Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness

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

"For the last decade or so, I've put my students' grades where my mouth is. Instead of just touting the importance of failing, I now tell students that if they want to earn an A, they must fail regularly throughout the course of the semester..."

The interior design is perhaps much more mod than one typically sees at a Canadian university - but a fascinating innovation.

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.

This article has some validating, and some surprising results from a study done on attendance policies in post-secondary classrooms.

"The goal of Teach With Tournaments is simple -- immerse students in the personalities and character of the great men and women of history through competition. For this school year, the tournament focused on one theme: the most courageous figure in U.S. history. Each student chose a historical figure he or she thought best embodies courage in U.S. history, from military heroes such as Alvin York to civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks to humanitarian pioneers such as Clara Barton. Each choice was then paired off in the bracket system. Students were required to research their character's accomplishments and then defend their choice in front of the class. Afterward, the class voted and the winners moved on to the next round, eventually narrowing the field of 64 to one champion."

"Hashtag is a great way for users to locate and keep track of particular information within the massive tweets. Know the topic you are interested in and look for its corresponding hashtag and try to continually check it for updates. This is the established way Twitter experts use to fish for new updates in their fields of interest."

"The traditional lecture may have been an efficient format for transferring information 100 years ago, but it's no longer practical in an era of exploding medical knowledge, says Dr. David Snadden, executive associate dean of education for the faculty of medicine at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. "We've actually reached a stage where we can't fit [in] all the curriculum. It's just not possible." "The thing that's becoming really critical for us is helping our students understand how to manage information, access and sift information" as they'll need to do as practising physicians, he adds. Shifting course material onto the Internet offers a solution to both these challenges, Snadden says. In addition to freeing class time for more active learning, the model allows students to control the pace of their learning and "skip the things that don't seem relevant or that they already know." 

"Until this week I had not known that George Washington (the President, not the institution) had considered the foundation of a national university to be of the utmost importance. In fact, he had meant to give it a starring role in his Farewell Address, and complained at length when Hamilton excised it from the work. Here's Washington to Hamilton on why the university merited mention in the address:"

The is a quick online tool to determine the "readability" of your written content. You simply paste in some text and it gives you an indication of how many years of formal education would be needed to be able to understand the reading. This tool is helpful when designing your course content. For example, if you paste in text for a first year course and get a reading level of 16 years of education on the Gunning Fog index; then you should try to state your content more simply. You don't need to "dumb down" the content, but rather re-state it.

This is a short piece written in the Wall Street Journal by Ken Bain to accompany the release of his new book - What the Best College Students Do.

Derek Bruff defines the "flipped classroom" and addresses the misconception that the flipped classroom requires heavy use of video.

"The TED-Ed team provides an in depth look at the powerful features of the newly-launched TED-ED Beta website. You'll learn how TED-Ed videos are created, how they are arranged, about the learning materials that surround each video, and how you can create customized or "flipped" lessons based on any TED-Ed video or any video on YouTube."

"A blended course often reduces face-to-face "seat time" so that students can pursue additional teaching and learning activities online. These ten questions (adapted from the University of Wisconsin's Hybrid Course website ) are a good starting point when thinking about blended course redesign."

An interesting tool developed at Guelph to support student peer evaluation, assessment and review (PEAR)

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)

From the site's FAQ: "IS IT UNETHICAL FOR ME TO BUY AN ESSAY? If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? Only you can answer that question. ISN'T IT REALLY UNETHICAL FOR YOU TO BE WRITING THESE ESSAYS FOR CASH? Incredibly so, and because the academic system is already so corrupt, we're totally cool with that. We even all have matching tweed t-shirts."

He may be talking about teaching high school but his words ring ever so true for teaching at the post-secondary level.

Video of a keynote by Erik Mazur - a physicist from Harvard. "...how he came to develop Peer Instruction, a teaching method that enhances interactive engagement among students, particularly in large lecture style settings or classrooms."

"The Modern Language Association likes to keep up with the times. As we all know, some information breaks first or only on Twitter and a good academic needs to be able to cite those sources. So, the MLA has devised a standard format that you should keep in mind."