2011-2012 Teaching Effectiveness Program
iClicker 2 Demonstration
with Shannon Frame, i-Clicker Representative
September 22, 2011; 1.5 hours
iClicker Representative, Shannon Frame, will be hosting an iClicker 2 demonstration in conjunction with the Instructional Development Centre. Please join us for a workshop dedicated to the advancement of Teaching and Learning!
iClicker is a classroom response system that allows students to instantly provide feedback and answer questions posed by their instructors. Using iClicker can significantly change the way instructors and their students interact by enabling them to assess their students' knowledge, keep their attention, provide immediate feedback, and encourage all students to participate.
During the presentation, instructors will be able to participate using iClicker just as a student would during a lecture. We hope you will be able to join us!
Ethics in Univeristy Teaching
with Dr. Sheldene Simola, Assistant Professor, Business Administration
October 12, 2011; 1.5 hours
Although university professors often receive instruction or other forms of guidance on research ethics, opportunities to learn about ethics related to teaching are typically limited. This can pose challenges for the early recognition and effective management of such predicaments. The purpose of this workshop is to enhance awareness and understanding of ethics as they pertain to university teaching, and to help develop skills related to the recognition, prevention and management of teaching-related ethical concerns. Topics to be discussed include:
- Common ethical dilemmas in teaching
- Principles and guidelines that can aid in the recognition, prevention and management of teaching-related ethical concerns
- Ethics pertaining to new technologies: Do new technologies require new ethics?
- Problem-solving when ethics, legal requirements and organizational policies seem to conflict
- Accessing consultation on teaching-related dilemmas
The workshop will use brief case-based scenarios, small-group discussion and interactive presentation.
Blogging for Grades
with Dr. Sara Humphreys, Assistant Professor, English Literature
November 2, 2011; 1.5 hours
This workshop will provide an overview of what works and what doesn’t in terms of offering blogs as an assignment option. Assignments and courses that engage with social media and networking are rapidly becoming the norm rather than the exception. We will begin with a basic overview of blog platforms and options, which will allow you to begin a blog or, perhaps, enhance your current blog. We will then review the ways in which social media can allow students to combine text and visual interfaces to express ideas more meaningfully.
Using Social Media in Course Delivery
with Dr. Craig Brunetti, Associate Professor, Biology
November 9, 2011; 1.5 hours
"Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them." – Steve Jobs
Mark Prensky coined the term Digital Natives to describe a person who was born during or after the introduction of digital technology. Students entering university today are Digital Natives who are adept at using technology to communicate and acquire information. In particular, today’s students often make extensive use of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
As educators, there are good reasons to consider the use of social media to enhance the student learning experience. However, without a well thought out plan on how social media will be integrated into your course, instructors may encounter unsatisfactory learning outcomes.
This workshop will explore how social media is being used at Trent University and what are some of the best practices and some of the concerns around its use.
iClicker 2 Demonstration
with Nicole Rome, i>Clicker Representative
November 15, 2011; 1.5 hours
iClicker Representative, Nicole Rome, will be hosting an iClicker 2 demonstration in conjunction with the Instructional Development Centre. Please join us for a workshop dedicated to the advancement of Teaching and Learning!
iClicker is a classroom response system that allows students to instantly provide feedback and answer questions posed by their instructors. Using iClicker can significantly change the way instructors and their students interact by enabling them to assess their students' knowledge, keep their attention, provide immediate feedback, and encourage all students to participate.
During the presentation, instructors will be able to participate using iClicker just as a student would during a lecture. We hope you will be able to join us!
Access to High Performance Computing
Resources at Trent University
with Dr. Sabine McConnell, Assistant Professor, Computing and Information Systems
November 23, 2011; 1 hour
Trent University joined SHARCNET (the Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Networks) in 2005. The consortium supplies a collection of high performance computing resources to the research community at Trent, at no charge, but is utilized by a fairly small number of users only. The purpose of this workshop is to provide an overview of the available computing resources, and guidance on how to utilize them. In addition, the workshop offers an opportunity for a discussion of the challenges faced when using these resources, identification of future computing needs of the research community at Trent, and possible future directions for SHARCNET. This one hour workshop will be followed by light refreshments (in the Environmental Sciences Crypt). The refreshments are provided by SHARCNET in celebration of its 10th year anniversary.
Providing options for lecture attendance
and review of lecture material through webcasts
with Mary-Jane Pilgrim, Information Technology and Professor Jocelyn Williams, Department of Anthropology
December 1, 2011; 1.5 hours
View the workshop resources
As of fall 2011, faculty have the option of webcasting lectures in four of Trent’s lecture halls (OCA W101.2, SC 137, OCA 203 and 121-Thornton Road Campus). The webcasts can be provided to students both as a simulcast of the lecture and as a recording of the lecture for future reference.
