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.

Engage your students: A SYDE Example — Samar Mohamed

Group 2 working with their TA, Justin Eitchel

What is student engagement and how can we achieve it? These questions are always in my mind. Heller et al state that:

 “Faculty stimulate engagement by providing students with active learning experiences, conveying excitement and enthusiasm for their subject, and providing opportunities for student-faculty interactions.  Students show their engagement by participating in class discussions, doing research projects, and interacting with their professors and peers.”

 An example of an engaging engineering course was discussed in a previous blog in which the course instructors used several blended activities to engage the students with their course material.

 Another example on engaging engineering courses is SYDE 411 “Optimization and Numerical Methods”, which is the focus of this blog. I have been working with Prof. Paul Calamai and his teaching team to design and implement engaging blended activities for their students. The designed activities satisfy the previously mentioned criteria by giving the students the opportunity to:

  • interact actively with both their peers and their teaching team
  • do research projects
  • participate in group discussion
  • provide constructive feedback to their peers
  • reflect on their own work

SyDe 411 is a new fourth year core Engineering course with an emphasis on understanding and applying numerical methods and optimization techniques as tools for problem solving and systems design. Students’ engagement with the course material is an important aspect of their learning. In order for them to be actively engaged with the course material, Professor Paul Calamai and his teaching team implemented several blended activities that were designed to keep the students engaged with each week’s topics and eager to learn more about these topics. Group Projects and Group Assignments are two main blended activities in this course:

Group Projects:

Prof. Calamai took the group project beyond the regular boundaries and created an enjoyable learning experience for everyone. The group project activity is summarized as follows:

  • Each group is responsible for a project topic that is worth 25% of the course total grade.
  • Each group researches a specific topic and submits:

o   Lecture notes on the topic including examples of application and/or demonstration.
o   One project topic Problem per group member with their solutions.

  • Groups are paired and dry run presentations between paired groups are conducted to provide the presenting group with feedback and recommendations for improvements.
  • The presenting group’s project is then posted to a discussion board and another group (reviewing group)  reviews it and provides the presenting group with questions and feedback through the discussion board. The presenting group is expected to respond to these questions during it’s presentation.
  • The presenting group delivers a 30 minutes presentation/lecture on it’s specific topic followed by 10 minutes for questions and answers.
  • Peer evaluation is conducted twice during the term among each group’s members using the “Comprehensive Assessment for Team-Member Effectiveness” CATME online tool. Peer evaluation provides the students with feedback regarding their effectiveness as team members throughout the academic term.

Group Assignments:

Prof. Calamai presented an interesting scenario for the group assignments in which the students engage with the material and come to the tutorial prepared and ready for the learning experience. The group assignment activity is summarized as follows:

The class is divided into groups in which each group, under the supervision of the TA, is responsible for solving and presenting their specific group assignment problems. Students are encouraged to prepare excellent solutions because a subset of these questions will contribute to parts of the Midterm and Final exams. Each student in the group prepares a solution to a specific assignment problem according to the following schedule:

  • Individual questions are sent by email to each student in Group X.
  • Each student submits the answer to his specific question/s to a dropbox.
  • Professor Calamai grades and gives personal independent feedback to the students.
  • The students submit a revised version of their answers to a dropbox.
  • After Professor Calamai approves the answers, the TA posts them to a discussion board so that the rest of the class can see them and ask for clarification.
  •  Group X will run the tutorial and facilitate a discussion around their assignment problems.

I think that SYDE 411 teaching team puts a lot of time and effort in providing an exciting and enjoyable learning experience to their students.

1-     R. S. Heller, C. Beil, K. Dam, and B. Haerum “Student and Faculty Perceptions of Engagement in Engineering”, Journal of Engineering Education, July 2010.

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.

 

Creative and Flexible – Marlene Griffith Wrubel

In the past two months, a number of workshops were offered on current trends in teaching and learning, including How to Develop Activities that Incorporate the Concept of a Deep Approach to Learning, Personal Autonomy in Learning, Flipping the Classroom, and the Meaning of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) in Education.

Recurring themes of collaboration and feedback, instructor creativity and flexibility, and injecting elements of fun in courses were addressed. Most importantly, faculty from different disciplines had an opportunity to interact with each other about the learning environments they have developed to support their students.

I was fortunate to take part in some of those conversations. It is clear to me that the successful instructors (instructors happy with how students learn in their course) are those who are creative and flexible in their approach to teaching. These instructors have systematically reworked learning activities to meet their learning outcomes. Their students learn through trial and error, receive feedback from their peers and the instructor, and are given an opportunity to improve in subsequent course activities. The learning activity is structured to emphasize the learning process and encourage students to think about the course material rather than focus on their grade. The instructor may not always be centre-stage or initiate the next step in the life of the assignment but guides the learning process nonetheless. These instructors also recognize that soliciting informal and formal student feedback of their learning experience is an important element of maintaining a good learning environment.

