Thursday, May 16 Keynote and Opening Reception Time: 1:30-4:30 p.m. Place: Templeton-Blackburn Memorial Auditorium President Robert Glidden, Dr. Gary Schumacher, and Dr. Stephen Kopp will share their thoughts on the scholarship of teaching and learning. A reception will follow the keynote session. Bio, President Robert Glidden Friday, May 17 Engaging Students in Large Enrollment Classes Time: 9-10 a.m. Place: Baker Center Ballroom Randy Phillis University of Massachusetts at Amherst Phillis and a colleague successfully redesigned large-section biology courses at the university with three goals in mind: to improve student learning, engagement and attendance; to improve the transfer of learning to higher-level biology courses; and to ensure more efficient use of faculty time. Thanks to a $200,000 grant by the Pew Charitable Trust, the course redesign incorporated in-class problem-solving exercises and a Web-based student preparation and quizzing system, with students in traditional course formats. Friday, May 17 Low Threshold Applications of Educational Technology: An Emerging Approach for Large-Scale, Improvement of education Time: 11 a.m. to noon NOTE LOCATION CHANGE: Baker 327 Stephen C. Ehrmann, Ph.D., Director The Flashlight Program for the Study and Improvement of Educational Uses of Technology at The Teaching, Learning and Technology Group Attempts to use computing to improve higher learning go back at least four decades. Only recently have we begun to escape a paradigm that once described most such investments. This older paradigm was characterized by attempts to make huge leaps forward, often featuring major investments in hardware and sophisticated interactive courseware. Today computing and the Web are becoming part of the fabric of education, changing the fabric (bit by bit) in the process. As we all know now, this new paradigm uses technology to support active learning and communication. Both take advantage of relatively familiar software (e.g., word processing, disciplinary packages) and the Web. The teaching-learning ideas are relatively easy to pass from person to person. Because the tools are familiar and the pattern of change is incremental, it's possible for rather profound changes in the fabric of education to creep up on us. Steve Ehrmann will discuss some of these possibilities and their implications for program improvement, assessment, and faculty development. Friday, May 17 Faculty Research on Technology Use in Their Own Courses: Promising Lines of Inquiry NOTE TIME CHANGE: 1-2 p.m. Place: CITL 021 Scott Quad Basement Stephen C. Ehrmann, Ph.D., Director The Flashlight Program for the Study and Improvement of Educational Uses of Technology at The Teaching, Learning and Technology Group The rapid pace of technological change has made education more exciting; the use of such technology makes teaching more risky, especially when students use technology outside the classroom. This session will explore the kinds of research ("scholarship of teaching") that faculty can do in order to improve learning in their own courses. In this session Steve Ehrmann will review Flashlight Online and some other tools and methods to help faculty members get started in gathering useful data. This informal discussion will describe several archetypal approaches. The emphasis will be on studies that are both easy to do and easily worth the effort.