Instructional / Course Design
-
Communicating Expectations: The Course Syllabus & First Day of Class
[social_share/] [social-bio] This post was originally published on the GSR 989: Philosophy and Practice of University Teaching blog on February 28, 2014. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the course syllabus and the impression it gives students on our first day of class. Personally, I like to think of the syllabus as a map with the following components: Where are we headed? (What are we studying and why?) How do we get there? (schedule, readings, assignments, etc) How do we know when we’ve arrived? (exams, evaluation, etc) What will it be like along the way? (classroom climate, expectations, behaviour) After coming up with this metaphor, I did some reading…
-
Effective – By Design
[social_share/] [social-bio] I just observed in a large first-year class that has incorporated an undergraduate research experience. Today one third of the class attended to work on operationalizing their research questions into items for a survey in their small groups. Last week I observed a whole group lecture. The differences are notable: On lecture day, students were packing up and leaving by 10:13 (the class wasn’t over. Some were just leaving.) Today students had to be reminded that the class was over and then they started to leave. On lecture day there were many more students using computers and smart phones and—from where I sat—not all were looking at the…
-
Using Google Hangouts to Bring in Guest Speakers
[social_share/] [social-bio] This post was originally published on Heather Ross’s blog on February 28, 2014. I’m considering myself very fortunate that I’m the instructor for Introduction to Learning Technologies. I get to meet with students in the blended cohort. I get to communicate with participants in both groups through email, Twitter, Facebook and Google+, and a couple of weeks ago I got to sit down and have a Google Hangout with John Boyer, a geography professor at Virginia Tech. He’s done some amazing things with learning technologies in his World Regions course. I started following John some time ago on Twitter and he was kind enough to respond to my…
-
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…
- 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…
-
Pedagogy First When Selecting Learning Technologies
[social_share/] [social-bio] I teach the Introduction to Learning Technologies course from the GMCTE. In the past, I’ve also taught a similar course for undergraduate students in the College of Education and over the past several years I’ve given a number of workshops on to the topic. I always give the same one bit of advice and the same caveat related to learning technologies. The advice is to never put post anything online, including in an email that you wouldn’t want your mother, your boss or your grandchildren to see. You don’t want to embarrass Mom or get fired from your job, and your content will be out there long enough…
-
Finding Our Footing With Our Communities
[social_share/] [social-bio] With Susan Bens Some time ago our Centre received a suggestion to tailor one of our increasingly known and appreciated Course Design Institutes specifically for those aiming to incorporate community-engaged learning. A team of us came together to begin that process and it’s fair to say we struggled to find our footing. After a few meetings, this led us to ask the question: “Do we really know what is needed by faculty with respect to community-engaged learning?” Our honest answer to ourselves was at best, a “maybe”. Since “maybe” isn’t good enough when planning a high-impact learning experience, we decided to take a few steps back in order to…
-
What Do We Mean by ‘Open’?
[social_share/] [social-bio] As I wrote about in an earlier post, the GMCTE is launching what we believe is the first “open” online course from the University of Saskatchewan. Introduction to Learning Technologies is being offered simultaneously to both a small blended cohort (mostly online, with five face-to-face sessions) and a much larger open group of participants. This course is designed for faculty, instructors and grad students who wish to learn more about effective uses of learning technologies. Participants will 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…
-
Curriculum of Fractal Beauty
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler What image of our discipline are we sharing with students or with colleagues as we start a new term? Are we sharing glimpses of the beauty that intrigue and motivate us? Just as lecture is a piece of the course, each course is embedded within a program, and each program within the ongoing history of a discipline. The transformative concepts and essential knowledge, skills, or values of the discipline are embodied within the program, enacted within the course, seen within the lecture activities, readings and assessments. These central features thus appear as more than just a single layer of foundational ideas. Instead, our programs…
-
Got the Group Project Blues?
[social_share/] [social-bio] Last week I gave my students back their group project assignments. They actually did quite a superb job, across the board. I asked them to provide me with comments on their own contribution, using a rubric I developed that was my adaptation and a shorter version of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) “teamwork” rubric that can be found at http://www.aacu.org/VALUE/rubrics/. And, then I also left it open if they wanted to share any comments with me about the teamwork demonstrated in their group. I knew because of some individual requests for guidance that most of the groups had encountered some conflict or difficulty and a…