Instructional / Course Design
- Assessment and Evaluation, Curriculum Development, Educational Technology, General, Graduate Education, Inclusivity, Indigenization, Decolonization, Reconciliation, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies, Open
Gearing Up With Fall Fortnight 2016
[social_share/] [social-bio] “Happy New Year!!” That is how I think of September and the new school year. This often coincides with a strong pull to stationary stores, tidying my office, organizing my supplies, reading new books, and pulling out sweaters and warm socks. Gearing up for the Fall Term is exciting. There’s often anticipation, hope, renewed energy for trying new things and looking forward to tweaking things I tried last year. I think about taking a class. There are new “school” clothes, crisp mornings, and longer shadows when I head for home. All of that is bundled together as the new term starts. I think about the new faculty, staff,…
- Curriculum Development, General, Inclusivity, Indigenization, Decolonization, Reconciliation, Instructional / Course Design
Historical Biases in Understanding Culture – A Barrier to Indigenization?
[social_share/] [social-bio] Western society has made significant advances in empirically derived truth and scientific inquiry (e.g., anthropology, psychology, linguistics, etc.) since the Age of Enlightenment (e.g., Descartes, Diderot, Montesquieu, Turgot, Vico, Voltaire, etc.). The impact and importance of this epistemological approach to the world and its mass adoption by Western societies can be perceived in many elements of European civilization and culture (Boon, 1972; Goodenough, 1961; Keesing, 1974; Triandis, 1994). The rise of Europe’s epistemological renaissance occurred during the era of colonial expansion. At the time that Europe was pressing itself onto numerous societies around the world, dominating the global stage, many Western thinkers were using this colonial perspective as…
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‘Softwhere’ in the Curriculum
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Donna Beneteau, Departmental Assistant, Mining – Civil and Geological Engineering In the era of rapidly developing technology, an efficient use of words in the title seemed appropriate. “Software, where in the curriculum?” didn’t provide the same effect. This question is now something that I ask myself after developing an assignment for the Gwenna Moss Centre’s course “Introduction to Learning Technologies”. I prepared and gave a survey asking 2nd and 4th year Civil, Environmental and Geological Engineering students questions about software that they use in school, on summer jobs and on internships. In total, I received 214 responses, 110 from CE295 and 104 from CE495. As expected, the…
- Assessment and Evaluation, Curriculum Development, Educational Theory, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies, SoTL
What is the science behind your course design madness?
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Fred Phillips, Professor, Baxter Scholar, Edwards School of Business As we begin another year, students are encountering some of the course design decisions made by their instructors. Some will be introduced to “flipped classrooms”, where students prepare by reading/viewing/responding to a learning prompt before it is formally taken up in class. Others will encounter new learning tools, such as adaptive reading systems that embed interactive questions within reading materials with the goal of assessing each student’s comprehension so that new topics can be delivered the moment he or she is ready to comprehend them. Just as instructors have questions about these approaches and tools, students are likely…
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Practice Problem Sets: Issues of Timing and Mixing
[social_share/] [social-bio] While looking for resources for a faculty member in the sciences who was interested in incorporating more problem sets into her lectures to increase student engagement, I came upon a 2007 article by Rohere and Taylor, appearing in Instructional Science. This article describes two experiments where particular timing and mixing of mathematics practice problems improved learning. The authors point out that it is usual for practice problems to be assigned: • immediately following the relevant lesson (massed), and • for problems of the same type to be grouped together (blocked). Through Rohere and Taylor’s experiments, they found that spacing the timing of two sets of practice problems 1…
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Developing ePublications
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Adrienne Thomas and Wayne Giesbrecht (Media Production) With discussion surrounding open resources, this is a good time to talk about actually developing epublications and ebooks. For the past 3 years, Media Production (formerly eMAP) has been working with faculty and content creators to realize epub resources. With each new project, we have learned more about what to do and how to do it – an ongoing lesson as the software, media files and platforms continue to evolve. Within the university environment, we are all concerned with the development of unique and immersive material to be used for information, education, research or knowledge mobilization purposes. If you want…
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Flexibility is Key When Teaching Online
[social_share/] [social-bio] As the new year and new term kick off, I’m facing a great deal of time in front of a computer for the next few months. I’m co-teaching Introduction to Learning Technologies for the GMCTE, which includes a blended face-to-face and online component for on-campus registrants and a purely online open course for everyone else. At the same time I’m taking an online course in qualitative methods for my PhD and taking the four-week long online workshop through BCcampus on adopting open textbooks, which directly connects to both my work at the GMCTE as well as my PhD. That’s a lot of screen time, even for me. I’m…
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Who’s in Charge? You or the Room?
[social_share/] [social-bio] ISSoTL 2014 was held this past October in Quebec City. I was attracted to the conference not just because of the theme (“Nurturing Passion and Creativity in Teaching and Learning”) but also because of the location—I had not been to Quebec City before. I walked from the Hotel Claredon, reputedly the oldest hotel in Canada, to the conference centre through the gates going from the old city to the “new” city each morning. I couldn’t help but notice how different it felt from one side of the wall to the other. The transition zone was well marked and prominent. On the winding narrow streets of the Old City,…
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Creativity and Innovation: An example with Soil and Art
[social_share/] [social-bio] For the past ten years, Dr. Ken Van Rees has been incorporating visual art as ateaching tool in his soil science field courses SLSC 898 and 480. Van Rees, of the Department of Soil Science, was recognized earlier this year by the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and Desire2Learn’s Innovation Award in Teaching and Learning. In the following address, delivered at this year’s Celebration of Teaching, Van Rees speaks about his innovative art and soil science classes and inspiring creativity in his students.
- Academic Integrity, Educational Technology, General, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies
It’s Course Design Not Entertainment: A visit from John Boyer
[social_share/] [social-bio] On October 7, we had the pleasure at the University of Saskatchewan of welcoming John Boyer from the Geography Department at Virginia Tech to speak with us about his innovative and increasingly acclaimed approaches to teaching large classes and his approaches for motivating learning and designing assessment. Recordings of his talks are available at these links, and are embedded at the end of this post. 1. Assessment Innovations that Reduce Cheating and Enhance Learning 2. Teaching (Really) Large Classes (Very) Well There is some repetition between them since there were slightly different audiences in attendance at both sessions and John therefore needed to describe the format of his…