TLC Prepares & Shares

Book Reads

We love to highlight books that we have personally found meaningful; we also elevate books faculty share with us to expand their influence more broadly by recommending them to others!   

Titles we have read and coordinated book reads with for faculty include: 

	The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker Priya Parker is a nationally recognized expert on effective gatherings and presents this step-by-step guide to intentional and meaningful gatherings where participants feel invited, included, and needed.  Her insights have ready application to the ways in which we gather to teach and learn.  Our favorite chapter in the TLC is “Never Start a Funeral with Logistics”!
	Dare to Lead by Brene' Brown Teams and departments working together in higher education today can be more innovative and better meet demands as they engage in four key skills shared by bestselling author, speaker, and professor Brene’ Brown in this book that is all about bravery, courage, and vulnerability.  Candace Boesiger collaborated with CSI’s Nursing program in a semester-long reading of Dare to Lead.
	Engaged Teaching: A Handbook for College Educators by Elizabeth F. Barkley and Claire Howell Major What does it mean to be an engaged teacher, and does it matter?  Barkley and Major propose that to be an effective teacher means to be an engaged teacher - one who is willing to be thoughtful, reflective, and actionable in their pursuit of excellence in the art and craft of teaching. This handbook provides a model of how to be an engaged teacher, together with practical strategies to put the model into action in your classroom.  The book includes theory and research but focuses especially on practical strategies for use in the classroom while covering course design, classroom environment, and teaching improvement.

Professional Development Opportunities

The TLC partners with the CSI Office of the Vice President of Instruction to identify opportunities to bring impactful faculty enrichment and training to campus.  An example of this includes: 

Dr. Natasha Jankowski

TLC Recommendations

Dr. Natasha Jankowski is a higher education and assessment expert.  Having previously served as the Director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA), Dr. Jankowski is the author of multiple assessment-related books, reports, and articles.  She is also a sought-after presenter nationally and internationally on student assessment practices.

Dr. Jankowski joined us at CSI for an Assessment Week – the period during the Fall Semester when faculty and non-faculty “readers” join to review and assess submitted student work using a portfolio-based process.   She presented multiple addresses in large and small groups to faculty and continues to collaborate with the TLC to guide our ongoing efforts in designing assignment charrettes. 

If you would like to know more, please visit the Assessment category of our Resources page. 

Meet Current Needs

When directed by the Office of the Vice President for Instruction, TLC learning designers respond to institutional priorities and prioritize training and resource development on initiatives and best practices related to these topics so we may support and provide resources to CSI faculty as requested.  Two examples of this include: 

Accessible Course Content

Our college president, Dr. Fisher, encourages us at CSI to think of students not as “at risk”, but instead “at promise”!  We are tasked to employ resources and pedagogies that serve all students.   The purchase of software tools such as CIDILabs DesignPLUS give us a great opportunity to prioritize student access to all course materials. 

Using DesignPLUS as a course design toolset, CSI instructors have content styling features and intuitive accessibility checkers at their literal fingertips to ensure each page meets common accessibility requirements.  Best of all, this can happen while they are building the course. 

High Impact Practices

HIPs are effective teaching strategies and educational experiences we can foster for students, which, when applied at an appropriately high-level and consistent frequency, lead to improved student engagement, retention, and achievement.  Stimulating curiosity, critical thinking, meaningful interactions, and impactful content engagement are desirable goals for all instructors.  HIPs can provide a framework and context in which to build improvements to our teaching and learning.   

To learn more, please see: 

• A CSI overview of High Impact Practices.
• The great work being done by Pike’s Peak Community College with HIPs, including faculty guides. 

Committees, Courses & Programs

We prioritize active participation in shared governance committees that promote teaching and learning and related initiatives at CSI, while we also work to identify and participate in professional courses and personal development.

TLC Committee Work

The CSI Committees that include representatives from the Teaching & Learning Center include: 

• Assessment Committee 
• Faculty AI-on-the-Fly Committee
• General Education Review Committee 
• Instructional Excellence Committee 
• LMS Optimization Committee 
• Math Pedagogy Committee 
  

TLC Professional Development and Course Participation

A sampling of recent courses and professional development TLC learning designers have completed includes: 

We went to Stanford! – In June of 2024, three of CSI's learning designers attended the 5-day d.school Teaching and Learning Studio.  The Stanford d.school is a design thinking institute with a mission to help people unlock creative abilities and apply them to the world.  It has become one of the most highly sought-after academic programs at Stanford University, while also offering a competitive application process to invite attendance from educators and designers nationwide. 

At d.school, we explored the use of design thinking to -  

• Foster innovation and experimentation, helping us to incorporate diverse ideas into our thinking and application of learning design to instruction. 
• Apply an interdisciplinary approach to an immersive and collaborative experience, working in partnership with faculty and designers from across the country on real-world problems and opportunities. 
• Create change inside and outside of the classroom, through a student-first perspective. 

This immersive, week-long experience transformed how we think and work as learning designers! Now in partnership with industry leaders in design thinking, we continue our growth and connection with the d.school monthly to bring fresh, research-backed strategies to CSI, helping our instructors tackle complex challenges and better support student learning.

Institute for Emerging Leadership in Online Learning – Candace completed this four-part leadership development series over a period of five months.  Sponsored by the Online Learning Consortium, participants in this elite program collaborate with others from around the world to explore, identify, and act upon opportunities to improve digital education. 

ISTEM Teaching Project – Bethany completed this 6-week MOOC (massive open online course) and can highly recommend it if you are willing to undertake a 3-hour weekly time commitment.  The course is free, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.  To date, more than 2,000 higher ed faculty have completed the course, and preliminary qualitative data show gains in awareness, attitudes, confidence, implementation, and student benefits.   

Questions?  Please ask, we’d love to share what we’ve learned! Email tlc@csi.edu. 

Professional Associations

We regularly seek opportunities to train with and learn from the following national organizations:

• AECT
• OLC
• AAC & U
• NISOD

New Technologies & Tools

In the Teaching & Learning Center, we partner regularly with campus committees, departments, individual instructors, and third-party vendors to learn more about educational technologies and how to apply them to instruction to improve outcomes.  A few examples of this include: 

Canvas – A TLC learning designer meets monthly with our Canvas Customer Support Manager and representatives from all higher education institutions using Canvas across the western United States.  This is a rich opportunity to learn about what is new and what is under development in Canvas while also connecting with other teams supporting faculty and student use of Canvas.  This means the updates we share with you monthly in Teaching & Learning Takeout are immediately relevant and directly informed by Canvas, and that we have a clear route to take your suggestions and questions back to our Canvas support team! 

CIDILabs DesignPLUS – This tool is a Canvas add-on that promises to empower instructors to take their courses from drab to fab in just a few clicks.  With the easy facilitation of page-level accessibility, the addition of tabs, columns, and more, and the easy grouping of content on a Canvas page, the promise is real!

Packback – as a relatively new tool integrated into CSI’s Canvas environment, Packback shows exciting promise to improve student engagement and participation in online discussion environments.  We in the TLC have been early adopters of Packback in our own courses, organized webinars to bring Packback introductions and Q&A sessions to instructors, and actively developed documentation when needed to illustrate Packback best-practices for course integration. 

Zoom Rooms – the TLC partners with CSI’s IT Department to offer regular training to instructors who teach from or to CSI’s Zoom Rooms.  This technology regularly improves and changes; consistent training is important to ensure instructors are prepared to share content, engage with students in multiple locations, and correctly schedule and manage all technology associated with these learning spaces.  To know more, please see the Zoom Room Instruction section of Teaching & Learning Resources.