Academic Computing has always offered a slew of workshops during June and January. This semester we are working to expand our offerings of events and workshops during the semester. Two new kinds of events we are offering are the SPARK Community of Practice lunches and the Emerging Technology and Pie series.
SPARK Community of Practice Lunches
We’ve been receiving a lot of traffic from new SPARK users, and the number of instructors using the system expands steadily. Doris Peterson, our SPARK system administrators reports 915 SPARK courses this semester, compared to 782 in our WebCT system in Fall 2006. We now have almost 500 instructors in over 75 departments using the SPARK system to deliver course content.
We offer many workshops on the technical aspects of SPARK, and though we frequently address pedagogy and instructional design theory in these workshops, we feel that it is important to provide forums for instructors using SPARK to share their experiences and develop best practices. To meet this goal, we are now offering SPARK Community of Practice lunches each semester. These events are geared specifically toward faculty discourse and will hopefully be valuable for those instructors who are new to SPARK as well as those who have used these systems for some time. To see when the next event and theme is schedule for check out:
http://www.umass.edu/accoprod/workshop/register.php
Emerging Technology and Pie
In our last workshop seasons we offered an overview of emerging technology in teaching in which we looked at tools like blogs, wikis, and podcasts. These sessions always had long waitlists, so this semester we are offering a series of Emerging Technology sessions in which we will look at specific tools and topics in more detail than the overview provided. As an added bonus, these events feature pie! Whenever possible we will have faculty who are already using the tools share their experiences.
To see what we’re covering and to register for the next session check out: http://www.umass.edu/accoprod/workshop/register.php