From the Connected Classroom summit to Hidden Gems for faculty, plus timely workshops on designing assignments in the AI era and acting on your student evaluations.
You're invited! Please join us for The Connected Classroom, a new kind of faculty summit. It's not about sitting in a chair all day, listening to people speak. Like the stories in this issue, it's about finding community and collaborating on shared challenges.
Learning Technologies Faculty Fellows will host three tracks featuring guided, hands-on learning: 1. The Assignment Makeover Studio; 2. The Evidence, Ethics, and Student Trust Lab; and 3. The Multimodal Engagement & Learning Design Playground. (Get more track details here. Or read a faculty perspective here.)
Faculty from all IU campuses are welcome to attend either day.
IU Bloomington: May 20, 8:30am to 4pm IU Indianapolis: May 21, 8:30am to 4pm
Designing Assignments for Human Thought & Academic Integrity in the AI Era
Review current research about how best to support student learning
With easy access to generative AI, we all face constant temptation to offload work to a bot, and no one can definitively calculate the gains (time, money) versus the losses (insert your concerns here!). When students offload coursework meant to develop core humanistic capacities such as critical thinking and self-reflection, however, the loss of learning seems obvious.
In this workshop, we'll review what current research shows about how best to support students' learning through writing in the AI era, considering face-to-face, online synchronous, and asynchronous teaching contexts. We'll then begin to apply these findings to our own upcoming summer or fall courses.
With the end of the semester comes the time to gather student feedback about your courses and teaching via your student evaluations: Online Course Questionnaires (OCQs). While you may not look forward to reading your OCQ results, they can be a source of useful information as you reflect on your fall semester courses. Making a plan for how you will process your OCQ results and extract action-oriented information from them can not only improve your teaching; it can also reduce the stress you may associate with reading your results.
Teaching with Engage (limited to IU faculty & staff)
Engage 2.0 is IU's university-standard e-reader. Join this webinar for a guided tour of the Engage interface, learn about its many features, and get resources to support your success with your IU eText.
Choose one session: 11–11:30am, 2–2:30pm, or 7–7:30 pm ET
In the world of Gemini AI, Gems are custom versions of the assistant designed to handle specific, repeatable tasks. Think of them as your own personal "AI experts" that have been pre-loaded with your specific rubrics, teaching preferences, or department guidelines—by using a Gem, you skip the repetitive setup and jump straight to high-quality, consistent results every time.
This isn't just a lecture. It's an interactive showcase. We will be demonstrating gems that have already been created, giving you a front-row seat to see how these tools perform in real-world academic scenarios.
This is an official publication of Indiana University and is produced by UITS Learning Technologies (LT). Subscription is automatic for IU instructors of record and members of the extended LT team. Please email comments and questions to ReachLT@iu.edu.
