About the Centre – Page 4 – Centre for Teaching Excellence Blog

Finding opportunities and taking new directions – Veronica Brown

Today is the Opportunities and New Directions (OND) conference at the University of Waterloo. I just learned that we’re expecting almost 160 participants, most from Waterloo but lots from other institutions, too. When I realized my blog date was the same as the conference, I thought it would be exciting to blog from the conference. Instead, as I began to think about what to post, I realized there are a few stories I’d like to share as a participant for the past five years. If you’d like to check out a play by play of the conference, there’s a Twitter feed that I understand will appear on the OND web page (the hashtag is #OND2013 – oh, I just noticed the Twitter feed is already there!). I’d like to share two opportunities and a new direction with you today.

Opportunity – Presenting my research

For a variety of reasons, disseminating my research was not on my radar as a grad student. I’m sure that sounds strange but grad school was a part-time affair juxtaposed with family (two toddlers), a full-time job and all the other things life throws at you. I was in a professional program that many would consider a “terminal” degree. As such, sharing my results beyond finishing my thesis wasn’t a priority. The OND conference gave me the chance to share my findings in, as a new researcher, a fairly safe place. It was just a short research presentation (I think it was 20 minutes with 5 minutes for discussion) but it was an important first step, which led to opportunities at larger conferences, both within my discipline and beyond.

Opportunity – Finding a community of practice

Having completed my degree, I felt a bit lost. My work did not necessarily afford opportunities for research and yet I was left with many unanswered questions thanks to the “future considerations” area of my thesis. How would I find time to answer these questions? What I discovered at OND that many of my colleagues shared the same tension. Research on teaching and learning was an add-on to a plate already full of scholarship, teaching, and service. Yet, there they were, sharing new findings or best practices. Their efforts encouraged me to continue to pursue research, particularly action research, despite a perceived lack of opportunity.

New direction – Becoming an educational developer

Finally, the most significant impact OND has had on my career was my decision to join the Centre for Teaching Excellence. Strange how we spend so much time “planning” our lives yet never realizing what hidden opportunity might arrive at our door suddenly. I think it’s fair to say that I stumbled into educational development, having every intention of staying with the Professional Development (WatPD) program for a very long time. Then a role as instructional developer came along and, having met some lovely CTE folks through the conference, I took a closer look and I’m so glad I did. I love my job, which shares many attributes with OND. I spend time with colleagues from across campus and beyond, who genuinely care about the success of their students and strive to make things better for them. I’m encouraged to use a scholarly approach in all aspects of mywork. And, most importantly, I get to spend my day focused on every possible aspect of teaching and learning.

Many, many, many thanks to everyone who has supported and contributed to the conference. Best wishes to my colleagues today who are presenting, collaborating, sharing, investigating, and just plain enjoying!

The hidden classroom

Public School, 1892. (Boston Public Library)

As you stand at the front of your class, about to start the session, what do you see? What do you notice about your students? Who sits at the front? Who sits at the back? Who is chronically late? Who rarely makes it to class? Who always sits alone?

While we see our students at class, what do we really know about them? There was once a student in my class who consistently fell asleep. As a very new teacher, I was really surprised and, at times, wondered if there was something I was doing wrong. Was my class really that bad? I also wondered about the student and the choice to come to class just to sleep through it. The reality is that I don’t know why the student was falling asleep. Perhaps it was from the fatigue of working two or three part-time jobs in order to pay for school. Possibly, the student’s role outside class was the main caregiver for a sick relative. Maybe 3:30pm on Monday in a darkened 250-seat lecture hall just didn’t work.

In course design workshops, we ask participants to explore the context of their classroom. As part of that reflection, we discuss factors such as the class size, required/elective course, the distribution of majors and non-majors, TA support, etc. But what about the hidden context, the part we rarely hear about.

The reality is that we don’t know what is impacting students’ participation or engagement in our classes. I remember speaking with a colleague several years ago who spoke about how she never attended class. Having never pondered the idea of missing class when I was a student, and knowing how successful my colleague was at school, I was surprised. In essence, the lecture hall didn’t work for her. It was much better for her to learn from the textbook and the assignments. She wasn’t “skipping” class, she was making a choice that made sense for her as a learner.

Given that there is no way for us to know about all the contextual factors that are impacting our students’ success in our class (and, of course, online), what can we do? One option is to consider universal design, which focuses on design for all. Although its roots are in designing accessible places and spaces for persons with disabilities, anyone can benefit from this design modality. Consider curb cuts. Although originally designed to support people with mobility limitations, as a mom, I can tell you they are a blessing when you are pushing a stroller, your toddler is on their tricycle, or your pre-teen is pulling a wagon full of flyers to deliver. There are examples all around campus of design choices that originally served one purpose but benefited many others.

The same holds true for our courses. Thoughtful design that focuses on engaging a broader spectrum of learners, or one that was made consciously to support a specific group, can have far-reaching benefits. Consider transcriptions of video content. While this text helps students with hearing impairments, it can also be really helpful for students whose first language is not English. I would have loved podcasts and video content as a student simply because I am not the best note-taker in the world and am sure I lost a lot by scrambling to take notes. With a podcast, I would have the chance to go back to catch what I’d missed.

There are countless examples of how we can make small changes in our course’s design, our teaching methods, learning activities, and assessments, that can provide deep learning experiences for a broader spectrum of students. If you would like to explore this idea, why not join Jay Dolmage and I next Friday, March 8, as we explore universal design. For information about the workshop, please go to CTE’s events listing.

