By CFT Digital Media Services

The Leading Lines podcast team produced 3 new episodes in the last month that offer keen insights into learning across online environments, social media, and board games.

Episode 110 – Patrick Rael

Patrick Rael is a professor of history at Bowdoin College in Maine. Patrick is also a gamer, a tabletop board gamer, to be specific. He brought together his expertise as a historian and his passion for analog gaming in a course he teaches at Bowdoin, a course called Historical Simulations. In this course, Patrick’s students play board games with historical settings as a way to understand and evaluate historical arguments. In the conversation, Patrick shares the origin of this interesting course, he talks about the ways games and play lead to deep learning in this course, and he argues for more scholarly work around the use of analog games in teaching and learning.

Listen on the Leading Lines website!

Episode 111 – Simon Howard

On today’s episode, we talk with Simon Howard, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Miami, about his recent TikTok assignments. In his social psychology course, he was looking for new ways to engage and assess his students, and during the pandemic he landed on the very short video format of TikTok as a solution. Leading Lines producer Julaine Fowlin brings us this interview, where Simon Howard talks about his educational journey, the TikTok assignment, and engaging students with creative, technology-supported alternatives to traditional exams and papers.

Listen on the Leading Lines website!

Episode 112 – Jill Lassiter

On today’s episode of Leading Lines, producer and colleague Stacey Johnson brings us an interview with Jill Lassiter, assistant professor of health sciences at James Madison University. Professor Lassiter recently wrote a Faculty Focus article on service-learning in a virtual world, including the changes she made to her service-learning projects during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the interview, professor Lassiter shares three principles for adapting service-learning to challenging environments, describes some of the virtual service-learning projects her students have engaged in over the last few years, and offers advice for instructors new to service-learning on getting started with technology-supported service-learning.

Listen on the Leading Lines website!

You can hear these podcast episodes, as well as others you’ve missed, by visiting the Leading Lines website, searching for “Leading Lines” in iTunes, or subscribing via RSS. You can also follow us on Twitter, @LeadingLinesPod.

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The Leading Lines podcast team produced 2 new episodes in the last month with instructors who are finding ways to use games and social media as tools for learning.

Episode 110 – Patrick Real

Patrick Rael is a professor of history at Bowdoin College in Maine. He specializes in African-American history, the Civil War era, and the history of slavery and emancipation. Patrick is also a gamer, a tabletop board gamer, to be specific. He brought together his expertise as a historian and his passion for analog gaming in a course he teaches at Bowdoin, a course called Historical Simulations. In the conversation, Patrick shares the origin of this interesting course, he talks about the ways games and play lead to deep learning in this course, and he argues for more scholarly work around the use of analog games in teaching and learning.

Listen on the Leading Lines website!

Episode 111 – Simon Howard

Simon Howard is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Miami, and directs the Psychology of Racism, Identity, Diversity, and Equity, or PRIDE, Lab on campus. In his social psychology course, he was looking for new ways to engage and assess his students, and during the pandemic he landed on the very short video format of TikTok as a solution. Leading Lines producer Julaine Fowlin brings us this interview, where Simon Howard talks about his educational journey, the TikTok assignment, and engaging students with creative, technology-supported alternatives to traditional exams and papers.

Listen on the Leading Lines website!

You can hear these podcast episodes, as well as others you’ve missed, by visiting the Leading Lines website, searching for “Leading Lines” in iTunes, or subscribing via RSS. You can also follow us on Twitter, @LeadingLinesPod.

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The Leading Lines podcast team produced 3 new episodes in the last month that offer keen insights into digital and physical learning environments.

Episode 107 – Mike Nino

Miguel “Mike” Nino is the director of the Office of Online Learning at the University of North Carolina Pembroke. He spoke in this episode about the elements of games and play that we can bring into the learning environment.

Listen on the Leading Lines website!

Episode 108 – Susan Hrach

Susan Hrach serves as Director of the Faculty Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and Professor of English at Columbus State University. In the interview, Susan Hrach shares some core understandings of bodies from her research, and some very practical ways to enhance student learning.

Listen on the Leading Lines website!

Episode 109 – Monica Sulecio de Alvarez

Monica Sulecia de Alvarez has taught for ten years in higher education on how to design for complex learning in online environments, and she’s created distance learning modules for organizations in fields ranging from nutrition to human rights. Monica discusses the differences between deep and shallow learning, and points toward pedagogies and technologies we can use to reach deep learning.

