Fall 2021 FLEX

(Submitted by Andrew Burch, Professor, Biology)Cerro Coso’s 2022 Spring Flex event was held on Friday, January 14th and was our college’s third consecutive entirely virtual flex event.  This flex event consisted of thirteen separate sessions, and primarily focused on two major themes: providing faculty with sessions related to practical and applicable teaching strategies, and employee wellbeing, particularly related to emotional and mental health. ...

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Equity-Minded Spring FLEX

(Submitted by Sharlene Paxton, Professor, Librarian)The Faculty Flex Committee, in collaboration with the Professional Development Committee, hosted Dr. Luke Wood as the keynote speaker for this year's spring flex, which was Cerro Coso's second entirely virtual flex event. Due to the far-flung nature of our campuses, more faculty were able to attend the flex event virtually, as indicated by record-setting flex attendance. Dr. Wood is the Vice...

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Embedded Tutoring

(Submitted by Tyson Huffman)Community college instructors support students in their classrooms in a variety of ways: supplemental study materials, student-contact hours, links to learning support services on campus, or by directing students to the college website in hopes that they will seek out resources as they are needed. Students often struggle to utilize the resources their college offers for fear of being viewed as a struggling student, or...

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Spotlight on Embedded Librarian: Scaffolding Research Skills in an Online Child Development Capstone Course

(Submitted by Julie Cornett)In Lisa Fuller’s CHDV C203 Capstone class, students are required to develop, implement, and evaluate an Action Research Project in the preschool centers where they are interns. To complete this high-stakes project, students must develop manageable topics, research extensively, and build an APA annotated bibliography. For several years, Lisa has had Julie Cornett join her class as an Embedded Librarian to provide support...

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OEI Rubric Tip: Course Navigation

By Gary Enns, English Professor, OEI Rubric Fan and POCR Team Member Section A4 of the OEI Rubric focuses on the navigability of an online class. To align, a course must exhibit navigation and content flow that are “easily determined by the user,” meaning that when a student first lands on the course homepage, they know what to do, when to do it, and how to do it because the designer has built an intuitive learning environment. To score...

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Increase Student-to-Student Interaction

Matthew Hightower Professor of Business and Information Technology  (submitted by Matt Hightower) As online instructors at Cerro Coso, we are bound to follow the Regular, Effective, and Documentable Contact (REDC) document. Among other things, this requires that we provide a learning environment that fosters regular instructor-to-student and student-to-student contact. In this article, I will present a technique that I have found to be...

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Increase Instructor-to-Student Interaction

Matthew Hightower Professor of Business and Information Technology  (submitted by Matt Hightower) As online instructors at Cerro Coso, we are bound to follow the Regular, Effective, and Documentable Contact (REDC) document. Among other things, this requires that we provide a learning environment that fosters regular instructor-to-student and student-to-student contact. I addressed one way to increase student-to-student interaction in my...

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