Accessibility tips I have learned on my Co-op term – Scott Hurley

A man stares at a bright computer screen.

The University of Waterloo is in the process of making our communications more accessible to everyone. Part of my job this term, as a Special Projects Assistant in the Centre for Teaching Excellence, has been to make our newsletter (Teaching Matters) more accessible.

I credit most of my knowledge to IST (Information Systems & Technology) and their SEW (Skills for the Electronic Workplace) courses and material, available to staff and faculty, which can be found on their Help & Training page.

Quick tips that helped me are:

Things that are not accessible and should not be used:
•   Text boxes
•   Drop caps
•   Hyperlinks like “click here” or “more”
•   Avoid adding in pictures that add no value other than “looking nice”
•   Blank cells in a table

Things to do that increase accessibility:
•   Use Styles appropriately
•   Use descriptive hyperlinks: State the title of webpage (example: “Centre for Teaching Excellence”) “ instead of “click here”
•   Provide alternate text for pictures, figures, and tables
•   Use the built in accessibility checker (in Word 2010)

Finally here are some of the tools that I have found helpful to check accessibility:
•   The PDF Accessibility Checker (PAC) (use this to check your PDF files)
•   The Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE) (use this to check if your website is accessible)
•   The built in Accessibility checkers in Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Word

I know it seems like a daunting task with a lot more work when you start to make your material accessible. Once we know what is/isn’t accessible, however, we can change our formatting habits and the process becomes very easy. It is also important to note that the real reason we are making our communications accessible is to make it easier to serve our audiences equally and not just because of new accessibility laws.

Assessment Philosophy – Veronica Brown, CTE

Bishop's University building with trees and grey sky — Bishop’s University (photo by Ryan Millar, flickr)

A few weeks ago, Julie (Timmermans from CTE) and I visited Bishop’s University to facilitate two workshops. The morning session was on course design, a condensed version of CTE’s Course Design Fundamentals. In the afternoon, the session was titled, “Designing Assessment for Learning”. We had an absolutely wonderful time and met many faculty members from both Bishop’s University and Champlain College, which is also located in Lennoxville.

We struggled for quite some time with the content of the assessment workshop. Whole university courses are dedicated to this topic. We had just three hours. What should we cover? What were the most critical messages? Should we focus on specific tools? What are some of the “best practices” that are happening at Waterloo that we should share? Should we spend an equal amount of time on both formative and summative assessment? Wow! There is so much to cover.

OK. Perhaps we could focus the assessment plan (as our intention was that the take-away from the workshop would be to have an assessment plan) around a few specific assessment tools. But what should we include? Exams? Quizzes? Assignments? Written assignments? Problem sets? Labs? Projects? Research? Essays? Community Service? Design Competitions? Case Studies? Reports? Studio projects? Individual work? Team work? Participation? Reflective Writing? Again, what a lot of content to cover in just three hours!

Our initial thoughts and design focused heavily on content and all the knowledge we wanted to impart. Ironic given the fact that we had just planned a course design workshop. We eventually took our own advice and stepped away from the content. As we continued to wrestle with these ideas, we kept asking ourselves, if there is just one thing we would like participants to know or have when they walked out the door, what would it be? It took a really, really long time to figure this out.

Eventually, we realized that we wanted participants to explore a different element of assessment. While we could impart lots of ideas related to specific tools, we decided to focus instead on how we view and value assessment. We began the workshop with an exploration of the concerns we, as instructors, have about assessment then compared it with our perceptions of students’ concerns about assessment. We then explored elements of a framework for assessment, which includes: observation (obtaining evidence of learning); interpretation (reasoning from the evidence); learning outcomes; and, at the centre of the framework, the purpose (Why am I assessing?) (the framework we presented was adapted from the National Research Council (2001). Knowing What Students Know. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, p. 44.).

Both these pieces led to the final activity of the day, in which we asked participants to articulate their Assessment Philosophy Plan, which might eventually become part of their Teaching Philosophy. The idea was to explore what their goals and philosophy were for the assessment of their students. We asked them to reflect on the following questions.

Who is involved with the assessment?
What roles does assessment play in learning?
What boundaries surround your assessment framework?
How can you provide flexibility to support the variety of learners in your class?
What pieces are rigid and which ones are flexible?

Having written this philosophy statement, we then asked them to reflect on how the assessments in their course reflect this philosophy. In reality, we cannot always control the contextual factors that impact our assessment choice (e.g., if part of our philosophy relates to developing a reflective practice, how do we provide formative feedback to a class of 1500?). But by reflecting and articulating our own philosophy, it can help guide us when we need to make some of the more difficult decisions tied to our assessment strategy for our course.

Teaching Orientation Days – Monica Vesely

In August, before our students hit the books and before our instructors “hit” the podium (real of otherwise), our new faculty had the opportunity to attend teaching workshops particularly tailored to their career stage and offered in a concentrated format at a timely point before the start of the fall term. For the second year in a row, two days in August (8^th and 9^th) were dedicated to Teaching Orientation. New faculty members were invited to attend any or all of four teaching workshops that form the core of the Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE)’s new faculty offerings. Continue reading Teaching Orientation Days – Monica Vesely

New and Improved NETsavvy — Mark Morton

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.

Opportunities and New Directions (OND) 2012 Conference — Julie Timmermans and Shirley Hall

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. Continue reading Opportunities and New Directions (OND) 2012 Conference — Julie Timmermans and Shirley Hall