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Richness of Research on Active Learning: Let’s Stand on the Shoulders of Giants (or at least Other Educators)
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and scholarship of teaching and learning research promote the benefits of active learning, student engagement, and faculty-student interaction with courses that challenge students, shake them out of the passive listener role, and engage them in collaboration with peers to improve student academic performance. Prior evidence and strategies are summarized for several disciplinary areas including. Cell biology Education by Deborah Allen & Kimberly Tanner Engineering Education by Smith, Sheppard, Johnson and Johnson or by Prince Physiology education by Joel Micheal In addition to research studies in many disciplines including: History and political science Geography and Environment studies For a…
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Syllabus Template Developed For Use at U of S
[social-bio] The syllabus is probably the most important document that you will provide your students during a class. It ideally conveys the learning outcomes, information on the methods of assessment, contact information for the instructor, time and locations for labs, required and supplemental readings, exam information, and other important details about the class. The University of Saskatchewan has a number of required items that must be included in the syllabus for any course (Academic Course Policy, 2011). They include: The type and schedule of term assignments with approximate due dates, as well as the type and schedule of term examinations Learning outcomes of the course and of the assignments and…
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Backchannels In Education
[social-bio] If you have attended a conference in the past year, then you probably at least heard about the conference’s “backchannel”. Essentially, a backchannel is a conversation that is taking place during an event, alongside the main activity or presentation. At conferences, this often takes place on Twitter by attendees using a hashtag for the event. For example, we have created a hashtag for our upcoming Teaching and Learning to the Power of Technology conference (TLt 2013) and will encourage those in attendance to discuss the presentations on Twitter by including “#tlt13” in their tweets. By using the hashtag, those in attendance can follow the discussion by searching #tlt13 on…
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With Great Power …
[social-bio] I am a regular reader of University Affairs. I always find it an interesting place to hear about what is making news in Canadian higher education. In particular, I like looking at the ‘most popular articles’ section just in case there are articles that I should pay attention to that I have somehow missed. That is how I stumbled across an article by Shirley Katz from 2000, titled “Sexual relations between students and faculty”. Most of the article was what I expected (ie. don’t do it! – there are too many possible conflicts of interest and risks associated with such relationships). While I have a number of questions about…
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The Use of WordPress for a Course Website
[social-bio] One of my favourite parts of my job is having the opportunity to teach pre-service teachers in an undergraduate course in the College of Education. I teach ETAD 470 – Design and Use of Online Resources. This course covers the pedagogical and technological aspects of using things like blogs, wikis, podcasts and other types of tools in teaching and learning. I taught this class for the first time in Term 2 of the 2011-2012 academic year. As part of the course I created a course blog using Google’s Blogger service where I shared weekly resources with the students and a Google Site where I listed all of the required…
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Is the Unexamined Program Really Worth Offering?
[social-bio] As we are being invited to take a vigorous look at the programs we are offering, I can’t help but wonder, haven’t we always been doing that? I mean, really, in this information age with new perspectives and burgeoning bags of “what we know” bursting at the seams on every possible topic, can we actually NOT be refreshing our program content annually at the very least? What was known last month is different than what we know this month! “Truth” is being regularly being rediscovered. Do you remember when the brontosaurus went the way of the dinosaur (so to speak) to be replaced by the new “truth” of the…
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Grades: Something to Lose, Something to Gain
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler At the start of each course, the syllabus outlines the assessments on which students’ marks will be based. Through this document, a rubric given with the assignment, or after receiving the marked up pages, students learn how we have chosen to grade. Specifically, they have learned if we are focused on loss or gain. We can frame grades as starting from nothing with everything to gain through phrases such as “Everyone starts with 0, work hard and you will earn marks on each assignment”. Whether a student’s goal is 50 or 90, they all start with zero and have nothing to lose. Assignments are marked…
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Academic Integrity and the Roles Students Play: The Student as Moral Agent
[social-bio] This is the final post in a series of four about metaphors revealed in students’ discussions of academic honesty and dishonesty. The four metaphors presented in this series do not represent mutually exclusive understandings and can overlap in their meanings. Not all students in my study expressed the same meanings or, if they did, did not express them in the same way. As McMillan and Cheney (1996) acknowledged, it can seem drastic to ascribe such power to metaphors but we rely so heavily on them that we often overlook their “powerful and practical role in our discourse” and that there is a “tendency to become what we say we…