Online Teaching Foundation Fellowship

 

Explore Strategies to Actively Engage Students Online in the Learning Process

Lumen Circle’s Online Teaching Foundation fellowships help faculty build skills and knowledge around how a wide range of evidence-based teaching practices can be integrated into an online environment to effectively support student learning and engagement.

Benefits of Online Teaching Foundation

  • Expand your online teaching toolkit
  • Create inclusive and equitable learning environments online
  • Learn and understand different technologies that can be used to enhance your teaching practice online
  • Discover assessment applications and tools to increase student collaboration and learning

Expected Outcomes of Online Teaching Foundation

  • Evaluate current teaching strategies and determine best practices to increase student engagement online

  • Plan and implement online activities that foster collaboration, communication, and reflection

  • Utilize evidence-based teaching practices to create vibrant, engaged online learning communities

  • Identify ways to make course content inclusive, accessible, and equitable for all students

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Brief Overview of the 9-Week Fellowship Curriculum

Explore and Connect: Explore the platform, complete your profile, and meet each other

Supportive and Varied: Explore how creating a supportive online learning environment impacts student persistence, and how varying teaching modalities and techniques keeps students engaged. Write a plan to add Supportive and/or Varied evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) to a learning activity you will teach over the next week. Report on how your plan and activities went and receive feedback from other faculty in your Circle. Give feedback to 2 of your peers on their plans and activities.

Reflection and Goal Setting: Create 1 – 3 SMART goals to target your fellowship experience 

Belonging: Explore teaching strategies that support success for all students by helping them feel seen, respected, and partners in the learning process. Write a plan to add Belonging Evidence-based Instructional Practices (EBIPs) into an online learning activity you will teach over the next week. Report on how your plan went and give and receive feedback from Circle peers.

Organized and Challenging: Delve into how creating an Organized and Challenging online learning environment leads to increased student achievement. Write a plan to add the associated EBIPs to a learning activity you will teach over the next week. Report on how your plan went and give and receive feedback from Circle peers.

Conclusion & Meta-Reflection: Reflect on your fellowship experience. What did you learn? What changes have you made in your online teaching? What do you want to learn and do next?

My experience joining the Lumen Circles as a fellow has positively impacted my teaching and benefited both me professionally and my students academically. At the beginning of the Lumen Circles, my objective was to learn how to support student learning online more effectively. The goals for what I wanted to accomplish during my time in the Circle were to build skills and knowledge to create a distinctly effective online teaching pedagogy and earn an online teaching certificate, so I could have confidence and competence to teach online. After the weekly training activities, I immediately adopted the evidence-based instructional practices (tags) in my two online courses’ I have been teaching this semester. I am intentional about having a clear plan for my lessons that weaves in a variety of teaching strategies. Particularly, the “Structured Lessons and Multimedia Learning” have become my strengths in teaching. I use online discussion forums, group projects, home-based lab instruction using household items; changed the asynchronous discussion session to one-hour synchronous discussion using Breakout Zoom, which made communications more effective and more efficiently facilitated conducting the group project; provided the full power of “Caring and Pedagogical Partnerships” surveys via email, providing personalized responses to each of my students. This proved to be a nice way to thank students for taking the time to complete the survey and made them feel like we are doing this work together. This practice of “Caring” in action goes beyond feeling one care’s to actually providing concrete evidence of care to my students.

There are so many evidence-based instructional practices (tags) available for all educators to explore and adopt. An educator joining the Lumen Circle can expect to learn, practice, and share teaching “tags”, which will enhance teaching performance, as it has surely done for me.

Linghong Li, Lumen Fellow, SUNY College at Potsdam

Prior to learning from Lumen circles, my entire focus of “fixing” the online classroom was one dimensional from student to teacher and teacher to student, kind of following the sage on stage model.  Now I am constantly looking for ways to see how I can use the online classroom as a platform so that the students can not only use me but their classmates as a support system and build relationships in their journey to not only learn the topic but also to navigate online learning and education in the college environment.

Nainika Patnayakuni, Lumen Fellow, John C Calhoun State Community College

My experience as a fellow was awesome. Being able to engage and learn from educators across the United States who have various fields of study has helped me to see things in a different perspective. This change in perspective has given me some great ideas on what I can change to help enhance my course and make it more user friendly for the students I am interacting with on a digital level.

Jeffrey McMinn, Hudson Valley Community College

My experience in Lumen Circles has impacted my teaching by allowing me to truly identify how assignments can reflect what the students need to learn. Also, I have resonated with the value of including students in the planning of assignments or receiving their feedback on the process of doing an assignment. My advice to others is that it is valuable to explore effective teaching practices. Often we feel like we are “winging it”, but it is great to learn that there can be a method and reasoning behind why we are doing what we are doing. Learning effective teaching practices can help in the times where we want to make changes, or better connect with students. It can also help “humanize” and individualize our online classes for students

Lue Turner, Lumen Fellow, SUNY Empire State College

What are Lumen Circles?

Lumen Circles are professional development experiences that use virtual learning communities to connect faculty members with peers and help them hone their expertise as student-centered teachers.

