As we have been reporting throughout the fall semester, the new Center for Teaching and Learning Innovation at Vermont State University is being built under the extremely capable leadership of Jen Garrett-Ostermiller. As a new staffing plan gets implemented, we will soon see some very increased support for teaching and learning across the system!
Among the first projects that the CTLI and the Transformation Teaching and Learning Innovation team have been working on is helping everyone to understand the new VTSU course modalities.
If you haven’t seen the FINAL draft of the course modalities, you can download a copy here.
As we start to plan for the fall semester 2023 with our optimized and integrated departments in place, we will probably need to revisit some of our assumptions about course modalities. When faculty made their first pass at the plan for optimized programs, they tended, on the whole, to imagine that “In-Person Plus” programs (that’s our VTSU name for the programs with mixed modalities for delivery) would mostly make use of F2F+ (that’s our term for the course modality in which some students attend in-person while others access the classroom remotely). As we move closer and closer to the launch of VTSU, it’s becoming apparent that some programs are now imagining a mixture of course modalities, with the individual selections of course modality depending on department needs and individual faculty skills and interests.
The TLI team is gearing up to help departments explore the new course modalities. Below is a handy graphic that organizes them.
This organizer demonstrates a way to differentiate the modalities. The rows designate “how” students access the courses, whether “in-person in a classroom,” “online” or in some mixed way. Then, each row is differentiated, mostly, by differences in “when” the class meets.
If you would like to learn more about course modalities, we have had two workshops in the past few weeks. Most recently, a workshop on VTSU Course Modalities provided a more in-depth explanation of the ideas above; it provides a 10-minute explanation. That workshop ended with a discussion of F2F+; if you are interested in that, you may appreciate this recording of a recent workshop on De-Mystifying F2F+ as a Teaching Modality.
Finally, the CTLI is developing a document that details considerations for faculty members and departments as they make choices about different course modalities. That document can be found here: Advice Guide for Designing in a New Modality.docx.
