TEACHxperts Archive

Spring 2025

AI in Teaching: Success Stories from Northwestern Faculty

AI is rapidly reshaping higher education, offering new opportunities for teaching and learning. But what does AI integration look like in practice?

Join this session to hear firsthand success stories from Northwestern instructors on leveraging AI for learning. Gain practical insights, explore challenges, and walk away with strategies to integrate AI into your own courses.

This session will be held remotely via Zoom.

Presenters:

Leigh Cohen, Assistant Clinical Professor, School of Communication
Franziska Lys, Professor of German and Director, MENA languages program, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Mindy Thorpe, Assistant Professor, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Feinberg School of Medicine

Winter 2025

Jacqueline Babb

Senior Lecturer and Director of IMC Full-Time Program, Medill School of Journalism

Integrating Metacognition into Your Teaching Practice

Tuesday, January 28

In this interactive workshop, we will explore the concept of metacognition and its positive effects on student learning. Participants will uncover the power of "thinking about thinking" and why it is crucial for fostering critical thinking, problem-solving, and self-directed learning. You will learn how to embed metacognitive practices into your courses through practical strategies, helping students develop skills to monitor and improve their learning. You will leave this session with actionable tools to enhance your teaching and empower your students to become more effective learners in your class and beyond.

Spring 2024

Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark

Director of the Office of Faculty Professional Development, Georgia Institute of Technology

Burnout Resilience through Connection

Wednesday, April 3

The last four years have been challenging, to say the very least. Many faculty and academic staff were on the edge of burnout before 2020, and the events since then have tested our coping skills as individuals and as a higher education community. Understanding and creating conditions that prevent burnout are important steps to creating resilience. In this workshop, we will explore what burnout is, how to recognize it, and how to approach your work through the lens of connection as a path to burnout resilience.

Winter 2024

Daniel Stanford

Faculty Development and Instructional Technology Consultant

Questioning AI Assumptions in Teaching and Learning

March 5, 2024

In this presentation, we’ll review "evergreen" strategies for fostering AI literacy—strategies that encourage transparency and experimentation without abandoning critical thinking. We’ll contrast common assumptions about student use of AI with findings from recent studies and use cases.

Past Canvas Hall of Fame Winners

Canvas Hall of Fame Winners Showcase

February 9, 2024

Featuring:

Annie Wilkinson, SPAN Postdoctoral Fellow, 2022-24
2023 Excellence in DEI/Accessibility Winner
Aude Raymond & Patricia Scarampi, Professors of Instruction in French
2023 Most Innovative Course Site Winners
Emily Kadens, Edna B. and Ednyfed H. Williams Memorial Professor of Law Vice Dean
2023 Best Use of Lecture Videos/Recordings Winners
Ilya Mikhelson, Associate Professor of Instruction
2022 Best Use of Lecture Videos/Recordings Winner
Katie Gesmundo, Assistant Professor of Instruction, Co-Director of General Chemistry Laboratory
2022 Most Innovative Course Site Winners

Fall 2023

Dawn Diperi

Education Specialist - Learning Passport Digital Content Lead at UNICEF Learning Passport

Make Learning Stick with Visually Appealing Course Materials

November 16, 2023

Presented by Dawn Diperi, Education Specialist - Learning Passport Digital Content Lead at UNICEF Learning Passport, this session will cover principles of visual design that support learning. Dawn is the author of “Graphic Design for Course Creators, Digitally accessible, Visually Appealing Courses” published by Press Books with a CC-BY Creative Commons license.

Spring 2023

Ruthann C. Thomas

Associate Director of Teaching and Learning at MIT's Teaching & Learning Lab

Learning Strategies to Support Equitable Student Engagement

April 5, 2023

In this interactive presentation we will learn and apply principles from the science of learning to design structured and inclusive learning activities that engage students through the practices of retrieval and self-explanation. We’ll discuss technological tools and teaching strategies that require minimal preparation and grading time to encourage more equitable engagement from all students.

