CTE’s 2015-2016 Annual Report is nearing completion and will soon be sent to the printers. It’s hard work creating the report, but also revealing and affirming: it gives us a chance to look back over the past year and discern what we have accomplished from a “big picture” perspective. And of course it also helps us reorient ourselves for a new year of activity.
As a preview of our 26-page report, I’ll paste below some of the achievements that our Director, Dr. Donna Ellis, highlights in her preamble to the report:
- Thanks to strategic plan funding, we hired a new Instructional Developer to assist with the development of our students’ communication skills. This staff member helps instructors at all levels learn strategies for teaching and assessing writing across the curriculum, as well as supports our instructional programs for graduate students.
- We contributed to two university-wide committees on large-scale change projects to assist with teaching quality: one on student evaluations of teaching and another on teaching and learning spaces. We bring research evidence and best practices to bear on these important and complex initiatives.
- In conjunction with the Graduate Studies Office, we launched a two-day Graduate Student Supervision series to ensure high-quality graduate instruction and assist new faculty members in attaining supervision status.
- With colleagues from Western University and Queen’s University, we developed two of six new online modules on university teaching for use in our instructional programs.
- We increased participation in our instructional development programming: since 2013, the number of unique participants in our workshops has increased by 19 per cent, with total workshop completions increasing by 37 per cent. This increase reflects an improved uptake, as our total number of workshops increased by only 23 per cent in the same timeframe.
- We added more instructor profiles to our high-traffic website to help promote public awareness of Waterloo’s teaching excellence.
- We started three projects to encourage innovative methods of course delivery using learning technologies. One project involves developing a new process for soliciting information from instructors about their use of learning technologies (beyond LEARN) so we can report on their usage and facilitate the sharing of best practices.
If you’re interested in receiving a copy of CTE’s 2015-2016 Annual Report, just let me know: mmorton@uwaterloo.ca .We’ll also be adding a link on our website to an accessible PDF version.