Listen on the Leading Lines website!

You can hear these podcast episodes, as well as others you’ve missed, by visiting the Leading Lines website, searching for “Leading Lines” in iTunes, or subscribing via RSS. You can also follow us on Twitter, @LeadingLinesPod.

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The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities is sponsoring the second annual Excellence in Podcasting Competition, in collaboration with the Office of Immersion Resources and the Center for Teaching. We had really fantastic student submissions last year, and you can listen to the winning submissions on our podcast VandyVox.

If you know of students who have recently produced great audio (maybe as an assignment in your class!), please encourage them to submit that audio to the competition. There are cash prizes! See below for the official announcement with more information. 

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In this episode, Nathan Stucky, director of the Farminary Project at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey, and Emma Lietz Bilecky, Farminary Fellow talk about the origin of the Farminary, combining work on the farm with theological education, and the challenges and opportunities that come with teaching in rhythm with nature.

Listen to the latest episode below!

To hear the podcast episodes you’ve missed, visit the Leading Lines website, search for “Leading Lines” in iTunes, or subscribe via RSS. You can also follow us on Twitter, @LeadingLinesPod.

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In October 2020, Stephen Kosslyn published a new book called Active Learning Online: Five Principles that Make Online Courses Come Alive. The book draws on Kosslyn’s experiences at Minerva, but also his very long and impressive career in higher education.

He recently facilitated a virtual workshop here at Vanderbilt on his new book, and we took the opportunity to talk with him for the podcast. Kosslyn goes through his five principles for active learning, offers practical strategies for implementing these principles in the virtual classroom, and speaks to the important role motivation plays in learning.

You can hear this podcast episode, as well as others you’ve missed, by visiting the Leading Lines website, searching for “Leading Lines” in iTunes, or subscribing via RSS. You can also follow us on Twitter, @LeadingLinesPod.

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Jesse Stommel is an author, speaker, and teacher with a focus on education, critical digital pedagogy, and documentary film. He’s the co-founder of the Digital Pedagogy Lab, a fantastic professional development workshop for those interested in critical digital pedagogy. He’s also the co-founder of Hybrid Pedagogy, the journal of critical digital pedagogy. And he’s the co-author of An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy.

You can hear this podcast episode, as well as others you’ve missed, by visiting the Leading Lines website, searching for “Leading Lines” in iTunes, or subscribing via RSS. You can also follow us on Twitter, @LeadingLinesPod.

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In January, the Leading Lines team released three podcasts with great advice for online teaching.

Dan Levy, a faculty member at Harvard University for 15 years, describes strategies for engaging and assessing students on Zoom.

Heeroon Shin, Mellon assistant professor of Asian art here at Vanderbilt, talks about her changing use of recorded video lectures, leading discussions on Zoom, and an Instagram activity.

Betsy Barre, the executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University, and Karen Costa, a faculty developer and author of the 2020 book, 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos, talk about student workload during pandemic teaching and how to address it.

You can hear these podcast episodes, as well as others you’ve missed, by visiting the Leading Lines website, searching for “Leading Lines” in iTunes, or subscribing via RSS.  You can also follow us on Twitter, @LeadingLinesPod.

In this episode, we talk with James M. Lang about distraction and attention, the subject of his new book. He is a professor of English and the director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University in Massachusetts. Jim talks about laptop bans and classroom norms, the ethics of attention and cognitive diversity, and much more. Listen to his podcast here.

To hear the podcast episodes you’ve missed, visit the Leading Lines website, search for “Leading Lines” in iTunes, or subscribe via RSS.  You can also follow us on Twitter, @LeadingLinesPod.

In this episode, we’re talking with one of the participants in the Vanderbilt Online Course Design Institute, Susan Kevra, a principal senior lecturer in French who also teaches in our American studies program. In our conversation, we talk about experiential learning activities, building community and fostering social presence, balancing asynchronous and synchronous modes of instruction, and the role of visual design in the online learning experience.

To hear the podcast episodes you’ve missed, visit the Leading Lines website, search for “Leading Lines” in iTunes, or subscribe via RSS. You can also follow us on Twitter, @LeadingLinesPod.