Course Design Clinic
Course Design Clinic, hosted by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) in collaboration with Technology-Enhanced Learning and Online Strategies (TLOS), is a two-day, hands-on workshop that guides instructors through the process of building or refreshing their course.
During the two-day session, you will be guided through several stages of course design to include:
- identifying goals and learning outcomes
- organizing the syllabus and schedule
- designing individual class meetings, activities, and assignments
- planning for assessment of student learning
Through working with the CETL and TLOS staff you will receive guidance on rigorous instructional design, assignment design, assessment strategies, active learning strategies, and the technological tools available to you when moving through all stages of course design and implementation, including Generative AI. The goal of this clinic is to get you to think through multiple levels of granularity for your course and complete much of the planning at once while having instructional experts on hand. You will leave the clinic well on your way to having a complete course, syllabus, and task list for implementation.
May Course Design Clinic
Location: Newman Library, Goodall Room
- May 19, 2025
8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Lunch Provided
- May 20, 2025
8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Lunch Provided
Keynote Address
From TL;DR to OMG I Get It: Rebuilding Student Reading Skills in the Attention Economy
In this keynote, I draw on my 17 years as a history professor to tackle the growing challenge of why college students read less—and with less skill—than ever before. We will walk through how this trend has evolved, what's driving it, and share battle-tested strategies to get our students to engage with academic texts again. You'll leave with practical approaches you can adapt tomorrow to help students in any discipline build stronger reading comprehension, sharpen their critical analysis, and develop better focus, and help them transform from reluctant readers into more confident academic readers.
Gen AI Disclosure: I used Claude to brainstorm titles and adjust the tone of the summary, although I drew the line at "Reading Between the Whines: A Professor's Guide to Overcoming Student Reading Resistance” and "Page Rage: Confessions of a History Professor's 17-Year Battle to Make Students Actually Read”.
Keynote Speaker
Ivonne Wallace Fuentes is a historian of Latin America, who received her Ph.D. from Duke University. Her research interests focus on Latin American revolutionary politics, especially in Peru and Guatemala. Her first book, Most Scandalous Woman: Magda Portal and the Dream of Revolution in Peru (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), was a biography of a Peruvian revolutionary leader and poet, and her current book project is a narrative history of revolutionary insurgencies in Central America. She was a Professor of History at Roanoke College, where she taught Latin American history and methodology, and is now the Assistant Director of Faculty Professional Development at Virginia Tech’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. This summer, she will also begin serving as Editor of the journal The Americas. She is the mother of two young children.