TSL First Fridays: Ray Simar on Creating a Class Portfolio

Speaker: Ray Simar, Professor in the Practice, Electrical and Computer Engineering

This monthly event is part of a Teaching and Scholarly Learning series that will feature instructor successes and will be a place for anyone who is teaching to ask questions, give feedback, share success stories, and get advice.

Date: November 6, 2020

Summary: Professor Simar described how he created an ePortfolio site using Google Sites to house recordings and associated documents, for Friday lunch talks that were intended to let the students in an academic course hear about a number of interesting topics while they were learning remotely in response to COVID-19 pandemic. While the meetings helped the class complete its coursework and labs, as the group started using Zoom for these activities, they also found that they  had a lot of discussions about other topics the students found interesting, giving the talks and the site a scope that was outside the original Spring 2020 academic term. Professor Simar found that Google Sites was  an easy-to-use resource to build, compile and share his media, with an approachable and attractive interface (all Rice faculty, students and staff have the ability to create and edit Google Sites through their Rice Google account). The talks on “A Zoom with a View” continued through the summer and are continuing through the Fall and Spring semesters of 2020-2021.