Intro to Umbra Edu: What to Expect

In Umbra lessons you can expect to find a variety of multimedia professional development content, downloadable materials you can adapt for use in your own courses, and so much more. Umbra lessons are envisaged as a collaborative, evolving ecology of resources to aid in your empowerment as instructor. Each lesson will be designed to fit the topics covered.

All content will be rooted in best practices, cutting edge peer-reviewed research, the broad expertise of Umbra staff, and current scholarly debates in the field of teaching & learning. You can learn more about the professional qualifications of the Umbra Edu Team on our website and our linked social media. The tone here, however, will usually be more conversational and light (read: unapologetically nerdy and jocular). Umbra is intended, above all things, as a human-to-human support system that brings you confidence via tools to reduce your workload and anxiety that aren’t a bore to consume. Your work as educators is straight-laced (and stressful) enough as is.

New content will be added regularly. While we have planned content – a curriculum even (*gasp*) – Umbra’s mission is to privilege responsiveness to your needs as educators. We’d love to hear the sorts of lessons that would be of greatest benefit to your particular educational support needs.

Multimedia Examples

Audio Recordings

Transcript: I’ll include audio with transcripts when I think hearing something would be especially valuable, or when I have a lot to say and realize you might not want to have to read more at the end of a long day.

Videos

The majority of our content will be 3-15 minute long videos. This time length is based on current research about people’s attention span with social media videos and faculty lectures, how long they will stay focused if we don’t add in some sort of interaction or shift in modality.

Pro Tip: You don’t want to sit at your computer watching me talk for an hour straight. Your students don’t want to sit at their computers and watch you talk for an hour straight either.

Resources

Resources will always be posted in the most appropriate, accessible formats available to me at the time, sometimes in multiple formats for your convenience. I will primarily post resources as searchable PDFs with alt text for the images. Resources I anticipate you may want to easily edit/adapt for your classroom may also be shared as Word documents.