In this workshop, Mary-Jane Pilgrim and Prof. Jocelyn Williams will provide an overview of how webcasting (or lecture capture) is providing options for lecture attendance and review of lecture material in eleven courses during the fall 2011 term.
Mary-Jane’s presentation will cover the Panopto recorder and viewing software, the camera and lecture podium controls, viewing and managing the statistics in Panopto and talking to students about webcasting.
Jocelyn will share her experiences teaching an introductory course with over 400 students; she will speak to attendance, student use, student comments/experience and benefits to students, especially students who commute or require accommodations through the Disability Services Office.
Universal Instructional Design
with Robyne Hanley, Coordinator, Human Rights, Accessibility & Equity
Wednesday, January 18, 2012; 1.5 hours
This presentation will introduce the principals of Universal Instructional Design in relation to students on the full continuum of abilities. We will discuss the prevalence of learning disabilities and the supports available to both staff and students on our campus.
Robyne is in a unique position of representing multiple roles and departments on campus. She is the Co-ordinator in the Office of Human Rights and is responsible for AODA training for all student employees, staff and faculty. Robyne teaches for the Department of Psychology with a focus on the developmental stream. In conjunction with her work in Human Rights, Robyne works with the Disability Services Office as an Educational Instructor.
The Impact of Lecture Webcasts and Student Self-Regulated Learning on Academic Outcomes
with Nima Hejazifar, M.Sc. Applications in Modelling, Trent University
(Thesis supervisor, Prof. Brenda Smith-Chant, Psychology)
Thursday, February 2, 2012; 1 hour
The growth of online technologies and their incorporation into learning
environments is based on the expectation that including technologically-based supportive tools into a ‘blended learning environment (i.e., combination of online and face-to-face course components) will substantially improve students' learning outcomes. However, very little is known about the motivational, cognitive, and behavioural attributes that contribute to student success in blended learning environments.
Using a social cognitive view of self-regulated learning as a theoretical framework (Pintrich, 1999, 2004; Zimmerman, 1989, 1998, & 2002) this presentation will examine the relations between students' self-regulation attributes and their academic outcomes in a large undergraduate course (N=780) that provided the lecture recordings as the primary online tool in the course. Sub-group analyses revealed characteristics of successful and unsuccessful blended students that have implications for course design.
Popular Education: An Approach to
Learning for Social Change
with Lynne Davis, Associate Professor, Indigenous Studies
Friday, February 10, 2012; 3 hours
This 3 hour workshop will introduce the theory and practice of popular education. Popular education challenges traditional power relations in the classroom. Inspired by the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, this teaching approach questions the political neutrality of the education process. In popular education, the experiences of students are valued and become the starting point for collective analysis leading to reflection and action. Often forms of creative expression such as theatre, mural-making, collaging, song-writing, and media are used to deepen and extend analysis. Lynne Davis has used this participatory and experiential approach for many years to introduce students to the theory and practice of building sustainable communities in Indigenous and international contexts, and more recently, in Indigenous-non-Indigenous alliance-building.
This workshop will use a number of exercises to introduce ways of working with a popular education methodology. Participants will have an opportunity to move from personal experience to collective analysis and reflection. Participants will also design an application of popular education that they can use in their own teaching.
Teaching Humanities in Small Classroom Settings:
On the Importance of Preserving its Advantages
with Emilia Angelova, Associate Professor, Philosophy & Kathryn Norlock, Kenneth Mark Drain Chair in Ethics and Associate Professor, Philosophy
Tuesday, February 14, 2012; 1.5 hours
The format of the session is two short talks, followed by discussion.
Emilia Angelova: This talk draws attention to a powerful pedagogical resource in the traditional (vs. technologically augmented) classroom: namely, the richness of the experience that students bring to class. Indeed, there is a responsibility, and an advantage, to having teaching start from this rich experience, even in our highly technologically advanced society. Attention to experience, and to students as experiencers (via body language, gesture, and non-verbal/ verbal person to person interaction and response), helps encourage intellectual growth and involvement of students on an individual level. The humanities in particular depend on keeping alive such resources, and such attention is crucial to actively promoting and fostering the immense promise inherent in all teaching and socio-cultural education.
Kathryn Norlock: One advantage of small courses in the Humanities is that everyone has a chance to participate in discussion. However, this is easier for some students than for others. How are we to teach our students to participate? I offer an example of one assignment which has generated good results, preserving the value of small-course discussion and promoting the sense among students that they are welcome to enter and expected to enter the ongoing conversation which philosophy ought to be.
