Karissa Thomson

Excellence in Teaching
CHEP Status: Active
CHEP Awarded: 12/01/2021

Badge Evidence | Completed Courses (4 Hours Each)

This course offers strategies to provide employment and job search skills training that enables students to seek jobs in the field for which they are trained. You'll learn how to offer comprehensive career services regardless of whether your career services department is staffed full- or part-time. The course provides strategies for an institution to set up a Career Services Department, enhance and run it, and measure results. It describes how a successful career services department can ensure that your students have the skills and self-confidence to succeed in the workplace. You'll learn techniques to increase placement rates and reach out to the community to meet and maintain relationships with hiring decision-makers.
In this course, you will be given tools to help your students find the job that's right for them, present themselves impressively on paper, and interview with ease. This course is designed so you can successfully support your students in four phases of their job search: doing a targeted job search, writing a powerful resume and cover letter, presenting professionally, and developing effective interview skills.
Social media is critical tool for career services professionals to interact with and reach their constituent groups yet many career professionals aren't aware of how to develop a purposeful social media strategy. Without a social media strategy, career services departments risk losing relevance with their audience, and they also lose the opportunity of harnessing social media to achieve department goals. This course describes the phases of planning and implementing a social media strategy for your career services department. Each module is based on the fundamental steps of preparing a comprehensive and measurable plan to achieve the goals of the career services department.
Military veterans represent a unique type of non-traditional student and must overcome distinctive challenges to reintegrate into the civilian workforce. With an influx of over one million veterans projected to enter higher education in the next several years, career services personnel must be prepared to provide the level of service these students need and deserve. This course helps career services practitioners understand the unique obstacles veterans face in the reintegration process, how to help them translate their military experience into civilian language and provides strategies & tools that can support veterans in becoming gainfully employed.
There are millions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) job seekers struggling to find careers and even hold down a job, due in part to their sexual orientation and gender identity. What amplifies this issue is the fact that many college career advisors who are supposed to help struggling jobseekers are not trained to address the unique struggles their LGBTQ students face in their career development. This course equips career advisors with the perspective, knowledge, and practical skills necessary to provide quality career services for their LGBTQ students, who greatly need their assistance.
In the most competitive economy ever, crafting powerful job search documents, communicating strategically with employers, and presenting evidence of one’s qualifications won’t even necessarily get candidates jobs—it’ll barely get them interviews. This course covers advanced writing techniques, shows examples, and offers detailed strategy explanations to help career professionals enhance their ability to teach students how to craft modern job search documents and strategic employer communications. You'll be able to more effectively advise students on how to use impactful strategies that differentiate them from competitors through résumés, letters, portfolio evidence, and strategic post-interview correspondence. *This course also contains several downloadable resources to be used in your career center.
This course shows instructors how to develop a comprehensive approach to effective and efficient instruction. From preparation for the classroom to selection of instructional delivery methods, the course provides effective ways of planning instruction to help instructors keep the content focused and the students engaged. We also cover the steps to set up a complete evaluation system that will work in all settings.
Retention is an issue, and what happens in the classroom is a critical factor influencing a student's decision to stay or go. The classroom environment may be hurting your students' view of the quality of your programs. In this course, you will learn tips and techniques to deal with environmental influences such as your role as the instructor, the classroom, the interactive activities, the support materials, and the sequence of instruction as well as other subtle influences. You will learn to view the environment from the student's perspective to increase your teaching effectiveness and student retention.
Outstanding teachers serve their students by guiding them through their coursework and motivating them to complete program requirements. Instructors at educational institutions are often faced with high stress resulting from heavy teaching loads and limited time. When teachers cannot manage their own time and stress, they cannot fully serve the needs of their students. This course will show instructors how to manage time and stress in their lives and teach some of these skills to their students.
The purpose of this course is to provide instructors with a very basic introduction to the concepts of soft skills and emotional intelligence (EQ). It is designed especially for new instructors in career schools who have little or no training in educational techniques and who are unfamiliar with the basics of emotional intelligence. The course provides a comparison of hard and soft skills, including people skills and workplace behaviors. Ten important soft skills are discussed in detail and the relationship between EQ and soft skills is explained. The course concludes with tips and suggestions to help instructors enhance their soft skills and EQ.