The trends in teaching and learning mentioned at the start of this blog will be present for the foreseeable future. Adoption of some of these trends to the classroom and online environment will take creativity and flexibility on the part of instructors. In some cases, it is already being done by faculty on campus. For anyone looking to boost their creativity quotient, you need look no further than what is happening in your department or on campus. I appreciated all of the conversations that took place in the workshops I attended. I encourage you to attend upcoming CTE events and let us know what you are doing in your class.

Johnson, Steven (2010). Where good ideas come from. Retrieved October 31, 2012, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU.

“You’re the Inspiration”

I remember the day I fell in love.  With my discipline of educational psychology.

It was my first term of graduate school, and I was taking an elective course in “Gender and Policy Studies in Education”.  The first sign that something special was about to happen came when I did the supplemental reading – a book called “Women’s Ways of Knowing.”  I never did the supplemental readings.  I think that I somehow knew that the moment would be special.  I lit candles, got comfortable, and devoured the book.  Finally, there were words (like epistemology) for the ideas that had been drifting in my mind without an anchor.  There were people doing research the way I one day wanted to do research.  Another sign appeared when it came time to write the final paper.  I had a love/hate relationship with writing.  Writing papers was usually a long and arduous (but ultimately rewarding) task.  Somehow, this 20-page paper just flowed. I wrote in one sitting, hand-writing the first draft, rather than typing it.  Somehow I felt that this connected me more to the ideas.  The first draft was also my final draft.

There have been other such moments throughout my graduate work and my career that have confirmed for me that I chose the right field – moments that revealed how my research and my self and my relationships with others are interconnected. I now realize, however, many years later, that I never told the professor of that elective course how that one reading changed my academic life, opening up an entire field within my discipline that I had not known existed, shaping my future research, and shaping, really, the lens through which I view the world.

We rarely know when we’re designing a course which moments in the classroom, conversations outside the classroom, readings, or assignments might ignite a flame in learners.   But what if we asked learners to share these moments with us, so that we might intentionally integrate them into the courses we design?  As instructors, how can we take students on the journey of discovering their own passions?

Might our own stories of falling in love be important to share with students?  In the midst of concerns about UDLES, GDLES, and accreditation, how might we weave into the courses we teach the stories of how our passion for our discipline evolved – the stories of what continues to inspire our work?

Do you remember when you fell in love with your field?   Please consider posting a brief note about the ideas/encounters/experiences that inspired your passion for your discipline.

 

Another Good Way to Learn: Debates — Justin He, Co-op Student

Learning, in many university students’ minds, is reading textbooks and attending lectures. Yes, this is one way to learn, but it should not be the only way for students to learn. It is true that students can learn knowledge by this way, but is this the best way for students to learn? Also, other than knowledge, what can they learn from just reading textbooks and attending lectures?

As we all have known in today’s society, students who only have “book” knowledge are not good enough. They require more realistic skills. The question is, how can they develop more skills? I am sure there are many ways to do that, but I suggest students to develop their skills by engaging in debates. You can develop many different useful skills for being a debater.

In general, debate helps you effectively to develop four skills:

  1. Communication
  2. Presentation
  3. Teamwork
  4. Critical thinking

A typical debate match has judges, a motion, which is a topic to debate, and at least six or more debaters. There must be two sides in a match, and debaters are evenly distributed on both sides. Each side is either in favour of or opposed to the motion. Therefore, it has a thesis statement and points to support its position.

Debaters need to figure out the most effective way to deliver all of this information to the judges. Otherwise, they will lose the match if no one can understand their speech. This is the time for people to improve their communication skill. It helps people to find a better way to deliver information and communicate with their audiences in their normal lives. Also, debaters need to clearly present their thesis and points during a debate match; therefore, this is an effective way to develop presentation skills too.

Debate is not an individual activity because a typical debate match involves more than one debater on one side. Debaters need to cooperate with teammates and debate with the other side. As we can see here, teamwork is extremely important. It is a great opportunity for debaters to build up the teamwork skill.

Furthermore, debaters should not only focus on their thesis and points. They have to think of the thesis and points of other side and find out a way to retort them. At this stage, debaters can improve or develop their critical thinking skill.

I suggest that professors consider having an in-class debate as one of the assignments for students. It will surely consume some of their lecture time for teaching; however, this assignment provides an opportunity for students to develop some important skills for their future. Therefore, it is worth to give up some teaching time to let students undertake an in-class debate.

Writing Math: MathJax and Desire2Learn — Paul Kates, Oct 18, 2012

Please visit the MathJax and Desire2Learn page to read about writing mathematics using MathJax in the Desire2Learn course management system here at the University of Waterloo.

Paul Kates
Mathematics Faculty CTE Liaison
pkates@uwaterloo.ca, x37047