According to its website, the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education is "devoted to improving teaching and learning in higher education. Founded in 1976, the POD Network provides its members with personal and academic relationships that are essential for professional growth." 

The 2023 POD Conference focused on "Envisioning the Future: Developing Equitable Opportunities for Success." Below, learn a little more about what some of the attendees took away from this important conference! 

Effective Microlectures 
Audrey Tocco, Coordinator of High Impact Practices and Student Experience 

Portrait of Audrey

The biggest takeaway for me was from a session on creating effective microlectures. I have essentially been creating microlectures for each edition of the HIP Tips series, and attending this session opened my eyes to so many possibilities to make them more engaging.

The presenter shared innovative ways to engage an audience through microlectures and provided a list of technologies that can be used to create them. Some of these technologies are:

Inclusive Icebreakers
Kristin Winet, Associate Professor of Practice, 
University Center for Assessment, Teaching, and Technology (UCATT)
Program Administrator, CIRTL
 

The biggest takeaway for me were inclusive icebreakers. The panelists shared a framework for selecting icebreakers as well as a list of 32 multimodal icebreakers that could be adapted/improved to include students with social anxiety.

They also provided a list of “safety tools” to help anxious learners engage (for example, limit the scope: instead of asking students to share their favorite movie, ask them what the *last* show they watched on Netflix was—anxious students will start panicking that they can’t choose one and they know it will represent them and their minds will go blank and they won’t be able to listen to anyone else because they’re be worrying about what to say when their turn comes up).

Kristin Winet