Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon Portland Community College

Session Schedule & Descriptions

10:30 – 11:20 AM

A1: Using Brightspace Tools to Increase Student Engagement & Instructor Presence (Guest Presenter)

There are many tools available within the D2L Learning Environment that instructors can use to increase their course presence and inspire greater levels of student engagement. We’ll take a look at custom home page widgets, personalized text through Replacement Strings, and Release Conditions for customized mini-journeys. Resources for a deeper dive into each topic will be made available to participants.

  • Room: TEB 113
  • Track: Instructor Presence, Instructional Tools
  • Presenter: Barry Dahl (D2L)
A2: H5P: Exciting New Tool for Interactive Online Learning

Learn what can be done with H5P, interactive software that lets you create a wide variety of interactive quizzes and exercises for your students in your online classes.

  • Room: TEB 219
  • Track: Instructional Tools
  • Presenter: Ron Bekey, Sharon Hennessy, Timothy Krause, Andy Freed
A3: Dispelling Myths: Visual Impairments, Education, and the Workforce

This session will break down some national, regional, and state statistics for those with visual impairments and discuss preconceived notions that they regularly negotiate. We will illustrate the different types of visual impairments and give you the opportunity to experience several visual impairments for yourself using Low Vision Simulators.  In addition, we will highlight some of the incredible careers that blind professionals pursue and the technologies that are used to level the playing field in education and the workforce.  Time will be reserved for you to ask a low vision and blind assistive technology specialist any questions that you might have.

  • Room: TEB 227
  • Track: Equity/Inclusion, Quality Course Design
  • Presenter: Rondi Schei & Mario Eiland
A4: Tips & Tricks For Using D2L Rubrics

Integrated rubrics can make grading within D2L efficient and more transparent for students but if you’ve ever tried to create or edit rubrics within D2L you know that there can be challenges, so come and learn some helpful Do’s and Don’ts from hours spent with the rubric tool.

  • Room: TEB 224
  • Track: Instructional Tools, Assessment
  • Presenter: Stacie Williams
A5: Conduct and Care Processes

In this session, we will go over how Conduct and Care processes look in an online environment. Our goal is to help support both the instructor and student through this process.

  • Room: TEB 217
  • Track: Student Support, Admin/OL Planning
  • Presenter: Charisse Loughery, Nicole Morris, Becca Parker Love, Christina Shafer
A6: The Quality Matters Approach to Online Course Design

We will provide an overview of the Quality Matters rubric and how instructors are using it to improve online course design and ultimately student learning at PCC. We’ll also provide information about the “Improving your Online Course” workshop we offer to experienced online faculty at PCC. Over 100 have participated, and three of them have joined the presentation to share something about their IYOC experience.

  • Room: TEB 225
  • Track: Admin/OL Planning, Quality Course Design
  • Presenter: Greg Kaminski, Mary Courtis, Heather Lubay, Tani McBeth, Jennifer Ward
A7: Diversification, Not Tokenization

Dominant culture tends to tokenize historically underrepresented perspectives and people, and this phenomenon often creates an alienating or dehumanizing learning environment. This tendency can show up within our course content as well as in the assumptions we, as instructors, make about our students. In an online classroom with limited personal interaction, it’s often all too easy for us to overgeneralize and make problematic assumptions about student experiences. Rarely do we have opportunities to examine when and how we might be perpetuating these problematic tendencies in our own classrooms. This session will provide some examples and an opportunity to critically reflect on strategies for framing course content and engaging student experiential knowledge.

  • Room: TEB 117
  • Track: Quality Course Design, Equity/Inclusion
  • Presenter: Blake Hausman & Heather Mayer
A8: Recording Engaging Lectures & Presentations

Come explore a variety of tools to use to record engaging lectures and screencasts.

  • Room: TEB 226
  • Track: Instructional Tools, Media
  • Presenter: Andre Temkin & Casey Twining

11:30 AM – 12:20 PM

B1: Real-time Conversations at the Center of an Online Classroom

In this session I’ll discuss the methodologies I’ve developed for organizing weekly live conversations as the backbone of my course on social justice. I translated my on-campus flipped classroom into a conversation-based distance learning project. I’ve refined the process and am happy to share with folks who’d like to try a similar approach.

