General
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WOW!! Polar Bears, Tundra, Teams AND Learning…
[social_share/] [social-bio] Ryan Brook teaches Animal Science 475.3 Field Studies in Arctic Ecosystems and Aboriginal Peoples and about 120 students have taken the course in the ten years he has been teaching it. Ryan has spent twenty summers on the Hudson’s Bay coast. Here is the course description: This field-based travel course will provide hands-on research experience in natural ecosystems in the sub-arctic of the Hudson Bay coast in northern Manitoba at the interface between animals, people, and the environment. This experiential course is an intensive introduction to and connection between the ecology and Aboriginal cultures of the sub-arctic. This is a paired course with the University of Manitoba so…
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GMCTE Resources – Our Staff Picks
[social_share/] [social-bio] Over the years, we at the GMCTE have been collecting resources about all aspects of teaching and learning. The collection includes a library, copies of Bridges newsletter, a blog, social media and a large section of our website. That is a fairly long list of resources and, unless you have a specific idea of what you want, it can be a bit overwhelming. So, I thought it would be useful to ask our staff about the most interesting or useful resource they would recommend: GMCTE Library Colleen Charles: I would recommend Magaret Kovach’s Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2009, if someone is doing research…
- Assessment and Evaluation, Curriculum Development, General, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies
Four Student Misconceptions About Learning
[social_share/] [social-bio] The main section of this blog post is a reprint of an article from Faculty Focus by Maryellen Welmer. It follows a brief introduction by Nancy Turner. I thought readers of this blog would be interested in the article reprinted below on common student misconceptions about learning. These points are usefully discussed openly with students at the start of a course or year of study but are also points for faculty to be aware of when planning curriculum and learning experiences. Both explicit discussion of the misconceptions alongside curriculum, assessment and session design to implicitly counter their effects (specific examples for each are included in the text of…
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Visual Note Taking As A New Way of Listening
[social_share/] [social-bio] Text notes are not the best method of note taking for many students. Some do better simply listening and taking it in, while others thrive on visual representations of what is being said. I just watched Giulia Forsythe at Brock University describe her visual note taking. The video is about 4 minutes long and brings together the why and the how of this technique. It makes great sense from a “how the brain learns” perspective, and can be viewed below. After watching the video I did a little digging and came upon this resource that is indeed comprehensive if you want to learn more—a LOT more about visual note-taking using…
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Shall I Google That For You?
[social_share/] [social-bio] A vital skill for faculty and students alike is to make effective use of search tools. Google is used millions of times every minute yet most folks are using only a tiny fraction of Google’s ability. In particular, when we wish to use Google for supporting our scholarly work, there are particular strategies, tactics, and features that everyone ought to know. I recently came across a blog post at LifeHacker.com on “Google tips and tricks every student should know” The best part of this post was the 41 minute video resource (embedded below) on making effective use of Google Scholar. A default Scholar search results are normally sorted by relevance,…
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GMCTE to Launch First Open Online Course From USask
[social_share/] [social-bio] On January 21, 2014, the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness (GMCTE) will launch the first open online course (OOC) from the University of Saskatchewan, Introduction to Learning Technologies. This course, aimed at novices, will invite participants to explore pedagogically informed use of blogs, podcasts, social bookmarking and a host of other tools, in addition to considering the implications of copyright and Creative Commons, digital citizenship and digital literacy for their teaching practice. The course was initially designed to be a blended course with a small group of participants coming in for face-to-face class meetings five times throughout the term, but with the bulk of the materials being open to…
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Taskforce Identifies Gwenna Moss Centre Programs as “Candidate for Phase Out”
[social_share/] [social-bio] The University of Saskatchewan is currently engaged in a program prioritization process, known as TransformUS. Two task forces were struck in April 2013 – one looking at academic programs and one looking at support services. The programs of the Gwenna Moss Centre were analysed along with nearly 400 other support services representing every aspect of the university – from groundskeeping to human resources, from financial management to library services. The support services task force consisted of 6 tenured faculty members, 10 professional staff members and 2 students. The task force grouped programs into “quintiles” with descriptors: Candidate for enhanced resourcing Maintain with current resourcing Retain with reduced resourcing…
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On Returning to Saskatchewan
[social_share/] [social-bio] Last Wednesday I arrived in Saskatoon, permanently relocating from London, England to take up the post of Program Director at the Gwenna Moss Centre. This is a return to Saskatchewan for me (BSPE 1994) and a new adventure for my British family. I have been asked several times over the past week how the experience of being back in Saskatchewan has been. Sometimes the question is genuine and sometimes said with a slight tongue in cheek given the minus 30 weather my family and I have been met with alongside the outcomes of the TransformUs report that was made public Monday. My response, even Monday, was that I…
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An Update on Open Courseware at the U of S
[social_share/] [social-bio] Last year we ran a blog post about the Open Courseware (OCW) initiative which is a joint venture of ICT, SESD and the ULC at the U of S. This portal offers a gateway to every course offered at the UofS and provides a space where instructors may choose to open up course information or learning resources to the world. There has been a lot of talk around the university lately about syllabi being open through OCW, which is now in accordance with the Academic Courses Policy. I thought that these conversations make it an appropriate time to write another post on this initiative. Instructors have the option to…
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GMCTE YouTube Channel Filled With Open Resources
[social_share/] [social-bio] The Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness, as a unit, is a proponent of “open” resources in education. We’ve created a number of digital and print resources that we’ve added Creative Commons licenses, we opened all of the content from our Introduction to Teaching Online course (another course will be open starting in the January 2014, but that will be discussed in a future blog post) and we help to educate the campus community about open access resources. In 2012, the GMCTE launched our YouTube channel where we have videos on a wide variety of topics including course design, experiential learning, flipped teaching, curriculum renewal, learning technologies, teaching…