CETLI Events Calendar

Graduate seminars do many things: introduce students to a field and how to be scholars and professionals in the field, provide students with the tools to follow their own interests as well as give students entry to an entirely new set of interests, lenses and questions.  In this session, Melissa Sanchez of English and Gender […]

Creative projects can allow students to explore course content in ways that encourage both analysis and imagination, excitement and insight. In this session Loren Goldman from Political Science and Grace Saunders Johnson from Africana Studies will start the discussion of how to design and implement such projects, considering how we can develop assignments that enable […]

This session will consider ways of assessing students that get away from high-stakes exams and better reflect the learning we expect of our students. Vijay Balasubramanian of Physics and Rob Ghrist of Math and Electrical and Systems Engineering will open this discussion of alternatives to exams, by exploring options that they have considered and how […]

The organization of your Canvas site can set a welcoming tone for your students and help students to find the information and resources they need to stay on track in your course. In this session we will discuss ways to set up your Canvas site to promote positive interactions with students and guide them through […]

The organization of your Canvas site can set a welcoming tone for your students and help students to find the information and resources they need to stay on track in your course. In this session we will discuss ways to set up your Canvas site to promote positive interactions with students and guide them through […]

In this workshop, we will explore ways to use Canvas to efficiently grade students’ work and give feedback. We’ll look at ways to set up Canvas assignments, grading tools, and the gradebook to fit your needs, including ways to provide students with immediate feedback on low-stakes assignments, to automatically weight and drop grades, and to […]

This academic year, Ed Discussion has replaced Piazza as a University-supported tool for online Q&A and threaded discussion among students, instructors, and TAs. Ed Discussion can be added to Canvas or used as a standalone tool to promote communication, collaboration, and problem-solving in order to help students better understand course materials. In this session, CETLI […]

This session focuses on how to make lectures more active and intellectually engaging for students. Allyson Mackey of Psychology and Rupa Pillai of Asian American Studies will facilitate this discussion of ways to incorporate active moments into lectures in order to encourage students to think, reset their attention and practice with material so they can […]

Audio assignments, such as podcasts, can help students think in new ways about what they are learning and about the audience for their work. In this session Jim English of English and Andi Johnson of History and Sociology of Science will ask us to consider why we might assign audio projects, how to do so […]

This conversation will allow faculty to talk through their concerns about ChatGPT, a new AI platform that can generate and revise text and code. Will such platforms enable students to complete assignments at the push of a button, and make such cheating harder to detect? Do instructors need to change their assignments? How drastically? Alternatively, […]

With last year’s return to in-person classes, some students – as attendance demonstrated – were uncertain about why it mattered whether they physically attended. In this conversation, facilitated by Cam Grey of Classical Studies and Josh Klein, we will consider why being present matters, how we explain that to students, and how we encourage ongoing […]

Across areas of study, we are increasingly considering ways to empower students to think with data. In this conversation, Bhuvnesh Jain of Physics and Matt Levendusky, of Political Science will start a discussion on how to introduce data science to undergraduates and how to integrate the study of data meaningfully into a range of undergraduate […]

In this session, CETLI staff will explore ways to make use of Turnitin, a tool designed to reduce student plagiarism. Turnitin might be able to detect the use of AI-assisted writing such as ChatGPT, but that is not established. The discussion will focus on ways instructors can use Turnitin to help in identifying possible instances […]

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED. Through writing we often come to more nuanced and complicated ideas as well as better approaches to problem solving. This conversation, led by Henry Townser of Math and Elly Truitt of History and Sociology of Science, will discuss the ways in which we can connect writing and thinking for our […]

ChatGPT has instructors rethinking their assignments – whether to address concerns around academic integrity, to help students learn new skills that prepare them for the future, to use the tool to open time for different kinds of thinking, or all three. Kate Dorsch, of History and Sociology of Science and John Paul MacDuffie of Management […]

In this session Michele Margolis of Political Science and Robyn Sanderson of Physics and Astronomy will use their ideas about their syllabuses to start a conversation about how to prepare for the fall by creating a syllabus for your class that engages students, excites them for the class, and makes clear to them what they […]

In this workshop, sponsored jointly with Penn’s office of Community Standards and Accountability, faculty will prepare for the Fall semester by considering their expectations around students’ use of generative AI platforms (like Chat GPT, Bing, Bard and others).  Discussion will focus on how faculty can use assignment design, class time and their syllabus to help […]

In this session, we’ll explore different strategies for helping students connect, communicate and collaborate as they work on projects in groups – making use of tools like Canvas Groups, Canvas Collaborations, group assignments, and group discussions. We will also review methods to track the progress of groups and individuals in those groups so you know who […]

Being in class together is valuable for student learning, but after the pandemic instructors have reported that students are coming to class less and that by mid-semester as many as half the students in lectures are not coming.  This session will explore ways to help students see the value of class, set expectations for why […]

This session will explore using Canvas to help students understand what they should be doing (and when they should be doing it) so they can stay on track in your class. We’ll share strategies for making your Canvas site easy for students to navigate, different methods for using Canvas to communicate with students, and how […]

Perusall is a social annotation tool that works within Canvas to enable students to comment on and discuss class readings, images, videos, and podcasts. In this session, we’ll consider different strategies for using Perusall to get students to come to class prepared, to discuss course material with one another, and to share their ideas and […]

What we do on the first day of class matters for how the rest of the semester unfolds. It is an opportunity to introduce yourself and your course design, provide students with a glimpse of your teaching style, and communicate your expectations. This session will explore ways to make you and your students feel at […]

In this session, CETLI staff will outline Penn policies and resources as well as discuss Penn semesters and culture as a way to prepare new lecturers for their first semester at Penn.

How can you set firm deadlines but still work with students who need some flexibility? In this conversation Sarah Kagan of Nursing and Marc Meredith of Political Science will talk about how they try to balance the challenges students sometimes encounter with the need for some firm deadlines to keep students on track.

Finding time to support and mentor students can be challenging. Drs. Lee Bassett and Jennifer Lukes will start the conversation by sharing ideas for promoting positive relationships with students while maintaining boundaries to preserve our time. We will consider ways to use office hours efficiently as well as ideas for leveraging technology to simplify scheduling […]

Mentors of doctoral students must both give students enough structure to complete their dissertations and learn particular skills, and support them as they find their own scholarly voices and interests. In this session Chenoa Flippen of Sociology and Daniel Levinthal of Management will begin the conversation by thinking about how to strike a balance between […]

In this session, instructors who teach ethics in professional schools across Penn will begin a conversation about the crucial role ethics can play in professional education, and challenges of and strategies for teaching them.

Class participation is often a nebulous concept for students. While faculty often encourage and grade participation, students can be unsure what is expected of them. Sarah Gronningsater and Wendy Roth will begin this conversation with concrete ideas for helping students participate in ways that will help them learn and setting expectations so that students know […]

In this discussion of clinical teaching, Nadia Bennett of the Perelman School of Medicine and Olivia Sheridan of the School of Dental Medicine will start a conversation on how to make feedback meaningful for clinical students, how to give feedback in front of patients, and other times and means of providing students with feedback to […]