General
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Truth and Reconciliation – Call to Action for Educators
[social_share/] [social-bio] Indigenous people and their communities have had a long and contentious experience with Western education. For far too long, schools and education were used as instruments to systematically dismantle Indigenous culture, their way of living and knowing. Generation after generation of children were taken from their homes, sometime forcefully, in the name of providing them with a civilized education. Instead, what many of these children experienced was at its best a destructive education, and at its worse an inhumane brainwashing, aimed at having these children renounce their ‘savage’ Indigenous perspectives for a more ‘sophisticated’ Canadian approach to life. Many Canadian universities are just beginning to acknowledge their role…
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Single-Point Rubrics: Exceeding Expectations
[social_share/] [social-bio] As an Instructional Designer, I often speak on the value of assessment rubrics. There are many reasons why creating a rubric for each assignment, providing students with the rubric, and using the rubric while grading can be advantageous. Many of these reasons are highlighted in the video below, including: You write the same comments on several assignments You decide how to assess after the assignments are handed in You realize after grading a few papers that your students didn’t understand the assignment expectations (Stevens & Levi, 2005) Knowing about these reasons for rubrics, I sat down last fall to create few rubrics for the assignments in an undergraduate…
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Open Textbook Integration Catching on at USask
[social_share/] [social-bio] A year ago we ran a reprint of a blog post by Professor Eric Micheels who teaches in the College of Agriculture and Bioresource. As far as I know, Eric was the first instructor on campus to adopt an open textbook instead of having students buy a commercial textbook. He saved the students in the class about $27,000 by doing so. Open textbooks are free, digital textbooks that instructors can customize to meet their specific needs, or use them as is. These open texts are written by instructors and many go through a peer review process. The book that Eric adopted includes a test bank and other ancillary…
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Talking with Students About Suspected Plagiarism: Ten Guiding Questions
[social_share/] [social-bio] As assignments start to come in, this can be the time in the term when faculty notice what may be inadvertent or intentional plagiarism by students. Hopefully, you rarely encounter this yourself. But, if you do suspect plagiarism, how can you best proceed? Here’s what I would do… First, become familiar with the institutional policy and any particular procedures with respect to this policy in your department or college. Next, I suggest that you discuss the matter with the student(s) you suspect. Here are ten guiding questions offered to help you to prepare for and to anticipate the potential directions of a discussion: Why am I asking to discuss…
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Why Mentoring for New and Pre-Tenure Faculty? Academic Success!
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Dr. Jim Thornhill, Special Assistant to the Vice-President Research Mentorship of pre-tenure faculty is a key component to academic success. Sutherland and Peterson (2009) advocate from a national study conducted throughout New Zealand that early academic success of new faculty is determined by 3 factors: Prior training and experience of the new candidate, Personal characteristics of the candidate (tenacity, resolve, work/life balance) and The institutional support provided (e.g. time, space, resources). At the University of Saskatchewan, The Provost’s Office via the Gwenna Moss Teaching & Learning Centre and the Vice President Research Office via the Research Mentorship Program have come together to highlight and support mentorship in…
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Complying with the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Diane (DeDe) Dawson, Science Liaison Librarian, University Library The new Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications came into effect on May 1st 2015. This policy applies to all grants awarded from that day and onward (exception: CIHR has had this policy in place since Jan 1, 2008). This blog post is intended to be a handy, practical introduction to the policy and how to comply. The Policy Details: “Grant recipients are required to ensure that any peer-reviewed journal publications arising from Agency-supported research are freely accessible within 12 months of publication” (emphasis my own). There are two routes to achieve this: Online Repositories (a.k.a. the “Green” route)…
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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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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…
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Too explicit? No such thing.
[social_share/] [social-bio] Following on Heather’s post last week about the key (and required) elements of the syllabus at the University of Sasaktchewan, I wanted to add a point of emphasis that I think saves time, saves confusion, and may even save you some heartache. That point is: be explicit with your students about your expectations. Sometimes, as instructors, we may forget that we too had to learn about academic expectations and norms. If we were lucky, we caught on quickly, probably in our first or second years of undergraduate study. Our new students (new to our disciplines, our institution, our jargon, our everyday language, our Saskatchewan and/or Canadian…
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Syllabus Requirements Updated in Academic Courses Policy
[social_share/] [social-bio] There were a number of changes to the Academic Courses policy at the University of Saskatchewan this year, including several related to the syllabus. As such, I want to take this opportunity to remind our readers at the U of S about what must be in your syllabus regardless of your college or department, which may have additional requirements. All of the information shown below is included in the syllabus template and guide that can be found on our web site. You are not required to use the template, but it can be handy to use as a checklist for your own syllabus. It also contains additional information…