Teaching
Curriculum design and course instruction are Dr. Henley’s primary responsibilities in her position with the MSU Neuroscience Program. She teaches neuroscience to a broad range of students, from freshmen to graduate students to adult learners. She utilizes evidence-based practices to provide students with the most effective environment for learning. She wants students to be capable of applying their knowledge and skills gained in the classroom to solve future problems. Active engagement with the material through the use of course activities completed with formal cooperative learning groups is incorporated into each course, whether in person or online.
Along with instruction, Dr. Henley is creating two new, one-year, fully-online transcriptable graduate certificate programs: Medical Neuroscience and Neuroscience and the Law. Each program will consist of 12 credits and be designed to meet the needs of adult learners with responsibilities outside of the classroom.
Neuroscience Sway Lessons
I have been trying to integrate more Office 365 apps into my course content, since I have been transitioning from Google Classroom to Microsoft Class Teams and Word. As part of my exploration of the different apps, I came across Sway and began playing. Sway allows for...
AT&T Award Winner
In April, my fully online graduate course, NEU 841 Medical Neuroscience, was awarded first place for the Best Fully Online category of the 2019 AT&T Faculty-Staff Instructional Technology Awards competition at MSU. It is an honor to win this award. I put student...
Transitioning from Google Classroom to Microsoft Class Teams
Google Classroom and I have a wonderful relationship. I love the functionality of Classroom since I use active learning assignments in a flipped classroom. Even in online classes, this structure works well. Using our learning management system to grade the problem set...
OLC Foundations Course – Finished!
The OLC Foundations course is now finished! To complete the certificate, I need to take 3 week-long workshops and work with a mentor to finish the changes I have planned for my undergraduate online course. I think I'm going to take a two-part workshop on the...
Managing Workload – OLC
This week we discussed techniques for managing workload within online courses. One issues many online instructors face is the feeling that we need to be available 24/7. Without that structured face-to-face time of an in-person course, our students can submit work, ask...
Learning Activities and Assessment – OLC
Going through this week's assignment covering learning assessments and learning activities made me realize that I blur the lines on learning activity and assessment quite a bit. I have a total of 6 course-level learning objectives for NEU 300. Two of those are...
Course Improvement – OLC
The OLC course is keeping me busy! After the learning community discussion, we began looking at rubrics for assessing our courses. MSU has a partnership with Quality Matters, so I have used that rubric before for course design and evaluation, but it was really great...
Learning Communities – OLC
We dove right in this week and covered a course aspect I feel needs improvement in my online courses - building learning community. My courses all use a discussion forum to allow students to communicate with each other about the problem set assignment. I used to have...
Online Teaching Certification – OLC
For the next 10 weeks I am going to be participating in the first course of an online teaching certification through the Online Learning Consortium. I am very excited for this professional development opportunity. I have an amazing group of teaching-focused colleagues...
Digital Syllabus!
I've been tinkering with this idea for a bit, but I finally figured out the tools to accomplish exactly what I wanted! For this semester, I have created a digital syllabus for my online graduate course. My hope is that a website-structure will allow for easier...