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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…
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Teaching Goals, the Learning Charter, and the Fall Fortnight
[social_share/] [social-bio] It’s hard to believe, as we sit on a 30+ day, that the fall term is coming up fast! It is even warm in my office today as I write. (And for those of you who have stopped by on other days and needed to put on a jacket, you know how hot it must be out there to warm it up in here!!) At the Centre we have been busy planning for the start of the fall turn and, as always, our guiding star is the University of Saskatchewan’s Learning Charter. It reminds us of our responsibilities and commitments to the university community. There are specific commitments…
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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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Evaluating Presentations With a Little Help From My (Citable) Friends …
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler Individual and group presentations provide great opportunity for students to share what they have learned with peers and an efficient and feasible way of marking for instructors. That being said, how do you grade them? I, and I’m pretty sure you too, have experienced the full range of presentations from the stunningly excellent to the staggeringly confusing, from the inspirational to the sleep-inducing. The challenge is describing these qualities so they can be identified and assessed. One option would be to create my own rubric based on these experiences. The easier option is to use or adapt existing materials from others I respect. The…
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Undergraduate Research: Co-Publishing With Students
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Jason Perepelkin, Assistant Professor, College of Pharmacy and Nutrition Passive listening and dumping information on exams doesn’t give students the depth of learning and experience that lasts beyond the scope of a course. Having students engage with practitioners and specialists and in a real world environment helps students learn more deeply; chasing grades doesn’t do this but chasing experience does. The elective fourth year course Marketing for Pharmacists is designed for up to 20 students. The course is a project based course where students, working in groups of two to three, work directly with a practicing pharmacist. By working directly with practitioners, on an issue identified by…
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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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What is Digital Citizenship?
[social_share/] [social-bio] Many teaching and learning conversations include notions of developing and fostering citizenship for our teachers and our learners in our respective disciplines and fields and in society. Citizenship can be such broad territory. One way to focus it further is to discuss Digital Citizenship. If you’re still stumped, let me point you to a useful set of Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship appearing on a web site dedicated to this topic. Here, among other things, you’ll find types of norms that characterize appropriate and response technology use. The distinctions between digital literacy, digital communication, digital etiquette, and digital rights and responsibilities strike me as most informative. When we…
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What It Means to Be an Ally
[social_share/] [social-bio] As we have recently come out of a week of sessions at the University aimed at making our campus a safer place for gender and sexual diversity and we enter Aboriginal Achievement week I am reflecting on what it means to me to be an ally. Use of the term ‘ally’ in relation to marginalized groups is relatively new to me, however, what the term represents is not new. Being an ally means working in solidarity with a marginalized group that I am not a part of to address systemic inequalities. I’ve tried to boil down what I feel I have to work at everyday in being an…
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Connecting Ideas for Innovation
[social_share/] [social-bio] Connecting Ideas for Innovation When do your great ideas come to you? Where do your great ideas come to you? Is it when you’re alone in your office or lab? How about when you’re out for a walk?< Are you sure about that? Steven Johnson, the author of How We Got to Now, Everything Bad is Good for You, and Where Good Ideas Come From argues that while bits and pieces of those ideas may come together in your solitude, they actually become really good or even great ideas when they have a chance to mingle with other ideas. In his TED Talk Where Good Ideas Come From (see the video…
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Authentic Assessment
[social_share/] [social-bio] I think of authentic assessments as ways for students to demonstrate knowledge and understanding in a public way. What makes assessment authentic for me is that students do something to show what they know in a public way that benefits a wider community than the one person assigning a grade. The posters that students did in their first year College of Agriculture and Bioresources (AgBio) classes this past term are, in my way of defining authentic assessment, stellar examples. Working in teams, students prepared a research poster as part of their undergraduate research experience. On the afternoon of December 3rd there were 99 posters on display up and…