Winter 2023

Veronica Berns

Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Chemistry Department

Adapting Ungrading Principles to STEM Lab Courses

February 2, 2023

Ungrading – an assessment philosophy which deemphasizes grading by “points” – offers many benefits to students, including transparency, flexibility, and forgiveness in assessments. Most often, Ungrading approaches are seen in small seminar or writing-centric courses due to the high time cost in providing written feedback to students. In this interactive presentation, we will discuss how Ungrading ideas inspired a change in the assessment structure of general chemistry lab courses at Northwestern. You’ll hear how Veronica and co-lab director Katie Gesmundo adapted a Specifications Grading model to fit courses of 100-450 students that heavily rely on teaching assistants. You will also have an opportunity to identify core ideas of Ungrading compatible with your own course formats, and discuss actionable ways to incorporate them into your grading scheme.
The work at the heart of this discussion was funded by a Weinberg College Summer Teaching Grant, co-authored with Assistant Professor of Instruction Katie Gesmundo, titled “Reconsidering methods of grading for lab reports in General Chemistry.”

Fall 2022

Megan Kohler

Learning Designer with the John A. Dutton e-Education Institute at Penn State

Strategies for Creating Neuroinclusive Learning Environments

October 26, 2022

It is estimated that up to 30% of the learners in your classroom have some form of neurodivergence such as autism, ADHD, or Tourette’s syndrome. They are gifted with a unique way of viewing the world and processing information but are faced with the challenge of learning in classrooms that do not support this variance. This talk explores the barriers neurodivergent learners encounter, the impact of those barriers on a social and emotional level, and strategies for creating neuro-inclusive learning environments where every student can thrive.

Winter 2022

Jessica Rowland Williams

Director, Every Learner Everywhere

The Intersection of Digital Learning and Equity: Key Considerations

February 2, 2022

Digital learning can be a catalyst for improving course outcomes for minoritized students, and awareness and tools for faculty are paramount to address the affective, interpersonal, and situational challenges that Black, Latinx, Indigenous, first-generation, and poverty-affected students experience. In this session, Dr. Williams will share key considerations for faculty, administrators, and other staff using digital learning for transformation that centers equity and racial justice at private universities.

Winter 2021

NU Faculty Panel

Handwriting Online

March 2, 2021

Moving handwriting online has required instructors and students to experiment and get creative with new technologies and hardware. Being able to share handwritten work is a vital connection between students and instructors. At this event you can learn about a variety of handwriting techniques from experienced instructors and contribute to Teaching & Learning Technologies' understanding of the ongoing challenges of handwriting online for both students and staff.

NU Faculty Panel

Faculty Connections

February 3, 2021

Connect to your fellow Northwestern instructors through this panel and small group discussion event. Our TEACHxperts are Northwestern instructors who have been navigating the complex teaching landscape of 2020 -2021. They all also participated in the Keep Teaching Video series; get a sneak peek of our panelists and discussion leaders in action by viewing the videos here. The session opens with a small panel of experienced instructors discussing a range of topics. Following the panel, you’ll have the chance to join a small group for discussion led by another experienced Northwestern instructor.

2020

Kate Sonka

Accessibility in the Time of Remote Teaching

Accessibility in the Time of Remote Teaching
April 3, 2020

As college instructors all over the world are suddenly grappling with teaching their courses remotely, there is growing concern about how to ensure learning experiences are inclusive and accessible to all students. In this presentation, Kate Sonka will discuss practical tips and strategies, as well as leave room to discuss challenges instructors and institutions are still working to resolve.

Michael Mills

Vice President of the Office of E-Learning, Innovation and Teaching Excellence at Montgomery College

OER, Equity, and Social Justice in the Time of Remote Teaching
May 7, 2020

Dr. Michael Mills and his team at Montgomery College have saved students an estimated $4.2M in textbook costs over the last three years through the MC Open Initiative, but saving money isn't the only positive impact the program has had. Specific student demographic groups have seen dramatic improvements in student outcomes. In this talk, Dr. Mills will share his experience leading the MC Open Initiative, including data about student success and equity. He'll share reports from professors and students participating in this initiative since the sudden shift to remote teaching. He'll also share approachable strategies and tips about developing OER in your discipline.

Suzanne Wakim

Distance Education Coordinator

How Open Educational Practices Support Universal Design
March 5, 2020

There is no “typical” student; how can we design courses that meet varied student needs? Universal design for learning (UDL) can help us build courses that are both more accessible and flexible enough to engage a diverse group of learners. UDL includes giving students various ways of acquiring information, interacting with the content and demonstrating understanding. Open Educational Practices (OEP) provide a framework for developing engaging and adaptable learning activities and assessments. We will discuss some simple (and some more complex) course designs based on the principles of OEP and UDL.

