General
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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.…
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What’s a Z-Course and How Do I Do That?
[social_share/] [social-bio] As costs for commercial textbooks continue to rise, there has been growing interest at the U of S in open educational resources (OER). OER is not only free to students, but adaptable to make the learning materials appropriate for a particular course. But OER is not the only way to reduce costs and move away from commercial textbooks. Z-courses, as defined at the U of S, are courses where students have zero or minimal ($35 of less) direct costs for learning materials. This can be achieved through the use of an open textbook or other OER, resources from the Library, instructor notes, or other such materials in place…
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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…
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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…
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Interested in Funding for your Teaching Innovation? Check out the “Innovative Teaching Showcase”
[social_share/] [social-bio] Sometimes, that example from a peer is just what is needed to help us move from thinking about it to doing it! As part of GMCTL Celebration Week, check out a wide range of teaching and learning projects undertaken with assistance of funds administered through the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning since 2012. Four showcases, each organized around a theme and set up as a series of faculty panel presentations, are offered: Teaching approaches and open pedagogy, Wednesday, April 26 9:00 – 12:00 Indigenization, Wednesday, April 26, 1:00 – 4:00 Program and course design, Thursday, April 27 1:00 – 4:00 Experiential learning and undergraduate research, Friday,…
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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…
- General, Indigenization, Decolonization, Reconciliation, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies, Open
Taking a Fresh Approach to the Course Design Institute
[social_share/] [social-bio] For more than a decade, the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL) has offered the Course Design Institute (CDI). Throughout the CDI, facilitators from the GMCTL work with instructors on developing or redeveloping a course. We go through learning about your students, writing learning outcomes, choosing teaching strategies, developing assessments, and putting it all together through constructive alignment and the blueprinting of your course. While the CDI had been an intensive four full-day experience within one week, a few years ago we revamped it to offer it in a “flipped” mode, with participants meeting face-to-face three half days over three weeks, plus completing activities and posting…
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WikiProjects, Article Importance, and Article Quality: An Intimate Relationship (1/2)
By John Kleefeld [social-bio] In a previous post, I wrote about how WikiProject Medicine acts as a forum for determining the priority (also called importance) of specific health-related Wikipedia articles and assessing their quality (also called class). More generally, these three concepts—WikiProjects, article importance, and article quality—are crucial for instructors and students to understand if they seek to use course-based assignments to improve Wikipedia. I will address each of them in turn. WikiProjects A WikiProject comprises a group of collaborators who aim to achieve specific Wikipedia editing goals, or to achieve goals in a specific subject or discipline represented in Wikipedia. An example of an editing type of project is…
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Teaching the Language of our Disciplines
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler Bolded words (those terms highlighted in textbooks), matter for they are the building blocks of every language that allow us to communicate complex ideas, convey how we see the world and shape our questions and ways of engaging with the world to answer our questions. But words, those collected sets of sounds, do not form a language. The relationships (syntax) and the underlying meetings & ideas (semantics) are necessary for fluency. We see this in students’ work where the keywords are there, but applied incorrectly or are erratically irrelevant. They may start a sentence with one theorists premise and end it with another’s conclusion…
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Faculty Fellows Playing Key Roles at GMCTL
[social_share/] [social-bio] The Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL) has, for the past 3 academic years, had GMCTL Faculty Fellows. These roles are filled by members of faculty who set aside up to 1/2 day of their time per week to contribute to teaching and learning related work with and through the GMCTL. The Centre and the university benefits hugely from the contribution of these fantastic Fellows whose contribution is planned to align with their particular expertise and experience as well as university priorities. Their work also assists in keeping the GMCTL services informed by and in alignment with the needs and interests of those we serve. Below…