Teaching Innovation Projects

Videos in Case-Based Teaching in the Sport Management Classroom

Alanna Harman — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 12:31:06 PST

Videos which can be used to address most learning objectives in the university classroom are available online at an unparalleled level. With more than eight million reference files available on the video sharing site YouTube, educators are able to use sites like YouTube to find video clips to address a variety of instructional topics (YouTube, 2012). Advancements in technology including WiFi availability and the proliferation of online video website have increased the ease with which videos are accessed. With the rise of videos in university teaching, researchers have begun to explore their impact on learners. Specifically, Berk (2009) has explored how videos address different learning types, impact brain waves to relax or grab students’ attention, and generally appeal to tech savvy students.

While videos are slowly becoming a prominent fixture in the classroom, story-telling and case-based learning have been a part of professors’ repertoires for a significant period of time as a means of developing problem solving and analytical skills among students (Jonassen & Hernandez-Serrano, 2002). The following seminar will discuss the value of videos in case-based teaching, introduce the development of case studies connected to videos, and provide practitioners with a list of pertinent considerations when selecting videos.

Assessing for Student Success and a Target Class Average: Balancing two grade-related goals facing university instructors and teaching assistants

Trevor J. Bieber — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 12:31:03 PST

In the current university system in Canada, course instructors and teaching assistants usually find themselves balancing two expectations related to grading:

1) The students (rightfully) expect assignments and exams to have criteria that are clearly expressed and are actually attainable for most/all students. (Goal: Student Success)

2) The university administration expects the instructor to meet grade-average and grade-distribution requirements for their course. (Goal: Student Comparison/ Sorting)

Many of those involved in university grading have personally experienced the tensions that can arise when attempting to balance both of the above-mentioned expectations. This is particularly true in Arts and Humanities disciplines, where graded assessments are predominantly (or even exclusively) essay style. This seminar will familiarize participants with two grading models that emphasize each of these goals. As a group, seminar participants will outline a practical grading scheme that can be used in the department to ensure that both of these goals can be achieved.

Reading like a Historian: Discipline-specific reading tools for undergraduates

Rachael Griffin — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 12:31:00 PST

This workshop is designed to help teaching assistants teach historical reading skills. One of the great difficulties history graduate students face is how to approach historical skill building with their undergraduates. Undergraduate courses in history can be heavily reliant on knowledge-based lectures, while tutorial hours are spent ensuring that students have absorbed the appropriate information from lectures and readings. Graduate students routinely complain that students, even when they do the assigned readings, rarely identify the appropriate information in those texts. Since reading techniques differ between disciplines, the failure to identify critical information is especially prevalent when non-history students take history electives

Although all historians recognize the importance of historiography to their craft, it is a difficult concept to define. Historiography involves a set of practical skills (analyzing secondary sources for specific information) and conceptual discussions (situating scholarship in the larger field). In my experience, students learn how to deconstruct primary documents in undergraduate history classes, but are less able to do the same with academic writing.

Given that teaching assistants rarely have control over course readings, the activities in this workshop are designed to integrate course material. Mastering historical reading skills will allow students to make meaningful contributions to tutorials and will also help them manage the heavy reading load of a history degree. In the long term, it will encourage them to become critical readers in other aspects of their lives.

Facing-Off in the Sport Management Classroom: Using Facebook as an educational tool

Katie Lebel — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 12:30:59 PST

Facebook has become firmly integrated into our communications infrastructure, and its hold only appears to be gaining in strength. Researchers in education are examining the implications of social media in the classroom setting. Perez (2009) found that students were logging into Facebook five days a week, upwards of four times per day. EDUCAUSE (2011) reported that 90 percent of undergraduate students have adopted Facebook and 58 percent have incorporated Facebook consumption into their daily routines. Over one quarter of the students surveyed reported spending six to 10 hours on social networking services each week; on the high end of the scale, a staggering eight hours of Facebook consumption per day was reported (Perez, 2009). These statistics coincide with reports that suggest course management systems and the use of e-mail are losing popularity among students (Joosten, 2009). Schroeder and Greenbowe (2009) found that the number of student posts were almost 400 percent greater on Facebook when compared to the popular course management software, WebCT. This same study rated Facebook postings to be superior in quality to those on WebCT; it further found that discussions were often continued throughout the entire semester, whereas those in WebCT tended to end more abruptly.

This paper addresses how educators might take advantage of Facebook as an educational tool. The following workshop outline will discuss strategies for implementing Facebook into a course and provide insight into the educational benefits inherent in this technology, while taking care to address potential challenges.