  • Room: TEB 117
  • Track: Equity/Inclusion, Instructor Presence
  • Presenter: Jimena Alvarado
B2: Using the Rubrics Tool in Brightspace (Guest Presenter)

Why use a rubric in Brightspace? What’s new with rubrics? How do instructors and students see and use rubrics?

  • Room: TEB 217
  • Track: Instructional Tools, Assessment
  • Presenter: Jane Mathers (D2L)
B3: Lightning Rounds

Room: TEB 113
Track: Instructor Presence, Student Support, Instructional Tools

A series of 5 concise presentations of 8 minutes each on the topics listed below.

  • Brightspace Apps for Students and Faculty (Alma Eaton)
    There’s an app for that! Explore the features of the D2L Brightspace Pulse and Grader apps to support both students and faculty.
  • Decoding the Priorities Survey for Online Learners (Andy Freed)
    PCC conducted this Ruffalo Noel-Levitz survey in Spring 2017. Come learn what is important to your online students and what they say about their experience in online classes.
  • Small Data: What you can learn using simple analytics? (Andy Freed)
    Learn about some easy to use reports in D2L Brightspace that can help you identify struggling students or challenging content in your courses.
  • Culturally Responsive Online Teaching (Michele Huss)
    Learn about what to do and not to do to create an inclusive online course.
  • Taking Advantage of Student Participation Tendencies in Online Discussions (Sean Peterson)
    Instructor of Introduction to Hip Hop Music will share observations of student participation tendencies in online discussions, and strategies for increasing student engagement and investment in those discussions.
B4: Quizzes for Deep Learning (Guest Presenter)

This session will explore how online quizzing tools can be used to create opportunities for deeper conceptual learning, to better measure depth of understanding, and to minimize student frustration. The presenter will discuss how theories of comprehension and principles of human-computer interaction can be applied to improve the design of online assessments and optimize their impact for meaningful online learning.

  • Room: TEB 219
  • Track: Instructional Tools, Assessment
  • Presenter: Kirsten Butcher (Guest)
B5: Using Technology to Enhance Instructor Presence

Instructor presence is an important factor contributing to student success in online courses. PCC’s Desire2Learn and Google environments support a variety of technology-based strategies to enhance instructor presence without increasing instructor workload, and without falling into the “robo-course” trap. This session will demonstrate techniques including intelligent agents and simple automation that can be implemented by any instructor, as well as advanced tools and techniques that can be created using programming and then given to any instructor to use. Participants will learn how to use technology to improve workflow while reducing workload, learn what tools are available in today’s PCC environment, and learn what additional training might be useful in creating custom tools to meet any unique needs in their class.

  • Room: TEB 227
  • Track: Instructor Presence, Instructional Tools, Student Support
  • Presenter: Doug Jones
B6: Online Course Observations

This panel will describe the course observation form and how it can be used by faculty as well as department chairs as a tool to improve online instruction.

  • Room: TEB 225
  • Track: Instructor Presence, Quality Course Design, Admin/OL Planning
  • Presenter: Rhonda Collier, Heather Guevara, Greg Kaminski, Rod Lee, Daphne Wu
B7: Cross-Campus Collaborative Course Development

PCC has been testing a new team development strategy for online course development, a process that involves multiple instructors working together with dedicated support from Online Learning. This panel involves groups of instructors from two different disciplines, each group having gone through slightly different versions of the process. We will be discussing the rationale for our work, our processes, the support given, and the benefits and drawbacks of each process, along with how we would suggest the process might be improved. The panel will share demonstrated new technologies integrated into the courses with support of Online Learning. Participants will have the opportunity to bring in their questions about this process and to reflect on their own experiences as course developers. Participants will learn about newer support process for online learning/newer strategies for collaborative design.

  • Room: TEB 224
  • Track: Quality Course Design, Admin/OL Planning
  • Presenter:Paul Montone, Martha Bailey, Jennifer Bird, Kris Fink, George Gray, Andrea Hills, Justin Rigamonti, Mary Sylwester
B8: Kaltura Capture Tools

This session presents the instructional multimedia tool Kaltura Capture and it’s suite of capabilities available for media creation, editing and storage within our LMS.

