Centre for Teaching Excellence Blog

Posted By Scott Anderson on May 15, 2012

There are many free tools and applications available on the web (in “the cloud,” so to speak) for instructors and students to use to support and enhance their teaching and learning. A few examples include:

• CATME (for group members to evaluate their peers about contributions and group dynamics),
• Google Docs (for creating and sharing a collaborative document by a group),
• MindMeister (for creating a concept map),
• Screencast-O-Matic (for creating short screen-capture videos).

A couple of key questions and issues include privacy and archiving of data in case of grade appeal.

The Patriot Act in the USA has resulted in caution here in Canada about using cloud based tools for fear of potential access to personal data that is stored on servers based in the US. One might think there shouldn’t be any problem since most students have Facebook accounts and Gmail or Hotmail accounts which are based in the US. But most is not necessarily all, and students choose to use Facebook or free email services voluntarily, whereas requiring students to use a cloud based service for their course work is not voluntary.

If a student is uncomfortable with his/her information being on a US server or is uncomfortable with the terms of service even if it is based in Canada, there may be grounds for academic appeal if an instructor requires use of the tool without providing an alternative. Having a suitable alternative ready is more work and may dissuade an instructor from using a potentially useful tool.

Another issue is archiving of data. If the material being graded is only available in the cloud-based application (e.g. blog postings), there may be issues with archiving of the material in case of grade appeal (to ensure a given posting was not modified). If a company offering a service goes out of business and the service is no longer available, what happens to the data? One option is to have postings submitted separately perhaps as documents which may make one question the purpose of creating a blog in the first place. With an institutional learning management system (LMS), it is more straightforward to ensure congruence with institutional policies, but with cloud-based tools, it is murkier.

Options for instructors are to forge ahead and hope for the best, or retreat from using tools that may well enhance functionality available in an institutional learning management system. Often the choice to use cloud-based tools remains foggy.

[Image provided by permission from opensourceway]

Category: New Educational Technologies, Policies, Student Assessment | No Comments »
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Posted By Jane Holbrook on May 10, 2012

My pet peeve is a slightly different. When students go and look at descriptions of courses in the UW course calendar they will see the course number and an array of codes for the “type of instruction”, e.g.,  LEC, TUT or SEM or LEC, LAB as well as a very brief description of the course that usually does not include any information on how the learning will happen in the course, only about what will be learned in terms of content. A search in the Schedule of Classes gives a bit more information about the amount of time spent in the LEC and TUT each week. This information does not provide any insight into what students can expect to be doing in the 8-10 hours a week that they spend on a course in “class” and outside of “class”.  Courses where students are required to watch online lectures and engage in group work in their classes usually have the LEC designation, and the way the course is actually taught may be a bit of a surprise to students when they come to the first class.  Many courses on campus expect students to participate in online tutorials and discussions may or may not have a TUT or DISC designation.

A course is made up of learning  experiences that are integrated together and take place with the instructor and/or class mates and independently in a variety of environments: face-to-face, online and offline. We should be able to give students more information (other than word of mouth) about how they will be learning before they come to the first class.  It’s exciting that there are so many ways that students can learn inside and outside the class room and in the community, it would be great to have a way to communicate the richness of the experiences that will be offered in courses to students when they are deciding what to take each term. The current calendar and course schedule designations seem limited. What’s the solution? Maybe course descriptions that include how and where students will learn rather than content topics, or areas in the course schedule where instructors can outline what’s special about their course each term. Any ideas?  This is a blog, so comments and ideas are welcome.

Category: Blended learning, Policies, Student Culture, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Tags: UW Calendar; Course Descriptions

Posted By Mark Morton on May 8, 2012

NETsavvy is a site that I maintain that’s devoted to identifying best practices for New Educational Technologies. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been working on updating and expanding that site. Nearly 50 new educational technologies are now included there, organized into 9 different categories. The latest category to be added is devoted to “Outliners” — that is, tools that you or your students can use to organize information. Check out the new and improved NETsavvy at netsavvy.uwaterloo.ca.