Studies reveal that as much as 85% of classroom communication is nonverbal. This course consists of eight entertaining modules that include audio tracks, animation and interactivity. Topics include the importance of nonverbal communication in the classroom, as well as our everyday lives. The modules describe the use of body language, effective vocal cues, proper appearance and the effective use of space (proxemics) and time (chronemics). A variety of support materials accompany the modules, including an assessment tool that instructors can use to evaluate their nonverbal skills.
This course covers the impact that personal electronic devices, in this case tablets, have on the delivery of instruction. The course discusses the reasons for using tablets in classroom and lab settings to enhance learning and expand educational resources for students. Strategies are given to enable instructors to see how the use of tablets can assist students in becoming active learners both within and outside of the school setting.
The term "Competency-Based Instruction" (CBI) is emerging as a new and preferred approach to education and the management of education. CBI is currently being evaluated at all levels of education, from K-12 to higher education and beyond. In traditional higher education it is referred to as CBE (Competency-Based Education) as it relates to specific competency-based programs. This course explores the topic in terms of the various characteristics of competency-based teaching and learning and highlights the most commonly agreed-upon benefits for students. The course also addresses the teaching approaches required to support a competency-based learning environment most effectively.
Did you ever hear that we only use about 10% of our brains? Were you ever told that you are more right-brained or left-brained? Did you know that males and females learn differently as a result of differences in their brains? Did you know that people have different learning styles? Did you ever hear that you retain more of what you do or see than of what you read or hear? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you have experienced a "myth-understanding." The purpose of this course is to explain the background and truth about these myth-understandings that pervade much of the popular literature to this day. All persons who are involved in the education of others must guard against these myths and ensure that they do not influence their professional practices. Note: Many learning theories have been developed that represent the efforts of researchers with different perspectives on how individuals develop and learn. As within any field, facts and myths may be driven by controversial opinions and philosophies that need to be considered by individuals engaged in professional development.
The most effective instructors are scholars, but they are also facilitators. Good scholars have a command of knowledge in their field of expertise that is both broad and deep. For a scholar to become an instructor, he or she also needs to be a facilitator. Facilitators help others to learn, which is as important as scholarship. In this course we will define "the scholar" and "the facilitator" as individuals (although they are two aspects of one person), as well as compare and contrast their nature and their roles. You will examine issues and challenges faced by instructors, both on-ground and online, and look at developing and improving your facilitation skills.
Awareness has grown in recent years that, to be effective today, learning must include more than knowledge and "hard skills," or technical ability. In a world where work is often team-based and project-driven, teaching needs also to encompass attitudes and social competencies. This course will describe ways students can enhance their professional skills across the curriculum. Strategies for teaching effective personal interaction and ways to support student professional growth and development will be discussed. This course will also explain how students can improve their writing skills and computer literacy across the curriculum.
This course emphasizes teaching strategies that can be implemented within different types of lessons to promote teacher proficiency, student motivation, and achievable outcomes. Topics relating to teaching methods include direct, indirect, interactive, and independent instruction. By utilizing various teaching strategies and methods, an instructor can approach teaching topics in a variety of ways. The goal of this course is to help develop a better understanding of essential teaching strategies, and produce tangible resources to help implement plans, strategies, and ideas at your institution. In addition to lecture videos, resource links, and assessments, you will be able to utilize Journal and Learning Activities, which will continue to be useful after successful completion of the course.
Motivation can be the difference between success and failure. In this course, the idea of how motivation impacts people will be discussed. Activities will focus on improving motivation in students, and other people you interact with, as well as yourself. The goal of this course is to help develop a better understanding of the topic, and produce tangible resources to help implement plans, strategies, and ideas at your institution. In addition to lecture videos, resource links, and assessments, you will be able to utilize Learning Activities, which will continue to be useful after successful completion of the course.
In this course, you will learn the difference between positive stress that enhances productivity and negative stress that breeds tension, lowers productivity, and undercuts job satisfaction. The course includes strategies for dealing with underlying causes of worry and stress, with tactical advice and coping mechanisms for immediate problem management.
How many times have we said “if we’d only known” as a student walks out the door? No one starts classes planning to fail, but unfortunately problems do arise that present barriers to success. Students are good at identifying these problems blocking their path to success, but they frequently don’t have adequate problem solving and communication skills needed to overcome these problems. This course looks at the effect of stress on attrition, the use of tools to identify and help students at risk, and how to develop an institutional culture that shares responsibility for student success across the entire organization.