Teaching Day 2 Schedule

Designing and Facilitating Group Work in Online Courses

This session aims to support instructors in designing and facilitating online group work and/or team projects that promote collaborative inquiry and use technology effectively. The facilitators will share their own experiences and draw upon evidence-informed best practices for creating, facilitating and assessing online group work.

Isabelle Barrette-Ng, Patrick Kelly, Barb Brown and Christy Thomas

9:30 – 10:20 a.m.

Promoting Student Engagement and Active Learning in Online Discussion Boards

Engaging students and managing online discussion boards can be challenging and overwhelming for both students and instructors who can struggle to keep up with and meaningfully contribute to hundreds or sometimes even thousands of posts online. This interactive session will focus on sharing practical strategies for developing discussion boards that promote student learning that is active, meaningful, relevant, interesting and (hopefully!) fun. 

Jessica Ayala, Patti Dyjur and Lin Yu

9:30 – 10:20 a.m.

Reading List Tool: How It Can Help You

The Reading List Tool helps you to quickly create course reading lists, encourage student engagement and discussion using the chat box, see what items your students are reading and easily reuse lists from term to term.  With the Reading List Tool, you can search the Library’s collection from within D2L, drag and drop items from the web and request items for purchase or digitization.

Susan Beatty and Marc Stoeckle  

11 a.m. – 11:50 a.m.

Taking Your Graduate Supervision and Mentoring Online

Taking your supervision of graduate students online can feel like travelling to a new frontier given that many professors completed their own training in conventional, residency-based doctoral programs and may have only recently moved to online teaching. Strategies that work well on campus and in the lab, such as clear communication, frequent meetings, instruction on research design, application and reporting, and regular feedback, are also successful when graduate supervision moves online. This workshop focuses on how to combine supervision pedagogy with contemporary technologies when one is supporting their graduate students' progress remotely.

Michele Jacobsen, Tracey Clancy and Tara Beattie

11 a.m. – 11:50 a.m.

Themed Conversation: Learning from Faculty about Conducting Undergraduate Research in the Remote Environment

In this themed conversation, we will identify benefits and challenges student researchers and their mentors experienced in conducting remote research during the spring and summer of 2020. Faculty supervisors from the Program for Undergraduate Research Experience (PURE) will lead a discussion about strategies and approaches that can enhance undergraduate research learning opportunities in a remote environment. Participants will also hear about the student perspective to imagine new ways to support remote undergraduate research for the upcoming academic term.

Panelist: 

• Anne Benneker, Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering
• Adam Murry, Department of Psychology
• Kazi Sumon, Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering
• Benjamin Tutolo, Department of Geoscience

Kyla Flanagan

11 a.m. – 11:50 a.m.

Learner-Centred Course Outlines

A learner-centred course outline goes beyond the traditional content-driven document to consider the alignment between student interests and needs, learning goals, opportunities to express higher-level thinking skills and student autonomy. In this workshop, we will share specific examples of how a learner-centred course outline can help build rapport, and increase motivation, achievement and empowerment in student learning (Richmond, 2016). 

Haboun Bair and Lin Yu

1:30 – 2:20 p.m.

Student Accommodations in an On-line Learning Environment

With the move to online and in-person learning, academic accommodations need to support students as they learn in multiple platforms. This session outlines the instructor’s role in support academic accommodation in the online environment. It highlights D2L features and SAS resources to support instructors. It highlights tips for communication and assessment design that support all students. 

Brenda McDermott

1:30 – 2:20 p.m.

Anti-Racism and Pedagogy: Learning Racial Justice

This session will introduce some of the recent work advancing racial justice in the university classroom. While we will look at some of the institutional and systemic barriers to BIPOC (Indigenous, Black, People of Colour) students and faculty that have already been identified at the university, we will focus mainly on possibilities and strategies that are undergirded by reflective practices focussed on anti-racism.

Aruna Srivastava

1:30 – 2:20 p.m.

Handling Challenges in the Zoom Classroom

The Zoom classroom is similar to a face-to-face setting in that it allows for a synchronous gathering in which students and instructors can see and speak to each other in real time. While tried and true strategies from face-to-face settings can apply in Zoom, there are also unique challenges in the online synchronous environment. This session explores challenges that arise in Zoom related to classroom behaviours and invites discussion around how best to engage students in the Zoom classroom.

Haboun Bair and Allie Wright

3 – 3:50 p.m.

Indigenizing Your Curriculum: More Than Content

As our campus community moves further into its commitment to ii' taa'poh'to'p, instructors are left wondering how to take up the work of Indigenizing and decolonizing in a good way. This interactive workshop will share ways in which curriculum can be Indigenized at the postsecondary level by adopting a relational pedagogy, alongside a set of critical Indigenous principles to consider in this important work. Our session offers insights into the core elements of the Relational Model for Teaching and Learning (Lalonde, 2017) which helps educators align Indigenous perspectives and principles in an inclusive and meaningful way.  

Yvonne Poitras Pratt and Solange Lalonde

3 – 3:50 p.m.

Teaching with Technology

There are numerous tools and technologies that are available for us to use in an educational setting. This workshop will give an overview of some of the applications commonly accessible to instructors and students, whether they are provided at the University, or free for all to use, and will show you how to bring them into the classroom to enhance the teaching & learning experience.

Isadora Mok-Kulakova and Laura L. Perissinotti

3 – 3:50 p.m.