Jon Emery

Associate Professor of Instruction, Northwestern University

Multilevel Co-Authoring of OERs: Collaborating with Students for the Creation of Course Materials
January 30, 2020

Professor Emery will speak about the Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) Departments efforts – supported by an Open Educational Resource Grant funded by the Office of the Provost and the Libraries – to develop and deploy a series of low- or no-cost, open educational resources for use in the MSE department’s core curriculum. The first half of this talk covered the philosophy and execution of this project, which aims to create and maintain more than 10 open textbooks co-authored by students and MSE faculty (with significant support from the Libraries). The second half of this talk was a hands-on workshop demonstrating the workflow for co-authoring of a “text” (a recipe book) by interested attendees.

2017-2019

John Rome

Deputy CIO, Arizona State University

Voice Technology Innovation: Alexa Goes to College
March 20, 2019

Attendees learned how Arizona State University became an early adopter of voice technology by integrating 1500 Amazon Echo Dots into a new residence hall in the fall of 2017 and other related projects since then. This session discussed and showcased the work ASU has done with “Alexa” and trying to voice enable their campus, including initiatives that integrate voice technology into the teaching and learning of students.

Judy Franks & Jim Stachowiak

Better Learning Experiences for All with UDL
March 5, 2019

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a growing set of educational initiatives to grant equal access to all students. Inspired by the late 20th-century movements in architecture and industrial design for the built environment that have come to be known as “universal design”—think, for example, of how improving physical access for people with disabilities makes places more accessible to everyone.The UDL framework leverages the flexibility of digital tools and materials to align teaching practice with recent research in learning sciences and the desire to make education more inclusive. Jim Stachowiak and Judy Franks discussed Universal Design for Learning efforts at Northwestern and, in particular, Franks’s experience with NUDL, AccessibleNU’s project partnering with instructors to help redesign courses around the principles of UDL.

Bonnie Stewart

Experiential Approaches to Digital Teaching and Learning

November 30, 2018

What does it mean to engage in open professional teaching and learning practices, in an era defined by fake news and data surveillance? How can meaningful, mindful digital practices be scaffolded for students and faculty, in today’s institutions? This session explores digital teaching and learning as experiential learning, and overviews some hands-on experiential paths to building learner-centered, community-oriented approaches to knowledge creation and media navigation.

Ashley M. Purpura

Making the Move from Lecturing to Active Learning

November 13, 2018

Do you wish your large introductory survey course felt more like a small discussion-based seminar? Have you thought about making your class more “active,” but have reservations? This talk presents one instructor’s journey from the lecture hall to an active learning student-centered classroom. As she candidly discusses her successes and challenges in exploring innovative ways to engage students, she will share some of the motivations, experiences, techniques, and classroom tools involved in adjusting instructional approaches and students’ expectations to an intentionally active classroom dynamic. Attendees will be given the opportunity to reflect on the ways that active learning may relate to their own particular contexts.

Ariel Rogers & Rebecca Poulson

VR/AR Experiences in Education: Immersive Computing on Campus

360 videos from CNN can take students to Siberia in the middle of winter, while social Virtual Reality (VR) applications can allow language learners to attend meetups with native speakers. Immersive computing platforms like Virtual and Augmented Reality (AR) offer opportunities for students to engage with complex information in new and different ways. When done well, VR and AR experiences are active, limit distractions, and place the viewer at the center of the story.

Ariel Rogers, assistant professor in RTVF, will discuss how she integrated AR and VR into her class. By partnering with Rebecca Poulson in the Knight Lab, Rogers’s students were able to experience a range of AR and VR technologies. You’ll learn about the specific technologies available at Northwestern and what resources exist to integrate AR/VR into your teaching practice. Benefit from the lessons Rogers and Poulson learned and consider how you might integrate AR/VR technologies into your course, regardless of subject matter.