Grounded in evidence-based teaching practices and self-reflection, Lumen Circles work well for any faculty member, in any discipline, and at any stage of career.

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Program Descriptions & Schedule
Circle of six icons denoting aspects of teaching and learning
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How Do Lumen Circles Work?

  • Set goals. Identify how you want to develop your teaching practice and pedagogical profile.

  • Build skills. Virtual, workshop-style learning opportunities expand your teaching repertory, help you work smarter through teaching “hacks,” and deepen your understanding of evidence-based practices.

  • Teach and reflect. Apply what you’re learning, consider how it’s working for your students and where to improve.

  • Share via virtual learning circles. Connect with peers, exchange feedback, and collect new ideas through expertly-facilitated learning circles. Our user-friendly platform makes it simple to connect and collaborate.

  • Recognize growth and progress. Track progress towards goals and see your teaching evolve as you incorporate new practices with students.

Pick the Offering that Works for You

We offer Lumen Circles experiences with different areas of focus, levels of depth and duration.

  • Lumen Circle Fellowships: Build skills in targeted areas, apply what you’re learning, and collaborate within a virtual learning circle
  • Success Accelerator: Engage with peers and accelerate the path to effective teaching and learning using Lumen courseware

Learn more about which fellowship suits you in a Lumen Circles 101 webinar. These 30-minute webinars will briefly overview Lumen Circles and how they help instructors hone their expertise as student-centered teachers through a collaborative and reflective process.

What’s Your Role?

Your connection with students is paramount to their success, but knowing how to reach them can be challenging. Lumen Circles provide opportunities to expand your teaching repertory in areas you want to grow. You can join colleagues to learn, share ideas, compare experiences, and be part of a thriving community focused on evidence-based teaching for today’s students.

Lumen Circles complement your center’s resources and priorities. Some centers offer a full menu of programs but struggle to generate meaningful evaluation data. Others cater to new faculty, but they sometimes overlook faculty who are later in their careers. Still others struggle to meet the needs of part-time faculty or graduate students. We can tailor offerings to fit the faculty members you want to reach with skill-building and professional growth focused on teaching practices that impact student success. We also offer flexible options around pricing and scale.

Recognizing student success is a result of faculty success, Lumen Circles can help you provide a broader foundation of faculty support to transform teaching and learning with a focus on evidence-based instructional practices. We can also help you track alignment and measure progress towards institutional and faculty goals for improving teaching practice.

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Lumen Circles FAQs

Do you have a question we don’t answer here? Contact us or send a note to info@lumenlearning.com.

Lumen Circles’ evidence-based teaching framework uses a methodology and process originally adapted from research published in Taking College Teaching Seriously: Pedagogy Matters by Gail Mellow, Diana Woolis, Marisa Klages-Bombich and Susan Restler. In work funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumen expanded the framework to add a “Belonging” theme that fully incorporates practices associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion into the Lumen Circles model. The framework identifies practices that increase student success, according to research evidence. Lumen Circles’ methodology guides faculty members through a process to recognize, explore and apply these effective practices in their teaching. It helps them become more aware and purposeful about making pedagogical choices that support student success.

Primary principles include:

  • Self-reflection: Faculty fellows examine their own teaching practices to become more aware of pedagogical choices and their impact on student success.
  • Appreciative Inquiry: This inquiry method invites educators to recognize and celebrate their strengths and what’s working in their teaching practice, and then using this as a foundation for self-directed growth and improvement.
  • Evidence-based Instructional Principles: To help faculty make the learning environment more student-centered, we encourage them to explore and try out specific practices aligned in four distinct dimensions of teaching practice: Supportive, Challenging, Organized, and Varied.
  • Pedagogical Analytics: As fellows progress through the Lumen Circles experience, we measure changes in faculty teaching patterns, progress towards their teaching goals, and how this aligns with institutional goals and changes in student outcomes.

Yes. The Lumen Circles professional development platform and learning circle-focused methodology are based the work of Faculty Guild, a faculty-focused coaching service created by serial education technology entrepreneur David Yaskin and a talented team of educators. As part of a strategic decision to expand our support for effective teaching and learning practices with professional development services, Lumen Learning acquired intellectual property and the higher education assets of Faculty Guild.

We construct virtual learning circles with careful attention to the goals and context of faculty members participating in Lumen Circles fellowships. Learning circles always align with the theme of the fellowship to connect faculty with peers working to expand their teaching practice in similar directions. As a rule, learning circles include faculty from multiple institutions teaching in related disciplines, such as STEM or social sciences. We may make exceptions to this rule in order to support specific institutional objectives, such as learning circles to connect faculty with peers from their own institution.

We coordinate start and end dates for Lumen Circles fellowships and other professional development programs to align with the academic calendar and windows when the experience will be most productive for participating faculty members. Staggered start dates generally coincide with the start of term for spring (winter), summer, and fall. Depending on interest, faculty availability, and demand, we can add additional fellowship terms as needed.

Note the Lumen Circles experience does require that faculty are actively teaching during a majority of their fellowship term because reflective practice is most beneficial when there are immediate opportunities to consider teaching choices, evaluate what’s working and try out new pedagogical directions.