Stop and Smell the Roses: Incorporating smell as a multisensory learning tool in the university English classroom

Stephanie Oliver — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 12:30:57 PST

Traditionally, most university instructors – particularly those in English departments – use didactic, or “chalk-and-talk,” teaching methods organized around readings and lectures. Yet numerous studies suggest that incorporating multisensory learning techniques in the classroom can more effectively promote student learning. Research shows that smell is a particularly powerful learning tool, as the olfactory sense is deeply connected to memory and emotion. However, most instructors – including those invested in multisensory learning – often overlook scent as a learning tool. Research also shows that smell also has a unique relationship to language and representation. Scents are typically constructed as purely visceral, subjective phenomena that escape our linguistic system, yet in spite of the apparent limits of representing smell in language, writers often describe scents in literature. This seminar combines research on scent as a multisensory learning tool with studies on smell’s relationship to language to explore how instructors can productively use scent in the university English classroom. However, olfactory learning tools need not be limited to teaching texts or ideas that deal explicitly with scent. This seminar specifically explores how smell can be incorporated into teaching literary concepts at the introductory, intermediate, and advanced level, and suggests that scent is particularly useful for teaching concepts that deal with issues of language and representation. Students can therefore reap the benefits of smell as a multisensory learning tool even if they are not studying topics or texts that deal directly with scent.

Making the Right Decision: Incorporating ethics into business education

Mark Desjardine — Fri, 04 May 2012 07:33:27 PDT

Every year a small number of business managers and executives are caught engaging in fraudulent behaviours and making questionable decisions (e.g., Enron). These headline-making actions become discussion points in many business schools; however, undergraduate business students receive little organized, formal education in business ethics. Using a multidisciplinary approach, this workshop emphasizes the importance of teaching business students about ethics in all undergraduate classrooms. In 90 minutes, participants will learn about the importance of business ethics, how to effectively incorporate a dialogue about ethical practices into any business classroom, and how to create a confidential learning environment to facilitate effective ethics discussions.

Social media as an Educational Tool in University Level Geography

Elizabeth Hundey — Fri, 04 May 2012 07:33:26 PDT

Social media is not a passing fad—it is a new, versatile way of both information gathering and production. It is broadly defined as “networked tools that emphasize the social aspect of the Internet for communication, collaboration and creative expression” (Dabbagh & Kitsantas, 2012). Although many courses have online components (e.g. WebCT or other learning management systems), it is arguable that we as educators are not taking advantage of mainstream (i.e. applications and sites that are not education specific) social media to its full potential in the classroom. This short paper offers an outline of a seminar discussing the uses of social media—such as web logs and Twitter—in the university geography classroom. Lessons learned in the geography context can be extrapolated to many other disciplines.

Virtual Reality: Re-Introducing Anatomy to the 21st Century

Louis G. Kour — Fri, 04 May 2012 07:33:25 PDT

The exponential progress of technology has led to an explosion of computer-based learning tools in the field of gross anatomical education. At the forefront of the classroom revolution are three-dimensional (3D) models. Publishers such as Elsevier are leading the foray and now offer fully interactive 3D models for purchase. With the current state of anatomical education, the addition of 3D anatomy on top of a crowded schedule can be daunting. Haphazard use can lead to student dissatisfaction and negative feedback. Through the use of research articles, we sought to discuss the advantages and disadvantages as well as highlight some the challenges that come with 3D anatomy. This seminar seeks to provide insight to anatomy educators on the proper implementation, seamless integration, and effective use of 3D anatomy in today’s anatomy laboratory.

Rethinking Classroom Participation

Rita Gardiner — Fri, 04 May 2012 07:33:24 PDT

Within the classroom, feelings of alienation can adversely affect students’ ability to speak, and thus serve to reproduce social inequities. This is especially the case with some first year students who may not have had many opportunities to speak, as well as students from different cultures where talking in class may not be the norm. To help mitigate power imbalances, it is necessary to develop a diversity of teaching practices and approaches to learning to ensure that each student feels that her class participation counts.

In this workshop, I want to consider ways in which it is possible to encourage participation by incorporating verbalization and vocalization techniques into the classroom.