Laura Trouille

co-PI for Zooniverse and Senior Director of Citizen Science at the Adler Planetarium

Citizen Science: Engaging Your Students and the Public in Your Research

April 25, 2018

Citizen science – engaging the public in research – is transforming the way we do research and has proved a creative and potent response to the ever increasing sizes of our scientific datasets. In the past few years, there has been an explosion in the number of valid citizen science projects launched; over 500 projects are listed at CitizenScience.gov alone. In parallel, a growing number of universities are recognizing citizen science as a powerful tool for engaging students in real research and exploring data collection, manipulation, analysis, and interpretation.

In this interactive session, we will engage in a discussion around different models for incorporating citizen science into your courses. I will highlight examples for how individual faculty as well as institutions more broadly are approaching this, both for hands-on, location based citizen science (particularly ecology/environmental science/biology) as well as online citizen science (applicable across the disciplines). For the latter, I will draw on examples from Zooniverse in particular. Zooniverse is the world’s largest platform for online citizen science, engaging more than 1.6 million people around the world in tasks including tagging animals in wildlife images, discovering planets, transcribing artist's notebooks, and tracking resistance to antibiotics. The platform currently supports over 80 active projects, in collaboration with hundreds of researchers across the disciplines, and has led to over 150 peer-reviewed articles. Zooniverse has been used in hundreds of classrooms around the world.

Lisa Cravens-Brown

Associate Vice Chair for Instruction, Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University

Making Community in the Classroom

March 15, 2018

So many things go into creating a successful learning experience for the students and instructional experience for the teacher. Often, we pay attention to setting learning outcomes, what textbook and materials we’ll use and how many tests we will give. Equally important is the environment you create in the classroom. This can be seen as an interaction between the instructor’s use of the physical characteristics of the room and the behaviors the instructor does to foster a sense of connection among the participants.

In this talk, I will discuss some research on classroom community and sense of belonging in the classroom, some social psychology concepts that support the importance of creating community in the classroom, and provide some practical tips for ways to create community in the classroom.

Sande Chen

Co-author of Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform

Games and Gamification in the Classroom

February 16, 2018

Can games or even game elements increase motivation, solidify learning objectives, and encourage overall engagement? Come to this session to learn about all the methodologies that have arisen around the field of educational games and discover which ones have proven results in learning outcomes. Using examples, we will delve into different issues such as the need for assessment or data, participatory culture, and community learning, or "meta-gaming." Finally, we will look at classrooms that have embraced gaming or gamification, whether in digital or analog form, and discuss the challenges that lay ahead.

Mei-Ling Hopgood

Associate Professor in the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications

Developing Empathy Through Multimedia Storytelling

January 24, 2018

In spring 2017, Mei-Ling Hopgood led a cross-cultural, multilingual storytelling project focused on international students. A team of domestic and international students from the Medill School of Journalism traveled in the U.S. and Beijing to study context, interview subjects and produce multimedia stories on the experiences of Chinese students in the Midwest. In this TEACHxperts session, Hopgood will explore and reflect on the power of multimedia interviewing and storytelling to help promote understanding towards a segment of the community that is often ignored.

She found that American journalism students listened to the interviews of Chinese students with rapt attention, and a little ashamed that they never thought about how their international classmates might experience college. The interviews revealed that their classmates might feel isolated—and are not just isolating themselves. International students might share stories of racism and isolation they've experienced on social media but never report the incidents. They might struggle with small talk and connecting with fellow students and professors, even while they are perceived to be high achievers.

Bennett Goldberg

Learning Sticks When Students Work Together: Fundamentals of Active and Collaborative Learning

Why are you doing all the thinking for your students? As faculty, we so often teach by demonstrating our (expert) analysis and interpretation of the content. While such modeling is important, it should be integrating into instruction that promotes active and collaborative learning too, so students can learn for themselves. We will explore the research on active and collaborative learning and examine the new findings on the impact of classroom space on faculty instruction and student learning.

This interactive session will provide input opportunities for your thoughts and experiences, and together, we will develop a framework that will help us advance learner-centered instruction. We’ll focus on the interaction of faculty instruction, student prior experience, and the classroom space itself, thereby allowing us to highlight activities that are easy to apply in your context and encourage students to think and learn for themselves.

Mark McDaniel

Author of Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

Make It Stick: A Took-Kit for Teachers to Improve Student Learning and Retention

From this talk you will learn 4 (at least!) tangible techniques that you can apply to your classes to improve student learning.

