Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness

Instructor Guidance from the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative at the University of British Columbia

"At Carnegie Mellon, we believe that for assessment to be meaningful (not bean-counting or teaching to the test!) it must be done thoughtfully and systematically. We also believe it should be driven by faculty so that the information gathered: * Reflects the goals and values of particular disciplines * Helps instructors refine their teaching practices and grow as educators * Helps departments and programs refine their curriculum to prepare students for an evolving workplace" Check out this website as a resource for assessment at the program level and the course level.

"The goal of the DEEP project is to revise the Mechanical Engineering (ME) undergraduate curriculum to make the discipline more able to attract and retain a diverse community of students. The project seeks to reduce and reorder the prerequisite structure linking courses to offer greater flexibility for students. This paper describes the methods used to study the prerequisites and the resulting proposed curriculum revision. " Ilene Busch-Vishniac is the lead author on this paper.

A useful overview of a variety of curriculum maps

Follow this link to learn more about Buffy Saint Marie's Cradleboard project and the Nihewan Foundation for Native American Education.

"Instructional Strategies Decision making regarding instructional strategies requires teachers to focus on curriculum, the prior experiences and knowledge of students, learner interests, student learning styles, and the developmental levels of the learner. Such decision making relies on ongoing student assessment that is linked to learning objectives and processes. Although instructional strategies can be categorized, the distinctions are not always clear cut. For example, a teacher may provide information through the lecture method (from the direct instruction strategy) while using an interpretive method to ask students to determine the significance of information that was presented (from the indirect instruction strategy). The five categories of instructional strategies are Direct Instruction, Indirect Instruction, Interactive Instruction, Experiential Learning, and Independent Study."

"The SOLO taxonomy stands for: Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes It was developed by Biggs and Collis (1982), and is well described in Biggs and Tang (2007) It describes level of increasing complexity in a student's understanding of a subject, through five stages, and it is claimed to be applicable to any subject area. Not all students get through all five stages, of course, and indeed not all teaching (and even less "training" is designed to take them all the way)."

This website, maintained by Mick Flanagan at University College London, is the most comprehensive online site gathering information, references, videos, and articles about threshold concepts. It includes overviews about threshold concepts, as well as an alphabetical listing of threshold concepts discussed in the literature across the disciplines.

Graham Gibbs' keynote at the National University of Singapore conference on teaching and learning in higher education. Graham has written many books that we own in the GMCTE library, and is very well known for his work on assessment.

"Before we can own failure as an educational opportunity, we have to disown it as an individual identity." - (Thanks to Erin D from the ULC for passing this along)

Journal devoted to Community Service-Learning Research. PDFs of articles can be downloaded for free and full journals can be purchased from this site

GMCTE's page on Academia.edu. You can find papers that have been published and uploaded by members of the Centre

"Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research."

This book (available in the U of S library) is an excellent exploration of the role of disciplines on teaching and learning in higher education (edited by Carolin Kreber, 2009)

"A growing literature suggests that there is a disjuncture between the instructional practices of the education system and the student body it is expected to serve, particularly with respect to the roles of digital technologies. Based on surveys and focus group interviews of first-year students at a primarily undergraduate Canadian university and focus group interviews of professors at the same institution, this study explores the gaps and intersections between students' uses and expectations for digital technologies while learning inside the classroom and socializing outside the classroom, and the instructional uses, expectations and concerns of their professors. It concludes with recommendations for uses of digital technologies that go beyond information transmission, the need for extended pedagogical discussions to harness the learning potentials of digital technologies, and for pedagogies that embrace the social construction of knowledge as well as individual acquisition."

"Medical Education is a group for individuals involved in medical education, nursing education and other health professions education. It's a place to share resources, ideas and best practice and get connected with others working in this field. This group is NOT for promoting products or services, the focus is on sharing bookmarks about education, medical education, Web 2.0, resources which would be helpful to students and teachers to support learning and teaching in medicine and the health professions."

Nice post about the writing application Scrivener on the ProfHacker blog on The Chronicle of Higher Education site. This is the main application that I use for writing anything longer than an email. Since this was written, a Windows version of Scrivener was released.

"This short video highlights several reasons why having an e-portfolio is a good decision whether you are a student, faculty, or staff." From Penn State. Thanks to Mark Morton at Waterloo for pointing this out.

"Pinterest is taking the social media world by storm, and it isn't just popular with individual users. Businesses, nonprofits, and even libraries are sharing ideas and information through the site as well, connecting with people from around the country and around the globe." While these are specific examples from libraries, I think that educators might find this interesting and possibly even useful.