FUN Final Fridays

FUN Final Fridays

Final Friday meetups are informal gatherings to share and learn about strong pedagogical tools and to provide fun collegial support. To provide more informal time to chat with FUN friends, we open each session at 3:45 (EDT) and place participants in a breakout room just to visit until the presenters are ready to go at 4 pm – so, please, come early and chat with friends!
In addition, FUN members can view all previous FUN Friday recordings by clicking the link at the bottom of this page.

Schedule 2025-2026

All meetings will take place on Friday, be one hour in length, and will begin at 4 pm (EST), unless otherwise indicated in the schedule. Information for 2025-2026 will be posted here when it is available.

THIS MONTH

FUTURE MONTHS

Friday, May 1st, 4 PM ET

Dr. Theresa McKim, University of Nevada, Reno, will join us to share her experience using the Allen Institute database in class, after helping to facilitate their summer programming.

Investigating Epilepsy: A Python Notebook Exploring Human Neuron Diversity: As neuroscience datasets grow in scale and complexity, helping undergraduates develop data literacy and coding skills has become increasingly important, even in courses not primarily focused on programming. In this interactive session, participants will code along using a freely available Python notebook (Google Colab) built around a published epilepsy case study (Milligan et al., 2023;JUNE) that explores diversity among human neurons. I will share how I adapted this activity for two undergraduate course contexts: a neuroscience laboratory course for students with little to no coding background, and an introductory Python course. Attendees will leave with a ready-to-use code notebook and practical strategies for scaffolding data analysis and visualization for students at different skill levels. No prior coding experience is required to participate.

Friday, May 8th (First Friday), 4 PM ET

Dr. Nancy Michael, University of Notre Dame, will share her experiences and ideas on how to incorporate community based learning.

Community-engaged learning: Long-term learning gains and life-changing experience: A large body of evidence now exists to support the efficacy of active learning strategies in higher education classroom settings, and it is heartening to see how these strategies are becoming broadly adopted. Community engaged learning is a form of active learning that can weave disciplinary content and class participation into practical community problem-solving with tremendous impact for both student and community member. Despite this formative and enduring learning, community engaged learning comes with very realistic and practical barriers to creating successful and sustainable community engaged learning programs. Some of these include but are not limited to access, time, bandwidth and questions regarding efficacy. The session will explore data collected from a pilot study substantiating significant long-term content learning gains and "frameshifts" in perspectives over years time, and then pivot to acknowledge the "big lift" of this type of work, identifying barriers and offering practitioners collaborative opportunities to brainstorm feasible implementation strategies for their own implementation.

Click here to view information and resources from previous FUN Final Fridays (Requires Member Login)

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