Blog
Improving Retention Through A Sense of Belonging: The EPIC Program
By Mike Watters, Professor of Biology Student retention is important to any university, especially keeping commuter students who are traditionally less anchored in campus life. Even more at risk, given the leaky STEM pipeline, are STEM commuter students. To address...
Teaching Underprepared Students and The Hidden Curriculum
By Tiffany Kolba (Math & Stats), Jenna Van Sickle (Lilly Fellows), Jesse Sestito (ME), & Lauren Sestito (ME) This academic year, fifteen Valpo faculty and staff members met biweekly for a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) on “Teaching Underprepared Students and...
Reimagining the Curriculum
By Theresa Carroll (CONHP), Alberto López Martín (World Lang & Culture), and Karen Hernes (CONHP) Several of your colleagues have been working to increase underrepresented voices in their courses as part of the “Reimagining the Curriculum'' (RIC) Initiative. These faculty...
Fostering Community and Student Engagement
By Natalie Krivas (English) & Stacy Hoult (World Languages & Cultures) For the past year, a group of Valpo faculty and staff have been meeting as a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) to discuss Fostering Community and Student Engagement. FLC members...
Talking is Teaching
By Abbie Thompson, Department of Psychology In this article Abbie Thompson (Psychology) describes how students in her service-learning courses support new mothers in Porter County to teach our youngest learners: babies and young children. The name says it all. Talking...
What is New in ValpoScholar?
By Jon Bull, Associate Professor of Library Science What is ValpoScholar? Since 2011 ValpoScholar has been Valpo’s institutional repository, hosted by the Christopher Center Library. In short, the platform tries to collect the university’s intellectual output in one place. That...
Inside-Out Prison Exchange – A Class Like No Other
By Dawn Jeglum Bartusch, Department of Sociology and Criminology In 1995, Professor Lori Pompa from Temple University took 15 students to a prison in Pennsylvania for a tour and conversation with incarcerated men. My colleague, Danielle Lavin-Loucks, and I have...
Maximizing Blackboard: Learning Integrations
By: Ed Finn, Executive Director Blackboard is a complex system that interfaces with other campus technologies to help support the faculty and student experience. However, not all of these integrations are apparent or used by faculty as they design and...
Why Quality Matters Matters
By Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development We all know that enrollment in traditional in-person university classes has declined across the country. But did you know that there has been a corresponding increase in enrollment in online and hybrid courses? ...
Healthy Minds, Healthy Bodies
By Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development, CITAL Half-way through the semester, both you and your students can start to feel run-down and overworked. Yet some faculty are unaware of the many resources at Valpo for mental, physical, and spiritual...