Every Tuesday in OnCampus the Deputy Provost shares two articles with a read time of 10 minutes.

There is a lot going on in the Office of the Deputy Provost and the Center for Teaching Excellence. (Spoiler alert: Spring weather puts me in an optimistic, planning mood….)

We have partnered with the School of Education to provide 10 additional spaces in an on-line Intercultural Conflict Workshop facilitated by Dr. Tara Harvey (True North Intercultural, LLC). The workshop will focus on helping participants better understand and navigate their own and others’ preferred conflict styles, so that they can more effectively communicate and engage in a diverse work environment. It is perfect for department chairs, associate deans, and others who might manage in and through conflict (ie: all of us). Registered participants would take, in advance, the Intercultural Conflict Style Inventory, and the focus of the half-day workshop will be on building participants’ awareness using the Inventory.

This is an online workshop, held April 25 from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.; preregistration required by April 11. Please note, if you are SOE faculty or staff, your registration is not through this link.

Please consider signing up to be part of the conversation on creating a faculty-to-faculty mentoring program, to inform my work as I look forward to launching a comprehensive faculty mentoring program over the summer.  Register here, so we can provide hospitality for everyone on Friday, March 25, from 1:30–3 p.m. in Howard Hall, Room 210.  If you cannot attend but would like to be a mentor—or be assigned a mentor— please email and tell me that.

Exciting news: The 2022 Baum Symposium will be comprised of a series of workshops focused on helping Drake faculty and staff respond ethically and compassionately to the shifts in higher education we have seen as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and demographic trends in our student body.  Featured speaker Cathy Davidson, the author of The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux, will speak on the evening of Wednesday, May 4.  Dr. Davidson is the winner of the 2021 Annual Advocacy Award from the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences, the Founding Director of the Futures Initiative at CUNY, and a founding member of HASTAC: Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory.  Her keynote will kick off an entire month of programming meant to help our faculty and staff address the ethical imperative of meeting our students where they are—emotionally, intellectually, and socially.  Please save the date, and watch for more.

I’m working with several campus partners to plan even more development opportunities through the spring and into summer, so please do keep a watch on this space for announcements about April, May, and June workshops and speakers.

Some reminders:

The Drake Research Grant awards committee, and the committees empaneled for determining the various professorships and awards are also ready to get busy reading application materials.

As such, I encourage faculty to apply for funding to hire student assistants for their research in the coming academic year (March 18 due date).

Applications for the Troyer Research Fellowship are due March 18; applicants should submit (via email to renee.cramer@drake.edu and nicki.kimm@drake.edu) a current curriculum vitae, a letter of application of no more than three pages, a preliminary budget suggesting how the fellowship dollars might be spent, and a one-paragraph abstract written for a non-specialist audience that summarizes the proposed research. The application letter should address the applicant’s record of scholarly accomplishment, future promise, how they will benefit and how the university will benefit if selected as the Troyer Research Fellow.

We welcome applications for Drake Research Grants for the coming academic year (July 22–23). These grants can include the possibility of sabbatical research support, and should be submitted by April 1.

We still have funds for Faculty Development and Enrichment Grants—and particularly welcome those proposals for projects that support innovative and high impact pedagogy and curriculum development, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and professional development as a leader at the institution. These are considered on a rolling basis.

I find I have been writing this OnCampus note with the energy of spring starting to percolate. I’m looking out the window of a coffee shop, and see sunshine. I slept in for an hour today and it almost felt like summer. I hope you read about these opportunities with some sense of excitement about the possibilities for community, recognition, support, and learning that they represent for Drake faculty and staff, in service of our students.

We truly have weathered—and continue to weather—a generation-altering series of events. Hibernation is always an option for survival—as spring hits in earnest, though, perhaps we can crawl out of our burrows, say hi to each other, and be in community a bit more frequently, to support each other’s growth and well-being.

— Renée Cramer, Deputy Provost

Our response to the COVID-19 pandemic has required many of us to learn quite a bit about online instruction and assessment over the past nearly two years.  And, many of us had to adjust our way of using exams to assess student learning. In some disciplines, the use of Respondus Lockdown Browser, a technology that attempts to guard against cheating in online exams, has become necessary or desirable. Like all technologies, there are limitations to the efficaciousness of this technology—and serious questions to consider, prior to adopting it. I asked some of our CPHS faculty to have a conversation with me about why they use Respondus Lockdown Browser, and how they use it well—in ways that facilitate good student interaction with the software, and highlight best practices in online assessment. 

Andy Meisner, associate professor of pharmacy practice, told me, ““I think Respondus Lockdown Browser provides guard rails for students when taking paperless exams. Most of our students are digital natives and often have a knee-jerk response to Google something when they don’t know or unsure of the answer. If we plan to use exams that are built into an internet browser we are constantly offering the temptation to search rather than to think deeply.” Lynn Kassel, associate professor of pharmacy practice, echoes many of Andy’s thoughts about the technology, and adds that, beyond the COVID-related uses of Lockdown Browser, students who encounter them in their classes will be better prepared for board exams as they enter their professions. 

Both faculty acknowledge that there are things that can go wrong—quickly—with the use of the browser.  Andy cautions that the technology “comes with a whole host of default settings when you add it to your BlackBoard exams, but many of these may not make sense for your course. For example, do you want students to have to show the camera their student ID when you already know what they look like? What about giving access to students who use iPads? Review your settings, don’t just set it and forget it!” As a bonus, Andy provided this meme:

Andy told me the best thing a faculty member can do is,  “download your own copy of Respondus and take your own exam yourself. If the settings don’t make sense to you, they definitely won’t make sense to your students.”  Lynn adds, “it is really helpful for instructors to take the exam using the technology, to understand what you’re asking the learner to complete.”   

It also makes very good sense to share these links with students about how they can bring best practices to the online testing environment, and some answers to their frequently asked questions. 

Even more importantly, Drake’s learning management specialists have put together terrific articles to assist instructors in designing and deploying online exams.  You can find them here and here.  

Finally, Lynn stresses, if you are using this technology for online assessment, “Be sure that students have the tools available to get the technology fixed, or ensure that the syllabus allows for some flexible interpretation of these technology issues (e.g., exemption of grade versus absolutely 0). Consider student access regarding equity in access by asking yourself: does a student’s home internet connection allow for use of this technology or what additional resources need to be considered for them to utilize the platform?” In summary, she says, “be considerate/compassionate to technology issues.”

— Renée Cramer, Deputy Provost

Every Tuesday in OnCampus the Deputy Provost shares two articles with a read time of 10 minutes.

Anisa Hansen, professor of pharmacy practice, will discuss her work on using case studies to facilitate student learning around social identities and social determinants of health, as part of our CTE conversations on the scholarship of teaching and learning. Please register here to join us for lunch on March 4 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. in Howard Hall, Room 210.

— Renée Cramer, Deputy Provost

All Staff Council and Human Resources are co-sponsoring a bingo event on March 9 from 3–4 p.m.  All faculty and staff are invited to play Drake’s version of bingo, GRIFO. Attend in-person at Parent’s Hall in the Olmsted Center and say hello to Griff II, or use this link to register for the virtual option. A multitude of prizes are available from Griff socks to a free parking pass.

— Molly Shepard, On Behalf of All Staff Council