Mini-Courses and Institutes
The Innovation in Learning Center offers a variety of mini-courses and institutes throughout the academic year.
Intentional Course Design with AI
This course will help higher education faculty members gain a holistic understanding of Generative AI, discuss academic integrity issues in the AI era, and investigate how to effectively teach in a world where AI plays an increasingly prominent role.
Throughout the course, you will have a chance to explore some resources about generative AI and discuss the information with your colleagues. You will also have an opportunity to create instructional materials for your own class and get inspiration from your peers.
After participating in this course, you should be able to:
- Assess AI tools and platforms for various educational purposes.
- Discuss effective strategies to maintain and promote academic integrity in the context of AI technologies.
- Develop pedagogical approaches and teaching methods that leverage AI technologies to enhance student learning experiences.
- Adapt existing courses or design new ones to incorporate AI tools and concepts while maintaining academic integrity.
- Develop a personalized action plan for integrating Generative AI and other AI technologies into higher education, considering institutional goals and constraints.
SoTL USA | Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
The SoTL USA program seeks to provide faculty with the tools to design, develop, and implement scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) research projects at South Alabama. Topics include:
- Decoding the disciplines
- What is SoTL
- Generating your investigation idea
- Designing your study and the IRB process
- Planning your data collection and analysis
LevelUP Your Course: Enhancing Curriculum-Based Career Readiness
What can we do in our classrooms to support students in articulating the value of our courses? How can we make our activities relevant and meaningful for students?
The LevelUP mini-course leads faculty to design career-focused activities that are discipline-specific and aligned with selected competencies and employer-valued skills. We will explore the importance of incorporating NACE competencies and the AAC&U employer-valued skills into existing curricula. Upon completion of the mini-course, you will have access to ready-made career resources that can be directly implemented in their courses.
Participants can expect to:
- Attend four in-person meetings
- Spend 2-4 hours engaging with online activities
- Leave the mini-course with practical ideas for integrating employer-valued skills into your existing course(s)
Click here to sign up or nominate someone.
Sustainability and Your Curriculum Course
The Sustainability course will help you embed sustainability competencies into your course. Our guiding questions for this course include:
- What does "sustainability" look like in your discipline?
- How can we lead our students to articulate the benefits of sustainability to positively impact our collective future?
- How can we document students' mastery of target sustainability competencies?
This course runs for two weeks and will take roughly 6 to 10 hours to complete. You can expect to:
- participate in 3 in-person meetings during the two weeks
- engage with online activities (1-3 hours)
- leave the course with:
- a sustainability-related objective and a course activity that assesses this objective
- a sustainability statement for your syllabus, and
- integration of your course in the Sustainability Minor course list
- receive a digital badge for your participation
Adobe Acrobat Pro Training Course
The primary goal of the Adobe Acrobat Pro course is to help you create accessible and fillable documents that will meet federal and university accessibility standards. When we follow accessibility guidelines for creating course documents we:
- Improve the learner experience
- Provide access to the content for everybody
- Comply with the law
- Add tools to our skill toolbox
Visit the Acrobat Pro training course website for more information and dates for the next course.
Panopto Training Course
Panopto is a video capture and management tool available to faculty, staff, and students at USA, and it is the primary application for creating and posting video content in USAonline. Users can record presentations that capture camera and/or desktop applications (including PowerPoint presentations), and later share them through embedded lessons, or as links. Panopto has a rich feature-set that includes editing, automatic captions, multi-angle sources, quizzing, student discussions, notes,etc. Instructors can even create assignment folders that allow students to produce and submit their own video-based assignments. The primary goal of this course is for you to learn how to create engaging and accessible videos to use in your courses. Participants who complete the course will receive a free Panopto Pack including: Lumens webcam, Lavalier lapel mic, ring light, and support arm for fixing your light to your desk. You will also earn a digital badge to connect to your LinkedIn profile.
Click below to see a past flyer for the Panopto Training Course:
Camtasia Training Course
Camtasia is a wonderful video editing tool for lecture videos and dynamic content.
The primary goal of this course is for
participants to learn how to create engaging and compelling video content directed
toward learning and instruction. After successful completion of the course, participants
earned a license key for Camtasia and a digital badge, which can be connected to a
LinkedIn profile.
Click below to see a past flyer for the Camtasia Training Course:
Careerizing the Curriculum
The Careerizing the Curriculum mini-course leads faculty to design career-focused activities that are discipline-specific and aligned with selected competencies and employer-valued skills. By engaging in synchronous and asynchronous activities, the faculty cohort will explore the importance of incorporating NACE competencies and the AAC&U employer-valued skills into existing curricula.
Click below to see a past flyer for Careerizing the Curriculum:
Summer Institute
The ILC Summer Institute is aimed at increasing student engagement and academic success through consistent design and equitable instructional practices that enhance courses of all modalities and disciplines. During this 4-week institute you will explore course content through synchronous and asynchronous team-based activities to develop effective courses that optimize the learning experience. This course generally runs from late June to early July.
Topics include:
- Consistent Module Design
- Transparent Assignments and Assessments
- Inclusive and Motivational Instructional Strategies
Click below to see a past flyer for the Summer Institute:
Advanced Summer Institute
The ILC Advanced Summer Institute, Documenting Student Success, is an intensive, two-week Institute focused on assessment. This course runs twice during the summer. During this Institute, you will dive into your course activities and assessments to answer such questions as:
- How do I develop reliable student assessments?
- How equitable is my test design?
- What types of alternative assessments might work for my discipline?
Click below to see a past flyer for the Advanced Summer Institute:
Strategic Course Design Mini-Course
The Strategic Course Design Mini-Course is a self-paced, online mini-course. Faculty can expect to devote about 20 - 30 hours in completing coursework that includes regular self-assessments and deliverables aligned with the course learning objectives and best practices for online instruction. This online course is offered periodically throughout the year. The overall goals of this course are for faculty to:
- Implement essential course organization practices using Canvas and integrated technology in future courses;
- Create a clear and consistent module design that encourages student engagement with the content, students, and instructor regardless of how the course is delivered.
Click below to see a past flyer for the Strategic Course Design Mini-Course:
Association of College and University Educators (ACUE)
The University of South Alabama partnered with ACUE to offer a course in Effective Teaching practices that helps faculty transform their teaching, overcome challenges they face in the classroom and provide strategies that lead to successful student learning. The program addressed essential pedagogical skills and knowledge in five units of study:
- Designing an Effective Course and Class
- Promoting Higher Order Thinking
- Establishing a Productive Learning Environment
- Assessing to Inform Instruction and Promote Learning
- Using Active Learning Techniques
The goals of the Effective Teaching program at South Alabama are to:
- improve student learning as faculty learn about, implement and assess instructional strategies proven to improve students' educational experiences
- support faculty advancement through improved promotion and tenure packages, particularly in how faculty articulate a dynamic and evidence-based teaching philosophy and provide evidence of effective teaching;
- enhance faculty productivity in their scholarship by developing new lines of inquiry through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
Click below to see a past flyer for ACUE:
Questions about these courses can be directed to ilc@southalabama.edu.