Professor Shanon Reckinger on Staying Connected with Faculty

Professor Shanon Reckinger of the University of Illinois at Chicago on using Piazza as a faculty group to share resources and experiences to work through challenging times.

Collaborate with colleagues more efficiently than over email

We’ve recently started using Piazza for groups of faculty to be able to chat with each other, collaborate on things, share ideas. We created our own UIC teaching track faculty Piazza page. This one is used mostly to share resources and get help from each other, and it helps to do that outside of email so that anyone who is available and interested can respond rather than having to just email the few people you think might be able to respond.

In response to COVID-19 when we all went online, we created another faculty Piazza page where all faculty in the college of engineering were able to share resources, experiences, and it was a very productive and efficient use of our time to be able to do this live on Piazza. There was so much time saved by being able to reach out quickly with an experience you had or a question you had and get some responses.

Seek advice and discuss solutions to unprecedented problems

Some examples of that are we had someone who had their first experience with an exam online and it didn’t go well. There were some technical issues and there were enough students that it didn’t go well for that this professor asked, “What should I do now? Do I give a new exam? Do I curve it?” This professor wanted some advice so they reached out on Piazza and there was a discussion about what we would do in that situation, which can help in these times where there’s really no precedence for these types of situations to have more confidence in the approach to solve that problem.

Share experiences and resources that could be useful to others

It’s also used to share experiences or resources that you used that have worked really well. There is another example of a faculty that had been able to get really good activity in synchronized classes online by using Google Slides and having student groups share the same Google Slide or Google Doc and collaborate. So there is a post on Piazza where this professor shares the resource that they had found for using Google Slides, but also their experience at using it and how much they liked it.