Our next monthly series: Staying in touch - communications as a key to project success
Would you like to raise awareness of your project? Do you need to stay in touch with members of your community? Do you need to recruit applicants for workshops, conferences, and other opportunities? Do you want to collect input from the community to help inform the project? These are important aspects of your project community and they are all based on communication. We know that communication is critical component of a successful education project. In fact, according to work by Charles Henderson and colleagues, propagation and sustained adoption of education innovations and education reform efforts requires:
- Feedback from potential adopters throughout the development process to reduce barriers to adoption
- Interactive dissemination strategies that attract, engage, and support potential adopters to facilitate initial adoption
- A plan to support adopters during the adoption process to promote sustained adoption
These efforts require effective, bidirectional communication throughout the lifetime of a project between:
- members of the project leadership team
- project leaders and current users
- project leaders and potential adopters
- project leaders and the broader education community
As important as it is, maintaining open lines of communication with project stakeholders is no easy task. Fortunately, QUBES has a variety of built-in tools and mechanism that help you stay connected and use communication to build community around your project. Therefore, over the next month, our conversations in the QUBES Support Community for Partner Projects will focus on communications as a key to project success.
QUBES Staff Picks: To kick off this series, we’ve asked members of the QUBES Leadership team, “What is your favorite way to use QUBES to communicate?” Follow along this month as they share a variety of ways to use the QUBES infrastructure to communicate along with some tips and tricks for using communications for building your community. First, follow this link to hear from Sam Donovan who will tell you about using a “Quick Links” page in your group to assemble frequently used links and information in one easy to find place.
Do you have a favorite tool or communication strategy you use to help your project be successful? Do you have questions about the best ways to communicate? Do you have questions about using tools like the Announcements tool, the Projects tool, or the group forum? Tell us how your project uses QUBES to communicate and ask questions in the group forum.
What are our Partner Projects up to?
We are happy to share with you a project update from the leaders of our Partner Project, Biology undergraduate Math Attitudes and Anxiety Program (BIOMAAP).
BIOMAAP – Biology undergraduate Math Attitudes and Anxiety Program
BIOMAAP seeks to provide faculty with practical, easily adoptable learning modules that improve student attitudes towards math and reduce student anxiety when faced with mathematical challenges. Our approach is not to provide remedial math content, but instead to help students develop a growth mindset, more self-efficacy, and connect with their intuitive number sense. There are a range of modules already posted, and over the summer we will be adding new more interactive modules, and we will also take advantage of QUBES’ new open education resource platform to make the modules easier to find, repurpose, and reshare.
We will offer a faculty mentoring network in either Fall or Spring semester that would bring faculty together online to discuss, implement, and refine math anxiety interventions in their own courses. Interested? Let us know! A great way to stay updated is to click here and join the group.
We will also be hosting a two-hour workshop at the BioQUEST/QUBES Summer Workshop June 18-23 at Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA. Apply today and you might still be able to sneak in to attend this great meeting!
- Dr. Arietta Fleming-Davies, University of San Diego
- Dr. Jeremy Wojdak, Radford University
Dr. Talithia Williams will deliver the keynote address at the BioQUEST/QUBES Summer Workshop
Dr. Talithia Williams will deliver the Keynote Address at the BioQUEST/QUBES Summer Workshop at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA on Monday, June 18 at 7:00 pm. Dr. Williams is cohost of the PBS series NOVA Wonders, that premiered in April 2018, and has delivered speeches nationally and internationally on the value of statistics in quantifying personal health information. She has made it her life's work to get students, parents, educators and community members more excited about the possibilities inherent in a STEM education.
Quick Tip
Where can you go to find a variety of QUBES news and events, all in one place? The QUBES “News & Activities” page! On this page, you can stay up to date on the latest QUBES happenings by browsing through the latest QUBES activities. These include recent QUBES blog posts, newsletters, and events, all of which are used to share information with the broader QUBES community about our Partners’ opportunities and events, such as meetings, workshops, webinars, and Faculty Mentoring Networks (FMNs). Of course, current and upcoming FMNs are also highlighted on the QUBES FMN page.
The News & Activities page illustrates the multiple mechanisms we use to spread the word about all of the exciting things happening in your project and collects them in one easy-to-navigate space. Users can click on the images in the newsfeed to read more about a particular activity or use the menu on the left side of the page to browse through all past blog posts, newsletters, and events. Users can reach this page by clicking on the “News & Activity” link in the upper right corner of the screen, next to their profile picture. The link remains in this location, even as the user navigates to different pages on QUBESHub, so this page is always just one click away. Or users can stay in the loop by subscribing to receive newsletters and subscribing to the blog rss feed to receive the latest updates via email.
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