- Assessment and Evaluation, Curriculum Development, Educational Theory, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies, SoTL
What is the science behind your course design madness?
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Fred Phillips, Professor, Baxter Scholar, Edwards School of Business As we begin another year, students are encountering some of the course design decisions made by their instructors. Some will be introduced to “flipped classrooms”, where students prepare by reading/viewing/responding to a learning prompt before it is formally taken up in class. Others will encounter new learning tools, such as adaptive reading systems that embed interactive questions within reading materials with the goal of assessing each student’s comprehension so that new topics can be delivered the moment he or she is ready to comprehend them. Just as instructors have questions about these approaches and tools, students are likely…
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Feedback in Marking – Some Tips for Efficiency
[social_share/] [social-bio] Feedback is one of the most important factors when it comes to improving student performance in a course. Yet many instructors would use words like tedious, grueling, or headache-inducing to describe the process of providing feedback to student work. If you are one of those instructors, consider integrating one (or more!) of the following strategies into your grading practice. Separate Grading and Feedback: If the student cannot use your feedback to improve the quality of their work, writing comments on student work is probably just a waste of your time and energy. Frontload Feedback: Provide specific and more detailed feedback early and frequent in the term, so it can be integrated into…
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“If Not Us, Who? If Not Now, When?”
By Tereigh Ewert In Peter Stoicheff’s speech for the Presidential Announcement, he posed two questions that inspire the university’s efforts to decolonize and Indigenize our campus (July 9, 2015, http://www.usask.ca/presidentialtransition/). Emphasizing the urgency for action, he asked, “If not us, who?” and “If not now, when?” At the University of Saskatchewan, we have a growing number of Indigenous staff, students, and faculty. Yet the U of S is comprised of a predominantly white settler Canadian campus population, and is set within a traditional Western institution. As we build capacity and become strengthened by the work and contributions of Indigenous staff, students, and faculty, the non-Indigenous people on campus have a…
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Co-authoring Take 2: A co-authored post about co-authoring
[social_share/] [social-bio] Co-written y Carolyn Hoessler and Shannon Lucky, Library Systems & Information Technology Earlier this year I excitedly read Shannon Lucky’s post on Co-authoring from April 21, 2015 on Brain-Work, sparking a chance to respond, connect and collaborate. In our discussion about co-authoring we captured a wide range of questions to ask and strategies that seemed to fit with the framework of the 5 Basic Elements of Cooperative Learning that we adapted to co-write this blog post. To see Shannon’s description of our collaboration visit http://words.usask.ca/ceblipblog/2015/08/27/co-authoring2/ where the following information is cross-posted on C-EBLIP. – Carolyn Co-authoring and collaborative research can be personally rewarding and can strengthen a project…