More information about fees, workshops, and speaking engagements is available on the Speaking page.

Custom workshops can be designed to fit the needs of the organization and the time available. Workshops can be organized in a short burst of learning or over a period of several weeks by webinar/LMS format. The cost will vary depending on how much of my time is required to engage with your organization, plan the learning, and carry out the workshops.

Workshops are highly interactive. Participants spend most of the workshop learning by doing.

Listed below is a “menu” of sorts for some of the topics that can be delivered in a workshop format. Keep in mind this is not only a selection. Want something else? Just ask.

Preparing for the Careers of Tomorrow

In the next decade, we’re going to see a lot of careers disappear and many careers we can’t imagine will take their place. On top of simple technology displacement of careers, we are also faced with the modernization of existing careers because of the ubiquitous access to information. We will look at the modernization of curriculum through a new lens which accounts for access to information. We will also execute a hands-on strategic futuring activity designed to give you some immediate practical take-home actions for your classes, department, or institution.

Learning is Not a Spectator Sport

The goal of the workshop is to help faculty to connect with research around effective learning experiences in a way that helps them shift the paradigm between what they have experienced and what they actually need to do in the classroom. Spoon-feeding of content is what students tend to desire but it is not good for long-term retention. Effective learning needs to include varied practice, productive failure, interleaving of concepts, and intentional design of interaction into learning. These learning techniques are a hard sell for students, but it can be done and this workshop will help faculty to learn some strategies to get started.

The workshop will focus on three areas in particular:

  • Research on interaction and impasse and the practical applications of this research
  • Research on productive failure and best practices from the game design industry around creating challenge and curiosity in learning
  • Principles from cognitive science around durable learning practices including spaced repetition, interleaving of concepts, varied practice, and schema formation

Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age

Note: The description below was for a 5-day event. It can be reduced in length by reducing the learning activities. Many of the sessions are tailored to the availability of technology tools and systems on the campus where the workshop is held. We want to work within the existing ecosystem, not go rogue.

This 5-day workshop is designed to help faculty get an “update” on teaching and learning for the digital age. Participants will go back to their job with a plan for how they will incorporate technology into their classes (traditional or online) and be prepared to begin helping others learn.

  • Internet Basics (vocabulary, web browser tricks and tips, itty bitty HTML)
  • Tips and Tricks from the “Secret Club” of Technology Users
  • Managing information overload
  • Best practices for using video in eLearning
  • Collaboration with colleagues and students
  • Designing digital learning spaces (using available resources like LMS or web tools)
  • Designing the learning experience online from an empty shell
  • Annotating images
  • Maintaining an appropriate online presence
  • Working with documents online
  • Digital presentation design
  • Interleaving in eLearning
  • Interaction in eLearning
  • Mobile Learning
  • Basics of UI/UX Best Practices for eLearning
  • Putting those Smartphones to work
  • How to Organize Your Digital Self

Designing Effective Online Learning Spaces

What makes an online class effective? Rather than recreating the face‐to‐face experience, we should actually look at the fundamental learning objectives for our courses and then look for the organization and eLearning tools that best foster these objectives in the online environment. Our discussion will include best practices for creating engaging and reusable video lessons, fostering collaboration and a sense of community within your online course. We will also spend time looking at how to go about assessing learning with multiple strategies, pitfalls, and tips.

Intentional Curriculum Design

If you actually pay attention to intentional design, learning objectives begin to take on real meaning. But it has to be more than just something you write in the syllabus – there must be alignment to what you actually teach and assess.

  • What do the words in learning objectives actually mean?
  • How do topics thread through your scaffolded courses?
  • Do your courses and programs focus on the big picture or the a myriad of tiny details?
  • How do you make the shift to focusing on those topics that actually benefit students in the long run?

Learning: The Long-term Game

The educational practices that lead to long-term learning gains (retention over time and transferability of skills) are often not the same as those that give good short term outcomes. How can we balance the short-term goals of good course outcomes with the long-term learning needs of our students to be successful in their careers in a future that might have very different jobs than today? In most cases, passing a course does not involve the same set of skills as becoming a lifelong learner. This workshop might include topics like:

  • What are the skills that lead to long-term success in an uncertain future job environment
  • How can we teach skills that lead to career and life success in online environments?
  • Analytics for long-term learning goals – what would they be? how could they be tracked?
  • How would we rebuild the first two years curriculum to improve the lives of students immediately and keep them bought into education as a long-term goal?
  • What are the threats and opportunities in the wider learning ecosystem? MOOCs, micro/nanodegrees, and learning tracking systems (LinkedIn Learning, Degreed, Watershed, xAPI initiatives)
  • Competency vs Traditional Education – what’s the right balance to serve learners?
  • What digital artifacts should we help students to build to prepare them for their life and career as a digital learner and participant in the world?

Learning Engineering

New buzzwords and acronyms have appeared in the education ecosystem: learning engineering, learning design, and LX (learning experience, as in learning experience architect). What are the key takeaways from these perspectives and what does it mean practically for your institution and your online learning initiatives?

  • ​What changes in the online learning environment if we approach course and program design from an LX perspective?
  • How do we bring online environments closer to a focus on interaction: interaction with content, interaction with students, and interaction with faculty/institution
  • Who are the learning engineers on your campus? How can you grow some (or grow some more of them)? How can you use them to your advantage?
  • ​How do we help faculty to not only understand learning design principles, but to actually use them?
  • What can administrators do to support faculty and instructional designers who want to build better learning experiences?
  • What initiatives and tools are available to help administrators and instructional designers make more thoughtful decisions about the choice of technologies to use for learning?

Playing to Learn Math

A workshop specifically focused on bringing more curiosity, challenge, and fun into the math classroom. How can we redesign the learning of math so that it is enjoyable, and challenging in a fun way, to students?

Futuring Workshop for Educators

We’ll use scenarios and wildcards to look at some possible futures of higher education and then converge on some common themes.  What should students be learning in the future? What should faculty be learning to prepare for the future? How should we be preparing to teach learners in the future? How can your college position itself to be closer to being a leader instead of a follower? How will people BE learning in the future? What are the threats and opportunities that the future brings to your college?

Measuring Teaching and Learning in Math

We explores resources available to measure learning, attitudes, behavior, effort, and competency related to mathematics. We draw on best practices in other STEM fields to see how we might better construct analytics in the measurement of math teaching and learning. This is not a workshop that can give you all the answers, but it can help a group of faculty to think about the metrics they have and the metrics they want to have, and help them make a plan for moving forward to better analytics and outcomes.