April Goal Win: The Liberal Studies Round Table

The process of proposing, organizing, and launching the Liberal Studies round table initiative has been a learning experience and a real privilege. In the past few weeks, I’ve been able to collaborate with amazing English department folks, including the very talented “Team Unicorn”, a group of composition teachers who’ve embraced the cinematic approach to creating slides. Check out one example of a deck used in this group’s English composition online course:

I am pleased to say that the English department worked for the past month to plan and organize our session, and we were ready for our debut today. The presentations went smoothly and we had an awesome turn out. The first hour was devoted to a series of presentations on the topic of teaching personas (defining persona, applying persona to a collaborative online team of teachers, and using the student’s experience to mold the teacher’s persona). The rest of the workshop was devoted to discussion. I’d like to see stronger discussion in the future, and this I think is where my presence would have been best used.

I chose not to present in this workshop (except for providing our attendees with an agenda of the session). I think at this point, people expect me to present, but I wanted to give the floor to some of the English folks who don’t often get heard but have incredible ideas. Instead, I functioned as facilitator. One of my tasks was to create a basic set of slides to serve as welcome, transition, and closing visuals. As you can see, my obsession with The Noun Project continues:

Our welcome slide sets the tone for the session–connect, discover, collaborate.

Our agenda moved from a presentation on the concept of personas to specific examples/applications.

Overall, I found the discussion of personas to be interesting and I know Alex and I gleaned some insights about how we can further work to create a positive relationship with our students. What’s your opinion on teacher personas online? Is it something you think about as an educator? What is your teaching persona?