Newsroom

Asynchronous learning is full of untapped potential.But it’s stuck in an endless loop of lecture video > reading > discussion post > quiz.For students, it's full of formulaic discussion boards with one initial post and two required replies to your peers. It’s hundreds of hours of lecture videos played at 2x speed. It’s reading and re-reading rubrics with a hesitation to reach out to the instructor with questions.

If you’ve run into me since I got back from Spain, there’s a very good chance that the first thing I shared about my time there was how amazing the students were. Followed by how excited I am about the learning that happened. Then, finally, gushing about the joy of spending a few weeks in Spain. It surprised me when I noticed I had just been teaching a study abroad course, and the abroad part wasn’t what I led with.

Christina Hnatov and I walked across the University of Maryland campus to grab bubble tea, chatting about knitting, grading, birding, the solar system, and course assignments. This was typical for our conversations: jumping from topic to topic, sharing things that caught our attention in an unstructured idea exchange.

Recently I had the honor of participating in a panel during the 3rd annual TerrapinSTRONG symposium here at the University of Maryland. The topic of this year’s symposium was Navigating Change: Turning Disruption into Direction, and the panel I participated in was titled Building Capacity: Supporting Ourselves & Others through Change. While preparing for that panel, I realized I have a lot to share about this topic — more than we had time to discuss during the symposium!