It's difficult to know where to funnel your energy when someone or something is constantly demanding your attention- especially as grad TA's. How do we set ourselves up for success? How do we accomplish what we need to do and do it exceptionally well? How can we be masters of time? In this talk, I will share real tools that you can take with you to downsize your stress, organize your day, and determine what your priorities and boundaries are.
In today’s rapidly changing educational landscape, fostering active participation and enhancing student engagement remains a focal point in higher education. This session will explore EchoPoll’ impact on student engagement, providing case studies of demonstrated success, and how the solution’s interoperability with Echo360’s Learning Transformation Platform™ (LTP™) - the Echosystem™ - is transforming the future of education.
Through the power of the EchoSystem, the world’s and only first Learning Transformation Platform, Echo360 has delivered a wholistic approach to student engagement with EchoEngage. By leveraging real-time, interactive polling technology, EchoPoll, one of the two EchoEngage solutions, instructors around the world are transforming traditional classroom dynamics into a more accessible and personalized exchange of ideas.
EchoPoll empowers instructors to integrate data-driven engagement strategies into lectures in a new way, seamlessly adding polls, quizzes, and surveys into their live and recorded lessons. This real-time interaction, which can always be captured and distributed for asynchronous engagement and review, not only provides immediate feedback on student understanding but also promotes critical thinking and semester-long discussions. This technology ensures that every voice is heard, regardless of class size, and allows students to respond anonymously, which can improve participation rates and reduce the barriers to speaking up.
During the spring 2024 quarter, a PhD candidate and music theory professor teamed up to conduct a teaching experiment across four sections of 2nd year music theory (including two sections taught by graduate students). The question: Could a card game improve students' retention and recall of music theory terminology definitions? This digital poster will describe the terminology card game, present the process and results of our teaching experiment, and outline plans for future modification/implementation.
Can a student's belief affect their behavior and learning? Research supports that self-efficacy can predict performance and account for poor performance when students have the required skills needed to learn. In this presentation, we will evaluate and explore our own self-efficacy as well as gain a general understanding of the impact of self-efficacy on learning. Then, we will discuss ways that we, as professors, administrators, parents, teachers, aunts, uncles, and others, can increase the development of belief in oneself and others. Lastly, we will work on setting two concrete goals with an action plan to implement steps to reach those goals. If a person's belief, or self-efficacy, that they can succeed influences learning, we must implement strategies to build self-efficacy.
Susan Schulhof is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education. She has been working in the Early Childhood Education field since 2001 with previous experience in Elementary Education and Social Work. In addition to teaching and leading others, she was an Assessor and Training... Read More →
Thursday May 22, 2025 8:30am - 9:15am CDT Wildcat Room
This session presents the Digital Accessibility Coach (DA Coach), an AI-powered assistant designed to support faculty and staff in ensuring digital accessibility compliance within university course materials. Developed by the Innovation in Digital Accessibility (IDA) Working Group, this initiative aligns with ADA Title II regulations, providing a scalable solution for achieving 100 percent accessibility compliance across diverse pedagogies and course materials.
Participants will explore the AI-driven accessibility assessment tool, built using Python and API integrations, which provides one-on-one personalized support for digital accessibility learning and compliance. The DA Coach will guide users through step-by-step accessibility checks, improving usability, user experience, and WCAG compliance through an iterative design process.
This approach not only enhances faculty accessibility practices but also drives long-term student success in a fully digitally inclusive learning environment.
