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It’s All About Your Outcomes
Summary: Clear, actionable outcomes are the backbone of effective teaching. Ensure your objectives drive student success and align with your educational goals. Date of publishing: September 19, 2018 Structurally, outcomes are obligations. You need outcomes for your course syllabus, and your program as whole has some form of outcomes. From a teaching and learning perspective, however, an outcome is much more than just a hoop. It’s at heart of why you’d bother to teach the course you do. Each outcome (and you don’t need that many), describes a skill, disposition, or set of complex knowledge that it is essential for your students to demonstrate to be successful in the course.…
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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.…
- Academic Integrity, Assessment and Evaluation, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies
Promoting Academic Integrity: Some design questions for instructors
[social_share/] [social-bio] Here are some propositions about students’ academic integrity that I’ve been working with: Students are more likely to do their work honestly when they see the personal value in what is to be learned. Students are more likely to do their work honestly when they believe the assessment produces actual evidence of what they have learned. Students are more likely to do their work honestly when they’ve had the chance for practice and feedback. Students are more likely to do their work honestly when they know the rules and expect them to be enforced. Designing assessments for academic integrity is much more than tight invigilation processes and tools…
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When Performing Gets in the Way of Improving
[social_share/] [social-bio] I encountered the following video in the spring and have been sharing it with faculty and groups with an interest in questions of assessment. I think it lays a useful foundation for discussions on (1) what it takes to master skills and knowledge, (2) the value of lower stakes practice, (3) the necessity of formative feedback for learning, and (4) recognition that moments of “performance” or assessment for grades are also needed. Additionally, this video supports the thinking behind a core element of the Instructional Skills Workshop—an internationally recognized workshop and certification offered regularly at our Centre. For that workshop, participants practice the facilitation of a 10 minute “mini…
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First-time Thoughts on a Student Blog Assignment
[social-bio] By Yin Liu, Associate Professor, Department of English Why I did it In 2016-2017 I taught, for the first time, a full-year (6 credit unit) English course. The course, “History and Future of the Book,” is one of our Foundations courses – that is, it is one of a few 200-level courses required for our majors. As in all of our courses, there is a substantial writing component, usually in the form of essay assignments. I decided to complicate my life further by trying out a type of student assignment also new to me: a student-written course blog. I had been thinking about using a student blog assignment ever since…
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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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Wikipedia’s Ways of Knowing – Part 2
By John Kleefeld In the first part of this two-part piece, I discussed arborescent (vertical, discrete, hierarchical) and rhizomatic (horizontal, overlapping, interconnected) ways of acquiring and classifying knowledge, as well as the convergence of the arbor and the rhizome in modern knowledge systems. In this part, I discuss how this applies to Wikipedia. Most of us use the Web rhizomatically: we enter a search term in Google or Wikipedia, look at the search results, and follow the links, whether to other Wikipedia pages or other online or offline resources. As I said in the previous post, this lets us explore pathways that interest us most, and may also lead to more engaged…
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An Opportunity to Request Open Textbooks You Need
[social_share/] [social-bio] Many of the open textbooks being used at the U of S were found through the BCcampus open textbook repository. If you are interested in switching to an open textbook, but haven’t been able to find one for your course, this call for suggestions from BCcampus may be of interest to you: In an ongoing effort to sustain and build the BC Open Textbook Collection, BCcampus asks for your help to identify subject areas within this collection that are missing open textbooks either entirely or in specific categories and/or course levels. As an overview, there are currently 180 textbooks in this collection covering eight main subject areas (Sciences,…