  • Room: TEB 226
  • Track: Instructional Tools, Media
  • Presenter: Michael Moss & Andre Temkin

2:30 – 3:20 PM

C1: DIY Instructional Video

Multiple instructors present their DIY solutions for creating video to enhance their online courses.

  • Room: TEB 219
  • Track: Instructional Tools, Media
  • Presenter: Tanya Mead, Tani McBeth, Micki Josi, Megan Savage
C2: Round Robin (Multiple topics & Presenters)

Room: TEB 113
Track: Instructor Presence, Instructional Tools, Equity/Inclusion, Admin/OL Planning, Media

8 topics of your choice with each 14-minute presentation repeated 3 times

  • Building community through introductory posts (Paul Montone & Stacie Williams)
    Student introductions for online courses may often feel cursory and reinforce the standard “post and respond” work that students come to expect in all their online classes. This lightning round session will consider other strategies to encourage introduction posts to be more interactive, more of a surprise, and more responsive to the unique experiences of our students.
  • Connecting with your online students (Debbie Austin)
    Based upon my 2017 doctoral dissertation titled “Exploring Factors that Help Students Feel More Connected to Their Online Instructors”, I would like to share the summarized results of my research. The research explored business students’ perceptions of connectedness with their online instructors in higher education. The results were analyzed to discover the basic constructs of these perceptions. The findings can help faculty understand how they can improve their connection with students in an online environment in an effort to form stronger relationships with students and better their teaching practice. I will summarize the findings for participants, ending with a list of best practices for online teachers wishing to form stronger connections with their online students.
  • Come Try Immersive Media! (Monica Marlo)
    This session offers a brief overview and hands on samples of virtual and augmented reality content for learning.
  • CRT and Community-Based Learning (Becca Parker Love)
    Learn how to use a Culturally Responsive Teaching lens to incorporate Community Based Learning projects and activities into your course
  • Shadowing courses: A method for training new faculty (Katherine Standish)
    Shadowing courses to support training of new online faculty.
  • Strategies for promoting instructional presence (Joni Meisner & Ena Rierson)
    Quick and simple strategies for increasing instructor presence in the online classroom and personally connecting with your students.
  • Teamwork and oral presentations (Marc Goodman)
    This round-robin presentation will discuss some techniques for fostering teamwork and developing good oral communication skills in the online environment, using collaborative online tools such as Discussion Groups, Slack, Discord, and Zoom.
  • Using an iPad for instructional purposes (Alma Eaton)
    This short interactive will allow participants to see the iPad in action using the D2L Brightspace Grader app, along with some other useful tips using built-in features of the iPad and Apple Pencil.
C3: 10 Bright Ideas to Make Brightspace More Accessible (Guest Presenter)

Web accessibility concerns have moved to the forefront in the world of online learning. This session will provide ten simple techniques for improving the accessibility of courses offered in the Brightspace Learning Environment. The focus will be on correcting common accessibility errors in Course Content, although the same techniques would apply in many other tools within the Learning Environment. All techniques can be executed by people with minimal knowledge of the generally accepted standards for web accessibility.

  • Room: TEB 218
  • Track: Quality Course Design
  • Presenter: Barry Dahl (D2L)
C4: Hands On: Quizzes for Deep Learning Lab (Guest Presenter)

This is a working session following Kirsten Butcher’s Quizzes for Deep Learning session where faculty can come to implement some of the things they’ve learned in the session. The room will be staffed with ITS and Kirsten to provide immediate feedback.

  • Room: TEB 225
  • Track: Assessment
  • Presenter: Kirsten Butcher (Guest)
C5: Understanding Academic Integrity Challenges Across Disciplines

This panel discussion presents academic integrity challenges and possible solutions across multiple curriculum areas

  • Room: TEB 220
  • Track: Assessment, Student Support
  • Presenter: Doug Jones, Andy Freed, Tim Krause, Vivian McCann
C6: Integrating Research Skills and Information Literacy Instruction into Online Courses

Librarians collaborate with faculty in many face-to-face classes to provide hands-on information literacy instruction tailored to the course and assignment learning outcomes. While librarians can’t provide synchronous instruction in asynchronous online courses, the medium provides many other unique opportunities to integrate information literacy instruction into the fabric of the course. Possibilities range from building online instructional content and activities into the course content, to designing assignments that both teach and assess information literacy, to having a librarian embedded in your D2L Brightspace classroom, and more.

