Continuing Development Program, Continuous Professional Development (CPD) Credential
During spring semester 2021, the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning has offered a series of virtual development workshops; completing three workshops in a 12-month period allows participants to earn the new “Level One” Professional Development credential to document their commitment to improving their teaching.
All workshops are open to faculty, staff, and graduate instructors across disciplines and ranks, at all levels of experience. Workshops are interactive and focused on just-in-time strategies that can apply directly to participants' own course materials. This year has shown us how much we are all still learning about teaching; CPD workshops are designed to help instructors improve strategically, build their networks, and demonstrate their progress.
The center’s Teaching Essentials CPD Series includes workshops to help you plan or upgrade your syllabus, first week, activities, assignments, and/or grading strategies using face-to-face, web-conferencing, and asynchronous modalities.
The Online Course Essentials CPD Series includes workshops to help you create high-quality course design, improve your course accessibility, design engaging assignments and activities, create effective videos, and/or plan for a range of authentic assessments in your online course.
The Teaching Explorations CPD Series includes workshops to help you blend learning across Zoom and Blackboard, create active learning in our new (socially distanced) Horizon Hall rooms, design and assess the impact of clearer assignment prompts, and explore the new collaboration software coming for Summer 2021.
For more information on the program, please check the Stearns Center’s website.
One more workshop is available for spring 2021:
Alternative and Authentic Assessments: Student Perspectives
Friday April 16, 2021, 1:30 – 2:30 pm
Alternative and authentic assessments provide a more creative and experimental approach to evaluate student learning. What do students think about alternative and authentic assessment?
Although changing from traditional assessment to alternative/authentic assessment is a significant paradigm shift for instructors, the benefits (for students) of using alternative/authentic assessments over more traditional assessments can far outweigh the challenges. In this webinar, we will
- focus on what students think about assessment– since student perspectives will impact their motivation, engagement, and learning;
- discuss the benefits and challenges of alternative assessments for students; and
- share examples of alternative and authentic assessments from Mason online courses.
Through this webinar, participants will gain an appreciation of student perspectives on assessment, identify potential benefits and challenges of alternative and authentic assessments for students, and consider examples and models for developing alternative/authentic assessment in participants' own courses.
Using the webinar information, the center encourages participants to design and create an alternative or authentic activity or project to assess student learning in their own courses, as follow-up activity for Stearns Center Continuing Development Program.
Laura Todd and Darlene Smucny (Stearns Center), a representative from Mason's Office of Contemporary Students, and a faculty facilitator will present the workshop.
March 18, 2021