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Posted By mvesely on May 7, 2012

What is signposting? It refers to all of those rhetorical phrases and devices which are used in spoken discourse primarily to help the listener understand the structure of what is being listened to. In other words, a signpost is a device used to indicate what direction you are travelling in a lecture. It lets your students know what is coming up, and positions them to accept what you are saying.

Why did I choose this particular theme for my blog? …because (to quote Barabara Gross Davis) we should “prepare our lectures for the ear, not the eye”. Very often we invest great effort into organizing our lectures into a clear structure, but we forget to communicate this structure plainly to our students. By including transitions and signposting language, we help our students follow the sequence of our lecture and hopefully, as a consequence, we help them better understand the content itself.

Lectures unfold over time, and students do not always know whether what they are listening to is a major substantive point, its elaboration, or a gloss or even digression. Listening for the duration of a 50-minute lecture requires attention at several levels, not only to the detail of the current point, but also to its place within a developing argument. The lecture should have a clear structure, with a beginning, middle, and end. It should relate back to previous material. To achieve this structure and relate the material backwards and forwards, signposting language is used.

Typical phrases used at the start of a lecture include “What I’d like to do today is…”, “OK everyone, today, we’re going to look at…” or “I’m going to divide the lecture into three parts…” These phrases help to set the scene and make sure that the students know what they are going to listen to.

In the main part of the lecture, the wording used will reflect the purpose it serves. If you wish to provide additional information, phrases such as “Another example of this phenomenon is……”, or “We can see this situation elsewhere” may be used. When signalling a shift in the argument, phrases such as “Let’s turn our attention now to …” or “What I’d like to do now is to move on to consider….” may be useful. Phrases that emphasise a point might include “The main point I’d like to emphasise here is…”, ”The key issue at stake here is…”, or “What I am essentially arguing is…”.  

Common phrases used to draw the lecture to a close, may include the ubiquitous “Well, that more or less wraps things up for today” or if the topic is not complete, a phrase such as “Next week, I’d like to go on with this. I’ll be looking at….” may be used.

Try some of these sample marker phrases in your next lecture and see if eyes and ears start to perk up!

 

Davis, Barbara Gross. “Preparing to Teach the Large Lecture Course.” Tools for Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. 1993. http://teaching.berkeley.edu/bgd/largelecture.html.

Category: Classroom practices, How We Learn, Teaching Strategies & Techniques | No Comments »
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Posted By Julie on May 1, 2012

It takes a village

It turns out that it really takes a village to put on a Conference.  The fourth annual Opportunities and New Directions (OND)Conference took place last Thursday, April 26^th, and there are countless people in our village who contributed in ways large and small to the success of this year’s OND.  Their ideas, skills, time, thoughts, (and strength!) enabled the ideas of the Conference to come to fruition.  We’re particularly grateful to Vice-President Academic and Provost, Geoff McBoyle for lending his vision and financial support to the Conference.  And once again, the Faculty Association of the University of Waterloo (FAUW) sponsored a lovely Presidents’ Colloquium refreshment break.

Sharing research and practices

Inspired by the report from the “Task Force on Innovative Teaching Practices to Promote Deep Learning at the University of Waterloo,” the theme of the Conference was “Fostering Deep Approaches to Learning.”  This year, we adopted a new approach and featured both a Research stream and a Sharing Practices stream.  Presenters from across the disciplines explored the idea of deep learning through an exciting array of sessions, including workshops, panel sessions, and presentations on research and practice.  Sessions were thought-provoking and created a unique opportunity for colleagues from different disciplines to exchange and create knowledge about topics of common interest.

Celebrating local talent

The Conference was also an opportunity to celebrate the excellent work being done by our University of Waterloo colleagues and by our colleagues from local universities to enhance teaching and learning. With over 130 participants from uWaterloo and from other institutions around the Province, there was a pleasant hum throughout the day of new ideas blossoming and new connections being made – a chance to think through together what we may often try to struggle through alone.  Drawing on their experience across three Canadian Universities, Presidents’ Colloquium speakers Marcy Slapcoff (McGill University) and Brad Wuetherick (University of Saskatchewan) delivered a talk on the timely topic of integrating research in our disciplines into undergraduate teaching in ways that promote deep learning.  The slides from their presentation, as well as from their Pre-Conference workshop on the same theme will soon be available on CTE’s website.

