It’s been a busy time for the Teaching and Learning Innovation sub-team.
First, we are very glad to announce that there are some new Director-level hires for VTSU in teaching and learning.
First, Jennifer Garrett-Ostermiller was named Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Innovation at the Vermont State University. Jennifer is currently an Educational Developer at the University of Vermont with extensive background work supporting academic and student support services. She has also worked at CCV as an administrator and instructor for several years. We’re excited to work with Jennifer, who started on October 10th, to help develop the Center for Teaching and Learning Innovation (CTLI) for VTSU.
Second, Sarah Chambers has been named the Director of Learning Technologies, working with both VTSU and CCV, Sarah is currently the Coordinator of Instructional Technology here, where she has worked for the last 14 years. With extensive work in supporting both the physical classroom technology and instructional software, Sarah is excited to support faculty in the effective use of learning technology across the system. While her official role begins Oct 22nd, she continues to support Castleton faculty until the IT Shared Services transition plan is fully implemented.    She will also be completing her dissertation for her PhD in Instructional Design leadership. Yay, Sarah!
In case you missed this detail above, we are calling the new center for VTSU the Center for Teaching and Learning Innovation. (That’s pending explicit support from the sponsors of the transformation.) The TLI team presented its plans for the new center at a stakeholder and sponsor’s meeting on October 6. The plan imagines a robust center, focused, at first, on assuring that we have everything we need in place to open the doors for the Fall 2023 term, with some special attention to building our capacity for F2F+ instruction. It will collect all of the online support materials around the system (videos, explanations, resources) into one place and will also provide faculty with a self-directed way to develop their own plans for learning such things as new technologies and teaching practice. Although it will be a digital center serving all of VTSU (and collaborating with CCV) it will also provide the kinds of in-person services that you have been accustomed to if you have participated in CTL activities here at Castleton.
The TLI team has started raising awareness about the new course modality names. You can watch a recording of our meeting on October 11. As we presented in a post earlier this year, the new course modalities aren’t really all that new; the course modalities document that has been circulated is mainly providing a common language for the things we already do. The exception is F2F+, of course. (As of this writing, we are using INP+ to talk about program modalities and F2F+ to talk about a particular course modality.) The aim of bringing your attention this language is to help faculty as they start to plan for the merged curriculum for next year and start to think about the array of course types (synchronous, F2F+, a-synchronous, etc…) that they will offer in order to deliver their curriculum. There is likely to be a lot of testing and experimentation in years to come, but this new language will give us a common frame of reference.
And finally, the F2F+ Pilot is continuing its work. After working independently to establish their courses, pilot participants gathered last week for their first meeting of the term and over the next month will be visiting the classrooms of other pilot members to conduct peer observations. We are hoping to share some of the insights emerging from the pilot soon!
