Welcome to Lamar University’s new blog about teaching and learning. This blog is being created during the COVID-19 crisis as a way for campus offices devoted to excellence in teaching, primarily the Center for Teaching and Learning Enhancement and the Division of Distance Education, to connect with faculty who are working at a distance. For the foreseeable future, the blog will focus on online teaching, since that is the immediate need of our campus, but once things are back to normal we will offer a wider variety of content to suit your needs. I will be hosting this blog so let me tell you a bit about myself, in case you don’t already know me.
I am an Associate Professor of English and I joined Lamar in 2009. Since 2017, I have been Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Enhancement and prior to that I created a support and mentoring program for new faculty, the SMART program, in 2014. I became passionate about teaching and learning and about the Center after I became an ACES Fellow in 2011-2012. That program gave me the opportunity to connect with other faculty around positive changes we could make in our classrooms to serve our students better and to reinvigorate our teaching. Connecting with like-minded colleagues about how to help our students learn better was one of the most exciting experiences of my professional career and I wanted to do it all the time and to support that community any way I could.
I have also been teaching online courses since 2006 when I developed the first online course for my graduate department at SUNY Binghamton. I have since designed and taught dozens of online courses for three universities, including many at Lamar. I won’t lie…I love teaching face to face best because I enjoy personal interactions with my students, but I have come to appreciate the real benefits of online instruction, for our students and for us.
In this blog, you can expect practical tips about how to use technology to support your goals as a teacher and to make this a more positive experience for you and your students, testimonials from teachers about their experience trying out new tools, advice from the experts in the Division of Distance Education, and features of faculty using online tools to take their classes to new levels. I want to demystify the terminology and tools of online teaching that can sometimes alienate and overwhelm us. I hope that you will find it helpful and that you will reach out to me, to the Instructional Designers, and to one another to explore new ways to practice our craft. This may not have been your first choice as a way to teach, but it can be an opportunity to find new ideas that may enhance your teaching for years to come.
Please share your questions and challenges as well as ideas for future blogs at amy.smith@lamar.edu. Be well and happy teaching!
