Inclusivity
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Collaborative Online International Learning – and Teaching!
by Monica del Valle, MSc (Marketing), USask. Monica was a Teaching Assistant for multiple COIL projects from 2021 to 2023. “Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterward.” – Oscar Wilde I started my MSc in Marketing in September 2021 and even before my program began, both my Associate Dean, Dr. Marjorie Delbaere, and Department Head, Dr. Maureen Bourassa thought of me due to my Latin American background and professional experience, to collaborate in an international educational initiative planned at the Edwards School of Business. Throughout my career, I have worked and connected with culturally diverse groups, as…
- Assessment and Evaluation, Curriculum Development, Inclusivity, Instructional / Course Design, Uncategorized, Wellness
Maximizing Learning Potential with Student Wellness
Your Brain on Teaching and Learning: Series 2 Are your students showing signs of anxiety? Are your students experiencing a sense of purpose and engagement in the classroom? ______________________________________________________________________________________________ The impact of teaching and learning practices on student wellness cannot be overstated ______________________________________________________________________________________________ By integrating insights from brain science, we can create powerful learning environments that prioritize student wellness. Let’s explore three ways to associate your teaching practices with student wellbeing: Alignment for Clarity: Alignment refers to the process of strategically planning your learning outcomes to clearly define what your students will be able to do, know, or value. Then, intentionally plan how you will assess and teach based on…
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Increasing Voice and Choice in the Classroom
By Racquel Biem, Educational Development Specialist, Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning When we think of increasing voice and choice in the classroom we may immediately think of choice in assignments or assessment tasks. Whereas these do increase student choice, these alone do not get to the heart of increasing student voice and seeing students as partners in the teaching and learning process. It is for this reason that supporting student voice and choice requires building a learning environment focused on partnerships, student agency, flexible learning paths, and deep learning tasks. The learning framework is described below. Learning Partnerships occur when students actively learn with and from others. Collaborative…
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Immersive Reader Enhances Accessibility in Canvas
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba The Immersive Reader option in Canvas helps students access your course materials, whether they have a certain learning or medical disability, use English as an additional language – or could simply benefit from its text-to-speech function. The Immersive Reader button, at the top right-hand of Pages, Assignments, the Course Home Page, and Syllabus page, gives users access to a multitude of functions. Fortunately, the button appears automatically; therefore as an instructor, all you need to do is make students aware of the function and embed any text directly into the Rich Content Editor when composing a page or assignment. What can the Immersive Reader do? Read and…
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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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Using Zoom Meetings in Canvas
Zoom is a web conferencing tool available in Canvas. To be enabled, it has to be added to the course navigation menu. Zoom can be used to schedule lectures, group meetings or appointments. Students can join any virtual meeting directly through Canvas and can review any recorded sessions through the Zoom Meetings link. The videos below explain how to use Zoom to schedule meetings and office hours in Canvas. Using Zoom to schedule meetings in Canvas (7.31) Using Zoom to schedule office hours in Canvas (4.05) How students can join a Zoom session in Canvas Once in Canvas students can simply click the Join button, either from the Zoom Meetings…
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Making it Accessible: Turn on live captions in Zoom
When you have certain learning disabilities or you are studying in a language you aren’t fully fluent in, it is easy to miss important details of what your professor says. As an instructor, you can make what you say accessible for all your learners by turning on captions before your Zoom meetings. The button to turn it on is right beside the button for breakout rooms at the bottom of your computer screen in Zoom. Unfortunately, there are currently only English transcripts and you need to deliberately turn them on for each meeting. However, Audio Transcript is added to Zoom recordings using our default settings so no action is required…
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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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Easy ways to make your course more accessible
There are 3,000 students at USask who have some form of accommodation, so there is an excellent chance that your class has a student with a disability. Ideally, we’d all design courses that are universally accessible and reduce the need for accommodations be using Universal Design for Learning. If you feel like you don’t have time for a rethink right now, you can make simple changes that make it easier for all students, not just your most advantaged students, to have an equitable opportunity to succeed in your course. Accessible Online Environments Here are four simple ways to make your online class more accessible for your students: Record and Share:…