Live teaching showcase — “Igniting our Practice” 

A highlight of the day was a live teaching showcase during which Serge D’Alessio (Mathematics), Shannon Dea (Arts), and Gordon Stubley (Engineering), three of uWaterloo’s outstanding faculty members, drew us into their disciplines and into the learning spaces they create for their students by teaching us a concept from their own courses.  This gave us all the opportunity to be learners again, and what a privilege it was to have our learning facilitated by such experienced Professors!  This April, one of the teaching showcase speakers, Gord Stubley, was very deservedly selected as the 2012 recipient of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance Award for Excellence in Teaching.  Our sincerest congratulations to Gord and to all of you who work daily to facilitate rich learning experiences for your students.

Our hope for the Conference was that participants would return to their teaching feeling energized and inspired.  When this happens, all members of our learning community thrive.

We hope that you’ll join us for next year’s Conference!

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Posted By Katherine Lithgow on April 19, 2012

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Posted By cgooyers on April 18, 2012

A few months ago I attended a workshop facilitated by Professor Ian McKillop from the School of Public Health and Health Systems, entitled “The Case for Online Cased-Based Learning”.  This inspired me to further explore how this teaching method could be applied in my own discipline of study, Kinesiology.

As a multidisciplinary body of knowledge, it is imperative that post-secondary training in Kinesiology develops a conceptual understanding of theories in the basic sciences (i.e. chemistry, biology, and physics) and promotes the necessary analytical and problem-solving skills that are essential for challenging today’s most the complex health problems.  Traditionally, Behaviorist (i.e. teacher-centered) instructional methods have dominated science teaching, reducing education to a transfer of information (Mazur, 2009), even though most experts teaching in these fields recognize that post-secondary education should foster “higher-level” thinking in their students.

Interestingly, despite having “success” with traditional teaching methods, a considerable number of health science students struggle with the application of factual knowledge to real-world problems (Watters et al. 2007).  For this reason, A.H.S. programs around the globe have been searching for methods to better prepare their students for the world of practice.   Borrowing from pedagogy applied in professional schools (e.g. law, business and medicine), many instructors are now using case-based teaching to compliment the more traditional lecture-textbook-laboratory courses.

The Association for Case Teaching defines case-based instruction as “a means of participatory and dialogical teaching and learning by group discussion and of actual events.” This definition encompasses a wide variety of approaches to case-based teaching (e.g. written, video, interactive, etc.).  For this reason, there is no single, best, method for integrating this pedagogical approach in post-secondary courses, as many instructors have devised creative ways for capitalizing on its educational strengths (e.g. directed, ‘real-time’, online cases, etc.). However, most variations of case-based teaching have many of the same objectives: (i) they foster an interactive and engaging form of student-centered learning, (ii) develop students’ ability to work with others and (iii) reinforce students’ confidence to think critically and articulate their ideas (Dunne & Brooks, 2004).  Moreover, case-based teaching allows course content to be structured in ways that can easily be applied in practical settings, and facilitates the integration of knowledge and skills from multiple domains of learning.

For those interested in learning more about case-based teaching and learning in A.H.S., my colleague Dr. Diana De Carvalho and I will be facilitating a 90-minute workshop entitled “Case Method Learning: Applications in Kinesiology” on Friday, April 27 @ 10 a.m.  Please send me an email if you are interested in attending.

 

References:

Dunne, D. & Brooks, K. (2004).  Teaching with cases. Halifax: Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

Mazur, E. (2009). Farewell, lecture. Science, 323(5910), 50-51.

Watters, D. J. & Watters, J. J. (2007). Approaches to learning by students in the biological sciences: Implications for teaching. International Journal of Science Education, 29(1), 19-43.

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