UVA's Teaching Hub: A Crowdsourced Collection of Teaching Resources

While I was at the POD Network conference last November, I learned about a fantastic new resource from the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia. It's called the Teaching Hub, and it aims to be the place to go to find resources on particular teaching and learning topics. Unlike the collection of teaching guides at the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, each of which was written by CFT staff or graduate fellows, the CTE's Teaching Hub is a set of curated collections that point to the best-of-the-best resources from around the web.

For example, consider the Teaching Hub collection titled "More Than Lecturing," curated by CTE assistant director Lynn Mandeltort. The collection links out to a video series from the University of Georgia showing active learning strategies in STEM courses, the teaching guide on lecturing from the Vanderbilt CFT collection, a Chronicle of Higher Education interview with Claire Major about interactive lecturing, the book Interactive Lecturing by Elizabeth Barkley and Claire Major, and an Inside Higher Ed piece on using teaching assistants to make large enrollment history courses more interactive. There's a preview of each of those resources in the Teaching Hub collection, along with a short introduction by Lynn.

Other Teaching Hub collections I explored include "ChatGPT in Technical Courses," curated by UVA commerce faculty Jingling Li and Reza Mousavi, and "How Can I Use Student Evaluations to Improve My Teaching?", curated by CTE director Michael Palmer. The Teaching Hub currently features 35 collections on a variety of topics (although almost half of them are generative AI at the moment) curated by 23 different UVA faculty and staff. The Hub also has a few "galleries," like a collection of sample syllabi from a variety of disciplines, drawn mostly from the CTE's course design institutes, or Small Changes, Big Impact, a series of 25 short video interviews with UVA faculty about teaching strategies.

Not only is this a really useful structure for sharing teaching and learning resources, the Teaching Hub allows anyone to be a curator and develop their own collections! Here's Michael Palmer's pitch to his fellow center for teaching and learning folks to join the Teaching Hub:

To join the Teaching Hub as a curator, just email teaching@virginia.edu. I signed up this morning. I don't know what collection I'll curate just yet, but I'm sure I'll think of something!

Whether or not you become a curator on the Teaching Hub, I think you'll find it a great starting point for finding resources for improving your own teaching or helping your colleagues refine their teaching practices.

Intentional Tech Slow Read

Inspired by a couple of slow​reads shared with me by friends, I'm hosting a slow read of my 2019 book Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching this winter! The idea is to take a couple of months to read and discuss Intentional Tech with a virtual book group of interested colleagues. Here's how this will work:

• Starting Monday, January 22nd, you're invited to start reading Intentional Tech one chapter a week for the next seven weeks. I'll share the reading schedule here in the newsletter, along with weekly reminders. Each chapter focuses on a different teaching principle relevant to using technology: creating times for telling, providing opportunities for practice and feedback, making visible thin slices of student learning, and so on.
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• Every week, I'll share a few discussion questions to help you go deeper with the week's chapter and apply it to your own teaching. The questions will be here in the newsletter and you're welcome to respond to them however and wherever you like, but I'll be encouraging discussion of the questions in my Patreon community. The Patreon platform has solid discussion forums that work well on both laptop and mobile.
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• Also in my Patreon, I'll have a bonus resource to share each week related to the chapter at hand. These will be a mix of new instructor vignettes like those found in the book, new audio interviews with faculty about the ways they teach with technology, and mini teaching guides on particular teaching topics. These will only be available to my Patreon community, although I might share a few of them more publicly later in the year.

There are, of course, lots of ways to read Intentional Tech. You can order a paperback copy through Amazon and other retailers, you might have electronic access through your institutional library, and my Patreon supporters can get a code for 20% off the book when ordering through my publisher West Virginia University Press.

A lot has changed in the educational technology landscape since Intentional Tech came out in 2019, and I'm excited to explore that changing landscape with y'all through this slow read! And we'll have it all finished the week of March 4th, which is right before my spring break and maybe yours, too.
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Thanks for reading!

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