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Helping Students Build Resilience
The COVID-19 pandemic has increased stress and mental health challenges for many people, including instructors, staff, and students. To help our students, and each other, to build or rebuild resilience we need to take a multi-pronged approach. While the university offers a variety of resources, there are things instructors can do within their classes to help students build resilience. A new resource created with funding from the Government of Ontario and eCampus Ontario offers information and methods on how to increase resilience for students and educators in the areas of Community Resilience, Personal Resilience, Academic Resilience, and Career Resilience. The Thriving in the Classroom is a “toolkit [that] shares the…
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Assigning Students to Act as Discussion Moderators
During in-class discussions, the entire class and the instructor may be part of the same discussion, but sometimes instructors put students into smaller groups, with multiple discussions happening around the room. While the instructor may be able to walk around the room and listen in on what the students are saying, they can’t catch everything that is said throughout the room. In such cases, instructors need to rely on students to facilitate the group discussions on their own. The instructor may then ask a representative from each group to share the key points of what was said. Online discussions in Canvas can work the same way. If the class is…
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Aligning Your Discussion Questions With Purpose and Desired Outcomes
Many instructors indicate that they struggle with how to come up with good questions of students, whether during a synchronous session (in-person or on Zoom) or in the discussion forums in Canvas. The purpose of this post is to help you consider three key factors when trying to decide what questions to ask in these situations: What is the purpose of the discussion? Which course outcomes do you want the discussion to align with? What evidence will you accept that students are meeting or making progress on those outcomes? The Purpose When planning for a discussion, you want to be clear about why you’re having the discussion. Is it to delve…
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GMCTL to Launch New Open Course on Open in Early February
The University of Saskatchewan is a leader in Canada around open educational resources (e.g. textbooks) and is moving toward wider integration of open pedagogy (students as contributors, not just consumers of knowledge). As part of this, and in the spirit of open educational practices (OEP), on February 1, 2022 we are launching a new open course to assist instructors in learning about all aspects of OEP. Open educational practices are a range of practices based on the idea that collaborating on the creation of and freely sharing knowledge, research, and learning materials benefits all of us. Key aspects of OEP include: Materials are accessible Anyone can create, collaborate on, and…
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Challenging Conversations – Safe Spaces vs. Brave Spaces
This is the second in a short series on having challenging conversations either in your classes or individually with students. The topics covered in these posts come from the GMCTL short-course Challenging Conversations. The ideas and concepts shared in the course and these posts were contributed in large part by Dr. Rose Roberts, Roberta Campbell-Chudoba, Dr. Wendy James, and myself, Heather Ross. We hear a lot about “safe spaces”. We see stickers on walls, doors, and windows with this term. The intentions are good, but they may not be the best approach. If you had to honestly answer, to yourself, nobody else, which of the following best represents where you…
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Challenging Conversations – The Stories We Tell
This is the first in a short series on having challenging conversations either in your classes or individually with students. The topics covered in these posts come from the GMCTL short-course Challenging Conversations. The ideas and concepts shared in the course and these posts were contributed in large part by Dr. Rose Roberts, Roberta Campbell-Chudoba, Dr. Wendy James, and myself, Heather Ross. One of the first concepts we talk about in the Challenging Conversations short-course is the stories we tell. While later in the course we talk about the importance of storytelling in many cultures and the role it can play in your own courses, this initial discussion is about…
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Using Your Syllabus to Set the Tone for Class
The syllabus is often the first window that students get into a course. An instructor may post it to Canvas, email it, or even still hand out printed copies. While the university sees it as a contract, and instructors and students see it as a description of expectations for course work, the syllabus can do a lot to set the tone for a class. Syllabi are often long, and honestly, dry. Is it any wonder that many students never read them, preferring to ask the instructor or peers questions when they already have the answers at their fingertips? While there are activities that can be done to encourage students to read the syllabus (scavenger hunts for…
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Apply For Funding to Support Your Open Pedagogy Projects
Open educational resources (OER), particularly open textbooks, have become widely used at USask since the first adoption for a large class in early 2015. More than 8,000 students used OER instead of commercial materials during the 2020-2021 academic year. That growth has helped to raise awareness about open educational practices overall, including open pedagogy. Taking an open pedagogy approach to assessment allows students to contribute to the creation of knowledge and resources that not only demonstrates their learning, but also provides opportunities to show how their learning and the discipline can contribute to helping local communities and the world address the challenges we face today. This approach increases engagement and…
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How Do I Subscribe to This Blog, and Other Sites
There have been some recent inquiries about how to subscribe to this blog, which is great. We love to hear that readers are finding this site helpful. This post will explain how to use RSS (Real Simple Syndication) to subscribe to Educatus and other sites. What Is RSS and What’s It Good For? RSS allows you to subscribe to any website that includes an RSS feed, which many do. Think of a magazine subscription. If you subscribe, the magazine will come to your home, or if a digital edition, to you email inbox. If you don’t subscribe, you either need to go to a store or website to see if there’s…
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Canvas Integrations Bring New Opportunities For Student Projects
Panopto and various homework systems integrate with Canvas allowing for users to access materials without any additional account create or sign-on. This integration for homework systems helps to link homework systems to the Canvas grade book and protects students from any potential risks associated with purchasing access from a publishers website. There are also new tools that instructors and students can make use of that can be accessed either directly through Canvas integrations or outside of Canvas, but using the same single-sign-on that they use to access Canvas and PAWs. Canvas doesn’t have its own blogging tool, but USask has had WordPress available for instructors and students to use for…