Director of Information Systems, Security, and Compliance, University of Illinois Chicago Division of Specialized Care for Children
Andrew Nichols is the Director of Information Systems, Security, and Compliance at the University of Illinois Chicago Division of Specialized Care for Children. With extensive experience in higher education IT leadership, he oversees enterprise information systems, cybersecurity strategy... Read More →
Thursday May 22, 2025 8:30am - 9:15am CDT Big Ten Room
This presentation explores a novel approach to leveraging AI in education, not as a replacement for critical thinking, but as a catalyst for it. We'll delve into a case study where students used AI Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze a business case, and then reflect on the AI's strengths and weaknesses. The surprising outcome? Students produced unusually insightful and lengthy reflections, demonstrating a level of engagement and ownership rarely seen in traditional assignments. This presentation will unpack the pedagogical principles behind this success, focusing on how AI-assisted assignments can naturally incorporate spiraling, spaced repetition, and agency -- three key elements for deep and lasting learning. Participants will leave with practical strategies for designing their own AI-enhanced assignments to promote deeper learning in their classrooms.
I did a study to investigate how learners with diverse cognitive abilities process data stories presented through infographics, focusing on the impact of visual and verbal data representations. Conducted in a controlled lab setting using an eye tracker, the experiment examined how individual cognitive differences -- such as working memory, visuospatial abilities, and inhibitory control -- affect infographic comprehension. I used Machine Learning algorithms to analyze learners' eye movement data and explored how they engage with data presented through both visual (graphs, charts) and verbal (textual descriptions) formats.
The results suggest that learners engage more effectively with data stories when critical information is communicated verbally rather than through data visualizations, especially when the content requires comprehension of complex data relationships. Furthermore, the findings emphasize the need to minimize seductive details in graphical representations, as these details can distract learners and hinder their ability to extract key information.
The study also highlighted important implications for educators and developers. Teachers should implement strategies to enhance learners' visuospatial abilities to improve overall engagement with graphical content. Developers should consider using eye-movement data to create adaptive infographics that cater to individual cognitive strengths, ultimately improving accessibility and comprehension for all learners.
Mellon Postodctoral Fellow, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Hi!I am Kristine, and I’m excited to share with you my presentation, "Designing Data Infographics for Adaptive Learning: Enhancing Engagement." This presentation is based on my research aimed at understanding how people generally comprehend visual data and make decisions in learning... Read More →
Thursday May 22, 2025 10:45am - 11:30am CDT Rock Room
From Succession to Squid Game, from Game of Thrones to Severance, we live in a culture saturated with stories. As educators, technologists, and researchers, we're frequently told that using stories will keep our audiences engaged when we need to convey information in a presentation or instructional-based format. How do we do that, though? We're not all natural-born storytellers, but there are effective, powerful frameworks that can help us tell compelling stories regardless of the subject.
After reviewing the four cornerstones of narrative, we'll cover two key frameworks for engagement through storytelling: Campbell's Hero's Journey and the Pixar Storytelling Framework. Participants will take what they have learned about the Pixar storytelling framework and apply it to a segment of content from their own area of expertise. After a brief working period, participants will be asked to share their work with the session audience for feedback. Each participant will leave with the experience of applied knowledge and be better able to tell stories in their own higher education environments.
Brian Klaas is the Assistant Director for Technology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Teaching and Learning. He also has a faculty appointment in the School's R3 Center for Innovation in Science Education. He teaches graduate level courses on communications... Read More →
Fluency in software is often assumed before students enter a course, but when students are challenged to perform concrete tasks, they struggle to work independently. In general chemistry lab courses we prioritize learning Microsoft Excel for data analysis and visualization early in the first quarter. While many students report prior experience with Excel, they struggle to execute the tasks required in a science lab course. To better support all students, we have integrated an in-class "data analysis" lab that allows them to gain fluency in the software with the support of their peers and teaching assistants. This requires some class time is devoted to active learning of the software; it also requires adequate training of the TAs. In this presentation, we will detail how we prioritize what tasks are done in class and what is expected to be independent work. While our example is in the teaching of Microsoft Excel, we aim to discuss objectives more generally to help participants assess their own relationship to the software of their choice. Bring your laptop!
Associate Professor of Instruction, Northwestern University
Veronica Berns (she/her) earned her BA in Chemistry at Northwestern University in 2009 before her PhD in Inorganic Chemistry at University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2014. Her doctoral thesis focused on the way atoms pack together in solids, specifically in compounds with multiple... Read More →