  • Room: TEB 227
  • Track: Quality Course Design, Equity/Inclusion
  • Presenter: Meredith Farkas, Sara Robertson, Elizabeth Smith
C7: Signature Assignments for Online Classes

This session will discuss how to create signature assignments that work in an online environment and provide participants with tools that they can later use to create signature assignments for all their online classes.

  • Room: TEB 224
  • Track: Quality Course Design, Assessment
  • Presenter: Mary Courtis
C8: VoiceThread – TEB 226

Learn what VoiceThread is all about, see various ways to use it, and how you can use it in your class.

  • Room: TEB 226
  • Track: Instructional Tools, Media
  • Presenter: Melany Budiman, Andre Temkin

3:30 – 4:20 PM

D1: A Star is Born: Creating Compelling Videos For Your Course

Looking at a variety of faculty-generated work, we’ll discuss the ins and outs of creating meaningful and engaging videos for your online classes.

  • Room: TEB 219
  • Track: Media
  • Presenter: Bryan Hull & Michael Annus
D2: Going Mobile with Brightspace (Guest Presenter)

Learn how Brightspace can help mobilize your learning experience so that it’s available anytime, anywhere. In this session we’ll examine the new Daylight Experience and its responsive design, the student app Brightspace Pulse, the teacher app Brightspace Assignment Grader and the Brightspace ePortfolio mobile app.

  • Room: TEB 113
  • Track: Instructional Tools
  • Presenter: Jane Mathers
D3: Spicing up your Brightspace Course

This session will discuss a variety of tips to organize content, style web pages, streamline assignment descriptions, and personalize your Brightspace course shell.

  • Room: TEB 225
  • Track: Quality Course Design
  • Presenter: Rondi Schei
D4: Proctoring Systems and Integrity of DL courses

We will share the results from testing the proctoring programs offered at PCC. We class tested “Proctorio” and ProctorU. This will include a discussion of Integrity and DL courses.

  • Room: TEB 224
  • Track: Assessment
  • Presenter: Katherine Standish & Stephanie Bryan
D5: Supporting Student Success with Early Alert

Faculty are a critical part of the student support network and are often the first to spot when a student faces challenges in their class. A new technology-assisted Early Alert process will support faculty to easily alert both the student and their assigned advisor in order to offer timely and helpful interventions. Come learn about this new tool in development – part of the college’s Advising Redesign Initiative – and provide your critical feedback to assure it is executed with ALL faculty – including online – needs at the center.

  • Room: TEB 220
  • Track: Assessment, Student Support
  • Presenter: Heather Lang, Jeanette Muehleck, Jason Pinkal
D6: Best Uses of Zoom

Overview and demo of zoom, sharing best practices and experience using zoom, and Q&A time.

  • Room: TEB 218
  • Track: Instructor Presence, Instructional Tools
  • Presenter: Dan Dougherty, Greg Rapp, Melany Budiman
D7: Exploring Equity Online: Victories and Lessons from the Equity and Open Education Faculty Cohort

Using a variety of techniques and tools, I am currently leading a professional development experience: the Equity and Open Education Faculty Cohort, a project funded through the President’s Fund for Excellence. The focus of my presentation will be about how to use online techniques and tools to facilitate discussions and engagement around social justice, equity, and other possibly difficult topics. I will share what I’ve learned, what techniques seemed fruitful, and which attempts were less than fruitful. I will also talk about how interactive professional development cohorts can be conducted online, especially in our environment where colleagues are dispersed throughout the district.

  • Room: TEB 227
  • Track: Equity/Inclusion
  • Presenter: Jen Klaudinyi
D8: Open Lab

Come work on something you’ve learned today under the guidance of an ITS.

  • Room: TEB 226
  • Track: Instructional Tools
  • Presenter: Andre Temkin & Casey Twining