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The prestigious conference’s guest-speakers included three Sacred Heart professors, and the university received a technology-innovation award for an app conceived and designed by its students, staff and faculty.
Antoinette Bruciati, associate professor of teacher education, presented on the topic of “Assessing Group Collaboration Processes in Online Courses;” Enda McGovern, associate professor of marketing and sport management, covered “Apps for Active and Mobile Learning: Experimenting with FlipBoard and Stitcher;” and María Lizano DiMare, associate professor of teacher education, discussed “Social Networking: Group Text and Video Technology Communication Tools for Online Education.”
Additionally, Linda Morrow, assistant program director for patient care services administration at the university's School of Nursing, attended the conference as a Wiley Fellow.
SHUSquare, a Sacred Heart University-built online learning program that promotes connectivity among faculty and students, won a national education award in “Effective Practice” from the Online Learning Consortium (formerly the Sloan Consortium).
Designed to enliven teaching and learning, SHUsquare is an online community for first-year seminar students where they can network with faculty and develop important 21st-century skills by sharing ideas, work and resources across various disciplines and between courses. It’s motto—“Keep the Conversation Going”—refers to its intent to encourage autonomous learning beyond the traditional classroom.
“It won because it’s quite unique in a first-year program to have this kind of formal process for networked learning,” says Jaya Kannan, Sacred Heart's director of the Office of Digital Learning. Kannan says SHUsquare represents the kind of educational opportunity that aligns perfectly with the goals of a liberal arts university.
“In an undergraduate liberal arts curriculum, the focus on critical thinking is crucial to achieving academic excellence,” she says.
“SHUsquare is a very original and pedagogically sound way to go beyond the traditional approach of just staying within course."
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