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Canadian Student Blogs About Finland
[social-bio] If you are curious about the student experience of higher education in Finland, which has been a hot topic in the news lately, I highly recommend you read this blog. It is written by Irene Smith, a Canadian and former undergraduate Peer Mentor from the U of S, who is currently studying at the University of Turku in Finland. Her blog posts cover topics as diverse as hierarchies in education and the integration of undergraduate and graduate degrees, and they all deal directly with the contrast between higher education in Canada and her experience of university in Finland. Finland is currently regarded as a world leader in education, according…
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What is CAT 1.0?
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler So what is “CAT” beyond our nickname for our Curriculum Alignment Tool? It is an online software for academic programs and instructors to fill in information about your courses, connect those courses within a program, and review what you are teaching your students. Designed as one approach to gathering data about programs, CAT fits into the inventory stage of the curriculum renewal cycle (see Susan & Sheryl’s dynamic video or diagram ). Focusing on an instructor’s approach to their course, CAT asks about instructional strategies, assessment methods and timing, course outcomes and connection with program outcomes. CAT is particularly good at displaying trends and allowing for…
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Registration Open For TLt 2013
[social-bio] The 2013 Teaching and Learning with the power of Technology (TLt) Conference will be held this coming May 1 and 2 at the University of Saskatchewan. This year’s theme is “Making IT Mainstream: Everybody’s doing IT”. With ubiquitous use of smart-phones, tablets and laptops by students and faculty the days of speaking of educational technology in future or fringe terms are long past. It is now mainstream so conversations at this year’s TLt will focus on the mainstream integration of learning technologies at both the level of the institution and individual instructor, what is what working and what is not, and how all of this is and will continue to…
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Academic Integrity and the Roles Students Play: The Student as Trainee
[social-bio] This is the third in a series of four posts about the ways students positioned themselves when discussing matters of academic honesty and dishonesty in my doctoral study. The metaphor of trainee described below, could also be conceived as the student as investor in or consumer of higher education. The overarching idea I gleaned is the student viewpoint that the desired outcome of a university education is gainful employment, where coursework is merely a means to that end, education an investment in the future, and enrolment in university a contractual relationship with an educational service provider. The Student as Trainee “This class that I’m taking is not relevant to…
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Are Learning Outcomes Corrosive? Isn’t it About How You Frame Them?
[social-bio] A recent article in CAUT Bulletin (January 2013) by Frank Furedi discussed the corrosiveness of learning outcomes. As I read through the author’s comments and opinions, I returned to the same questions of: “Isn’t it about how you frame learning outcomes? Shouldn’t the conversations be about how learning outcomes contribute to the learning process? Shouldn’t we as educators be focused on student learning?” I found the article to be very interesting, as I believe that each of the author’s arguments against learning outcomes may be flipped around to show the positive aspects. The article lists four main consequences of learning outcomes: First, that learning outcomes threaten to disrupt the…
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Developing CAT 1.0
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler When I first arrived at the GMCTE one of the first curriculum development projects I got involved in was the curriculum inventory tool. Initially called Currimap, it was in its initial feedback and trial stages and still growing: over the next few months, feedback from colleagues and faculty led to additional capabilities, refinements and flexibility being built into the code by our programmer. This fall we were pleased to launch our Curriculum Alignment Tool (CAT) 1.0. CAT is now an open-source resource available for those on our campus, and also with the code available for other institutions. Throughout CAT’s development we have strived to balance…
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Academic Integrity and the Roles Students Play: The Student as Competitor
[social-bio] This is the second in a series of four posts where I present the metaphors I recognized as being in use in students’ discussions in my doctoral study of students’ understandings of academic honesty and dishonesty. These metaphors can be treated as lenses students appeared to use to see themselves in the university, to navigate their relation to others, and to interpret events. The Student as Competitor “It’s [good grades] like a carrot dangling in front of you. And everybody’s at a race and whether or not your carrot is big enough will tell you how far you’ll go.” “But you try to find every possible way,…