Supporting Students with Varied Spatial Reasoning Abilities in the Anatomy Classroom

Kelly Pedersen — Fri, 04 May 2012 07:33:24 PDT

The study of anatomy requires abstract thinking and strong spatial reasoning. Traditional pedagogical approaches to teaching anatomy take advantage of the didactic lecture setting in which students are taught to memorize concepts and learn from two-dimensional pictures. Students are required to mentally formulate three-dimensional relationships based on what they see in two-dimensional pictures. This is a task that can be very difficult for many students. There is consistent evidence in the literature that states that students with low spatial abilities typically do not perform as well in an anatomy class as students with higher spatial abilities. This seminar will discuss the spatial abilities of students and how it relates to student performance in human anatomy classes. It will also explore teaching modalities that will allow for effective student learning among students of varying levels of spatial ability as well as make some suggestions for ways to increase a person’s spatial ability. Information garnered from this workshop will help future educators in planning and executing their anatomy courses.

Understanding the Everyday: In-class ethnography for social science students

Jennifer Long — Fri, 04 May 2012 07:33:23 PDT

I am interested in developing hands-on learning activities that can take place within the confines of an undergraduate classroom with minimal preparation by the student. My specific discipline of anthropology has various fields of expertise yet, certain fields have an easier time applying their material in classroom settings than others; for example, archaeology and physical anthropology students have access to labs where they can practice measuring and identifying artefacts. Socio-cultural undergraduates, conversely, are most often limited to learning and applying knowledge through various forms of debate and discussion which, although an important and interesting learning tool, can become tedious over time and arguably suits only a limited range of learners. For this reason, I have developed an activity that simulates ethnographic research, a hallmark of cultural and social anthropologists’ research methodology, to suit an in-class environment that actively engages students in paired discussion, group debate, and analysis of first-hand resources gathered by the students. In this paper, I explain how to use ethnography as an in-class learning strategy that provides social science and humanities lecturers with the tools to conduct similar exercises in their own classrooms.

A Moot Point: Encouraging discussion and debate in the Arts and Humanities classroom

Jennifer Chisholm — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 10:49:17 PST

In any classroom, engaging students in rigorous discussion and debate can be difficult. In my own discipline of Women’s Studies, I have found that students can be wary of challenging one another or presenting opposing viewpoints. While agreement is not inherently negative, I have noticed that opposing viewpoints and controversy are often bypassed or overlooked for the sake of agreement. An unintended consequence of this is the silencing of difference, which can be one of the most effective learning tools in any classroom. For this reason, I have developed a class activity that necessitates debate and a consideration of opposing viewpoints. In this paper, I explain how to organize and run a class moot, and offer an outline of the workshop I developed to help give you the tools to adapt and carry out this exercise with your own classes.

Getting Feedback to Feed Forward: Incorporating revision into upper-year English papers

Nadine Fladd — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 10:49:15 PST

Faculty and teaching assistants sometimes get the impression that students in upper-year courses believe that they already know how to write essays, and are more concerned with the grade than the written feedback they receive on their papers. Research suggests that students do in fact read and value comments on their written work, and yet it is not uncommon to see students make the same kinds of mistakes throughout an entire academic year with little evidence of development in their writing skills. This workshop uses studies of students' perception of written feedback to suggest new ways of approaching how we respond to student writing and structure writing assignments so that students treat essay writing as a process-driven endeavor.

Problem Based Learning in Engineering Education: Meeting the needs of industry

Katarina Grolinger — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 10:49:14 PST

Industry hires engineers primarily for solving workplace problems; consequently problem solving skills are an essential part of an engineering education. However, industry problems, as well as the environment engineers work in, are often quite different than what students experience at universities. This workshop explores problem based learning, the differences between problems students typically solve in the classroom and the workplace, as well as the strategies for making classroom problems emulate real-world workplace problems. As the main goal of engineering education is to prepare students for work in industry, closing the gap between classroom and workplace problems will result in better prepared graduates.

Effecting Affect: Methods for facilitating affective knowledge in the classroom

Braden Te Hiwi — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 10:49:12 PST

Bloom’s (Bloom et al, 1956) taxonomy of knowledge encompasses three central domains - the cognitive, the affective, and the psychomotor. University research and teaching, both historically and contemporaneously, validates objective and cognitive knowledge at the expense of subjective and affective forms of knowledge (Boler 1999; Cassell, 2002). This seminar aims to provide an argument for the use of affect, but more specifically, to provide practical examples of methods for implementing affect in classes, tutorials and laboratories. This interactive seminar will involve personal reflection, discussion, active learning activities, and will model a number of methods for using affect in the classroom.

Fostering Critical Thinking and Student Participation in Biological Sciences

Emeline J. Ribot — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:02:55 PST

Instead of giving a lecture that can discourage both students and teachers, let’s try a different way of teaching Biological Sciences by using student participation and critical thinking techniques. Science professors usually perform power point presentations that include hundreds of slides in regards to a specific topic lasting about 2 hours without a break or interruption by student questions. Studies have demonstrated that students, when they participate in class, will memorize information for a longer period of time and develop critical thinking skills. Thus, an interesting approach would be to make students more involved in the course by having interactions between teacher(s) and the student body. To achieve this, analyzing experiments that have been published in international journals would make the course more realistic, and would also allow the students to understand what clinical and academic research has benefited our progress and knowledge base in the field of interest.