For many students their typical study activities such as rereading text and lecture notes seem to heavily engage repetitive recycling of target information. One implication for education from basic memory research is that typical student study activities just mentioned may not be overly effective for learning and retention. Memory research would favor instead activities that promote elaborative processing. Several concrete techniques to stimulate elaborative learning will be illustrated.

Another well-supported memory principle is that of spacing review, instead of cramming, to increase long-term retention. I present research from middle school to medical school classrooms that reinforces this principle for authentic educational contexts. Similarly, I present research with authentic materials showing that practice on concepts and problems that are close in similarity should be mixed rather than blocked. Unfortunately, in many educational contexts practice is blocked by concept or problem, leading to poor transfer. Finally, I present a number of experimental demonstrations of test-enhanced learning in college classrooms showing that quizzing results in subsequent improvement on exam performances relative to target content that is not quizzed or that is presented for restudy.

William C. McGaghie, David Salzman, Jeffrey H. Barsuk

Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern

Developing a Mastery Learning Curriculum

Traditional assessments can frequently be based off of subjective evaluations but integrating features from the mastery learning approach allows a more thorough evaluation of the students' knowledge/practice of the material. Using a model that assess goals, strategies and evaluations helps in developing a curriculum. Mastery learning builds upon traditional approaches to curriculum development; however, several key differences exist such as advancement to next unit based on measured achievement, and continued practice until mastery standard is achieved.

During this workshop, four educators from the Feinberg School of Medicine will explain the process of mastery learning and how it has been applied in medical education at Northwestern. The theoretical construct will be supported by a specific example of medical procedure training using a mastery learning approach. Participants will work in small groups to create a curriculum using the mastery learning model.

Derek Bruff

Students as Producers: Active Learning Instruction for Innovative Assignments

April 25, 2017

Join us for an exploration of the idea of "students as producers". Bruff will help us think about creating assignments that:

ask students to work on problems that haven't been fully solved or questions that haven't been fully answered.
are shared with authentic audiences (audiences other than the instructor), either fellow students or external audiences, motivating students to produce work worth sharing.
give students greater autonomy, because cognitive science tells us that students are more motivated when they feel they have some autonomy over their work.
give students greater autonomy, because cognitive science tells us that students are more motivated when they feel they have some autonomy over their work.

A portion of this session will on classroom activities that build the skills students need in order to complete the kinds of innovative assignments that come with the “Students as Producers” approach

Tim McKay

Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Physics, Astronomy, and Education in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, University of Michigan

Why Learning Analytics? How exploration of data has driven reform in foundational classes

In an age of learning management systems, online gradebooks and homework, discussion forums, and clickers, the progress of a college course generates a rich, deep stream of data. Learning analytics aims to put this information to use; first to learn more about how teaching and learning happens, and then to improve it. Timothy McKay will share insights with us from the ECoach project at the University of Michigan.

McKay’s team looked at learning analytics then extensively interviewed students who were doing better and worse than predicted, to learn more about student success. The team then shared their findings with students, but how did they do that in an efficient manner?

The ECoach project was developed to give students tailored communication in a way that they would listen. Public health professionals have found great success using similar tools. Come here more about how Michigan is motivating students to learn more effectively.

Sam Van Horne

Assessment Director, University of Iowa

Elements of Success: A Learning Analytics Intervention in Introductory Chemistry

Elements of Success is a learning analytics intervention that the University of Iowa developed to help learners make decisions about their learning activities in large enrollment STEM courses. Currently, the system has been adopted by faculty in the Departments of Chemistry and Biology at the University of Iowa.

In this presentation, Van Horne will discuss how Information Technology Services developed the data visualizations, how they collaborated with the faculty to develop and refine their interventions, and their assessment of the effect of this intervention on student learning

Ray Schroeder

Director of the Center for Online Leadership at the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA)

Active Learning Stra

Have you been curious about active learning strategies? Would you like to reflect on how to move some materials outside class time to free up face-to-face time for more critical thinking, deeper learning, collaborative projects, and a more thorough immersion in the discipline?

Ray Schroeder will speak about active learning strategies. You'll learn about his research and also have an opportunity to apply these ideas to your teaching.