize Discussions (and more) Overview

Never heard of Harmonize? Love Harmonize discussions but want to know what else is available? Whether you're a noobie or a pro, this webinar is for you! Learn how to save time and improve the classroom experience with all the tools that are available to you today as part of your Harmonize subscription: discussions, peer review, PDF annotations, individual assignments, polling, and more.

COLRS provides this tool for the campus to enhance the discussion, multimedia interaction, and peer review tools in Canvas. Come to this session to learn more about this

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