When NIU faculty have technical questions about Blackboard, they often turn to the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning (CITL). And when NIU students have technical questions about Blackboard, they turn to … well, typically, the faculty who are requiring them to
Read moreTaking the plunge: Melissa Fickling taps AI to enrich course in counseling ethics
New graduate students in this fall’s section of COUN 500: Professional Identity and Ethics in Counseling probably weren’t expecting what Melissa Fickling told them. Fickling, associate professor in the Department of Counseling and Higher Education, revealed that she had devoted the summer
Read moreNIU curricular innovation grants enable faculty to try new tech, teaching styles
In 2023, NIU’s Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning piloted a Curricular Innovation Grant Fund. Congruent “with university goals and priorities,” the program was “established to provide competitive grants for experimenting with innovative teaching methods such as transdisciplinary learning, virtual reality, digital
Read moreCAHE’s Kassandra Kavanaugh honored with graduate teaching assistant award
Working as a counselor fulfilled Kassandra Kavanaugh. She became interested in the field during high school, when she started to explore career options, and then cemented that decision while taking a psychology course at the community college in her hometown of Brainerd,
Read moreGoggles on, paddles in hand: NIU serves as pilot ‘metaversity’ to test VR teaching
Since joining the Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education faculty in 2015, Zach Wahl-Alexander has taught in plenty of Anderson Hall spaces. None is remotely like where his KNPE 343 class is meeting this fall. Wahl-Alexander accepted the university’s invitation to teach
Read more