The Deep Dive

Faculty180 is an online platform that will house faculty profiles, vita, and accomplishments in teaching, scholarship, and service. In addition to helping facilitate institutional reporting on faculty credentials and accomplishments, Faculty180 will also support a fully online workflow for annual performance review (beginning with AY18-19) and tenure and promotion applications. This session was to learn more about Faculty180 features, such as verifying your profile, adding activities, vitas, and biosketches – and to help inform Park’s rollout of this new tool.

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International students sometimes struggle to work with the feedback provided by their instructors on their writing, and the conventional advice about effective commenting sometimes doesn’t work for students from other language and cultural backgrounds. During this workshop, facilitators discussed effective strategies for commenting on international student writing, and demonstrated effective commentary by practicing with a student paper.

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Participants were able to write more accessible prompts for non-native English speakers. Many native speakers of English are unaware of how particular sentence structures, words, or document design choices make prompts harder to read and understand for ESL students. During this workshop, participants demonstrated some easy changes you can make to assignments and gave feedback on each of the participant's prompts brought to the workshop.

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Understanding how privilege shapes our experiences and possibilities is an essential component of diversity and inclusion, but privilege takes multiple forms, including race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality. How do you engage students in such a complex conversation? How do you encourage them to see their own position in relation to other groups and within the structure of opportunities and barriers? This workshop offered some ideas for exercises to teach about privilege and how to facilitate a productive classroom experience on this topic in any discipline, ultimately offering students a lens for understanding diverse groups in any future career field.

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During this first session, we discussed the two major English proficiency exams used by Park to admit non-native English speakers to Park, discussed the scoring systems, and showed how different scores map to different student abilities in writing.

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Military learners are one of Parks largest yet least visible populations. This session was an interactive event, where we addressed:

1. Defining the military learner and some of the challenges these learners face
2. Sharing optimal teaching strategies
3. Finding ways to leverage the unique skills and abilities these learners bring to our classrooms

ParkWrites hosted a movie day for participants to watch a video (link below) presentation by Rebecca Moore Howard and Sandra Jamison, the principal investigators on The Citation Project, an ongoing multi-institutional research study on how students use and cite sources. In this video of their 2011 conference presentation “The Background: Why We Need Data-Driven Research to Understand Plagiarism,” Howard and Jamieson present some of their initial findings from their ground-breaking research. The citation project is the first study of student writing in which trained scorers read hundreds of student papers, as well as all the sources used by students in those papers. In the first phase of their ongoing research, Citation Project Scorers have analyzed student papers from 16 colleges and universities, and have tracked down 1911 citations.

Watch the video here: http://citationproject.net/publications-and-presentations/ conference-presentations/video-presentations/

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Paige Singleton from Turnitin provided an overview on how to use Turnitin Feedback Studio in Canvas to go beyond simple originality checking. This session focused on interpreting a Turnitin Originality Report, applying Turnitin best practices and delivering quality student feedback.

Park is among dozens of higher education institutions across the country actively exploring ways to reduce textbook costs for students while upholding the rights and responsibilities of academic departments/faculty to adopt the instructional materials best for their courses. Institutions are increasingly turning to Open Educational Resources (OER) and the collections within their own libraries to reduce cost, increase expedient access to instructional materials, and enhance learning outcomes.This conversation about reducing textbook costs through OER and library resources was presented by:

• Jon Ritterbush, Director of Library Services and Learning Commons
• Katelyn Handler, Assistant Professor and Reference Instruction Librarian
• Scott Curtis, Open Educational Resources Coordinator, UMKC Libraries

The purpose of this session provided practical information about how to plan a meeting, lead the meeting, take notes at the meeting, and follow-up from the meeting. This session was designed for those leading academic department meetings, school or college meetings, campus center meetings and committee meetings.

This presentation offered a view of writing as a highly varied language activity that could be strongly tied to goals for student learning, and, through examples and research, suggested ways that it could play a central role in every discipline.

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Find out how to help your students identify opportunities that are right for them and how to support students through the application processes. The presenters also discussed how to write letters of recommendation that will help your students win awards.

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Roundtable representatives included: Raed Alhathni, Robin Burger, Julie Creek, Kevin Vicker, Maureen Wambui, and Zephra Weber

Park University has a long tradition of diversity and inclusivity, and our dedication to international students is a matter of pride. However, as faculty, we often struggle with the challenges of teaching students who come from different cultural or linguistic backgrounds than ourselves. We are good enough teachers that we find strategies to help our students, but what are we not considering? In what ways could we better support our international students, both in the classroom and outside of it?

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This session provided information on student demographics and student development theory and the resources that Park provides for underprepared students.

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This workshop provided an opportunity for participants to explore effective and efficient strategies for grading student work. Participants discussed the purposes of grading as well as ways to ensure that grades measure what students know. Various approaches to formative and summative assessment were introduced.

Visit KCPDC to view offerings. Kansas City Area Park University employees may register for KCPDC sessions by logging into Paycor and enrolling in the sessions of interest. For KCPDC questions, please email innovate@park.edu.

This session explores pedagogical approaches to preventing plagiarism rather than punishing it. Presenters shared resources for working on proper source use with students and demonstrated how students can use Turnitin through Canvas as a revising tool.

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In response to feedback Stacey Kikendall and Glenn Lester received through their “Teaching the International Classroom” reading group and faculty survey, they gathered five international students representing different cultural backgrounds who spoke about their educational experiences in their home countries and how it might differ from their experiences at Park. The student panelists included: Anna Jaehn, Arber Dumani, Iroda Narzullaeva, Jinhong Li, and Leonard Lindweld.