All posts by Hannah Lee

Where Do You See Yourself in 5 Years? A Look at Strategic Planning and Your Stakeholder Goals

As part of faculty and learning support staff in higher education, the phrase strategic plan is a term central to projects to pursue, resources to allocate, and roles to identify for the university or institution. Where do you fit in the grand scheme of your institution’s agenda and vision? Does your work as an educator matter in the midst of corporate, large-scale goals? How can you support a strategic plan? If you’re a student, you may wonder how a strategic plan is supposed to benefit you in the midst of an often corporate-feeling objective. 

Since I am employed at a university with a newly minted strategic plan, and I also study at a school with a new strategic plan in progress, to ignore the significance placed on institutional priorities is unavoidable. My day-to-day work as an instructional technology consultant is framed in terms of Grounded in the Mission 2024. The support programming and resources available to me as a student are under town hall debates with the university president. If successful in its implementation and process, a strategic plan should be apparent to all stakeholders, albeit in different ways. Continue reading →

Troubleshooting Common Videoconferencing Problems

With increasing technologies being used to facilitate global learning experiences (GLE) and guest participants in the classroom, technical difficulties are inevitable (as with any technology). Such unplanned technological mishaps often lie beyond the control of participants and instructors, so as with any collaborative effort to meet, it is best to prepare for common scenarios.

Consider the following scenario: You have invited a remote guest speaker in Germany for an hour-long class lecture. Since this lecture is a big deal due to the labor-intensive logistics planning (which include coordinating time zone differences, course scheduling, language coordination, appointments with the instructional technology support at your institution, and much emphasis for participation from your students), you are very much hoping that the videoconferencing tool you’ve selected will work. 

Despite your careful planning, testing, and prior use of the technologies at hand, sometimes, things just won’t work out. When things do not work out, here are some ways to save your videoconferencing event.

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Coordinating and Managing Meaning Across Cultures: Pearce for Global Learning Experiences

In a recent meeting for DePaul’s ongoing series of GLE (Global Learning Experience), professor of Italian Caterina Farina Mongiat suggested facilitators of GLE might gain valuable insights from the field of intercultural communication to prepare for coordinating cross-cultural interactions between student cohorts.

Though conceptualizing what to apply from an entire scholarly field is difficult to do when also planning the logistics and curriculum for a GLE course, we can try to start somewhere with an accessible application. As a student of TESOL studies and now intercultural communication at the Illinois Institute of Technology, I have started by looking at W. Barnett Pearce’s (2005) initial work on the coordinated management of meaning (CMM). The context for Pearce’s work, though now dated, parallels our present challenges in engaging meaningful intercultural discussions, even within an academic space: global nation-state relations, misunderstandings of the cultural and social other, conflicting faith-based and cultural values, among the many complexities that cannot all be accounted for here.  

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Pedagogy and Technology: Alignment for Pedagogy in Online Course Design

Jigsaw puzzle piecesAlignment is a core guiding principle in the Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric for hybrid, blended, and online courses. Designing a course that exhibits individual components and activities that align with module-level course learning objectives and course-level learning objectives helps students make connections between the things they do in a course and what they should be learning.

With the growing demand for diverse classroom environments—that is, blended, online, hybrid, and so forth— instructors may face the challenge of maintaining their pedagogies when moving from a physical to a virtual classroom. Pedagogy is difficult to maintain in a traditional physical classroom, and the challenge to convey pedagogy in an online environment resides in course design decisions.

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