-
Non-Disposable Assignments and Why You Should Use Them
This post originally ran on the Open Education at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) website and is reposted here under a CC-BY license. By Jen Moss, Instructional Designer and Adjunct Faculty at UAF The idea of the non-disposable or reusable assignment has been around for a while. The last couple years may have brought new practices and strategy to your teaching and new thoughts about assessment strategies. Perhaps some of those thoughts revolve around designing assessments connect meaningfully with the community outside the classroom bubble in some way. This is one of the fundamental points of open pedagogy and something that can be accomplished through the reusable assignment. David…
-
Improving Student Feedback Response Rates in Remote Courses
By David Greaves, Teaching and Learning Enhancement Specialist When it comes to student feedback, more is generally better. When we have higher response rates, we know that more student voices are being heard and that the feedback an instructor receives is more complete. To ensure that student feedback processes are effective, it is important for all parties to do their part to encourage students to complete their feedback surveys. Unfortunately, our most reliable method of improving response rates – offering dedicated time in class – is no longer an option in many courses that continue to be offered remotely. This leaves us all with the question of how to improve…
-
Students in Grief: What can you do?
By Lisa Greig, Student Support and Outreach Coordinator It has been a difficult nine months for many as we have all been braving the waves of grief, collectively, in this pandemic. Understanding grief Jack Jordan provides a great definition of grief: it is “the whole person response to the actual or threatened loss of anything which we are psychologically attached”. This is important because grief is not just tied to a death loss, it is a response to any loss. And, where loss lives, grief will follow (Carrington, 2020). A few things to note about grief: It is Normal There is no timeline Grief is the universal response to loss…
-
Building Relationships With Students Before They Arrive at the University of Saskatchewan
[social-bio] By Murray Drew, Professor, Department of Animal and Poultry Science I am a member of a committee which is exploring whether there are teaching practices that support student mental wellbeing in the classroom. You are probably thinking that this means talking about mental health directly with students. That’s not what we are interested in. Instead, we want to find out how instructors can create a classroom environment that is more conducive to student mental wellbeing. There has been some research in this area but it is a relatively new approach. In the few studies that have been published, several teaching strategies have been reported to improve student mental health.…
-
First-time Thoughts on a Student Blog Assignment
[social-bio] By Yin Liu, Associate Professor, Department of English Why I did it In 2016-2017 I taught, for the first time, a full-year (6 credit unit) English course, “History and Future of the Book,” which is one of our Foundations courses – that is, it is one of a few 200-level courses required for our majors. As in all our courses, there is a substantial writing component, usually in the form of essay assignments. I decided to complicate my life further by trying out a type of student assignment also new to me: a student-written course blog. I had been thinking about using a student blog assignment ever since I heard…
-
Fostering Successful Intercultural Group Work: A Summary and Response to article “Rethinking multicultural group work as intercultural learning.”
By Tereigh Ewert When I read the above article, I was immediately reminded of an article I read a few years ago, called “’I know the type of people I work well with’: Student anxiety in multicultural group projects.”[1] The authors of that article identify the “cognitive anxiety” and “affective anxiety” of students doing group work with diverse cultural representation within the group (anxieties that seem to be higher among domestic, rather than international students). Each form of anxiety is attributed to “uncertainty…the phenomenon affecting the way we think about strangers” (Strauss, et al, 816). As a result of these anxieties, English-first language speakers were far more likely to, if…
-
Creating Time for Intellectual Creation: Deep Work and Maker Time
By Carolyn Hoessler The familiar challenge: We are 6 weeks into summer, and in the pile on our desk about mid-way down is that proposal, paper, course redesign that there has yet to be time for. Each week offers 40+ hours, yet there can barely be 2 hours of continuous focused worktime strung together. How can this be? What’s going on: We have time but how we use it changes the quality of that time for worse or for better. Just as fractures weaken the structure integrity of a beam, or aesthetics transform an object into art, time’s productivity is transformed by our use. Within computer science and programming there…
-
Wikipedia’s Ways of Knowing – Part 2
By John Kleefeld In the first part of this two-part piece, I discussed arborescent (vertical, discrete, hierarchical) and rhizomatic (horizontal, overlapping, interconnected) ways of acquiring and classifying knowledge, as well as the convergence of the arbor and the rhizome in modern knowledge systems. In this part, I discuss how this applies to Wikipedia. Most of us use the Web rhizomatically: we enter a search term in Google or Wikipedia, look at the search results, and follow the links, whether to other Wikipedia pages or other online or offline resources. As I said in the previous post, this lets us explore pathways that interest us most, and may also lead to more engaged…
-
Wikipedia’s Ways of Knowing – Part 1
By John Kleefeld [social-bio] In my previous post, I characterized the subject categories in the Requested articles page as idiosyncratic and mused that they might be better based on the Library of Congress Classification system. As it happens, Wikipedia does map some of its articles (pages) into the LCC system, and also provides several other methods of organizing knowledge. Some of these are well known, some less so. I want to discuss them because I think that instructors and students alike should be familiar with ways of finding knowledge beyond today’s default method of keyword searching. First, though, I want to talk about two approaches to knowing or learning, which…
-
Creating Articles With Wikipedia’s ‘Requested Articles’ Feature
By John Kleefeld [social-bio] In my previous two posts, I discussed how instructors and students can use WikiProjects to select articles for editing in Wikipedia-based course assignments. In this post, I discuss the creation of new articles, using WikiProject Requested articles (WP:WPRA) as a starting point. This is not the only way to start creating new articles, but the process allows you to see whether the article you are thinking of writing, or one like it, has already been requested, and to see how that request fits in with the larger subject of which it is a part. What is “WikiProject Requested articles”? The WPRA page explains that WikiProject Requested…