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Collaborative Online International Learning – and Teaching!
by Monica del Valle, MSc (Marketing), USask. Monica was a Teaching Assistant for multiple COIL projects from 2021 to 2023. “Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterward.” – Oscar Wilde I started my MSc in Marketing in September 2021 and even before my program began, both my Associate Dean, Dr. Marjorie Delbaere, and Department Head, Dr. Maureen Bourassa thought of me due to my Latin American background and professional experience, to collaborate in an international educational initiative planned at the Edwards School of Business. Throughout my career, I have worked and connected with culturally diverse groups, as…
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Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement within JSGS
By Jamie Mayoh-Bauche, Instructional Designer, U of R, Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy Keeping up with the latest scholarship on evidence-based practice can be a challenge for instructors who are busy with their own areas of research, amongst all the other things. In response to this challenge, Johnson Shoyama Graduate School (JSGS) embarked on creating a culture of continuous learning by making recent evidence-based teaching and learning practices easy and accessible for our instructors. Throughout the 2021/2022 school year, we organized a series of events and workshops aimed at building a shared understanding of program level competencies and instructional approaches that enhance student competency development. We gathered monthly…
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Collaboration technical tools
One of the essential goals of the Learning Technology Ecosystem at USask is to allow students to connect to others. While collaboration skills are one of the essential skills most employers describe, the need for collaboration tools is actually more immediate. When students have the opportunity to think through things actively with others, they learn more than they if they only listen to a professor talk about them, and they are more likely to be able to apply what they learn. Best ways to support collaboration Focus on talking to others during the learning, like working on questions or discussing, instead of group projects. When you do group projects, don’t…
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Introduction to Teaching Online
If someone asked you “How is online teaching different from face-to-face teaching?”, the first thing you might say is that face-to-face teaching involves real time interaction between students and instructors (synchronous) whereas online teaching happens through a computer, with students typically working through course content like lectures and other materials in their own time (asynchronous). In an online environment students and instructors access the course at different times and from different places; therefore, it is necessary to deliberately build in opportunities to develop a rapport with students and guide them through the course so that they are successful. There are a number of strategies that are effective in online courses that…
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Elaborations on Canvas collaborations
The transition to remote learning has been in progress for almost a year now, with many instructors grabbing the Canvas bull by the horns and learning how to use the different Canvas tools to provide their students with the best learning experience possible. With what feels like the whole world working remotely right now, collaborating with peers and colleagues is a necessary skill that we can help students develop and refine. Learning to work collaboratively is important because it not only helps to prepare students for careers but it elegantly highlights that it is often easier to succeed at tasks when working in a team. Canvas gives you the ability…
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From Modelling to Designing Intercultural Curricula
You now know that you have pretty decent intercultural teaching capacities. You have continued to develop an awareness of your own identity and are modelling perspective-taking. Students in your course have the opportunity to interact with different worldviews because you know that makes them smarter. You actively create opportunities to build relationships between ‘others’ and can recognize barriers to student participation – you’ve essentially mastered using your intercultural capacity to inform teaching practices. So now you must be wondering, “What’s next? How can I further internationalize in my course?” No fear, you are not alone. Dimitrov & Haque (2016) have some suggestions for “curriculum design competencies”. “Effective instructors are able…
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Building Broad Minds: Active learning strategies for large classrooms
Building broad minds is not about back filling. Broad minds are the byproduct of encountering diverse ideas, thinking deeply about them, and integrating those ideas into our own worldviews and cognitive frameworks. In higher education, the opportunity to be exposed to the thinking of a wide variety of disciplines usually happens at the first year level. However, those are also often large courses where the primary method of instruction is listening to your professor speak. To actually get broad minds, our learning activities have to be active, even in the large classrooms where active learning strategies are limited by the room, and even when students are first encountering the subject…