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High Impact Teaching Practices
[social_share/] [social-bio] NOTE: There are ten high impact educational practices that reportedly increase student success. You can access that list and brief description at https://www.aacu.org/leap/hip.cfm, http://www.uwgb.edu/outreach/highimpact/assets/pdfs/kinzieHO2012.pdf, or watch this short 6-minute video: For the back-story—the elements that make these high impact practices check out http://us.tamu.edu/Faculty-Administrators/High-Impact-Learning. A summary is provided here: High impact practices have these elements in common: 1. EFFORTFUL is not a bad thing. In fact, “effortful” stimulates learning and increases retention of that which is learned. “Effortful” is also engaging and focuses attention for an extended period. One of the greatest disservices we can do for students is to reduce the required effort and make things easy. 2.…
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Why You Should Consider Lecture Capture
[social_share/] [social-bio] “Lecture Capture describes technologies instructors can use to record voice and data projector content and make those recordings available digitally” (ICT University of Saskatchewan). At the University of Saskatchewan, many rooms are equipped to allow instructors to easily record their live lectures and distribute these recordings to their students. Now that I’ve defined what lecture capture is, let’s explore why you should consider using it. Research has shown numerous benefits. A study found that, after using lecture capture across a variety of disciplines, class sizes, and teaching styles, students and faculty were both in favor of using lecture recordings. Benefits for students included: being able to review material that was…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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GMCTE Resources – Our Staff Picks
[social_share/] [social-bio] Over the years, we at the GMCTE have been collecting resources about all aspects of teaching and learning. The collection includes a library, copies of Bridges newsletter, a blog, social media and a large section of our website. That is a fairly long list of resources and, unless you have a specific idea of what you want, it can be a bit overwhelming. So, I thought it would be useful to ask our staff about the most interesting or useful resource they would recommend: GMCTE Library Colleen Charles: I would recommend Magaret Kovach’s Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2009, if someone is doing research…
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What? A Menu of Assessment Options?
[social_share/] [social-bio] I have recently come upon a few interesting ideas about the conditions we create for assessment in higher education, especially with respect to deterring academic dishonesty. Standing out to me right now is a 2013 book I’ve been reading by James Lang titled “Cheating Lessons.” This book provides inspiration, encouragement, and practical advice to teachers in higher education. Lang’s premise is that cheating is an inappropriate response by students to environments that convey an emphasis on performance within the context of extremely high stakes and where extrinsic motivators overpower the “intrinsic joy or utility of the task itself” (p. 30). Lang points his readers to an innovative assessment…
- 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…
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Where Are You From?
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Colleen Charles Academically speaking, when you first meet a professional on campus, you state your name, job title and credentials accordingly. However, for First Nations people, and I speak for myself as a Woodland Cree, Treaty Six Territory, from the Lac La Ronge Indian Band, La Ronge, Saskatchewan, I have been raised to ask the question, “Where are you from?” when being introduced to new people. This is to find out if you have relations to the individual and their family. Also, I used this technique in a presentation that I did for the GSR 989 Philosophy and Practice of University Teaching. According to Kim West, Educational…