• Assessment and Evaluation

    Evaluating Presentations With a Little Help From My (Citable) Friends …

    [social_share/] [social-bio]   By Carolyn Hoessler Individual and group presentations provide great opportunity for students to share what they have learned with peers and an efficient and feasible way of marking for instructors. That being said, how do you grade them? I, and I’m pretty sure you too, have experienced the full range of presentations from the stunningly excellent to the staggeringly confusing, from the inspirational to the sleep-inducing. The challenge is describing these qualities so they can be identified and assessed. One option would be to create my own rubric based on these experiences. The easier option is to use or adapt existing materials from others I respect. The…

  • Undergraduate Research

    Undergraduate Research: Co-Publishing With Students

    [social_share/] [social-bio] By Jason Perepelkin, Assistant Professor, College of Pharmacy and Nutrition Passive listening and dumping information on exams doesn’t give students the depth of learning and experience that lasts beyond the scope of a course. Having students engage with practitioners and specialists and in a real world environment helps students learn more deeply; chasing grades doesn’t do this but chasing experience does. The elective fourth year course Marketing for Pharmacists is designed for up to 20 students. The course is a project based course where students, working in groups of two to three, work directly with a practicing pharmacist. By working directly with practitioners, on an issue identified by…

  • Educational Technology,  General,  Instructional / Course Design

    Developing ePublications

    [social_share/] [social-bio] By Adrienne Thomas and Wayne Giesbrecht (Media Production) With discussion surrounding open resources, this is a good time to talk about actually developing epublications and ebooks. For the past 3 years, Media Production (formerly eMAP) has been working with faculty and content creators to realize epub resources. With each new project, we have learned more about what to do and how to do it – an ongoing lesson as the software, media files and platforms continue to evolve. Within the university environment, we are all concerned with the development of unique and immersive material to be used for information, education, research or knowledge mobilization purposes. If you want…

  • Educational Technology,  General

    What is Digital Citizenship?

    [social_share/] [social-bio] Many teaching and learning conversations include notions of developing and fostering citizenship for our teachers and our learners in our respective disciplines and fields and in society.   Citizenship can be such broad territory. One way to focus it further is to discuss Digital Citizenship. If you’re still stumped, let me point you to a useful set of Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship appearing on a web site dedicated to this topic. Here, among other things, you’ll find types of norms that characterize appropriate and response technology use. The distinctions between digital literacy, digital communication, digital etiquette, and digital rights and responsibilities strike me as most informative. When we…

  • General,  Inclusivity

    What It Means to Be an Ally

    [social_share/] [social-bio] As we have recently come out of a week of sessions at the University aimed at making our campus a safer place for gender and sexual diversity and we enter Aboriginal Achievement week I am reflecting on what it means to me to be an ally. Use of the term ‘ally’ in relation to marginalized groups is relatively new to me, however, what the term represents is not new. Being an ally means working in solidarity with a marginalized group that I am not a part of to address systemic inequalities. I’ve tried to boil down what I feel I have to work at everyday in being an…