Faculty Spotlight / Jan Herington

Be engaged as an instructor:

• “The facilitator needs to be actually seen … I do a video note every single solitary week.”
• “I encourage them to take risks. This is the time that you can risk. It's a relatively safe environment. Get out of your comfort zone, stretch yourself.” 
• Give feedback on areas they can improve and why and where they’re progressing.

Create engaging content:

• “Get it as interactive as we absolutely can. So there's an interactive, there's quizzes, fun quizzes, not necessarily just for marks. There's opportunities to build through different technologies.”
• Using interactives allows us to reinforce the message and the content that we're trying to get across to students.
• Using videos that are short and to the point, targeted to the learning outcome that you want along with practice activities.

Create engaging real-world activities:

• "You as a facilitator are the conduit between education and the workplace. And so I think that's really, really important to build on and make sure that it's a very conscious effort on your part to say, you know what we're learning this today, but this is how it gets applied out there in the real world."

• “Praise students in public, usually in in the collective way.”  
• Use the video note feature – it's where you can connect with your students.
• Try to respond the same day and get marks in as soon as possible.
• Consider having discussion participation mandatory with rubric expectations, having discussions on a topic where there could be different experiences makes a richer conversation.

• Using Video Note, Flipgrid, Padlet, or H5P Interactive Quizzes
• “There are a lot of things that I continually learn. I'm like a sponge. I'm trying to learn all sorts of new technologies that I can use in this asynchronous learning environment.” 
• Intelligent Agents - “I've had some great feedback around [this tool] you can send out email blasts to all of your class or maybe a day or two before the assignment.” 
• Again, keeping the content relevant and interactive is really important and there's lots of technology."

• Be creative and be intentional to create a community and be visible!
• “I really believe that it is the onus is on us as facilitators, as professors to really be that conduit, to be that bridge between the students, education, and how that's going to apply and serve them in their work community...Sometimes students are not aware of the simplest things that that we are a sharing with them in terms of content and how that really applies to their work life, their personal life, and you know their community life." 
• "I leave them with the message that they matter, that they're that they're important, that they add value to their peers, to me, to their friends, their family, their community. And that they're special and that they have a lot to offer and they're going to make change and I think that's what lots of them really want to do. They want to make an impression. They want to make some change. They want to, they want to matter, and that's what I try and share with them."