Attending a conference is always a good thing for numerous reasons but one of the best for me is learning about new resources or getting reacquainted with old favorites. While attending the Louisiana Board of Regents annual eLearning conference last week, Dr. Curtis Bonk of Indiana University shared a number of new resources. I spent some time each day this week and last week taking a look at the many ideas he shared with us. I found Flipgrid (which can be embedded in Canvas) to be something I could easily use to encourage more participation in pre-class discussions. Using Vocaroo to give audio feedback to students was also very useful and you can even encourage them to use it for peer critiques. Finally, Polleverywhere came in handy  with the various questions I usually ask during a class session but you are limited to forty free responses. As for getting reacquainted, I spent some time on the Merlot site after being reminded by Dr. Gerry Hanley of all the wonderful (and free) resources there. If you use the Stop-Start-Keep Doing student feedback survey during the semester, you might want to look at FAST (Free Assessment Summary Tool) instead. You know that students like to do things online and the app does a lot of the work for you. Want to teach your students about information literacy? Try the University of Idaho's Merlot contribution. You can spend hours on the Merlot site alone so be careful and set some time limits for yourself. Better yet, share resources you have created that worked best for you.

Stephanie Kumi is a second year graduate student studying Information Security Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University. She asks a very relevant question, "Who is responsible for teaching students about cyber-security?", in a recent blog post. I think that it is one of a number of topics that we as faculty assume our students know but to be honest, as computer systems become more and more sophisticated, I think even those of us who consider ourselves tech-savvy may not be prepared to help our students. At BRCC, we have adopted an eSkills Orientation that is required of all students before they can register for an eLearning course. The pre-requisite was developed in response to faculty feedback about many of their students enrolling in eLearning courses without understanding just what was required of them. Recently the eSkills Orientation was revised and a much more concise version is now required of students wanting to register for eLearning courses. The new instrument was developed using feedback from faculty teaching eLearning courses (both online and hybrid). In addition, this semester the faculty who teach College Success Skills 1023 adopted the eSkills Orientation as a technology literacy learning experience. The expected outcomes were twofold: first any student taking a CSSK class would then be eligible to register for an eLearning class and second, it was hoped that the experience would improve their technology literacy skills. Preliminary feedback from CSSK faculty has been very positive and our students are expressing that the learning experience really helped them to learn about Canvas and how to use all of the available tools more effectively. So back to the question at hand, who is responsible for teaching our students about cyber-security?

The BRCC Library has added a new book of interest for those of us looking to expand our teaching toolkit. Why Students Resist Learning edited by Anton O. Tolman and Janine Kremling is offered as a practical model for understanding and helping students. The authors spend some time on the subject of student resistance that you may encounter as you begin to move them from passive to active learners. The book is written in a way that helps us "develop a coherent and integrated understanding of the various causes of student resistance to learning...and enable them to create conditions conducive to implementing effecting learning strategies." There is also a new volume (54, number 1-February 2017) of the American Educational Research Journal in the collections. There are a number of articles related to teaching in the STEM disciplines. In addition, the opening article, Educating for Democracy in a Partisan Age: Confronting the Challenges of Motivated Reasoning and Misinformation by Joseph Kahne and Benjamin Bowyer might be of interest to you in your attempt to teach information literacy and critical thinking to our students.