Developing a Grading Rubric in a Multi-TA Course

Carolina Paz — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:02:54 PST

This project aims to assist the development of a grading rubric for marking essays in a biomedical ethics course although the process outlined can be applied to any multi-TA course. Guaranteeing grading consistency across teaching assistants (TAs) in courses with multiples TAs is challenging. Multi-TA courses are particularly challenging to maintain the consistency among TAs in respect to, for instance, teaching strategies and grading essays. Past teaching experiences, educational background, teaching perspectives, gender, and cultural background are some reasons why inconsistencies happen.

In an attempt to overcome this challenge, this project proposes a session that brings together TAs and the course instructor to develop a grading rubric that both makes sense for all TAs and meets the instructor’s expectations of the content and format of the essay. It is true that TAs must have autonomy in terms of teaching strategies; however, some consistency in the grading process is necessary to guarantee fairness to all students. Research suggests that grading rubrics help TA to consistently mark students’ written assignments. Furthermore, rubrics help TAs to provide constructive feedback to students and guarantee that students know the how their assignments will be marked.

Preparing Computer Science Graduates for the 21st Century

Paul Parsons — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:02:53 PST

The nature of computer use has changed remarkably in the past fifty years. However, most undergraduate computer science courses are still often taught through an old paradigm that is not adequate to address modern concerns. This 90 minute seminar will address some issues relevant to preparing computer scientists for the 21st century. These include issues central to human-computer interaction (HCI) such as cognitive and perceptual aspects of computer users, ergonomics, and human factors. Although there has been literature on this topic for at least the past 15 years, it is still not widely recognized nor understood by the majority of computer science educators. Computer science graduates are often expected to have an understanding of many issues surrounding the interaction between humans and computers when they are in the workplace. However, most computer science graduates are ill equipped to deal with such issues, and could benefit if they were given more consideration in the university curriculum. In recent years, interest in HCI has grown enormously in both industry and academia. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recently reported that its special interest group in HCI is the fastest growing of all its interest groups, and has recommended the development of new HCI programs in universities to combat a shortage of professionals with the skills and training to advance the design of more usable technologies.

Talking about this issue can hopefully arouse awareness among computer science educators about its importance. Additionally it is hoped that seminar participants will be able to understand some of the main issues surrounding HCI teaching and education and how to begin to address them. The seminar will examine a number of contemporary issues regarding computer science education and what experts are saying about it.

Integrating Problem Solving and Critical Reflection Opportunities in First- and Second-Year Science Courses.

Aimee Lee Houde — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:02:52 PST

The development of problem solving and critical reflection skills is neglected in early-level science courses; however, such skills are necessary in upper-year science courses and scientific careers (Gupta 2005). Early-year science teaching seems to be about memorization and recall (McDonald and Dominguez 2009) because teachers feel that they have insufficient time to integrate problem solving and critical reflection components into their courses while covering the subject matter (Kronberg and Griffin 2000). Yet, integrating problem solving and critical reflection opportunities into science courses does not have to take too much time and can cover the same curriculum subject matter (Kronberg and Griffin 2000; McDonald and Dominguez 2009); students usually learn more and have a greater understanding of concepts resulting in better grades (e.g., Chaplin 2009); and teachers have more frequent assessments of what their students are learning and can make instructional changes as required (McDonald and Dominguez 2009). This seminar will demonstrate methods (that are not greatly time consuming or drastically change the current curriculum) to integrate problem solving and critical reflection opportunities into lectures, laboratories, and tutorials of early-level science courses. Participants also have the opportunity to actively demonstrate the methods. The benefits of developing problem solving and critical reflection skills earlier in university science education are better grades, better integration of complex topics, and a better understanding of what students are actually learning.

Guiding Group Work: Activities to maximize student learning from group projects

Chelsea Hicks — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:02:52 PST

Educators in many disciplines recognize the value of incorporating group learning into their curriculum. Unfortunately, over 80% of instructors give modest, little or no support to students working in groups (Bolton, 1999). In many cases, this can lead to student frustration and resentment of group work. This will also reduce the amount of course content that students will retain from group projects. This workshop is designed to equip you, the instructor, with specific activities to help you guide your students through the stages of group development and the hurdles associated with each.