Active Learning in the Humanities using mLS (WebCT)
with Sarah Keefer, Professor, English Literature
Tuesday, February 28, 2012; 1.5 hours
View a recording of the workshop
In November 2010, Jacqueline Murray (University of Guelph) led a workshop on Enquiry Based Learning (EBL) and presented research demonstrating students that are given the tools and freedoms with which to pursue active learning within their courses, acquire skill-sets more rapidly and in a broader fashion than students who learn passively with all learning and assessment flowing only from instructor to class.
This workshop lays out a demonstration of an experimental component of ENGL 3100 which Sarah Keefer constructed, using a large-registration adaptation of the EBL model proposed by Jacqueline Murray. In her EBL application, Sarah Keefer has divided a class of 48 students into small-group “pods” that interact in face-to-face and virtual settings. These students read, analyse and discuss each week's short text for an hour in small groups of four, then post their notes independently within their discrete "pod" on mLS (WebCT), reviewing, peer-assessing using a simple scale, and providing rationale for each assessment of their podmates' posts during the following week. The course instructor monitors student input each week and, where requested, comments privately on individual posts but only reads postings and collects assessments at the end of each course section, altering the assessment-translation-to-grade results as little as possible: thus this learning strategy belongs entirely to the students who are responsible for all aspects of it.
Strategies for Generating In-course Evaluation & Feedback
with David Poole, Professor, Mathematics
Tuesday, March 20, 2012; 1.5 hours
In most courses, teaching evaluations by students are done at the end of the course using a departmentally standardized instrument. Any constructive feedback about the instructor's teaching is therefore received too late to be of benefit to either the instructor or the students in that particular offering of the course. In this workshop, David Poole will offer several suggestions for supplementary ways to obtain formative feedback from a class during a course. Via these vehicles, instructors can gauge the effectiveness of their teaching - and the consequent level of student engagement - on an ongoing basis. Feedback received may also prove to be useful to faculty wishing concrete ways of demonstrating teaching effectiveness for the purposes of applying for tenure, promotion, or merit awards. Participants in the workshop are encouraged to bring their own strategies as well.
Nicole Rome, iClicker Representative
Friday, May 4, 2012; 1 hour
Meeting of first year course instructors
Wednesday, May 23, 2012; 2 hours
Ray Dart, of the Business Administration Program, has offered to chair the meeting of first year course instructors. The purpose of this meeting is to share experiences and generate ideas that might further enhance Trent's first year experience.
The agenda for the meeting is as follows:
- Academic integrity module for first year courses
Jocelyn Aubrey, Associate Dean (Undergraduate Studies) & Dana Capell, Instructor, Academic Skills
- Transition Programming for New Students
(including NSO, ISW)
Jocelyn Aubrey, Associate Dean (Undergraduate Studies) & Nona Robinson, Associate Vice President, Students
- Sharing experiences and generate ideas that might further enhance the first-year experience of new Trent students
Facilitated by Ray Dart, Business Administration
- What our shared experience of teaching in the first year is like,
- Discussing and developing some ideas regarding academic skill development within and without first year courses, and
- Discussing and developing some ideas regarding more constructive assessment approaches for first year courses (and for all of undergraduate courses).
Strengthening Community-University
Engagement at Trent University
Roundtable discussion facilitated by Todd Barr, Executive Director, Trent Centre for Community Based Education
Thursday, May 24, 2012; 2 hours
Trent University’s Integrated Plan names community engagement as one of its three foundational pillars. The Plan prioritizes increased community-based learning opportunities for students among other community engagement priorities. Stemming from the Integrated Plan, the University’s Academic Plan also recognizes community engagement in three of its ten overarching goals. By recognizing curricular-based, community-university engagement as a strategy for ensuring high quality and relevant student educational experiences - and as a way for contributing to community economic development, maintaining positive institutional awareness in the greater community and improving student recruitment and retention - the University is poised to take community engagement to the next level. Many courses and departments at Trent University feature community engagement at different stages of the educational process for undergraduate and graduate students. At Trent and elsewhere, there are several examples where best practices have been developed based on years of working through the challenges associated with supporting students, faculty and community partners to achieve their best together. Examples include: student skill preparation before entering the “field”, formal community engagement learning pathways for students (e.g. a minor or major in community engagement), community ‘host’ partner involvement as co-educator, equitable community-university investment in projects and programs and having a physical/virtual “single-point” access for community-university engagement. The purpose of this roundtable is to share experiences, discuss “best” practices for community-university engagement and identify opportunities for collaboration that address some of the challenges we collectively face.
Online Quiz Banks and Best Practice to Ensure Security