Office of Instructional Innovation
The Office of Instructional Innovation partners with instructors in the College of Education to create high-quality learning experiences that benefit all students. To accomplish this goal, we provide instructional design consulting, advise on teaching techniques, help select appropriate educational technologies, and develop clear and engaging learning resources.
Whether you’re new to college teaching or an experienced faculty member, we want you to be successful. We invite you to work with us for all your teaching and educational technology needs by emailing oi2@utexas.edu.
Services Offered
- Consulting on course design, course redesign, and academic program development, including face-to-face, online, and hybrid learning scenarios
- Design, implementation, and support for social and experiential learning
- Development of meaningful student learning assessments and assignments
- Production of digital course resources, including multimedia and interactive content presentation
- Design and development of custom learning tools
- Facilitation of professional learning for faculty, including online resources, communities of practice, and technology workshops
- Support for digital literacy assessment and instruction across the college
- Responsive support on the use of Canvas, Zoom, Panopto, Qualtrics, Poll Everywhere, and other educational technology resources
Quick Tips for Teaching
Strategies for Supporting Absent Students
Strategies for Supporting Absent Students
With the increase in on-campus teaching and learning, we’d like to pass along some suggestions for negotiating student absences. We recommend that you continue maintaining flexible attendance policies and consider options other than lecture capture for students who miss class. Combining the use of student note-takers and a single five-minute video recording per class session, here’s an approach that’s quick, easy, and effective.
Professional Development Opportunities
CAMP OI2: Teaching in an Online/Hybrid Environment
Designed to prepare instructors to teach online and hybrid courses, this collection of 15-minute self-paced modules provides an excellent starting point for those who are new to these approaches. Topics covered include:
- Organizing Online Learning Experiences,
- Building Online Community,
- Presenting Information (Live) Effectively Online,
- Facilitating Discussion Online,
- Scaling Online Instruction, and
- Assessing Learning Online.
Camp OI2 is available for any member of the UT-Austin community. Participants receive virtual badges for the successful completion of each module.
Digital Literacy Repository
The Digital Literacy Repository is a collection of resources for anyone interested in learning how to smartly navigate the digital age.
Faculty Working Groups
Working groups provide opportunities for instructors to share successes and innovations, troubleshoot teaching challenges, and engage in a collaborative learning process to become even better teachers and users of educational technology. The groups are small, personalized to your interests, and typically meet once per month. Each group is facilitated by a staff member from the Office of Instructional Innovation.
Contact OI2 to join.
Faculty Workshops
The Office of Instructional Innovation invites you to join us for a workshop about the Canvas gradebook. We will start with a quick Q&A session to address questions submitted by instructors. Next, we will discuss different ways of setting up a gradebook, dropping the lowest score, entering extra credit, viewing a gradebook in different ways, and other topics that might interest you.
Canvas Blueprint courses are templates that can be used to manage multiple course sections that have similar content. They can also be used when multiple instructors need to teach various sections of the same course. Join us to learn how to use the tool to manage your course effectively and how to push out specific content to associated courses.
The Office of Instructional Innovation has a workshop opportunity that will focus on two topics. First, we will discuss the university’s Canvas Adoption Policy and steps that you can take to prepare for the policy’s rollout in Fall 2024. Second, we’ll spend some time exploring the Ally Accessibility Platform, which is a tool enabled in all Canvas courses that helps you make your digital course resources more accessible, inclusive, and useable for all students.
Effective feedback can help students understand their progress and guide them to improve their work. This workshop will cover different ways of using feedback in the teaching process and how different tools can be used to integrate feedback in teaching.
This workshop focuses on developing and using high-quality learning outcomes in your courses. The workshop will equip you to create meaningful learning outcomes, align assessments with learning outcomes, and use the learning outcomes feature in Canvas to track student performance. Developing learning outcomes is essential in designing effective courses, so we hope you’ll join us!
New Instructor Guide
Created to help new (and current) instructors effectively prepare for their courses, this guide includes various resources related to policies, course preparation materials, instructional technologies, and more. The guide can be explored comprehensively or selectively as needed. Here is an outline of the content detailed in this guide:
- Adding students to your course
- Using Class Info Pages (CLIPS)
- Supporting students with accommodations
- Designing your syllabus
- Reporting behavior concerns
- Navigating Canvas
- Using Zoom
- Incorporating Panopto
- Integrating Poll Everywhere
The New Instructor Guide is available for any member of the UT-Austin community (e.g., professors, assistant instructors, teaching assistants). We especially encourage new instructors to check out the guide as they map out their courses.
Teaching with Technology
The Office of Instructional Innovation provides support to a list of educational technologies approved by the College of Education. Feel free to reach out by emailing oi2@utexas.edu if you’d like to learn more about these technologies.
Approved Educational Technologies
We have curated the following collection of tutorials to help you become productive.
Canvas
OI2 Canvas App: Journal
The journal app provides a blog-like experience where each student has a personal space for reflections, reading responses, and other writing assignments. Journals can be private (shared only between the student and instructor) or public (shared with other members of the class).
Panopto
- Upload media to Panopto
- Record a video using Panopto for Windows
- Record a video using Panopto for Mac
- Trim a Panopto video
- Make an interactive Panopto video
- Add auto-captioning in Panopto
- Embed a Panopto video in a Canvas course
- Create a Panopto video assignment in Canvas
- Use a Panopto quiz as a Canvas assignment
About Us
Lucas holds a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in Learning Technologies. His interests include the application of web and interactive multimedia technologies to support face-to-face, blended, and online instruction.
Rui holds a Ph.D. in Instructional Technology and an M.S. in Educational Technology.
Email or call us for any questions you may have or to make an appointment with an OI2 member.
oi2@utexas.edu
512-232-2189
SZB 2.318
Director: Lucas Horton
512-232-4199
@oi2ut on Twitter